“I want to know why you didn’t learn anything in prison. Too busy taking it up the ass? You get out, come down here, and in two days you try to muscle me? How fucking stupid they make you in there, Joe?”
“Maybe I was just trying to get your attention,” Joe said.
“Then you were a smashing success,” Albert said. “Today we started hearing back from my bars, my restaurants, my pool halls, every speak I got tucked away from here to Sarasota that they don’t pay me anymore. They pay you. So naturally I went to talk to Esteban Suarez, and he’s suddenly got more armed guards than the U.S. Mint. Can’t be bothered to meet with me. You think you and a gang of wops and, what, niggers I hear?”
“Cubans.”
Albert helped himself to a piece of Joe’s toast. “You think you’re going to push me out?”
Joe nodded. “I think I did, Albert.”
Albert shook his head. “Soon as you’re dead, the Suarezes will fall in line and you can be damn sure the dealers will.”
“If you wanted me dead, you would have done it. You came to negotiate.”
Albert shook his head. “I do want you dead and there’s no negotiation. I just wanted you to see that I’ve changed. I’ve mellowed. We’re going to walk out the back door and leave the girl behind. Won’t touch a hair on her head, though, Lord knows, she could spare it.” Albert stood. He buttoned his suit coat over his softening belly. He straightened the brim of his hat. “You make a fuss, we take her with us, kill you both.”
“That’s the proposition?”
“That’s it.”
Joe nodded. He pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and placed it on the table. He smoothed it. He looked up at Albert and began reading the names listed there. “Pete McCafferty, Dave Kerrigan, Gerard Mueler, Dick Kipper, Fergus Dempsey, Archibald—”
Albert pulled the list from Joe’s fingers, read the rest of it.
“You can’t find them, can you, Albert? All your best soldiers, and they’re not answering their phones or their doorbells. You keep telling yourself it’s a coincidence, but you know that’s bullshit. We got to them. Every one of them. And, Albert, I hate to tell you this, but they’re not coming back to you.”
Albert chuckled, but his normally ruddy face was now the white of an elephant tusk. He looked at Bones and Loomis and chuckled some more. Bones chuckled along with him, but Loomis looked sick.
“While we’re on the subject of people in your organization,” Joe said, “how’d you know where to find me?”
Albert glanced at Graciela, a little bit of color returning to his face. “You’re simple, Joe—just follow the pussy.”
Graciela’s jaw tightened but she said nothing.
“It’s a good line, I guess,” Joe said, “but unless you knew where to find me last night—and you didn’t, because nobody did—then you wouldn’t have been able to tail me here.”
“You got me.” Albert held up his hands. “I guess I have other methods.”
“Like a guy inside my organization?”
The smile slid through Albert’s eyes before he blinked it away.
“Same guy who told you to take me in the café, not on the street?”
No smile in Albert’s eyes anymore. They turned flatter than pennies.
“He tell you if you took me in the café, I wouldn’t put up a fight because of the girl? Tell you I’d even take you to a bag of cash I stashed in a flop over in Hyde Park?”
Brendan Loomis said, “Shoot him, boss. Shoot him now.”
Joe said, “You should have shot me coming through the door.”
“Who says I won’t?”
“I do,” Dion said, coming up behind Loomis and Bones, a long-barrel .38 pointed at each of them. Sal Urso entered through the front door and Lefty Downer came in behind Sal, both of them wearing trench coats on a cloudless day.
The café owner and the couple at the counter were officially rattled now. The old man kept patting his chest. The café owner thumbed her rosary beads, her lips moving frantically.
Joe asked Graciela, “Could you go tell them we won’t hurt them?”
She nodded and got up from the table.
Albert said to Dion, “So betrayal’s your defining personality trait, eh, fat boy?”
“Only once, you dandy fuck,” Dion said. “Shoulda thought long and hard about what I did to your boy Blum last year before you bought my bullshit this time around.”
“How many more we got on the street?” Joe asked.
“Four cars full,” Dion said.
