The drive from St. Petersburg to Ybor was twenty-five miles, and Joe counted every yard of it. Every bump, every lurch of the car. Every rattle of the chassis became the sound of his immediate death. He and Dion never discussed the fear because they didn’t have to. It filled their eyes, filled the car, turned their sweat metallic. They looked straight ahead mostly, occasionally off to the bay as they crossed the Gandy Bridge and the strip of shoreline on either side of them was sharp white against the dead blue water. Pelicans and egrets took flight from the rails. The pelicans often seized up in midflight and then fell from the sky as if they’d been shot. They’d plunge into the flat sea and swoop back out with contorting fish in their bills, open their mouths, and the fish, no matter what the size, vanished.
Dion hit a pothole, then a metal road bracket, then another pothole. Joe closed his eyes.
The sun flung itself against the windshield and breathed fire through the glass.
Dion reached the other side of the bridge, and the paved road gave way to a stretch of crushed shell and gravel, two lanes dropping to one, the pavement suddenly a patchwork of various grades and consistencies.
“I mean,” Dion said but said nothing else.
They bounced along for a block and then came to a standstill in the traffic and Joe had to fight the urge to bolt the car, abandon Dion, run away from this whole idea. Who in his right mind drove a fucking bomb from one point to another? Who?
An insane person. Guy with a death wish. Someone who thought happiness was a lie told to keep you docile. But Joe had seen happiness; he’d known it. And now he was risking any possibility of ever feeling it again to transport an explosive powerful enough to pitch a thirty-ton engine through a steel-plated hull.
There’d be nothing left of him to recover. No car, no clothes. His thirty teeth would sprinkle the bay like pennies flung into a fountain. Be lucky if they found a knuckle to mail back to the family plot in Cedar Grove.
The last mile was the worst. They left Gandy and drove down a dirt road that ran parallel to some train tracks, the road sloughing to the right with the heat, creviced in all the wrong places. It smelled like mildew and things that had crawled and died in warm mud, and were left there until they fossilized. They entered a patch of high mangroves and soil pocked with puddles and sudden steep holes, and after another couple of minutes of bouncing through that terrain, they arrived at the shack of Daniel Desouza, one of the outfit’s most reliable builders of concealment contraptions.
He’d fashioned them a toolbox with a false bottom. Per his instructions, he’d dirtied the toolbox down, gritted it to the point where it smelled not just of oil and grease and dirt but also of age. The tools he’d placed in it were top of the line, however, and well tended, some wrapped in oilskin, all recently cleaned and oiled.
As they stood by the kitchen table in his one-room shack, he showed them the release on the bottom of the box. His pregnant wife waddled around them, heading to the outhouse, and his two kids played on the floor with a pair of dolls that weren’t much more than rags stitched together with a butcher’s finesse. Joe noted one mattress on the floor for the kids, one for the adults, neither with a sheet or pillow. A mongrel dog wandered in and out, sniffing, and flies buzzed everywhere, mosquitoes too, while Daniel Desouza checked Sheldon’s work for himself out of idle curiosity or sheer insanity, Joe couldn’t tell anymore, numb to it by this point, standing there waiting to meet his Maker as Desouza poked a screwdriver into the bomb and his wife came back in and swatted at the dog. The kids started fighting over one of the rag dolls, screeching all shrill until Desouza shot his wife a look. She left the dog alone and started clouting the kids, slapping them all over their faces and necks.
The kids wailed with shock and indignation.
“You boys got you a nice piece of craft right here, what it is,” Desouza said. “Gonna make itself a statement.”
The younger of his two children, a boy of five or so, stopped crying. He’d been wailing his wail of stunned outrage, but when he stopped, he did so as if he’d snuffed out a match at the core of himself, and his face went blank. He picked one of his father’s wrenches up off the floor and hit the dog in the side of the head with it. The dog snarled and looked like it might lunge for the boy, but then it thought better of it and scurried out of the shack.
