“You mean one where everyone lives on what they need and sits around singing songs and, shit, smiling all the time?”
She flicked suds into his face. “You know what I mean. A good world. Why can’t it be so?”
“Greed,” he said. He raised his arms to their bathroom. “Look how we live.”
“But you give back. You gave a quarter of our money last year to the Gonzalez Clinic.”
“They saved my life.”
“The year before you built the library.”
“So they’d get books I like to read.”
“But all the books are in Spanish.”
“How do you think I learned the language?”
She propped her foot on his shoulder and used his hair to scratch an itch along the outside of her arch. She left it there and he gave it a kiss and found himself, as he often did at times like these, experiencing a peace so total he couldn’t imagine a heaven that could compare. Compare to her voice in his eardrums, her friendship in his pocket, her foot on his shoulder.
“We can do good,” she said, looking down.
“We do,” he said.
“After so much bad,” she said softly.
She was looking into the suds below her breasts, disappearing into herself, loosing herself from this tub. Any moment, she’d reach for a towel.
“Hey,” he said.
Her eyelids rose.
“We’re not bad. Maybe we’re not good. I dunno. I just know we’re all scared.”
“Who’s scared?” she said.
“Who isn’t? The whole world. We tell ourselves we believe in this god or that god, this afterlife or that one, and maybe we do, but what we’re all thinking at the same time is, ‘What if we’re wrong? What if this is it? Well if it is, shit, I better get me a real big house and a real big car and a whole bunch of nice tie pins and a pearl-handled walking stick and a—’ ”
She was laughing now.
“ ‘—a toilet that washes my ass and my armpits. Because I need one of those.’ ” He’d been chuckling too, but the chuckles trailed off into the suds. “ ‘But, wait, I believe in God. Just to be safe. But I believe in greed too. Just to be safe.’ ”
“And that’s all it is—we’re scared?”
“I don’t know if that’s all it is,” he said. “I just know we’re scared.”
She pulled the suds around her neck like a scarf and nodded. “I want it to matter that we were here.”
“I know you do. Look, you want to rescue these women and their kids? Good. I love you for that. But some bad people are going to want to stop some of those women from leaving their grips.”
“I know that,” she said in a singsong that told him he was naive to think she didn’t. “That’s why I’ll need a couple of your men.”
“A couple?”
“Well, four for starters. But, mi amado?” She smiled at him. “I want the toughest ones you’ve got.”
That was also the year Chief Irving Figgis’s daughter, Loretta, returned to Tampa.
She got off the train accompanied by her father, their arms entwined. Loretta was dressed from head to toe in black, as if she were in mourning, and the way Irv held so tight to her arm, maybe she was.
Irv locked her up in his house in Hyde Park, and no one saw either of them for the whole of the season. Irv had taken a leave of absence after he’d gone to L.A. to retrieve her and he extended it through the fall when he got back. His wife moved out, taking his son with her, and neighbors said the only sound they ever heard from over there was the sound of praying. Or chanting. There was some argument over the particulars.
When they emerged from the house at the end of October, Loretta wore white. At a Pentecostal tent meeting later that evening, she declared that her decision to wear white hadn’t been hers at all; it had been Jesus Christ’s, to whose teachings she would now be wed. Loretta took the stage at the tent in Fiddlers Cove Field that night and she spoke of her descent into the world of vice, of the demons alcohol and heroin and marijuana that had led her there, of wanton fornication that led to prostitution that led to more heroin and nights of such sinful debauchery she knew Jesus had blocked them from her memory in order to keep her from taking her own life. And why was he so interested in keeping her alive? Because he wanted her to speak his truth to the sinners of Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, and Bradenton. And if he saw fit, she was to carry that message across Florida and even across these here United States.
