World Gone By: A Novel (18 page)

Joe shrugged. “There ain’t much. Same as the knock on me.”

“He don’t got the stomach for blood.”

Joe nodded. “If Freddy
had to
deal with him, though, he would. But if he thought he could push him off the perch, take over everything
with his own man running the Negro side of things, he’d do that faster.”

“And Freddy’s nigger is?”

Joe frowned. “Montooth, come on.”

Montooth poured himself another drink. Put down the bottle, lifted Joe’s and poured him one too.

“Little Lamar,” he said.

Joe nodded. Little Lamar was a Negro version, some said, of Freddy DiGiacomo. They were both native sons of the area, and both had started their careers taking the jobs no one else wanted; in Little Lamar’s case, he’d handled a lot of the heroin trade; he also cut his teeth double-crossing all the illegal Chinese who came over, turning half the women into opium-addicted whores working out of casitas on the east side. By the time Montooth Dix figured out Little Lamar wasn’t satisfied working for him anymore, Lamar had built up too strong a gang to muscle. He’d been given his walking papers three years ago and a very shaky truce had existed ever since.

“Shit,” Montooth said. “Freddy gone steal my book, cut off my head, take what I built, and give it to that high yellow shit stain?”

“ ’Bout the size of it.”

“Then I die, they come after my
son
?”

“Yes.”

“Aw now,” Montooth said, “that’s not right.”

“I agree,” Joe said. “But it’s a hard world.”

“I know it’s a fucking hard world. Ain’t have to be evil, though.” He finished his drink. “They’ll really kill my boy?”

Joe took a sip of rum. “I think so, yeah. Unless they have no choice but to deal with him.”

Montooth looked across the table at him, said nothing.

“West Tampa don’t run without Negroes,” Joe said. “So Freddy has to deal with somebody. Right now, his plan probably is—kill
you, then kill your son, and put Little Lamar on the throne. But can I ask you, Montooth, who could take the throne if Lamar, you,
and
Breezy were all dead?”

“No one. It’d be fucking chaos down here. Lord, would the blood spill.”

“And the product would go in the toilet, and the whores would take off, and people would stop playing the
bolita
because they were too shit scared.”

“All that.”

Joe nodded. “Which Freddy understands.”

“So if all three of us are gone . . .”

Joe held out his hands. “Disaster.”

“But me, I’m dead no matter what.”

Joe nodded, letting him see it now.

Montooth leaned back in his throne, stared at Joe with a stony face that grew flatter and deader by the second until the softest of smiles transformed it. “The question ain’t whether I live or die. It’s which other motherfucker goes down—my own son or Little Lamar.”

Joe crossed his hands on his lap. “Anyone know where Lamar’s at right now?”

“Up the same place as always this time of the morning.”

Joe tipped his head toward the windows. “Barbershop on Twelfth?”

“Yeah.”

“No civilians?”

Montooth shook his head. “Barber goes for coffee. Little Lamar take his counsel from his boys there every morning while one of them gives him a shave.”

“How many of his boys?”

“Three,” Montooth said. “Everyone gunned up to the chinny-chins.”

“Well, Little Lamar’s in a chair, and one of his men is busy shaving him. So that leaves two gunners at the front door.”

Montooth gave that some thought. Eventually he nodded, seeing it.

“You send your wives away?”

“Why you say that?”

“Normally I’d have heard at least one of them by now.”

Montooth stared over his pipe at him for a bit before nodding.

“Why’d you send them away?” Joe asked.

“Figured you’d find a way to kill me. If anyone could, I figured it’d be you this
A
.
M
.”

Joe lied. “I haven’t killed anyone since 1933.”

“Yeah, but you killed a king that day. A king started out his morning with twenty men.”

“Twenty-five,” Joe said. “Now you know I’m not here to kill you, you want to call your women back?”

Montooth scowled. “I ain’t saying good-bye to anybody but once.”

“So you’ve said your good-byes.”

“I said most of them.” Muffled footsteps passed overhead, and Montooth looked up at the ceiling. Small footsteps, a child’s. “I’ll say a few more and then—”

“Little Lamar’s got business this week in Jacksonville. He’s on a train at noon. Gone.” Joe shook his head. “Time he’s back, who knows how the wind will have blown?”

