World Gone By: A Novel (10 page)

“Do you know the song, Daddy?”

“I know the song.”

“Is it Cuban?”

His father shook his head. “American. Your mother was very fond of it, even though it’s a very sad song.”

There were only a couple of lyrics and Tomas learned them before he turned six, even though, to this day, he didn’t fully understand them:

Black girl, black girl, don’t lie to me

Tell me where did you sleep last night

In the pines, in the pines

Where the sun don’t ever shine

I shivered the whole night through

There was another verse about a man who may or may not have been the girl’s husband who died when he was hit by a train. Tomas’s father told him the song was known as either “In the Pines” or “Black Girl,” though some people called it “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”

It was a scary song, Tomas had always felt, a threatening one when the singer sang, “Don’t lie to me.” Tomas’s fascination didn’t stem from it giving him pleasure, because it gave him no pleasure at all. It broke his heart every time he played it on the Victrola. But in that sadness, he felt he touched his mother. Because his mother, he believed, was now the girl in the pines, in the pines, and she was alone and shivering the whole night through.

Other days, he believed his mother was not in the pines, she was not shivering the whole night through. She was in a world beyond the night and the cold. She was someplace very warm, where the sun baked the brick streets below her feet. She was strolling through a piazza on market day and selecting items she’d have ready for the day he and his father joined her.

She handed Tomas a red silk scarf and said, “Hold that for me, my little man,” and hummed “In the Pines” as she selected another scarf, a light blue one this time. She turned to him with it trailing from her hand and was about to hand it to him when the car door opened and he snapped awake as his father hopped in the backseat with him.

They pulled away from the prison and onto the main road and the sun was low and hot and all around them. His father rolled down his window, removed his hat, and let the wind muss his hair.

“You were thinking about your mother, weren’t you?”

“How’d you know?”

“Just a look you get.”

“What kind of look?”

“An inward one,” his father said.

“I think she’s happy.”

“Okay. Last time you said she was alone in the dark.”

“It changes.”

“Fair enough.”

“Do you think she’s happy? Wherever she is?”

His father turned on the seat and faced him. “Matter of fact, I do.”

“But she must be lonely.”

“Depends. If you believe time works like it does down here, then, yeah, she’s only got her father for company and she didn’t much like him.” He patted Tomas’s knee. “But what if there’s no such thing as time after this life?”

“I don’t understand.”

“No minutes, no hours, no clocks. No night turning into day. I like to think your mother’s not alone, because she’s not waiting for us. We’re already there.”

Tomas looked into his father’s kind face and was struck, as he sometimes was, by how much
belief
his father had. He couldn’t define all the beliefs and they didn’t necessarily share anything in common, but when Joe Coughlin decided upon something, he never second-guessed himself. Tomas was just old enough to suspect that kind of conviction could lead to its own problems, but to be around his father for any length of time was to feel a security unlike he’d encountered anywhere else in his life. His father, wry and glamorous and occasionally prickly, was a man who infected others with his unwavering self-assurance.

“So we’re already with her?” Tomas said.

His father leaned across the seat and kissed the top of his head. “Yup.”

Tomas smiled, still sleepy. He blinked a few times and his father began to blur before him, and he fell asleep feeling that kiss on his head like the foot of a very small bird.

SOMEONE IS TRYING TO KILL YOU.

It was a hard thought to shake. The rational side of Joe knew it
made zero sense. If there was such a thing as an irreplaceable asset in the Bartolo Family, it was him. And not just to the Bartolo Family; he was integral to Lansky’s operations so, by extension, he was integral to Luciano’s. He was tight with Marcello in New Orleans, Moe Dietz in Cleveland, Frank Costello in New York, and Little Augie in Miami.

Not me
.

People had tried to kill him in the past, of course, but back then it had made sense—a mentor who decided Joe had gotten too big for his britches; before that, members of the Klan who didn’t much cotton to a pasty Yankee coming down to their turf and showing them how real money got made; and before that, a gangster whose girlfriend he’d fallen in love with.

But those hatreds had made sense.

Why me?

