He headed for the door.
“Dinner tonight?” Maso said.
Joe stopped at the door. “Sure. Tropicale at nine sound good?”
“Sounds great.”
“Okay. I’ll get us the best table.”
“Wonderful,” Maso said. “And make sure he’s dead by then.”
“What?” Joe took his hand off the knob. “Who?”
“Your friend.” Maso poured himself a cup of coffee. “The large one.”
“Dion?”
Maso nodded.
“He hasn’t done anything,” Joe said.
Maso looked up at him.
“What am I missing?” Joe said. “He’s been a great earner and a great gun.”
“He’s a rat,” Maso said. “Six years ago, he ratted on you. Means six minutes from now, six days, six months, he’ll do it again. I can’t have a rat working for my son.”
“No,” Joe said.
“No?”
“No, he didn’t sell me out. That was his brother. I told you.”
“I know what you told me, Joseph. I also know you lied. Now, I allow you one lie.” He held up his index finger while he added cream to his coffee. “You’ve had yours. Kill that hunk of shit before dinner.”
“Maso,” Joe said. “Listen. It was his brother. I know it for a fact.”
“You do?”
“I do.”
“You’re not lying to me?”
“I’m not lying to you.”
“Because you know what it means if you are.”
Jesus, Joe thought, you came down here to steal my operation for your useless fucking son. Just steal it already.
“I know what it means,” Joe said.
“You’re sticking to your story.” Maso dropped a cube of sugar into his cup.
“I’m sticking to it because it’s not a story. It’s the truth.”
“The whole truth and nothing but, uh?”
Joe nodded. “The whole truth and nothing but.”
Maso shook his head slowly, sadly, and the door behind Joe opened and Albert White walked into the room.
Chapter Twenty-four
How You Meet Your End
The first thing Joe noticed about Albert White was how much he’d aged in three years. Gone were the white- and cream-colored suits and fifty-dollar spats. His shoes were one step above the cardboard worn by the people who lived in the streets and the tents all over the country now. The lapels of his brown suit were frayed and the elbows thin. His haircut was the kind you got at home from a distracted wife or daughter.
The second thing Joe noticed was that he held Sal Urso’s Thompson in his right hand. Joe knew it was Sal’s because of the markings along the breech. Sal had a habit of rubbing the breech with his left hand when he was sitting with the Thompson on his lap. He still wore his wedding ring, even though his wife had caught the typhus in ’23, not long before he came to work for Lou Ormino in Tampa. When Sal rubbed the Thompson, the ring scratched the metal. Now, after years of cradling that gun, there was almost no bluing left.
Albert raised it to his shoulder as he crossed to Joe. He appraised Joe’s three-piece suit.
“Anderson and Sheppard?” he asked.
Joe said, “H. Huntsman.”
Albert nodded. He opened the left side of his own jacket so Joe could admire the label—Kresge’s. “My fortunes have changed a bit since the last time I was here.”
Joe said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“I’m back in Boston. I was close to getting a tin cup, you know? Selling fucking pencils, Joe. But then I run into Beppe Nunnaro in this little basement place in the North End. Beppe and I used to be friends. A long time ago, before all this unfortunate series of misunderstandings with Mr. Pescatore. And Beppe and me, Joe, we got to talking. Your name didn’t come up immediately but Dion’s did. See, Beppe used to be a newsie with Dion and Dion’s dumb brother, Paolo. Did you know that?”
Joe nodded.
“So you can probably see where this is going. Beppe said he’d known Paolo most of his life and had a hard time believing Paolo would double-cross anyone, never mind his own brother and a police captain’s son, on a bank job.” Albert slung his arm around Joe’s neck. “To which I said, ‘Paolo didn’t double-cross anyone. Dion did. I know because I’m the guy he ratted to.’ ” Albert walked toward the window that faced the alley and Horace Porter’s defunct piano warehouse. Joe had no choice but to walk with him. “At this point, Beppe thought it might be a good idea if I talked to Mr. Pescatore.” They stopped at the window. “Which leads us to now. Raise your hands.”
