World Gone By: A Novel (16 page)

Joe watched him drink his beer now, friendliest-looking guy you’d ever come across in your life.

Billy said, “You ever think the rumor could be the point?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Sure you do, Joe.”

“Someone wants me to
think
there’s a hit on me?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Get into your head, stir things up with a ladle.”

“Whatever for?”

“Fuck would I know?” Billy shrugged. “I’m not the kind of guy they bring into the boardroom, explain the whole picture to. I’m a worker bee.” He held up his empty beer. “A thirsty one actually. Mind if I get another?”

Marston, the private investigator Joe had hired to watch the house for the past several days, had reported that Billy had exactly two beers every night. Never a third.

Joe mentioned this now.

Billy nodded. “Normally, yeah, I just have the two. But when a guy sits across from me in my own home with a gun pointed at me and my son still awake upstairs? Guy who thinks I’ve been hired to kill him? That might make me break routine a bit. Get you one?”

“Sure,” Joe said.

Billy went to the icebox and rummaged around in there. “You look like you might have put on a little weight. That true?”

“Maybe a couple pounds, I don’t know. Don’t own a scale.”

“You needed it. You were always on the thin side. You look good.”

Each of his hands came out of the icebox carrying a beer. He placed them on the table. He closed the icebox. He reached for the can opener.

“How old’s your boy now?” he asked.

“Nine,” Joe said.

The first beer can hissed when he punctured it. “Few years younger than mine.”

“Walter’s quite smart, I hear.”

Billy slid the beer across the table to Joe and beamed with pride. “They want him to skip eighth, go right into high school. Tampa Catholic. You believe that?”

“Congratulations.”

Billy punctured his own can twice and then raised it in toast. “To our kids.”

“To our kids.”

Joe drank. Billy drank.

Billy said, “You notice how their natures were pretty much set on day one?”

Joe nodded.

Billy smiled softly and shook his head. “I mean, they tell you as a parent don’t do this or you’ll get this type of kid; don’t do that, or your kid’ll grow up to be that kind of kid. Truth is, they are who they are in the womb.”

Joe nodded in agreement and they drank. The silence that followed was comfortable.

“I was sorry to hear about your wife,” Joe said. “You know, back then.”

“I remember you came to the wake.” Billy nodded. “Thank you. And I was sorry to hear about yours. I would have made it to the funeral, but I was stuck out of town.”

“I understood. The flowers you sent were beautiful.”

“I used that florist in Temple Terrace. They do nice work.”

“Yeah.”

“Mind if I smoke?”

Joe said, “I wasn’t aware you smoked.”

“I keep it from my son. They thought it was bad for his asthma and he hates the smell. But every now and then, when I’m feeling oh, a little tense”—he laughed and Joe chuckled too—“I like to have me a Lucky.”

Joe reached into his inside pocket and produced a pack of Dunhills and a silver Zippo. “You got an ashtray?”

“Sure.” Billy stood and went to a drawer midway down the kitchen counter. “May I?”

Joe nodded.

Billy opened the drawer. He reached in, his back to Joe, and then turned back to the table with a small glass ashtray in hand. He placed it on the table. He closed the drawer.

“No one would want you dead, Joe. It makes no sense.”

“So you’re back to the theory that someone’s playing a head game.”

“Stirring things up in there, yeah.”

Billy took his seat again and smiled across the table at Joe.

Joe opened the pack of Dunhills and proffered the pack to Billy.

“What are those?”

“Dunhills. They’re English.”

“They look fancy.”

“I guess.”

“I’m a Lucky’s man. Always have been.”

Joe said nothing, the pack still between them.

“May I?”

“What’s that?”

“Get my pack of Lucky Strikes?”

Joe withdrew his hand. “Be my guest.”

From upstairs, a small scrape of the chair.

Billy went to one of the upper cabinets. He opened it, looked back over his shoulder at Joe. Joe could see nothing in there but cereal bowls and a couple of coffee cups.