“I’m a beat that dog or that boy to death,” Desouza said, his eyes never leaving the toolbox. “One of the two.”
Joe met with their bomber, Manny Bustamente, in the library of the Circulo Cubano, where everyone but Joe smoked a cigar, even Graciela. Out on the streets, it was the same thing—nine- and ten-year-old kids walking around with stogies in their mouths the size of their legs. Every time Joe lit one of his puny Murads, he felt like the whole city laughed at him, but cigars gave him a headache. Looking around the library that night, though, at the brown blanket of smoke that hung above their heads, he assumed he was going to have to get used to headaches.
Manny Bustamente had been a civil engineer in Havana. Unfortunately his son had been part of the Student Federation at the University of Havana, which spoke out against the Machado regime. Machado closed the university and abolished the federation. One day several men in army uniforms came to Manny Bustamente’s house a few minutes after sunup. They put his son on his knees in the kitchen and shot him in the face and then they shot Manny’s wife when she called them animals. Manny was sent to prison. Upon his release, it was suggested to him that leaving the country would be an exceptional idea.
Manny told this to Joe in the library at ten o’clock that evening. It was, Joe assumed, a way to reassure him of Manny’s devotion to his cause. Joe didn’t question his devotion; he questioned his speed. Manny was five foot two and built like a bean pot. He breathed heavily after walking up a flight of stairs.
They were going over the layout of the ship. Manny had serviced the engine when it had first arrived in port.
Dion asked why the navy didn’t have its own engineers.
“They do,” Manny said. “But if they can get a y . . . especialista to look at these old engines, they do. This ship is twenty-five years old. It was built as a . . . ” He snapped his fingers and spoke quickly to Graciela in Spanish.
“A luxury liner,” she said to the room.
“Yes,” Manny said. He spoke to her again in rapid Spanish, a full paragraph of it. When he finished, she explained to them that the ship had been sold to the navy during the Great War and then turned into a hospital ship afterward. Recently it had been recommissioned as a transport ship with a crew of three hundred.
“Where’s the engine room?” Joe asked.
Again Manny spoke to Graciela and she translated. It actually made things move a lot faster.
“Bottom of the ship, at the stern.”
He asked Manny, “If you’re called to the ship in the middle of the night, who will greet you?”
He started to speak to Joe but then turned to Graciela and asked her a question.
“The police?” she said, frowning.
He shook his head, spoke again to her.
“Ah,” she said, “veo, veo, sí.” She turned to Joe. “He means the naval police.”
“The Shore Patrol,” Joe said, looking over at Dion. “You on top of that?”
Dion nodded. “On top of it? I’m ahead of you.”
“So you get past the Shore Patrol,” Joe said to Manny, “you get into the engine room. Where’s the nearest sleeping berth?”
“One deck up and down the other end,” Manny said.
“So the only personnel near you are the two engineers?”
“Yes.”
“And how do you get them out of there?”
From over by the window, Esteban said, “We have it on good authority that the chief engineer is a drunk. If he even goes to the engine room to double-check our man’s assessment, he won’t stay.??
?
“What if he does, though?” Dion said.
Esteban shrugged. “They improvise.”
Joe shook his head. “We don’t improvise.”
Manny surprised them all when he reached into his boot and came back with a one-shot derringer with a pearl handle. “I will take care of this man if he does not leave.”
Joe rolled his eyes at Dion, who was closer to Manny.
Dion said, “Give me that,” and snatched the derringer from Manny’s hand.
“You ever shot anybody?” Joe said. “Ever kill a man?”
Manny sat back. “No.”
“Good. Because you’re not starting tonight.”
Dion tossed the gun to Joe. He caught it and held it up before Manny. “I don’t care who you kill,” he said and wondered if that were true, “but if they frisked you, they would have found this. Then they would have taken an extra hard look at your toolbox and found the bomb. Your primary job tonight, Manny? Is to not fuck this up. Think you can handle that?”
“Yes,” Manny said. “Yes.”
