The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [136]
Her eyebrow went up. “Miami’s urban revival is due to my father’s doing the tango with a criminal’s girlfriend? I don’t think so.”
Impatiently, the small rumpled man shook his finger at her. “It felt like it. Listen to me. That’s Jack’s gift. To make you feel it. He was an artist,” he said, stretching out the word artist with his slender arms.
Annie, taken aback by his intensity, sidestepped into sarcasm. “Right, sure, an artist. The ‘confidence art.’ I’ve heard the line.”
He sighed, frustrated by his inability to make the young woman appreciate her father’s talents. “For a while I was his gardener, you know, gardener? Lay the groundwork with a mark? He was the best I ever saw.”
Raffy kept trying to paint a picture of Annie’s father as a sort of a racketeering Robin Hood, who only swindled the already corrupt; who lived daily life as a performance art of social skill and psychological ‘freedom’: “He would make bets how long he could live like a king without touching a cent. No bad plastic or bouncing checks either, though nobody could pass a check like your dad. He’d go weeks without a penny. Nicest restaurants in town, crowded, he’d slip in, dine for free, slip out. Never paid a cent. Best hotel, find an empty suite, put on his tux, drift down to the ballrooms, join weddings, bar mitzvahs, sit at their tables, always the life of the party, never saw the people before or since, but enjoyed their hospitality so much they loved him. You think your father did it to save a penny? He did it for art. Some days I would just follow him up and down the streets of Miami.”
Annie drank from the bottled water. “Sort of like Ratso in Midnight Cowboy?”
“I don’t follow you, I apologize.” Raffy didn’t appear to be much of a moviegoer. “I’m trying to say, he was in that league, with Lustig, Mike Romanoff, Serge Rubenstein.”
Annie registered the fact that Raffy kept saying of her father, “He was an artist.” “He was in that league”—not is, but was. She asked him if he was implying that Jack was, in fact, so critically ill that his life was effectively over?
His response was oblique. “Know what he said when I pulled him up from the curb? ‘I will be a bridegroom in my death, and run into’t as to a lover’s bed.’ Annie, he always had the right quote. He wants to die with this one last thing of beauty. He wants to leave you a million dollars. On the other hand, I would like a small share.”
She scoffed. “In the first place, he doesn’t have a million dollars. In the second, I don’t want a million dollars.”
“Good.” The Cuban smiled. “Then give it to me.”
At this moment the groundskeeper finally shouldered his rake and made his way to the exit. Raffy watched the man shuffle toward his truck, where he sat for a long while before driving slowly away. “They must pay him by the hour,” the Cuban muttered.
He hurried Annie over to a white fence post at the final turn in the track and began pacing out a distance, one foot carefully positioned in front of the other. When he had counted ten feet, he stopped, made a quick right turn and paced some more.
Annie stood, watching him fall to his knees and dig with his trowel. Was Rafael Rook practicing con art, or was he one of her dad’s victims?
When she was a child, her father had told her the same stories about “the great con artists” and how their victims were never the pure of heart. One of his favorite “artists” was the fake Count Lustig who had sold the Eiffel Tower to suckers and had also peddled “green grocery machines” that supposedly could turn one-dollar bills into twenties. Hundreds of larcenous innocents had bought these machines from Lustig for as much as forty thousand dollars each; even the sheriff who’d arrested him had bought one.
Annie wondered