Joe couldn’t remember the last time he’d angered anyone of note. Dion pissed people off. Dion made enemies and then usually killed them so their existence wouldn’t disturb his sleep. Since taking over the Tampa operation from Joe back in ’35, Dion had spilled a lot of blood. Far less than he would have had he not had Joe as his consigliere, but even so, it was a notable amount. Maybe the hit was on Dion and they just figured they had to take out his brain trust while they were at it. But, no, the killing of a boss like Dion always had to be approved; and the only people who could confer that approval were all close associates of Joe’s, and all people who lined their pockets because of him and expected to do so well into the future.

Besides, Theresa had sworn that Lucius’s attorney specifically named Joe as the target. Not one of the targets.
The
target.

But Theresa was a killer and a con woman and had a lot more motive than most to lay the con at Joe’s doorstep. If Joe was suitably
motivated, he was one of a very select few who might be able to approach King Lucius and change his mind. It would be a smart play, if one were Theresa, to approach Joe with news of a plot to kill him that was vague yet just specific enough to put a clock in the back of his mind: Ash Wednesday was eight days away. He could assure himself that there was no earthly reason anyone would want him dead and that if there were, he had enough friends in this business that one of them would have heard of the plot and informed him of it by now. He could tell himself that with the exception of one bit of jailhouse gossip exchanged between a shyster and a killer there was no more substance to this rumor than there was to the smoke uncoiling off the end of his cigarette. And if the intended victim were anyone but himself he would have laughed off the ruse for what it was—a desperate woman’s attempt to curry favor with a man she believed could save her life.

But the rumor, however vague, insubstantial, and unsubstantiated,
was
about him.

He looked across the seat and smiled at his son, who was blinking, futilely it seemed, at sleep. Tomas gave him a quizzical smile back and narrowed his eyes. Joe shook his head to say,
It’s nothing. All is A-OK.
And Tomas’s eyes closed and his head drooped. Joe sat with the back of his head to the open window and smoked.

Up front, Al Butters told Joe he needed to pull over to relieve himself.

Joe said fine, just be careful of the gators and the snakes.

“Ain’t nobody interested in this old carcass, no.” Al pulled to the side of the road, the passenger-side tires sinking into the soft green shoulder.

Al exited the car and walked a few feet before unzipping his fly. Joe had to assume he was unzipping his fly since, with his back to
them, Joe didn’t exactly know what his hands were touching. Could be a gun.

The road was a bright white strip cut between oceans of green saw grass and scrub oak and sickly thin pines. The sky was as white as the road.

The Bunsford Mob could have subcontracted for the job. If so, Al Butters could turn with a pistol in his hand and take Joe out first, put the next bullet through his son’s forehead. Nothing to do then but stand around and wait for the getaway car, which could be idling on the side of the road around the next bend.

Al Butters turned from the grass and headed back toward the car, zipping his fly.

Joe waited for him to get in the car and pull off the shoulder before he placed his hat down his forehead and closed his eyes. He could feel shadows of the trees play across his face and pat his eyelids.

Then it was Graciela patting his face, gently at first but growing a little less gentle, the method she’d used to wake him the day of Tomas’s birth. Joe had just returned from a business trip that had taken him and Esteban to the northern tip of South America, and he hadn’t slept well in days. He opened his eyes and saw the truth in his wife’s face—they were about to become parents.

“It’s time?”

“It’s time.” She pulled back the sheets. “Time for the first one.”

He’d slept in his clothes. He sat up, rubbing his face, and then placed the hand to her belly.

A contraction hit and she winced. “Come, come.”

He climbed out of bed and followed her to the stairs. “The first one, uh?”

She looked back at him and winced again. “Of course,
mi amor
.” She gripped the banister with her left hand.

“Yeah?” He took her free arm. “How many we gonna have?”

“At least three.”

JOE OPENED HIS EYES and felt the heat on his face.

That last day of her life, she hadn’t been talking about towels. Or grapefruit.

She’d been talking about children.

THE BARTOLO FAMILY EMPIRE was headquartered on the top floor of the American Cigarette Machines Service Company, a dark brown building with beige leaded windows caked gray with dust at the end of Pier 6 in Port Tampa. When he arrived, Joe found Rico DiGiacomo already sitting in the waiting room.

