World Gone By Page 12

  “About the rat?”

  “About the whole organization. We look weak. We look ripe for takeover.”

  “To who?”

  “Where you want to start? Santo’s guys.”

  Joe didn’t argue that one. Santo worked out of the Italian Social Club on Seventh Avenue, and was looking very hungry of late. Hungry and humorless, always a bad combination.

  “Who else?”

  Rico lit a smoke, tossed the match out the window. “Fucking whatshisname, uh, from Miami.” He snapped his fingers.

  “Anthony Crowe?”

  Rico pointed an affirmative finger at him. “Nick Pisano knows he has to give him some big territory right fucking soon or Anthony’s gonna come for Nick Pisano. He might-could tell Anthony to help himself to ours.”

  “Crowe’s not full-blooded Italian. He can’t take over.”

  “Sorry to break the news, but he is. Parents changed the name from Crochetti or something when they came over, but that fucker can trace his roots right back to Sicily. He’s smart, he’s mean, and he’s not satisfied with his spot at the table anymore. Wants his own dining hall.”

  Joe gave it some thought. “We’re not that weak. We’re a little shaky right now, okay. Everybody is. Revenue’s down all over because of that Kraut midget and his mustache and the fucking war. But we still control one of the richest ports in this country, we control narcotics for half the state, gambling for a quarter of it, and trucking for damn near all of it.”

  Rico said, “But our house is out of order. And everyone knows it.”

  Joe took his time lighting his own cigarette. Took his time cracking his window to let the smoke out. “You talking treason, Rico?”

  “What?”

  “You talking about removing the boss?”

  Rico stared across the seat at Joe for a long moment and then held up his hands. “Fuck no. Dion’s the boss and that’s all there is to it.”

  “That is all there is to it.”

  “I know.”

  “But?”

  “But somebody’s gotta talk to him, Joe. Somebody he listens to. Somebody has to . . .”

  “What?”

  “Get him to take the reins again. He took over? Everyone loved him. They still do, but he doesn’t seem to be watching the store the same way. You know? There’s a lot of bad talk going around, is all I’m saying.”

  “Let me hear it.”

  Rico took a moment. “Everyone knows the boss has a problem with the cards. And the horses. And the wheel.”

  “Noted,” Joe said.

  “The big weight loss over the last few years? People think he’s sick. You know, dying.”

  “He’s not dying. It’s something else.”

  “I know that.” Rico tapped the side of his nose a few times. “But it’s not common knowledge outside the Family. And what do you say to people—he ain’t dying, he’s just getting tight on the powder?” Rico held up his hands again. “Joe, this is said just between us and with all respect.”

  Joe drove for a bit in silence, let Rico twist for a while.

  “I’ll agree you might have a point,” he said eventually. He glanced across the seat. “Don’t give you the right to talk about it, though.”

  “You don’t think I know that?” Rico flicked his cigarette out the window and took a long slow exhale. “I love our thing. You know? I fucking love it. We wake up every day and find new ways to screw the system. Don’t take a knee for anyone, don’t line up in rows of two for anyone. We”—he drove his index finger into the dashboard—“make our lives, make our rules, make our way like men.” He hunched forward. “I fucking love being a gangster.”

  Joe chuckled softly.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Joe said.

  “No, what?”

  Joe looked over at him. “I like it a whole hell of a lot too.”

  “So, so . . .” Rico took a breath. “I risked talking about, you know, problems with—”

  “Perceived problems.”

  “Right. I risked talking about perceived problems with the boss because I don’t want to lose this thing. I don’t want to end up with two in the dome or doing time, come out nobody knows me anymore, I gotta fucking get a straight job or something. I never made an honest buck in my life, and I don’t want to learn how.”

  Joe nodded and said nothing until they were just outside Sarasota.

  “I’ll talk to Dion,” he said eventually. “I’ll impress upon him that we need to find this rat and get our house in order.”

  “He’ll go for it.”

  Joe shrugged. “He might.”

  “He will,” Rico said, “because it comes from you. He still looks up to you, I think.”

  “Get the fuck out of this car.”

  “No, really.”

