Kaleidoscope (18 page)

But for a man living a lie, the warm greetings and café banter now freely offered by these malformed and unusual people made Jack uneasy, as though he had incurred a debt, as though he were cheating cards at a table of children. Didn’t take much reflection to realize that it was in precisely these moments that Jack was reminded he
was
cheating these people, all of them, and that if Luna and Tommy and the other freaks had grown to trust their new brodie, it was not the fruit of any fidelity on his part, but the product of his fabrication.

Jack pressed his hands to his temples. It was hard to know what was true when you spent so much time lying to yourself. But what the hell could he do about that, now? He
wanted
to deal straight, that was what Jack told himself, but he had no choice! He couldn’t tell Luna why he was down here or who had sent him or what he was really trying to find. What would she do to him if she knew? What would happen to his own family if the carneys discovered a con-man in their midst?

All night went the merry-go-round. From there to the Funny House, Jack stumbling through a hall of mirrors searching for the authentic face in the endless souls receding into infinity on either side. Which was the knock-off, the facsimile, the fake?

Was there a real Jack Romaine at all?

But the old defenses would reassert themselves. The old voice that had taken him from New York to Chicago to Cincinnati pushing forward to say, Listen, chump, it don’t matter what game you got goin’, you think these geeks are playin’ straight? You think these freaks don’t got a card up the sleeve?

The old, familiar rationalization:

Just because you’re playing them, Jack, doesn’t mean they aren’t playing you.

That was what Jack held onto as he sought slumber in a sleepless night. For all he knew Luna could be lying to his face. So could Tommy. So could they all. These people weren’t telling him everything they knew, that was for sure. Not about Alex Goodman, not about their money. There was definitely something fishy going on and if Jack had learned anything since coming to Kaleidoscope it was that a carney could hide a lie behind a smile easier than a rube could wipe his ass.

It was possible, his own sins aside, that the generosity Jack had experienced since saving Jacques & Marcel was no more than a come-on, a turn, a shill. It was possible, signs to the contrary, that Luna did not really trust him. That she was using him exactly as he was using her.

There was no way out of the maze. He had to protect Martin and Mamere and the only way to do that was to get Bladehorn his property. Time was running out; Jack knew he couldn’t keep Bladehorn at bay with telegrammed encouragement. Jack had to get the gangster his property and if that meant he was a rat to Luna and Tommy and the other freaks, well—to hell with it.

There was nothing he could do.

Those were the thoughts that robbed Jack of sleep that night and embittered the early morning coffee he was sipping the following day in the café when Luna came in, her hair swaying down that long, hard back, to hand him his first pay check.

“Here,” she ran her hand through his hair. He tried to respond in kind.

“Four and a half bucks. Thank you, Boss Lady.”

“Don’t spend it all in one place.” She winked, and then turned to Half Track. “I’ll be gone most of the day, Jenny. Giant needs some lumber to repair the camels’ paddock and we’re short on hay. You need anything?”

“Nope,” Half Track scooped sugar into a jar. “We’re stocked up.”

Luna bent to brush her lips on the nape of Jack’s neck.

Sent chills down his spine.

“You all right?”

“I’m fine.” He smiled reassurance and she gave him a squeeze on the shoulder before she swayed away.

Jack watched Luna leave the café and cross the street. If she was shining him, she was doing a good job. Jack sipped his coffee. Luna said she’d be gone for the day, but it didn’t take a day to get lumber and hay. Didn’t take half a day. Jack had made runs for supplies with Tommy and even buying lumber and feed and all the rest he’d never missed the noon-meal’s flag.

Was there something else taking Luna’s time?

Something else in Tampa?

Jack made up his mind to follow her. Luna would obviously bring back a load of lumber and fodder—failing to complete that errand would look odd. And Jack knew that any run for timber and hay meant she’d be taking the Big Truck, the sideboarded Ford that had towed Peewee’s wagon from the train station. The Ford was the only vehicle suited for heavy loads and would be a snap to tail. But Jack would need a vehicle of his own if he was to follow Luna’s. The Model T—Shouldn’t be hard to borrow the flivver for a daytrip to Tampa.

Jack left the café and found Tommy filling the stock’s tank with fresh water.

