Live by Night

In no time at all, Joe and Esteban had turned a one-million-dollars-a-year operation into a six-million-dollars-a-year juggernaut.

And this during a global financial crisis that kept worsening, each shock wave followed by a bigger one, day after day, month after month. People needed jobs and they needed shelter and they needed hope. When none of those proved forthcoming, they settled for a drink.

Vice, he realized, was Depression-proof.

Just about nothing else was, though. Even insulated from it, Joe was still as bewildered as everyone else by the elevator drop the country had taken in the last few years. Since the ’29 crash, ten thousand banks had gone belly-up and thirteen million people had lost their jobs. Hoover, facing a reelection fight, kept talking about a light at the end of the tunnel, but most people decided that light came from the train barreling up to run them over. So Hoover made a last-ditch scramble to raise the tax rate for the richest of the rich from 25 to 63 percent and lost the only people left who supported him.

In Greater Tampa, oddly, the economy surged — shipbuilding and canneries thrived. But no one got the word in Ybor. The cigar factories started sinking faster than the banks. Rolling machines replaced people; radios supplanted the readers on the floor. Cigarettes, so cheap, became the nation’s new legal vice, and sales of cigars plummeted by more than 50 percent. The workers of a dozen factories went out on strike, only to see their efforts crushed by management goons, police, and the Ku Klux Klan. The Italians left Ybor in droves. The Spaniards started to move out too.

Graciela lost her job to a machine. This was fine with Joe — he’d been wanting to get her out of La Trocha for months. She was too valuable to his organization. She met the Cubans who came off the boats and brought them to the social club or the hospitals or the Cuban hotels, depending on what they needed. If she saw one she believed was suited for Joe’s line of work, she spoke to him of an even more unique job opportunity.

In addition, it was her instinct for philanthropy, coupled with Joe and Esteban’s need to clean their money, that led to Joe’s buying up roughly 5 percent of Ybor City. He bought two failed cigar factories and reemployed all the workers, turned a failed department store into a school and a bankrupt plumbing supplier into a free clinic. He turned eight empty buildings into speakeasies, though from the street they all looked like their fronts: a haberdasher, a tobacconist, two florists, three butchers, and a Greek lunch counter that much to everyone’s shock — none more so than Joe’s own — became so successful they had to import the rest of the cook’s family from Athens and open a sister lunch counter seven blocks east.

Graciela missed the factory, though. Missed the jokes and tales the other rollers would tell, missed hearing the readers narrate her favorite novels in Spanish, missed speaking in her mother tongue all day.

Even though she spent every night at the house Joe had built for them, she kept her room above the café, although as far as Joe knew, all she ever did there was change her clothes. And not very often, either. Joe had filled a closet in his home with clothes he’d bought her.

“Clothes you bought me,” she’d say when he’d ask her why she didn’t wear them more often. “I like to buy my own things.”

Which she never had the money for because she sent all her money back to Cuba, either to the family of her deadbeat husband or to friends in the anti-Machado movement. Esteban made trips back to Cuba on her behalf sometimes too, fund-raising trips that coincided with the opening of this nightclub or that. He’d come back with news of fresh hope in the movement that, experience had taught Joe, would be dashed on his next trip. He’d also come back with his photographs — his eye getting sharper and sharper, wielding that camera like a great violinist wielded his bow. He’d become a name in the insurgency circles of Latin America, a reputation built, in no small part, on the sabotage of the USS Mercy.

“You’ve got a very confused woman on your hands,” he told Joe after his last trip over.

“This I know,” Joe said.

“Do you understand why she is confused?”

Joe poured them each a glass of Suarez Reserve. “No, I don’t. We can buy or do anything we want. She can have the finest clothes, get her hair done at the nicest shops, go to the nicest restaurants—”

“That allow Latins.”

“That goes without saying.”

“Does it?” Esteban leaned forward in his chair, put his feet on the floor.

“The point I’m trying to make,” Joe said, “is that we won. We can relax, she and I. Grow old together.”

“And you think that’s what she wants — to be a rich man’s wife?”

“Isn’t that what most women want?”

Esteban gave that a strange smile. “You told me once you did not grow up poor like most gangsters.”

Joe nodded. “We weren’t rich but…”

“But you had a nice house, food in your bellies, could afford to go to school.”

“Yes.”