By this point, Joe was mostly out of danger for hemorrhagic shock, the main killer of abdominal knifing victims. Second to that was liver damage, and his liver had been given a clean bill of health. This, the doctors told him much later, was thanks to his father’s watch, which bore a new scrape on the dust cover. The point of the knife had glanced off the cover first, altering its path, however slightly.
The first doctor had done his best to check for damage to the duodenum, the rectum, the colon, the gallbladder, the spleen, and the terminal ileum, but the conditions had not been ideal. Joe had been stabilized on the dirty floor of an abandoned building and then moved across the bay on a boat. By the time they got him into an operating room, more than an hour had passed.
The second doctor who examined Joe suspected, due to the angle the blade had traveled during its peritoneal penetration, that there was damage to the spleen, and they cut Joe open again. The Spanish doctor was on the money. He repaired the nick in Joe’s spleen and removed the toxic bile that had begun to ulcerate his abdominal wall, though some damage was already done. Joe would require two more surgeries before the month was out.
After the second surgery, he woke to someone sitting at the foot of his bed. His vision was blurred to the point that it turned the air to gauze. But he could make out a thick head and a long jaw. And a tail. The tail thumped against the sheet over his leg and the panther came into focus. It stared at him with its hungry yellow eyes. Joe’s throat constricted and the flesh that covered it was slick with sweat.
The panther licked its upper lip and nose.
It yawned, and Joe wanted to close his eyes in the face of those magnificent teeth, the white of every bone they’d ever cracked in half and torn the meat from.
The mouth closed and the yellow eyes found him again and the cat placed its front paws on his stomach and walked up his body to his head.
Graciela said, “What cat?”
He stared up into her face, blinking at the sweat. It was morning; the air coming through the windows was cool and bore the scent of camellias.
After the surgeries, he was also prohibited from having sex for three months. Alcohol, Cuban food, shellfish, nuts, and corn were forbidden. If he feared that the lack of lovemaking would drive him and Graciela apart (and he did; so did she), it actually had the opposite effect. By the second month, he learned a different way to satisfy her, using his mouth, a way he’d stumbled upon by accident a few times over the years, but which now became his sole method of giving her pleasure. Kneeling before her, her ass cupped in his hands, his mouth covering the gateway to her womb, a gateway he’d come to think of as sacred and sinful and luxuriously slippery all at the same time, he felt he’d finally found something worth taking a knee for. If surrendering all preconceived notions of what a man was expected to give and receive from a woman was what it took to feel as pure and useful as he felt with his head between Graciela’s thighs, then he wished he’d lost those notions years ago. Her initial protestations—no, you can’t; a man does not do that; I must bathe; you cannot possibly like the taste—gave way to something bordering on addiction. For the final month before she could return the favor, Joe realized they were averaging five acts of oral gratification a day.
When the doctors finally cleared him, he and Graciela closed the shutters of their home on Ninth and filled the icebox on the second floor with food and champagne and confined themselves to the canopy bed or the claw-foot tub for two days. Near the end of the second day, lying in the red dusk, the shutters reopened to the street, the ceiling fan drying their bodies, Graciela said, “There will never be another.”
“What’s that?”
“Man.” She ran her palm over his patchwork abdomen. “You are my man until death.”
“Yeah?”
She pressed her open mouth to his neck and exhaled. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“What about Adan?”
For the first time he saw contempt enter her eyes at the mention of her husband.
“Adan is no man. You, mi gran amor, are a man.”
“You’re certainly all woman,” he said. “Christ, I get so lost in you.”
“I get lost in you.”
“Well, then . . .” He looked around the room. He’d waited so long for this day, he wasn’t sure how to treat it now that it had arrived. “You’ll never get a divorce in Cuba, right?”
She shook her head. “Even if I could return under my own name, the Church does not allow it.”
“So you’ll always be married to him.”
“In name,” she said.
“But what’s a name?” he said.
She laughed. “Agreed.”
He moved her on top of him and looked up her brown body into her brown eyes. “Tú eres mi esposa.”
She wiped at her eyes with both hands, a small wet laugh escaping her. “And you are my husband.”
“Para siempre.”
She placed her warm palms on his chest and nodded. “Forever.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Light My Way
Business continued to boom.
Joe began greasing the skids on the Ritz deal. John Ringling was open to selling the building but not the land. So Joe had his lawyers work with Ringling’s to see if they could reach an accommodation that would suit both. Lately the two sides had investigated a ninety-nine-year lease but had gotten hung up on air rights with the county. Joe had one set of bagmen buying the inspectors in Sarasota County, another set up in Tallahassee working on state politicians, and a third group in Washington targeting members of the IRS and senators who frequented whorehouses, gambling parlors, and opium dens the Pescatore Family had stakes in.