“I keep them out of sight so the boy won’t know,” Billy said. “I gotta reach back there.”

Joe nodded.

“Ain’t no reason, Joe.” He dug deep and off to the right.

“What’s that?”

“Anyone would want to kill you.”

“Guess it’s just a crazy rumor then.” Joe shifted slightly to his left.

“That’d be my bet.”

Billy’s arm came out of the cupboard a lot faster than it went in, and Joe caught a spark of kitchen light bouncing off something metal in Billy’s hand, and he shot Billy in the chest. Well, he’d been aiming for the chest, but the shot went high and the bullet took out the man’s Adam’s apple. Billy slid down the cupboard and sat on the floor, eyelids fluttering like mad, his gaze hungry and frantic.

Joe looked at the silver cigarette case in his hand. Billy snapped it open with his thumb to show Joe the white stubby row of Lucky Strikes.

“
This
time,” Joe said.

Billy’s eyelids stopped fluttering and his mouth formed an O as his chin drooped over his torn throat. Joe drained his beer can in the sink and rinsed it before putting it in the pocket of his coat. He wiped off the faucet with a dish towel and used it to open the side door off the kitchen. He put the dish towel in the other coat pocket and left the house.

He walked down the street to his car and he placed his coat on the backseat. He removed his hat and placed it on the passenger
seat and then closed up the car and walked back up Obispo on the opposite sidewalk. He leaned against a telephone pole and watched the light in Walter Kovich’s room.

After a few minutes, he lit a cigarette. He knew his actions were those of an insane man, certainly a wildly incautious one. He should have been ten miles away from here by now, twenty.

He thought of all the children who would grow up without fathers simply because he and men like him existed. His own son had lost his mother because of Joe’s work. Ten years ago, on the bloodiest day in Tampa mob history, twenty-five men had been cut down between noon and midnight. Of those twenty, at least ten had been fathers. And if Joe died tomorrow or the day after, his own son would be orphaned. They had a rule in this business of theirs—never involve families. It was a sacred rule, trumping all except the one about making as much money as possible. It allowed them to believe something separated them from the animals. A higher moral code. A limit to their cruelty and self-interest.

They respected family.

But the truth was something different. They didn’t kill families, true. They just amputated them.

He waited to see Walter Kovich’s light shut off because he wanted to know the kid had one last peaceful night of sleep. After he discovered his father’s body in the kitchen, peace would be a hard thing to come by for a while, and so would sleep.

Tomorrow morning, Walter Kovich, twelve years old and about to skip eighth grade, was going to walk downstairs and discover his father sitting on the kitchen floor without his throat. The splatter of blood would be black and gummy. There’d be flies. Walter would not be going into school. By this time tomorrow night, his bed would feel alien. His house would have morphed into a baffling, haunted place. He would not be able to taste his food. He would
never have another conversation with his father. He would probably never know why his father was taken from him.

Nor, if Joe were to die soon, would his own son.

Did Walter Kovich have an aunt or uncle to take him in? A grandparent? Joe had no idea.

He looked back up at the window. The light was still on.

It was late. Kid must have fallen asleep at the desk, Joe decided, cheek pressed to the pages of a textbook.

Joe stepped off the curb and walked up the street to his car. The street was very quiet as he drove away; not even the bark of a dog marked his exit.

MONDAY, MARCH 8, 1943, two days before Ash Wednesday.

With Billy Kovich down at the morgue, Joe was surprised to wake up feeling less safe, not more. So when Dion called to convince Joe that no matter how many of Rico’s bodyguards he hired, he still didn’t live in a gated house, Joe put up far less of a fight than his friend would have expected.

He set off with Tomas an hour later and they drove out of Ybor and headed for Dion’s. Tomas spread the morning paper out, the top half resting on the dash, the lower half on his lap. Above the fold—the battle of the Bismarck Sea. Below it, right-hand corner—the death of Billy Kovich, taxi dispatcher with suspected ties to underworld figures.

“What’s an archipageo?”

Joe looked at his son. “A what?”

