Live by Night

A week later, when John Ringling’s minions asked for a meeting, Joe knew it was over. If not completely, certainly tabled for a while. The entire country was going wet again, wet with abandon, wet with fervor and joy, but Tampa, under Loretta Figgis’s influence, was swinging the other way. If they couldn’t trump her when it came to the acceptance of booze, which was a signature away from being legalized, they were sunk when it came to gambling. John Ringling’s men told Joe and Esteban that their boss had decided to hold on to the Ritz a little longer, wait out the dip in the economy, and revisit his options at a later time.

The meeting was held in Sarasota. When Joe and Esteban left, they drove over to Longboat Key and stood looking at the gleaming Mediterranean Almost Was on the Gulf of Mexico.

“It would have been a great casino,” Joe said.

“You’ll have another chance. Things swing back around.”

Joe shook his head. “Not all things.”

Chapter twenty-two Quench Not the Spirit

The last time Loretta Figgis and Joe saw each other alive was early in 1933. It had rained heavily for a week. That morning, the first cloudless day in some time, the ground fog rose so thick off the streets of Ybor it was as if the earth had turned itself upside down. Joe walked the boardwalk along Palm Avenue, distracted, Sal Urso pacing him from the opposite boardwalk, and Lefty Downer pacing both of them in a car inching along the center. Joe had just confirmed a rumor that Maso was considering another trip down here, his second in a year, and the fact that Maso hadn’t told him himself didn’t sit right. On top of that, stories in this morning’s papers said that President-elect Roosevelt planned to sign the Cullen-Harrison Act as soon as someone put a pen in his hand, effectively ending Prohibition. Joe had known it could never last, but he still hadn’t been prepared somehow. And if he was unprepared, he could only imagine how poorly all the mugs in the bootleg boomtowns like KC, Cincy, Chicago, New York, and Detroit were going to take the news. He’d sat on his bed this morning and tried to read the article so he could identify the exact week or month Roosevelt was going to wield that most popular of pens, but he was distracted because Graciela was puking up last night’s paella to beat the band. Normally, she had a cast-iron stomach, but lately the stress of running three shelters and eight different fund-raising groups was shredding her digestive system.

“Joseph.” She stood in the doorway and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “We may need to face something.”

“What’s that, doll?”

“I think I’m with child.”

For a few moments Joe thought she’d smuggled one of the street urchins back from the shelter with her. He actually glanced past her left hip before it dawned on him.

“You’re…?”

She smiled. “Pregnant.”

He got off the bed and stood before her and wasn’t sure if he should touch her because he was afraid she’d break.

She put her arms around his neck. “It’s okay. You’re going to be a father.” She kissed him, her hands finding the back of his head where his scalp tingled. Actually everything tingled, as if he’d woken to find himself encased in fresh skin.

“Say something.” She looked at him, curious.

“Thanks,” he said because nothing else occurred to him.

“Thanks?” She laughed and kissed him again, mashing his lips with her own. “Thanks?”

“You’re going to be an amazing mother.”

She pressed her forehead to his. “And you’ll be a great father.”

If I live, he thought.

And knew she was thinking it too.

So he was a little off his feed that morning when he entered Nino’s Coffee Shop without looking through the windows first.

There were only three tables in the coffee shop, a crime for a place that served coffee this good, and two of them were occupied by Klan. Not that an outsider would have recognized them as such, but Joe had no trouble seeing hoods even if they weren’t wearing them — Clement Dover and Drew Altman and Brewster Engals, at one table, the older, smart guard; at the other, Julius Stanton, Haley Lewis, Carl Joe Crewson, and Charlie Bailey, morons all, more likely to set themselves on fire than any cross they were trying to burn. But, like a lot of dumb people who didn’t have the sense to know how dumb they were, mean and merciless.

As soon as he stepped over the threshold, Joe knew it wasn’t an ambush. He could see in their eyes that they hadn’t expected to see him. They’d just come here for the coffee, maybe to intimidate the owners into paying some protection. Sal was right outside, but that wasn’t the same thing as inside. Joe pushed his suit jacket back and left his hand there, one inch from his gun as he looked at Engals, the leader of this particular pack, a fireman with Engine 9 at Lutz Junction.