What differentiated Loretta from so many speakers who stood before worshippers in the revival tents was that Loretta spoke with no fire and no brimstone. She never raised her voice. She spoke so softly, in fact, that many a listener had to lean forward. Occasionally glancing sideways at her father, who’d grown quite stern and unapproachable since her return, she gave plaintive testimony to a fallen world. She didn’t claim to know the will of God so much as she claimed to hear the crestfallen dismay of Christ at what his children had gotten up to. So much good could be salvaged from this world, so much virtue could be reaped, if it were virtue that was sown in the first place.
“They are saying this country will soon return to the despair of wanton alcohol consumption, of husbands beating their wives because of the rum, of carrying home venereal disease because of the rye, of falling to sloth and losing their jobs and the banks putting even more little ones out in the street because of the gin. Don’t blame the banks. Don’t blame the banks,” she whispered. “Blame those who profit from sin, from the peddling of flesh and the weakening of it through spirits. Blame the bootleggers and the bordello owners and those who allow them to spread their filth through our fair city and in God’s sight. Pray for them. And then ask God for guidance.”
God apparently guided some of the good citizens of Tampa to raid a couple of Coughlin-Suarez clubs and take axes to the rum and beer barrels. When Joe heard, he had Dion contact a guy in Valrico who made steel barrels and they put them in all the speaks, lifted the wooden casks into them, and waited to see who would come through their doors and take a swing now, snap their holy elbows off their holy fucking arms.
Joe was sitting in the front office of his cigar export company—a fully legitimate corporation; they lost a small fortune every year exporting superior tobacco to countries like Ireland and Sweden and France, where cigars had never really caught on—when Irv and his daughter walked through the front door.
Irv gave Joe a quick nod but wouldn’t meet his eyes. In the years since Joe had shown him those pictures of his daughter, he hadn’t met Joe’s eyes once and Joe estimated they’d passed each other on the street at least thirty times.
“My Loretta has some words for you.”
Joe looked up at the pretty young woman in her white dress and bright, wet eyes. “Yes, ma’am. Do take a seat if you’d like.”
“I’d prefer to stand, sir.”
“As you wish.”
“Mr. Coughlin,” she said, clasping her hands over her thighs, “my father said there was once a good man in you.”
“I wasn’t aware that man had departed.”
Loretta cleared her throat. “We know of your philanthropy. And that of the woman with whom you choose to cohabitate.”
“The woman with whom I choose to cohabitate,” Joe said, just to try it out.
“Yes, yes. We understand she is quite active in charitable work within the Ybor community and even in Greater Tampa.”
“She has a name.”
“But her good works are strictly temporal in nature. She refuses all religious affiliation and rebuffs all attempts to embrace the one true Lord.”
“She is named Graciela. And she is a Catholic,” Joe said.
“But until she publicly embraces the Lord’s hand moving through her work, she is—however well intentioned—aiding the devil.”
“Wow,” Joe said, “you completely los
t me on that one.”
She said, “Luckily, you have not lost me. For all your good works, Mr. Coughlin, we both know they are unmitigated by your evil deeds and your distance from the Lord.”
“How so?”
“You profit from the illegal addictions of others. You profit off people’s weakness and their need for sloth and gluttony and libidinous behavior.” She gave him a sad and kindly smile. “But you can free yourself of that.”
Joe said, “I don’t want to.”
“Of course you do.”
“Miss Loretta,” Joe said, “you seem like a lovely person. And I understand Preacher Ingalls has seen his flock triple since you’ve begun preaching before them.”
Irv held up five fingers, his eyes on the floor.
“Oh,” Joe said, “I’m sorry. So attendance has quintupled. My.”
Loretta’s smile never left her face. It was soft and sad. It knew what you were going to say before you said it and it judged those words pointless before they left your mouth.
“Loretta,” Joe said, “I sell a product people enjoy so much that the Eighteenth Amendment will be overturned within the year.”
“That’s not true,” Irv said, his jaw set.
