The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [134]
“Cheap?” He waggled his cigarillo at her. “What you need to know about Jack? For a while, Miami had flatlined.” He waved a full circle to encompass the city, let his arm plummet. “Morgue-dead. The Mother of God—for my own mother’s sake, may She even exist—couldn’t resurrect Miami.” He raised his arms to the sky. “Your dad shows up one night and the lights come on. I mean, not literally that night but it’s a simile. Or litotes?”
She watched the flamingos turn from one direction to the other, like a ballet of indecision. “Okay, Raffy. And this meeting took place how long before the two of you ended up reciting Shakespeare together in a Cuban prison?”
“Years.” The thin man tightened his ponytail, raised his bony shoulders. “But in fact, there was a causality.” He said the next words as you might whisper a potent and malevolent hex. “Your papa met Feliz Diaz.”
Annie shrugged. “So?”
“Diaz! The Jefe, the banker. El Padrino. Your papa somehow ended up owing him, oh, two hundred thousand dollars. Flushes and straights, your papa couldn’t resist them.”
Annie’s heart sank. “My father owes a professional gambler two hundred thousand dollars?” That was the size of her IRA account.
“Two hundred. Maybe three hundred.” Raffy shook out water from his bottle as if he were a priest blessing a church. “Diaz is a gambler like the Garcias and José Battle are gamblers. They own the whole bolita. Men like that, like Diaz, they have the cash. And your papa, he has no cash, to tell you the truth. You heard of the Corporation? You do not want to owe them.”
“Like a Mafia? He owes them two hundred thousand?”
“Maybe three. Your papa is not a crook; he’s a performance artist. But anyhow, Diaz heard about the Queen from your papa, and he wants it, and he sets the debt as an advance on what he will pay for the Queen. And he will pay a lot.”
Annie got the picture. “All right, all right, Raffy. I’m going to assume, conclude, believe, pretend, hope, this Inca statue is real. This criminal wants it. Give it to him and let him cancel the debt and stop sending his goons after Dad. If my father’s as ill as he looks, getting punched out in St. Louis and kicked to the curb in Miami isn’t so good for him.”
Annie’s cell phone rang. It was Chamayra at Golden Days, wanting to speak to Raffy. Annie handed him her phone with a wry grimace. “Is there anybody who hasn’t been given my cell number?”
The news from Chamayra was not good. Thanks to the scene Annie and Raffy had caused yesterday when they’d left Golden Days pursued by the police, Ms. Skippings, the administrator, was on the warpath. Such suspicion had fallen on Chamayra that she couldn’t risk their return to the center today at all; tomorrow morning she could manage things maybe, so they had to just sit tight till tomorrow. Meanwhile, Jack, aka Ronny Buchstabe, would be fine, as long as he too kept a low profile and didn’t leave his room. In fact, the rest would do him good.
Annie took the news of the imposed delay reasonably well because secretly she planned to send Daniel Hart over to Golden Days today anyhow, as soon as she could reach him, to arrest her father for his own good. In fact, as soon as they left the racetrack, she was going to Miami Police Headquarters to track Hart down. So she was able to tell herself, “Take a breath, just wait.” Sipping water, watching the flamingos, she kept an eye on the groundskeeper and let Raffy go on with his stories.
Raffy said that the first time he had seen Jack Peregrine had been at Hialeah, when Jack had given him a long-shot tip with such confidence that he’d put $100 on it and come away with $890; he’d gotten his guitar out of hock, taken his girlfriend out for a fancy dinner, and decided that Jack (or Eddie, as he called him) was “entirely illuminated with magic.”
And as if by magic they met again. Jack walked into the Club Tropigala at the Fontainebleau on a night when Raffy was playing guitar with the rumba band there; these were