Live by Night Page 0,150

he turned into a ball with thick, wrinkly thighs. But once he began to walk, he quickly began to run. He would run through the fields and up and down the slopes, and the women would chase him so that very soon he was not a ball but a slim boy with his father's light hair but his mother's dark eyes and skin that was a cocoa-butter combination of them both.

Joe made a few trips back to Tampa on the tin goose, a Ford Trimotor 5-AT that rattled in the wind and lurched and dipped without warning. He exited a couple of times with his ears so blocked he couldn't hear the rest of the day. The air nurses gave him gum to chew and cotton to stuff in there, but it was still a primitive way to travel and Graciela wanted no part of it. So he would make the trip without her and find that he missed her and Tomas at a physical level. He would wake in the middle of the night at their house in Ybor with stomach pain so sharp it stole his breath.

As soon as his business was concluded he'd take the first plane he could get down to Miami. Take the next available one out of there.

It wasn't that Graciela didn't want to return to Tampa - she did. She just didn't want to fly there. And she didn't want to return right now. (Which, Joe suspected, meant she really didn't want to go back.) So they stayed in the hills of Las Terrazas, and her mother and sister, Benita, were joined by a third sister, Ines. Whatever bad blood had existed between Graciela, her mother, Benita, and Ines looked to have been healed by time and the presence of Tomas. On a couple of unfortunate occasions, Joe followed the sound of their laughter to catch them dressing Tomas like a girl.

One morning Graciela asked if they could buy a place here.

"Here?"

"Well, it doesn't have to be right here. But in Cuba," she said. "Just a place we could visit."

"We'd be 'visiting'?" Joe smiled.

"Yes," she said. "I must get back to work soon."

She didn't really. On his trips back, Joe had checked in on the people in whose care she'd left her various charities, and they were all trustworthy men and women. She could stay away from Ybor for a decade and all her organizations would still be standing, hell, flourishing, when she returned.

"Sure, doll. Whatever you want."

"It wouldn't have to be a big place. Or a fancy place. Or a - "

"Graciela," Joe said, "pick whatever you want. You see something and it's not for sale? Offer them double."

Not unheard of in those days. Cuba, hit by the Depression worse than most countries, was taking tentative steps toward recovery. The abuses of the Machado regime had been replaced by the hope of Colonel Fulgencio Batista, leader of the Sergeants Revolt that had sent Machado packing. The official president of the Republic was Carlos Mendieta, but everyone knew Batista and his army ran the show. So favored was this arrangement, the American government had started pouring money into the island five minutes after the revolt that put Machado on a plane to Miami. Money for hospitals and roads and museums and schools and a new commercial district along the Malecon. Colonel Batista not only loved the American government, but he also loved the American gambler, so Joe, Dion, Meyer Lansky, and Esteban Suarez, among others, had full access to the highest offices in government. They'd already purchased ninety-nine-year leases on some of the best land along the Parque Central and in the Tacon Market district.

There was no end to the money they'd make.

Graciela said Mendieta was Batista's puppet and Batista was the puppet of United Fruit and the United States; he'd raid the coffers and rape the land, while the United States kept him propped in place because America believed good deeds could somehow follow bad money.

Joe didn't argue. He also didn't point out that they, themselves, had followed bad money with good deeds. Instead he asked her about this house she'd found.

It was a bankrupt tobacco plantation, actually, just outside the village of Arcenas, fifty miles farther west in the Pinar del Rio province. It came with a guesthouse for her family and endless fields of black soil for Tomas to run in. The day Joe and Graciela purchased it from the widow, Domenica Gomez, she introduced them to Ilario Bacigalupi outside