World Gone By: A Novel Read online

  Henry Ames blinked several times and stood. He played with the inside of his hat as he walked to the door and fiddled with the brim as he stood there. “They’ve already tried to kill her twice. Once on the bus over, the second time in the shower. My uncle worked in Raiford his whole life; he said once they start trying to kill you, they finish the job eventually. So they’ll . . .” He looked at the doorknob and then back at the floor, his jaw working. “They’ll kill her. She told me she knows they will. And then they’ll kill you.”

  “Who’s they, son?” Joe tapped his cigarette ash into the tray.

  “Only she knows.” The boy stared across the office at Joe, more grit in him than Joe had originally suspected. “But she told me to give you one name.”

  “The name of the person coming to kill me? Or the man who hired him?”

  “I have no idea, sir. She just said to give you the name.”

  Joe stubbed out his cigarette. He could tell the kid was thinking about walking out, now that he had Joe on a hook, however small. There was a defiance in him that most of his friends and neighbors probably never saw. You might be able to push this boy around, but pushing him into a corner could be a mistake.

  “Well?” Joe said.

  “And you’ll help her? If I give you the name?”

  Joe shook his head. “Didn’t say that. Your girlfriend started out as a bunco artist who turned into a grifter and then a damn good thief and then a contract killer. She doesn’t have any friends because they’re too afraid that at some point she’ll con them, rob them, or kill them. Or all three. So sorry, son, you can shoo right the fuck out that door and take the name with you and I won’t lose a wink of sleep over it. But if you feel like telling me, then—”

  The kid nodded and walked out the door.

  Joe couldn’t believe it. Boy had some sand.

  He picked up the phone and called down to Richie Cavelli, who manned the back door, through which the majority of their business entered the building. He told him to get up to the front and stop the blond kid on his way out the main door.

  Joe took his suit coat off the back of his chair and put it on and headed out of the office.

  But Henry Ames was waiting for him in the reception area, hat still in hand.

  “Will you agree to see her?”

  Joe looked around reception—Margaret clacking away on her Corona, squinting through her own cigarette smoke; a salesman from a grain wholesaler down in Naples; a flunky from the War Department. Joe gave them all a friendly nod—Go back to your magazines; nothing to see here—and met the boy’s eyes.

  “Sure, kid,” he said. Just to get him out of the office.

  The boy nodded and fiddled with the brim of his hat again. He looked up at Joe. “Gil Valentine.”

  Joe kept the light smile on his face even as the splash of ice water found his heart and testicles at the same time.

  “That’s the name she gave you, huh?”

  “Gil Valentine,” the kid said again and put on his hat. “Good day to you, sir.”

  “And to you, son.”

  “I’ll expect to see you soon, sir.”

  Joe said nothing and the boy tipped his hat to Margaret and let himself out. Joe said, “Margaret, call down to Richie. Tell him to forget the order I just gave him and go back to what he was doing. He’s at the front door phone.”

  “Yes, Mr. Coughlin.”

  Joe smiled at the flunky from the War Department. “David, right?”

  The man stood. “Yes, Mr. Coughlin.”

  “Come on in,” Joe said. “I understand Uncle Sam needs some more alcohol.”

  ALL THROUGH THE MEETING with the fella from the War Department and the subsequent one with Wylie Wholesale, Joe couldn’t get his mind off Gil Valentine. Gil Valentine had been something of an exemplar in their thing. He’d come up, like most of them, during the glory days of Prohibition and was both a hell of a distiller and a bootlegger. But what he really had was an ear. Gil could sit in the back row of a revue and single out the one singer-dancer out of twenty who was going to be a star. He wandered nightclubs and juke joints all over the country—St. Louis, St. Paul, Cicero, Chicago, down into Helena, Greenwood and Memphis, and out into the glitter of New York and the sparkle of Miami—and he came back with some of the greatest recording artists the mob ever owned. By the time alcohol was legal again, he was one of the few guys, like Joe, who’d prepared for a seamless transition into mostly legitimate business.