Tomas nodded at the newspaper. “An archipelago?” This time he pronounced it “archeep lagoo.”

“An archipelago,” Joe said.

“Yeah.”

“Try it.”

Slowly. “An archipelago.”

“First try.” Joe bounced his fist lightly off his son’s knee. “Well done. It’s what they call a group of islands.”

“Why not just call it a group of islands?”

Joe smiled. “Why call a dozen things twelve? Why call a dog a canine?”

“Or a cat a feline?”

“Or a child a kid?” Joe knew once the two of them got started this way they could go all day and he was already running close to late as it was.

Luckily Tomas broke from the jokes. “New Gween-e-a?”

“New Guinea.”

Tomas sounded it out, again getting it on the first try.

It’s all the papers had been talking about for two days, Uncle Sam and the Australian Air Force raining hell’s holy fury down on a Japanese naval convoy off the Bismarck Archipelago. And today’s reports noting that a new battle had just opened nearby off Bougainville in the Solomon Islands.

“Well, they’re sure giving ’em what for, aren’t they?”

“I want to be a soldier someday.”

Joe almost drove the car into a curb.

“Is that right?” he said lightly.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Fight for my country.”

“Would your country fight for you?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You know why we live in Ybor?”

“Because we have a nice house there.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “But also because it’s the only place Cubans can live around here without people treating them like they’re second-class. You know what ‘second-class’ means, right?”

Tomas nodded. “Not as good.”

“Exactly. So your mother lived here and they treated her like she was second-class. She couldn’t go into a lot of restaurants or hotels. If she went to the movie theater downtown? They made her drink water from the colored fountain.”

Just talking about it was thickening Joe’s voice.

“So?” Tomas said.

“So this country never welcomed your mother.”

“I know that,” Tomas said, though Joe could tell he was in a mild state of shock. Joe had never told him about the water fountains before.

“You do?”

Tomas was wide-eyed now, and the wideness made the pain all that more apparent.

Joe decided to switch tacks. “Wait—which country, by the way?”

“Which?”

Joe nodded. “Here or Cuba?”

Tomas looked at the window for a very long time, so long in fact that they’d reached Dion’s and pulled past the guards at his front gate and driven down a path lined with palm trees and towering magnolias before he spoke again. It was a question Joe had never put to his son before because he’d always feared the answer. Graciela had been full-blooded Cuban. His grandmother and aunts were all Cuban. Tomas had attended first and second grades in Havana. He spoke Spanish as easily as English.

“Here,” he said. “America.”

The answer surprised Joe so much he almost forgot to depress the clutch as they pulled up in front of Dion’s house and the car sputtered for a moment before he could slide the shift into neutral.

“America’s your home?” Joe asked. “I thought—”

Tomas shook his head. “Cuba’s my home.”

“I’m confused.”

Tomas reached for his door handle, a look on his face that said it all made perfect sense to him. “But America’s worth dying for.”

“I just told you how America treated your mother.”

“I know,” Tomas said. “But, Dad . . .”

He tried to work it out in his head, his hands moving more than usual.

“What?” Joe said eventually.

“No one’s perfect,” Tomas replied and opened the door.

As Tomas exited the car, Dion opened his front door, a cigar already hanging out of the side of his mouth at eight in the morning. He scooped Tomas off the patio without a word and carried him on his hip like a loaf of bread as they entered his house.

“I heard you were sick.”

“Put me down, Uncle D.”

“You don’t look sick.”

“I’m not sick. I had chicken pox.”

“I heard you looked like something in the circus.”

“No.”

Joe followed them inside, their banter almost easing the dread that had been building in him all morning, maybe all month when he thought about it. It wasn’t just dread over the assassin who could be out there, although he carried plenty of that. It wasn’t just dread of the ghost boy, though he dreaded another appearance from the spooky fucking thing more than he could ever admit. It was a larger
dread, a more unwieldy type. It was a feeling he’d had for the last few months that the whole world was being remade, slave-demons working tirelessly night and day at its core, reshaping, remolding. The slave-demons worked in pits of fire, and they never slept.

