Live by Night (32 page)

So he knew what he had to do, but he had yet to give the order.

He went to see her preach. He stopped shaving for a day and dressed the part of a man who sold farming equipment or possibly owned a feed store—clean dungarees, white shirt, string tie, a dark canvas sport coat and a straw cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. He had Sal drive him to the edge of the campgrounds the Reverend Ingalls was using that night, and he made his way down a thin dirt road between a small stand of pines until he reached the back of the crowd.

Along the shore of a pond, someone had built a small stage out of crate board, and Loretta stood on it with her father on the left and the reverend on the right, heads bowed. Loretta was speaking of a recent vision or dream (Joe came too late to hear which). With her back to the dark pond, in her white dress and white bonnet, she stood out against the black night like a midnight moon in a sky swept of stars. A family of three, she said—mother, father, tiny baby—had arrived in a strange land. The father, a businessman sent by his company to this strange land, had been instructed to wait for their driver inside the railway station and not venture outside. But it was hot inside the terminal and they had traveled far and wished to see their new land. They stepped outside and were instantly beset upon by a leopard as black as the inside of a coal bucket. And before the family had so much as its wits about them, the leopard had torn open their throats with its teeth. The man lay dying, watching the leopard slake itself on the blood of his wife, when another man appeared and shot that black leopard dead. This man told the dying businessman that he was the driver who had been hired by the company and all they'd had to do was wait for him.

But they hadn't waited. Why hadn't they waited?

And so it is with Jesus, Loretta said. Can you wait? Can you not give yourselves over to the earthly temptations that will tear your families asunder? Can you find a way to keep your loved ones safe from the beasts of prey until our Lord God and Savior returns?

“Or are you too weak?” Loretta asked.

“No!”

“Because I know that in my darkest hours,
I'm
too weak.”

“No!”

“I am,” Loretta cried. “But he gives me strength.” She pointed at the sky. “He fills my heart. But I need you to help me complete his wishes. I need your strength to continue preaching his word and doing his works and keeping the black leopards from eating our children and staining our hearts with endless sin. Will you help me?”

The crowd said
Yes
and
Amen
and
Oh, yes.
When Loretta closed her eyes and began to sway, the crowd opened its eyes and surged forward. When Loretta sighed, they moaned. When she fell to her knees, they gasped. And when she lay on her side, they exhaled as one. They reached for her without stepping any closer to the stage, as if some invisible barrier lay between them. They reached for something that wasn't Loretta. Cried out to it. Promised all to it.

Loretta was its gateway, the portal by which they entered a world without sin, without dark, without fear. One where you were never alone. Because you had God. And you had Loretta.

T
onight,” Dion said to him on the third-floor gallery of Joe's home. “She's gotta go.”

“You don't think I've thought about it?” Joe said.

“Thinking about it ain't the issue,” Dion said. “Acting on it is, boss.”

Joe pictured the Ritz, light pouring from its windows onto the dark sea, music flowing through its porticos and out across the Gulf as the dice rattled on the tables and the crowds cheered a winner, and he presided over all of it in tux and tails.

He asked himself, as he had so often over the past few weeks, What is one life?

People always died during building construction or laying steel tracks in the sun. They died from electrocution and other industrial accidents every single day, the world over. And for what? For the building of something good, something that would employ their fellow countrymen, put food on the table of the human race.

How would Loretta's death be any different?

“It just would,” he said.

“What?” Dion peered at him.

Joe held up a hand in apology. “I can't do it.”

“I
can,
” Dion said.

Joe said, “If you buy a ticket to the dance, then you know the consequences or you damn well should. But these people who sleep while the rest of us stay up? Work their jobs, mow their lawns? They didn't buy a ticket. Which means they don't suffer the same penalties for their mistakes.”

Dion sighed. “She's jeopardizing the entire fucking deal.”

“I know that.” Joe was thankful for the sunset, for the darkness that had found them on the gallery. If Dion could see his eyes clearly, he'd know how shaky Joe was with the decision, how close he was to crossing the line and never looking back. Christ, she was
one
woman. “But my mind's made up. No one touches a hair on her head.”

“You'll regret this,” Dion said.

Joe said, “No shit.”

A week later, when John Ringling's minions asked for a meeting, Joe knew it was over. If not completely, certainly tabled for a while. The entire country was going wet again, wet with abandon, wet with fervor and joy, but Tampa, under Loretta Figgis's influence, was swinging the other way. If they couldn't trump her when it came to the acceptance of booze, which was a signature away from being legalized, they were sunk when it came to gambling. John Ringling's men told Joe and Esteban that their boss had decided to hold on to the Ritz a little longer, wait out the dip in the economy, and revisit his options at a later time.