Joe did and Albert frisked him as Maso and Digger wandered over and stood by the windows. He removed the Savage .32 from behind Joe’s back and the derringer single-shot above his right ankle and the switchblade in his left shoe.
“Anything else?” Albert said.
“Usually that suffices,” Joe said.
“Cracking wise to the end.” Albert put his arm around Joe’s shoulders.
Maso said, “The thing about Mr. White, Joe, that you should probably have grasped—”
“And what’s that, Maso?”
“It’s that he knows Tampa.” Maso raised a thick eyebrow at Joe.
“Which makes you a lot less ‘needed,’ ” Digger said. “Dumb fuck.”
“The language,” Maso said. “Is that really necessary?”
They all turned back to the window, like kids waiting for the curtain to part at a puppet show.
Albert raised the tommy gun in front of their faces. “Nice piece. I understand you know the owner.”
“I do.” Joe heard the sadness in his own voice. “I do.”
They stood facing the window for about a minute before Joe heard the scream and the shadow plummeted down the yellow brick wall across from him. Sal’s face flew past the window, his arms flapping wildly at the air. And then he stopped falling. His head snapped up straight and his feet jerked up toward his chin as the noose snapped his neck. The body swung into the building twice and then twirled on the rope. The idea, Joe assumed, had been for Sal to end up hanging directly in front of their eyes, but someone had misjudged the length of rope or maybe the effect of a man’s weight at the end of it. So they stood looking down at the top of his head as his body hung between the tenth and ninth floors.
They’d cut Lefty’s rope correctly, however. He arrived without a scream, his hands free and clasped to the noose. He looked resigned, as if someone had just told him a secret he’d never wanted to hear but had always expected to. Because he’d relieved the weight of the rope with his hands, his neck didn’t break. He arrived in front of their faces like something conjured by magicians. He bounced up and down a few times and then dangled. He kicked at the windows. His movements were not desperate or frantic. They were strangely precise and athletic and the look on his face never changed, even when he saw them watching. He tugged at the rope even as the tracheal cartilage pressed over the edges of it and his tongue flopped over his lower lip.
Joe watched it ebb out of him, slowly, and then all at once. The light left Lefty like a hesitant bird. But once it left, it flew high and fast. The only solace Joe took from it was that Lefty’s eyes, at the very end, fluttered to a close.
He looked at Lefty’s sleeping face and the top of Sal’s head and begged their forgiveness.
I will see you both soon. I will see my father soon. I will see Paolo Bartolo. I will see my mother.
And then:
I am not brave enough for this. I am not.
And then:
Please. God. Please, God. I do not want to meet the dark. I will do anything. I beg your mercy. I cannot die today. I’m not supposed to die today. I’m to be a father soon. She’s to be a mother. We will be good parents. We will raise a fine child.
I am
not ready.
He could hear his own breathing as they walked him to the windows that looked down on Eighth Avenue and the streets of Ybor and the bay beyond, and he heard the gunfire before he got there. From this height, the men on the street looked two inches tall as they fired Thompsons and handguns and BARs. They wore hats and raincoats and suits. Some wore police uniforms.
The police were aligned with the Pescatore men. Some of Joe’s men lay in the streets or half out of cars and others kept firing, but they were in retreat. Eduardo Arnaz took a burst straight through his chest and fell against the window of a dress shop. Noel Kenwood was shot in the back and lay in the street, clawing at it. The rest Joe couldn’t identify from up here as the battle moved west, first one block, then two. One of his men crashed a Plymouth Phaeton into the lamppost at the corner of Sixteenth. Before he could get out, the police and a couple Pescatore men surrounded the car and unloaded their Thompsons into it. Giuseppe Esposito had owned a Phaeton, but Joe couldn’t tell from here if he’d been the one driving it.
Run, boys. Just run.
As if they’d heard him, his men stopped firing back and scattered.
Maso placed a hand to the back of Joe’s neck. “It’s over, son.”
Joe said nothing.
“I wished it could have been different.”
“Do you?” Joe said.
