Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

“It would,” Joe said.

“I don’t believe he casts people into eternal flame for fornication, as you pointed out. Or for believing in a version of him that is a little off the mark. I believe—or, I want to believe—he considers the worst sins to be those we commit in his name.”

He looked at her very carefully. “Or those we commit against ourselves in despair.”

“Oh,” she said brightly, “I’m not in despair. Are you?”

He shook his head. “Not even close.”

“What’s your secret?”

He chuckled. “This is a little intimate for coffee shop chat.”

“I want to know. You seem…” She looked around the café, and for a fleeting moment a wild abandonment slid through her eyes. “You seem whole.”

He smiled and shook his head repeatedly.

“You do,” she said.

“No.”

“You do. What’s the secret?”

He fingered his saucer for a moment, said nothing.

“Come now, Mr. Cough—”

“Her.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Her,” Joe said. “Graciela. My wife.” He looked across the table at her. “I hope there’s a God too. I so deeply hope that. But if there isn’t? Then Graciela is enough.”

“But what if you lose her?”

“I don’t intend to lose her.”

“But what if you do?” She leaned into the table.

“Then I would be all head, no heart.”

They sat in silence. Carmen came over and warmed their cups and Joe added a bit more sugar to his and looked at Loretta and felt the most powerful and inexplicable urge to hug her to him and tell her it would be okay.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked.

“How do you mean?”

“You’re a pillar of this city. Hell, you came up against me at the height of my power and you won. The Klan couldn’t do that. The law couldn’t. But you did.”

“I didn’t get rid of alcohol.”

“But you killed gambling. And until you came along? It was a lock.”

She smiled, then covered the smile with her hands. “I did do that, didn’t I?”

Joe smiled with her. “Yes, you did. You’ve got thousands of people who will follow you right off a cliff, Loretta.”

She laughed a wet laugh and looked up at the tin ceiling. “I don’t want anyone to follow me anywhere.”

“Have you told them that?”

“He doesn’t listen.”

“Irv?”

She nodded.

“Give him time.”

“He used to love my mother so much I remember him trembling sometimes when he got too close to her. Because he wanted to touch her so badly? But he couldn’t because we children were around and it wasn’t proper. Now she’s died, and he didn’t even go to her funeral. Because the God he imagines would have disapproved. The God he imagines doesn’t share. My father sits in his chair every night, reading his Bible, blind with rage because men were allowed to touch his daughter the way he used to touch his wife. And worse.” She leaned into the table and rubbed at a stray grain of sugar with her index finger. “He walks around the house in the dark whispering one word over and over.”

“What word?”

“Repent.” She looked up at him. “Repent, repent, repent.”

“Give him time,” Joe said again, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Within a few weeks, Loretta went back to wearing white. Her preaching continued to pack them in. She’d added a few new wrinkles, though—tricks, some people scoffed—speaking in tongues, frothing at the mouth. And she spoke with twice the thunder and twice the volume.

Joe saw a picture of her in the paper one morning, preaching to a gathering of the General Council of the Assemblies of God in Lee County, and he didn’t recognize her at first, even though she looked exactly the same.

President Roosevelt signed the Cullen-Harrison Act on the morning of March 23, 1933, legalizing the manufacture and sale of beer and wine with an alcohol content no greater than 3.2 percent. By the end of the year, FDR promised, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution would be a memory.

Joe met with Esteban at the Tropicale. Joe was uncharacteristically late, something that had been happening a lot lately because his father’s watch had started to run behind. Last week it consistently lost five minutes a day. Now it was averaging ten, sometimes fifteen. Joe kept meaning to get it fixed, but that would mean releasing it from his possession for however long the repair took and, even though he knew it was an irrational reaction, he couldn’t bear the thought of that.

When Joe entered the back office, Esteban was framing yet another photograph he’d taken on his last trip to Havana, this one of the opening night of Zoot, his new club in the Old City. He showed the photo to Joe—pretty much like all the others, drunk, well-dressed swells and their well-dressed wives or girlfriends or escorts, a dancing girl or two over by the band, everyone glassy-eyed and joyous. Joe barely glanced at it before giving the requisite whistle of appreciation and Esteban turned it facedown on the mat that awaited it on the glass. He poured them drinks and set them on the desk amid the frame pieces and set to work joining the pieces, the smell of the glue so strong it even overpowered the smell of tobacco in his study, something Joe would have assumed impossible.

“Smile,” he said at one point and raised his glass. “We are about to become extremely wealthy men.”

Joe said, “If Pescatore lets me go.”

“If he is reluctant,” Esteban said, “we will let him buy his way into a legitimate business.”

“He’ll never come back out again.”

“He’s old.”

“He has partners. Hell, he has sons.”

“I know all about his sons—one’s a pederast, one’s an opium addict, and one beats his wife and all his girlfriends because he secretly likes men.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think blackmail works on Maso. And his train gets in tomorrow.”

“That soon?”

“From what I hear.”

“Eh. I’ve been in business with his kind all my life. We’ll manage him.” Esteban raised his glass again. “You’re worth it.”

“Thank you,” Joe said, and this time he drank.

Esteban went back to work on the frame. “So smile.”