The Four Corners of the Sky

by Michael Malone

  Raffy said that the first time he had seen Jack Peregrine had been at Hialeah, when Jack had given him a long-shot tip with such confidence that he’d put $100 on it and come away with $890; he’d gotten his guitar out of hock, taken his girlfriend out for a fancy dinner, and decided that Jack (or Eddie, as he called him) was “entirely illuminated with magic.”

  And as if by magic they met again. Jack walked into the Club Tropigala at the Fontainebleau on a night when Raffy was playing guitar with the rumba band there; these were musicians ordinarily out of his league, but the regular guitarist had broken his arm water-skiing and Raffy’s father’s sister was the band’s accountant so he’d gotten the gig.

  “I notice your papa as the gentleman I met at Hialeah; he walks right up wearing this creamy linen suit with a creamy rosebud in his lapel, and he says hello to me, and then he tells us, I mean the Tropigala band, he wants us to play this particular tango. So Omar, Omar Ordonez, our bandleader, plays it. Slow Argentine tango. So at the best table in the place that night is this woman, sitting there between two ex-big-shots from Cuba, friends of Batista, one in the Church and one in crime. Both making money, we could say, from the sins of the flesh, not to mention the heart’s sad aspirations. The churchman is Archbishop de Uloa.”

  “The other is Feliz Diaz?”

  “Yes.” Raffy went on to describe Diaz, with a keen dislike, as a man of political influence in Miami, whose criminal interests were protected by the powerful and paid for by the hopeless who bought the drugs, hookers, and numbers rackets that he sold. “Castro is on my primo shit list, but kicking Diaz out of Havana showed excellent judgment on Castro’s part.”

  “And the woman in the Tropigala that night? The same woman we saw yesterday at Golden Days getting out of the black Mercedes with Diaz?”

  “Yes.”

  Annie asked for her name.

  “Helen Clark.”

  “So my father met Diaz that night? And?”

  “Diaz and this woman are sitting with Archbishop de Uloa. She’s all tan in a little white dress. It’s nothing but you can tell it’s a thousand dollars, you know the kind I mean?”

  Annie did.

  “I’m watching from the bandstand. I see your dad’s asking her to dance. She laughs out loud, but she’s nervous. Jack introduces himself to Diaz and the archbishop. Edward Fettermann, vice president of this mining corporation.” Raffy pinched off the burning tip of his cigarillo and slid the butt into his shirt pocket. “Your dad stares at Helen, almost mad-looking, and holds out his hand, just holds it there. Whole Tropigala freezes, like the Ice Age broke through the windows in big chunks.”

  Annie asked if her father had already known Helen Clark before.

  “I don’t think so. Later he told me that’s when they met. She stands up and walks onto the dance floor. I’m thinking, the poor guy (your papa), he’s going to wash up dead with the morning tide because nobody in Miami moves in on Feliz Diaz. I don’t know this tango and I’m trying to fake it, strum and thump, but I’m distracted like everybody else, watching the two of them. At first it’s like she was trying to get away but then it was like they’d practiced.” Raffy did a slow graceful sequence of tango steps up the aisle beside their seats. “When the number’s over, guess what?”

  Annie shrugged. “Diaz shot my dad.”

  “No. Don’t make jokes.” Raffy clapped his hands. “Diaz claps. Then the big-shot priest claps. Then Diaz holds his hand out to Jack. He says, ‘Join us.’”

  “My dad,” Annie admitted, “could dance.”

  Raffy nodded. “Across the sky and never look down.” Humming a song, he held out his arms and courteously invited Annie into a dance. She thought, why not? She hadn’t danced, except rock-music gyrations, for a long time. They moved down the stairs and onto the close-cut grass. The rumba steps came back to her from her childhood.

  Each in their separate memories, Raffy sang and they danced at the racetrack. The moment again felt curiously peaceful to her. It was strange that Rafael Rook should feel so familiar.

  Finally she stepped away from him and asked, “Did Helen Clark take up with my dad after that night?”

  He leaned against a gate and shook his head no. “Honestly I think they hated each other’s guts. But your dad and Diaz, they hit it off big. Diaz loves humongous stakes poker, seven-card stud. It’s like an addictive obsession with him. Your papa would play those stakes. Jack was the ace of aces with regard to poker. Except, he had some bad runs.”

