We Were Kings (14 page)

Dante moved toward the door.

“I just want you to know that she wants to have her own child with me. As a matter of fact, she wants her own life with me. So make it easy for yourself and let's not sling mud at each other anymore. We could be brothers real soon. Keep it in the family, as they say. I won't say a thing. Won't say one fucking thing, you remember that and we'll be okay.”

“Listen, scumbag,” Dante said before turning the lock and opening the door. “You keep Claudia away at night when she's supposed to be watching Maria, I'll come find you. Don't think I won't.”

“You call that a threat? A real tough guy…”

Dante slammed the door. A panel of glass rattled in the pane and then slid from its hold, shattering on the sidewalk. On the stoop of the neighboring building, the three men stood up and stared him down as he passed, waiting for him to turn around so that they could start something. He kept on walking. They cursed him in Italian. Dante heard the words
vigliacco
and
figa,
but calling him a coward and a cunt wouldn't make him pissed enough to get into a fight. All that bad energy, all that anger—it was brewing up inside him, but he knew it was best to take a deep breath and save it for later. The violent world that Cal knew so well had finally found him, was pulling him in whether he liked it or not, and he decided that starting now, no matter where he went, no matter what time of day, he would carry a gun.

_________________________

Griffin's, Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester

THE CEILING FANS
had stopped and the beer was more froth than liquid. Dante and Cal were back on the Avenue to help Owen, sitting at a bar during a noonday blackout in one of the workingman Irish pubs along the Avenue, listening to the men about them cursing the electrical outage and the heat and trying to get a sense of this part of the city again, one that they knew but to a large extent one that was also completely unfamiliar. The bar was almost all Irish FOBs, even though it was run by a Ukrainian whom everyone called Dommo.

There were a few Irish Americans at this time of day, an old-timer who Cal often saw at the bathhouses pushing a mop across the floor or handling the towels, and a young fellow Cal recognized as the last of the Kinneallys, Pauli Kinneally, the twins' youngest brother, sitting by himself on the stool closest to the door. He'd always been a decent kid, the one who'd managed to stay untouched by his brothers' criminal activities; everyone knew he wasn't made from the same stuff, which, to Cal's thinking, was a good thing. He'd gone into the trades, working as a plasterer's apprentice, and now, after getting married and having a child, he had bought a van and had his own small business going. He was listening to the horse races on the portable tube radio above that end of the bar and scribbling in the race section of the
Herald
.

Cal wondered briefly how hard the death of his brothers had been on him, and on his mother, Bridie Kinneally, who was still alive, but he didn't know the kid well enough to say hello or
I'm sorry for your loss, I'm sorry I had to kill your scumbag brothers three years ago.

It was an odd feeling to share the same space with the family member of someone you'd killed or had a part in killing, but he never allowed himself to consider it too deeply. It was akin to the way he'd felt when, as a cop, he'd arrested someone for hard crimes, helped put him away for a long time—in a way, a sort of death—and then seen a wife or sister on the streets or a brother or uncle in a bar. Dorchester was such a large part of the small city that it was difficult to return home and not be surrounded by it. Lynne knew that, and it was for that reason she had wanted them to leave.

He'd felt the same way when they'd shipped him stateside after his hospital stay in Verdun and he'd been reunited with some of the men from his old platoon. They shared a common grief for lost friends and comrades, men they had witnessed die in horrible ways, but each of them also experienced a particular and singular shame at being alive and that shame, instead of creating a bond between them, produced a distinct estrangement. He looked at Pauli circling the horses as the next race began on the radio. He was a good kid, Cal thought, and had deserved better, but at least he'd been fortunate enough to escape the violence that had been the ruin of his brothers.

“How you doing, kid?” Dommo called to him. “Any luck?”

The kid smiled at him and raised his hands in defeat. “I never have any luck with the ponies, Dommo, and besides, my wife hates it.”

“Ahh, every man have a vice, otherwise is not a man. I no trust a man who say he have no vice—either he afraid of living or he bullshitting you. He has vice but he just no tell you, he hide it away.”