  Gil Valentine took his whole operation west. When he arrived in L.A., he paid proper tribute to Mickey Cohen and Jack Dragna, even though he wasn’t doing much of anything illegal anymore. He created Cupid’s Arrow Records and unfurled a seemingly endless ribbon of hits. He continued paying a cut to the men in Kansas City who’d given him his start and kicked back to any of the families who’d been in charge of any of the clubs where he’d found his acts. In the spring of ’39, he packaged a tour that combined the Hart Sisters with the Johnny Stark Orchestra, the Negro singers Elmore Richards and Toots McGeeks, and the two biggest heartthrob crooners in the country, Vic Boyer and Frankie Blake. Every city they scheduled, they had to add two more dates to deal with the demand. It was the biggest music tour in the history of North America, and the boys in KC and all the other boys across the country who owned a piece, however big or small, took their cut.

  Gil Valentine was the U.S. Mint with a revolving door instead of a vault; he made money, hand over fist, for his friends. And they didn’t have to do anything but spend it. Gil made no enemies. He lived a quiet life in the Holmby Hills with his wife, Masie; two daughters in braces; and a son who ran track for Beverly Hills High School. He had no mistress, no addictions, no enemies.

  In the summer of 1940, someone disappeared Gil Valentine from a parking lot in West Los Angeles. For six months, Cohen’s men, Dragna’s men, and wiseguys from all over the country scoured L.A. for the mob’s golden boy. Hands were broken, heads were dented, knees were caved in, but no one knew shit.

  And one day, while most of the searchers were chasing a rumor of indeterminate origin that Gil Valentine had been sighted sipping cervezas in the Mexican fishing village of Puerto Nuevo, just south of Tijuana, his son came home from an early morning errand and found his father in canvas bags all over the backyard of the house in Holmby Hills. There was a bag for each arm, a bag for each hand. A big bag that contained his chest, a smaller one that contained his head. Thirteen bags in all.

  And no one—not the bosses in KC or the bosses in L.A. or all the hundreds of men who’d searched for him, nor any of his associates in legitimate or illegitimate enterprises—knew why he was dead.

  Three years later, few spoke his name. To speak it meant you acknowledged that there were some things beyond the reach of the most powerful business syndicate in the Western Hemisphere. Because the message of Gil Valentine’s death grew clearer as time passed, and it was a simple message: Anyone can be killed. At any time. For any reason.

  After the salesman from Wylie Wholesale left, Joe sat in his office and looked out the window at the collection of warehouses and factories that spilled all the way down to the port. Then he picked up the phone and told Margaret to look for spaces in his schedule in the next week when he might have time to take a quick trip to Raiford.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Father and Son

  JOE COUGHLIN’S SON, Tomas, was almost ten years old and didn’t lie. It was an embarrassing trait he certainly hadn’t inherited from his father. Joe came from a family tree whose branches had bent over the centuries with the weight of troubadours, publicans, writers, revolutionaries, magistrates, and policemen—liars all—and now here was his son getting them both in trouble with Miss Narcisa because she’d asked him what he thought of her hair, and Tomas told her it looked fake.

  Miss Narcisa Rusen was the governess of their house in Ybor. She stocked the icebox, laundered the sheets twice a week, cooked their meals, and looked after Tomas whenever Joe had to go away on business,
which was often. She was fifty, at least, but dyed her hair every few months. Many women her age did, but most made some concession to their actual age. Miss Narcisa, on the other hand, instructed the colorist at Continental Beauty Shop to dye her hair the black of wet road on a moonless night. Which made her chalk-white skin stand out all the more.

  “It looks fake,” Tomas said as they drove to Sacred Heart in downtown Tampa on Sunday morning.

  “But you don’t tell her that.”

  “She asked.”

  “So you tell her what she wants to hear.”

  “But that’s lying.”

  “Well,” Joe tried to keep the frustration from his voice, “it’s a white lie. There’s a difference.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “White lies are harmless and small. Regular lies are big and hurtful.”

