Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

“How long will it take?” Joe asked.

“I’m not sure,” the man said. “I must take the watch apart and look at each piece.”

“I understand that,” Joe said. “How long?”

“If the pieces need reoiling and nothing more? Four days.”

“Four,” Joe said and felt a flutter in his chest, as if a small bird had just flown through his soul. “No way it could be quicker?”

The man shook his head. “And, senor? If anything is broken, just one small part—and you see how small these parts are?”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

“I will have to send the watch to Switzerland.”

Joe looked out the dusty windows to the dusty street for a moment. He took his wallet from his inside suit pocket and removed a hundred American, placed the bills on the counter. “I’ll be back in two hours. Have a diagnosis by then.”

“A what?”

“Tell me if it’ll need to go to Switzerland by then.”

“Yes, senor. Yes.”

He left the shop and found himself wandering Old Havana in all its sensual decay. Habana, he’d decided on his many trips here over the past year, wasn’t simply a place; it was the dream of a place. A dream gone drowsy in the sun, fading into its own bottomless appetite for languor, in love with the sexual thrum of its death throes.

He turned one corner and then another and then a third and he was standing on the street where Emma Gould’s brothel was.

Esteban had given him the address more than a year ago now, on the night before that bloody day with Albert White and Maso and Digger and poor Sal and Lefty and Carmine. He supposed he’d known he was coming here since he’d left the house yesterday, but he hadn’t admitted it to himself because to come here seemed silly and frivolous, and very little of him remained frivolous.

A woman stood out front, hosing the sidewalk free of the glass that had been broken the night before. She sent the glass and dirt into the gutter and it ran down the slope of the cobblestone street. When she looked up and saw him, the hose drooped in her hand but didn’t fall.

The years hadn’t been horrible to her, though they hadn’t exactly been fond either. She looked like a beautiful woman whose vices had failed to love her back, who’d smoked and drunk too much, and both habits had found a way to manifest themselves in crow’s-feet and lines around the edges of her mouth and below her lower lip. Her lower eyelids sagged and her hair was brittle, even in all this humidity.

She raised the hose and went back to work. “Say what you have to say.”

“You want to look at me?”

She turned toward him but kept her eyes on the sidewalk, and he had to move to keep his shoes dry.

“So you had the accident and you thought, ‘I’m going to take advantage of this’?”

She shook her head.

“No?”

Another shake of the head.

“Then what?”

“Once the coppers started chasing us, I told the driver the only way to get away was to drive off the bridge. But he wouldn’t listen.”

Joe stepped out of the path of her hose. “So?”

“So I shot him in the back of the head. We went in the water and I swam out and Michael was waiting for me.”

“Who’s Michael?”

“He’s the other fella I was keeping on the hook. He was waiting outside the hotel the whole night.”

“Why?”

She scowled at him. “Once you and Albert started getting all ‘I can’t live without you, Emma. You are my life, Emma,’ I needed some kind of safety net in case you blew each other up. What choice did a gal have? I knew sooner or later I’d have to get out from under your thumbs. God, the way you two would go on.”

“My apologies,” Joe said, “for loving you.”

“You didn’t love me.” She concentrated on a particularly stubborn piece of glass that had lodged itself between two stones in the street. “You just wanted to have me. Like a fucking Grecian vase or a fancy suit. Show me to all your friends, say ‘Ain’t she a dish?’ ” She looked at him now. “I’m not a dish. I don’t want to be owned. I want to own.”

Joe said, “I mourned you.”

“That’s sweet, pumpkin.”

“For years.”

“How did you carry such a cross? Gosh-golly, you’re some man.”

He took another step back from her, even though she’d pointed the hose in the opposite direction, and he saw the whole play for the first time, like a mark who’d been grifted so many times his wife didn’t allow him out of the house unless he left his watch and his pocket change behind.

“You took the money out of the bus locker, didn’t you?”

She waited for the bullet she feared was behind the question, but he raised his hands to show they were empty and would stay that way.

She said, “You did give me the key, remember.”

If there was honor among thieves, then she was right. He’d given her the key; from that point, it was hers to do with as she saw fit.

“And the dead girl? The one they kept finding pieces of?”

She turned off the hose and leaned against the stucco wall of her bordello. “Remember Albert talking about how he’d found himself a new girl?”

“Not really.”

“Well, he did. She was in the car. Never got her name.”

“You kill her too?”

She shook her head, then tapped her forehead. “Her head hit the back of the front seat during the crash. Don’t know if she died then or later, but I didn’t stick around to find out.”

He stood on the street feeling like a fool. A fucking fool.

“Was there a moment when you loved me?” he asked.

She searched his face with growing exasperation. “Sure. Maybe a few moments. We had laughs, Joe. When you stopped mooning over me long enough to fuck me proper, it was really good. But you had to make it something it wasn’t.”

“Which was what?”

“I dunno—something flowery. Something you can’t hold in your hand. We’re not God’s children, we’re not fairy-tale people in a book about true love. We live by night and dance fast so the grass can’t grow under our feet. That’s our creed.” She lit a cigarette and plucked a piece of tobacco off her tongue, gave it to the breeze. “You don’t think I know who you are now? You don’t think I’ve been wondering when you’d show up over here, among the natives? We’re free. No brothers or sisters or fathers. No Albert Whites. Just us. You want to come by? You have an open invitation.” She crossed the sidewalk to him. “We always had a lot of laughs. We could laugh now. Spend our lives in the tropics and count our money on satin sheets. Free as birds.”