“You’ve got a very confused woman on your hands,” he told Joe after his last trip over.
“This I know,” Joe said.
“Do you understand why she is confused?”
Joe poured them each a glass of Suarez Reserve. “No, I don’t. We can buy or do anything we want. She can have the finest clothes, get her hair done at the nicest shops, go to the nicest restaurants—”
“That allow Latins.”
“That goes without saying.”
“Does it?” Esteban leaned forward in his chair, put his feet on the floor.
“The point I’m trying to make,” Joe said, “is that we won. We can relax, she and I. Grow old together.”
“And you think that’s what she wants—to be a rich man’s wife?”
“Isn’t that what most women want?”
Esteban gave that a strange smile. “You told me once you did not grow up poor like most gangsters.”
Joe nodded. “We weren’t rich but . . .”
“But you had a nice house, food in your bellies, could afford to go to school.”
“Yes.”
“And was your mother happy?”
Joe said nothing for a long time.
“I’ll assume that’s a no,” Esteban said.
Eventually Joe said, “My parents seemed more like distant cousins. Graciela and me? We’re not those people. We talk all the time. We”—he lowered his voice—“fuck all the time. We truly enjoy each other’s company.”
“So?”
“So why won’t she love me?”
Esteban laughed. “Of course she loves you.”
“She won’t say it.”
“Who cares if she says it?”
“I do,” Joe said. “And she won’t divorce Shithead.”
“I can’t speak to that,” Esteban said. “I could live a thousand years and never understand the hold that pendejo has over her.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Every time I walk down the worst block in Old Havana he sits there in one of the bars, drinking her money.”
My money, Joe thought. Mine.
“Is anyone still looking for her over there?”
“Her name’s on a list,” Esteban said.
Joe thought about it. “But I could get her false papers in a fortnight. Couldn’t I?”
Esteban nodded. “Of course. Maybe sooner.”
“So I could send her back there, she could see this asshole sitting on his barstool, and she’d . . . She’d what, Esteban? You think it would be enough for her to leave him?”
He shrugged. “Joseph, listen to me. She loves you. I have known her all my life and I have seen her in love before. But you? Whoosh.” He widened his eyes, fanned his face with his hat. “It’s something different than she’s ever felt. But you must remember, she’s spent the last ten years defining herself as a revolutionary, and now she wakes up to discover that what she really wants is to throw all that off her shoulders—her beliefs, her country, her calling, and, yes, her stupid old husband—to be with an American gangster. You think she’s just going to admit that to herself?”
“Why not?”
“Because then she has to admit she’s a café rebel, a fake. She’s not going to admit that. She’s going to redouble her commitment to the cause and hold you at arm’s length.” He shook his head and grew thoughtful, staring up at the ceiling. “When you say it out loud, it’s quite mad actually.”
Joe rubbed his face. “You got that right.”
Everything hummed along smoothly for a couple years—a hell of a run in their business—until Robert Drew Pruitt came to town.
The Monday after Joe’s talk with Esteban, Dion came in to tell him that RD had stuck up another of their clubs. Robert Drew Pruitt was called RD, and he’d been a concern to everyone in Ybor since he’d gotten out of prison eight weeks ago and showed up here to make his way in the world.
“Why can’t we just find this asshole and put him down?”
“The Klavern ain’t going to like that.”
The KKK had gained a lot of power in Tampa recently. They’d always been fanatic drys, not because they didn’t drink themselves—they did, and constantly—but because they believed alcohol gave delusions of power to the mud people and led to fornication between the races and was also part of a papist plot to sow weakness in the practitioners of true religion so Catholics could eventually take over the world.
The Klan had left Ybor alone until the crash. Once the economy went in the tank, their message of white power began to find desperate believers, the same way the fire-and-brimstone preachers had seen attendance in their tents swell. People were lost and people were scared and their lynch ropes couldn’t reach bankers or stockbrokers, so they looked for targets closer to home.
They found it in the cigar workers, who had a long history of labor battles and radical thought. The Klan ended the last strike. Every time the strikers gathered, the KKK would bust into the meetings firing rifles and pistol-whipping whoever was in reach. They burned a cross on one striker’s lawn, firebombed the house of another on Seventeenth, and raped two female cigar workers walking home from the Celestino Vega factory.
The strike was called off.
RD Pruitt had been Klan before he left to do a two-year bid at the State Prison Farm at Raiford, so there was little reason to believe he hadn’t joined right back up when he got out. The first speak he stuck up, a hole-in-the-wall in the back of a bodega on Twenty-seventh, was directly across the train tracks from an old shotgun shack rumored to be the headquarters for the local Klavern run by Kelvin Beauregard. As RD was helping himself to the night’s till, he gestured at the wall closest to the tracks and said, “We all be watching so we best not see no laws.”