The meeting was held in Sarasota. When Joe and Esteban left, they drove over to Longboat Key and stood looking at the gleaming Mediterranean Almost Was on the Gulf of Mexico.

“It would have been a great casino,” Joe said.

“You'll have another chance. Things swing back around.”

Joe shook his head. “Not all things.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Quench Not the Spirit

T
he last time Loretta Figgis and Joe saw each other alive was early in 1933. It had rained heavily for a week. That morning, the first cloudless day in some time, the ground fog rose so thick off the streets of Ybor it was as if the earth had turned itself upside down. Joe walked the boardwalk along Palm Avenue, distracted, Sal Urso pacing him from the opposite boardwalk, and Lefty Downer pacing both of them in a car inching along the center. Joe had just confirmed a rumor that Maso was considering another trip down here, his second in a year, and the fact that Maso hadn't told him himself didn't sit right. On top of that, stories in this morning's papers said that President-elect Roosevelt planned to sign the Cullen-Harrison Act as soon as someone put a pen in his hand, effectively ending Prohibition. Joe had known it could never last, but he still hadn't been prepared somehow. And if he was unprepared, he could only imagine how poorly all the mugs in the bootleg boomtowns like KC, Cincy, Chicago, New York, and Detroit were going to take the news. He'd sat on his bed this morning and tried to read the article so he could identify the exact week or month Roosevelt was going to wield that most popular of pens, but he was distracted because Graciela was puking up last night's paella to beat the band. Normally, she had a cast-iron stomach, but lately the stress of running three shelters and eight different fund-raising groups was shredding her digestive system.

“Joseph.” She stood in the doorway and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “We may need to face something.”

“What's that, doll?”

“I think I'm with child.”

For a few moments Joe thought she'd smuggled one of the street urchins back from the shelter with her. He actually glanced past her left hip before it dawned on him.

“You're . . . ?”

She smiled. “Pregnant.”

He got off the bed and stood before her and wasn't sure if he should touch her because he was afraid she'd break.

She put her arms around his neck. “It's okay. You're going to be a father.” She kissed him, her hands finding the back of his head where his scalp tingled. Actually everything tingled, as if he'd woken to find himself encased in fresh skin.

“Say something.” She looked at him, curious.

“Thanks,” he said because nothing else occurred to him.

“Thanks?” She laughed and kissed him again, mashing his lips with her own. “Thanks?”

“You're going to be an amazing mother.”

She pressed her forehead to his. “And you'll be a great father.”

If I live, he thought.

And knew she was thinking it too.

S
o he was a little off his feed that morning when he entered Nino's Coffee Shop without looking through the windows first.

There were only three tables in the coffee shop, a crime for a place that served coffee this good, and two of them were occupied by Klan. Not that an outsider would have recognized them as such, but Joe had no trouble seeing hoods even if they weren't wearing them—Clement Dover and Drew Altman and Brewster Engals, at one table, the older, smart guard; at the other, Julius Stanton, Haley Lewis, Carl Joe Crewson, and Charlie Bailey, morons all, more likely to set themselves on fire than any cross they were trying to burn. But, like a lot of dumb people who didn't have the sense to know how dumb they were, mean and merciless.

As soon as he stepped over the threshold, Joe knew it wasn't an ambush. He could see in their eyes that they hadn't expected to see him. They'd just come here for the coffee, maybe to intimidate the owners into paying some protection. Sal was right outside, but that wasn't the same thing as inside. Joe pushed his suit jacket back and left his hand there, one inch from his gun as he looked at Engals, the leader of this particular pack, a fireman with Engine 9 at Lutz Junction.

Engals nodded, a small smile growing on his lips, and he flicked his eyes at something behind Joe, at the third table by the window. Joe glanced over, saw Loretta Figgis sitting there, watching the whole thing happen. Joe removed his hand from his hip, let his suit jacket fall free. No one was getting into a gun battle with the Madonna of Tampa Bay sitting five feet away.

Joe nodded back and Engals said, “Another time then.”

Joe tipped his hat and turned to exit when Loretta said, “Mr. Coughlin, sit. Please.”

Joe said, “No, no, Miss Loretta. You look like you're having a peaceful morning without me disrupting it.”

“I insist,” she said as Carmen Arenas, the owner's wife, came to the table.

Joe shrugged and removed his hat. “The usual, Carmen.”

“Yes, Mr. Coughlin. Miss Figgis?”

“I will have another, yes.”

Joe sat and placed his hat on his knee.

“Do those gentlemen not like you?” Loretta asked.

Joe noticed she wasn't wearing white today. Her dress was more a light peach. In most people, you wouldn't notice, but pure white had become so identified with Loretta Figgis that seeing her in anything else was a bit like seeing her naked.

“They aren't going to invite me for Sunday dinner anytime soon,” Joe told her.

