Live by Night Page 0,97

it to him as they left the room.

"Burn that, will you?"

The guns were bound for the Pinar del Rio province, west of Havana. They left St. Petersburg on five grouper boats out of Boca Ciega Bay at three in the afternoon. Dion, Joe, Esteban, and Graciela saw them off. Joe had changed from the suit he'd ruined in the swamp to the lightest one he owned. Graciela had watched as he'd burned it along with her dress, but she was fading now from her time as prey in a cypress swamp. She kept nodding off on the bench that sat under the dock lamp yet refused all offers to sit in one of the cars or let someone drive her back to Ybor.

When the last of the grouper captains had shaken their hands and shoved off, they stood looking at one another. Joe realized they had no idea what to do next. How could you top the last two days? The sky had grown red. Somewhere down the jagged shoreline, past a clump of mangroves, a canvas sail or tarp fluttered in the hot breeze. Joe looked at Esteban. He looked at Graciela, who leaned against the lamppost with her eyes closed. He looked at Dion. A pelican swooped over his head, its bill bigger than its belly. Joe looked at the boats, way out there now, the size of dunce caps from this distance, and he started laughing. He couldn't help himself. Dion and Esteban were right behind him, all three of them roaring in no time. Graciela covered her face for a moment and then she started laughing too, laughing and crying actually, Joe noticed, peeking out from between her fingers like a small girl until she dropped her hands entirely. She laughed and cried and ran both hands through her hair repeatedly and then wiped her face with the collar of her blouse. They walked to the edge of the dock and the laughs became chuckles and then echoes of chuckles and they looked out at the water as it grew purple under the red sky. The boats found the horizon and slipped past it, one by one.

Joe didn't remember much about the rest of that day. They went to one of Maso's speaks behind a veterinarian on the corner of Fifteenth and Nebraska. Esteban arranged to have a case of dark rum aged in cherry casks sent over, and word got around to everyone involved in the heist. Soon Pescatore gunsels mingled with Esteban's revolutionaries. Then the women arrived in their silk dresses and sequined hats. A band took the stage. In no time, the joint was hopping enough to crack the masonry.

Dion danced with three women simultaneously, swinging them behind his broad back and under his stubby legs with surprising dexterity. When it came to dance, however, Esteban proved to be the artist of the group. He moved on his feet as lightly as a cat on a high branch, but with a command so total that the band soon began to fashion songs to his tempo, not the other way around. He reminded Joe of Valentino in that flicker where he played a bullfighter - it was that degree of masculine grace. Soon half the women in the speak were trying to match his steps or land him for the night.

"I never saw a guy move like that," Joe said to Graciela.

She was sitting in the corner of a booth, while he sat on the floor in front of it. She leaned over to speak in his ear. "It's what he did when he first came here."

"What do you mean?"

"It was his job," she said. "He was a taxi dancer downtown."

"You're putting me on." He tilted his head, looked up at her. "What doesn't this guy do well?"

She said, "He was a professional dancer in Havana. Very good. Never the lead in any productions but always in high demand. It's how he supported himself during law school."

Joe almost spit up his drink. "He's a lawyer?"

"In Havana, yes."

"He told me he grew up on a farm."

"He did. My family worked for his. We were, uh - " She looked at him.

"Migrant farmers?"

"Is that the word?" She scrunched her face at him, at least as drunk as he was. "No, no, we were tenant farmers."

"Your father rented land from his father and paid his rent in crops?"

"No."

"That's tenant farming. It's what my grandfather did in Ireland." He tried to appear sober, learned, but it was work