When Joe heard that, he knew he was dealing with a moron—who the fuck would call the police when a speakeasy was robbed? But the “we” gave him pause because the Klan were just waiting for someone like Joe to stick his head up. A Catholic Yankee who worked with the Latins, Italians, and Negroes, shacked up with a Cuban, and made his money selling the demon rum—what wasn’t there to hate about him?
In fact, he realized pretty quickly, that’s exactly what they were doing. They were calling him out. The foot soldiers of the Klan might have been a collection of inbred idiots with fourth-grade educations at third-rate schools, but their leaders tended to be a bit smarter. Besides Kelvin Beauregard, a local cannery owner and city councilman, the group was rumored to include Judge Franklin of the 13th Judicial Court, a dozen cops, and even Hopper Hewitt, publisher of the Tampa Examiner.
The other, far more meaningful complication, in Joe’s view, was that RD’s brother-in-law was Irving Figgis, also known as Eagle Eye Irv, but more formally as Tampa’s chief of police.
Since their first meeting back in ’29, Chief Figgis had brought Joe in for questioning a few times, just to keep clear the adversarial nature of their relationship. Joe would sit in his office and sometimes Irv would have his secretary bring them lemonade, and Joe would look at the pictures on his desk—the beautiful wife, and the two apple-haired children, the boy, Caleb, a dead ringer for his daddy, and the girl, Loretta, still so beautiful it muddied Joe’s brain whenever he looked at her. She’d been homecoming queen at Hillsborough High School and had been winning all sorts of awards in local theater since she was a pup. So no one was surprised when she headed west for Hollywood upon graduation. Like everyone else, Joe expected to see her up on the big screen any day now. She had that light about her that turned people around her into moths.
Surrounded by the images of his perfect life, Irv had warned Joe on more than one occasion that if his department ever found anything to tie him to the Mercy job, they’d damn well rope Joe up for the rest of his life. And who knew what the Feds would do from there—maybe tie that rope around his neck, drop him through th
e gallows. But otherwise, Irv let Joe and Esteban and their people be, as long as they all stayed the hell out of white Tampa.
But now here came RD Pruitt sticking up the fourth Pescatore speakeasy in a single month and fairly begging Joe to retaliate.
“All four bartenders have said the same thing about this kid,” Dion told Joe, “said he’s sick-mean. You can see it in him. He’s gonna kill somebody next time or the time after.”
Joe had known plenty of guys in prison who fit that description and they normally left you with only three choices—get them to work for you, get them to ignore you, or kill them. There was no way Joe wanted RD to work for him and no way RD would take orders from a Catholic or a Cuban, so that left options two and three.
One morning in February, he met with Chief Figgis at the Tropicale, the day warm and dry, Joe having learned by now that from late October to the end of April, the climate here was hard to beat. They sipped their coffees with a boost of Suarez Reserve added to it, and Chief Figgis looked out onto Seventh with an itch in his stare and fidgeted in his chair.
Lately there was something tucked just behind the corner of him that was trying not to drown. Some second heart beating in his ears, beating in his throat, beating behind his eyes enough to make them bulge sometimes.
Joe didn’t have a clue what had gone wrong in the man’s life—maybe his wife had run off, maybe someone he loved had died—but it was clear something ate at him lately, took the vigor from him, took the certainty too.
He said, “You hear the Perez factory is closing?”
“Shit,” Joe said. “That’s got, what, four hundred workers?”
“Five hundred. Five hundred more people without jobs, five hundred pairs of idle hands waiting to do the devil’s handiwork. But, shit, even the devil ain’t hiring these days. So they ain’t going to get up to much of anything but drinking and fighting and robbing and making my job all the harder, but at least I got one.”
Joe said, “I heard Jeb Paul’s closing his dry goods store.”
“Heard that too. Been in his family since before this city had a name.”
“A shame.”
“Damn shame, what it is.”
They drank, and RD Pruitt sauntered in off the street. Wore himself a tan knicker suit with wide lapels, a white golf cap, and two-toned Oxfords like he was heading out to the back nine. Rolled a toothpick across his lower lip.
Soon as he sat down, Joe saw it in his face clear as a stream—fear. It lived back behind his eyes, leaked out of his pores. Most people didn’t see it because they mistook its public faces—hatred and ill temper—for rage. But Joe had studied it for two years in Charlestown, and he’d discovered that the worst of the men in there were also the most terrified—terrified of being found out as cowards or, worse, victims, themselves, of other terrible and terrified men. Terrified someone was going to infect them with more poison and terrified someone might come and take their poison away. This terror moved through their eyes like quicksilver; you had to catch it on your first meeting, in the first minute, or you’d never see it again. But in that moment of original contact, they were still assembling themselves for you, so you could spy the fear animal as it dashed back into its cave, and Joe was sad to see that RD Pruitt’s animal was as big as a boar, which meant he’d be twice as mean and twice as unreasonable because he was twice as scared.
As RD sat, Joe offered his hand.
RD shook his head. “Don’t shake hands with papists.” He smiled and showed Joe his palms. “I mean no offense.”
“None taken.” Joe left the hand out there. “Help if I said I haven’t been in church for half my life?”