Joe could feel the wide swaths of ground shifting below his feet, but every time he looked, the earth appeared not to have moved at all.

“You joining the circus?” Dion asked Tomas.

“I’m not joining the circus.”

“You could have your own pet monkey.”

“I’m not joining the—”

“Or, say, a baby elephant. That’d be fun.”

“I couldn’t have a baby elephant.”

“Why not?”

“He’d grow too big.”

“Oh, so you’re worried you’d have to clean all his poop.”

“No.”

“No? It’s a lot of poop.”

“He’d be too big to keep in the house.”

“Yeah, but you got that farm in Cuba.” Dion adjusted Tomas on his hip with one hand, adjusted the cigar in his mouth with the other. “You’d probably have to quit the circus, though. Elephants need a lot of attention.” When they reached the kitchen, he let Tomas down.

“Got something for you.” He reached into the sink and came back with a basketball. He tossed it to Tomas.

“Keen.” Tomas rolled the ball between his palms. “What do I do with it?”

“You shoot it through a hoop.”

A frown. “I know that. But there’s no hoop.”

“There wasn’t a hoop,” Dion said, eyebrow cocked at Joe’s son until he got it.

“Christ,” Joe said.

Dion shot him a look. “What?”

“Where? Where?” Tomas hopped in place.

Dion jerked his head toward the sliding glass doors. “Out back. Just past the pool.”

Tomas took off running.

“Hey,” Joe said.

He stopped.

“What do you say?”

“Thanks, Uncle D.”

“Pleasure.”

Tomas ran out the back of the house.

Joe looked out past the pool. “A fucking basketball court?”

“It’s not a whole court. It’s a hoop. I paved over the koi pond and a rosebush.” He shrugged. “Fish and flowers—all they do is fucking die anyway. No big deal.”

“You spoil that kid like he’s your only grandkid.”

“I’m not old enough to be a grandfather, you fuck.” Dion poured some orange juice into a glass of champagne. He lifted the glass. “Want one?”

Joe shook his head as they walked into the living room. Joe gave nods to the men there—Geoff the Finn and Granite Mike Aubrey. The Finn was a great soldier when he was sober, but that was getting to be a rare condition in which to find him. Aubrey was useless. They called him Granite Mike because he looked to have been carved out of it. No one could match him in the weight room at Philo’s. He could tell a good joke, and he was quick to light your cigarette or cigar, but he was all muscle and no brain. Worse than that, all muscle and no balls. Joe had seem him twitch at a car backfiring.

But Dion kept guys like these around because they made him laugh and they’d match him drink for drink and steak for steak. In
Joe’s opinion, he was too chummy with his men, so when he had to knock one back into line or reprimand one, they resented it on a personal level. If Dion saw the resentment in their faces, he felt a mirror sense of betrayal or ingratitude that could trip the switch on his rage. And Dion’s rage was not something you wanted to see twice, and most didn’t live to.

“I know you got a lot on your mind right now, but we get any further on this rat in our house?” Dion took a drink.

“I know what you know.”

“You know what I know,” Dion said. “How about doing something about it?”

“I’m not your lieutenant,” Joe said. “I’m your advisor.”

“You work for me, you don’t get to claim limited duties.”

They walked into the billiards room, sat up in the chairs, and looked at the empty table.

Joe said, “With all due respect, D—”

“Oh, now I’m in for it.”

“You’ve known for months this rat can only be coming from here.”

“Or up north. Donnie’s house.”

“But Donnie runs Boston
for you
. So the rat’s inside our house. And he’s not sticking to the basement anymore. He’s in the pantry.”

“So take a broom and go get him.”

“I’m not on the street,” Joe said. “I’m in Havana, I’m in Beantown, I’m in the Apple, I’m all over the fucking place. I’m the front, D. I run the legit shops and the gambling. You’re the street.”

“But the rat’s in the house.”

“Sure,” Joe said, “but he crawled from a sewer.”