  “Let me tell you something about Dion—he was the boss of our crew when we were kids. He was the toughest and scariest of all of us. Only reason he ended up taking orders from me was because of a bank job that went bad. He ended up on the run; I ended up making powerful friends. Except for that little . . . run of time, he’s always been my boss, not the other way around.”

  “Might be so,” Rico said, “but you’re still the only guy he looks at like he cares what you think.”

  Joe said nothing and they drove on along a ghostly strip of road under the ruined plum sky.

  “Tomas.” Rico said, “Kid’s growing like a weed. I couldn’t believe it when I saw him the other day.”

  “Tell me about it. His mother was tall. His uncles are tall.”

  “You’re not a midget.”

  “But I might look like one standing next to him someday.”

  “How do you like it?” Rico said, his voice a bit more serious.

  “Being a father?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I like it a lot. I mean, I’m terrible at it most days. Lose my temper more than I ever thought I would.”

  “I’ve never even heard you raise your voice.”

  “I know, I know.” Joe shook his head. “Most people haven’t. My son, though? Seen it so many times, he rolls his eyes if I do it now. They get to you. I mean, he’s a great kid, but he still does shit like climb up on a barn roof when he knows the roof is weak and needs repairs. That’s how he broke his arm last year at our farm in Cuba. When he was a toddler, he was always trying to swallow small, sharp rocks. Or I’d be giving him a bath, I’d look away for a second, he’d be standing up trying to dance. And, boom, down he goes. And all you’re thinking is, My job is to keep you alive. Keep you from getting another broken arm or losing an eye. So, you know, stop fucking dancing in the fucking tub.”

  Rico cracked up and Joe laughed along with him.

  “You can’t believe it now,” Joe said, “but once you have one, buckle up, partner.”

  “I will be having one.”

  Joe looked over at him.

  Rico raised his eyebrows up and down and Joe punched him in the shoulder.

  “Damn.” Rico rubbed the shoulder.

  “Who’s the girl?”

  “Kathryn Contarino. Everyone calls her Kat?”

  “From South Tampa?”

  A proud, boyish smile. “Yeah.”

  “Beautiful girl,” Joe said. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” Rico said. “Yeah, I . . . yeah.” He looked out the window. “I’m lucky.”

  “What’re you,” Joe asked, “smitten?”

  Rico rolled his eyes and then nodded. “Matter of fact. Gonna marry her.”

  “What?” Joe swerved the car slightly.

  “What’s the big deal? People get married.”

  “I never took you for the type.”

  “Not ‘the type,’” Rico said, smoothing his shirt into his pants where it had bunched up from the car ride. “The fucking nerve of ya. What about you?”

  Joe laughed.

  “No, really. No one’s seen you with a steady filly in seven years. You got something secret stashed away?
”

  “Nope.”

  “Sure?”

  “You know I’d tell you if I did,” Joe said with a straight face.

  Rico gave him the finger. “You hardly ever go to whores, Joe. And the ones you do see say you take them to dinner and buy ’em nice dresses and earrings and half the time you don’t even fuck them.”

  “I got someone regular in Cuba,” Joe said to get him off his back. “Not Havana. A village girl in the west, near my farm. She cooks well, she’s real pretty, lets me come and go as I please. Ain’t true love, but it ain’t bad.”

  “Well, good for you,” Rico said. “Now we just gotta find a girl for my brother.”

  She’d have to be a young one, Joe thought. Or a boy.

  “Yeah, I’ll get thinking on that,” Joe told him.

  About a half an hour west of Zolfo Springs, Rico said, “Are we ready for this?”

  Joe said, “Lucius?”

  Rico nodded, lips parted, his eyes a little wider than usual.

  “We’ve both dealt with the man before.”

  “Not on his boat, though. You ever been on his boat?”

  Joe shook his head.

  “People get on, sometimes they don’t come off. You heard about those Adrocalese, or whatever they call them?”

  “Androphagi,” Joe said. Lucius’s Palace Guard, a group of twenty men you had to pass through before you got to him.

  “I heard the reason nobody ever finds the bodies Lucius drops is because they eat them.”

