“How are you, my son?”
“I’m very good, Mr. Pescatore. Thanks for asking.”
“Fausto, see if his men need anything.”
“Take their rods, Mr. Pescatore?”
Maso frowned. “Of course not. You gentlemen make yourselves comfortable. We shouldn’t be too long.” Maso pointed at Fausto. “Anyone wants a sandwich or something, you call room service. Anything these boys want.”
He led Joe into the suite and closed the doors behind them. One set of windows looked out on an alley and the yellow brick building next door, a piano manufacturer who’d gone belly-up in ’29. All that remained was his name, HORACE R. PORTER, fading on the brick, and a bunch of boarded-up windows. The other windows, though, looked out on nothing that would remind guests of the Depression. They overlooked Ybor and the channels that led out to Hillsborough Bay.
In the center of the living area four armchairs were arranged around an oak coffee table. A sterling silver coffeepot and matching creamer and sugar bowl sat in the center. So did a bottle of anisette and three small glasses of it, already poured. Maso’s middle son, Santo, sat waiting for them, looking up at Joe as he poured himself a cup of coffee and placed the cup down beside an orange.
Santo Pescatore was thirty-one and everyone called him Digger, though no one could remember why, not even Santo himself.
“You remember Joe, Santo.”
“I dunno. Maybe.” He half rose from his chair and gave Joe a limp, damp handshake. “Call me Digger.”
“Good to see you again.” Joe took a seat across from him, and Maso came around, took the seat beside his son.
Digger peeled the orange, tossing the peels onto the coffee table. He wore a permanent scowl of confused suspicion on his long face, like he’d just heard a joke he didn’t get. He had curly dark hair that was thinning up front, a fleshy chin and neck, and his father’s eyes, dark and small as sharpened pencil points. There was something dulled about him, though. He didn’t have his father’s charm or cunning because he’d never needed to.
Maso poured Joe a cup of coffee and handed it across the table. “How’ve you been?”
“Very good, sir. You?”
Maso tipped a hand back and forth. “Good days and bad.”
“I hope more good than bad.”
Maso raised a glass of the anisette to that. “So far, so far. Salud.”
Joe raised a glass. “Salud.”
Maso and Joe drank. Digger popped an orange slice in his mouth and chewed with his mouth open.
Joe was reminded, not for the first time, that for such a violent business, it was filled with a surprising number of regular guys—men who loved their wives, who took their children on Saturday-afternoon outings, men who worked on their automobiles and told jokes at the neighborhood lunch counter and worried what their mothers thought of them and went to church to ask God’s forgiveness for all the terrible things they had to render unto Caesar in order to put food on the table.
But it was also a business that was populated by an equal number of pigs. Vicious oafs whose primary talent was that they felt no more for their fellow man than they did for a fly sputtering on the windowsill at summer’s end.
Digger Pescatore was one of the latter. And like so many of the breed Joe had come across, he was the son of a founding father of this thing they all found themselves entwined with, grafted to, subjects of.
Over the years Joe had met all three of Maso’s sons. He’d met Tim Hickey’s only boy, Buddy. He’d met the sons of Cianci in Miami, Barrone in Chicago, and DiGiacomo in New Orleans. The fathers were fearsomely self-made creatures, one and all. Men of iron will and some vision and not even a passing acquaintance with sympathy. But men, unquestionably men.
And every one of their sons, Joe thought as the sound of Digger’s chewing filled the room, was a fucking embarrassment to the human race.
As Digger ate his orange and then a second one, Maso and Joe discussed Maso’s trip down, the heat, Graciela, and the baby on the way.
After those topics had been exhausted, Maso produced a newspaper that had been tucked into the seat beside him. He took the bottle around the table and sat beside Joe. He poured two more drinks and opened the Tampa Tribune. Loretta Figgis’s face stared back at them under the headline:
He said to Joe, “This the filly who caused us all the trouble on the casino?”
“That’s her.”
“Why didn’t you clip her then?”
“Would’ve been too much blowback. The whole state was watching.”
Maso tore an orange slice free of the peel. “That’s true but that’s not why.”
“No?”
Maso shook his head. “Why didn’t you kill the ’shiner like I told you back in ’32?”
“Turner John?”
Maso nodded.
“Because we came to an accommodation.”
Maso shook his head. “You weren’t ordered to accommodate. You were ordered to kill the son of a bitch. And the reason you didn’t was the same reason you didn’t kill this puttana pazzo—because you’re not a killer, Joseph. Which is a problem.”
“It is? Since when?”
“Since now. You’re not a gangster.”
“Trying to hurt my feelings, Maso?”
“You’re an outlaw, a bandit in a suit. And now I hear you’re thinking of going legitimate?”
“Thinking about it.”
“So you won’t mind if I replace you down here?”
Joe smiled for some reason. Chuckled. He found his cigarettes and lit one.
“When I got here, Maso? This outfit grossed a million a year.”
“I know.”
“Since I got here? We’ve averaged almost eleven million.”
“Mostly because of the rum, though. Those days are ending. You’ve neglected the girls and the narcotics.”
“Bullshit,” Joe said.
“Excuse me?”
“I concentrated on the rum because, yeah, it was most profitable. But our narcotic sales are up sixty-five percent. As for the girls, we added four houses in my time here.”
“But you could have added more. And the whores claim they’re rarely beaten.”
Joe found himself looking down at the table into Loretta’s face, then looking up, then looking back down again. It was his turn to exhale a loud breath. “Maso, I—”
“Mr. Pescatore,” Maso said.
Joe said nothing.
“Joseph,” Maso said, “our friend Charlie wants to make some changes to the way we run our thing.”
“Our friend Charlie” was Lucky Luciano out of New York. King, essentially. Emperor for Life.
“What changes?”
“Considering Lucky’s right hand is a kike, the changes are a bit ironic, even unfair. I won’t lie to you.”
Joe gave Maso a tight smile and waited for the old man to get to it.
“Charlie wants Italians, and only Italians, in the top slots.”
Maso wasn’t kidding—it was the height of irony. Everyone knew that no matter how smart Lucky was—and he was smart as hell—he was nothing without Meyer Lansky. Lansky, a Jew from the Lower East Side, had done more than anyone in this thing of theirs to turn a collection of mom-and-pop shops into a corporation.
The thing was, though, Joe had no desire to reach the top. He was happy with his small local operation.
He said as much now to Maso.
“You’re far too modest,” Maso said.
“I’m not. I run Ybor. And the rum, yeah, but that’s over, like you said.”
“You run a lot more than Ybor and a lot more than Tampa, Joseph. Everyone knows that. You run the Gulf Coast from here to Biloxi. You run the out routes from here to Jacksonville and half the ones that head north. I’ve been through the books. You’ve made us a force down here.”