Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

“Listen to you.” Joe whistled. “Speaking the language like the king of Spain.”

“You have to around here,” Dion said. “Italian too. You better brush up.”

“You speak Italian, my brother did, but I never picked it up.”

“Well, I hope you’re still as quick a learner as you used to be. Reason we get to do our business here in Ybor is because the rest of the city just leaves us alone. Far as they’re concerned, we’re just dirty spics and dirty wops and as long as we don’t make too much noise or the cigar workers don’t go on strike again, make the owners call in the cops and the head breakers, then we’re left to do what we do.” He turned onto Seventh Avenue, apparently a main drag, people bustling along the clapboard sidewalks under two-story buildings with wide balconies and wrought iron trellises and brick or stucco facades that reminded Joe of the lost weekend he’d had in New Orleans a couple years ago. Tracks ran down the center of the avenue and Joe saw a trolley coming their way from several blocks off, its nose disappearing, then reappearing behind waves of heat.

“You’d think we’d all get along,” Dion said, “but it doesn’t always work out that way. The Italians and the Cubans keep to themselves. But the black Cubans hate the white Cubans, and the white Cubans look at the nigger Cubans like they’re niggers, and they both high-hat everyone else. All Cubans hate the Spaniards. Spaniards think the Cubans are uppity coons who forgot their place since the US of A freed them back in ’98. Then the Cubans and the Spanish look down on the Puerto Ricans, and everyone shits on the Dominicans. The Italians only respect you if you came off the boat from the Boot, and the Americanos actually think someone gives a shit what they think sometimes.”

“Did you actually call us Americanos?”

“I’m Italian,” Dion said, turning left and running them down another wide avenue, although this one wasn’t paved. “And around here? Proud of it.”

Joe saw the blue of the Gulf and the ships in port and the high cranes. He could smell salt, oil slicks, low tide.

“Port of Tampa,” Dion said with a flourish of his hand as he drove them along redbrick streets where men crossed their path in forklifts that burped diesel smoke and the cranes swung two-ton pallets high over their heads, the shadows of the netting crisscrossing the windshield. A steam whistle blew.

Dion pulled over by a cargo pit and they got out, watched the men below take apart a bale of burlap sacks stamped ESCUINTIA, GUATEMALA. From the smell, Joe could tell some of the sacks held coffee and others chocolate. The half-dozen men off-loaded them in no time, and the crane swung the netting and the empty pallet back up, and the men in the hold disappeared through a doorway down there.

Dion led Joe to the ladder and descended.

“Where we going?”

“You’ll see.”

At the bottom of the hold, the men had closed the door behind them. He and Dion stood on a dirt floor that smelled of everything ever off-loaded in the Tampa sun—bananas and pineapple and grain. Oil and potatoes and gas and vinegar. Gunpowder. Spoiled fruit and fresh coffee, the grounds crunching underfoot. Dion placed the flat of his hand to the cement wall opposite the ladder and moved his hand to the right and the wall went with it—just popped up and out of a seam Joe couldn’t see from two feet away. Dion revealed a door and rapped on it twice, then waited, his lips moving as he counted. Then he rapped it another four times and a voice on the other side said, “Who’s it?”

“Fireplace,” Dion said, and the door opened.

A corridor faced them, as thin as the man on the other side of the door, who was dressed in a shirt that might have been white before the sweat tanned it for the ages. His trousers were a brown denim, and he wore a kerchief around his neck and a cowboy hat. A six-gun stuck out of the waistband of his denim trousers. The cowboy nodded at Dion and allowed them to pass before he pushed the wall back into place.

The corridor was so narrow Dion’s shoulders brushed along the walls as he walked ahead of Joe. Dim lights hung from a pipe above them, one bare bulb for every twenty feet or so, half of them out. Joe was pretty sure he could make out a door down the far end of the corridor. He guessed it was about five hundred yards away, which meant he could easily be imagining it. They slogged through mud, water dripping from the ceiling and puddling the floor, and Dion explained that the tunnels commonly flooded; every now and then they’d find a dead drunk in the morning, the last of the stragglers from the night before who’d decided to take an ill-advised nap.

“Seriously?” Joe asked.

“Yeah. Know what makes it worse? Sometimes the rats get to them.”

Joe looked all around himself. “That’s just about the nastiest fucking thing I’ve heard all month.”

Dion shrugged and kept walking and Joe looked up and down the walls and then at the pathway ahead. No rats. Yet.

“The money from the Pittsfield bank,” Dion said as they walked.

Joe said, “It’s safe.” Above him, he could hear the clack of trolley wheels followed by the slow heavy clop of what he assumed was a horse.

“Safe where?” Dion looked back over his shoulder at him.

Joe said, “How’d they know?”

Above them several horns beeped and an engine revved.

“Know what?” Dion said, and Joe noticed he’d grown closer to bald, his dark hair still thick and oily on the sides but ropey and hesitant up top.

“Where to ambush us.”

Dion looked back at him again. “They just did.”

“There’s no way they ‘just did.’ We scouted that location for weeks. The cops never came out that way because they had no reason to—nothing to protect and no one to serve.”

Dion nodded his big head. “Well, they didn’t hear anything from me.”

“Me, either,” Joe said.

Near the end of the tunnel now, the door revealed itself to be brushed steel with an iron dead bolt. The street sounds had given way to the distant clank of silverware and plates being stacked and waiters’ footsteps rushing back and forth. Joe pulled his father’s watch from his pocket and clicked it open: noon.

Dion produced a sizable key ring from somewhere in his wide trousers. He opened the locks on the door, threw back the bars, and unlocked the bolt. He removed the key from the ring and handed it to Joe. “Take it. You’ll use it, believe me.”

Joe pocketed the key.