World Gone By: A Novel (Joe Coughlin Series)

by Dennis Lehane

  “How many guys?”

  “Six,” Joe said. “All pros with long-range rifles. If I remove my tie on the boat, get ready to duck.”

  “Won’t be enough.” Rico adjusted his own hat.

  “Won’t even be close. But we’ll take a few with us if it goes wrong. Fuck. Let’s do this.”

  “You said it.”

  Joe put the hat back on and he and Rico walked up the gangplank.

  Ogden Semple met them up top. Ogden had lost an eye in a knife fight a dozen years back, so his right eyelids were permanently sewn together. The remaining eye was milky, pale, and intensely focused. He looked at everything like a man squinting to peer through a microscope. Joe handed Ogden his Savage .32 automatic and a switchblade from his front pocket. Rico handed over a Smith & Wesson .38.

  Ogden said, “I hope you catch it.”

  They stared back at him. “Catch what?”

  “The King’s cold. He should be in bed resting, but instead he’s attending a meeting you insisted upon. It could make him sicker.” He dropped their weapons into a leather pouch he’d brought for the occasion. “I hope you get what he has but you get it worse.”

  Joe knew many assumed Ogden was King Lucius’s lover, but Joe knew he loved a whore at one of Joe’s brothels in Tampa. Her name was Matilda, and Ogden liked to read her bedtime stories and scrub her clean during long baths. Matilda reported to Joe that Ogden was a gentle, considerate lover and hung like a White House chandelier. His only kink was that he insisted on calling her Ruth. Matilda had no proof, but she believed Ruth was a dead sister or dead daughter from very long ago. Matilda’s eyes had picked up a sheen when she told this to Joe, and just before he left her room, she said to him, “Is everyone we know broken?”

  Joe had looked back at her and told the truth. “Pretty much.”

  On the boat, Ogden gestured for them to climb the ladder to the second deck. He stayed below, however, their guns in the pouch at his feet and looked out at Al Butters in the parking lot as the boat pulled away from the dock and headed downriver.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  An Absence of Illness

  ON THE UPPER DECK, twenty men formed a wall between Joe, Rico, and the rest of the boat. Two of them stepped from the pack to frisk the guests. The rest stood motionless under a pale brown canopy, all light missing from their eyes. Most were tall. None wore shirts, which exposed the track marks in their arms, as black as worms burned into asphalt. Their rib cages protruded.

  They represented a multitude of races—Turks, Russians, two Orientals, three or four who looked like garden-variety American white trash. The one who frisked Joe had toffee skin, straw-yellow hair cut close to his scalp, and a harelip. He wore a long curved knife on his hip with an ivory handle sheathed in a leather scabbard. The one who frisked Rico had sharp Slavic features and hair as dark as the sky. Both sported long nails. Joe looked at the other eighteen men and saw that all grew their nails long. A few had pared them to points. Most brandished knives in the waistbands of their tattered trousers. The ones who didn’t tucked pistols there. When the two had finished frisking Joe and Rico, the wall parted to reveal Lucius on the other side, sitting in a mahogany plantation chair.

  Joe had heard a pit boss in Havana describe King Lucius as weighing “three bills easy. Huge head, bald as an egg.” Another time, he’d overheard a Tampa bartender tell three drunks that Lucius was “thinner than Death and taller than God.”

  Joe had known Lucius for almost fifteen years and was often struck by how forgettable he appeared. He was three or four inches shy of six feet, much like Joe himself. His head was shaped like a peach with reddened cheeks and ears. His hair was pale and thinning. His full lips would have been considered sensual on a woman; his tiny teeth were gray. His light green eyes seemed fixed in a state of mild wonder. Even when they were perfectly still, however, they somehow managed to move. Joe had often felt circled by them.

  He wore an oversize white Cuban guayabera over loose seersucker trousers with thick sandals on his pink feet. He looked the blandest of fellows.

