Live by Night (24 page)

Joe nodded.

“And if you'd let him live,” she said, “I would have been arrested. And then you would have been arrested.”

He nodded. He considered the insect bites on her ankles and then raised his eyes up her calves, across her dress, and into her eyes. She held his gaze just long enough to slide hers off his face. She looked out at an orange grove as they raced past it. After a while, she looked back at him.

“Do you think I feel bad?” he asked.

“I can't tell.”

“I don't,” he said.

“You shouldn't.”

“I don't feel good.”

“You shouldn't feel that, either.”

“But I don't feel bad.”

That pretty much summed it up.

I'm not an outlaw anymore, he thought. I'm a gangster. And this is my gang.

In the back of the scout car with the sharp smell of citrus giving way, once again, to the stench of swamp gas, she held his gaze for a full mile, and neither of them said another word until they reached West Tampa.

Chapter Seventeen

About Today

W
hen they got back to Ybor, Esteban dropped Graciela and Joe at the building where Graciela kept a room above a café. Joe walked her up while Esteban and Sal Urso went to dump the scout car in South Tampa.

Graciela's room was very small and very neat. The wrought iron bed was painted the same white as the porcelain washbasin under a matching oval mirror. Her clothes hung in a battered pine wardrobe that looked to predate the building, but she kept it clear of dust or mold, which Joe would have guessed impossible in this climate. The one window overlooked Eleventh Avenue, and she'd left the shade down to keep the room cool. She had a dressing screen made of the same raised-grain wood as the wardrobe, and she pointed Joe to face the window as she went behind it.

“So you are a king now,” she said as he raised the shade and looked out at the avenue.

“I'm sorry?”

“You have cornered the rum market. You will be a king.”

“A prince, maybe,” he admitted. “Still gotta deal with Albert White.”

“Why do I think you've already figured out how to do that?”

He lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of the windowsill. “Plans are just dreams until they're executed.”

“Is this what you always wanted?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, then, congratulations.”

He looked back at her. The filthy evening gown hung over the screen and her shoulders were bare. “You don't sound like you mean it.”

She pointed for him to turn back around. “I do. It's what you wanted. You achieved it. That's admirable in some way.”

He chuckled. “In some way.”

“But how will you hold the power now that you have it? That's an interesting question, I think.”

“You think I'm not strong enough?” He looked back at her again and she allowed him to because she'd covered her upper body with a white blouse.

“I don't know if you're cruel enough.” Her dark eyes were very clear. “And if you are, then that will be sad.”

“Powerful men don't have to be cruel.”

“But they usually are.” Her head ducked below the screen as she stepped into her skirt. “Now that you've seen me dress and I've seen you shoot a man, can I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure.”

“Who is she?”

“Who?”

Her head appeared above the screen again. “The one you love.”

“Who says I'm in love with anyone?”

“I say so.” She shrugged. “A woman knows these things. Is she in Florida?”

He smiled, shook his head. “She's gone.”

“She left you?”

“She died.”

She blinked and then stared at him to see if he was putting her on. When she realized he wasn't, she said, “I'm sorry.”

He changed the subject. “Are you happy about the guns?”

She leaned her arms on the top of the screen. “Very. When the day comes to end Machado's rule—and that day
will
come—we will have a . . .” She snapped her fingers, looked at him. “Help me.”

“An arsenal,” he said.

“Arsenal, yes.”

“So these aren't the only weapons.”

She shook her head. “Not the first and they will not be the last. When the time comes, we will be ready.” She came out from behind the screen in the standard clothes of a female cigar worker—white blouse with string tie over tan skirt. “You think what I'm doing is foolish.”

“Not at all. I think it's noble. It's just not my cause.”

“What is?”

“Rum.”

“You do not want to be a noble person?” She held her thumb and index finger close together. “A little bit?”

He shook his head. “I've got nothing against noble people, I've just noticed they rarely live past forty.”

“Neither do gangsters.”

“True,” he said, “but we eat in better restaurants.”

From the wardrobe, she selected a pair of flats the same color as her shirt, sat on the bed to put them on.

