Live by Night

“About ten minutes before you get there.”

Joe gave it some thought. “Tampa, huh?”

“It’s hot.”

“I don’t mind hot.”

“You ain’t never felt hot like this hot.”

Joe shrugged. The old man had a penchant for exaggerating. “I’m going to need somebody I can trust there.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“Yeah?”

Maso nodded. “It’s already done. He’s been there six months.”

“Where’d you find him?”

“Montreal.”

“Six months?” Joe said. “How long you been planning this?”

“Since Lou Ormino started putting some of my cut in his pocket and Albert White showed up to grub up the rest.” He leaned forward. “You go down there and make it right, Joe? Spend the rest of your life living like a king.”

“So if I take over, are we equal partners?”

“No,” Maso said.

“But Lou Ormino’s an equal partner.”

“And look how that’s going to end up.” Maso stared through the mesh at Joe with his true face.

“How much do I get then?”

“Twenty percent.”

“Twenty-five,” Joe said.

“Fine,” Maso said with a twinkle in his eye that said he’d have gone to thirty. “But you better earn it.”

Part II Ybor 1929–1933

Chapter eleven Best in the City

When Maso had first proposed that Joe take over his West Florida operations, he’d warned him about the heat. But Joe still wasn’t prepared for the wall of it that met him when he stepped onto the platform at Tampa Union Station on an August morning in 1929. He wore a summer-weight glen plaid suit. He’d left the vest behind in his suitcase, but standing on the platform, waiting for the porter to bring his bags, jacket over his arm and tie loosened, he was soaked by the time he finished smoking a cigarette. He’d removed his Wilton when he stepped off the train, worried that the heat would leach the pomade from his hair and suck it into the silk lining, but he put it back on to protect his skull from the sun needles as more pores in his chest and arms sprang leaks.

It wasn’t just the sun, which hung high and white in a sky swept so clear of clouds it was as if clouds had never existed (and maybe they didn’t down here; Joe had no idea), it was the jungle humidity, like he was wrapped inside a ball of steel wool someone had dropped into a pot of oil. And every minute or so, the burner got turned up another notch.

The other men who’d exited the train had, like Joe, removed their suit jackets; some had removed their vests and ties and rolled up their sleeves. Some had donned their hats; others had removed them and waved them in front of their faces. The women travelers wore wide-brimmed velvet hats, felt cloches, or poke bonnets. Some poor souls had elected for even heavier material and ear treatments. They wore crepe dresses and silk scarves, but they didn’t look very happy about it, their faces red, their carefully tended hair sprouting splits and curls, the chignons unraveling at the napes of a few necks.

You could tell the locals easily — the men wore skimmers, short-sleeved shirts, and gabardine trousers. Their shoes were two-toned like most men’s these days but more brightly colored than those of the train passengers. If the women wore headgear, they wore straw gigolo hats. They wore very simple dresses, lots of white, like the one on the gal passing him now, absolutely nothing special about her white skirt and matching blouse and both a little threadbare. But, Jesus, Joe thought, the body under it — moving under the thin fabric like something outlawed that was hoping to slip out of town before the Puritans got word. Paradise, Joe thought, is dusky and lush and covers limbs that move like water.

The heat must have made him slower than usual because the woman caught him looking, something he’d never been nabbed for back home. But the woman — a mulatto or maybe even a Negress of some kind, he couldn’t tell, but definitely dark, copper dark — gave him a damning flick of her eyes and kept walking. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the two years in prison, but Joe couldn’t stop watching her move beneath the thin dress. Her hips rose and fell in the same languid motion as her ass, a music to it all as the bones and muscles in her back rose and fell in a concert of the body. Jesus, he thought, I have been in prison too long. Her dark wiry hair was tied into a chignon at the back of her head, but a single strand fell down her neck. She turned back to shoot him a glare. He looked down before it reached him, feeling like a nine-year-old who’d been caught pulling a girl’s pigtails in the schoolyard. And then he wondered what he had to be ashamed of. She’d looked back, hadn’t she?

When he looked up again, she was lost to the crowd down the other end of the platform. You have nothing to fear from me, he wanted to tell her. You’ll never break my heart and I’ll never break yours. I’m out of the heartbreak business.