Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

“So you get past the Shore Patrol,” Joe said to Manny, “you get into the engine room. Where’s the nearest sleeping berth?”

“One deck up and down the other end,” Manny said.

“So the only personnel near you are the two engineers?”

“Yes.”

“And how do you get them out of there?”

From over by the window, Esteban said, “We have it on good authority that the chief engineer is a drunk. If he even goes to the engine room to double-check our man’s assessment, he won’t stay.”

“What if he does, though?” Dion said.

Esteban shrugged. “They improvise.”

Joe shook his head. “We don’t improvise.”

Manny surprised them all when he reached into his boot and came back with a one-shot derringer with a pearl handle. “I will take care of this man if he does not leave.”

Joe rolled his eyes at Dion, who was closer to Manny.

Dion said, “Give me that,” and snatched the derringer from Manny’s hand.

“You ever shot anybody?” Joe said. “Ever kill a man?”

Manny sat back. “No.”

“Good. Because you’re not starting tonight.”

Dion tossed the gun to Joe. He caught it and held it up before Manny. “I don’t care who you kill,” he said and wondered if that were true, “but if they frisked you, they would have found this. Then they would have taken an extra hard look at your toolbox and found the bomb. Your primary job tonight, Manny? Is to not fuck this up. Think you can handle that?”

“Yes,” Manny said. “Yes.”

“If the chief engineer stays in that room, you repair the engine and walk away.”

Esteban came off the window. “No!”

“Yes,” Joe said. “Yes. This is an act of treason against the United States government. Do you comprehend that? I’m not doing it just so I can get caught and strung up at Leavenworth. If anything goes south, Manny, you walk the fuck back off that boat and we figure out another way. Do not—look at me, Manny—do not improvise. ¿Comprende?”

Manny nodded eventually.

Joe indicated the bomb in the canvas bag at his feet. “This has a short, short fuse.”

“I understand this.” Manny blinked at a drop of sweat that fell from his eyebrow and then wiped the brow with the back of his hand. “I am fully committed to this event.”

Great, Joe thought, he’s overweight and overheated.

“I appreciate that,” Joe said, catching Graciela’s eyes for a moment, seeing the same concern in hers that probably lived in his. “But, Manny? You have to be committed to doing it and getting off that boat alive. I’m not saying this because I’m so swell and I care about you. I’m not and I don’t. But if you’re killed and they identify you as a Cuban national, the plan falls apart right there and then.”

Manny leaned forward, his cigar as thick as a hammer grip between his fingers. “I want freedom for my country and I want Machado dead and the United States to leave my lands. I have remarried, Mr. Coughlin. I have three niños, all under six years old. I have a wife I love, God forgive me, more than my wife who died. I’m old enough that I would rather live as a weak man than die a brave one.”

Joe gave him a grateful smile. “Then you’re the guy I want delivering this bomb.”

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.