“Or,” Joe said, “it is. Either way, Prohibition is dead. They used it to keep the poor in line and it failed. They used it to make the middle class more industrious, and instead the middle class got curious. More booze was drunk in the last ten years than ever before, and that’s because people wanted it and didn’t want to be told they couldn’t have it.”
“But, Mr. Coughlin,” Loretta said reasonably, “the same could be said of fornication. People want it and they don’t want to be told they can’t have it.”
“Nor should they.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nor should they,” Joe said. “If people wish to fornicate, I see no pressing reason to stop them, Miss Figgis.”
“And if they wish to lie down with animals?”
“Do they?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do people wish to lie down with animals?”
“Some do. And their sickness will spread if you have your way.”
“I’m afraid I don’t see a correlation between drinking and fornication with animals.”
“But that isn’t to say there isn’t a correlation.”
Now she sat, hands still clasped in her lap.
“Sure it is,” Joe said. “That’s exactly what I said.”
“But that’s just your opinion.”
“As some would call your belief in God.”
“So you do not believe in God?”
“No, Loretta, I just don’t believe in your God.”
Joe looked over at Irv because he could feel the man seething, but, as always, Irv wouldn’t meet his eyes, just stared at his hands, which were clasped into fists.
“Well, he believes in you,” she said. “Mr. Coughlin, you will renounce your evil path. I just know it. I can see it in you. You will repent and become baptized in Jesus Christ. And you will make a great prophet. I see this as clearly as I see a sinless city on a hill, here in Tampa. And, yes, Mr. Coughlin, before you can make fun, I realize there are no hills in Tampa.”
“Well, none you’d notice, even if you were driving fast.”
She smiled a real smile, and it was the one he remembered from a few years ago, coming across her at the soda fountain or in the magazine section of Morin Drugstore.
Then it transformed into the sad, frozen one again, and her eyes brightened and she extended a gloved hand across the desk to him, and he shook it, thinking of the track scars it covered, as Loretta Figgis said, “I will one day spirit you off your path, Mr. Coughlin. Of that, you can be sure. I feel this to my bones.”
“Just because you feel it,” Joe said, “doesn’t make it so.”
“But that doesn’t mean it isn’t so.”
“I’ll grant you that.” Joe looked up at her. “Now why can’t you grant my opinions the same benefit of the doubt?”
Loretta’s sad smile brightened. “Because they’re wrong.”
Unfortunately for Joe, Esteban, and the Pescatore Family, as Loretta’s popularity rose, so did her legitimacy. After a few months, her proselytizing began to endanger the casino deal. Those who’d initially brought her up in public company had done so mostly to ridicule her or marvel at the circumstances that had brought her to her current state—all-American police chief’s daughter goes to Hollywood, comes back a raving loon with track marks in her arms that yokels mistake for stigmata. But the tone of the conversation began to shift not only as the roads clogged with both cars and foot traffic on nights it was rumored Loretta would appear at a revival, but also as regular townsfolk were exposed to her. Loretta, far from hiding from the public eye, engaged it. Not just in Hyde Park but also in West Tampa, Port of Tampa, and Ybor as well, where she liked to come to purchase coffee, her one vice.
She didn’t talk religion much during daylight hours. She was unfailingly polite, always quick to ask after someone’s health or the health of their loved ones. She never forgot a name. And she remained, even as the hard year of her “trials,” as she called them, had aged her, a strikingly beautiful woman. And beautiful in a conspicuously American way—full lips the same color as her burgundy hair, eyes honest and blue, skin as smooth and white as the sweet cream at the top of the morning milk bottle.
