The Four Corners Of The Sky (39 page)

“Open the case.” She placed it exactly between them.

Each of them clicked a sidelock at the same time and the latches flew up. Inside the case, padded with gray Styrofoam, wrapped tightly in green velvet strips of cloth, was a rounded object, cubic at its base, a foot and a half long. Slowly, holding his breath, Raffy unraveled it. His sigh blew upward, like leaves rustling high in the air. “
Madre de dios. Es la Reina!
”

Even in silver moonlight, the Queen of the Sea was gold. Gold from the tips of her slippers to the points of her crown. She wore a broad cape that was gleaming with gold and with the sparkle of the few small rubies and emeralds and sapphires that were still intact in its borders. Most of the casings were, however, empty. Her crown was a spray of gold rods that Raffy gently loosened from her face. The rods spread into a sunburst, each tip capped with a rectangular frame of gold. These larger casings were also empty.

Holding the statue up so its golden surface glowed in the lamplight, Raffy whispered, “
Buena
…”

Impressed, despite herself, Annie nodded. “It looks real.”

The eyeless silver baby in the crook of Mary’s arm wore a crown too, but a crown of silver thorns. On the mother’s breast a little silver door opened into her heart cavity. The cavity, a 3-inch cube, was silver and was empty. “Inside here—” Raffy touched his fingers to the cavity, “was the heart of the Queen. Your papa gave it to me to give to my mother.”

“The ruby?”

“More precious. The Thorn.” Raffy cradled the Queen in his arms, rocking her softly. “When the Immortal Bard told us, ‘All that glitters is not gold,’ he couldn’t have been more monumentally in complete and absolute error.”

Annie held out her hand. “Give me back those emeralds.”

Raffy pulled the gems from his pocket. She took one of them. It was, he told her, an emerald of at least forty carats. She held it against one unfilled rectangle at the tip of the gold rods, then she moved it to next, then to the next. The holes were all too large for it, except for the last one, near the statue’s right ear. The emerald fit perfectly into the smallest setting on the crown of
La Reina Coronada del Mar.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Annie.”

She touched the queen’s golden smile. “And in the sea too, apparently. At least we’re supposed to think so.” Annie placed the two other emeralds into the casings that fit them.

The Cuban brushed his hand against the thin gold rods so that they quivered. “It isn’t that thinking makes it so but thinking opens your eyes to see what is otherwise in your blind spot.” He hunched his thin shoulders. “At least in my opinion.”

All the way back up to her room, they argued about what to do next with the Queen. Annie wanted to turn over the statue to Daniel Hart immediately, in exchange for his help in resolving her father’s troubles with the police. Raffy wanted to take the relic to show Jack. Exhausted, she finally agreed. They’d go in the morning. She asked Rook to leave so she could get to sleep. With a blush, he declined. With apologies, he couldn’t leave the Queen and if she wouldn’t give it to him—

“I won’t,” she agreed.

“Then I must stay.” He made a short bow.

“Fine,” she told him. “Sleep on my floor then.”

“Floor? This is a carpet. This is comfort.” He ran his hand in the soft plush. “When I was in the cell in Cuba with your papa? Now that was a floor to sleep on. Hard, cold stone. Like the hearts of policemen.”

Raffy lay down propped against the door of her hotel room with Malpy in his arms. Suspicious that he would steal the courier case, she locked it inside her duffel bag and tied the bag under the bed.

They rested a while, but then Raffy complained he was hungry so they returned to the restaurant, where over a late meal, he continued to argue his opinion that Sergeant Hart was absolutely 100 percent not to be relied on, despite his good looks, which had clearly blinded Annie. Without a blink, Hart would throw Jack and Raffy (and Annie) in jail for so long that they’d drown in their cells when global warming flooded Miami. Instead of giving up the Queen, Annie should honor her father’s dying wish by going to Havana to collect the gems from the bank where Raffy’s second cousin was first assistant manager. Putting those gems back in the Queen’s crown would save her father’s last days, because if Jack did not quickly pay off his debts to Feliz Diaz, his life was not worth a
zuzu
.

“What debts to Feliz Diaz? Is that why Diaz is looking for my dad?”

“Pretty much. Jack took an advance payment from Diaz on the Queen, sort of. Seven-card-stud.”

Annie asked how much he’d lost.

“Considerable,” admitted Raffy. “I am not party to the specifics.” As for Raffy himself, a single emerald from the crown would be ample reward. The Queen was Jack’s discovery and Jack deserved the reward for it. Raffy was only a minor player, a brief shadow, dust.

After they went back up to the hotel room, Annie put the courier case under her pillow, like, she thought, a tooth for the tooth fairy. And she hadn’t believed in that either.