The waiting room was almost as nice as the office beyond it. The floor was composed of wide planks of honey-colored pine. The leather armchairs and couches had been imported from Burma before the war. Large full-color photographs of Manganaro, the tiny Sicilian town where Dion Bartolo had been born, adorned the brick walls. Two years after he’d taken over as boss of the family, Dion had paid a
Life
photographer an obscene amount of money to travel to Manganaro to take those pictures. They were shot in amber hues on Polaroid stock, the images as rich and warm as
the leather chairs and honey floors. In one, a man and his donkey trudged up a hill, the sun pancaking into the field to their right. In another, three old women laughed about something in front of a butcher. The porticos of a narrow church dwarfed a dog sleeping in their shadows. A child rode his bicycle past a stand of olive trees.

Joe, never stricken with the disorder of nostalgia, always felt the photos spoke to Dion’s desire to recapture a world he barely remembered, a world gone by before he’d tasted it or fully smelled it. He’d left Italy when he was four; so he’d gotten, at best, a whiff of the world the photos portrayed, but that scent stayed with him the rest of his life. It became the home he almost knew, the boy he almost was.

Joe exchanged a handshake with Rico and took a seat on the couch beside him. Rico pointed at one of the photos. “Think that old geezer and his donkey do that every day, just walk up that hill?”

“I don’t know about these days, with the war and all.”

Rico stared at the photo. “I bet he does, even now. He’s like my old man—it’s all about putting in the day’s work. Even if—no, no,
particularly if
—someone’s dropping bombs on you. Him and that donkey, Joe, they’ve probably been blown up by now. But he went out doing what he committed his life to.”

“Which was?”

“By the looks of it, walking that fucking donkey up a hill every day.”

Joe chuckled. He’d forgotten how much fun it was to hang around Rico. Probably the hardest part of promoting him from his personal bodyguard to a much more rewarding career track in their thing was that Joe missed the guy’s company.

They both looked at the oak door that led to Dion’s office. “Anyone in there with him now?”

Rico nodded. “My brother.”

Joe exhaled slowly. “So what happened?”

Rico shrugged and moved his hat from one knee to the other. “Couple of Freddy’s guys ran into Montooth on Tenth Street—”

“These are white guys?”

“Yeah. Kermit—”

“We use guys named Kermit these days?”

Rico shrugged. “It is what it is. Half our ginzos are overseas, you know that.”

Joe closed his eyes and pinched the top of his nose, exhaled. “So, uh, Kermit and a friend are just two white guys strolling around Brown Town at ten o’clock at night?”

Rico gave that a soft smile and another shrug. “Anyway, they started beefing right there on the street. Big nigger pulls a gun, starts pop-pop-popping away. Next thing you know, he’s put a round through Wyatt Pettigrue’s squash.”

“Pettigrue? That little kid from Third Avenue, by the Mongolian grocer?”

“He ain’t a kid no more, Joe. Well, shit, he ain’t nothing anymore. But, yeah, he was maybe twenty-one? Just became a father.”

“Jesus.” Joe remembered getting shines from the kid on the corner of Third and Sixth. The kid wasn’t that good at shining, but he had a fun patter, and he could rattle off all the important stories from the morning papers for you.

“So, yeah, he’s down at Blake’s Funeral Parlor right now,” Rico said, “two in the chest, one in the face. Daughter’s three days old. Fucking tragedy, I don’t mind saying.”

They both looked at the clock above the door at the same time: ten past the hour. Another hallmark of the Dion Bartolo regime—meetings never started on time.

Joe said, “So Montooth put two of ours down. And what happened to him?”

“Oh, he’s still with the human race. Can’t say for how long, though, hot as Freddy is.”

“And you’re on board with that?” Joe asked.

Rico squirmed a bit and sighed loudly. “What am I going to do? It’s like having a kid who fucks up—do you disown him? Look, Freddy is a fuckhead. We know this. He stepped into Montooth’s territory, told him he was taking it, and Montooth, man that he is, said, ‘The fuck you are.’ I mean, I blame myself.”

“Why?”

“I let it get to this. If I’d stepped in months ago, before the water started to really bubble, I could have kept it from reaching a boil. But I didn’t. And now Montooth killed two of Freddy’s guys, which means he killed two of our guys. He’s supposed to get a pass?”

Joe nodded and then shook his head and then nodded again. “I dunno, I dunno. I mean, Freddy moved on
him
. What else was Montooth supposed to do?”

Rico held out his hands, reasonable and plaintive at the same time. “Not kill two white guys.”

Joe shook his head again at the waste of it.

Rico appraised Joe’s suit. “You been traveling?”

