World Gone By: A Novel (Joe Coughlin Series), Page 3

  When the guards came to Theresa and asked her what happened, she told them.

  One of them said, “You know you could have killed her?”

  “Apparently,” she said, “I’ve slowed a step.”

  The other guards walked away and she was left with the one who’d asked the question, the youngest of them.

  She said, “Henry, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Henry, do you think you could get me a little of that gauze the nurse has in her satchel? My head’s cut.”

  “How do you know there’s gauze in there?”

  “What else would be in there, Henry? Comic books?”

  He smiled and nodded at the same time and went and got her the gauze.

  Later that evening, after lights out, Henry came to her cell. She’d been in prison before so she’d been expecting it sooner or later. At least he was young and nearly handsome and clean.

  Afterward, she told him she needed to get a message to someone on the outside.

  “Oh, now,” Henry Ames said.

  “A message,” Theresa said, “nothing more.”

  “I don’t know.” Henry Ames, less than two minutes removed from the end of his virginity, now had cause to wish he’d held on to it a little longer.

  “Henry,” Theresa said, “someone with a lot of power is trying to have me killed.”

  “I can protect you.”

  She smiled at him. She caressed the side of his neck with her right hand and Henry felt taller, stronger, and more alive than he’d ever felt in his twenty-three years on this earth.

  She placed the razor blade to his ear with her left hand. It was double-edged, the kind Henry placed in the brass razor his father had given him when he graduated high school. These days, with the restrictions on metal, Henry used a blade until it was as dull as a spoon, but Theresa’s appeared to have never been used until she flicked it lightly under his earlobe. Before he could react, she pulled the handkerchief from his shirt pocket and dabbed at the cut.

  “Henry,” she whispered, “you can’t even protect yourself.”

  He never saw where she hid the blade; it just wasn’t in her hand anymore. He stared into her eyes. They were wide and dark and warm.

  “Now,” she said gently, “if I don’t get word to someone about my predicament, Henry, I won’t last a month in here. And my son will grow up an orphan. And that I cannot fucking abide. You hear me?”

  He nodded. Theresa continued to dab at his earlobe. Much to his surprise and shame, he felt himself growing hard again. Henry Ames of Ocala, Florida, a farmer’s son, asked Female Prisoner 4773 who she wanted the message to go to.

  “Go to the home office of Suarez Sugar on Howard Avenue in Tampa and tell the vice president, Joseph Coughlin, that I need to see him. Impress upon him that it’s a matter of life and death. His and mine.”

  “I can protect you in here.” Henry heard the desperation in his own voice, but even so, he wanted her to believe it.

  Theresa handed his handkerchief back. She stared at him for a while.

  “That’s sweet,” she said. “Now remember—Suarez Sugar. Howard Avenue in Tampa. Joe Coughlin.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Runner

  HENRY AMES WAS OFF FRIDAYS, so as soon as his Thursday shift ended, he left Raiford and drove through the night to Tampa. During the drive, he had plenty of time to think on his transgressions. His father and mother, as morally upright as two people without wings could get, would seize up and die if they knew their eldest son was fornicating with a convicted murderess who’d been left in his charge. And while the other guards turned a blind, if smirking, eye to his relationship with Female Prisoner 4773, it was only because they were all doing the same thing, if not worse, which did little to change the fact that they were all breaking the law. And not just man’s law, Henry Ames feared, but the good Lord’s as well.

  And yet . . .

  And yet . . .

  What a joy it had been to slip into her cell near the end of every shift this week and be received by her.

  Henry was currently courting Rebecca Holinshed, daughter of the local doctor in Lake Butler, where Henry lived, twelve miles west of the prison. The courtship had been arranged by Henry’s aunt, who also lived in Lake Butler and had been charged with keeping an eye on him by her sister, Henry’s mother. Rebecca Holinshed was a very pretty blond girl with skin so white it appeared to have been boiled. She had told Henry in her very soft voice that she expected the man she married to have ambition beyond just guarding a pack of filthy women with no more moral center than that of a filthy chimpanzee. Rebecca Holinshed used the word filthy a lot, always in the softest of tones, as if hesitant for the word to leave her mouth. She’d also never met Henry’s eyes, not once in their whole courtship. If someone were to witness their early evening strolls, that witness could be forgiven for believing Rebecca conversed not with Henry but with the road, the porch, the trunks of trees.