  Tomas looked at his father, eyes narrowing.

  Even Joe didn’t understand his own explanation. He tried again. “If you do something bad, and me or one of the nuns or priests or Miss Narcisa asks if you did that thing, then you say yes or otherwise you’re lying and that’s not good.”

  “It’s a sin.”

  “It’s a sin,” Joe agreed, already feeling like his nine-year-old son was setting him up. “But if you tell a woman she looks nice in that dress, even though you don’t think so, or you tell a friend—” Joe snapped his fingers. “What’s the name of that friend of yours wears the huge glasses?”

  “Matthew?”

  “Matthew Rigert, right. So if you tell Matthew he’s an okay ballplayer, that’s being nice, right?”

  “But I wouldn’t tell him that. He can’t hit. He can’t catch. He throws six feet over my head.”

  “But if he asked you if he might get better someday?”

  “I’d say I doubted it.”

  Joe looked over at his son and wondered how it was they were related. “You take after your mother.”

  “You say that a lot lately.”

  “Do I? Well, must be true then.”

  Tomas was dark-haired like his mother but had thin features like his father—thin nose and lips, pronounced jawline and cheekbones. He had his mother’s dark eyes but unfortunately her vision too; he’d worn glasses since he was six. He was, for the most part, a quiet boy, but that quiet masked a passion and flair for the dramatic that Joe attributed to his mother. It also hid a sly sense of humor and appreciation for the absurd that had defined Joe when he was that age.

  Joe turned onto Twiggs, the spire of Sacred Heart coming into view as the traffic slowed to a bumper-to-bumper crawl, the church three blocks away, its parking lots filling and the lines backing out onto the streets. You couldn’t get near the lots on a Sunday unless you arrived half an hour before mass began. And even then you were cutting it close. Joe looked at his watch—forty-five minutes early.

  In the spring of ’43, everyone prayed. The church could hold eight hundred, and every pew would be packed tighter than a roll of nickels. Some mothers prayed for sons overseas. Others for the souls of those recently returned in coffins. Wives and girlfriends did the same. Undrafted men prayed for a second shot with the draft board or, secretly, that their number would never be called. Fathers prayed for their sons to come home or, barring that, that the lad comport himself well on the field of battle; whatever becomes of him, Lord, please don’t let him show cowardice. People of all stripes knelt and prayed that the war stayed There and never reached Here again. Some, sensing End Days, asked God to take note of them, to see them for what they were—members of His team, pious and supplicant.

  Joe craned his head to see how many cars idled between him and the nearest parking lot entrance. The lot just past Morgan Street was still a good twenty cars away. Brake lights flared ahead of him and he came to another lurching stop. The chief of police and his wife passed on the sidewalk chatting with Rance Tuckston, the president of First National Bank. Just behind them was Hayley Gramercy, the owner of the All American food store chain, and his wife, Trudy.

  “Hey,” Tomas said, “there’s Uncle D,” and waved his hand.

  “He can’t see us,” Joe said.

  Dion Bartolo, head of the crime family that bore his name, exited a lot ahead on the right that had a FULL sign propped by the entrance. He was flanked by two of his bodyguards, Mike Aubrey and Geoff the Finn. Dion was a big man and usually a fat one, but his clothes had begun to hang on him lately, and his cheeks had grown long. There were rumors floating through their circles of associates and partners that he was sick. Joe, who knew him better than anyone, knew that wasn’t the case. Not that anybody else needed to know the truth.

  Dion buttoned his suit jacket and indicated his men should do the same, the three of them the picture of brute power as they strode toward the church. Joe had known that kind of power; he’d had bodyguards with him day and night. And he didn’t miss it. Not for an instant. What they didn’t tell you about absolute power was that it was never absolute; the instant you had it, someone had already lined up to try to take it away. Princes could sleep soundly, but never kings. The ear was always tuned for the creak on the floorboard, the whine of a hinge.