Montooth looked up at the ceiling again, his jaw working, those footsteps gone. “You done your homework.”

“I always do.”

“So it’s now.”

“Or it’s never.” Joe sat back. “Which case, you sit around the rest of your days waiting for someone to come end them. No control in it, no choice in the matter.”

Montooth sucked a great breath up through his nostrils and his eyes grew to the size of silver dollars. He clapped his hands on his thighs several times and stretched his neck until Joe could hear the cracks.

Then he stood and crossed to the dark green wardrobe.

He removed his bathrobe and hung it on a hanger, smoothing a wrinkle from the side. He removed his slippers and placed them inside, took off his pajama pants and folded them. Did the same with the top. He stood in his underwear for a moment, staring into the wardrobe, deciding something. “Gonna go with the brown,” he said. “Brown man in a brown suit makes a harder target.”

He removed a tan shirt so stiff with starch it would have stood upright if he’d dropped it to the floor. As he put it on, he looked over his shoulder at Joe. “How old’s your boy now?”

“Nine.”

“Needs a mother.”

“You think so.”

“Fact, man. All boys need mommas. Otherwise they grow up wolves, treat their ladies like shit, have no appreciation for nuance.”

“Nuance, uh?”

Montooth Dix fed a dark blue tie under his collar and went to work tying it off. “You love your boy?”

“More than anything.”

“Stop thinking about yourself then and give him a momma.”

Joe watched him pull a pair of brown pants from the wardrobe and step into them.

“He’ll leave you someday.” Montooth threaded a belt through the pant loops. “It’s what they do. Sit in the same room with you the rest of your life, they’ll still be gone on you.”

“I was the same with my father.” Joe took another sip of rum. “You?”

Montooth slipped his arms into a pair of leather shoulder holsters. “Pretty much. It’s the process, how you become a man. Boys cling; men leave.” He added a .44 revolver to the left holster and then another one to the right.

“You ain’t going to be slipping those past anyone,” Joe said.

“Ain’t fixing to.” Montooth added a .45 automatic to the base of his spine. He donned his suit coat. He added a tan raincoat and matching hat, smoothed the brim. He pulled out two more pistols and added them to the pockets of the raincoat, then removed a shotgun from the highest shelf, turned and looked across the room at Joe. “How do I look?”

“Like the last thing Little Lamar’s going to see on this earth.”

“Son,” Montooth Dix said, “you got that fucking right.”

THEY TOOK THE BACK STAIRS down to the alley. The guy who’d frisked Joe was standing down there with another guard, and there were two guards across the alley in a car. Their heads all spun on a swivel when they saw their boss exit the building armed for another world war.

Montooth called out to the one who’d frisked Joe. “Chester.”

Chester couldn’t stop staring at his boss, that big shotgun dangling by his side, the butts of the .44s sticking out of his coat.

“Yeah, boss.”

“What at the end of this alley?”

“Cortlan’s Barbershop, boss.”

Montooth nodded.

His four men exchanged wild, desperate looks.

“Gonna get a bit messy in there about three minutes from now. Follow?”

“Boss, look, we—”

“I asked if you follow.”

Chester blinked several times, took a breath. “Yes. I follow.”

“Good. About
four
minutes from now, a few of you need to head down there after me, finish off anything still moving. Hear?”

Chester’s eyes filled and damn near spilled. But he looked to his right and then his left and they cleared. And he nodded. “Won’t nothing be left alive, Mr. Dix.”

Montooth patted his cheek and nodded at the other three. “When this is over, you listen to Breezy. Any you got a problem working for my son?”

The men shook their heads.

“Good. He gonna run a good ship, my boy. And ya’ll know he’s fair.”

“He just ain’t you,” Chester said.

“Shit, boy, ain’t none of us our fathers.”

Chester hung his head and busied himself checking the load on his pistol.

Montooth held out his hand to Joe. Joe shook it.

“Freddy gonna know you gave me this option.”

“He’ll know,” Joe said, “and he won’t know.”

Montooth held his gaze a long time, his hand still gripping Joe’s. “Gonna see you on the other side someday. Teach you how to drink brandy like a civilized man.”