Joe nodded. “It’s obvious?”

“Never known you to have a wrinkle, but that suit looks slept in.”

“Thanks. How’s the hair?”

“Hair’s all right. Tie could use a straightening. Where were you?”

Joe worked on his tie as he told Rico about traveling to Raiford, told him what Theresa claimed about his imminent demise.

“A hit? On
you
?” Rico chuckled hard. “Joe, that’s fucking ridiculous.”

“That’s what I said.”

“And all you got is the word of this vicious fucking dame who’s sucked up in her own paranoia?”

“Yeah. Though, in her case, the paranoia’s pretty justified.”

“Well, sure, you go to work for King Lucius, you go to work for Beelzebub. That’s the foundation block of that relationship.” Rico stroked his smooth, pointed chin. “It’s in your head, though, isn’t it? The
idea
that someone could be out there gunning for you.”

Joe said, “It’s not rational, but yeah.”

“How you supposed to be rational you hear someone may have thrown your name in the hat?” Rico looked at him, his eyes widening. “But it makes no sense, Joe. You can see that much, right?”

Joe nodded.

“I mean, none,” Rico said. “Shit, just your list of judges is worth more than every whorehouse in Tampa combined.” He laughed. “You’re the golden goose.”

Joe said, “So why don’t I feel safe?”

“Because whoever did this got in your head. Which is probably the point.”

“Fine. But why?”

Rico opened his mouth, then closed it. He stared into the middle distance of the room for a bit, then gave Joe a sheepish smile. “Fuck if I know.” He shook his head. “It just sounds like bullshit.”

Joe said, “But you try and put your head to a pillow thinking somebody’s coming for you.”

Rico said, “Remember when Claudio Frechetti thought I was fucking his wife?”

“You were fucking his wife.”

“But he couldn’t prove it. But then he thought he could? And he said he was going to kill me? And they hadn’t opened the books for me yet, so I was just a nobody and he was a big earner back then. Christ, I didn’t sleep in the same place two nights running for six weeks. I had my back on more couches than a bad actress. Then I run into Claudio himself coming out of the Rexall downtown
and
he’s
got bags under his eyes and twitchy shoulders because he heard someone had put out a contract on him. The whole time, he couldn’t have given a shit about me. Six weeks I lost hiding out and he’s worried about the bullet with his own name on it.”

“Which arrived about a week later, right?”

Rico nodded. “He had his hand in the till. Wasn’t that it?”

Joe shook his head. “Snitch.”

“Claudio?”

Joe nodded. “That’s how we lost all those loads on Forty-one that time. Fifty K of product ends up getting burned behind the Bureau of Narcotics Building, somebody’s gonna get found out and somebody’s gonna pay.”

They sat looking at the clock for a bit more until Rico said, “Why not take off for a couple weeks? Go to Cuba? You won’t have to sleep on a couch.”

Joe looked over at him. “What if that’s the play, though? The hitter’s waiting there for me. I run right into his arms.”

“That’d be a smart play,” Rico agreed. “Who do we know who’s that smart, though?”

“King Lucius’s name keeps coming up.”

“So go talk to him.”

“On my way tomorrow. You got plans?”

Rico smiled big. “Like old times?”

“Like old times.”

“That’d be a kick.”

“Yeah?”

“Hell, yeah.”

The thick oak door to Dion’s office opened and they were ushered in by Mike Aubrey. Geoff the Finn was waiting just inside the door, suit jacket off, his shoulder holster and pistol exposed. Both Mike and Geoff the Finn wore their stone faces for the guests
today, but Joe had his doubts either of them would stand tall if they ever faced the kind of shit Dion and Joe had back in the 1930s.

Joe and Rico made themselves drinks and Captain Dale Byner of the Fifth Precinct showed up, made his own drink. Byner had been in their pocket since he was a detective sergeant. One day he’d be commissioner. He wasn’t exceptionally corrupt—you could never place a bet on those guys—he just wanted to keep the peace, by whatever means necessary. He was also people-smart but money-dumb, a perfect combination.

Joe sat on the couch across from Dion’s desk and Freddy sat down beside him, sat so close their knees touched. It immediately got on Joe’s nerves. Fucking Freddy sitting there like both the injured party and the puppy who’d had another accident on the rug. Wanted everyone to believe it was beyond his control, wanted everyone to believe he meant well.

