Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

“Sounds good,” Joe said, wondering when he’d get around to naming his price.

Chief Figgis saw the question in Joe’s eyes and his own darkened slightly. “I don’t take bribes. If I did, three of those seven dead I mentioned would still be among the living.” He came around to sit on the edge of the desk, spoke in a very low voice. “I have no illusions, young Mr. Coughlin, on how business is transacted in this town. If you were to ask me in private how I feel about Volstead, you’d see me do a pretty fair imitation of a kettle come to boil. I know plenty of my officers take money to look the other way. I know I serve a city swimming in corruption. I know we live in a fallen world. But just because I breathe corrupt air and rub elbows with corrupt people, never make the mistake of believing I am corruptible.”

Joe searched the man’s face for signs of puffery, pride, or self-aggrandizement—the usual weaknesses he’d come to associate with “self-made” men.

Nothing stared back at him but quiet fortitude.

Chief Figgis, he decided, was never to be underestimated.

“I won’t make that mistake,” Joe said.

Chief Figgis held out his hand and Joe shook it.

“I thank you for coming by. Careful in the sun.” A flash of humor passed through Figgis’s face. “That skin of yours could catch fire, I suspect.”

“A pleasure meeting you, Chief.”

Joe went to the door. Dion opened it, and a teenage girl, all breathless energy, stood on the other side. It was the daughter in all the photographs, beautiful and apple-haired, rose gold skin so unblemished it achieved a soft-sun radiance. Joe guessed she was seventeen. Her beauty found his throat, stopped it for a moment, put a catch in the words about to leave his mouth, so all he could manage was a hesitant, “Miss…” Yet it wasn’t a beauty that evoked anything carnal in him. It was somehow purer than that. The beauty of Chief Irving Figgis’s daughter wasn’t something you wanted to despoil, it was something you wanted to beatify.

“Father,” she said, “I apologize. I thought you were alone.”

“That’s all right, Loretta. These gentlemen were leaving. Your manners,” he said.

“Yes, Father, I’m sorry.” She turned and gave Joe and Dion a small curtsy. “Miss Loretta Figgis, gentlemen.”

“Joe Coughlin, Miss Loretta. Pleased to meet you.”

When Joe lightly shook her hand, he felt the strangest urge to genuflect. It stayed with him all afternoon, how pristine she was, how delicate, and how hard it must be to parent something so fragile.

Later that evening, they ate dinner at Vedado Tropicale at a table off to the right of the stage, which gave them a perfect view of the dancers and the band. It was early so the band—a drummer, piano player, trumpeter, and slide trombonist—kept it peppy but didn’t go full bore yet. The dancers wore little more than shifts, pale as ice, the color matching their headgear, which varied. A couple of them wore sequined bandeaux with aigrettes arching out from the center of their foreheads. Others wore silver hairnets with frosted bead rosettes and fringe. They danced with one hand on their hips and one raised to the air or pointing out at the audience. They gave the dinner crowd just enough flesh and gyrations not to offend the missus but to guarantee the mister would return at a later hour.

Joe asked Dion if their dinner was the best in the city.

Dion smiled around a forkful of lechon asado and fried yucca. “In the country.”

Joe smiled. “It’s not bad, I gotta say.” Joe had ordered ropa vieja with black beans and yellow rice. He wiped the plate clean and wished the plate was bigger.

The maître d’ came over and informed them that their coffee was waiting with their hosts. Joe and Dion followed the man across the white tile floor, past the stage, and through a dark velvet curtain. They went down a corridor the cherry oak of rum casks, and Joe wondered if they’d brought a few hundred of them across the Gulf just to make this hallway. They would have had to bring more than a few hundred, actually, because the office was constructed of the same wood.

It was cool in there. The floor was dark stone, and iron ceiling fans hung from the crossbeams, clacking and creaking. The slats of the honey-colored plantation shutters were open to the evening and the infinite hum of dragonflies.

Esteban Suarez was a slim man with unblemished skin the color of weak tea. His eyes were the pale yellow of a cat’s and his hair, slicked back off his forehead, was the color of the dark rum in the bottle on his coffee table. He wore a dinner jacket and black silk bow tie and he came to them with a bright smile and a vigorous handshake. He led them to high wingback armchairs that had been arranged around a copper coffee table. On the table were four tiny cups of Cuban coffee, four water glasses, and the bottle of Suarez Reserve Rum in a weave basket.

Esteban’s sister, Ivelia, rose from her seat and extended her hand. Joe bowed, took her hand, and brushed it lightly with his lips. Her skin smelled of ginger and sawdust. She was much older than her brother, with tight skin over a long jaw and sharp cheekbones and brow. Her thick eyebrows rolled together like a silkworm and her wide eyes seemed trapped in her skull, bulging to escape but helpless to do so.

“How were your meals?” Esteban asked when they sat.

“Excellent,” Joe said. “Thank you.”

Esteban poured them glasses of rum and raised his in toast. “To a fruitful relationship.”

They drank. Joe was stunned by how smooth and rich it was. This is what liquor tasted like when you had more than an hour to distill it, more than a week to ferment it. Christ.

“This is exceptional.”

“It’s the fifteen-year,” Esteban said. “I never agreed with the Spanish mandate from the old days that lighter rum was superior.” He shook his head at the notion and crossed his legs at the ankles. “Of course, we Cubans went along because of our belief that lighter is better in all things—hair, skin, eyes.”

The Suarezes were light-skinned themselves, descended from the Spanish strain, not the African.

“Yes,” Esteban said, reading Joe’s thought. “My sister and I aren’t of the lesser classes. That doesn’t mean we agree with the social order of our island.”

He took another sip of rum and Joe did the same.

Dion said, “Be nice if we could sell this up north.”

Ivelia laughed. It was very sharp and very short. “Someday. When your government treats you like adults again.”