  Joe forced a chuckle. “That’s what Androphagi means, yeah.”

  Rico looked over at him. “Means what?”

  “A tribe of cannibals.”

  “Fuck.” Rico exhaled the word, turning one syllable into three or four. “How do you know this shit?”

  “Jesuit high school,” Joe said. “You study a lot of Greek mythology.”

  “The Greeks had cannibals?”

  Joe shook his head. “This was a private army. Some say they were out of Africa, others say they were Finns or Russians. Either way, they helped Darius the Great invade Southern Russia. And supposedly they, uh, ate a few people.” He tried to lighten his tone, had to work at it. “So Lucius names his guys Androphagi to scare the shit out of everyone.”

  Rico said, “Succeeded.”

  After another mile, Joe said, “You don’t have to board with me. Just drop me off. As long as you’re seen.”

  Rico shook his head with a wry smile. “I talk to calm my nerves. Don’t mean I’m some fucking moke would leave a pal in his hour of need. Fuck, Joe, the two of us? Take a battalion of these fucking Androcalese—”

  “Androphagi.”

  “Andro-fuck-them. Okay? Take a battalion of them to get the better of a couple tough monkeys like us.” He took out his flask and handed it to Joe. “Drink to that.”

  Joe raised the flask. “Glad to have you with me, Rico.” He drank and handed the flask back.

  “Glad to be here, Joe.” Rico took a powerful snort. “If they try to fuck with a couple of downtown fellas like us, we’ll show these country assholes a thing or two.”

  THE RAIN FOUND THEM a few miles short of Zolfo Springs. It lashed the car and floated across the road in great sheets. They’d rolled down their windows to smoke but now they rolled them back up and the rain clattered on the roof and the road hissed under their tires and the frame of the Pontiac shuddered in gusts that came and went at random.

  They reached Zolfo Springs and left the main road and from there Rico had to read from the directions Joe had placed on the seat between them. Right here, next left, no second left, sorry. The low sky and the bending palm trees formed a cowl around the car, and the rain slowed but the drops thickened. It was like driving through broth.

  Charlie Luciano himself had once said he never wanted to get any closer to the devil on this earth than he already had to his gatekeeper, King Lucius. Meyer wouldn’t deal with Lucius face-to-face, and even Joe had avoided the man whenever humanly possible over the past fifteen years.

  King Lucius had appeared on the scene during the Florida land boom back in ’23, coming, some said, from Russia by way of New Orleans. It was impossible to pinpoint his accent because it was so maddeningly faint. It could have been Russian or Montenegron or even Albanian. It was definitely aristocratic, as was the care Lucius took with his eyebrows and nails.

  Over the years, he and his crew had pulled down more high-end scores in more parts of the country than any other. And yet no matter where he hit—from as far away as Santa Barbara, California, to as close as Key West—he always paid tribute to the men within whose boundaries his base of operations lay. He paid the Bartolos in Tampa, the Pisanos in Miami, and the Nicolo brothers in Jacksonville. Not every job, of course—they would have lost respect for anyone that honest—but a solid 90 percent of them. He made the three Florida families so much money that he could pretty much live with impunity. Which he did. When someone mentioned back in ’36 that Eliot Fergs had advanced an opinion on Lucius’s taste in women, Lucius personally beat Eliot to death in the back room of Eliot’s service station. In the late fall of ’38, he fed Jeremy Kay to the gators. When Jeremy’s brother came looking less than a month later, a few people saw him board King Lucius’s boat, but no one ever saw him disembark.

  If anyone else had clipped three employees of the Family, they would have been clipped themselves. It was a testament to King Lucius’s power that he wasn’t even called before the Commission, though Joe himself had taken a trip to Central Florida back in ’39, shortly after Jeremy Kay’s brother vanished, to tell King Lucius that as far as they were concerned, he’d gotten three freebies; there wouldn’t be a fourth.

