Live by Night

When the doctors finally cleared him, he and Graciela closed the shutters of their home on Ninth and filled the icebox on the second floor with food and champagne and confined themselves to the canopy bed or the claw-foot tub for two days. Near the end of the second day, lying in the red dusk, the shutters reopened to the street, the ceiling fan drying their bodies, Graciela said, “There will never be another.”

“What’s that?”

“Man.” She ran her palm over his patchwork abdomen. “You are my man until death.”

“Yeah?”

She pressed her open mouth to his neck and exhaled. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“What about Adan?”

For the first time he saw contempt enter her eyes at the mention of her husband.

“Adan is no man. You, mi gran amor, are a man.”

“You’re certainly all woman,” he said. “Christ, I get so lost in you.”

“I get lost in you.”

“Well, then…” He looked around the room. He’d waited so long for this day, he wasn’t sure how to treat it now that it had arrived. “You’ll never get a divorce in Cuba, right?”

She shook her head. “Even if I could return under my own name, the Church does not allow it.”

“So you’ll always be married to him.”

“In name,” she said.

“But what’s a name?” he said.

She laughed. “Agreed.”

He moved her on top of him and looked up her brown body into her brown eyes. “Tú eres mi esposa.”

She wiped at her eyes with both hands, a small wet laugh escaping her. “And you are my husband.”

“Para siempre.”

She placed her warm palms on his chest and nodded. “Forever.”

Chapter twenty-one Light My Way

Business continued to boom.

Joe began greasing the skids on the Ritz deal. John Ringling was open to selling the building but not the land. So Joe had his lawyers work with Ringling’s to see if they could reach an accommodation that would suit both. Lately the two sides had investigated a ninety-nine-year lease but had gotten hung up on air rights with the county. Joe had one set of bagmen buying the inspectors in Sarasota County, another set up in Tallahassee working on state politicians, and a third group in Washington targeting members of the IRS and senators who frequented whorehouses, gambling parlors, and opium dens the Pescatore Family had stakes in.

His earliest success was to get bingo decriminalized in Pinellas County. He then got a statewide bingo decriminalization bill on the docket, to be heard by the state legislature in the autumn session and possibly put on the ballot as early as 1932. His friends in Miami, a much easier town to buy, helped soften the state even further when Dade and Broward Counties legalized pari-mutuel betting. Joe and Esteban had crawled out on a limb to buy up land for their Miami friends, and now that land was being turned into racetracks.

Maso had flown down to take a look at the Ritz. He’d survived a bout with cancer recently, though no one but Maso and his doctors knew what kind. He claimed to have come through it with flying colors, though it had left him bald and frail. Some even whispered that his thinking had grown muddy, though Joe saw no evidence of it. He’d loved the property and he’d liked Joe’s logic — if there was ever a time to strike at the gambling taboos, it was now, as Prohibition tragically collapsed before their eyes. The money they’d lose on the legalization of booze would go right into the government’s pocket, but the money they’d lose on legal casino and racetrack taxation would be offset by the profit they’d make from people dumb enough to bet against the house on a mass scale.

The bagmen also began to report back that Joe’s hunch was looking good. The country was soft enough for this. You had cash-strapped municipalities from one end of Florida to the other and one end of the country to the other. Joe had sent his men out with pledges of infinite dividends — a casino tax, a hotel tax, a food and beverage tax, an entertainment tax, a room tax, a liquor license tax, plus — and all the pols loved this one — an excess revenue tax. If, on any given day, the casino cleared more than eight hundred thousand dollars, the casino would kick 2 percent of it back to the state. Truth was, any time the casino came close to clearing eight hundred large, they’d skim the take blind. But the politicians with their small plates and their big eyes didn’t need to know that.