  A girl lay facedown on the chaise beside him and he slapped her ass lightly as he rose from his chair. “Chop-chop, Vidalia, there’s business on the day’s agenda.” As the girl roused herself, he came to Joe and Rico with an outstretched hand. “Gentlemen.”

  The girl stumbled her way toward them, either half-asleep or half-bombed on something.

  “Say hi to my friends, Vidalia.”

  “Hi, friends,” the girl mumbled as she reached them. She wore an unbelted white silk bathrobe over her ruffled black bathing suit.

  “Shake their hands.”

  If he hadn’t been told her name, Joe might not have placed her. But Joe had only met one other Vidalia in his lifetime—Bobby O’s girlfriend last year—and he realized it was the same girl. The realization became a lament. The Vidalia Langston of twelve-to-fourteen months ago had been, as all Bobby O’s girlfriends were back then, jailbait. Recently transplanted from either Iowa or Idaho, if he remembered correctly. A high school senior at Hillsborough High, member of the cheerleading squad, and class treasurer, she’d confided to Joe, because she was a little too wild for anyone to let her run for class president. That Vidalia Langston had been unbridled in just about everything she did—the roar of her laugh, the thrusts of her hips when she broke into impromptu dances in the club, the abundance of dark hair that fell over one eye in a peek-a-boo cut.

  She’d run so many rings around Bobby O she may have cured him of his taste for jailbait, though; after Vidalia, he took to dating middle-aged coffee-shop waitresses. Even Joe, who’d never seen the attraction in bedding a girl whose brains were still years from catching up to her body, recalled feeling pleasantly uncomfortable around Vidalia a few times.

  Now, though, when they shook hands, hers felt like an old woman’s. She smacked her lips, as if her mouth was far too dry, and wavered slightly from side to side. He couldn’t tell if she remembered him. She dropped his hand and crossed to the other deck to lie on another chaise past the canopy. When she dropped the silk robe off her shoulders, he could see the bones in her back. Her hair spilled down her spine, reaching almost to her lowest ribs. Lucius always picked them that way—young with long, abundant hair. At the start. At the finish, they were always something else. This, Joe wished he’d told Vidalia a year ago, is how unbridled dreams often end—bridled beyond hope.

  Lucius led them back under the canopy. He waved them to chairs to the right and left of his own. When they all sat, he clapped once, as if harmony had been achieved. “My partners.”

  Joe nodded. “Good to see you again.”

  “And you, Joe.”

  “How are you feeling?” Rico asked.

  “Fit as a fiddle, Enrico. Why?”

  “Heard you had a bit of a cold.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  Rico, already realizing he’d managed to step in it, tried to deflect. “Just hoping it passes quick. Warm weather ones are the worst.”

  “I don’t have a cold.”

  On the table beside him—hot tea, a lemon, and a box of tissues. He stared back at them, his face an open book.

  “Well, you look great anyway,” Rico said.

  “You say that with some surprise.”

  “No.”

  “Did someone else suggest I was ill?”

  “No,” Rico said.

  “Weak or frail or laid low by maladies?”

  “Nope. Just mentioning you look good.”

  “As do you, Rico.” He turned and appraised Joe. “You look tired, however.”

  “Can’t imagine why.”

  “Been sleeping well?”

  “Like a champ.”

  “Well, then, we’re all looking good enough to have to buy our way out of the draft.” He flashed his gray smile. “What brings you by? You said it was urgent.”

  As Joe told him about being contacted by Theresa Del Fresco and her fears for her safety, various Androphagi p
laced a large coffee table between them and laid out place mats, followed by plates and silverware. That was followed by stemware, linen napkins, a pitcher of water, and a bottle of white wine in a bucket of ice.

  Lucius listened to Joe with one eyebrow softly raised, his mouth occasionally forming an O of surprise. He nodded at one of his men, and the man poured them each a glass of wine.

  When Joe finished talking, Lucius said, “I’m confused. Does Theresa think I have anything to do with these attempts on her life? Do you?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Absolutely not.” Lucius smiled at Rico. “I’ve noticed people speak most emphatically when they’re selling something.” He turned back to Joe. “Because why else would you be telling me this unless you believed I had something to do with these inexcusable acts?”