  Even so, to prove that he did, in fact, have ambition, Henry had enrolled in criminal law courses at night, all the way over in Gainesville. On his free nights, instead of having a few beers with the other guards at Dickie’s Roadhouse, or catching up on laundry, or, God forbid, just relaxing, Henry drove ninety minutes each way to sit in a sweltering box of a room near the rear of the University of Florida campus and listen to Professor Blix, a drunk, disbarred lawyer, slur his way through lectures on fraud in the inducement and motions to compel.

  Henry knew it was good for him, though. Knew Rebecca was good for him. She’d make a fine mother. One day soon, he hoped, she might even let him kiss her.

  Female Prisoner 4773, however, had already kissed Henry Ames pretty much anyplace he had skin. She’d told him about her son, Peter, and her hopes to reunite with him in five years, maybe move back to Italy with the boy if this war ever ended and Mussolini and his Black Shirts were driven from power. Henry knew she was using him—just because he was small town didn’t make him an idiot—but she was using him to achieve safety for her and her son, which seemed a worthy cause. She certainly wasn’t asking him to become something he didn’t want to become—a lawyer—she was just asking him to help save her life.

  So he was making a mistake sleeping with her, yes. Maybe the biggest mistake of his life. One he’d never recover from were it exposed. He’d lose his family over it. He’d lose Rebecca. Lose his job. Probably be shipped off immediately to fight the Nazis, flat feet be damned. Die in some bombed-out village along a stagnant river that no one had ever heard of. Leave behind no offspring, no evidence he’d ever existed. A waste of a life.

  So why couldn’t he stop smiling?

  JOE COUGHLIN, the Tampa businessman with the dubious past and a history of great benevolence toward his adopted home of Ybor City, met that morning with Lieutenant Matthew Biel of Naval Intelligence in his office at Suarez Sugar.

  Biel was a young man with blond hair cut so tight to his scalp one could see the pink beneath the bristles. He wore sharply pressed khakis and a black sport coat with contrasting gray plaid sleeves over a white shirt. He smelled of starch.

  “If you’re trying to look like a civilian,” Joe told him, “you might want to study a few more J. C. Penney catalogues.”

  “That where you shop?”

  Joe thought of telling this yahoo what he thought of J. C. Penney—he was wearing a suit that had been hand-tailored in fucking Lisbon, for Christ’s sake—but he refrained and poured Biel a cup of coffee instead, brought it around the desk to him.

  Biel accepted the coffee with a nod of thanks and said, “This is a very unassuming office for a man of your stature.”

  Joe sat behind his desk. “Seems appropriate for a vice president of a sugar company.”

  “You also run three import companies, don’t you?”

  Joe sipped his coffee.

  Biel smiled. “Two distilleries, a phosphate mining concern, and pieces of several businesses back home in Boston, including a bank.” He l
ooked around the office again. “That’s why your attempts at humility here are so fascinating.”

  Joe put his coffee cup down on the desk. “How about you tell me why you’re here, Lieutenant.”

  Biel leaned forward. “A guy got beaten on the docks in Port Tampa the other night. You hear about it?”

  “A guy gets beaten every night in Port Tampa. It’s the docks.”

  “Yeah, well, this guy was one of ours.”

  “Whose?”

  “Naval Intelligence. Apparently he asked one question too many of some of your guys and—”

  “My guys?”

  Biel closed his eyes for a second, took a breath, opened them. “Fine. Your friend, Dion Bartolo’s guys. Longshoremen’s Local 126. That ring a bell?”

  Those were Dion’s guys all right.

  “So some swabbie of yours got the snot kicked out of him. You want me to pay for his dry cleaning?”

  “No. He’ll recover, thank you.”

  “Help me sleep, knowing that.”

