“He too pretty,” she said and looked at Joe. “Someone need to mess you up.”
“We’ll get to work on that.”
“See you do,” she said and went to serve another customer.
They took the bottle out onto the back porch and set it on a small table and took residence in two rocking chairs. They looked out through the netting at the swamp as the rain stopped falling and the dragonflies returned. Joe heard something heavy moving through the brush. And something else, just as heavy, moved underneath the porch.
“Reptiles,” Dion said.
Joe lifted his feet off the porch. “What?”
“Alligators,” Dion repeated.
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“No,” Dion said, “but they will.”
Joe raised his knees higher. “What the fuck are we doing in a place with alligators?”
Dion shrugged. “You can’t escape ’em down here. They’re everywhere. You see water, there’s ten of ’em in there, big eyes watching.” He wiggled his fingers and bugged his eyes. “Waiting for dumb Yankees to come take a dip.”
Joe heard the one below him slither away and then crash through the mangrove again. He didn’t know what to say.
Dion chuckled. “Just don’t go in the water.”
“Or near it,” Joe said.
“That too.”
They sat on the porch and drank and the last of the rain clouds drifted off. The moon returned and Joe could see Dion as clearly as if they were inside. He found his old friend staring at him, so he stared back. For quite a while, neither of them said a word, but Joe felt a whole conversation pass between them nonetheless. He was relieved, and he knew Dion was too, to finally get on with it.
Dion took a swig of the rotgut rum, wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “How’d you know it was me?”
Joe said, “Because I knew it wasn’t me.”
“Could’ve been my brother.”
“May he rest in peace,” Joe said, “but your brother wasn’t smart enough to double-cross a street.”
Dion nodded and looked down at his shoes for a bit. “It’d be a blessing.”
“What’s that?”
“Dying.” Dion looked at him. “I got my brother killed, Joe. You know what living with that’s like?”
“I have some idea.”
“How could you?”
“Trust me,” Joe said. “I do.”
“He was older than me by two years,” Dion said, “but I was the older brother, get me? I was supposed to look out for him. ’Member when we all first started palling around, knocking over newsstands, Paolo and me had that other little brother, called him Seppi?”
Joe nodded. Funny, he hadn’t thought of the kid in years. “Got the polio.”
Dion nodded. “Died, he was eight? My mother was never right again after that. I said to Paolo at the time, you know, we couldn’t do nothing to save Seppi; that was just God and God gets his way. But each other?” He twisted his thumbs together, raised his fists to his lips. “We would protect each other.”
Behind them the shack thumped with bodies and bass. In front of them mosquitoes rose off the swamp like claps of dust and found the moonlight.
“So what now? You requested me from prison. You had them find me in Montreal and pull me all the way down here, give me a good living. And for what?”
“Why’d you do it?” Joe asked.
“Because he asked me to.”
“Albert?” Joe whispered.
“Who else?”
Joe closed his eyes for a moment. He reminded himself to breathe slowly. “He asked you to rat us all out?”
“Yeah.”
“He pay you?”
“Fuck no. He offered, but I wouldn’t take his fucking money. Fuck him.”
“You still work for him?”
“No.”
“Why would you tell the truth, D?”
Dion removed a switchblade from his boot. He placed it on the small table between them and followed it with two .38 long-barrels and one .32 snub-nose. He added a lead sap and brass knuckles, then wiped his hands clean of them and showed his palms to Joe.
“After I’m gone,” he said, “ask around Ybor about a guy named Brucie Blum. You’ll see him down around Sixth Avenue sometimes. He walks funny, talks funny, has no idea he used to be big noise. He used to work for Albert. Just six months ago. Big hit with the ladies, had himself some nice suits. Now he shuffles around with a cup, begging for change, pisses himself, can’t tie his own fucking shoes. Last thing he did when he was still big noise? He come up to me in a blind pig over on Palm? He says, ‘Albert needs to talk to you. Or else, see.’ So I chose ‘or else’ and beat his fucking head in. So, no, I don’t work for Albert no more. It was a onetime job. Just ask Brucie Blum.”
Joe sipped the awful rum and said nothing.
“You going to do it yourself or get someone else to do it?”
Joe met his eyes. “I’ll kill you myself.”
“Okay.”
“If I kill you.”
“I’d appreciate you make up your mind about it, one way or the other.”
“Don’t much give a shit what you’d appreciate, D.”
Now it was Dion’s time to be silent. The thumps and the bass grew softer behind them. More and more cars left the grounds and headed back up the mud path toward the cigar factory.
“My father’s gone,” Joe said eventually. “Emma’s dead. Your brother’s dead. My brothers scattered. Shit, D, you’re one of the only people I know anymore. I lose you, who the fuck am I?”
Dion stared at him, the tears rolling down his fat face like beads.
“So you didn’t betray me for money,” Joe said. “So why then?”
“You were gonna get us all killed,” he said eventually, sucking air up from the floor. “The girl. You weren’t yourself. Even that day at the bank. You were gonna get us into something we couldn’t get out of. And my brother would have been the one to die, because he was slow, Joe. He wasn’t us. I figured, I figured…” He sucked in a few more breaths. “I figured I’d get us all off the street for a year. That was the deal. Albert knew a judge. We were all going to get a year, that’s why we never pulled guns during the job. One year. Long enough for Albert’s girl to forget you and maybe you’d forget her.”
“Jesus,” Joe said. “All this because I fell for the man’s girlfriend?”
“You and Albert were both bugs when it came to her. You couldn’t see it, but once she came into the picture, you were gone. And I’ll never understand it. She was no different than a million dames.”
“No,” Joe said, “she was.”
“How? What didn’t I see?”
Joe finished the rest of his rum. “Before I met her? I didn’t realize there was this bullet hole right in the center of me.” He tapped his chest. “Right here. Didn’t realize it until she came along and filled it. Now she’s dead and the hole’s back. But it’s grown to the size of a milk bottle. And it keeps growing. And I just want her to come back from the dead and fill it.”
Dion stared at him as the tears dried on his face. “From the outside looking in, Joe? She was the hole.”
Back at the hotel, the night manager came from behind the desk and handed Joe a series of messages. They were all calls from Maso.
“Do you have a twenty-four operator?” Joe asked him.
“Of course, sir.”
When he got to his room, he called down and the operator patched him through. The phone rang on the North Shore of Boston and Maso answered it. Joe had a cigarette and told him all about the long day.
“A ship?” Maso said. “They want you to hit a ship?”
“Navy ship,” Joe said. “Yeah.”
“What about the other thing? You get your answer?”