  “Because you’re the only man with the reach in these parts to make the acts stop.”

  “You have powerful friends. You’re powerful yourself.”

  “My reach has limits.”

  “But mine doesn’t?”

  “Not in Union County.”

  Lucius reached for his wine and motioned for them to do the same. He raised his glass. “To a continued partnership.”

  Rico and Joe both nodded and raised their glasses before drinking. The Androphagi returned with food—two roasted chickens, boiled potatoes, ears of steamed corn. One of the men carved the chickens at the table, his long knife slicing through the meat like beams of light flashing through a cave. In moments, a pile of meat rose from a platter in the center of the table, and the pillaged carcasses were removed.

  “So you’ve come to purchase protection for Theresa Del Fresco?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” Lucius forked some chicken onto his plate. Before Joe could answer, Lucius said, “Go on. Help yourselves. Rico, start with the corn. Joe, the potatoes.”

  They made themselves plates. As they did, Vidalia stumbled past them, told Lucius she was heading down for a nap. She gave Joe and Rico a distant, disenchanted smile and Lucius a small wave. As she headed for the stairs Joe wondered, not for the first time, if men in their thing soiled all women whose paths they crossed, or if certain women came to them because they preferred to be soiled. That distant smile she’d given them wasn’t part of her repertoire a year ago; back then she had a laugh you couldn’t have caught with a steel net. He’d remember the sound of it for the rest of his life; he wondered if she remembered it at all.

  “Why did I come?” he asked Lucius. “That’s your question?”

  “Why are you helping a woman you barely know?”

  “She asked. It seemed a small favor to reach out to a business associate.”

  Lucius coughed several times into his fist. They were wet, rattling coughs and he held up a hand until they passed. He sat back for a moment, a hand to his chest. His eyes focused and he cleared his throat. “And she’s offering me compensation for this service?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what compensation did she offer you?”

  “She claims to have information crucial to my survival.”

  “How so?”

  “She claims there’s a contract on me.” Joe tried some of the chicken.

  Lucius looked at Rico, then back at Joe, then down at his plate. The houseboat moved lazily down the river. Mounds of phosphogypsum rose along the shoreline like hills of damp ash. Beyond the hills lay dead trees and piles of curled and blackened palm fronds. The white sun had returned and beat down on it all.

  Lucius sipped his drink and watched Joe over the rim of the glass. “That would strike me as odd.”

  “Why’s that? This is a rough business.”

  “Not for golden boys like yourself who threaten no one. You have no pretensions to power anymore. You’re not known for having a hot temper or a gambling problem. You don’t fuck other men’s wives, at least not the wives of men in our profession. And the last enemies you did have you dispatched in one day, so no one would take you lightly on that score, either.” He sipped some more wine and leaned forward. “Do you think you’re an evil man?”

  “Never gave it much thought.”

  “You profit from prostitution, narcotics, loan-sharking, illegal gambling—”

  “A lot of which is legal when I do it in Cuba.”

  “Legal isn’t, as a matter of course, moral.”

  Joe nodded. “And, by the same logic, illegal isn’t necessarily immoral.”

  Lucius smiled. “Didn’t you run some illegal Chinese through Havana into Tampa a few years back? Hundreds of them, if not thousands?”

  Joe nodded.

  Rico chimed in. “We both did. That was a joint venture”

  Lucius ignored him, eyes never leaving Joe. “Didn’t several of them die?”

  For several moments, Joe watched sandpipers scuttle along a damp stretch of shoreline. He looked back at Lucius. “On one trip, yeah.”

  “Women? Children? A one-year-old, if I remember correctly, boiled like a holiday ham in the cargo hold?”

  Joe nodded.

  “So we’ll add trafficking in human beings to your ledger. And you’ve killed, of course. Killed your own mentor. Ordered the death of his son and several of his men on the same day.”

  “After they’d killed some of mine.”