Pescatore cars and Tampa PD cars raced down Eighth, and Joe saw several heading north or south along Seventeenth and then east along Ninth or Sixth to outflank his men.
But his men disappeared.
One second a man ran along the street, and the next he was gone. The Pescatore cars would meet at the corners, the gunners pointing desperately, and go back on the hunt.
They gunned down someone on the porch of a casita on Sixteenth, but that seemed to be the only Coughlin-Suarez man they could find at the moment.
One by one, they’d slipped away. Into the air. One by one, they simply weren’t there anymore. The police and the Pescatore men milled in the streets now, pointing fingers, shouting at one another.
Maso said to Albert, “The fuck did they all go?”
Albert held up his hands and shook his head.
“Joseph,” Maso said, “you tell me.”
“Don’t call me Joseph,” Joe said.
Maso slapped him across the face. “What happened to them?”
“They vanished.” Joe looked into the old man’s double-zero eyes. “Poof.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Joe said.
And now Maso raised his voice. Raised it to a roar. And it was a terrifying sound. “Where the fuck are they?”
“Shit.” Albert snapped his fingers. “It’s the tunnels. They dropped into the tunnels.”
Maso turned to him. “What tunnels?”
“The ones running underneath this fucking neighborhood. It’s how they get the booze in.”
“So put men in the tunnels,” Digger said.
“No one knows where most of them are.” Albert jerked a thumb at Joe. “That’s this asshole’s genius. Ain’t that right, Joe?”
Joe nodded, first at Albert and then at Maso. “This is our town.”
“Yeah, well, not anymore,” Albert said and drove the butt of the Thompson into the back of Joe’s head.
Chapter Twenty-five
Higher Ground
Joe woke to blackness.
He couldn’t see and he couldn’t speak. At first he feared somebody had gone so far as to stitch his lips together, but after a minute or so, he suspected something that pressed up against the base of his nose might be tape. The more he accepted this, the more the tacky sensation around his lips, as if the skin were smeared with bubble gum, made sense.
His eyes weren’t taped, though. What had initially presented itself as total dark began to give way to the occasional shape on the other side of a dense shroud of wool or rope.
It’s a hood, something in his chest told him. They’ve got a hood over you.
His hands were cuffed behind his back. Definitely not rope binding them; metal all the way. His legs felt tied, and not terribly tight judging by how much he could move them—what felt like a full inch before he met resistance.
He lay on his right side, his face pressed to warm wood. He could smell low tide. He could smell fish and fish blood. He realized he’d been hearing the engine for some time before he recognized it as such. He’d been on enough boats in his life to recognize what it powered. And then the other sensations coalesced and made sense—the slap of waves against the hull, the rise and fall of the wood on which he lay. He could hardly be sure of this but he didn’t hear any other engines, no matter how hard he concentrated on isolating the various sounds around him. He heard men’s voices and footsteps passing back and forth on the deck and, after a while, he discerned the sharp inhale and fluttering exhale of someone close by smoking a cigarette. But no other engines, and the boat wasn’t going terribly fast. Didn’t feel like it anyway. Didn’t sound like something in flight. Which meant it was fair to assume no one was coming after them.
“Someone get Albert. He’s awake.”
Then they were lifting him—one hand sinking through the hood and into his hair, two more hands under his armpits. He was dragged back along the deck and dropped into a chair, could feel the hard wooden seat under him and the hard wood slats at his back. Hands slid over his wrists and then the cuffs were unlocked. They’d barely had time to pop open before his arms were pulled around the back of the chair and the cuffs were snapped back on. Someone tied his arms and chest to the chair, tied them just short of too tight to breathe. Then someone—maybe the same someone, maybe someone else—did the same to his legs, tying them so tight to the chair legs that movement was out of the question.
They tilted the chair back and he screamed against the tape, the sound of it in his ears, because they were pushing him over the side of the boat. Even with the hood covering his head, he clenched his eyes shut, and he could hear his breath exit his nostrils so desperate and ragged. If breath could beg, his did.
