Another look between Esteban and his sister.
“There’s something you could get us,” she said.
“Okay.”
“But it’s well guarded and won’t be given up without a fight.”
“Fine, fine,” Joe said. “We’ll get it.”
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“If we get it, will you cut all ties with Albert White and his associates?”
“Yes.”
“Even if it brings bloodshed.”
“It will most certainly bring bloodshed,” Esteban said.
“Yes,” Joe said, “it will.”
Esteban mourned the thought for a moment, the sadness filling the room. Then he sucked it right back out of the room. “If you do what I ask, Albert White will never see another drop of Suarez molasses or distilled rum. Not one.”
“Will he be able to buy sugar in bulk from you?”
“No.”
“Deal,” Joe said. “What do you need?”
“Guns.”
“Okay. Name your model.”
Esteban reached behind him and took a piece of paper off his desk. He adjusted his glasses as he consulted it. “Browning automatic rifles, automatic handguns, and fifty-caliber machine guns with mounting tripods.”
Joe looked at Dion and they both chuckled.
“Anything else?”
“Yes,” Esteban said. “Grenades. And box mines.”
“What’s a box mine?”
Esteban said, “It’s on the ship.”
“What ship?”
“The military transport ship,” Ivelia said. “Pier Seven.” She tilted her head toward the rear wall. “Nine blocks from here.”
“You want us to raid a navy ship,” Joe said.
“Yes.” Esteban looked at his watch. “Within two days, please, or they leave port.” He handed Joe a folded piece of paper. As Joe opened it, he felt a hollowing of his center, and he remembered how he’d carried notes like these to his father. He’d spent two years telling himself the weight of those notes hadn’t killed his father. Some nights he almost convinced himself.
Circulo Cubano, 8 A.M.
“You’ll go there in the morning,” Esteban said. “You’ll meet a woman there, Graciela Corrales. You’ll take your orders from her and her partner.”
Joe pocketed the paper. “I don’t take orders from a woman.”
“If you want Albert White out of Tampa,” Esteban said, “you’ll take orders from her.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Hole of the Heart
Dion drove Joe to his hotel a second time, and Joe told him to stick around until he decided whether or not he was staying in tonight.
The bellman was dressed like a circus monkey in a red velvet tux and matching fez, and he swooped out from behind a potted palm on the veranda and took Joe’s suitcases from Dion’s hand and led Joe inside while Dion waited at the car. Joe checked in at a marble reception desk and signed the ledger with a gold fountain pen handed to him by a severe Frenchman with a brilliant smile and eyes as dead as a doll’s. He was handed a brass key tied to a short length of red velvet rope. At the other end of the rope was a heavy gold square with this room number on it: 509.
It was a suite, actually, with a bed the size of South Boston and delicate French chairs and a delicate French desk overlooking the lake. He had his own bathroom, all right; it was bigger than his cell in Charlestown. The bellman showed him where the outlets were and how to turn on the lamps and the ceiling fans. He showed him the cedar closet where Joe could hang his clothes. He showed him the radio, complimentary in every room, and it made Joe think of Emma and the grand opening of the Hotel Statler. He tipped the bellman and shooed him out and sat in one of the delicate French chairs and smoked a cigarette and looked out at the dark lake and the massive hotel reflected in it, squares and squares of light tilted sideways on the black surface, and he wondered what his father could see right now and what Emma could see. Could they see him? Could they see the past and the future or vast worlds far beyond his imaginings? Or could they see nothing? Because they were nothing. They were dead, they were dust, bones in a box and Emma’s not even attached.
He feared this was all there was. Didn’t just fear it. Sitting in that ridiculous chair looking out the window at the yellow windows canted in the black water, he knew it. You didn’t die and go to a better place; this was the better place because you weren’t dead. Heaven wasn’t in the clouds; it was the air in your lungs.
He looked around the room with its high ceilings and chandelier over the enormous bed and curtains as thick as his thigh and he wanted to come out of his skin.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to his father, even though he knew he couldn’t hear him, “it wasn’t supposed to be”—he looked around the room again—“this.”
He stubbed out his cigarette and left.
Outside of Ybor, Tampa was strictly white. Dion showed him a few places above Twenty-fourth Street with wooden signs stating their position on the matter. A grocery store on Nineteenth Avenue wanted it known that NO DOGS OR LATINS were allowed and a druggist on Columbus had a NO LATINS on the left side of his door and NO DAGOS on the right.
Joe looked at Dion. “You all right with that?”
“Of course not, but what’re you going to do?”
Joe took a hit off Dion’s flask and passed it back to him. “Gotta be some rocks around here.”
It had started to rain, which did nothing to cool things off. Down here, rain felt like more sweat. It was close to midnight, and things just seemed hotter, the humidity a woolen embrace around everything you did. Joe got into the driver’s seat and kept the engine idling while Dion shattered both of the druggist windows and then hopped into the car and they drove back into Ybor. Dion explained that the Italians lived around here, in the higher-numbered streets between Fifteenth and Twenty-third. The lighter spics were between Tenth and Fifteenth, the nigger spics below Tenth Street and west of Twelfth Avenue, where most of the cigar factories were.
They found a joint down there at the end of an almost-road that went past the Vayo Cigar Factory and vanished into a cowl of mangrove and cypress. It was nothing more than a shotgun shack on stilts overlooking a swamp. They’d strung netting from the trees along the banks, and the netting covered the shack and the cheap wood tables beside it and the porch out back.
They played some music in there. Joe had never heard anything quite like it—Cuban rumba, he guessed, but brassier and more dangerous, and the people on the dance floor were doing something that looked far more like fucking than dancing. Most everyone in there was colored—some American black, mostly Cuban black, though—and those who were merely brown didn’t have the Indian features of the highborn Cubans or the Spaniards. Their faces were rounder, their hair more wiry. Half the people knew Dion. The bartender, an older woman, gave him a jug of rum and two glasses without him asking.