  A thin smile. Another gaze leveled over the top of his glass. “But you’re not evil?”

  “I’m having a little trouble following the point of this conversation, Lucius.”

  Lucius stared at the water. “You think feeling bad about your sins makes you good. Some might find that kind of delusion contemptible.” He turned his gaze back on them. “And maybe my initial disbelief on hearing there could be a contract on you—which I presume was your initial reaction, and yours too, Rico?”

  “Definitely,” Rico said.

  “Possibly that disbelief was naïve. You have put a lot of sin out into the world, Joseph. Maybe it’s rolling back in on the tide. Maybe men like us, in order to be men like us, sacrifice peace of mind forevermore.”

  “Maybe we do,” Joe said, “which is a theory I’m willing to consider in my leisure next month if I’m still alive.”

  Lucius clasped his hands together and leaned forward. “Let’s start with logic—where did you hear there was a contract on you?”

  Joe said, “Theresa.”

  “Why did she share the information with you? Theresa never did anything in her life unless it benefited Theresa.”

  “So I’d go to you for her protection.”

  “And so you did.” One of his silent men replaced the bottle of wine with a fresh one. “What’s Theresa offering me?”

  “Ninety percent of her share of that German boat your crew took off in Key West.”

  “Ninety.”

  Joe nodded. “The other ten percent to be handed to me, which I’ll put in an account for her son, so Theresa’s mother can access it while she’s in prison.”

  “Ninety percent,” Lucius said again.

  “For full protection her entire stay in prison.”

  “We have a small problem.” King Lucius sat back in his chair and crossed his left ankle onto his right knee.

  “What’s that?”

  “She’s offering me money I already have, and you’re offering me nothing. I’m unconvinced how continuing this conversation benefits me.”

  “You and I are partners,” Joe said. “You can mine all the phosphate you want, but you can’t move it without me.”

  “That’s not entirely so,” Lucius said. “If some calamity were to befall you, god forbid, I trust your associates would place their considerable grief aside and carry on. Do you consider our current terms fair?”

  “Very,” Joe said.

  Lucius laughed. “Of course you would! They benefit you. But what if I find your rates usurious?”

  “Do you?” Rico asked.

  “Let’s say that on occasion or two it’s troubled my sleep.”

  Joe said, “You
pay far less than the going rate to use our trucks. We’re charging you . . .” He looked over at Rico.

  “Twenty cents a pound, four dollars a mile.”

  “Those are loss leaders,” Joe said.

  “Fifteen cents a pound,” Lucius said.

  “Seventeen.”

  “And three dollars a mile.”

  “You’re dreaming.”

  “Three twenty-five.”

  “Any idea what gas costs these days?” Joe said. “Three seventy-five.”

  “Three fifty.”

  “Three sixty-five.”

  Lucius looked down at his plate and chewed his food for a bit. Then he turned to Rico and grinned. He indicated Joe with his knife. “Young Rico, you can learn from this one. He’s always been a very bright boy.”

  Lucius dropped his knife and extended his hand across the table.

  Joe had to lean forward to shake it.

  “I, for one, hope you are among the living, Joe, at least as long as I am.”

  They broke the handshake.

  Along the shoreline, several Negro children fished from a canted pier in waters turned chalky with phosphorous debris. Behind the Negro children, the green and yellow jungle was pocked with small shacks. Back behind the shacks, a white cross rose from the local church, which didn’t appear much bigger or much better than the shacks. On the opposite shoreline, the trees had all been cut away and the road ran close to the riverbank and Joe saw Al Butters, clear as day, puttering along in his car.

  “What about you?” Lucius said to Rico.

  “What about me?”

  “Are you your brother’s keeper?”

  “Not that I’m aware.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  Rico gave Lucius a befuddled smile. “Wanted to get out of the city for a day, see some country. You know how it is.”

  “Not really.” Lucius wasn’t smiling. “You’re a crew boss, aren’t you?”

  “Yup.”

  “Youngest in the organization.”

  “I guess.”

  “A prodigy like your mentor here was.”