  Joe checked the cars ahead of him—ten, maybe nine.

  All the front-pew celebrities were on the streets or milling in front of the church now. The handsome young mayor, Jonathan Belgrave, and his pretty, even younger wife, Vanessa, exchanged pleasantries with Allison Picott and Deborah Minshew, both young wives who had husbands serving overseas. If Allison’s and Deborah’s husbands didn’t make it back, the society scuttlebutt went, they’d survive the blows better than most; both were daughters of two of Tampa’s original families, those with streets and hospital wings named after them. Both husbands, on the other hand, had married up.

  Tomas turned a page of his history book—he was always reading, this kid—and said, “I told you we’d be late.”

  “We’re not late,” Joe said. “We’re still early. Other people are just, you know, early-early.”

  His son gave him a cocked eyebrow.

  Joe watched the traffic light at the next intersection go from red to green. As they sat there, without a single car moving, it turned yellow and then red again. To distract himself he turned on the radio, expecting the war news that was a constant, as if there were no other news, as if people didn’t need weather reports or stock reports anymore. He was unpleasantly surprised, however, with a breathless account of last night’s mass narcotics arrest on the outskirts of Ybor City.

  “Here in the Negro section of the city just south of Eleventh Avenue,” the reporter said in a tone that intimated he was speaking of a neighborhood where only the fearless or foolish dared tread, “police confiscated an estimated fourteen pounds of narcotics and exchanged gunfire with brutal gangsters, both Negroes and Italian nationals. Captain Edson Miller, of the Tampa PD, reports that his men are looking into the background of all arrested Italians to ensure that none were saboteurs sent to these shores by Mussolini himself. Four suspects were killed by police, while a fifth, Walter Grimes, committed suicide in custody. Captain Miller also stated that police had been watching the narcotics warehouse for some months before they swooped in yesterday eve—”

  Joe shut off the radio before he could hear another lie. Wally Grimes had been about as suicidal as the sun, all of the “Italian nationals” had been born here, and the narcotics “warehouse” hadn’t been anything of the sort. It had been a cooking facility and it had gone into operation for the first time Friday night, so it was impossible for anyone to have been watching it for a week, never mind a month.

  Worse than all the lies, however, were the bodies that had been lost, including a master cook and several excellent street soldiers in a time when brave, able-bodied men were increasingly hard to come by.

  “Am I a nigger?” Tomas asked.

  Joe’s head snapped on its neck. “What?”

  Tomas chin-gestured at the radio. “Am I?”

  “Who called you that?”
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  “Martha Comstock. Some kids were calling me a spic, but Martha said, ‘No, he’s a nigger.’”

  “She’s that triple-chinned little troll never shuts the fuck up?”

  A smile found Tomas’s face for a moment. “That’s her.”

  “And she called you that?”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” he said.

  “I know it bothers you. Question is how much.”

  “Well, how nigger am I?”

  “Hey,” Joe said, “you ever heard me use that word?”

  “No.”

  “You know why?”

  “No.”

  “Because I got no problem with it, but your mother hated it.”

  “Well, then, how colored am I?”

  Joe shrugged. “I know some of her ancestors came from the slave class. So the bloodline probably started in Africa, got mixed with Spanish and maybe even a white guy or two in the woodpile.” His father applied the brake as the car ahead of them lurched to a stop. He laid his head back against the seat for a moment. “Something I loved about your mother’s face was that the whole world was in it. I’d look at her sometimes and I’d see some condesa walking through her vineyard in Spain. Other times, I’d see a tribeswoman carrying water from the river. I’d see your ancestors crossing deserts and oceans or walking the streets of the Old City with puffy sleeves and swords in their scabbards.” The car ahead moved and he eased off the brake and popped the gearshift into first and his head came off the seat. He sighed so softly Tomas doubted he heard it himself. “Your mother had a hell of a beautiful face.”

  “And you saw all that in it?”

  “Not every day. Most days I just saw your mom.” He looked over at his son. “But after a few drinks, you never knew.”