Dion lit his cigar, looked through the smoke at Freddy, and said, “All right, make your case.”

Freddy couldn’t believe what he’d been asked. “My
case
? My case is Montooth Dix killed two of my guys, so he’s gotta go. That’s it. Plain and simple.”

The police captain, Dale Byner, said, “There’s been rumblings for months, Freddy, that you were pushing the guy off his racket.”

“The
guy
?” Freddy said. “Like you drink with him down the Elks, Byner? He ever showed up in your neighborhood, you’d shoot him on sight.”

Joe said, “Montooth Dix has been running the numbers in Brown Town since I got here in ’29. He’s always been a businessman, always been fair in his dealings, even hid the Sukulowski brothers after that clusterfuck in Oldsmar two years ago. Every cop in the city looking for them, and Montooth was a tall glass of ice on our behalf.”

“That’s how the Sukulowskis got out?” Captain Byner asked.

“Yup.” Joe lit a cigarette.

“Where’d they end up?”

Joe tossed his match in the ashtray. “You don’t really want to know.”

Rico said, “Gentlemen, I agree with you. Freddy was a fucking asshole going after Montooth in the first place.”

Freddy, already aggrieved, looked even more dismayed.

“You were.” Rico looked Freddy in the eye and formed a circle with the thumb and index of his right hand. “Huge asshole. Size of a fucking paint can.” He turned to the other men in the room. “But, gents, we can’t let a nigger kill a white man. Even if it’s a nigger we like, and I like Montooth Dix. I’ve broken bread with the man. But still. And we can’t let a guy who’s not in our thing kill someone who is. No matter what. Dion? Joe? You two taught
me
that. Anyone hits our family gets hits back
by
our family. That’s gospel.”

Dion looked at Joe for a long moment. “What do you think? Business-wise, not emotional.”

“You ever known me to let emotion rule the day?”

Dion started to open his mouth.

Joe cut him off. “This decade?”

Dion eventually nodded. “Fair enough.”

“From a business standpoint,” Joe said, “there’s a lot of potential for disaster. All Montooth’s people turn against us? They can fuck us on heroin, our
bolita
cut, our control of some of the cigar factories. In terms of hookers, they control the Jamaican and Haitian pipelines, which is almost half the business down here. We always act like they’re a separate thing, but they are not. Anyone who’s come at Montooth’s throne in the past twenty years has died bloody. And there’s no appointed successor. Which means, whichever way the wind blows, there’s gonna be a nightmare of a power
vacuum left in his wake. And all our profits down there will get sucked up into it.”

“He’s got sons,” Freddy said.

Joe turned to Freddy and hid his contempt. He appeared logical, reasonable, and respectful. “But only one of them—Breezy—is strong. And I can think of at least three guys down there who would come at Breezy if he got the throne.”

Dion said, “But would any have a shot?”

They looked at Rico because it was his territory at the end of the day.

“Nah.” He shook his head, then paused, then shook his head again. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Who?” Dion said.

Rico looked at Joe for confirmation.

Joe said, “You thinking who I’m thinking?”

Rico nodded, and they turned to Dion and said it together. “Little Lamar.”

Dion said, “The guy deals in Chinks?”

Joe nodded.

Rico said, “He’s the only one who’s got a shot at uniting the tribe if he takes the throne fast enough.”

“They trust him that much?” Dion asked.

Joe shook his head. “They fear him that much.”

Dion said, “So can anyone deal with him?”

Now it was Freddy and Rico who looked at each other.

Rico said, “I think he can be reasoned with you put enough green in front of him.”

Freddy nodded. “He’s a businessman. He—”

“He’s a fucking snake.”

They all looked over at Captain Byner.

“Slaughter his own young if there was ten dollars in it. Fuck
their corpses for twenty.” Byner leaned forward and refilled his drink. “That ‘Chink business’ he’s into? We found a shipping container of them last year—nine men, seven women, seven children—at the bottom of the ocean. Best we pieced it together, one of the men in the container had been the father of a girl Lamar pimped out on Fifteenth Street. She ran off with another Chink, lit out for San Francisco. He heard her father was coming over on a Chink freighter that he’d bought into? He had them dump the container overboard. Killed twenty-three people because a whore ran off on him. That’s who you’re thinking of putting in power.”