“I wanta bank my pay,” Jack explained. “I got nearly seventy bucks in cash, countin’ what I brought down with me. It’s too much to have layin’ around.”

Tommy agreed and without a qualm gave Jack the coupe.

Jack let Luna have a good five minutes’ start before he cranked the T and rattled off in pursuit. He had changed clothes in the interim, into a suit appropriate for a visit to a bank, but not the duds he’d been wearing when he arrived at Kaleidoscope. He did what he could to create an unfamiliar appearance, tossing aside his fedora for a planter’s hat, a local straw-woven headpiece with a loose, drooping brim. Discarding his pin-striped shirt for a solid, cotton weave. A bowtie and new second-hand shoes. In that camouflage Jack pulled onto the Tamiami Trail.

He could not see the Big Truck on the narrow two-lane ahead, but was not worried. Jack knew that Luna’s first stop would be to get lumber and feed. Griffith’s Lumber was not located in Tampa proper, but was situated north of the city, off a rail-line’s spur. There were a series of sawmills and warehouses and other businesses located not far from the Tampa train station along a variety of feeding lines. Businesses dealing in large quantities of timber or produce or retail goods loaded and unloaded cars of goods along these lines.

The blacktop took you almost all the way to the lumberyard. As Jack drove in he saw long stretches of cypress and pine and palmetto give way to the burned ruins of orange groves. The Mediterranean fruit fly had destroyed tens of thousands of acres of these and other orchards. Virtually every manner of fruit could host the insect; every form of that produce had had to be destroyed, even down to individual trees at residences in town.

Stiff penalties were enforced against any attempt to transport fruit of any kind. The
Tribune
warned travelers that every outgoing trunk, portmanteau and handbag would be inspected for hoarded samples of guava or tangerine. Even that meager contraband could spread the plague of the fruit fly to the entire southeast, the paper warned its readers, a prospect terrifying governors from Florida to the Carolinas.

The smell of petroleum and smoke wafted into the Model T’s cab. Jack could see fires stretching in straight lines alongside the road and across barren fields. Ditches normally used for irrigation or drainage had been filled with motor oil to burn tens of thousands of acres of fruit. What had been some of the most productive soil in agriculture was now no more than a grid of darkened stumps. Jack turned off the blacktop and away from a horizon of devastation to find the clay road leading to Mr. Griffith’s yard.

He spotted Luna’s truck pulling into the lumberyard. He found cover for the Model-T behind a drying yard and stacks of field fence, kicked the door open to let some air in and surveyed the grounds. A pair of yardboys were already at work with The Giant loading two-bys and lathe onto the big Ford. Then came the hay. He saw Luna step inside the one-story clapboard that was Griffith’s office and for the next half hour the only thing Jack saw entering the yard was a Studebaker coupe and a pair of deuce-and-a-halfs. The coupe arrived first. A tepid hoot from the driver and the man at the gate waved him through to a meager shade beneath a cottonwood near the office. Somebody employed by the yard, Jack figured. Or maybe a salesman. Sure wasn’t hauling lumber in a Studebaker.

The deuces came in later, offloading barrels it turned out. The workers moving slowly, sweat shining on mostly black skin.

The morning’s heat and humidity made the cab stifling hot; Jack finally got out and made a shade for himself in the bed of the truck. He had begun to think he had blown a day off, that Luna was on a routine errand, and taking her own sweet time about it, too.

When she left the yard, he almost missed her.

Jack was expecting the Boss Lady to leave Griffith’s in her truck, naturally, with The Giant riding shotgun. But there was Luna Chevreaux, now, driving the Studebaker coupe! Jack realized that she must have had somebody from town bring out the car which meant that Luna had more on her mind than wood and hay.

Jack got the T’s magneto firing, engaged the hand-operated clutch and pulled out to follow Luna south toward Tampa. He was fortunate to have a truck laden with shade tobacco to put between himself and Luna as he tailed the Boss Lady down the narrow blacktop. They picked up perhaps half a dozen trucks on the road and as many automobiles. Jack began to resent his present chore; in other circumstances, he’d have taken the day off from pounding stakes and shovelling shit to tour Tampa’s Gulf-Coast diversions. He might have admired the homes of rumrunners and cigar magnates. He might have paused to appreciate the Moorish cast of the city’s architecture, minarets rising across the river at the Tampa Bay Hotel. Maybe get out on the water. Eat a decent steak. Hell, if he played his cards right, Jack could imagine living down here. Provided they did something about the damn flies.