  “I’ll say: two or three hundred thousand dollars worth.” Annie took her bottled water from her purse.

  “Unfortunately. But that was later. So I start to see him and Diaz everywhere. Your dad was on a roll, treating large crowds to dinner at the best places. Taking twenty, thirty people, a la carte. Annie, fast forward five, six years, here in Miami we have condos and clubs, night lights, Marlins, Dolphins, SoBe, the Grove, it’s a boomtown, an American Riviera.”

  Her eyebrow went up. “Miami’s urban revival is due to my father’s doing the tango with a criminal’s girlfriend? I don’t think so.”

  Impatiently, the small rumpled man shook his finger at her. “It felt like it. Listen to me. That’s Jack’s gift. To make you feel it. He was an artist,” he said, stretching out the word artist with his slender arms.

  Annie, taken aback by his intensity, sidestepped into sarcasm. “Right, sure, an artist. The ‘confidence art.’ I’ve heard the line.”

  He sighed, frustrated by his inability to make the young woman appreciate her father’s talents. “For a while I was his gardener, you know, gardener? Lay the groundwork with a mark? He was the best I ever saw.”

  Raffy kept trying to paint a picture of Annie’s father as a sort of a racketeering Robin Hood, who only swindled the already corrupt; who lived daily life as a performance art of social skill and psychological ‘freedom’: “He would make bets how long he could live like a king without touching a cent. No bad plastic or bouncing checks either, though nobody could pass a check like your dad. He’d go weeks without a penny. Nicest restaurants in town, crowded, he’d slip in, dine for free, slip out. Never paid a cent. Best hotel, find an empty suite, put on his tux, drift down to the ballrooms, join weddings, bar mitzvahs, sit at their tables, always the life of the party, never saw the people before or since, but enjoyed their hospitality so much they loved him. You think your father did it to save a penny? He did it for art. Some days I would just follow him up and down the streets of Miami.”

  Annie drank from the bottled water. “Sort of like Ratso in Midnight Cowboy?”

  “I don’t follow you, I apologize.” Raffy didn’t appear to be much of a moviegoer. “I’m trying to say, he was in that league, with Lustig, Mike Romanoff, Serge Rubenstein.”

  Annie registered the fact that Raffy kept saying of her father, “He was an artist.” “He was in that league”—not is, but was. She asked him if he was implying that Jack was, in fact, so critically ill that his life was effectively over?

  His response was oblique. “Know what he said when I pulled him up from the curb? ‘I will be a bridegroom in my death, and run into’t as to a lover’s bed.’ Annie, he always had the right quote. He wants to die with this one last thing of beauty. He wants to leave you a million dollars. On the other hand, I would like a small share.”

  She scoffed. “In the first place, he doesn’t have a million dollars. In the second, I don’t want a million dollars.”

  “Good.” The Cuban smiled. “Then give it to me.”

  At this moment the groundskeeper finally shouldered his rake and made his way to the exit. Raffy watched the man shuffle toward his truck, where he sat for a long while before driving slowly away. “They must pay him by the hour,” the Cuban muttered.

  He hurried Annie over to a white fence post at the final turn in the track and began pacing out a distance, one foot carefully positioned in front of the other. When he had counted ten feet, he stopped, made a quick right turn and paced some more.
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br />   Annie stood, watching him fall to his knees and dig with his trowel. Was Rafael Rook practicing con art, or was he one of her dad’s victims?

  When she was a child, her father had told her the same stories about “the great con artists” and how their victims were never the pure of heart. One of his favorite “artists” was the fake Count Lustig who had sold the Eiffel Tower to suckers and had also peddled “green grocery machines” that supposedly could turn one-dollar bills into twenties. Hundreds of larcenous innocents had bought these machines from Lustig for as much as forty thousand dollars each; even the sheriff who’d arrested him had bought one.