He stayed at the window. “Let's say someday you have this revolution.”

“Yes.”

“Will anything change?”

“People can change.” She put one shoe on.

He shook his head. “The world can change, but people, no, people stay pretty much the same. So even if you replace Machado, there's a good chance you'll replace him with a worse version. Meanwhile, you could be maimed or you could—”

“I could die.” She twisted her torso to put on the other shoe. “I know how this probably ends, Joseph.”

“Joe.”

“Joseph,” she said. “I could die because a comrade betrays me for money. I could get captured by damaged men, as damaged as the one today or even worse, and they will torture me until my body can no longer endure it. And there won't be anything
noble
in my death because death is never noble. You weep and beg and the shit flows out of your ass as you die. And those who kill you laugh and spit on your corpse. And I will be quickly forgotten. As if”—she snapped her fingers—“I was never here. I know all that.”

“So why do it?”

She stood and smoothed the skirt. “I love my country.”

“I love mine but—”

“There is no but,” she said. “That's the difference between us. Your country is something you see out that window. Yes?”

He nodded. “Pretty much.”

“My country is something in here.” She tapped the center of her chest and then her temple. “And I
know
she won't thank me for my efforts. She's not going to return my love. That would be impossible, because I don't just love the people and the buildings and the smell of her. I love the idea of her. And that's something I made up, so I love what isn't there. Like you love that dead girl.”

He couldn't think of anything to say to that so he just watched her cross the room and pull the dress she'd worn in the swamp off the screen. She handed it to him as they left the room.

“Burn that, will you?”

T
he guns were bound for the Pinar del Río province, west of Havana. They left St. Petersburg on five grouper boats out of Boca Ciega Bay at three in the afternoon. Dion, Joe, Esteban, and Graciela saw them off. Joe had changed from the suit he'd ruined in the swamp to the lightest one he owned. Graciela had watched as he'd burned it along with her dress, but she was fading now from her time as prey in a cypress swamp. She kept nodding off on the bench that sat under the dock lamp yet refused all offers to sit in one of the cars or let someone drive her back to Ybor.

When the last of the grouper captains had shaken their hands and shoved off, they stood looking at one another. Joe realized they had no idea what to do next. How could you top the last two days? The sky had grown red. Somewhere down the jagged shoreline, past a clump of mangroves, a canvas sail or tarp fluttered in the hot breeze. Joe looked at Esteban. He looked at Graciela, who leaned against the lamppost with her eyes closed. He looked at Dion. A pelican swooped over his head, its bill bigger than its belly. Joe looked at the boats, way out there now, the size of dunce caps from this distance, and he started laughing. He couldn't help himself. Dion and Esteban were right behind him, all three of them roaring in no time. Graciela covered her face for a moment and then she started laughing too, laughing and crying actually, Joe noticed, peeking out from between her fingers like a small girl until she dropped her hands entirely. She laughed and cried and ran both hands through her hair repeatedly and then wiped her face with the collar of her blouse. They walked to the edge of the dock and the laughs became chuckles and then echoes of chuckles and they looked out at the water as it grew purple under the red sky. The boats found the horizon and slipped past it, one by one.

Joe didn't remember much about the rest of that day. They went to one of Maso's speaks behind a veterinarian on the corner of Fifteenth and Nebraska. Esteban arranged to have a case of dark rum aged in cherry casks sent over, and word got around to everyone involved in the heist. Soon Pescatore gunsels mingled with Esteban's revolutionaries. Then the women arrived in their silk dresses and sequined hats. A band took the stage. In no time, the joint was hopping enough to crack the masonry.

Dion danced with three women simultaneously, swinging them behind his broad back and under his stubby legs with surprising dexterity. When it came to dance, however, Esteban proved to be the artist of the group. He moved on his feet as lightly as a cat on a high branch, but with a command so total that the band soon began to fashion songs to his tempo, not the other way around. He reminded Joe of Valentino in that flicker where he played a bullfighter—it was that degree of masculine grace. Soon half the women in the speak were trying to match his steps or land him for the night.

