It started innocuously enough. A young man in his mid-thirties was sitting at the bar, talking to one of the working girls. The man didn’t seem the type to rely on hookers to find companionship. He was good-looking and well dressed, with dark brown hair and a sharp, intelligent face. She was clearly working him hard, and had been for more than an hour. Stone had seen them earlier, but noticed nothing unusual, at least not for a couple in the Kiss Club. He certainly hadn’t seen anything that would have suggested the volatile exchange at the bar.
Everything was fine for an hour or two. Finn continued to buy the young lady champagne cocktails as she leaned in toward him. The drinks were a small price to pay for the temporary illusion of companionship, and he found himself feeling a little better.
Then she put her hand on his thigh, and began rubbing higher and higher, dragging her fingernails across the fabric of his pants, grinding into him with her palm. Her face was just a few inches from his and her perfume was overpowering. It made him more light-headed than the alcohol. She whispered in his ear, “Let’s get out of here and go to your place.” As she whispered, her hand slipped fully up the inside of his thigh underneath the bar, and Finn felt himself tighten with desire.
For a moment he actually considered it. What would be the harm? He was a grown man, and the thought of human contact, even in its basest form, was undeniably appealing. No one could begrudge him the momentary escape.
He wouldn’t do it, though. Even as he felt his desire swell, he knew with an unavoidable certainty that to accept her offer would demean his pain.
He smiled sadly as he gripped her hand under the bar and pulled it away.
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” he said.
“Why?” she asked. “Are you married?”
He shook his head and almost laughed. “No,” he began.
“Because I don’t care,” she interrupted. “I’m not going to tell anyone. It can just be our little secret.”
Even in his drunkenness Finn realized that half of the woman’s appeal was her resemblance to Natalie. He was tempted again, but he bolstered his resolve and stood firm.
“No, I’m sorry, I just can’t.” He knew he’d never be able to explain it to her satisfaction, so he didn’t even try.
“What the fuck do you mean, you can’t?” She said it loudly, making Finn uncomfortable. He suspected that was her goal. “You’ve been sitting here for an hour and a half, buying me drinks and sending me signals, and now you decide you can’t?” Her eyes scanned the bar, looking for another potential mark, but it was late, and the place had cleared out. She realized the evening was going to be a total loss and she was livid. She leaned in again and grabbed him between the legs.
“Do you know how much men pay me for an hour and a half of my time?” she said through clenched teeth.
“Sadly, probably less than they pay me,” Finn joked. It was the wrong thing to say, but he was just trying to lighten the mood. Not amused, she gave a firm squeeze between his legs, pulling Finn’s testicles away from his body, inflicting gut-wrenching pain in a quick, merciless strike.
He was taken entirely by surprise. He’d imagined she might be somewhat annoyed when he turned her down, but he never expected the violence of the retribution. He reacted instinctively, swinging his arm at her wildly and catching her in the side of the face with the back of his hand. The blow sent her sprawling off the bar stool and onto the floor. As she fell she released her grip, allowing him to breathe again.
His relief was short-lived, as a wave of nausea swept through his lower abdomen and he doubled over. At the same time, he could see two mean-looking bouncers moving in toward him fast, practically drooling at the prospect of pummeling him.
“You fuckin’ faggot!” the girl was screaming. “I’ll rip your goddamned balls off!” She was struggling to her feet, but it wasn’t easy in the high-heeled shoes she was wearing. She looked like a mackerel flopping around on the barroom floor. At the same time, her hand was rubbing the growing welt under her eye.
“He fuckin’ hit me!” she screamed at the bouncers. “That fuckin’ faggot hit me because he couldn’t get it up!”
Finn looked at the two giants headed his way. It was clear they had no interest in getting at the truth. They’d already chosen to side with the hooker, who probably spent four or five nights a week in the bar, and might even work for the same people they did. Finn couldn’t blame them. If he’d seen a man strike a woman, he wouldn’t be in the mood for excuses, either. He was about to take a beating.
He was still doubled over when the first bouncer reached him. The man grabbed Finn by the collar and pulled him into a standing position. Finn watched as the giant pulled his arm back, aiming his huge fist at Finn’s chin in a controlled rage. Finn was powerless, and closed his eyes in anticipation of the blow.