  King Lucius was, first and foremost, a phosphate king, his kingdom stretching for seventy miles down the Peace River from Fort Meade to Port Charlotte. For years, he’d invested his ill-gotten gains into dredging and mining the waters of the Bone Valley of Central Florida. He owned a majority share in the Bone Valley Fertilizer Company, and had even used shell companies to buy small pieces of the other twelve mining concerns that operated along the Peace, all of them involved in the procurement of phosphates to make fertilizer or, since the war had broken out, munitions.

  Joe was a partial owner in BVFC, as was Dion Bartolo and Rico DiGiacomo. They weren’t majority shareholders, but they didn’t have to be; when it came to phosphates in Florida, half the job was mining it, but the rest lay in transporting it. When Prohibition wound down in the early 1930s, Joe and men like him were left with an unfortunate surplus of trucks, boats, and the occasional seaplane with no one to sell them to and nothing illegal left to transport. In 1935, Joe, Esteban Suarez, Dion Bartolo, and Rico joined up, when Rico was nothing but a smart, baby-faced kid who’d grown up in the bosom of Port Tampa, to form Bay Area Transport Company. And after ten years under Joe’s guidance and Rico DiGiacomo’s stewardship, nothing moved off the Peace River—not so much as a pebble—if it wasn’t transported by Bay Area Transport.

  King Lucius’s cut—however sizable it may have been—was limited to Bone Valley Fertilizer Company. He didn’t own a single share of Bay Area Transport, and that forced parity into the relationship. He could mine all the phosphate he wanted, but if he couldn’t get it to a rail line or across to the ocean, he couldn’t do dick with it.

  King Lucius kept a suite at the Commodore Hotel in Naples and another at the Vinoy in St. Petersburg, but most nights he could be found on his houseboat, which motored up and down the Peace River. The houseboat was two-tiered and had been imported from India. It had been constructed over a hundred years ago in the Kerala region of anjili wood planks as smooth and dark as frozen toffee and was held together by not a single screw or nail, but by coir knots coated in boiled cashew resin. With a curved roof of bamboo and palm leaves, six bedrooms, and a second-floor dining room that could seat fourteen, the boat cut an impressive figure on the silver-thread surface of the Peace River. To behold it, one could easily imagine he’d been transported
to the banks of the Ganges.

  Joe and Rico pulled into a crushed-shell parking lot and looked through the rain at the boat until Al Butters pulled down the small incline into the mine site from what remained of the jungle behind them. They’d chopped down so much of it and burned so much more, felled cypress and banyan trees that had stood for centuries, since before men had possessed the words to name them or the tools to kill them. Al pulled alongside them in the same faded green Packard he’d driven Joe around in the last time they’d met. He pointed the nose of his car at the trunk of theirs, so his window ended up parallel to Joe’s.

  The rain stopped. As if someone had turned it off with a switch.

  Al Butters rolled down his window, and Joe rolled down his own.

  Joe looked out at the houseboat as Ogden Semple, King Lucius’s longtime aide, stepped onto the rear deck and stared back at the cars.

  “I should come with you guys.” Al didn’t sound excited by the prospect.

  “Nah.” Joe moved his tongue around, tried to get some liquid going in there. “There’s a Thompson in the trunk in case we don’t come back off the boat.”

  “What do I do with it? Come find you?”

  “No.” Something ticked at the base of Joe’s throat. Felt like a beetle. “You just strafe the boat until whoever killed us is dead too. There’s a can of gas back there with the gun. You light that fucking thing up and watch till it sinks.” He looked over at him. “You do that for us, Al?”

  “He’s got an army on there.”

  Rico leaned across the seat. “And you’ll have a Thompson. If we die, you respond. Clear?”

  Al eventually nodded, his lips moving, his eyes too big.

  “What?” Joe said. “Just say it.”

  “You can’t kill the devil.”

  “He’s not the devil,” Joe said. “The devil’s charming.”

  He and Rico got out of the car. Joe straightened his tie and the line of his suit in the same motion. He removed his hat, a straw half-fedora with a black silk band, and raised it to the satin sky, which gave off a glare from a sun he couldn’t see; it hid behind the pewter clouds. Across the river, past the ravaged shore, and back through the burned and spoiled land, a small flash of light glittered once, twice, and then no more. Rico saw it too.