Every week for the past two years, Dion had gone to Chinetti’s Bakery on Seventh to eat his fill of pastry and get his marching orders from either a Fed or a cop as to which of his guys he was going to rat out next.
Joe folded the note and placed it in his wallet and then put the cardboard, the wax paper, and the cake back in the carton. He closed the carton and took a seat by his rosebushes and the knowledge that he was alone in this business—truly fucking alone—threatened to knock him off his chair. So he stood and he buried his sorrow and buried his fury in a fresh pocket of himself. At thirty-six, after twenty years on the wrong side of the law, he had a lot of those pockets. They were sealed and stored all over his interior. He wondered if they’d ever burst all at once and that’s what would kill him. Either that or he’d run out of space for them and choke from the lack of air.
HE FELL ASLEEP IN HIS STUDY, sitting upright in the big leather armchair. In the middle of the night he opened his eyes, and the boy stood by the fireplace, the fire mostly embers behind him. He wore red pajamas similar to a pair Joe had worn as a child.
“Is that it?” Joe asked. “You my twin who died in the womb? Or are you me?”
The boy crouched and blew on the embers.
“I never heard of someone having a ghost of himself,” Joe said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”
The boy looked back over his shoulder at Joe, as if to say, Anything’s possible.
In the shadows of the room, there were others. Joe could feel them, even if he couldn’t see them.
When he looked at the fireplace again, the embers were out and it was already dawn.
THE HOUSE WHERE HE’D STASHED Dion and Tomas was in Nazareno, smack in the center of the interior of Habana Province. Behind it lay Havana and the Atlantic, beyond it were mountains, jungles, and then the sparkle of the Caribbean. It was deep in sugarcane country, which is how Joe had discovered it. The house had been originally built as the estate of the Spanish commandante who’d headed the army brought in to crush a rebellion by the Cuban field hands back in the 1880s. The barracks of the soldiers who’d done the crushing had long since been abandoned and retaken by the jungle, but the commandante’s estate remained in its original state of glory—eight bedrooms, fourteen balconies, high iron fences and gates surrounding it.
El Presidente himself—Colonel Fulgencio Batista—had provided Joe with twelve soldiers, enough to repel any attack from Rico DiGiacomo and his men, should they have discovered the location. But Joe knew the real danger wouldn’t have come from Rico, even if he had survived his trip to the boat. It would come from Meyer. And not from the outside, but from one of the well-armed soldiers already inside.
He found Tomas and Dion in Dion’s bedroom. Dion was teaching the boy chess, a game Dion himself was barely adequate at, but at least he knew the rules. Joe placed the paper shopping bag down on the floor. In his other hand, he carried the medicine bag Dr. Blake had given him in Ybor. He kept it in his hand as he stood in the doorway and watched them for a while, Dion telling Tomas all about the origins of the European conflict. He told him about the anger over Versailles, about Mussolini invading Ethiopia, about the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia.
“That’s where his shit should have been stopped,” Dion said. “Once you tell a man it’s okay to steal, he won’t stop until you cut off his hand. But if you threaten to cut off his hand before he reaches for that piece of bread, and he sees in your eyes that you’re serious? He’ll figure out how to get by on less.”
“Will we lose?” Tomas asked.
“Lose what?” Dion said. “We don’t own real estate in France.”
“But then why’re we fighting?”
“Well, we’re fighting the Japs because they attacked us. And Hitler, little Kraut bastard, kept going after our ships, but the real reason we’re fighting is because he’s just nuts and he’s gotta go.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. Sometimes, a guy’s just gotta go.”
“Why’re the Japanese mad at us?”
Dion opened his mouth to answer, then closed it. After a minute, he said, “You know, I don’t even know. I mean they’re Japs, so they’re not like you or me, but I don’t know why their panties got in a bunch originally. Want me to look into it?”
Tomas nodded.
“Deal. By our next game, I’ll know all there is worth knowing about Japs and their sneaky ways.”
Tomas laughed and said, “Checkmate.”