His earliest success was to get bingo decriminalized in Pinellas County. He then got a statewide bingo decriminalization bill on the docket, to be heard by the state legislature in the autumn session and possibly put on the ballot as early as 1932. His friends in Miami, a much easier town to buy, helped soften the state even further when Dade and Broward Counties legalized pari-mutuel betting. Joe and Esteban had crawled out on a limb to buy up land for their Miami friends, and now that land was being turned into racetracks.
Maso had flown down to take a look at the Ritz. He’d survived a bout with cancer recently, though no one but Maso and his doctors knew what kind. He claimed to have come through it with flying colors, though it had left him bald and frail. Some even whispered that his thinking had grown muddy, though Joe saw no evidence of it. He’d loved the property and he’d liked Joe’s logic—if there was ever a time to strike at the gambling taboos, it was now, as Prohibition tragically collapsed before their eyes. The money they’d lose on the legalization of booze would go right into the government’s pocket, but the money they’d lose on legal casino and racetrack taxation would be offset by the profit they’d make from people dumb enough to bet against the house on a mass scale.
The bagmen also began to report back that Joe’s hunch was looking good. The country was soft enough for this. You had cash-strapped municipalities from one end of Florida to the other and one end of the country to the other. Joe had sent his men out with pledges of infinite dividends—a casino tax, a hotel tax, a food and beverage tax, an entertainment tax, a room tax, a liquor license tax, plus—and all the pols loved this one—an excess revenue tax. If, on any given day, the casino cleared more than eight hundred thousand dollars, the casino would kick 2 percent of it back to the state. Truth was, any time the casino came close to clearing eight hundred large, they’d skim the take blind. But the politicians with their small plates and their big eyes didn’t need to know that.
By late ’31, he had two junior senators, nine members of the U.S. House of Representatives, four senior senators, thirteen county representatives, eleven city councillors, and two judges in his pocket. He’d also bought off his old KKK rival, Hopper Hewitt, editor of the Tampa Examiner, who’d begun
running editorials and hard news stories that questioned the logic of allowing so many people to starve when a first-class casino on Florida’s Gulf Coast could put them all to work, which would give them the money to buy up all those foreclosed houses, which would need lawyers to come off the breadlines to do the closings proper, who would need clerical staff to make sure it was written up nice.
As Joe drove him to his train for the return journey, Maso said, “Whatever you need to do on this, you do.”
“Thanks,” Joe said, “I will.”
“You’ve done some real good work down here.” Maso patted his knee. “Don’t think it won’t be taken into consideration.”
Joe didn’t know what his work could be “taken into consideration” for. He’d built something down here out of the mud, and Maso was talking to him like he’d found him a new grocer to shake down. Maybe there was something to those rumors about the old man’s thinking of late.
“Oh,” Maso said as they neared Union Station, “I heard you still got a rogue out there. That true?”
It took Joe a few seconds. “You mean that ’shiner won’t pay his dues?”
“That’s the one,” Maso said.
The ’shiner was Turner John Belkin. He and his three sons sold white lightning out of their stills in unincorporated Palmetto. Turner John Belkin meant no harm to anyone; he just wanted to sell to the people he’d been selling to for a generation, run some games out of his back parlor, run some girls out of a house down the street. But he wouldn’t come into the fold, no matter what. Wouldn’t pay tribute, wouldn’t sell Pescatore product, wouldn’t do anything but go about his business as he’d always run it, and his father and grandfathers had run it before him, going back to when Tampa was still called Fort Brooke and yellow fever killed three times more people than old age.
“I’m working on him,” Joe said.
“I hear you been working on him for six months now.”
“Three,” Joe admitted.
“Then get rid of him.”
The car pulled to a stop. Seppe Carbone, Maso’s personal bodyguard, opened the door for him and stood waiting in the sun.
“I’ve got guys working on it,” Joe said.
“I don’t want you to have guys working on it. I want you to end it. Personally, if you have to.”
Maso got out of the car, and Joe followed him to the train to see him off even though Maso said he didn’t need to. But the truth was, Joe wanted to see Maso leave, needed to, so he could confirm that it was okay to breathe again, to relax. Having Maso around was like having an uncle move in with you for a couple of days and never leave. And worse, the uncle thought he was doing you a favor.
A few days after Maso left, Joe sent a couple guys to put a little scare into Turner John, but he put a scare into them instead, beat one into a hospital, and this without his sons or a weapon.
Joe met with Turner John a week later.
He told Sal to stay behind in the car and stood on the dirt road out front of the man’s copper-roof shack, the porch collapsed on one end, just a Coca-Cola icebox sitting on the other end, so red and shiny Joe suspected it was polished every day.
Turner John’s sons, three beefy boys in cotton long johns and not much else, not even shoes (though one wore a red wool sweater with snowflakes on it for some ungodly reason), frisked Joe and took his Savage .32 and then frisked him again.
After that, Joe went inside the shack and sat across from Turner John at a wood table with uneven legs. He tried adjusting the table, gave up, and then asked Turner John why he’d beaten his men. Turner John, a tall, skinny, and severe-looking man with eyes and hair the same brown as his suit, said because they’d come upon him with a threat in their eyes so clear wasn’t no point waiting for it to leave their mouths.