“Why?” She leaned into the table as Carmen brought their coffees.

“I lie down with mud people, work with mud people, fraternize with mud people.” He looked over his shoulder. “I leave anything out, Engals?”

“ 'Sides you killed four of our number?”

Joe nodded his thanks and turned back to Loretta. “Oh, and they think I killed four friends of theirs.”

“Did you?”

“You're not wearing white,” he said.

“It's almost white,” she said.

“How will that go over with your”—he searched for the word but couldn't come up with anything better than—“followers?”

“I don't know, Mr. Coughlin,” she said, and there was no false brightness in her voice, no desperate serenity in her eyes.

The Klavern boys got up from their tables and filed past, each of them managing either to bump Joe's chair or hit his foot with his own.

“Be seeing
you,
” Dover said to him and then tipped his hat to Loretta. “Ma'am.”

They filed out and then it was just Joe and Loretta and the sound of last night's rain ticking off the balcony gutter and down onto the boardwalk. Joe studied Loretta as he sipped his coffee. She'd lost the sharp light that had lived in her eyes since the day she walked back out of her father's house two years ago, having traded the black mourning dress of her death for the white dress of her rebirth.

“Why does my father hate you so much?”

“I'm a criminal. He used to be chief of police.”

“But he liked you then. He even pointed you out to me once when I was still in high school and said, ‘That's the mayor of Ybor. He keeps the peace.' ”

“He said that, huh?”

“He did.”

Joe drank some more coffee. “Those were more innocent days, I guess.”

She sipped her own coffee. “So what did you do to deserve his rancor?”

Joe shook his head.

Now it was her turn to study him for a long, uncomfortable minute. He held her eyes as she searched his. Searched until the realization dawned.

“You were how he knew where to find me.”

Joe said nothing, his jaw clenching and unclenching.

“It was you.” She nodded and looked down at the table. “What did you have?”

She stared at him for another uncomfortable period of time before he answered.

“Photographs.”

“And you showed them to him.”

“I showed him two.”

“How many did you have?”

“Dozens.”

She looked down at the table again, turned her cup on its saucer. “We're all going to hell.”

“I don't think so.”

“No?” She twirled the coffee cup again. “Do you know what truth I've learned these last two years of preaching and fainting and thrusting my soul out to God?”

He shook his head.

“That
this
is heaven.” She indicated the street, the roof above their heads. “We're in it now.”

“How come it feels so much like hell?”

“Because we fucked it all up.” Her sweet and serene smile returned. “This is paradise. And it's lost.”

Joe was surprised by the depths of his own mourning for her loss of belief. For reasons he couldn't explain, he had hoped that if anyone did have a direct line to the Almighty, it was Loretta.

“When you started,” he asked her, “you
did
believe, though, didn't you?”

She stared back at him with clear eyes. “With such a certainty, it just had to be divinely inspired. It felt like my blood had been replaced with fire. Not burning fire, just a constant warmth that never ebbed. I'd felt that way as a child, I think. I felt safe and loved and
so sure
this is how life would always be. I would always have my daddy and my mommy and the world would look just like Tampa and everyone would know my name and wish good things for me. But I grew up, and I went west. And when all those beliefs turned out to be lies? When I realized I wasn't special, I wasn't safe?” She turned her arms to show him the track marks. “I took the news poorly.”

“But after you came back here, after your . . .”

“Trials?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I came back and my father chased my mother from the house and beat the devil from me and taught me to pray again on my knees and without wishing for personal gain. To pray as a supplicant. To pray as a sinner. And the flame returned. On my knees, by the bed I'd slept in as a child. I'd been on my knees all day. I'd been awake most of the week. And the flame found my blood, found my heart, and I felt
certain
again. Do you know how much I'd missed it? I'd missed it more than any drug, any love, any food, maybe more even than the God who supposedly bequeathed it to me. Certainty, Mr. Coughlin. Certainty. It's the most gorgeous lie of them all.”

Neither said anything for a bit, long enough for Carmen to return with fresh cups of coffee to replace the ones they'd emptied.

“My mother passed away last week. Did you know that?”

“I hadn't heard, Loretta, I'm sorry.”

She waved off his apology and drank some coffee. “My father's beliefs and my beliefs drove her from our home. She would say at him, ‘You don't love God. You love the idea of being special to him. You want to believe he sees you.' When I learned of her passing, I understood what she meant. I took no comfort in God. I don't
know
God. I just wanted my mommy back.” She nodded several times to herself.

A couple walked into the shop, the bell tinkling over the door as Carmen came out from behind the counter to seat them.

“I don't know if there's a God.” She fingered her coffee cup handle. “I certainly hope there is. And I hope he is kind. Wouldn't that be swell, Mr. Coughlin?”

“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.”