On market day, their tobacco sold for the second-highest price at the warehouse, 400 sheets of tobacco, weighing an average of 275 pounds, went to a single buyer, the Robert Burns Tobacco Company, which manufactured the panatela, the new American sensation in cigars.
To celebrate, Joe gave bonuses to all the men and women. He gave two cases of Coughlin-Suarez rum to the village. Then on Ciggy’s suggestion, he rented a bus and he and Ciggy took the baseball team to their first movie at the Bijou in Viñales.
The newsreels were all about the Nuremberg Laws taking effect in Germany—footage of anxious Jews packing up belongings and leaving furnished apartments behind to head for the first train out. Joe had read accounts recently that claimed Chancellor Hitler represented an authentic threat to the fragile peace that had held in Europe since ’18, but he doubted the funny-looking little man would go much further with this lunacy, now that the world had sat up and taken notice; there just wasn’t any percentage in it.
The shorts that followed were forgettable, though the boys on the team all laughed a lot, their eyes as wide as the base pads he’d bought them, and it took Joe a moment to realize that they knew so little of the movies they’d thought the newsreels about Germany were the feature.
Then came the main event—an oater called Riders of the Eastern Ridge starring Tex Moran and Estelle Summers. The credits flashed quick across the black screen and Joe, who never went to movies in the first place, couldn’t have cared less who was responsible for making it. He was, in fact, starting to look down to make sure his right shoe was tied when the name that popped on the screen snapped his eyes back up:
Joe looked over at Ciggy and the boys, but they were oblivious.
My brother, he wanted to tell someone. My brother.
On the bus ride back to Arcenas, he couldn’t stop thinking about the movie. A Western, yes, with gunfights galore and a damsel in distress, and a stagecoach chase along a crumbling cliff road, but something else too, if you knew Danny. The character Tex Moran had played was an honest sheriff in what turned out to be a dirty town. A town where the most prominent citizens gathered one night to plot the death of a swarthy migrant farmer who, one claimed, had ogled his daughter. In the end, the movie retreated from its own radical premise—the good townspeople learned the error of their ways—but only after the swarthy migrant farmer had been killed by a group of outsiders in black hats. The message of the movie, then, as far as Joe could tell, was that the danger from without would wash clean the danger from within. Which, in Joe’s experience—and in Danny’s—was bullshit.
But, either way, it was a hell of a fun time at the theater. The boys had gone wild for it; the whole bus ride home they’d talked about buying six-guns and gun belts when they grew up.
Late that summer, his watch returned from Geneva by mail. It arrived in a lovely mahogany box with velvet inlay and gleamed from a polishing.
Joe was so overjoyed that it would be days before he could admit to himself that it still ran a bit slow.
In September, Graciela received a letter informing her that the Greater Ybor Board of Overseers had elected her Woman of the Year for her work with the less fortunate in the Latin Quarter. The Greater Ybor Board of Overseers was a loose collection of Cuban, Spanish, and Italian men and women who gathered once a month to discuss their shared interests. In the first year, the group had disbanded three times while most of the meetings had ended in fights that spilled out of the restaurant of choice and into the street. The fights were usually between the Spaniards and the Cubans, but every now and then the Italians threw a punch or two so they wouldn’t feel left out. After enough of the bad blood had been given full measure, the members managed to find common ground in their shared exile from the rest of Tampa and grew into a fairly powerful interest group in a very short time. If Graciela would agree, the board wrote, they would be pleased to present her with her award at a gala to be held at the Don Ce-Sar Hotel on St. Petersburg Beach the first weekend in October.
“What do you think?” Graciela asked over breakfast.
Joe was groggy. He’d been having variations on the same nightmare lately. He was with his family and they were somewhere foreign, Africa he felt, but he couldn’t say why exactly. Just that they were surrounded by tall grass and it was very hot. His father appeared at the limit of his vision, at the farthest edge of the fields. He said nothing. He just watched as the panthers emerged from the tall grass, sleek and yellow-eyed. They were the same shade of tan as the grass and, thus, impossible to see until it was too late. When Joe saw the first of them, he shouted to warn Graciela and Tomas, but his throat had already been removed by the cat that sat on his chest. He noticed how red his blood looked on its great white teeth and then he closed his eyes as the cat went back for seconds.
He poured himself more coffee and willed the dream from his head.
“I think,” he said to Graciela, “that it’s time for you to see Ybor again.”
The restoration of the house, much to their surprise, was mostly complete. And last week Joe and Ciggy had laid the grass sod for the outfield. There was nothing holding them to Cuba, for the time being, except Cuba.
They left near the end of September at the end of the rainy season. They left Havana Harbor and crossed the Florida Straits and steamed due north along the west coast of Florida, arriving at the Port of Tampa in the late afternoon of September 29.
Seppe Carbone and Enrico Pozzetta, both of whom had risen fast in Dion’s organization, met them in the terminal, and Seppe explained that word had leaked of their arrival. He showed Joe page five of the Tribune:
The story alleged that the Ku Klux Klan was making threats again and that the FBI was mulling an indictment.
“Jesus,” Joe said, “where do they come up with this shit?”
“Take your coat, Mr. Coughlin?”
Over his suit, Joe wore a silk raincoat he’d bought in Havana. It was imported from Lisbon and sat as lightly on him as a layer of epidermis, but the rain couldn’t make a dent in it. The final hour of the boat ride Joe had seen the clouds massing, which was no surprise—Cuba’s rainy season might be far worse, but Tampa’s was no joke, either, and judging by the clouds, it was still hanging around.
“I’ll keep it on,” Joe said. “Help my wife with her bags.”
“Of course.”
The four of them left the terminal and walked into the parking lot, Seppe to Joe’s right, Enrico to Graciela’s left. Tomas rode Joe’s hip, his arms around his neck, Joe checking the time, when the sound of the first gunshot reached them.
Seppe died on his feet—Joe had seen it enough times. He continued to hold Graciela’s bags as the hole went straight through the center of his head. Joe turned as Seppe fell and the second gunshot followed the first, the gunman saying something in a calm, dry voice. Joe clutched Tomas to his shoulder and threw himself at Graciela and they all toppled to the ground.