Joe asked if he knew this meant Joe would have to kill him to save face. Turner John said he suspected as much.
“So,” Joe said, “why you doing it? Why not just pay a bit of tribute?”
“Mister,” Turner John said, “your father still with us?”
“No, he passed.”
“But you still his son, am I right?”
“I am.”
“You have twenty great-grandkids, you still be that man’s son.”
Joe was unprepared for the flood of emotion that found him in that moment. He had to look away from Turner John before that flood found his eyes. “Yes, I will.”
“You want to make him proud, right? Make him see you for a man?”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “Of course I do.”
“Well, I’m the same way. I had me a fine daddy. Only beat me hard when I had it coming and never when he’d taken to drink. Mostly, he’d just whack my head when I snored. I’m a champeen in the snoring, sir, and my daddy just couldn’t abide it when he was dog tired. Other than that, he was the finest of men. And a son wants his father to be able to look down and see his teachings took root. Right about now, Daddy’s watching me and saying, ‘Turner John, I ain’t raised you to pay tribute to another man didn’t get down in the muck with you to earn his keep.’ ” He showed Joe his big scarred palms. “You want my money, Mr. Coughlin? Well then you best set to working with me and my boys on the mash and helping us work our farm, till the soil, rotate the crops, milk the cows. You follow?”
“I follow.”
“Else, ain’t nothing to discuss.”
Joe looked at Turner John, then up at the ceiling. “You really think he’s looking?”
Turner John revealed a mouth full of silver teeth. “Mister, I know he is.”
Joe unzipped his fly and withdrew the derringer he’d taken off Manny Bustamente a few years ago. He pointed it at Turner John’s chest.
Turner John unleashed a long, slow breath.
Joe said, “Man sets to a job, he’s supposed to complete it. Right?”
Turner John licked his lower lip and never took his eyes off the gun.
“You know what kind of gun this is?” Joe asked.
“It’s a woman’s derringer.”
“No,” Joe said, “it’s a What Coulda Been.” He stood. “You do whatever you want out here in Palmetto. You get me?”
Turner John blinked an affirmative.
“But don’t you let me see your label or taste your product in Hillsborough or Pinellas County. Or Sarasota neither, Turner John. We clear on that?”
Turner John blinked again.
“I need to hear you say it,” Joe said.
“We clear,” Turner John said. “You have my word.”
Joe nodded. “What’s your father thinking now?”
Turner John stared past the gun barrel, up Joe’s arm and into his eyes. “Thinking he came a damn sight close to having to put up with my snoring again.”
As Joe maneuvered to legalize gambling and buy the hotel, Graciela opened lodging of her own. Whereas Joe was after the Waldorf salad crowd, Graciela built accommodations for the fatherless and the husbandless. It was a national shame that men these days were leaving their families like armies during wartime. They left Hoovervilles and tenement apartments or, in the case of Tampa, the shotgun shacks locals called casitas, went up the road to get milk or cadge a cigarette or because they’d heard a rumor of work, and they never came back. Without men to protect them, the women were sometimes victims of rape or forced into the basement levels of prostitution. The children, suddenly fatherless and possibly motherless, entered the streets and the back roads, and the news that returned of them was rarely good.
Graciela came to Joe one night as he sat in the tub. She brought them two cups of coffee laced with rum. She removed her clothes and slipped under the water across from him and asked him if she could take his name.
“You want to marry me?”
“Not in the Church. I can’t.”
“Okay . . .”
“But
we are married, are we not?”
“Yes.”
“So I would like to call myself by your surname.”
“Graciela Dominga Maela Rosario Maria Concetta Corrales Coughlin?”
She slapped his arm. “I don’t have that many names.”
He leaned in for a kiss, then leaned back. “Graciela Coughlin?”
“Sí.”
He said, “I’d be honored.”
“Ah,” she said, “good. I’ve bought some buildings.”
“You’ve bought some buildings?”
She looked at him, those brown eyes as innocent as a deer’s. “Three. That, um, cluster? Yes. That cluster by the old Perez factory?”
“On Palm?”
She nodded. “And I would like to give shelter there to abandoned wives and their children.”
Joe wasn’t surprised. Lately Graciela had talked about little else but these women.
“What happened to Latin American politics for a cause?”
“I fell in love with you.”
“So?”
“So you restrict my mobility.”
He laughed. “I do, huh?”
“Terribly.” She smiled. “It can work. Maybe someday we could even profit from it and it could stand as a model for the rest of the world.”
Graciela dreamed of land reform and farmers’ rights and a fair distribution of wealth. She believed in fairness, essentially, a concept Joe was certain had left the earth about the time the earth left diapers.
“I don’t know about a model for the rest of the world.”
“Why can’t it work?” she said to him. “A just world.” She splashed bubbles at him to show she was only half serious, but there was no “half” about it really.
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