“If the chief engineer stays in that room, you repair the engine and walk away.”
Esteban came off the window. “No!”
“Yes,” Joe said. “Yes. This is an act of treason against the United States government. Do you comprehend that? I’m not doing it just so I can get caught and strung up at Leavenworth. If anything goes south, Manny, you walk the fuck back off that boat and we figure out another way. Do not—look at me, Manny—do not improvise. ¿Comprende?”
Manny nodded eventually.
Joe indicated the bomb in the canvas bag at his feet. “This has a short, short fuse.”
“I understand this.” Manny blinked at a drop of sweat that fell from his eyebrow and then wiped the brow with the back of his hand. “I am fully committed to this event.”
Great, Joe thought, he’s overweight and overheated.
“I appreciate that,” Joe said, catching Graciela’s eyes for a moment, seeing the same concern in hers that probably lived in his. “But, Manny? You have to be committed to doing it and getting off that boat alive. I’m not saying this because I’m so swell and I care about you. I’m not and I don’t. But if you’re killed and they identify you as a Cuban national, the plan falls apart right there and then.”
Manny leaned forward, his cigar as thick as a hammer grip between his fingers. “I want freedom for my country and I want Machado dead and the United States to leave my lands. I have remarried, Mr. Coughlin. I have three niños, all under six years old. I have a wife I love, God forgive me, more than my wife who died. I’m old enough that I would rather live as a weak man than die a brave one.”
Joe gave him a grateful smile. “Then you’re the guy I want delivering this bomb.”
The USS Mercy weighed ten thousand tons. It was a four-hundred-foot-long, fifty-two-foot-wide, plumb-bow displacement ship with two smokestacks and two masts. The mainmast sported a crow’s nest that seemed to Joe like it belonged on a ship from another time, when brigands roamed the high seas. Two faded crosses were painted on the smokestacks, which confirmed her history as a hospital ship, as did the white of her paint. She looked worked over, creaky, but the white of her gleamed against the black water and the night sky.
They were up on the catwalk above a grain silo at the end of McKay Street—Joe, Dion, Graciela, and Esteban, looking out at the ship moored at Pier 7. A dozen silos clustered there, sixty feet high, the last of the grain having been stored there this afternoon by a Cargill ship. The night watchman had been paid off, told to make sure he told the police tomorrow that it was Spaniards who tied him up, and then Dion knocked him out with two swings of a lead sap to make it look authentic.
Graciela asked Joe what he thought.
“Of what?”
“Our chances.” Graciela’s cigar was long and thin. She blew rings over the rail of the catwalk and watched them float over the water.
“Honestly?” Joe said. “Slim to none.”
“Yet it’s your plan.”
“And it’s the best one I could think of.”
“It seems quite good.”
“Is that a compliment?”
She shook her head, though he thought he saw the smallest twitch of her lips. “It’s a statement. If you played good guitar, I would tell you and still not like you.”
“Because I leered?”
“Because you are arrogant.”
“Oh.”
“Like all Americans.”
“And all Cubans are what?”
“Proud.”
He smiled. “According to the papers I’ve been reading, you’re also lazy, quick to anger, incapable of saving money, and childish.”
“You think this is true?”
“No,” he said. “I think assumptions about an entire country or an entire people are pretty fucking stupid in general.”
She drew on her cigar and looked at him for a bit. Eventually, she turned to look out at the ship again.
The lights of the waterfront turned the lower edges of the sky a pale, chalky red. Beyond the channel, the city lay sleeping in the haze. Far off at the horizon line, thin bolts of lightning carved jagged white veins in the skin of the world. Their faint and sudden light would reveal swollen clouds as dark as plums massed out there like an enemy army. At one point, a small plane passed directly overhead, four lights in the sky, one small engine, a hundred yards above, possibly for a legitimate purpose, though it was hard to imagine what that could be at three in the morning. Not to mention, in the short time he’d been in Tampa, Joe had come across very little activity he’d describe as legitimate.