The fainting spells began to occur late in ’31 after the European banking crisis sucked the rest of the world into its vortex and killed all remaining hope for financial recovery. The spells came without warning or theatrics. She would be speaking of the ills of liquor or lust or (more and more lately) gambling—always in a quiet, slightly tremulous voice—and the visions God had sent her of a Tampa burned black by its own sins, a smoke-wisped wasteland of charred soil and smoldering piles of wood where homes had once stood, and she would remind them all of Lot’s wife and implore them not to look back, never to look back, but to look ahead to a shining city of white homes and white clothing and white people united in love of Christ and prayer and earnest desire to leave behind a world their children could be proud of. Somewhere in this sermon, her eyes would roll left and then right, her body swaying with them, and then she would drop. Sometimes she convulsed, sometimes a small amount of spittle leaked over her beautiful lips, but mostly she just appeared to be asleep. It was suggested (but only in the lowest circles) that part of the surge in her popularity stemmed from how lovely she looked when she lay prone on a stage, dressed in thin white crepe, thin enough so you could see her small, perfectly formed breasts and her slim, unblemished legs.
When Loretta lay on the stage like that, she was proof of God because only God could make something that beautiful, that fragile, and that powerful.
And so her swelling ranks of followers took her causes quite personally and none more so than the attempts of a local gangster to ravage their communities with the scourge of gambling. Soon the congressmen and the councilmen returned to Joe’s bagmen with “No,” or “We’ll need more time to consider all the variables,” though Joe noted the one thing they didn’t return with was his money.
The window was closing fast.
If Loretta Figgis were to meet with an untimely end—but in such a way as to be plausibly considered an “accident”—then after a respectful period of mourning, the casino idea would reach full flower. She loved Jesus so much, Joe told himself, he’d be doing her a service by bringing them together.
So he knew what he had to do, but he had yet to give the order.
He went to see her preach. He stopped shaving for a day and dressed the part of a man who sold farming equipment or possibly owned a feed store—clean dungarees, white shirt, string tie, a dark canvas sport coat and a straw cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. He had Sal drive him to the edge of the campgrounds the Rev
erend Ingalls was using that night, and he made his way down a thin dirt road between a small stand of pines until he reached the back of the crowd.
Along the shore of a pond, someone had built a small stage out of crate board, and Loretta stood on it with her father on the left and the reverend on the right, heads bowed. Loretta was speaking of a recent vision or dream (Joe came too late to hear which). With her back to the dark pond, in her white dress and white bonnet, she stood out against the black night like a midnight moon in a sky swept of stars. A family of three, she said—mother, father, tiny baby—had arrived in a strange land. The father, a businessman sent by his company to this strange land, had been instructed to wait for their driver inside the railway station and not venture outside. But it was hot inside the terminal and they had traveled far and wished to see their new land. They stepped outside and were instantly beset upon by a leopard as black as the inside of a coal bucket. And before the family had so much as its wits about them, the leopard had torn open their throats with its teeth. The man lay dying, watching the leopard slake itself on the blood of his wife, when another man appeared and shot that black leopard dead. This man told the dying businessman that he was the driver who had been hired by the company and all they’d had to do was wait for him.
But they hadn’t waited. Why hadn’t they waited?
And so it is with Jesus, Loretta said. Can you wait? Can you not give yourselves over to the earthly temptations that will tear your families asunder? Can you find a way to keep your loved ones safe from the beasts of prey until our Lord God and Savior returns?
“Or are you too weak?” Loretta asked.
“No!”
“Because I know that in my darkest hours, I’m too weak.”
“No!”
“I am,” Loretta cried. “But he gives me strength.” She pointed at the sky. “He fills my heart. But I need you to help me complete his wishes. I need your strength to continue preaching his word and doing his works and keeping the black leopards from eating our children and staining our hearts with endless sin. Will you help me?”
The crowd said Yes and Amen and Oh, yes. When Loretta closed her eyes and began to sway, the crowd opened its eyes and surged forward. When Loretta sighed, they moaned. When she fell to her knees, they gasped. And when she lay on her side, they exhaled as one. They reached for her without stepping any closer to the stage, as if some invisible barrier lay between them. They reached for something that wasn’t Loretta. Cried out to it. Promised all to it.