World Gone By: A Novel (17 page)

“Two.”

“Two. You lose weight, get bags under your eyes, fuck, your hair got thinner. And for what? To make a rich fucking devil richer and save one of his minions from getting offed, which, by the way, she deserved.”

“You really think that’s been the play?”

Dion sat on the edge of the desk and swirled the brandy in his glass. “What other play could there be? No one”—he leaned forward
and tapped his glass off Joe’s knee—“I mean, fucking
no one
wants you dead. So why do this, except to make you chase your tail so they could get what they wanted?”

Joe settled into the chair. He placed his drink on the side table and found his cigarettes, lit one. He could feel the night on his face and heard something thick and fast—a squirrel or a rat, he guessed—scuttle through the trees. “Well, if I get to Thursday at 12:01
A
.
M
., I’ll eat any crow you put before me. Do it with fucking gusto. Until then, though, I’m hearing footsteps running up behind me everywhere I go.”

“Understandable.” Dion poured some more brandy into their glasses. “How ’bout tomorrow you take your mind off it?”

“How would I go about doing that?”

“Montooth Dix.” Dion clinked his glass off Joe’s.

“What about him?”

“He’s Dead Coon Walking and you know it.” Dion opened the humidor on his desk. “He’s gotta go. It’s making me look weak, him holed up and breathing while two of my guys are already buried.”

“But, like you said, he’s holed up. I can’t get to him.”

Dion lit his cigar, puffed on it until it got going. “They respect you in Brown Town, just like they do everywhere else in this city. You can get through his front door. I know you. You get in there and you tell him to come out in the fresh air and it’ll be quick. He’ll never see it coming.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then, shit, I gotta come in after him. Can’t let this go on any longer. Losing too much face. He don’t come out, I’ll hit that building he’s hiding in like the Krauts hit Leningrad. His kids are there, his wives? Ain’t my fucking problem. I’ll turn the whole fucking building into a parking lot.”

Joe said nothing for a bit. He drank his brandy and listened to the leaves rustle and the water that bubbled from the fountain in the northwest corner of the yard.

“I’ll talk to him,” he said. “I’ll do my best.”

FAT TUESDAY, with the clock that had been ticking in his head replaced by the echoes of his own heartbeat, Joe worked the phones with Montooth’s people until he’d arranged a meeting for the following morning.

He barely slept again that night. He’d nod off for fifteen minutes and then find himself wide awake once more, eyes on the ceiling. He waited for the blond boy to make an appearance, but he never did. Joe realized it was the randomness of the ghost’s visits—some spaced a week apart, others occurring on the same day—that rattled him almost as much as the visits themselves. You never knew when he was going to show up. And if he had a message he was trying to transmit from the afterlife, Joe was damned if he could find it.

He went down to the room where Tomas slept. He sat on the bed and watched his son’s chest—so small and fragile—rise and fall. He smoothed his cowlick with a damp palm and put his nose close to the boy’s neck and breathed him in. Tomas never stirred, and Joe had to fight the urge to shake him awake and ask if he’d been a good father to him. He lay in the bed with his face across from his son’s and he drifted off for a bit, had an almost-dream in which a rabbit raced along the top of a fence, though Joe couldn’t see what it was running from. Then the rabbit was gone and he was staring at his sleeping son, wide awake.

The next morning, he drove Tomas to Sacred Heart and they stood in line with the other eight hundred parishioners. Father
Ruttle dipped his thumb into the chalice filled with damp ash and applied the ash to their foreheads.

Outside the church, fewer people milled around than did on a Sunday, but everyone looked slightly unsettling. Father Ruttle had a heavy thumb, and the crosses on everyone’s foreheads were thick, some dripping black residue in the heat.

Back at Dion’s Joe freshened up and came out into kitchen, found Dion and his son eating cornflakes at the table.

Joe crouched by his son. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

Tomas gave him a flat look that was all Graciela. “A couple hours? Or five?”

Joe felt the guilt flood his own smile. “Be good for Dion.”

Tomas nodded, mock-solemn, fidgeting.

“Don’t load up on sugar. You know he’s going to take you to the bakery.”

“Bakery?” Dion said. “What bakery?”

“Tomas?” Joe looked his son in the eye.

Tomas nodded. “I won’t load up on sugar.”

Joe clapped his shoulders. “See you in a bit.”

Dion spoke around a mouthful of cereal. “How you know I’m going to take him to the bakery?”