  Annie wondered if Raffy, urgently scooting on his knees over the sod, knew the end of these con artists’ stories? Count Lustig had died in Alcatraz Prison. The great Ponzi of the infamous Ponzi scheme had later sold his services to Mussolini and degenerated into a seedy bum. The plundering stock manipulator Serge Rubenstein had gotten himself murdered, and Ivar Kreuger, the Match King, who’d put billions of other people’s money into his own fake banks, had killed himself, and so had John Sadleir, bringing down the London Stock Exchange with him. They were all failures. The best of the confidence artists had failed in the end, not so much because they’d lost confidence but because they’d kept going until they did fail. To fail was, as Raffy might say, their destiny. Just as failure and not “a thing of beauty” was her father’s destiny. It was somehow deep down his desire.

  Near the track rail, Raffy was now cutting out a square in the grass. He carefully removed the sod and scooped away the dirt. As if he’d been following her thoughts, he called out, “Jack’s gift!” Holding up a package, he ran back to her with it. Wrapped in green velvet like that in which they’d found the Queen of the Sea was a 2-inch by 2-inch ornately engraved old silver box. The box had a pronged setting on its lid that seemed designed for some (large) missing jewel.

  He held the box in the palm of his hand, tapped it gently. “Right here sat the big ruby, 135-carat ruby, now in the bank in Havana. Inside this box?” He patted the lid as if it were a living thing. “Inside this box is a genuine thorn from the Crown of Thorns of the possible—who knows for sure?—Savior, Jesus Christ. Your father gave this treasure to me, a free gift, in order for me to present it to my mother, when I see her again, after all these years, in Cuba. This is a generous man, to make me such a gift.” He held out the box to Annie.

  It did indeed look like very old silver, beautifully crafted. She gave it back to him. “Come on, Raffy, you honestly think a piece of Christ’s Crown of Thorns is inside this little box?”

  Raffy’s sigh was like a yawn of relief. “I know there is. I don’t want to open it, you understand, because of the atmospheric pressure.” He refolded the cloth, slid the little box into his pants pocket.

  Annie glanced around the clubhouse area. She checked her cell phone. Daniel Hart either hadn’t gotten her message, or he didn’t care about her offer. She wasn’t sure what she should do with the Queen.

  She walked high up into the stands and took a seat, put her feet up on the rail in front of her, stared at the green empty track to think it through. Maybe she should just give the gold (if it were gold) statue to Raffy and wish him and her father good luck in making their own way to Cuba to collect the emeralds and ruby (if they existed). She herself would take a commercial flight back home to North Carolina. That would be the wiser plan, wouldn’t it? Just disappear out of her father’s life, the way he had disappeared from hers?

  Raffy joined her up in the grandstand. They sat side by side and might have been watching an invisible horse race together. In the silence, the Cuban smoothed the flamingos on his shirt as if they had tried to fly away to join the flock of birds that suddenly wheeled into the sky. Quietly he said, “For me, it’s my mother. For your father, it’s you he wants to make amends to. The Queen is his way of making it up to you. The Thorn is my way.”

  “Why do you need to make amends to your mother?” She didn’t question that her father needed to do so to her.

  Raffy confessed that he had been a terrible disappointment to his mother. If only he had stayed with her and his brother in Cuba, or gone back to them, instead of falling under the influence of her no-good brother Mano, who’d introduced him to the high life in Miami, including booze, horses, craps, and show biz—none of which had done a thing for him but break his heart. In Cuba, he might now be an astrophysicist or at least have finished some kind of education, instead of turning into a deadbeat flopper on the grift.

  She touched his hand briefly. “Or maybe worse would have happened to you in Havana. You might be dead. You never know.”

  “The readiness is all,” he agreed.

  Slowly they made their way back to her rental car in the empty parking lot. Every few feet he stopped to sigh a long soft sad sigh. “But I’m not a physicist and I’m not dead. I’m a spot-the-pigeon, do-the-chisel, hasta la vista flopper. That’s me, Annie. Except when I worked with Jack. Because with Jack it was never the score, it was the insubstantial pageant.”

  “Make one of your own.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can. I saw you.”

  He shook his head. Anything but the simplest scam was too stressful for him to bear. For instance, some floppers made extra money working with accomplices who pretended to be doctors and would validate the injuries of the supposed victims, to scare the elderly into higher payoffs. But the risks posed by partners were too anxiety-producing for Raffy to endure.

