“No,” Joe said.
“You are at war?”
“We are at war,” Joe said. “Yes.”
“When will you be finished?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ever?”
“I don’t know.”
For a minute they said nothing. He heard her smoking from her end and she could hear him smoking from his. He checked his father’s watch and saw that it was now running a full half an hour behind, even though he’d reset it on the boat.
“You don’t see it,” she said eventually.
“See what?”
“That you have been at war since the day we met. And why?”
“To make a living.”
“Is dying a living?”
“I’m not dead,” he said.
“By the end of the day you could be, Joseph. You could. Even if you win today’s battle and the next one and the one after that, there is so much violence in what you do, that it must—it must—come back for you. It will find you.”
Just what his father had told him.
Joe smoked and blew it up toward the ceiling and watched it evaporate. He couldn’t say there wasn’t truth in her words, just as there may have been some in his father’s. But he didn’t have the time for the truth right now.
He said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say here.”
“I don’t either,” she said.
“Hey,” he said.
“What?”
“How do you know it’s a boy?”
“Because he’s kicking at things all the time,” she said. “Just like you.”
“Ah.”
“Joseph?” She inhaled on her cigarette. “Don’t leave me to raise him on my own.”
The only train scheduled to leave Tampa that afternoon was the Orange Blossom Special. Seaboard’s two standard trains had already left and no more were scheduled until tomorrow. The Orange Blossom Special was a deluxe passenger train that ran to and from Tampa in the winter months only. The problem for Maso, Digger, and their men was that it was booked solid.
While they were working on bribing the conductor, the police showed up. And not the ones on their payroll.
Maso and Digger were sitting in the back of an Auburn sedan in a field just west of Union Station, where they had a clear view of the redbrick building and its cake-icing white trim and the five tracks that ran from the back of it, gunmetal rails of hot rolled steel that stretched from this small brick building and endlessly flat land to points north and east and west, splaying like veins across the country.
“Should’ve gotten into railroads,” Maso said. “When there was still a chance back in the teens.”
“We got trucks,” Digger said. “That’s better.”
“Trucks ain’t getting us out of this.”
“Let’s just drive,” Digger said.
“You don’t think they’ll notice a bunch of wops in swell cars and black hats driving through the fucking orange groves?”
“We drive at night.”
Maso shook his head. “Roadblocks. By now? That Irish cocksucker has them set up on every road from here to Jacksonville.”
“Well, a train ain’t the way to go, Pop.”
“Yes,” Maso said, “it is.”
“I can get us a plane out of Jacksonville in—”
“You fly on one of those fucking deathtraps. Don’t ask me to.”
“Pop, they’re safe. They’re safer than… than—”
“Than trains?” Maso pointed. As he did, the air popped with a percussive echo and smoke rose from a field about a mile away.
“Duck hunting?” Digger said.
Maso looked over at his son and thought how sad it was that a man this stupid was the smartest of his three offspring.
“You seen any ducks around here?”
“So then…?” Digger’s eyes narrowed. He actually couldn’t figure it out.
“He just blew up the tracks,” Maso said and looked across at his son. “You get your retard from your mother, by the way. Woman couldn’t win a game of checkers against a bowl of fucking soup.”
Maso and his men waited by a pay phone on Platt while Anthony Servidone went on ahead with a suitcase full of money to the Tampa Bay Hotel. He called an hour later to report that the rooms were taken care of. There was no police presence and no local hoods as far as he could see. Send in the security detail.
They did. Not that there was much of one left after whatever had happened on that tugboat. They’d sent twelve guys out on that boat, thirteen if you counted that Slick Sammy fuck, Albert White. That left a security detail of seven men plus Maso’s personal bodyguard, Seppe Carbone. Seppe was from the same town Maso had grown up in, Alcamo, on the northwest coast of Sicily, though Seppe was much younger, so he and Maso had grown up there in different times. Still, Seppe was a man from that town—merciless, fearless, and loyal to the death.
After Anthony Servidone called back to confirm that the security detail had cleared the floor and the lobby, Seppe drove Maso and Digger to the back of the Tampa Bay Hotel, and they took the service elevator to the seventh floor.
“How long?” Digger said.
“Day after tomorrow,” Maso said. “We keep our heads down until then. Even that mick son of a bitch doesn’t have the pull to keep roadblocks up that long. We drive down to Miami, catch the train from there.”
“I want a girl,” Digger said.
Maso slapped his son hard in the back of the head. “What part of lying low don’t you understand? A girl? A fucking girl? Why don’t you ask her to bring some friends, maybe a couple of guns, you dumb fuck.”
Digger rubbed his head. “A man has needs.”
“You see a man around here,” Maso said, “you point him out to me.”
They arrived at the seventh floor and Anthony Servidone met the lift. He handed Maso his room key and Digger his.
“You clear the room?”
Anthony nodded. “They’re clean. Every one. Whole floor.”
Maso had met Anthony in Charlestown, where everyone was loyal to Maso because it was death if you weren’t. Seppe, on the other hand, had come from Alcamo with a letter from Todo Bassina, the local boss, and had distinguished himself more times than Maso could count.
“Seppe,” he said now, “give the room another look.”
“Subito, capo. Subito.” Seppe’s Thompson cleared his raincoat and he walked through the men gathered outside Maso’s suite and let himself inside.
Anthony Servidone stepped in close. “They were seen at the Romero.”
“Who?”
“Coughlin, Bartolo, a bunch of Cubans and Italians on their side.”
“Coughlin, definitely?”
Anthony nodded. “No question.”
Maso closed his eyes for just a moment. “He even get a scratch?”
“Yeah,” Anthony said quickly, excited to deliver some good news. “Big cut on his head and took a slug to his right arm.”
Maso said, “Well, I guess we should wait for him to die of fucking blood poisoning.”
Digger said, “I don’t think we got that kind of time.”
And Maso closed his eyes again.
Digger walked down to his room with a man on either side of him as Seppe came back out of Maso’s suite.
“It’s all clear, boss.”
Maso said, “I want you and Servidone on the door. Everyone else better act like centurions on the Hun border. Capice?”
“Capice.”
Maso entered the room and removed his raincoat and his hat. He poured himself a drink but from the bottle of anisette they’d sent up. Booze was legal again. Most of it, anyway. And what wasn’t, would be. The country had found sanity again.
A fucking shame, what it was.