RD chuckled and shook his head some more.
Joe took his hand back and settled into his seat.
Chief Figgis said, “RD, word around the fire is you’ve taken to your old ways down here in Ybor.”
RD looked at his brother-in-law, eyes wide and innocent. “And how’s that?”
“We hear you’re sticking up places,” Figgis said.
“What kind of places?”
“Speakeasies.”
“Oh,” RD said, his eyes suddenly dark and small. “Mean them places don’t exist in a law-abiding town?”
“Yes.”
“Mean them places that are illegal and should therefore be shuttered?”
“That would be them,” Figgis said, “yes.”
RD shook his small head and his face returned to its cherubic innocence. “I just don’t know anything about that.”
Joe and Figgis exchanged a look, and Joe got the impression both of them were trying hard not to sigh.
“Ha-ha,” RD said. “Ha-ha.” He pointed at the two of them. “I’m just playing with you all. And you know that.”
Chief Figgis indicated Joe with a tilt of his head. “RD, this is a businessman who’s come to do business. I’m here to suggest you do it with him.”
“You do know that, right?” RD asked Joe.
“Sure.”
“What am I playing at?” RD said.
“You’re just joking around,” Joe said.
“I am. You know. You know.” He smiled at Chief Figgis. “He knows.”
“Okay, then,” Figgis said. “So we’re all friends.”
RD gave them a vaudevillian roll of the eyes. “I didn’t say that.”
Figgis blinked a few times. “Either case, we all understand one another.”
“This man”—RD pointed his finger in Joe’s face—“is a bootlegger and a fornicator with niggers. He needs to be tarred and feathered, not done business with.”
Joe smiled at the finger and considered snatching it out of the air, slamming it on the table, and snapping it at the knuckle.
Before he could, RD removed it and said, “I’m just joshing!” very loudly. “You take a joke, right?”
Joe said nothing.
RD reached across the table and chucked his fist off Joe’s shoulder. “You take a joke? Huh? Huh?”
Joe looked across at possibly the friendliest face he’d ever come across. A face that wished only the best of things for you. Kept looking until he saw the fear animal make a dash through RD’s sick and friendly eyes.
“I can take a joke.”
“Long as you don’t become one, right?” RD said.
Joe nodded. “My friends tell me you frequent the Parisian.”
RD narrowed his eyes like he was trying to recall the place.
Joe said, “I hear you’re fond of the French seventy-five they serve.”
RD hitched his trouser leg. “And if I was?”
“I’d say you should become more than a regular.”
“What’s more than a regular?”
“A partner.”
“What’s the stake?”
“Cut you in for ten percent of the house take.”
“You’d do that?”
“Sure.”
“Why?”
“Let’s say I respect ambition.”
“That all?”
“And I recognize talent.”
“Well, that ought to be worth more than ten percent.”
“What were you thinking?”
RD’s face went as blandly beautiful as a wheat field. “I was thinking sixty.”
“You want sixty percent of the take of one of the most successful clubs in the city?”
RD nodded, blithe and bland.
“For doing what, exactly?”
“You give me my sixty percent, my friends might look on you less unkindly.”
“Who are your friends?” Joe asked.
“Sixty percent,” RD said, as if for the first time.
“Son,” Joe said, “I’m not giving you sixty percent.”
“Ain’t your son,” RD said mildly. “Ain’t nobody’s son.??
?
“Much to your father’s relief.”
“What’s that?”
“Fifteen percent,” Joe said.
“Beat you to death,” RD whispered.
At least that’s what Joe thought he whispered. He said, “What?”
RD rubbed his jaw hard enough Joe could hear the stubble bristle. He fixed Joe with eyes that were blank and too bright at the same time. “You know, that sounds like a right fair arrangement.”
“What does?”
“Fifteen percent. You wouldn’t go to twenty?”
Joe looked at Chief Figgis, then back at RD. “I’m thinking fifteen is about as generous as it gets for a job I’m not even asking you to show up to.”
RD scratched his stubble some more and looked down at the table for a bit. He looked up eventually, gave them his most boyish smile.
“You’re right, Mr. Coughlin. That is a fair deal, sir. And I’m just pleased as corn on the cob to agree to it.”
Chief Figgis leaned back in his chair, hands on his flat belly. “That’s great to hear, Robert Drew. I just knew we could come to an accord.”
“And we did,” RD said. “How will I pick up my cut?”
“Just drop by the bar every second Tuesday around seven at night,” Joe said. “Ask for the manager, Sian McAlpin.”
“Schwan?”
“Close enough,” Joe said.
“He a papist too?”
“He’s a she, and I never asked her.”
“Sian McAlpin. The Parisian. Tuesday nights.” RD slapped the table with his palms and stood up. “Well, that’s just great, I tell ya. A pleasure, Mr. Coughlin. Irv.” He tipped his hat to them both and gave them a half-wave, half-salute as he left.
For a full minute, no one said anything.