“I look forward to it.”

Montooth dropped his hand and turned without a word.

He walked up the alley, his strides growing longer, faster, the shotgun rising to port position in his hands.

JOE DROVE OUT OF BROWN TOWN with some part of him wishing he could have followed Montooth Dix into that barbershop, just to see the look on Little Lamar’s face if Montooth made it past his bodyguards with the shotgun. But if Joe was caught anywhere near that mess, Freddy DiGiacomo could cry foul and take up arms against the entire Bartolo Family.

Which may have been the play all along. Except that Freddy was incapable of the long game. He thought small, always had. He’d wanted to take over Montooth’s policy racket, and now he was about to. If he’d had the smarts to go after the whole kingdom, Joe would have almost had to respect the asshole. Instead, he was going to wreck a dozen lives—minimum—for chump change.

Unless, as Montooth suspected, Freddy wasn’t alone in this play.

But, Jesus, if Joe could pick one guy in this entire racket besides
Dion he’d call a true friend, it would be Rico. Then again, if he had to pick one guy who had the smarts and the brass to have orchestrated Montooth’s downfall, it too would be Rico. But pushing out Montooth was too small a move for a guy like Rico. And pushing out Dion was a little too big.

Was it?

He’s too young, Joe told the voice in his head. Charlie Luciano was young when he formed this whole thing. So was Meyer Lansky. Joe himself ran the entire Tampa operation by the time he was twenty-five.

But those were different days. Different times.

Times may change, the voice whispered, but men don’t.

Joe crossed Eleventh and found the pair of Dion’s bodyguards waiting for him. It was Bruno Caruso and Chappi Carpino. Joe pulled alongside them, rolling his window down while Chappi did the same from the passenger seat of the other car.

Joe said. “Weren’t there two cars?”

“Mike and the Finn went back after we checked in with the boss.”

“Trouble?”

Chappi yawned. “Nah. Angelo took a sick day, so the boss figured you’d still want muscle with him and your boy.”

Joe nodded. “And that’s where you should be too.”

“We’re following you.”

Joe shook his head slowly. “I got a private meeting. You can’t come.”

Bruno Caruso leaned forward and looked across the seat at Joe. “We got orders.”

“Bruno, you’ve seen me drive. When I put this car in gear, I’ll be at the corner before you’ve come off the clutch. Then you gotta U-turn with all those delivery trucks double-parked over there? You really want to play cops ’n’ robbers with me?”

“But, Joe—”

“I got a private thing, ya know? Man-woman kinda thing. Very hush-hush. And I’d rather you and Chappi go where you’ll be useful. Tell the boss I made you say yes and I’ll see him back at his house in two hours.”

They exchanged looks. Joe revved his engine, shot them a smile.

Bruno rolled his eyes. “You call the boss and tell him?”

“You got it.”

Joe put the car in gear.

“Oh,” Chappi said, “the boss said Rico’s been trying to get ahold of you. He’s at his office.”

“Which one?”

“The docks.”

“All right. Thanks. First phone booth, I’ll call Dion, get you off the hook.”

“Thanks.”

He pulled away before they could change their minds, banged an immediate left on Tenth, and headed across town.

PULLING DOWN THE BACK ROAD behind the Sundowner Motel, he didn’t have a clue what to think. She’d called him last night, all business, and said he was to meet her at noon. Then she hung up. He couldn’t help feel he’d been summoned. That for all their playful lovemaking and postcoital banter, she was still a woman of considerable power and she expected those she called to appear before her without question.

Funny how power worked. Hers extended no farther than the city of Tampa and the county of Hillsborough. But that’s the ground his shoes touched at the moment, so her power trumped his. Montooth Dix’s power had seemed impenetrable until he killed two
men to defend it, and those men were represented by an octopus of an organization far more powerful than himself. Poland, France, England, Russia—all had probably thought themselves powerful enough not to fear the ridiculous tyrant now giving them a humbling lesson in power that had sucked in most of the free world. Japan thought it was powerful enough to bomb the United States. The United States thought it was powerful enough to retaliate and then open a second front in Europe and a third in Africa. And always in such struggles, one truth overrode all others—one side had grossly miscalculated.