“Sneak attack, uh?” Dion looked down at the board. “You might be half Jap yourself.”
Tomas looked back at Joe. “I won, Father.”
“I see that. Well done.”
Tomas got off the bed. “Are we leaving here soon?”
Joe nodded. “Soon, yeah. Can you go wash up? I think Mrs. Alavarez is making you lunch downstairs.”
“Okay. See you, Uncle Dion.”
“See ya.”
“Checkmate,” Tomas said as he was leaving. “Ha.”
Joe placed the shopping bag near the foot of the bed and the doctor’s satchel on the nightstand. He removed the chessboard from Dion’s thighs. “How you feeling?”
“Better every day. Still weak, you know, but getting there. I got a list of guys I think we can trust. Some are in Tampa, but a lot of them are guys from our Boston operation. If you could get up there, convince them to get down to Tampa in a month, maybe six weeks, we could take the town back. Some of these guys are going to be expensive. You know, like Kevin Byrne ain’t picking up his eight kids and leaving his empire there in Mattapan out of pure loyalty. We’ll have to pay him boxcar numbers. And Mickey Adams, he ain’t going to be cheap either, but if they say yes, their word is gold. And if they say no, they’ll never tell anyone you were ever in town. Guys like that are—”
Joe placed the chessboard on top of the dresser. “I had a meeting yesterday with Meyer, Carlos, and Sammy Turnips.”
Dion resettled his head against the pillows. “You did, uh?”
“Yup.”
“And how’d that go?”
“I’m still breathing.”
Dion snorted. “They wouldn’t have clipped you.”
“Actually,” Joe said and sat on the side of the bed, “they had the burial spot all picked out. I was floating above it for a good hour.”
“You met on a boat? What are you, insane?”
“I didn’t have a choice. The Commission says come, you better well come. If I hadn’t, they’d have clipped us all by now.”
“Get past those guards out there? I don’t think so.”
“Those are Batista’s guards. Batista takes money from me and he takes it from Meyer. That means if there’s a beef between the two of us, he’ll take the biggest cut from whoever gets it to him first and let the gods sort it out. Nobody has to get through these guards. It would be the guards who’d kill us.”
Dion shifted some more in the bed and pulled half a cigar out of his ashtray and relit it. “So you met with the Commission.”
“And Rico DiGiacomo.”
Dion’s eyes rose around the cigar smoke as the flame finally caught and the tobacco cackled. “He’s a little irate about his brother, I’d guess.”
“That’s a mild way of putting it. He came in wanting my head.”
“How’d you leave with it then?”
“I promised them yours.”
Dion shifted in the bed again, and Joe realized he was trying to get a look in the bag. “You promised them mine.”
Joe nodded.
“Why would you do that, Joe?”
“Only way I walked back off the boat.”
“What’s in the bag, Joe?”
“They made it clear to me that the hit on you wasn’t something Rico just thought up and did. It was sanctioned.”
Dion sat with that for a while, his eyes gone small and inward, his face pale. He continued to puff on his cigar, but Joe wondered if he was even aware of it. After about five minutes had pass
ed, he said, “I know revenue’s been declining the last couple years on my watch. I know I play the horses too much, but . . .” He fell silent again, took a few more puffs on the cigar to keep the coal hot. “They say why they want me cooked?”
“No. But I got a few theories.” Joe reached into the bag and pulled out the box from Chinetti’s. He placed it on Dion’s lap and watched his friend’s face drain.
Dion said, “What’s that?”
Joe chuckled.
Dion said it again. “What’s that? That from Chinetti’s?”
Joe reached into Dr. Blake’s bag, removed a full syringe of morphine. Enough to dope a herd of giraffe. He tapped it against the heel of his hand and considered his oldest friend.
“Dirty box,” Dion said. “Got blood all over it.”
“It’s dirty,” Joe agreed. “What’d they have on you?”
“Look, I don’t know what you—”
“What’d they have?” Joe tapped the syringe off Dion’s chest.