“Hold up! Hold up!” Finn heard the yells and recognized the voice, though in the confusion of the moment he couldn’t place it. It was a thick Irish brogue with a deep baritone pitch.
“Wait a minute! I know this man! He’s all right!” the voice boomed. Finn could hear some additional yelling and a brief argument, but things were spinning out of control and he kept his eyes closed.
Then he felt himself being pulled by the collar. “I’ll take care of this,” the voice said, and Finn felt his shoulder being grabbed as he was steered out of the melee. His eyes were still closed and the nausea still permeated his abdomen as a giant hand shoved his head into the doorway and out into the street, where he crashed onto the sidewalk.
The entire altercation took less than two minutes, and then was seemingly forgotten in seconds. That was the way it worked in places like this, Stone knew. Although individual grudges could fester for decades, the collective memory was fleeting.
Only the girl was still at the bar, talking about the ruckus. The bartender had given her a bar rag filled with ice, and she was holding it against her cheek, cursing under her breath. One of the bouncers was looking at her with a critical eye, evaluating the damage.
“A little extra makeup and you should be able to work by Saturday night,” he concluded.
“You think I’m coming back here with the kind of bastards you let in?”
The bouncer laughed. “Yeah, I do.”
“Fuck you.”
“How much?”
“More than you can afford, asshole.”
She was tough, Stone had to give her that. She’d just gone a quick round with the guy at the bar and she was still shooting her mouth off to anyone who crossed her. But there was also something underneath the toughness. Something sad and desperate and familiar.
Familiar. That was most of it. There was something about the girl that stuck in his memory, like a phantom, just out of reach. Her shoulder-length blonde hair was tousled from the fight, and she radiated an energy, even in her acceptance of it all. He’d seen that energy before.
Suddenly she looked up and turned, staring straight at him. Her eyes were pale blue and full of intensity. Around her neck was a choker. Right then the memory fell into place.
Stone tossed some cash on the table and ran out the door, leaving Salandro behind. It was important he catch up to the man in the suit who’d attacked the girl. He’d gotten a good look at him, but he needed more: a name, an address, a license plate number— something that would allow him to check the guy out.
The street was empty. A light rain had come and gone, coating the neighborhood with a watery sparkle as the few lights in the adjacent buildings reflected off the bricks and the cars and the garbage piles. Stone looked up and down the block, half expecting some movement to give him a clue about which way the man in the suit had gone, but nothing happened. The rain hadn’t broken the humidity, but instead had added to it. The air was thick, and he could almost taste the city in the damp atmosphere; dark and old and secret.
“Damn,” he muttered to himself. The man was gone. Stone should have noticed him earlier—him and the girl. If he had, he would have paid closer attention to them at the bar. He would have anticipated something like this, and it might even have provided a break in the case. He should have noticed the resemblance earlier, but he hadn’t seen the girl’s eyes. The girl looked very much like Natalie Caldwell.
“W
HAT THE HELL
were you doing in there, Scotty?”
They were sitting at a small Formica table in Dynasty at the edge of Chinatown, waiting on a late-night dinner of fried rice and wontons. Finn was nursing his blossoming hangover as he looked across a sea of condiments at Tigh McCluen. He hadn’t changed in eight years, Finn noticed. No, make that twenty years.
He was huge, as he’d been since the days of their youth. Six foot four, with broad, rolling shoulders and thick, immovable legs, he’d always been a great boulder of a man. Eyes that twinkled with mischief regarded Finn from the center of a large, round face, and beneath a dark goatee his mouth was torqued into a wry smile.
“Nobody calls me Scotty anymore,” Finn corrected.
“Getting a little big for our britches, aren’t we, lad?” McCluen snapped back. He’d never bought into any of Finn’s “bullshite,” as he referred to it; not when they first met on the streets of Charlestown as children—an orphan and an immigrant making their way on the meanest streets in New England; not even when Finn successfully defended him against a manslaughter rap resulting from a bar brawl several years earlier. “Don’t you go forgetting where you came from, Scotty boy, or you’ll lose your soul. It doesn’t matter how nice your suits are.”
