White Shadow (51 page)

Pelusa didn’t even look over. “Jesus Christ, Dodge. You want to get me killed?”

“You never call me back anymore.”

“I got to take a piss.”

“I need to talk.”

“I got nothing to say.”

“Just a little direction.”

“Everyone’s asshole is getting tight. You won’t leave the Sicilians alone. Christ, you called in old man Scaglione and Primo Lazzara on Charlie Wall.”

“Is that all it took to want to kill me?”

“You betcha.”

Pelusa kept eating the popcorn and screamed at the Red Menace, who held Harry Smith in a headlock. “Come on, Hercules. Come on!” Then he whispered: “Man, I love that guy.”

Dodge stood and brushed off some popcorn that had landed on his pants.

Pelusa, looking right at the lit ring, simply said: “They killed Charlie Wall and they killed that reporter.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“She was meeting with Charlie Wall, and he was feeding her information about the Trafficante brothers and the bolita business with the niggers in St. Pete. They figured it could get the mess of them a ticket to Raiford. They were real nervous about the trial.”

“It wasn’t her,” Dodge said.

Pelusa kept eating popcorn: “Too late now, brother.”

Dodge nodded.

Dodge walked back down the aisle and passed the big, hulking shape of Cowboy Luttrall and searched the front row for his son. He walked around the ring twice and then back to the popcorn stand and then to the bathrooms.

But his son was gone.

“YOU ARE a newspaperman,” Fidel said, “devoted to your profession, determined to work for good, honest journalism. I am a revolutionary. Either I work, love, and fight for social justice, for bettering the life of the people, or I have no reason for existence. This is what the people of Cuba expect; it is what they demand. They understand what we are trying to do, and we are going to give them what they want.”

We sat in the back corner of the old Ayers’ Diner on Florida Avenue about ten o’clock at night. I smoked cigarettes and ate ham and eggs, and Fidel ate Cuban toast with endless black coffee. Before he ordered, he counted the change in his pockets.

I offered to pay. He refused.

As he spoke, he was careful with each word. Each word was so carefully chosen, he hesitated not out of his unsteady grasp of English but to get it right. He understood my job of getting his word out, and he knew my importance as a tool.

He’d pound the table—softly then—or grab my arm, keeping eye contact to make sure I’d heard the message.

His tattered tie hung loosely on the neck of his soiled collar.

“Why did you choose Tampa?”

“Cuba is the daughter of the cigar makers of Tampa,” he said. “This is where José Martí came. This is where I will come.”

He had to say no more. José Martí, the patron saint to all who wanted to free Cuba. The poet, writer, lawyer, revolutionary. He’d been in prison. He’d come to Tampa to spread his message of separation from Europe and the United States.

The diner’s booths were covered in oxblood vinyl; a narrow Formica table separated us. Fidel used heaping tablespoons of sugar in his coffee and drank in large gulps all at once so the conversation could continue.

I had a few questions. He answered my questions, fed me quotes, before I could even ask them.

“Social justice is the necessity of the future of everything in the hemisphere, and the only hope of preventing much worse kinds of revolution,” Fidel said. His eyes were soft brown but determined. “This is what you have achieved in the United States. Unemployment cannot go on at this high level in Cuba. The standard of living must be raised, but not by soaking the rich, not by war of class against class. I have complete faith in the triumph of this revolution, although I know it will take time.”

I asked him about his speech at the Italian Club.

He shrugged and shook his head with disgust.

“Batista’s agents have done much to sabotage this,” he said. “I will speak. I don’t know where. The dictator’s money is here in Tampa.”

“Who does business with Batista here?”

“The criminals with Tampa,” he said. “I know that the Italians refused to let Mussolini’s ambassador speak there. But what is the difference between Mussolini and Batista?”

I asked him about that. I drank some coffee and lit another cigarette. It was late, and the diner filled with workers getting off the late shift or about to roll on. Men in coveralls and women in maid uniforms from the downtown hotels.

“Men are torn from their beds in the night,” Fidel said. “They are assassinated and buried in lonely graves. The people are hungry.”

“What Italians do business with Batista?” I asked, looking back through my notes.

He smiled at me. “Havana is a whore,” he said. “Women sell themselves on every corner. The city spreads its legs to the gamblers and criminals. It is these criminals who back Batista. He is in bed with all of them.”

“Trafficante.”

“I do not know some names, my friend,” he said. He looked at me and I looked away. Hudsons and Chevy Bel Airs and big whaleback Cadillacs zoomed past on Florida. Their shiny, colorful shapes would brighten as they’d cross under streetlamps and then back into the darkness.

“Are you sick?” he asked.

“No, Señor Castro,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“It is Fidel,” he said. “I am always just Fidel.”

I smiled at him and wiped my face.

“This talk of criminals has upset you?”

I looked back through my notes. “If you were to take over Cuba, what would you do with the criminals?”

“That is a question,” he said. And for the first time, smiled at me. He gripped my forearm and pulled me in. Castro was a big man. Tall and powerful. He looked at me, keeping my eye. “It would be my first priority to arrest them all. They would be tried as criminals for turning our daughters into whores and raping our country. Those found guilty would be set against the wall.”

I looked at him. My hand was shaking the pen and Fidel noticed this. His eyes were heavy and brown and soft. He looked down at my shaking hand and then up at my face. He nodded more.

“Shot,” he said. “I would have them all shot.”