Joe stood. “Albert, I don’t want to kill anybody in this café but that doesn’t mean I won’t if you give me half a reason.”
Albert smiled, smug as always, even outnumbered and outgunned. “We won’t give you a quarter of a reason. How’s that for cooperation?”
Joe spit in his face.
Albert’s eyes went as small as peppercorns.
For a very long moment, no one in the café moved.
“I’m going to reach for my handkerchief,” Albert said.
“You reach for anything, we plug you where you stand,” Joe said. “Use your fucking sleeve.”
As he did, Albert’s smile returned but his eyes remained filled with murder. “So you’re either killing me or running me out of town.”
“That’s right.”
“Which?”
Joe looked at the café owner and her rosary, at Graciela standing beside her, her hand on the woman’s shoulder.
“Don’t think I feel like killing you today, Albert. You don’t have the guns or the funds to start a war, and you’d need years of building new alliances to make me look over my shoulder.”
Albert took a seat. Just as easy as you please. Like he was visiting old friends. Joe remained standing.
“You planned this since the alley,” he said.
“Sure did.”
“At least tell me some of this was just business,” he said.
Joe shook his head. “This was completely personal.”
Albert took that in and nodded. “You want to ask about her?”
Joe felt Graciela’s eyes on him. And Dion’s.
He said, “Not particularly, no. You fucked her, I loved her, and then you killed her. What’s left to discuss?”
Albert shrugged. “I did love her. More than you could imagine.”
“I got a hell of an imagination.”
“Not this good,” he said.
Joe tried to read the face behind Albert’s face, and he got the same feeling he’d gotten in the basement service corridor of the Hotel Statler—that Albert’s feelings for Emma matched his own.
“So why’d you kill her?”
“I didn’t kill her,” Albert said. “You did. The moment you put your dick in her. Thousands of other girls in that city and you a pretty boy to boot, but you take mine. You give a man horns, he has two choices—gore himself or gore you.”
“But you didn’t gore me. You gored her.”
Albert shrugged and Joe could see clearly that it pained him still. Christ, he thought, she owns a piece of both of us.
Albert looked around the café. “Your master ran me out of Boston. Now you’re running me out of Tampa. That the play?”
“Pretty much.”
Albert pointed at Dion. “You know he sold you out in Pittsfield? That he’s the reason you did two years in jail?”
“Yeah, I do. Hey, D.”
Dion never took his eyes off Bones and Loomis. “Yeah?”
“Put a couple bullets in Albert’s brain.”
Albert’s eyes popped wide and the café owner let out a yelp and Dion crossed the floor with his arm extended. Sal and Lefty revealed Thompsons under their raincoats to cover Loomis and Bones, and Dion put the gun to Albert’s temple. Albert scrunched his eyes clo
sed and held up his hands.
Joe said, “Hold it.”
Dion stopped.
Joe fixed his trousers and squatted in front of Albert. “Look in my friend’s eyes.”
Albert looked up at Dion.
“You see any love for you in them, Albert?”
“No.” Albert blinked. “No, I don’t.”
Joe nodded at Dion, and Dion removed the gun from Albert’s head.
“You drive here?”
“What?”
“Did you drive here?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You’re gonna go to your car and drive north out of the state. I suggest Georgia because as of now I control Alabama, the Mississippi coast, and every town between here and New Orleans.” He smiled at Albert. “And I’ve got a meeting about New Orleans next week.”
“How do I know you won’t have men waiting on the road for me?”
“Hell, Albert, I will have men on the road. In fact, they’re going to follow you out of the state. Ain’t that right, Sal?”
“Car’s all gassed up, Mr. Coughlin.”
Albert got a look at Sal’s tommy gun. “How do I know they won’t kill us on the road?”
“You don’t,” Joe said. “But if you don’t leave Tampa right now and leave for good, I’ll give you the A & P fucking guarantee you won’t see tomorrow. And I know you want to see tomorrow because that’s when you’ll start planning your revenge.”
“Then why leave me alive?”