Joe knocked on the door to 107, and the woman who opened it was not Vanessa, it was Mrs. Mayor. She wore a stiff business suit and her hair was tied back severely, which only accentuated the ashen cross on her forehead. Her face was tight, eyes distant, as if he were delivering room service and she suspected he’d gotten the order wrong.

“Come in.”

He removed his hat as he entered, stood by the wrought-iron bed where they’d so often made love.

“Drink?” she asked in a tone that suggested she didn’t care how he answered.

“No, I’m fine.”

She poured him one anyway and freshened her own. She handed him his glass. She raised hers in toast and clinked it off his.

“What’re we toasting?”

“What we’ve already passed by.”

“And that is?”

“Us.”

She drank, but he put his glass on the edge of the dresser.

“It’s good scotch,” she said.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said, “but—”

“No,” she said, “you don’t.”

“But I’m not giving you up.”

“That’s your choice, but I’m giving you up.”

“You could have done that over the phone.”

“You wouldn’t have accepted it. You needed to see it in my face.”

“See what?”

“That I’m serious. That when a woman moves on, she doesn’t look back, and I’m that woman.”

“Where . . .” He couldn’t seem to find the right way to hold his hands suddenly. “Where is this coming from? What did I do?”

“You didn’t do anything. I’ve been dreaming. I woke up.”

He put his hat beside his drink and reached for her hands, but she backed up.

“Don’t do this,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Why
not
?”

“Yes, Joe. Give me one reason why not.”

“Because . . .” He waved his hand at the walls for some reason.

“Yes?”

“Because,” he said, as calmly as possible, “without you . . . without knowing I have you to look forward to—and, no, not the sex, not just the sex anyway, but
you
—without that, the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is my son. Without you, everything’s just—” He gestured at the cross on her forehead.

“A crucifix?”

“Ash,” he said.

She drained her glass. “Are you in love with me? Is that what you’re peddling today?”

“What? No.”

“No, you’re not in love with me?”

“No. No, I mean, I don’t know. What?”

She poured herself another drink. “How do you see this going? You have your fun with me until we’re exposed?”

“We won’t necessarily be—”

“
Yes,
we will. That’s what’s been sinking in all week. I don’t see how the fuck I never saw it before. And if that happens, you can gallivant off to Cuba for a while and by the time you return, the noise will have died down. Meanwhile, I’ll have been shipped back to Atlanta where the family business will be handed over to the board of directors because no one is going to trust a dumb slut who fucked a gangster and turned her powerful husband into a cuckold.”

“That’s not what I want,” he said.

“What
do
you want, Joe?”

He wanted her, of course. Wanted her right now, in fact, on the bed. And if they could manage it without getting caught—and why couldn’t they?—he’d like to continue seeing her a few times a month until either they found themselves so swept up in each other that it made sense to consider some kind of bold break from the pack or they discovered their passion had been a hothouse flower, the bloom already curdling.

“I don’t know what I want,” he said.

“Great,” she said. “Magnificent.”

“I do know that I can’t get you out of my head no matter how hard I try.”

“How burdensome for you.”

“No, no. I just mean, look, we could try, couldn’t we?”

“
Try
?”

“To see where this takes us. It was working so far.”

“This?” She pointed at the bed.

“Yeah.”

“I’m married. To the mayor. This can’t take us anywhere but disgrace.”

“Maybe it’s worth the risk.”

“Only if there’s a reward for losing everything you know.”

Women. Jesus.

Maybe he was in love with her. Maybe. But did that mean he was supposed to ask her to leave her husband? That would be a scandal for the ages. Turn the handsome young mayor into a public cuckold? If they did that, Joe would go from outlaw to outcast. He’d never be able to do business in West Central Florida again. Possibly the whole state. They smiled more down south, Joe had learned, but they forgave less. And a man who stole the wife of the war hero son of one of Tampa’s oldest families would find every door in town shut to him. Joe would have to go back to being a full-time gangster; problem was, he was thirty-six and too old to be a soldier, too Irish to be a boss.

“I don’t know what you want here,” he said eventually.

