Albert raised it to his shoulder as he crossed to Joe. He appraised Joe’s three-piece suit.
“Anderson and Sheppard?” he asked.
Joe said, “H. Huntsman.”
Albert nodded. He opened the left side of his own jacket so Joe could admire the label—Kresge’s. “My fortunes have changed a bit since the last time I was here.”
Joe said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“I’m back in Boston. I was close to getting a tin cup, you know? Selling fucking pencils, Joe. But then I run into Beppe Nunnaro in this little basement place in the North End. Beppe and I used to be friends. A long time ago, before all this unfortunate series of misunderstandings with Mr. Pescatore. And Beppe and me, Joe, we got to talking. Your name didn’t come up immediately but Dion’s did. See, Beppe used to be a newsie with Dion and Dion’s dumb brother, Paolo. Did you know that?”
Joe nodded.
“So you can probably see where this is going. Beppe said he’d known Paolo most of his life and had a hard time believing Paolo would double-cross anyone, never mind his own brother and a police captain’s son, on a bank job.” Albert slung his arm around Joe’s neck. “To which I said, ‘Paolo didn’t double-cross anyone. Dion did. I know because I’m the guy he ratted to.’ ” Albert walked toward the window that faced the alley and Horace Porter’s defunct piano warehouse. Joe had no choice but to walk with him. “At this point, Beppe thought it might be a good idea if I talked to Mr. Pescatore.” They stopped at the window. “Which leads us to now. Raise your hands.”
Joe did and Albert frisked him as Maso and Digger wandered over and stood by the windows. He removed the Savage .32 from behind Joe’s back and the derringer single-shot above his right ankle and the switchblade in his left shoe.
“Anything else?” Albert said.
“Usually that suffices,” Joe said.
“Cracking wise to the end.” Albert put his arm around Joe’s shoulders.
Maso said, “The thing about Mr. White, Joe, that you should probably have grasped—”
“And what’s that, Maso?”
“It’s that he knows Tampa.” Maso raised a thick eyebrow at Joe.
“Which makes you a lot less ‘needed,’ ” Digger said. “Dumb fuck.”
“The language,” Maso said. “Is that really necessary?”
They all turned back to the window, like kids waiting for the curtain to part at a puppet show.
Albert raised the tommy gun in front of their faces. “Nice piece. I understand you know the owner.”
“I do.” Joe heard the sadness in his own voice. “I do.”
They stood facing the window for about a minute before Joe heard the scream and the shadow plummeted down the yellow brick wall across from him. Sal’s face flew past the window, his arms flapping wildly at the air. And then he stopped falling. His head snapped up straight and his feet jerked up toward his chin as the noose snapped his neck. The body swung into the building twice and then twirled on the rope. The idea, Joe assumed, had been for Sal to end up hanging directly in front of their eyes, but someone had misjudged the length of rope or maybe the effect of a man’s weight at the end of it. So they stood looking down at the top of his head as his body hung between the tenth and ninth floors.
They’d cut Lefty’s rope correctly, however. He arrived without a scream, his hands free and clasped to the noose. He looked resigned, as if someone had just told him a secret he’d never wanted to hear but had always expected to. Because he’d relieved the weight of the rope with his hands, his neck didn’t break. He arrived in front of their faces like something conjured by magicians. He bounced up and down a few times and then dangled. He kicked at the windows. His movements were not desperate or frantic. They were strangely precise and athletic and the look on his face never changed, even when he saw them watching. He tugged at the rope even as the tracheal cartilage pressed over the edges of it and his tongue flopped over his lower lip.
Joe watched it ebb out of him, slowly, and then all at once. The light left Lefty like a hesitant bird. But once it left, it flew high and fast. The only solace Joe took from it was that Lefty’s eyes, at the very end, fluttered to a close.
He looked at Lefty’s sleeping face and the top of Sal’s head and begged their forgiveness.
I will see you both soon. I will see my father soon. I will see Paolo Bartolo. I will see my mother.
And then:
I am not brave enough for this. I am not.
And then:
Please. God. Please, God. I do not want to meet the dark. I will do anything. I beg your mercy. I cannot die today. I’m not supposed to die today. I’m to be a father soon. She’s to be a mother. We will be good parents. We will raise a fine child.
I am not ready.
He could hear his own breathing as they walked him to the windows that looked down on Eighth Avenue and the streets of Ybor and the bay beyond, and he heard the gunfire before he got there. From this height, the men on the street looked two inches tall as they fired Thompsons and handguns and BARs. They wore hats and raincoats and suits. Some wore police uniforms.
The police were aligned with the Pescatore men. Some of Joe’s men lay in the streets or half out of cars and others kept firing, but they were in retreat. Eduardo Arnaz took a burst straight through his chest and fell against the window of a dress shop. Noel Kenwood was shot in the back and lay in the street, clawing at it. The rest Joe couldn’t identify from up here as the battle moved west, first one block, then two. One of his men crashed a Plymouth Phaeton into the lamppost at the corner of Sixteenth. Before he could get out, the police and a couple Pescatore men surrounded the car and unloaded their Thompsons into it. Giuseppe Esposito had owned a Phaeton, but Joe couldn’t tell from here if he’d been the one driving it.
Run, boys. Just run.
As if they’d heard him, his men stopped firing back and scattered.
Maso placed a hand to the back of Joe’s neck. “It’s over, son.”
Joe said nothing.
“I wished it could have been different.”
“Do you?” Joe said.
Pescatore cars and Tampa PD cars raced down Eighth, and Joe saw several heading north or south along Seventeenth and then east along Ninth or Sixth to outflank his men.
But his men disappeared.
One second a man ran along the street, and the next he was gone. The Pescatore cars would meet at the corners, the gunners pointing desperately, and go back on the hunt.
They gunned down someone on the porch of a casita on Sixteenth, but that seemed to be the only Coughlin-Suarez man they could find at the moment.
One by one, they’d slipped away. Into the air. One by one, they simply weren’t there anymore. The police and the Pescatore men milled in the streets now, pointing fingers, shouting at one another.
Maso said to Albert, “The fuck did they all go?”
Albert held up his hands and shook his head.
“Joseph,” Maso said, “you tell me.”
“Don’t call me Joseph,” Joe said.
Maso slapped him across the face. “What happened to them?”
“They vanished.” Joe looked into the old man’s double-zero eyes. “Poof.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Joe said.
And now Maso raised his voice. Raised it to a roar. And it was a terrifying sound. “Where the fuck are they?”
“Shit.” Albert snapped his fingers. “It’s the tunnels. They dropped into the tunnels.”
Maso turned to him. “What tunnels?”
“The ones running underneath this fucking neighborhood. It’s how they get the booze in.”