The chair stopped tipping when it met a wall. Joe sat there at a forty-degree angle or so. He guessed his feet and the front chair legs were a foot and a half to two feet off the deck.
Someone removed his shoes. Then his socks. Then the hood.
He batted his eyelids rapid-time at the sudden return of light. And not any light—Florida light, immeasurably strong even though it was diffused by banks of roiling gray clouds. He couldn’t see any sun, but the light managed to bounce off a nickel-plated sea. Somehow the brightness lived in the gray, lived in the clouds, lived in the sea, not strong enough to point to, just strong enough for him to feel its effect.
When he could see clearly again, the first thing that came into focus was his father’s watch. It dangled in front of his eyes. Then Albert’s face came into focus behind it. He let Joe see as he opened the pocket of his cheap vest and dropped the watch in. “I was making do with an Elgin, myself,” he said and leaned forward, hands on his knees. He smiled his small smile at Joe. Behind him, two men dragged something heavy across the deck toward them. Black metal of some kind. With silver handles. The men neared them. Albert stepped back with a bow and a flourish, and they slid the object just below Joe’s bare feet.
It was a tub. The kind one saw at summer cocktail parties. The hosts would have it filled with ice and bottles of white wine and good beer. There wasn’t any ice in it now, though. Or wine. Or good beer.
Just cement.
Joe bucked against his ropes but it was like bucking against a brick house as it fell on top of him.
Albert stepped behind him and slapped the back of the chair and the chair dropped forward and Joe’s legs sank into the cement.
Albert watched him struggle—or try to—with the distant curiosity of a scientist. About the only thing Joe could
move was his head. As soon as his feet entered the bucket, they were there to stay. His legs were already bound fast, ankles to knees, not a twitch of mobility available. The cement had been mixed a little earlier judging by the feel of it. It wasn’t soupy. His feet sank into it like they were sinking into slits in a sponge.
Albert sat on the deck in front of him and watched Joe’s eyes as the cement began to set. The sponge sensation gave way to something firmer under the soles of his feet that proceeded to snake around his ankles.
“Takes a while to harden,” Albert said. “Longer than some would think.”
Joe got his bearings when he saw a small barrier island off to his left that looked an awful lot like Egmont Key. Otherwise, nothing around them but water and sky.
Ilario Nobile brought Albert a canvas folding chair and wouldn’t meet Joe’s eyes. Albert rose from the deck. He adjusted the chair so the glare off the sea was off his face. He leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. They were on a tugboat. Joe and his chair leaned against the rear wall of the wheelhouse, looking out at the back of the boat. It was a great choice in crafts, Joe had to admit; you wouldn’t know it to look at one, but tugs were fast and they could turn on a fucking dime.
Albert spun Thomas Coughlin’s watch on its chain for a minute, like a boy with his yo-yo, sending it out into the air and then back into his palm with a snap. He said to Joe, “It’s running slow. You know that?”
Even if he could have spoken, Joe doubted he would have.
“Big, expensive watch like this, and it can’t even keep the fucking time right.” He shrugged. “All the money in the world, am I right, Joe? All the money in the world, and some things are just meant to run their course.” Albert looked up at the gray sky and out at the gray sea. “This isn’t a race we enter to place second. We all know the stakes. Fuck up, you die. Trust the wrong person? Stake the wrong horse?” He snapped his fingers. “Lights-out. Have a wife? Kids? That’s unfortunate. Planning a trip to Merry Olde England next summer? The plan just changed. Thought you’d be breathing tomorrow? Fucking, eating, taking a bath? You won’t.” He leaned forward and stabbed his finger into Joe’s chest. “You will be sitting at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. And the world will be shut to you. Hell, if two fish go up your nose and a few nibble your eyes? You won’t mind. You’ll be with God. Or the devil. Or no place. Where you won’t be, Joe?” He raised his hands to the clouds. “Is here. So take a good last look. Take some deep breaths. Really suck that oxygen in.” He slipped the watch back into his vest, leaned in, grasped Joe’s face in his hands, and kissed the top of his head. “Because you die now.”