He saw in her eyes that his answer confirmed something for her. He’d failed some kind of test. Hadn’t even known he’d been taking it, but he’d failed it all the same.

As he looked across the bed at her, a voice whispered in his head,
Don’t speak
.

He didn’t listen to it. “Am I supposed to put a ladder up to your window? We run off into the night?”

“No.” Her fingers shook slightly on her lap. “It would have been nice to know you considered buying it, though.”

“Do you want to run away?” Joe said. “Because I’m wondering how your husband and all his powerful cronies will respond to that. I’m wondering—”

“Stop talking.” She looked across the bed at him, her lips pursed.

“What?”

“You’re right. I agree with you. There’s nothing to discuss. So please stop talking.”

He blinked at that. Several times. Then he took a sip of the drink she’d poured him and awaited sentence for a crime he couldn’t remember committing.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

He placed the glass back down. “Preg.”

“Nant.” She nodded.

“And you know it’s mine.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive.”

“Would your husband know?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“He could get the math wrong. He could—”

“He’s impotent, Joe.”

“He’s . . . ?”

She gave him a tight smile and a tighter nod. “Always has been.”

“So you’ve never . . . ?”

“Twice,” she said. “Once and a half, really, when I think about it. The last time was over a year ago.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I know a doctor.” She said with false brightness. She snapped her fingers. “Problem solved.”

“Hang on,” he said. “Hang on.”

“What?”

He stood. “You’re not killing my child.”

“It’s not a child yet, Joe.”

“Sure it is. And you’re not killing it.”

“How many men have you murdered, Joseph?”

“That has nothing to do with—”

“If even half the stories I’ve heard are true, I’ll assume several,” she said. “Either personally or on your orders. But you think you’re going to—”

He came around the bed so fast, her chair toppled as she stood.

“You’re not doing this.”

“Oh, yes, I am.”

“I know every abortionist in this town. I’ll blackball you.”

“Who said I’m doing it here?” She looked up into his face. “Would you kindly take a step back?”

He held up his hands, took a breath, and did as she asked.

“All right,” he said.

“All right what?”

“All right. You leave your husband, come with me. We raise the child together.”

“Catch me,” she said. “I’m swooning.”

“No, listen—”

“Why would I leave my husband to live with a gangster? Your chances of being alive this time next year aren’t much better than a soldier’s in Bataan.”

“I’m not a gangster.”

“No? Who’s Kelvin Beauregard?”

Joe said, “Who?”

“Kelvin Beauregard,” she repeated. “A local businessman in Tampa back in the thirties. Owned a cannery, I believe?”

Joe said nothing.

Vanessa took a drink of water. “Rumored to be a member of the Klan.”

Joe said, “What about him?”

“My husband came to me two months ago and asked if you and I were intimate. He’s not a fool, you know. I said, ‘No. Of course
not.’ He said, ‘Well, if you ever do become intimate, I’ll send him to jail for the rest of his fucking life.’”

“That’s smoke,” Joe said.

Vanessa shook her head slowly, sadly. “He has two signed affidavits from witnesses who place you in Kelvin Beauregard’s office the day someone shot him through the head.”

Joe said, “He’s bluffing.”

Another head shake. “I’ve seen them. According to both affidavits, you nodded to the gunman just before he pulled the trigger.”

Joe sat on the bed and tried to figure a way out of the box. But he couldn’t. After a while, he looked up at her, his hands hanging off his knees.

Vanessa said, “I’m not getting tossed out of the mayor’s mansion and tossed out of my family, so I can land on the street and give birth in the poorhouse to a child who will grow up seeing his father through bars. That is”—she smiled sadly at him—“if one of the judges in my husband’s pocket doesn’t sentence you to death instead.”

They sat in silence for five minutes. Joe tried to find an escape hatch and Vanessa watched his search fail.

Eventually Joe said, “Well, when you put it that way.”

She nodded. “I thought you’d come around.”

Joe said nothing.

Vanessa gathered her purse and velvet cloche. She looked back at him, her hand on the door. “For a smart man, I’ve noticed you have a lot of trouble seeing what’s directly in front of your nose. You might want to work on that.” She opened the door.