Joe said, “It’s Wednesday. Isn’t that your pound cake day?”

“It’s not a pound cake, you ignoramus. It’s a
torta al cappuccino
.” He put his spoon aside and raised one finger to make his point. “Sponge cake soaked in cappuccino and layered with ricotta then topped with whipped cream. And they don’t make it every Wednesday, either, ’cause of this fucking war. They make it one Wednesday a month.
This
Wednesday.”

“Yeah, well, don’t give too much to my boy. He’s got an Irish stomach.”

“I thought I was Cuban.”

“You’re a mongrel,” Joe assured him.

“I’ll give the mongrel a little taste of the
sfogliatelle
and that’ll be the extent of it.” He pointed his spoon at Tomas. “We playing basketball, work up an appetite?”

Tomas beamed. “Absolutely.”

Joe gave his son a last kiss on the head and headed out.

AS PREVIOUSLY AGREED UPON, Dion’s bodyguards stayed behind when Joe crossed into the Negro section of Ybor City. If anyone saw two carloads of white thugs driving south of Eleventh, they’d presume the truce was off and light them all up. So he drove the final few blocks alone.

On the drive over, he’d grown increasingly angry about the way Montooth was being treated. Maybe because he genuinely liked the man. Or maybe simply because he could identify with anyone who lived in the shadow of his own noose. Joe was being asked to convince Montooth to come out into the open and die, even as Joe himself was desperately trying to stave off his own Judgment Day. And what crime had Montooth committed in the first place? He’d protected himself against men who’d come into his neighborhood to kill him.

Joe was the furthest thing from a moral pillar, but he knew an
unequivocal evil when he saw it. And what was being done to Montooth fell into that category.

Montooth Dix and his family lived above the billiards parlor he owned on Fifth. The building was four stories tall and a block long. Montooth, his brood of nine children, three wives, and his phalanx of bodyguards occupied the top three floors, so much room up there it never felt crowded. So much room and so little light, you could easily get lost, Montooth having a fondness for thick dark curtains—reds and browns mostly—that covered the windows.

Joe pulled up outside the pool hall and there was a space waiting right out front, one of Montooth’s men removing a cane chair that had been holding the spot, though Joe couldn’t imagine anyone in this neighborhood or the whole of Tampa being stupid enough to park in front of Montooth’s place. Or really anywhere near the spot where the man himself parked his ride—a canary yellow ’31 Packard Deluxe Eight, a car the length of a small yacht, big enough possibly to fit all nine of Montooth’s kids, though probably not the three wives, who ran big and were rumored to despise one another. Joe pulled past the Packard so he could back in behind it, and he caught pieces of his own car reflected in the gleaming spokes of Montooth’s hubcaps.

Montooth’s man waved Joe into the spot, the chair still in his hand. While most of the Negroes in the sporting parts of town dressed in zoot suits, two-toned shoes, and wide-brimmed hats, Montooth’s men wore what they’d been wearing for ten years—crisp black suits over crisp white shirts, top button undone but never the second, no ties, black shoes gleaming from the shoeshine stand that sat out front of the billiards parlor, two of Montooth’s men up in the chairs now getting the leather turned into mirrors.

Joe stepped out of his car slowly, aware of all the eyes on him—not just the eyes in front of this building but eyes that had been
tracking him for blocks. Eyes that said, You don’t belong and you ain’t gonna start neither. Some of that, of course, was because he was white in a black neighborhood. But in Ybor any sort of racialism was unsound business. The neighborhood had been settled by Spaniards and Cubans; the Italians and coloreds had followed soon after. Joe’s wife had been Cuban, her father descended from Spaniards but her mother from African slaves. Joe’s son was a mixture of Irish, Spanish, and African. So Joe had no problem with the coloreds, but for the first time in a few years, he was very aware as he stepped out of his car that the last white face he’d seen had been seven blocks back.

There was no guarantee Montooth’s guys wouldn’t take turns banging a pipe off his skull until they got to the pink folds, leave the corpse twitching on the sidewalk. Montooth and Freddy DiGiacomo had gone to war, which meant all the black crime families and white crime families in Tampa were at war.

Montooth’s man placed the chair against the brick wall beside the shoeshine stand and approached Joe to pat him down.

When he was almost done, he shot a glance at Joe’s groin. “Gotta check your snake, man. Heard the stories.”

Joe had once snuck a Derringer past the John brothers over in Palmetto County. Tucked it under his ball sack, pulled it out ten minutes later, and pointed it across the table at their father.

