Live by Night

The USS Mercy weighed ten thousand tons. It was a four-hundred-foot-long, fifty-two-foot-wide, plumb-bow displacement ship with two smokestacks and two masts. The mainmast sported a crow’s nest that seemed to Joe like it belonged on a ship from another time, when brigands roamed the high seas. Two faded crosses were painted on the smokestacks, which confirmed her history as a hospital ship, as did the white of her paint. She looked worked over, creaky, but the white of her gleamed against the black water and the night sky.

They were up on the catwalk above a grain silo at the end of McKay Street — Joe, Dion, Graciela, and Esteban, looking out at the ship moored at Pier 7. A dozen silos clustered there, sixty feet high, the last of the grain having been stored there this afternoon by a Cargill ship. The night watchman had been paid off, told to make sure he told the police tomorrow that it was Spaniards who tied him up, and then Dion knocked him out with two swings of a lead sap to make it look authentic.

Graciela asked Joe what he thought.

“Of what?”

“Our chances.” Graciela’s cigar was long and thin. She blew rings over the rail of the catwalk and watched them float over the water.

“Honestly?” Joe said. “Slim to none.”

“Yet it’s your plan.”

“And it’s the best one I could think of.”

“It seems quite good.”

“Is that a compliment?”

She shook her head, though he thought he saw the smallest twitch of her lips. “It’s a statement. If you played good guitar, I would tell you and still not like you.”

“Because I leered?”

“Because you are arrogant.”

“Oh.”

“Like all Americans.”

“And all Cubans are what?”

“Proud.”

He smiled. “According to the papers I’ve been reading, you’re also lazy, quick to anger, incapable of saving money, and childish.”

“You think this is true?”

“No,” he said. “I think assumptions about an entire country or an entire people are pretty fucking stupid in general.”

She drew on her cigar and looked at him for a bit. Eventually, she turned to look out at the ship again.

The lights of the waterfront turned the lower edges of the sky a pale, chalky red. Beyond the channel, the city lay sleeping in the haze. Far off at the horizon line, thin bolts of lightning carved jagged white veins in the skin of the world. Their faint and sudden light would reveal swollen clouds as dark as plums massed out there like an enemy army. At one point, a small plane passed directly overhead, four lights in the sky, one small engine, a hundred yards above, possibly for a legitimate purpose, though it was hard to imagine what that could be at three in the morning. Not to mention, in the short time he’d been in Tampa, Joe had come across very little activity he’d describe as legitimate.

“Did you mean what you told Manny tonight, that it makes no difference to you whether he lives or dies?”

They could see him now, walking along the pier toward the ship, toolbox in hand.

Joe leaned his elbows on the rail. “Pretty much.”

“How does anyone become so callous?”

“Takes less practice than you’d think,” Joe said.

Manny stopped at the gangplank where two sailors of the Shore Patrol met him. He raised his arms while one of the SPs patted him down and the other opened the toolbox. He rifled through the top tray and then removed it and placed it on the pier.

“If this goes well,” Graciela said, “you’ll take over rum distribution in Tampa.”

“In half of Florida, actually,” Joe said.

“You’ll be powerful.”

“I guess.”

“Your arrogance will reach new heights then.”

“Well,” Joe said, “one can hope.”

The SP stopped frisking Manny and he lowered his hands, but then that sailor joined his partner and they both looked at something in the toolbox, started conferring, their heads lowered, one with his hand on the butt of his.45.

Joe looked down the parapet at Dion and Esteban. They were frozen, necks extended, eyes locked on that toolbox.

Now the SPs were ordering Manny to join them. He stepped in between them and looked down too. One of them pointed, and Manny reached down into the toolbox and came back with two pints of rum.

“Shit,” Graciela said. “Who told him to bribe them?”

“I didn’t,” Esteban said.

“He’s making up things on the fly,” Joe said. “This is fucking great. This is wonderful.”

Dion slapped the parapet.

“I didn’t tell him to do this,” Esteban said.

“I specifically told him not to do this,” Joe said. “ ‘Don’t improvise,’ I said. You were wit—”

“They’re taking it,” Graciela said.

Joe narrowed his eyes, saw each of the SPs put a bottle inside his tunic and step aside.

Manny closed his toolbox and walked up the gangplank.

For a moment, they were very quiet on the roof.

Then Dion said, “I think I just coughed up my own asshole.”

“It’s working,” Graciela said.

“He got on,” Joe said. “He’s still got to do his job and get back off.” He looked at his father’s watch: 3 A.M. on the nose.

He looked over at Dion, who read his thoughts. “I’d figure they started busting up that joint ten minutes ago.”

They waited. The metal of the catwalk was still warm from a day of baking in the August sun.