“So everyone knows I took everything you had, and you weren’t man enough to stop me.” Joe straightened from his crouch. “I’m letting you keep your life, Albert, because I can’t think of a soul who would fucking want it.”
Chapter Eighteen
Nobody’s Son
During the good years, Dion said to Joe, “Luck ends.”
He said it more than once.
Joe would reply, “Good luck and bad.”
“It’s just your luck has been good so long,” Dion said, “no one remembers your bad.”
He built a house for himself and Graciela on the corner of Ninth and Nineteenth. He used Spanish labor, Cuban labor, Italians for the marble work, and brought in architects from New Orleans to ensure that a multitude of styles coalesced into a Latin Vieux Carré. He and Graciela made several trips to New Orleans to tour the French Quarter for inspiration and took long walking trips around Ybor as well. They came up with a design that married Greek Revival with Spanish Colonial. The house sported a facade of redbrick and pale concrete balconies with wrought iron rails. The windows were green and kept shuttered so the house looked almost plain from the street, and it was difficult to tell when it was occupied.
But in the back, wide rooms with high copper ceilings and tall archways looked onto a courtyard, a wading pool, and gardens where spotted horsemint, violets, and tickseeds grew alongside European fan palms. The stucco walls were covered in Algerian ivy. In the winter the bougainvillea flowered alongside a riot of yellow Carolina jessamine, both fading in the spring to be replaced by trumpet creepers as dark as blood oranges. The stone paths snaked around a fountain in the courtyard, then passed through the loggia archways to a staircase that curled up into the house past walls of eggshell brick.
All the doors in the home were at least six inches thick and sported ram’s horn hinges and door latches of black iron. Joe had helped design the third-floor salon with the domed ceiling and an azotea overlooking the alley that ran behind the house. It was a frivolous porch, given the second-story balcony that wrapped around the rest of the house and the cast-iron third-story gallery with a veranda as wide as the street, and he often forgot it was there.
Once Joe got started, though, he couldn’t stop himself. Guests lucky enough to be invited to one of Graciela’s charity fund-raisers couldn’t help noticing the salon or the grand center hall with the double-wide staircase or the imported silk draperies, Italian bishop’s chairs, Napoléon III cheval mirror with attached candelabras, marble mantels from Florence, or gilt-framed paintings from a gallery in Paris Esteban had recommended. Exposed Augusta Block brick walls met walls covered in satin paper or stenciled patterns or fashionably cracked stucco. Parquet floors at the front of the house yielded to stone floors at the back to keep the rooms cool. In the summer, the furniture was slip-covered in white cotton, and gauze dripped from chandeliers to keep them safe from insects. Mosquito netting hung from Joe and Graciela’s bed and over the claw-foot tub in the bathroom where they often gathered at the end of a day with a bottle of wine, the sounds of the streets rising to them.
Graciela lost friends over the opulence. These were mostly her friends from the factory and those who’d volunteered with her during the early days of the Circulo Cubano. It wasn’t that they begrudged Graciela her newfound wealth and good fortune (though a few did), it was more that they feared they’d bump into something valuable and knock it to the stone floors. They couldn’t sit without fidgeting, and soon they ran out of things they had in common with Graciela and so had nothing left to discuss.
In Ybor, they called the house El Alcalde de la Mansión—The Mayor’s Mansion—but Joe wouldn’t learn of the nickname for at least a year because the voices in the street never rose high enough for him to hear them distinctly.
Meanwhile, the Coughlin-Suarez partnership created enviable stability in a business not known for it. Joe and Esteban established a distillery in the Landmark Theater on Seventh and then another behind the kitchen of the Romero Hotel, and they kept them clean and in constant production. They brought all the mom-and-pop operations into the fold, even the ones who’d worked for Albert White, by giving them a healthier cut and a better product. They bought faster boats and replaced all the engines in their trucks and transport cars. They bought a two-seater seaplane to fly cover for the Gulf runs. The seaplane was piloted by Farruco Diaz, a former Mexican revolutionary as talented as he was insane. Farruco, a notable mess of ancient pockmarks as deep as fingertips and long hair as pale and stringy as wet pasta, lobbied to install a machine gun in the passenger seat “just in case.” When Joe pointed out to him that since he flew solo, there would be nobody to man the gun on those times that “just in case” occurred, Farruco agreed to a compromise, by which they allowed him to install the mount but not the gun.