“Did you mean what you told Manny tonight, that it makes no difference to you whether he lives or dies?”
They could see him now, walking along the pier toward the ship, toolbox in hand.
Joe leaned his elbows on the rail. “Pretty much.”
“How does anyone become so callous?”
“Takes less practice than you’d think,” Joe said.
Manny stopped at the gangplank where two sailors of the Shore Patrol met him. He raised his arms while one of the SPs patted him down and the other opened the toolbox. He rifled through the top tray and then removed it and placed it on the pier.
“If this goes well,” Graciela said, “you’ll take over rum distribution in Tampa.”
“In half of Florida, actually,” Joe said.
“You’ll be powerful.”
“I guess.”
“Your arrogance will reach new heights then.”
“Well,” Joe said, “one can hope.”
The SP stopped frisking Manny and he lowered his hands, but then that sailor joined his partner and they both looked at something in the toolbox, started conferring, their heads lowered, one with his hand on the butt of his .45.
Joe looked down the parapet at Dion and Esteban. They were frozen, necks extended, eyes locked on that toolbox.
Now the SPs were ordering Manny to join them. He stepped in between them and looked down too. One of them pointed, and Manny reached down into the toolbox and came back with two pints of rum.
“Shit,” Graciela said. “Who told him to bribe them?”
“I didn’t,” Esteban said.
“He’s making up things on the fly,” Joe said. “This is fucking great. This is wonderful.”
Dion slapped the parapet.
“I didn’t tell him to do this,” Esteban said.
“I specifically told him not to do this,” Joe said. “ ‘Don’t improvise,’ I said. You were wit—”
“They’re taking it,” Graciela said.
Joe narrowed his eyes, saw each of the SPs put a bottle inside his tunic and step aside.
Manny closed his toolbox and walked up the gangplank.
For a moment,
they were very quiet on the roof.
Then Dion said, “I think I just coughed up my own asshole.”
“It’s working,” Graciela said.
“He got on,” Joe said. “He’s still got to do his job and get back off.” He looked at his father’s watch: 3 A.M. on the nose.
He looked over at Dion, who read his thoughts. “I’d figure they started busting up that joint ten minutes ago.”
They waited. The metal of the catwalk was still warm from a day of baking in the August sun.
Five minutes later one of the SPs walked to a ringing phone on the deck. A few moments later, he came running back down the gangplank and slapped his partner’s arm. The SPs ran a few yards along the pier to a scout car. They drove down the pier and turned left, headed into Ybor, to the club on Seventeenth where ten of Dion’s guys were, at this moment, beating the shit out of about twenty sailors.
“So far”—Dion smiled at Joe—“admit it.”
“Admit what?”
“Everything’s going like clockwork.”
“So far,” Joe said.
Beside him, Graciela drew on her cigar.
The sound reached them, the echo of a surprisingly dull thud. Didn’t sound like much, but the catwalk swayed for a moment, and they all held out their arms as if they stood atop the same bicycle. The USS Mercy shuddered. The water around it rippled and small waves broke against the pier. Smoke as thick and gray as steel wool billowed from a hole in the hull the size of a piano.
The smoke grew thicker, darker, and after a few moments of staring at it, Joe could see a yellow ball blooming behind it, pulsing like a beating heart. He kept looking until he saw red flames mixed in with the yellow, but then both colors vanished behind the plumes of smoke, which was now the black of fresh tar. It filled the channel and blotted out the city beyond, blotted out the sky.
Dion laughed and Joe met his eyes and Dion kept laughing, shaking his head, and nodding at Joe.
Joe knew what the nod meant—this was why they became outlaws. To live moments the insurance salesmen of the world, the truck drivers and lawyers and bank tellers and carpenters and Realtors would never know. Moments in a world without nets—none to catch you and none to envelop you. Joe looked at Dion and recalled what he’d felt after the first time they’d knocked over that newsstand on Bowdoin Street when they were thirteen years old: We will probably die young.