Joe nodded. “Try not to linger.”

“Just so you make sure it stay the same size, hear?”

Joe thought he detected a smile on one of the guards sitting up on the shine stand as his compatriot reached between Joe’s thighs and ran his palm under Joe’s testicles and around his groin, the man’s face turned away and twisted into a grimace.

“There.” He stepped back. “I ain’t lingered and you stayed small.”

“Maybe that’s as big as I get.”

“Then God musta been drunk day he made you. My sympathies.”

Joe readjusted his suit jacket, smoothed his tie. “Where’s he at?”

“Up the stairs. He’ll find you directly.”

Joe entered the building. To his right was the door to the pool hall. He could smell the smoke and hear the snap of the balls coming out of there at eight thirty in the morning, the place legendary for its marathon games and fortunes won and lost. He climbed the stairs alone. The red steel door up top had been left open wide onto a mostly bare room with a dark wood floor that matched the walls. The velvet drapes were closed over the windows and were a shade of purple so dark it was almost black. Between two of the windows near the back of the room was a pine wardrobe painted army surplus green.

There were two chairs and a table in there. Well, more precisely—one chair, one table, and a throne.

Montooth sat in the throne, hard to miss in white silk pajamas and a white satin bathrobe, matching slippers on his feet. He smoked cannabis from a corncob pipe, day and night, Montooth did, and he was smoking it now as he watched Joe take the seat across from him, the chair a twin of the one that had held Joe’s parking space for him. On the table between them were two bottles of liquor—brandy for Montooth, rum for Joe. Montooth’s brandy was Hennessy Paradis, the finest in the world, but he hadn’t scrimped on Joe’s rum either, pulling out a bottle of Rhum Barbancourt Réserve du Domaine, the best bottle of rum in the Caribbean not produced by Joe and Esteban Suarez.

Joe nodded at it. “I’m to drink my competition.”

Montooth exhaled a thin stream of smoke. “Were it always so simple.” He took another small drag off his pipe. “Why all you white people walking around town with crosses on your head?”

“Ash Wednesday,” Joe said.

“All look like you found voodoo. I expect to see chickens start disappearing off the street.”

Joe smiled, looked Montooth in his eyes—one the color of an oyster, the other brown as the floor. He didn’t look good, not like the old Montooth Dix Joe had known for going on fifteen years now.

“No way you can win this,” Joe said.

Montooth gave that a lazy shrug. “Then we go to war. I’ll hit you in the streets. I’ll blow up all your clubs. I’ll paint the streets the color of—”

“To what end?” Joe asked. “Just get a bunch of your people killed.”

“Yours too.”

“Yeah, but we’ve got more people to spare. Meanwhile, you’ll have dismantled your whole organization, weakened it beyond repair. And you’ll still be dead.”

“So what’re my options? ’Cause I don’t see any.”

“Take a trip,” Joe said.

“Where?”

“Anywhere but here for a while. Let everything cool down.”

“This here’ll never cool down long as Freddy DiGiacomo’s alive.”

“Can’t say that for sure. Just take the wives and go for a bit.”

“ Take the wives.” Montooth chuckled hard at that. “You ever met
one
woman who traveled well? And now you want me to put three crazy bitches on some fucking boat with me? Man, you want to kill me, you couldn’t do it surer.”

“I’m telling you,” Joe said, “it’s time to see the world.”

“Shit, boy, I ain’t drop outta my momma and land on this street. I was with the 369th in the Great War. Hellfighters of Harlem—heard of us? Know what we’re famous for besides being the only niggers the government ever gave a weapon
to
?”

Joe did, but he shook his head so the man could tell it.

“We were under fire for six months straight, lost fifteen hundred
men, but we didn’t lose one fucking
foot
of ground. Not one. Never had a man taken prisoner either. You think about that. We stood our fucking ground till they got tired of dying. Not us. Them. Blood up to my boots. Blood inside my boots. Six months of fighting and not sleeping and scraping some asshole’s meat off my bayonet. And you want me to be what now? Afraid?”

He tapped the ash out of his pipe into a tray on the table, refilled it from a brass urn beside the ashtray.

“After the war,” he said, “everyone said it’d be different. We’d go home heroes, get treated like men. I knew that was just nigger dreaming, so I lit out. Saw me Paris, saw me Germany just so I could see why everyone had been dying. Time I got back here in ’22? I’d seen Italy and a whole shitload of Africa. Funniest thing about Africa? No one over there ever confused me with an African. Clear as day to them what an American looks like, no matter his shade. Gotta come back here to get told you only half American at best. So I seen the world, boy, and I got all I want right here. You got anything else you offering?”