On the ground, they bought into routes all over the South and along the Eastern Seaboard, Joe’s logic being that if they paid the various Dixie gangs tribute to use their roads, the gangs would pay off the local laws, and the number of arrests and lost loads would drop by 30 to 35 percent.
They dropped by seventy.
In no time at all, Joe and Esteban had turned a one-million-dollars-a-year operation into a six-million-dollars-a-year juggernaut.
And this during a global financial crisis that kept worsening, each shock wave followed by a bigger one, day after day, month after month. People needed jobs and they needed shelter and they needed hope. When none of those proved forthcoming, they settled for a drink.
Vice, he realized, was Depression-proof.
Just about nothing else was, though. Even insulated from it, Joe was still as bewildered as everyone else by the elevator drop the country had taken in the last few years. Since the ’29 crash, ten thousand banks had gone belly-up and thirteen million people had lost their jobs. Hoover, facing a reelection fight, kept talking about a light at the end of the tunnel, but most people decided that light came from the train barreling up to run them over. So Hoover made a last-ditch scramble to raise the tax rate for the richest of the rich from 25 to 63 percent and lost the only people left who supported him.
In Greater Tampa, oddly, the economy surged—shipbuilding and canneries thrived. But no one got the word in Ybor. The cigar factories started sinking faster than the banks. Rolling machines replaced people; radios supplanted the readers on the floor. Cigarettes, so cheap, became the nation’s new l
egal vice, and sales of cigars plummeted by more than 50 percent. The workers of a dozen factories went out on strike, only to see their efforts crushed by management goons, police, and the Ku Klux Klan. The Italians left Ybor in droves. The Spaniards started to move out too.
Graciela lost her job to a machine. This was fine with Joe—he’d been wanting to get her out of La Trocha for months. She was too valuable to his organization. She met the Cubans who came off the boats and brought them to the social club or the hospitals or the Cuban hotels, depending on what they needed. If she saw one she believed was suited for Joe’s line of work, she spoke to him of an even more unique job opportunity.
In addition, it was her instinct for philanthropy, coupled with Joe and Esteban’s need to clean their money, that led to Joe’s buying up roughly 5 percent of Ybor City. He bought two failed cigar factories and reemployed all the workers, turned a failed department store into a school and a bankrupt plumbing supplier into a free clinic. He turned eight empty buildings into speakeasies, though from the street they all looked like their fronts: a haberdasher, a tobacconist, two florists, three butchers, and a Greek lunch counter that much to everyone’s shock—none more so than Joe’s own—became so successful they had to import the rest of the cook’s family from Athens and open a sister lunch counter seven blocks east.
Graciela missed the factory, though. Missed the jokes and tales the other rollers would tell, missed hearing the readers narrate her favorite novels in Spanish, missed speaking in her mother tongue all day.
Even though she spent every night at the house Joe had built for them, she kept her room above the café, although as far as Joe knew, all she ever did there was change her clothes. And not very often, either. Joe had filled a closet in his home with clothes he’d bought her.
“Clothes you bought me,” she’d say when he’d ask her why she didn’t wear them more often. “I like to buy my own things.”
Which she never had the money for because she sent all her money back to Cuba, either to the family of her deadbeat husband or to friends in the anti-Machado movement. Esteban made trips back to Cuba on her behalf sometimes too, fund-raising trips that coincided with the opening of this nightclub or that. He’d come back with news of fresh hope in the movement that, experience had taught Joe, would be dashed on his next trip. He’d also come back with his photographs—his eye getting sharper and sharper, wielding that camera like a great violinist wielded his bow. He’d become a name in the insurgency circles of Latin America, a reputation built, in no small part, on the sabotage of the USS Mercy.
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