What Loco knew about Celestino Reyes could be divided, roughly, into what he knew from direct observation and what he knew from the accumulated testimony of men who had reason to speak carefully and therefore could be trusted in proportion to how frightened they seemed when they spoke. The frightened testimony was, on balance, more reliable.
Reyes had come to Miami in 1962. He was among the second wave, not the first: not the men who left in the immediate chaos of the revolution, the wealthy and the connected who had seen it coming and moved their money before their bodies, but the men who had waited to see how things would settle and had found, after two years of watching, that things had settled in a direction incompatible with the lives they had been living. He had been, in Havana, a man of some commercial standing. Not a rich man exactly, but a man who understood the relationship between money and information and between information and power, and who had cultivated that understanding with the patient deliberate care of a gardener who knows the harvest is years away.
He had arrived in Miami with very little. Within ten years he had very much. This was, in the exile community of Little Havana, not unusual in itself. What was unusual was the specific character of how he had acquired it, which was not through the conventional channels of exile industry, the restaurants and the cigar shops and the law offices that formed the visible economy of the community, but through a parallel economy that used those visible structures as surfaces while operating, with great sophistication, beneath them.
La Palma opened in 1971. It served, then as now, excellent Cuban food. It had, then as now, more cash flowing through its accounts than could be explained by the number of tables and the price of the ropa vieja. The explanations it offered to anyone who looked were technically adequate and structurally impenetrable, which meant they had been constructed by someone who understood both the letter of how money is tracked and the spirit of how it is actually found when someone is looking for it, and had designed La Palma to satisfy the letter while defeating the spirit. This, Loco said, was the work of a man who had been doing it for a long time and had never made a careless error.
"Has he ever been looked at?" Cale asked.
"Twice. IRS in seventy-eight, Metro-Dade financial crimes in eighty-three. Both times they looked and both times they went away without anything they could use." Loco paused. "The eighty-three investigation lasted eleven months."
"Eleven months and nothing."
"Nothing they could prove. Which is different from nothing."
Cale turned this over. Outside the kitchen window the dog lay in the shade of the fence, its legs extended with the total relaxation of a creature that had never had a complicated thought about anything. He envied it, briefly.
"The Ramos brothers," he said.
"Rodrigo, Carlos, and Efrain. Rodrigo is the one who is dead. Carlos and Efrain are in Raiford on RICO charges from eighty-six, minimum twenty years each." Loco delivered these facts with the economy of a man reading from a ledger he had memorized. "Reyes financed their operation for three years starting in eighty-three. Distribution network out of Little Havana, crack and powder, servicing about a twelve-block radius. Profitable operation. Then the Ramos brothers made two mistakes."
"What were the mistakes."
"The first mistake was getting sloppy with the money. The second mistake was that when the DEA came, Rodrigo decided to solve the first problem by offering to solve the DEA's problem, which is to say he offered to give them Reyes in exchange for consideration." Loco paused again. "Rodrigo was shot in the parking lot of a Winn-Dixie in Hialeah six days after he made that offer."
Cale did not say anything. He thought about Rodrigo Ramos and the six days between the offer and the parking lot and what those six days had felt like from the inside, which was a particular kind of knowledge he had no desire to acquire from experience.
"How did Reyes know?" he said.
"That," Loco said, "is the question. The answer, as best I can understand it, is that Reyes has a relationship with someone inside the Metro-Dade financial crimes unit that is old enough and deep enough that when Rodrigo's name was mentioned in connection with a cooperation offer, Reyes knew about it before the paperwork was filed."
"He has someone inside Metro-Dade."
"He has someone. Whether it is inside Metro-Dade or adjacent to it or simply someone who knows someone, I cannot say with precision. What I can say is that a man who has been investigated twice and walked away clean both times is either extraordinarily careful or extraordinarily connected, and in my experience those two things tend to accompany each other."
Cale stood and went to the counter and poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot that sat there the way the shotgun sat there, as a fixture, as a thing that had always been part of the kitchen's ecology and would continue to be long after any particular human occupant had moved on. He drank it standing at the counter and thought about Edgar Matos and the conversation that had been scheduled and what the word scheduled meant when applied to a man like Edgar Matos visiting a man like King Mosely.
"King doesn't know any of this," he said.
"If King knew any of this he would not have borrowed the money in the first place."
"Or he would have been more careful about paying it back."
"Same thing, different words."
Cale set the cup down. He looked at Loco across the small kitchen with its slow fan and its accumulated heat and its smell of mangoes coming through the screen and he thought about what it meant to be the person who knew what King did not know, which was a kind of power he had not previously held in relation to the man who employed him. Small power. Preliminary power. The kind that could disappear in a night if it was used carelessly or too soon.
"When Edgar Matos has his conversation with King," Cale said slowly, "there are two outcomes. King pays or King doesn't pay."
"Yes."
"If King pays, where does he get the money."
"He doesn't have it. He has been skinning corners for four months trying to make the vig. He does not have two hundred thousand dollars."
"So he doesn't pay."
"He doesn't pay."
"Then what does Edgar Matos do."
Loco thought about this for a moment. Not because he did not know the answer but because he understood that the answer required a certain amount of care in the stating of it.
"Edgar Matos," he said at last, "in my understanding, does not administer violence directly. What Edgar Matos does is he makes a man understand, in terms that are not possible to misunderstand, the nature of what will happen next if the situation is not resolved. He establishes a timeline. He defines consequences. And then he leaves, and the consequences are administered by other people if the timeline is not met."
"Other people," Cale said.
"People whose names I do not know and whose faces I have not seen."
"But the operation continues."
"The corners continue. The corners always continue. The corners are not the problem. The corners are the asset. What changes is who is collecting from the corners and whose pockets the money goes into after it has been collected."
Cale was quiet. The fan turned. The dog shifted in its sleep. Somewhere far down the block a car horn sounded twice and then was absorbed back into the general noise of the afternoon.
"I want to know the timeline," he said. "Whatever Edgar Matos gives King. I want to know how many days."
"That I can find out."
"Good." He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. He thought for a moment about what else he needed and decided that what he needed was time, which was the one thing that could not be acquired by asking for it and had to be accumulated the slow way, day by day, the same way compound interest accumulated, the same way a man went from running packages to something else entirely: not in a single moment of decision but in the long unremarkable accumulation of small correct choices that nobody noticed until suddenly the pile was large enough to matter.
"Loco," he said.
"Yeah."
"You did good."
Loco said nothing to this. But the gap-toothed smile appeared briefly and without permission across his face before he put it away, and Cale saw it, and the seeing of it was enough.
He went out the back, into the alley that smelled of mangoes and motor oil, and he walked north toward whatever came next.