“Hey, Joe, I know it looks like one thing.”
“Because it is.”
“But sometimes things aren’t what they seem.”
Joe tapped the syringe down Dion’s leg. Tap tap tap. “Most times they are, though.”
“Joe, we’re brothers. You’re not going—”
Joe placed the point of the needle against Dion’s throat. He didn’t do it with any sort of flourish—one second the syringe was tapping against Dion’s shin, the next the point was pressed against the artery just to the left of his Adam’s apple. “You betrayed me once before. I spent three years in prison because of it. And not just any prison—Charlestown. And still I stood by you. Second time I had this choice given to me, they killed nine of my guys because I chose not to give you up. Remember Sal? Remember Lefty and Arnaz and Kenwood? Esposito and Parone? They’re all dead because I didn’t turn you over to Maso Pescatore in ’33.” He scratched the needle point down Dion’s throat and then back up the other side. “Now, here comes the choice again. Except I got a son now, D.” He tipped the point of the needle into the skin and placed his thumb on the plunger and kept his voice steady. “So why don’t you fucking tell me what the Feds have on you?”
Dion gave up trying to see the needle and looked into Joe’s face. “What do they always have on guys like us? Proof. They had me on the phone ordering a knee-capping of that turd in Pinellas last year. Had pictures of me when we off-loaded that boat you sent from Havana back in ’41.”
“You went to an off-load? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“I got sloppy. I was bored.”
It was all Joe could do not to plunge the needle into his fucking eye.
“Who made contact?”
“He worked for Anslinger.”
The Bureau of Narcotics, under the zealot Harry Anslinger, was the only law enforcement group out there that could tell the difference between its ass and a hat. And there had long been a suspicion that this could be due to Anslinger having someone feeding him information from the inside.
Dion said, “I would never have turned on you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You know that.”
“I do, uh?”
Joe reached over and dumped the stale cake out onto Dion’s lap.
“The fuck you doing?”
“Ssshhh.” Joe removed the envelope he’d found under the cake last night. He threw it up the bed, where it hit Dion in the chin. “Open it.”
Dion’s fingers trembled as he did. He pulled out the sheaf of bills—two thousand in hundreds—and the slip of paper below it. He opened the piece of paper and closed his eyes.
“Show it to me, D. Show me the name on it.”
“Just because they were asking, doesn’t mean I would have given it to them. Plenty of times, I don’t.”
“Show me the name. Show me who their next target was.”
Dion turned the piece of paper outward:
Coughlin.
“I never would have—”
“How many lies you want me to believe? How long you want this dance to go on? You keep saying you wouldn’t this, you’d never that, you couldn’t the other thing. What do you want me to do—fucking agree with you? Okay, fine, I agree with you. You’re a man of principle pretending to be a man without honor. Me, I’m just the sap who lost everything—my home, my standing, could still lose my life—to protect a rat.”
“You were protecting a friend.”
“My son was in the car. You took my son to your contact point with federal fucking cops. My son.”
“Who I love like a—”
Joe came forward in a rush, put the needle under Dion’s left eye. “Don’t you say the word love again. Not in this room.”
Dion breathed heavily through his nostrils but said nothing.
“I think you rat on people because it’s your nature. Gives you a thrill. I can’t say for sure, but that’s my guess. And if you do a thing enough times, you are that thing. All your other characteristics are just bullshit.”
“Joe, listen. Just listen.”
Joe was humiliated when he saw a warm tear hit Dion’s face and realized it had come from his own eye. “What am I supposed to believe in now? Huh? What’s left?”
Dion didn’t answer.
Joe sucked a wet breath through his nostrils. “There’s a sugar plantation a few minutes’ walk from here.”
Dion blinked. “I know. You and Esteban showed it to me about five years ago.”
“Angel Balimente is going to meet us there in a couple hours. I’ll hand you off to him and he’ll lead you out of the province to a boat. You’ll be off the island by tonight. I ever hear from you again or I ever hear of you popping your head up somewhere, I’ll put you down. Like a fucking goat with a foaming mouth. We clear?”