ED DODGE found his boy out back of the armory, sitting on the front bumper of an army transport truck with Joe Bedami, eating peanuts and playing with the cylinder of a .38. The boy spun the cylinder, sounding like the slowing of a roulette wheel, as Dodge walked through the gravel lot. Bedami looked up at Dodge and cracked a peanut, those dead-flat eyes ringed in blackness like a corpse, and he took back the gun from the boy. Dodge’s son smiled up at him, and Bedami slid the weapon back under his suit coat and handed over the rest of the bag.

Dodge walked toward them and Bedami just stared, wordless, in the dark lot lined with a long alley of still transport trucks. Somewhere, loose metal jangled against a chain-link fence, sounding like wind chimes.

Dodge got within two feet of Bedami.

He took a breath.

Dodge slugged Joe Bedami square in the forehead, knocking the back of his head against the truck grille. His bald head clanged against the metal, and Bedami closed his eyes tight and then opened them.

He stood.

Dodge straightened his coat, and the two walked in a slow circle until Dodge flew into the man’s legs and took him down to his back and began slamming his fist into Bedami’s dead eyes and thick stomach. Bedami kicked and flipped Dodge to his back, where he joined his fists together and walloped Dodge in the side.

The whole while, the boy kept eating the peanuts but walked backward. He kept moving back until he disappeared, and Dodge kicked Bedami to his side, got to his feet, and kept kicking with his wingtips until he heard the gristle and cartilage and bone snap. He grabbed Bedami by the shirt and punched him hard in the mouth.

Bedami’s mouth bled and he gasped for air, and Dodge stopped. Bedami wavered to his feet.

It was dark and the men easily moved in and out of deep shadow.

Dodge reached in his back pocket for the leather of his sap and moved to Bedami and pulled the leather high. He cracked it down hard on Bedami’s back and neck, and the man fell like a large ape down on his face, bruising and cutting it on the rock.

Dodge held the sap high, ready to crack down again.

Then there was the spinning sound of the cylinder, and a man walked from the shadow, aiming a gun at Dodge’s head. The man, a slim unknown Italian in a sharkskin suit, reached for the sap and pulled it from Dodge’s hand.

He motioned for Dodge to stand back. He kept the gun aimed at his stomach.

Dodge took in a breath, hearing the sounds of the wrestlers inside the armory slamming against the mat and the cheers from the crowd.

Dodge stepped back.

Bedami, deep in shadow, nodded to the man as he wiped his face with a handkerchief. The man pulled back the hammer.

And then the sound of the horn. Someone was honking a goddamned horn on the truck. The truck’s headlights switched on, and the Italian man covered his face with his gun arm and Dodge and Bedami turned from the bright lights. And then another truck lit up another stretch of gravel alley. And then another.

A horn sounded again from one of the big army green trucks.

More crowd screaming and yelling. More mat-crashing from the mouth of the armory.

“Step back,” a voice called. Dodge could only make out the shape of a man. A ghost figure in black. There was a gun in an outstretched hand.

Then there was the sound of shuffling, running feet on the gravel, and there was Dodge’s boy in the far puddle of light with Harry Smith and Mr. Moto and one-eyed Cowboy Luttrall with a .45 hanging loose in his hand.

“Back,” the voice called again. “Let them be.”

Dodge took a breath and understood.

He jumped on Bedami and knocked him back to the gravel, and he punched at his temples and hammered the flat of his fists at his eyes. Bedami tried to muscle up, but Dodge kicked him back to the ground and choked him until Bedami flailed and stopped struggling. His thick stomach pumped for lost air.

His back was flat to the ground. Dodge thought only of lonely nights on the back porch of his house and being locked out alone and of men with shiny nickels and dead eyes and of shackled feet and hands in deep, rancid water.

Dodge backhanded Bedami, wheezed out his breath, and shakily got to his feet. He pulled out a pair of handcuffs and latched one end to Bedami and dragged him by the neck to the grille of the truck, where he attached the other bracelet with a click.

His boy stood in the light, smiling. A grin so big it would take weeks to pry off his face.

Cowboy, Mr. Moto, and Harry Smith looked over at Joe Bedami and took steps forward.

But Dodge shook them off. Then light cracked on from the opposite row of army trucks and shined against the wall of headlamps.

The dark, phantom figure who saved Dodge became a man. Joe “Pelusa” Diaz stood there for a moment, in dark shades and suit, brightly lit. He nodded.

Exposed and on a pedestal.

Joe Bedami, knocked on his ass and latched to a truck, cracked a smile when he realized who he’d seen.

“You want me to call someone?” Harry Smith asked.

“Nope,” Dodge said, and reached into his pocket for a hand-cuff key. He tossed the small key to Bedami, who caught it in midair and unlatched the bracelet from his wrist. “You tell the Old Men that if they want me, to come for me themselves. Tell them I’m ready to meet anytime.”

Bedami stumbled to his feet using the bumper for support, and walked down the row of trucks. He moved past Cowboy and Harry Smith and Mr. Moto and followed the chain-link fence around the armory to where they stacked old desks and chairs and empty ammo cases.

Dodge watched his boy, who looked up at the wrestlers. His boy nodded and smiled and shook each one of their hands in appreciation. Harry Smith looked at Dodge and shook his head, letting out his breath. He took Dodge’s son and hoisted him onto his thick bare shoulders and carried him back into the armory.