If he ever got out from under Bladehorn’s thumb, Jack promised himself a vacation with his son in this sundrenched city. They’d get a room someplace, get out on the water. And for sure he would take Martin down to Plant Field to see where the Cincinnati Reds camped for spring training.

There were carnal pleasures, too, and carnal opportunities. Tampa’s tropical climate combined with its distinctive minarets to conjure images of harems and women and Arabian nights. The Green Parrot was reputed to be one of the quickest clubs in town. It was no problem for a man with gladrags and cash to find himself a honey at the Parrot.

Those idle thoughts jarred to a stop when Jack realized with a sudden sense of disorientation that Luna was not taking her car into downtown Tampa. Instead, the Studebaker continued west across the Hillsborough River before turning south to the still-new Davis Islands Bridge.

Jack had heard only a smattering of gossip concerning the Islands, even though it was big news for Tampa realtors. The Davis Islands were one of the first pieces of real estate to be created artificially, the islands no more than a series of landfills developed specifically for speculative investment. Some big money had been spent on the project. Before it was even completed, fat cat investors, bankers and crooks were cutting each other’s nuts to crowd in.

So what was Luna up to on the Islands?”

The newly finished bridge spanned not much more than a hundred yards from the mainland to the Islands and it was over that abbreviated causeway where Jack Romaine now followed Luna’s car.
Rump, rump, rump
…Jack could hear his tires as they hit the seams separating the bridge’s spans. The smell of salt air and sea breeze rushing through the cab of his flivver.

Seagulls and terns flew overhead, their lazy wheeling transformed in an instant with the plunge to beak some bounty from the salty water. There were people plunging into the water, too. Jack spotted a marina slipped with sailboats and other pleasure-craft, but he was sure Luna wasn’t here for sailing, or any other recreation.

The bridge gave onto quiet, well-landscaped streets lined with palm trees and bougainvillea. Within minutes Jack had followed Luna up a paved driveway passing a well-tended display of palm trees and oleander to reach the grounds of the most spectacular hotel he had ever seen.

You approached the Mirasol Hotel on a drive punctuated with palm trees forty feet tall. Jack waited until Luna gave a valet her keys before sputtering past to find his own parking on the south side of the hotel. The automobiles in the garage made Jack’s flivver look like a delivery van. He thought he had seen some pretty douche rides in Cincinnati, but this—!

The hotel and grounds embraced a sensibility even more exotic than what Jack had seen downtown. He found shade in a loggia supported by columns that looked to have been filched from a Greek temple. Finding his way back to the main entry he saw that every window and door in the place was arched like some kind of mosque. Jack recalled the article about the hotel he had read on the train down to Tampa. So was this Venetian Gothic? Looked like a cross between General Franco and Ali Goddamn Baba.

Still, you had to admire the work. Lots of detailing on the windows, the cornices, shields cast in plaster to decorate the stuccoed exterior. The hotel’s main tower was six, seven stories tall with two wings offering spectacular views. The railings on the balconies were wrought in iron, all the castings turned.

Unless you arrived at the hotel by boat, you entered the Mirasol through a door flanked on either side by a trefoiled transom and French doors. A short hallway and a stroll past potted palms before you entered the Grand Lobby. Jack had no idea what you’d need a fireplace for given his experience of the climate, but there it was, an enormous hearth framed with fixtures of brass and iron. Fairly dark in the lobby, but a great view of the yacht basin below; Jack saw a sloop easing out from a slip, a soiree of gents and ladies playing croquet nearby on a lawn flat and green enough for billiards.

A tall ceiling overhead was carved like a mosque’s interior into interlocking patterns of hexagons and squares. Like a kaleidoscope, Jack realized, and for a moment was tempted to spin on his heel for that effect. The wood itself was interesting, too, the entire ceiling finished in pecky cypress, that worm-eaten timber unique to southern forests. Everything in the lobby reeked of expense, the Chippendale recliners, the Corinthian leather binding the books in the adjoining library, the fireplace, the Persian rugs. The Mirasol was opulent, decadent, luxurious. A destination for foreigners and millionaires.