  “I bet you could do a shell game,” Annie said to cheer him up.

  “Never had the hands.” He held his out; they were unsteady.

  She opened her car door. “I bet you could do sob stories. ‘I’ve got five kids and my wife’s dying’ type thing? You’d be good at that.”

  He shrugged, morosely emptying a discarded bag of potato chips at the feet of a seagull in the parking lot; the bird seemed to know him personally and to dislike him. “To be honest with you, Annie, the flopper bit you saw me do on Joyce Weimar, that’s about all my nerves can take.”

  He looked pensively at the cloudless blue sky, then into his water bottle, but there was no solace to be found in either place. “So I’m hoping to give my mama the Holy Thorn—that woman loves Jesus so much and He honestly has been a better Son to her than I have, and so has my oldest brother, to hear him tell it, which he will, like twenty-four-hour talk radio.” He blew a mournful foggy note on the bottle’s mouth. “Not that I’m defending the failure of my life. Maybe for such a success as yourself, it’s not so easy to see how someone could…what?…inhabit so much…insignificance. Except, I think, with an education I could have done a little better.”

  Annie felt oddly urged by some unspecified impulse of human sympathy to kiss Raffy Rook and in an uncharacteristic impulsiveness, she did so. “It’s okay. You’ve educated yourself.”

  “You think?” he asked softly.

  “Yes.” She kissed him again. The full warmth of his lips gave her an unexpected, deeply sweet feeling, strangely reminding her of the healing ointments Sam had heated in her hands before rubbing them on Annie’s chest when she was a child, ill with a cold.

  It had been some time since Annie’s lips had touched someone else’s lips. The pleasure of it surprised her.

  Obviously touched, Raffy stepped back, reaching for her hand, kissing it in the same gentle way. “Thank you,” he said. “Your heart goes out to me. It’s very kind of you.”

  “I mean it,” she said. “You know a lot of things. You’ve taught yourself.”

  “Don’t think the worst. And don’t feel bad. Sometimes these ladies I flop on? These ladies and myself, at Golden Days, we get to be friends. We go to the salad bars, botanical gardens, zoo, IMAX. They get a senior’s discount, I play them a song on my guitar. It’s a connection. And in this sad fast life, how many do we make time for?” He spoke wistfully into the water bottle, as if he were depositing his confession inside and then quickly screwing the cap bac
k on to keep it there.

  Not until they were on their way back to the Dorado, and caught in a morning traffic jam caused by a fender bender at a big intersection, did Annie announce her intention of driving right now to the Miami police department headquarters on Second Avenue to find Sergeant Hart. She explained her conviction that the best way to keep both Raffy and her father out of jail was for her to make a deal with the police as quickly as possible. Tell Hart everything. So that’s what they were going to do. Right now.

  The closeness they’d established at the track vanished. Raffy refused to let her take him to the “son-of-a-bitch cops.” Asked to listen to reason, he declined, lapsing into indignant Spanish that she couldn’t follow although she was able to interpret the gist from his tone. Finally she blurted out that she’d already left a message with Hart, saying that Raffy and she had found the gold statue called the Queen of the Sea and that they wished to turn it over to the police. If indeed the relic was a relic, it belonged to Cuba.

  The slender musician stared at her in horror then abruptly threw open the car door and tumbled out of it into the street. “Gracias!” he shouted over his shoulder.

  “Raffy! Come back here!”

  But he ran across the divider into the rush-hour traffic on Ocean Drive.

  “Raffy!”

  Dodging honking cars, threading his way to the beach side of the busy four-lane, he soon disappeared into the crowd.

  Annie shook her head, watching him go. The car behind her beeped. She leaned over, closed the door. Traffic moved and she moved with it. Oddly enough, she had no doubt she would see him again.

  ***

  The desk officer at the Vice Unit of the central Miami Police Department was evasive when Annie persisted in her demands to speak with Sgt. Daniel Hart, whose home number and address were unlisted in the phone directory. Finally he snarled at her, “Try La Loca. It’s a bar in Coconut Grove. Dan’s there every night.”