“Sorry,” Finn conceded. It was the least he could do after Tigh had saved him from the worst beating in years. “Thanks for pulling me out of there. I was in for a nasty time if you hadn’t come along.”
McCluen smiled. “Nothing compared to the old days, though, eh? And not that you wouldn’t have deserved it—hitting a fine lady like that. I should take you across my knee myself. Not even your wife and you’re raising your hand to her? Not exactly kosher, now, is it?”
Finn laughed. “What the hell would a Mick like you know from kosher?” Then he turned serious. “I told you, I didn’t mean to hit her, but she grabbed my balls and was trying to crush them. I was just trying to get her off of me. I must’ve looked like a schmuck.”
McCluen roared at that, his laughter drawing stares from several of the other late-night patrons at Dynasty. “Maybe you haven’t changed as much as I thought, Scotty! Why the hell was she trying to make a gelding out of you, anyway?”
“She found out I wasn’t a paying customer.”
“You weren’t looking for a free ride, I hope.”
“No, nothing like that. I just needed someone to talk to, but I didn’t want to pay for it.”
“Ah, the worst of all economic crimes.” McCluen was still chuckling as he regarded his old friend. He could see the bags under Finn’s eyes, and the paleness in his cheeks. He’d lost weight, too. McCluen leaned in across the table. “Looks like something else’s got you by the balls as well, hasn’t it? You look like a hundred and eighty pounds of cow shit. What is it, Scotty?”
Finn shook his head. “It’s nothing you can do anything about, Tigh. A good friend of mine was killed a couple of weeks ago. I’m having trouble picking myself up from it, that’s all. That’s why I was at the bar, I guess. She took me there once, and I thought that going back there might make me feel better somehow. I was wrong.”
“A woman? And she took you to the Kiss Club?” McCluen looked sympathetic but skeptical. “It’s not a place many respectable ladies frequent. She wasn’t working you, was she?”
“No, nothing like that.” Finn could still see the reservation in McCluen’s eyes. “The world has changed, you backward Irish Catholic dinosaur. Women are allowed to go to more than church socials now.”
“Well, I’ll give you one thing: the world has changed, and not for the better. Even the priests have been feeling their liberty a little too well these days.”
“I don’t think it’s their liberty they’re feeling, that’s the problem.”
“True enough, the sick bastards.” McCluen examined his friend again. The pain was obvious on his face, and there was a notion of defeat about him that concerned the big man. “If she was a friend of yours, Scotty, I’m sure she was every bit the lady. I’m sorry to hear of her passing, and for your sorrow. Is there anything I can do?”
“No, but thanks for the offer.”
“Look, Scotty, I don’t forget my friends, particularly my old friends. If it wasn’t for you I’d be sitting on my arse in a tin can up at Walpole for that manslaughter rap they had me on. More than that, we go back to the first day I stepped off the boat. If there’s anything I can do, I want you to be straight with me.”
“No, really. If there was anything, I’d let you know.”
McCluen continued to regard Finn for a moment or two, then shrugged. “All right, then,” he said. He took out a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote on it, handing it to Finn. “That there is the number for my mobile. I don’t give that out to many people, so keep it to yourself, but if you ever need anything the phone’s always on.”
Finn frowned. “What are you doing these days that you need a cell phone on around the clock?”
“Now why would a nice, respectable barrister like yourself want to know the answer to a question like that?” McCluen raised his eyebrows.
Finn nodded. “You’re right, I don’t want to know. Forget I asked.”
“It’s forgotten.”
They sat in silence for a minute or two; just two old friends from a tough neighborhood who knew when nothing needed to be said. Then McCluen raised his half-empty glass of beer in a toast.
“Ná feic a bhfeicir; is ná clois a gcloisir. Is má fiafraítear díot, abair ná feadrais.”
“That’s quite a mouthful. What is it?”
“An old Irish proverb.”
“Sounds pretty. What does it mean?”
“Don’t see what you see; don’t hear what you hear. And if you’re asked, say you don’t know.”
“Words to live by from the motherland?”
“As applicable in the new world as they were in the old, Scotty. Sometimes I think more so.”