of his hand. "I am fully committed to this event."
Great, Joe thought, he's overweight and overheated.
"I appreciate that," Joe said, catching Graciela's eyes for a moment, seeing the same concern in hers that probably lived in his. "But, Manny? You have to be committed to doing it and getting off that boat alive. I'm not saying this because I'm so swell and I care about you. I'm not and I don't. But if you're killed and they identify you as a Cuban national, the plan falls apart right there and then."
Manny leaned forward, his cigar as thick as a hammer grip between his fingers. "I want freedom for my country and I want Machado dead and the United States to leave my lands. I have remarried, Mr. Coughlin. I have three ninos, all under six years old. I have a wife I love, God forgive me, more than my wife who died. I'm old enough that I would rather live as a weak man than die a brave one."
Joe gave him a grateful smile. "Then you're the guy I want delivering this bomb."
The USS Mercy weighed ten thousand tons. It was a four-hundred-foot-long, fifty-two-foot-wide, plumb-bow displacement ship with two smokestacks and two masts. The mainmast sported a crow's nest that seemed to Joe like it belonged on a ship from another time, when brigands roamed the high seas. Two faded crosses were painted on the smokestacks, which confirmed her history as a hospital ship, as did the white of her paint. She looked worked over, creaky, but the white of her gleamed against the black water and the night sky.
They were up on the catwalk above a grain silo at the end of McKay Street - Joe, Dion, Graciela, and Esteban, looking out at the ship moored at Pier 7. A dozen silos clustered there, sixty feet high, the last of the grain having been stored there this afternoon by a Cargill ship. The night watchman had been paid off, told to make sure he told the police tomorrow that it was Spaniards who tied him up, and then Dion knocked him out with two swings of a lead sap to make it look authentic.
Graciela asked Joe what he thought.
"Of what?"
"Our chances." Graciela's cigar was long and thin. She blew rings over the rail of the catwalk and watched them float over the water.
"Honestly?" Joe said. "Slim to none."
"Yet it's your plan."
"And it's the best one I could think of."
"It seems quite good."
"Is that a compliment?"
She shook her head, though he thought he saw the smallest twitch of her lips. "It's a statement. If you played good guitar, I would tell you and still not like you."
"Because I leered?"
"Because you are arrogant."
"Oh."
"Like all Americans."
"And all Cubans are what?"
"Proud."
He smiled. "According to the papers I've been reading, you're also lazy, quick to anger, incapable of saving money, and childish."
"You think this is true?"
"No," he said. "I think assumptions about an entire country or an entire people are pretty fucking stupid in general."
She drew on her cigar and looked at him for a bit. Eventually, she turned to look out at the ship again.
The lights of the waterfront turned the lower edges of the sky a pale, chalky red. Beyond the channel, the city lay sleeping in the haze. Far off at the horizon line, thin bolts of lightning carved jagged white veins in the skin of the world. Their faint and sudden light would reveal swollen clouds as dark as plums massed out there like an enemy army. At one point, a small plane passed directly overhead, four lights in the sky, one small engine, a hundred yards above, possibly for a legitimate purpose, though it was hard to imagine what that could be at three in the morning. Not to mention, in the short time he'd been in Tampa, Joe had come across very little activity he'd describe as legitimate.
"Did you mean what you told Manny tonight, that it makes no difference to you whether he lives or dies?"
They could see him now, walking along the pier toward the ship, toolbox in hand.
Joe leaned his elbows on the rail. "Pretty much."
"How does anyone become so callous?"
"Takes less practice than you'd think," Joe said.
Manny stopped at the gangplank where two sailors of the Shore Patrol met him. He raised his arms while one of the SPs patted him down and the other opened the toolbox. He rifled through the top tray and then removed it and placed it on the pier.
"If