“Listen—”
Joe spit in his face.
Dion scrunched his eyes and now he was weeping too, his chest heaving.
“I said are we clear?”
Dion kept his eyes closed and waved his arm at the air above his face. “Clear.”
Joe got off the bed, walked to the door. “Do what you need to do. Pack, say good-bye to Tomas, have a meal, whatever. If you’re seen outside the house before I come back for you, the guards have orders to shoot you on sight.”
He left the room.
OUT ON THE STONE PORCH, Tomas was bewildered. “When will I see you again?”
“Oh,” Dion said, “soon enough. You know.”
“I don’t know. I don’t.”
Dion knelt by him. It took some effort, would probably take more to get back up. “You know what business your father and me are in.”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“Illegal.”
“Well, yeah, but it’s more than that. We call it our thing because that’s what it is—a few guys like me and your father involved in a, whatta ya call it—enterprise. And it’s just ours. We don’t bother nobody outside it, we don’t invade your country or steal your land because our eyes are bigger than our plates. We make money. And we protect other people who are trying to make money the same way for a fee. And if we get in trouble, we can’t cry to the police or the mayor. We’re on our own, like men. And sometimes that’s a tough pill to swallow. So, yeah, now I gotta go away. Because you saw what happened back in Tampa. You saw how it can get when we have a disagreement in our thing. It can get a little serious, right?”
He laughed and Tomas laughed too.
“Very serious, right?”
“Yes,” Tomas said.
“But that’s okay—the serious stuff is what makes life worthwhile. The other stuff—the dames, the laughs, the silly games and lazy days—it’s all fun, but it doesn’t stick. The serious stuff—that sticks, makes you feel alive. So it’s pretty serious right now, and your father he’s got a way to get me out but I gotta go now, and I might have to go forever.”
“No.”
“Yeah. Listen to me. Look, l
ook at me.” He gripped Tomas’s shoulders, locked their gazes. “Someday you’re going to get a postcard. Ain’t going to be anything written on it. Just the card. And the place on that card? That won’t be where I am, but it will be where I was. And you’ll know your uncle Dion is living the life somewhere. He’s getting by.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“Your old man and me, Tomas, we don’t believe in kings or princes or presidents. We believe we’re all kings and princes and presidents. We’re all whatever we decide to be and no one tells us different. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t ever take a knee for nobody.”
“You’re on your knee now.”
“That’s because you’re family.” He chuckled. “Now help me up, would ya, kid? Shit.”
“How can I help you up?”
“Just keep your head right there and don’t move it.”
He clamped his big paw on top of Tomas’s head and pushed up.
“Ouch.”
“Stop your bellyaching and be a man, for Christ’s sake.” He said to Joe, “Gotta toughen this kid up.” He pinched Tomas’s biceps. “Right? Right?”
Tomas swatted at his hand.
“Bye, kid.”
“Bye, Uncle Dion.”
He watched his father lift Dion’s suitcase off the stone porch and then watched them walk out of the yard toward the slope that led down to the plantation, and he hoped this wasn’t what life was—a series of departures.
But he suspected it was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Cane
JOE AND DION WALKED DOWN A ROW that cut through the center of the plantation. The workers called the row Little House Lane; at the end of it stood a small yellow house the previous owner had built as a playhouse for his daughter. It was no bigger than a toolshed but had been constructed to look like a Victorian. The owner had sold the plantation to Suarez Sugar Ltd., Joe’s and Esteban’s company, back in the early 1930s, during the boom years of rum-running, when sugar was at a premium. The owner’s daughter had long since grown up and left the island, and the little house she’d left behind had been used as storage and occasionally as sleeping quarters for smaller men. One year, they’d removed the window in the west wall and fixed a shelf below it and turned the house into a cantina with a few small wooden tables placed out front. It proved an ill-fated act of benevolence, however, when the drunken workers became prone to fighting, and the experiment ended for good when two got in a machete battle that left both men maimed and unemployable.