  “Thing is,” Lieutenant Biel said, “we’ve got stories like that all over the country—Portland, Boston, New York, Miami, Tampa, New Orleans. Hell, our guy in New Orleans almost died. As it was, he lost an eye.”

  “Yeah, well,” Joe said, “I wouldn’t fuck with New Orleans. You tell your guy he’s lucky he’s not blind and dead.”

  “We can’t infiltrate the docks,” Biel said. “Every time we get a guy in, he gets his head beat in and sent back to us. We understand now—you own the docks, you rule the waterfront. We’re not arguing. But we’re not after you. Any of you.”

  “Who am I?” Joe said. “Who are we? I’m a legitimate businessman.”

  Biel grimaced. “You’re the consigliere—did I pronounce that right?—for the Bartolo Family, Mr. Coughlin. You’re the fixer for the entire Florida criminal syndicate. On top of that, you and Meyer Lansky control Cuba and the narcotics pipeline that begins somewhere in South America and ends somewhere in Maine. So do we really have to play this game where you’re ‘retired’ and I’m a fucking dunce?”

  Joe stared across the desk at him until the silence grew uncomfortable. At the moment when Biel couldn’t take it any longer, when he’d opened his mouth to speak, Joe said, “Who’re you after then?”

  “Nazi saboteurs, Jap saboteurs, anybody who could infiltrate the waterfront and commit violence against the government.”

  “Well, I’d say you can stop worrying about any Jap infiltration. They tend to stick out, even in San Francisco.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I’d worry about a homegrown Kraut,” Joe said, “one who could pass himself off as having mick parents or Swede parents. He’d be a problem.”

  “Could he infiltrate you?”

  “I just said he could. Didn’t say it was likely, but it could happen.”

  “Well, then Uncle Sam needs your help.”

  “And what’s Uncle Sam giving in return?”

  “The thanks of a grateful nation and a lack of harassment.”

  “That’s what you call harassment—your men getting their heads handed to them on a regular basis? Well, feel free to harass me any day of the week.”

  “Your legitimate businesses survive on government contracts right now, Mr. Coughlin.”

  “Some of them do, yeah.”

  “We could make that relationship a bit more unwieldy.”

  “Half an hour after you leave this office, Lieutenant, I’m meeting with a gentleman from the War Department, which wants to increase its orders with me, not decrease them. So, if you’re going to play a bluff, son, do it from a more informed place, would you?”

  Biel said, “Fine. Tell us what you want.”

  “You know what we want.”

  “No,” Biel said, “I’m not sure we do.”

  “We want Charlie Luciano released. Simple as that.”

  Biel’s apple-pie face darkened. “It’s out of the question. Lucky Luciano’s going to rot in Dannemora for the rest of his natural life.”

  “Okay. He prefers ‘Charlie,’ by the way. Only his closest friends call him Lucky.”

  “Whatever he calls himself, we’re not giving him amnesty.”

  “We’re not asking for amnesty,” Joe said. “After the war—if, that is, you guys don’t fuck it up and we actually win—you deport him. He never steps foot on these shores again.”

  “But.”

  “But,” Joe said, “he’s otherwise free to go where he wants and earn a living however he wants.”

  Biel shook his head. “FDR’ll never go for it.”

  “It’s not his decision, is it?”

  “At a public relations level? Sure it is. Luciano ran the most violent criminal syndicate this country’s ever seen.” Biel gave it a little more thought and then shook his head emphatically. “Ask for something else. Anything.”

  Just like the government. So used to paying for what it wanted with free money that it had no idea how to forge a real business deal. We’d like something for nothing, please; so give it to us, fuck off, and thank us for the privilege.

  Joe studied Lieutenant Biel’s open, all-American face. A quarterback in high school to be sure. All the girls had wanted to wear his letter sweater.

  “There’s nothing else we want,” Joe said.

  “So that’s it?” Biel seemed authentically dumbfounded.

  “That’s it.” Joe leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette.

  Biel stood. “You won’t like what we do next then.”

  “You’re the government. Liking what you do has never been one of my weaknesses.”