Dion pinched the skin between his eyebrows and sighed. “You think I need a wife?”

“What?”

Dion looked out at his garden. “You know, someone to cook and give me kids, shit like that?”

Joe had been watching Dion fuck his way through shopgirls, showgirls, and cigarette girls since they were dodging the truant officer in the streets of Boston just after the Great War. He’d never stayed with a girl more than a few weeks.

“I think women are too much of a pain in the ass,” Joe said, “to move in with one unless you love her.”

“You moved in with one.”

“Yeah, well,” Joe said, “I loved her.”

Dion took a pull from his cigar. They could hear Tomas behind the house, clanging the ball off the backboard. “You ever figure on moving in with another one?”

Joe looked at Dion’s monstrosity of a house. He lived alone, but his bodyguards had to sleep somewhere, so he had an eight-thousand-foot main house, and the only thing he ever used the kitchen for was to hide a basketball in the sink.

“No,” Joe said, “I don’t.”

“She’s been gone seven years.”

“Are we talking as friends right now? Or boss and advisor?”

“Friends.”

“I know she’s been gone seven fucking years. I’ve counted them. I’ve lived them.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“Day by day.”

“I said okay.”

They sat without talking for a while and then Dion let loose a loud groan. “Like we need all this shit right now,” Dion said. “I got Wally Grimes in the ground, Montooth Dix holed up in his fortress, I got more union trouble in Ybor, I got some sort of stomach
flu moving through three of my whorehouses, and the war took away half our best customers.”

“It’s a tough job.” Joe pantomimed playing a very small violin. “I’m going to go take a nap. Haven’t slept in days.”

“You look it.”

“Fuck you.”

“Take a number, sweetie.”

THE NAP DIDN’T WORK OUT. If he wasn’t worried about a bullet with his name on it, he was fretting over the rat in the organization. And if he wasn’t fretting over the rat in the organization, he was worried about how his son would fare if something happened to his father. Which led him back to the bullet with his name on it.

To switch gears, he tried thinking about Vanessa, but that didn’t carry the same comfort it used to. Something had changed between them. Or maybe just in her. With women, who knew? But it was a different Vanessa he’d sat with on the dock. An air of regret and possibly dismay—not transitory either but permanent—hung over her. They’d sat on the dock, held hands, and said almost nothing for an hour. But when she stood to walk to her car, it seemed as if an entire journey had taken place, a trek from
A
to
Z,
in the time that she’d been sitting.

Her good-bye had been a light palm placed to his cheek and eyes that darted back and forth across his face, searching, searching. But for what?

He had no idea.

And then she was gone.

So a failed nap, and Joe wandered through the rest of the day near-comatose and twitchy. He rebounded a bit after dinner, and he and Dion took brandies into Dion’s study and talked about Billy
Kovich for the first time. Tomas was asleep in a bedroom upstairs.

Dion poured them each a healthy snifter and said to Joe, “What choice did you have?”

“He really was reaching for his cigarettes, though.” Joe grimaced and took a long pull from his glass.

“That time,” Dion reminded him.

“Yeah, yeah,” Joe said. “I know, I know.”

Dion went to crank open the window behind his desk, then looked back at Joe. “Okay with you?”

“Huh?” Joe looked up at his friend and then at the dark vegetation beyond the window. “Yeah, fine. I’m past worrying about myself. I just don’t want someone to hit Tomas ’cause he’s standing too close to me.”

Dion opened the window, and the breeze that found them was pleasantly cool for March in West Florida. It sounded like schoolgirls whispering as it rustled through the palm fronds in the dark.

“Nobody’s getting to Tomas,” Dion said, “and no one’s getting to you. You’re gonna wake up Thursday morning and wonder how you ever fell for this. Bitch played a con to get you to convince Lucius to let her live. Hell, Lucius himself probably hatched the plan—he’s that smart—so that he keeps ninety thousand fucking dollars and she keeps her life but thinks it was her own idea to play you. Meanwhile, you lose sleep for a week—”