Bobby Raines lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Hialeah that smelled of sawdust and cheap coffee and the particular kind of loneliness that is not sad exactly but merely descriptive, the loneliness of a man who has organized his life around the absence of complication and found the arrangement largely satisfactory. He had a pickup truck with a cracked rear window he had been meaning to replace for two years. He had a job with a concrete company that put him on sites across Miami-Dade five days a week and left him with enough money to pay his rent and eat adequately and send thirty dollars home to his mother in Georgia at Christmas, which was the full extent of his philanthropic ambition. He was twenty-eight years old and he looked forty and he did not appear to find this troubling.
Cale went to see him on a Thursday evening, which was Bobby's night for doing nothing in particular, a ritual Bobby observed with the same fidelity other men brought to church. He knocked and Bobby opened the door in a white undershirt with a beer in his hand and looked at Cale with the expression of a man who is not surprised to see someone he has been vaguely expecting and somewhat hoping would not come.
"Cale," he said.
"Bobby."
Bobby stepped back and Cale went inside. The apartment had a couch the color of dried grass and a television and a folding table with two chairs and on the table a plate of rice and chicken that Bobby had clearly just been eating. There were no pictures on the walls. There was a calendar from a lumber supply company hanging by the kitchen and a single photograph on the windowsill of Bobby and Cale's uncle Raymond, who was dead, standing in front of a truck at what appeared to be a quarry.
"You eaten?" Bobby said.
"I'm fine."
"I got plenty."
"I said I'm fine, Bobby."
Bobby settled himself back into the chair in front of the folding table and picked up his fork and looked at his food with the philosophical resignation of a man who has accepted that this meal will now be eaten in company whether he wanted company or not. Cale sat on the couch.
Bobby ate. Cale watched him eat. Outside, the Hialeah evening made its usual sounds: traffic on the boulevard, someone's radio two units over playing something with a lot of brass in it, a dog making a complaint about something that did not appear to be resolving itself.
"You need something," Bobby said. Not a question.
"I need to ask you something."
"That's different from needing something how, exactly."
"I just want to know something. About a place."
Bobby set his fork down and looked at Cale with the particular quality of attention he deployed when Cale said things that were, on their face, innocuous but in their texture something else. Bobby Raines was not a smart man in any formal sense, had not finished high school, could not have told you the capital of France or the name of the current Secretary of State, but he had a native and nearly infallible instinct for the shape of things beneath the surface of things, an instinct that had served him adequately in the trades and less adequately in his personal life and that he deployed now with the wariness of a man who has learned that certain questions from certain people are not really questions.
"What place," he said.
"La Palma. On Calle Ocho."
Bobby picked up his fork again. He speared a piece of chicken and ate it and chewed it and swallowed it and took a drink of his beer before he spoke.
"That's a restaurant," he said.
"I know it's a restaurant. I want to know what else it is."
"Why would I know what else it is."
"Because you worked a loading dock at the port for eight months in eighty-five and eighty-six and the port is where things come in and the people who move things through the port know who owns what in this city and what those things are used for."
Bobby looked at him steadily. Outside the dog had stopped complaining. The brass music continued.
"I poured concrete," Bobby said. "I don't know anything about any restaurant."
"Bobby."
"I'm serious, Cale. I poured concrete, I drove a forklift, I didn't ask questions about anybody's business because that is how a man in my position stays employed and stays healthy and goes home at the end of the day."
"I'm not asking you to testify. I'm asking you to tell me what you heard."
A long pause. Bobby finished his chicken. He set the fork down again with the precision of a man placing a tool back in its bracket, a man who has learned over the years that the putting away of things is at least as important as the using of them.
"The man who owns that restaurant," Bobby said at last, and his voice had changed quality, had taken on the particular flatness of a man choosing each word from a very limited and very carefully considered selection, "is a man that certain people at the port were careful about. Not afraid of, exactly. Careful about. The way you are careful about a piece of equipment that works correctly and reliably right up until it does not, and when it does not, it takes your hand off."
Cale said nothing. He let the silence do its work.
"I heard his name twice in eight months," Bobby said. "The first time was from a man who said it in passing and then looked like he wished he hadn't. The second time was from a foreman who said, and I am remembering this clearly because of the way he said it, that the man owned the port the same way God owned the weather. Meaning he didn't need to be there. Meaning the fact of him was sufficient."
"The fact of him was sufficient," Cale repeated.
"That's what he said."
"Did anyone tell you anything specific? About the restaurant?"
"I was told once, by a man I trusted, that if I ever found myself in a position where I owed money to Celestino Reyes, I should treat that as an emergency of the same order as a house fire." Bobby looked at Cale steadily across the folding table and the remnants of his dinner. "Which is the full extent of what I know and the full extent of what I am willing to say."
Cale nodded once. He looked at the photograph on the windowsill, Uncle Raymond squinting into a quarry sun, a man who had also died too young of causes that were not dramatic but merely relentless, the way most men in their family died.
"How's work," he said.
"Fine," Bobby said. "How's your work."
"Fine," Cale said.
They sat with the mutual and comfortable dishonesty of two men from the same place who understood that certain questions were rituals of connection rather than requests for information, and that the connection was what mattered, and that the information, whatever it was, would continue to be what it was regardless of whether they spoke of it.
Cale left an hour later. He drove back toward Liberty City through the Miami night, past the lit gas stations and the dark lots and the palm trees that stood along the boulevard like men who had been waiting there a long time and had achieved a kind of patience about it that was beyond patience, that was simply the condition of being rooted in a place where the weather rarely killed you.
He thought about what Bobby had said. Not the information itself, which confirmed things he already knew and added one texture he had not had: the weight of Reyes's name in the mouths of working men. That was different from the weight of a name in the mouths of people who were in the life. Working men were not performing anything when they said a name carefully. They were reporting a fact about the world.
The fact of him was sufficient.
He filed it in the account. The account that had no name yet. The account that was beginning, very slowly and without fanfare, to approach the size where a name would be necessary.