“I never saw a guy move like that,” Joe said to Graciela.

She was sitting in the corner of a booth, while he sat on the floor in front of it. She leaned over to speak in his ear. “It's what he did when he first came here.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was his job,” she said. “He was a taxi dancer downtown.”

“You're putting me on.” He tilted his head, looked up at her. “What
doesn't
this guy do well?”

She said, “He was a professional dancer in Havana. Very good. Never the lead in any productions but always in high demand. It's how he supported himself during law school.”

Joe almost spit up his drink. “He's a lawyer?”

“In Havana, yes.”

“He told me he grew up on a farm.”

“He did. My family worked for his. We were, uh—” She looked at him.

“Migrant farmers?”

“Is that the word?” She scrunched her face at him, at least as drunk as he was. “No, no, we were
tenant
farmers.”

“Your father rented land from his father and paid his rent in crops?”

“No.”

“That's tenant farming. It's what my grandfather did in Ireland.” He tried to appear sober, learned, but it was work under the circumstances. “Migrant farming is when you go from farm to farm with the seasons, depending on the crop.”

“Ah,” she said, unhappy with the clarification. “So smart, Joseph. You know
everything
.”

“You asked,
chica
.”

“Did you just call me
‘chica'
?”

“I believe I did.”

“Your accent is horrible.”

“So's your Gaelic.”

“What?”

He waved it off. “I'm a work in progress.”

“His father was a great man.” Her eyes shone. “He took me into the home, gave me my own bedroom with clean sheets. I learned English from a private tutor. Me, a village girl.”

“And his father asked for what in return?”

She read his eyes. “You're disgusting.”

“It's a fair question.”

“He asked nothing. Maybe his head, it swelled a bit for all he did for this little village girl, but that was all.”

He held up a hand. “Sorry, sorry.”

“You see the worst in the best of people,” she said, shaking her head, “and the best in the worst of people.”

He couldn't think of a reply to that, so he shrugged and let the silence and the liquor return the mood to a softer place.

“Come.” She slid out of the booth. “Dance.” She pulled at his hands.

“I don't dance.”

“Tonight,” she said, “everyone dances.”

He allowed her to pull him to his feet even though it was a fucking abomination to share the same dance floor as Esteban or, to a lesser extent, Dion, and call what he did the same thing.

Sure enough, Dion laughed openly at him, but he was too drunk to care. He let Graciela lead and he followed and soon he found a beat he could keep a kind of pace with. They stayed out on the floor for quite some time, passing a bottle of Suarez dark rum back and forth. At one point he found himself lost in cross-images of her; in one she ran through the cypress swamp like desperate prey and in the other she danced a few feet away from him, hips twitching, shoulders and head swaying as she tipped the bottle to her lips.

He'd killed for this woman. Killed for himself too. But if there was one question he hadn't been able to answer all day, it was why he'd shot the sailor in the face. You didn't do that to a man unless you were angry. You shot him in the chest. But Joe had blown his face up. That was personal. And that, he realized as he lost himself in the sway of her, was because he'd seen clearly in the sailor's eyes that the man held Graciela in contempt. Because she was brown, raping her wasn't a sin; it was just indulging in the spoils of war. Whether she'd been alive or dead when he did it would have made little difference to Cyrus.

Graciela raised her arms above her head, the bottle up there with her, her wrists crossing, forearms snaking around each other, crooked smile on her bruised face, eyes at half-mast.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

“About today.”

“What about today?” she asked but then saw it in his eyes. She lowered her arms and handed him the bottle and they moved out of the center and stood by the table again and drank the rum.

“I don't care about him,” Joe said. “I guess I just wish there had been another way.”

“There wasn't.”

He nodded. “Which is why I don't regret what I did. I just regret that it happened.”

She took the bottle from him. “How do you thank the man who saved your life after he dangered it?”

“Dangered it?”

She wiped at her mouth with her knuckles. “Yes. How?”

He cocked his head at her.

She read his eyes and laughed. “Some other way,
chico
.”

“You just say thanks.” He took the bottle from her and had a sip.