“I’m thinking. You haven’t left me much to work with, Montooth.”

“Back in the old days, when you were running things? You could have worked a deal.”

“I can still work a deal.”

“Not for my life.” Montooth leaned forward, wanting to hear Joe say it.

“No,” Joe said, “not for your life.”

Montooth took that final confirmation in. He might have faced death every day of his six months on French battlefields, but that was over twenty years ago. This was right now, and death sat closer than Joe. Sat on his shoulder, ran its fingers through his hair.

“I still have the big man’s ear,” Joe said.

Montooth leaned back. “Problem is, he might not be as big a man as he thinks anymore.”

Joe smiled and scowled simultaneously at the absurd notion.

Montooth matched the smile. “Oh, you still think he is?”

“I know he is.”

“You ever think what happened between me and Freddy was a play from the beginning?” He leaned back in his throne. “Which white man runs policy in this town?”

“Dion.”

Montooth shook his head. “Rico DiGiacomo.”

“For Dion.”

“And who run the docks?”

“Dion.”

Another slow shake of that big head. “Rico.”

“
For
Dion.”

“Well, Dion best be glad all those people doing so much
for
him because he don’t seem to be doing shit for himself.”

Was this the dread that had been pecking at Joe all morning? All week? All month? Did this explain the leaden weight that filled his body when he snapped awake from dreams that turned instantly elusive?

In his time on earth, he’d learned one truth above all else when it came to power—those who lost it usually didn’t see it vanishing until it was already gone.

Joe lit a cigarette to clear his head. “You only got two options here. And one of them is run.”

“Ain’t taking that one. What else?”

“Decide what happens to the things you leave behind.”

“You telling me to pick my successor?”

Joe nodded. “Or Freddy DiGiacomo gets it all. Everything you built.”

“Freddy and his brother Rico.”

“I don’t think Rico’s in on this.”

“Really? You think Freddy’s the smart brother, do you?”

Joe said nothing.

Montooth flung his hands at the air. “Fuck were you a month ago?”

“Cuba.”

“This was a sweet town when you ran it. Hummed along like it’s never hummed since. Why can’t you run it again?”

Joe pointed to the freckles on his cheeks. “Wrong race.”

“Tell you what,” Montooth said, “you grab all the spics and micks you know, join up with me and my niggers, we take this town
back
.”

“It’s a nice dream.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“We’re mom-and-pop, they’re Sears and Roebuck. We’d get a week—two, tops—before they’d come down here and crush us. Turn our bones to gravel.”

Montooth poured himself a drink, nodded at Joe’s bottle so Joe would know if he wanted some, he’d have to pour his own. Montooth waited as Joe did, and they raised the glasses.

“What’re we toasting?” Montooth asked.

“Whatever you want.”

Montooth considered the liquor in his glass and then the room around him. “To the ocean.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I always liked looking at it.”

“Good enough for me.” Joe met Montooth’s glass with his own and they drank.

“You look out at it,” Montooth said, “it makes you feel like whatever’s on the other side of it—all those worlds—are better places. Places you’ll be welcome and treated like a man.”

“Never quite works out that way, though,” Joe said.

“Nah. But I still feel it. All that water,” he said and took another drink, “all those worlds could be got to, but now they just gone by. Like anything, I guess.”

“I thought you were done traveling.”

“I am. ’Cause I know the truth—all those worlds ain’t nothing but this one. Still, when you look at all that blue stretching to forever.” He chuckled softly to himself.

“What?” Joe said.

Montooth waved it off. “You think I’m crazy.”

“Try me.”

Montooth squared himself, his eyes suddenly clear. “You heard the earth’s mostly water, right?”

Joe nodded.

“And people think God lives up in the sky, but that don’t never make much sense to me because the sky is way, way up there, not part of us, you know?”

“But the ocean?” Joe said.

“That’s the skin of the world. And I think God lives in the drops. Moves through a wave like the foam itself. I look in the ocean, I see Him looking back.”

“Well, shit,” Joe said, “I’ll drink to it a second time, then.”

They did and Montooth returned his empty glass to the table. “You know I’d choose Breezy as my successor.”

Joe nodded. Breezy, the second of Montooth’s children, was as smart as a roomful of bankers. “I figured.”

“What’s the knock on him?”