She gave Raffy a pillow and a blanket. There was a strange peacefulness for her in his lying there by the door, with Malpy’s chin resting on his shoulder. The shadowy room was quiet.

“Raffy?…You’ve been a good friend to my dad.”

But the Cuban was asleep, softly snoring.

V
ery early in the morning, at the oval track of the legendary Hialeah Racetrack, Annie and Raffy watched pink long-necked flamingos twist and strut at the pond’s edge. The birds were the same lurid color as the flamingos on Raffy’s shirt.

There were no races at Hialeah in the heat of July. The birds were the only crowd at this time of year, hundreds of them flying low over the infield, turning the sky a gaudier rose. Raffy explained that he preferred Hialeah in the off-season, without the thundering of remorseless horses galloping away with his money, as had happened all too often in his old drinking days when gambling had also been a personal problem. He no longer believed in chance, only in destiny.

Annie was feeling a little guilty. She had secretly left a message on Daniel Hart’s office phone, informing him that she had the so-called
La Reina Coronada del Mar
in her possession and that she was heading to Hialeah Racetrack with Rafael Rook, who was claiming he’d hidden artifacts there belonging to the relic. That at 9 a.m., the two of them would be meeting her father and his alleged doctor at Golden Days. Last offer: She would trade Daniel Hart the Queen for the promise of a deal to get Jack’s immunity from prosecution.

As usual, the Miami detective hadn’t answered his phone, nor had he called back, nor had he, so far, shown up here at the track. She kept glancing at the entrance at the clubhouse chateau, hoping he would.

Raffy had brought her to Hialeah to retrieve “the Queen’s heart,” which he had buried here, although he seemed to be having trouble remembering exactly where. Late one night he’d “left his heart at the track.” He admitted he might have been close to delirium tremens at the time.

As he searched the grounds for some landmark to give him his bearings, she had to admit it was pleasant to be outdoors in the early morning breeze, walking along the lush green oval on mazy lanes lined with tropical flowers. No one was around but a slow-moving groundskeeper who was raking a gravel path near the track.

Raffy suddenly whispered (not that there was anyone to overhear them) that it was all coming back to him; he remembered where to dig (two posts from the finish line) and would do so as soon as the groundskeeper left. He meant “dig” literally, for he pulled a small trowel from a knapsack. He said he had buried the “heart” as a way of keeping it safe from “a bunch of ‘smiling damned villains,’ which included the rotten Miami cops. When Annie saw this treasure, Raffy vowed, she would also see the kind of man her father was.

“I know the kind of man he is,” she said. “He’s a crook. That’s a fact.”

“Facts have nothing to do with this. Let me tell you a little more about the man I knew.”

“No, don’t. Just go use your trowel.”

“Not till that groundskeeper leaves; they don’t like you to dig up the track.” Raffy pulled Annie down beside him on seats in the front boxes facing the finish line and offered her a bottle of water from his knapsack. “You like water? I never did. But now? It’s my honest preference.”

Back in the day, Raffy began, he had hung out here at the track every afternoon; it was his fascination with possibility—which horse was going to win which race—that had sadly led to his loss of his girlfriend, his house, and his car. Betting on the horses proved a worse way to earn a living even than a jazz band.

So, just as it had been Raffy’s preordained destiny that any horse on which he’d placed his entire life savings would inevitably finish dead last, despite the fact that the jockey (his cousin’s husband) had often sworn the winner was a done deal, when it wasn’t, so it had been his destiny to meet Jack Peregrine. “Jack’s name was Eddie Fettermann when I met him.” The slender man shrugged. “But what’s in a name?”

“Apparently not much,” agreed Annie. So, what cheap con had her dad been up to in Miami when Raffy had first come across him?

“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 musicians ordinarily out of his league, but the regular guitarist had broken his arm water-skiing and Raffy’s father’s sister was the band’s accountant so he’d gotten the gig.

“I notice your papa as the gentleman I met at Hialeah; he walks right up wearing this creamy linen suit with a creamy rosebud in his lapel, and he says hello to me, and then he tells us, I mean the Tropigala band, he wants us to play this particular tango. So Omar, Omar Ordonez, our bandleader, plays it. Slow Argentine tango. So at the best table in the place that night is this woman, sitting there between two ex-big-shots from Cuba, friends of Batista, one in the Church and one in crime. Both making money, we could say, from the sins of the flesh, not to mention the heart’s sad aspirations. The churchman is Archbishop de Uloa.”

“The other is Feliz Diaz?”

“Yes.” Raffy went on to describe Diaz, with a keen dislike, as a man of political influence in Miami, whose criminal interests were protected by the powerful and paid for by the hopeless who bought the drugs, hookers, and numbers rackets that he sold. “Castro is on my primo shit list, but kicking Diaz out of Havana showed excellent judgment on Castro’s part.”