  “Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

  “You’ve heard our price,” Joe said.

  Biel stopped at the door, his head down. “We have a file on you, Mr. Coughlin.”

  “I would have assumed.”

  “It’s not as thick as most because you are very, very good at hiding in plain sight. Never came across anyone who does it as slickly as you. Around the office, know what they call you?”

  Joe shrugged.

  “The Runner. Because you’ve been running the table for longer than anyone can remember. But you own a casino in Havana, don’t you?”

  Joe nodded.

  “So you know that luck ends.”

  Joe smiled. “Message received, Lieutenant.”

  “Was it?” Biel asked and let himself out.

  TEN MINUTES AFTER BIEL LEFT, Joe’s intercom buzzed.

  He depressed the send button. “Yes, Margaret.”

  Margaret Toomey, his secretary, said, “There’s a gentleman out here to see you. He says he’s a guard at the prison in Raiford. He claims it’s urgent you speak to him.”

  Joe lifted the receiver off the cradle. “Tell him to fuck off,” he said kindly.

  “I tried,” Margaret said, “in so many words.”

  “Then use the exact ones.”

  “He said to tell you ‘Theresa Del Fresco asks for an audience.’”

  “Shit, really?” Joe said.

  “Shit really,” Margaret said.

  Joe gave it some thought for a bit and eventually sighed. “Send him in. He a yokel or an operator?”

  “The former, sir. He’s on his way.”

  The boy who came through the door looked like he’d climbed out of a playpen. His hair was so blond it was almost white and a sprig of it rose like a crooked finger from the crown. His skin was so unblemished it appeared he’d put it on for the first time this afternoon. His eyes were green and clear as a baby’s, and his teeth were as white as his hair.

  This child was a guard? In the women’s wing?

  Theresa Del Fresco would have zeroed in on this kid like a town cat on a country mouse.

  Joe shook the boy’s hand and gestured toward a chair. The boy took it, hitching his trousers at the knees.

  The boy explained that he was, in fact, a guard at the Women’s Correctional Wing of the State Prison at Raiford and that Female Prisoner 4773, or There
sa Del Fresco as she’d been known in free society, had asked him to visit Mr. Coughlin, sir, because she believed his life—and her own—was in danger.

  “Your life?” Joe asked.

  The boy was befuddled. “No, no, sir. Yours.”

  Joe laughed.

  The boy said, “Sir?”

  Joe laughed harder. The idea became funnier the more he thought about it.

  “That’s her play?” he said as the chuckles began to die away.

  “Her play, sir? I’m not following.”

  Joe wiped his eye with the heel of his hand. “Ah, Jesus. So, yes, yes, Mrs. Del Fresco thinks my life is in grave danger?”

  “And her own.”

  “Well, at least she’s not trying to sell it as a selfless act.”

  “I’m confused, Mr. Coughlin, and I’m not afraid to say so. Mrs. Del Fresco has asked me to drive a great distance to tell you your life is in danger and hers as well, and you act like it’s all some kind of big joke. Well, it’s not a very funny one, sir, I’ll tell you what.”

  Joe looked across the desk at the kid. “You through?”

  The boy moved his hat from one knee to the other and tugged nervously on his right earlobe. “Well, I don’t rightly know, sir.”

  Joe came around his desk and stood in front of the kid and offered him a cigarette. The boy took one, his hand shaking slightly, and Joe lit it for him and then lit his own. He placed an ashtray on the desk beside his hip and took a long drag before he addressed Henry Ames again.

  “Son, I have no doubt that Mrs. Del Fresco has, in her befriending of you, shown you a banquet of lascivious delights. And I—”

  “Sir, I will not allow you to suggest impropriety in the character of either myself or Mrs. Del Fresco.”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up, kid,” Joe said kindly and patted the boy’s shoulder. “Where was I? Right. I’m sure fucking Mrs. Del Fresco and being fucked by her has been the high point of your life thus far and, judging strictly on appearance, will remain the high point until you die.”

  The boy had, if possible, turned whiter. He stared back at Joe like he’d been stricken by an embolism.