The radio had just announced the fourth race from Saratoga when the bar's door opened. Cal glanced up, aware of the shifting heat in the room and the sound of honking horns on the Avenue. He registered that it was Pat Nash, John Jo Nash's son, a no-good who was mostly seen with one of the Fitzpatricks, small-timers trying to claim some ground in the city and who were at odds with the Walshes and the McDonaghs, old pals of Blackie's. The boy, no more than seventeen, approached the bar and raised his hand as if to order a drink, and Cal saw much too late that in it was a gun. Pauli was looking at the newspaper when the boy shot him in the head point-blank and then sprinted out the door. Pauli fell hard from the stool and struck the floor. “Jesus Christ,” Dante said and they both raced to the front of the bar.

“Call for an ambulance,” someone shouted, “call for the cops!” but Dommo was wailing and wringing the dishrag over his head. Blood spatter spotted his right cheek.

“I can't!” he cried. “The phones aren't working.”

“Shit!” one of the men said and ran out onto the Avenue for help.

Cal knelt by the body, checked for a pulse. It was there, but weak. He took off his shirt, and Dante helped him position the kid's head so that they could hold the shirt against the wound on the left side of the skull, where the bullet had exited. The other men crowded around. They looked at the kid's pale face; his eyes were closed and it seemed as if he were sleeping. Blood trickled from the hole at his right temple, and Cal tried to stanch that as well.

They stayed at Pauli's side and watched as he bled; the shirt became sodden and dark. Sweat shone on their foreheads. It trickled into Cal's eyes and stung. He blinked but refused to let go of the kid. Someone propped open the door, and a slight breeze turned the pages of the newspaper on the bar. Cal felt the kid's pulse grow slower, and then, almost imperceptibly, it was gone and he let go of him and stood. His undershirt clung to him, soaked with sweat and blood.

By the time two beat cops and the ambulance arrived, the kid was already cold, cold in the way that only the dead can be, even in the heat of summer. None of the men looked at one another. Dommo sat with his head in his hands at the bar, his shoulders shaking softly. The bar rag lay on the countertop beside him, bloodied from where he'd tried to wipe up the spray from the gun blast.

Dante sat heavily on a stool and Cal sat beside him.

“Shit,” Dante said. “This is too much.”

Cal nodded and watched as the ambulance attendants put the body on a stretcher, covered it with a sheet, and carried it out the door. The cops took all the info they needed from some of the patrons and stood in the corner waiting for the homicide detective to arrive. Cal stared at the spot on the floor where the kid had fallen, at his bloody shirt, which the attendants had left there. The announcer on the radio called the results from the last race of the day at Saratoga and one of the men somehow thought looking at Pauli's newspaper was a good idea. After a moment scanning it, he said: “The kid's got the winning horse circled. Wild Colonial Boy. The fucking kid won in the fourth, sixty-four-to-one odds. A real fucking payout.”

Dommo thumped the bar in anger and then wailed some more. Tears streaked his face. “No, the kid never make money bets, he just listen to the races, see if he could guess the winners. He never have no luck at it.”

That's right, Cal thought, the iron-rich smell of blood on his undershirt and still strong in his nostrils. The kid hadn't been lucky, he hadn't been fortunate, and he hadn't escaped after all.

_________________________

Angel of Mercy Nursing Home, Fields Corner, Dorchester

SULLIVAN, THE OLD
gangster, was sitting up in his bed and staring out the window when Cal and Dante came in. An oscillating metal fan ratcheted back and forth, pushing feebly at the air, stirring the tops of newspapers laid out on a reading table. Shaw was in a chair at the other side of the room, sucking on a lozenge and reading a dog-eared pulp novel. He glanced up, gestured with his head toward Sullivan, and held a finger to his lips, and Cal and Dante took it as a cue to wait.

The old man looked like an old man; the flesh about his once-strong jaw sagged, and there was a gray pallor to his skin, the color Cal had seen on dead men or men in shock during the war. Sully's hair, once a fiery bush of red, was a sickly, yellow-tinged white—discolored from the nicotine of cigarettes. One smoldered in a tin ashtray on his bedside table. On the peeling plaster wall above Sully's head, a small wooden crucifix hung. It was the type with the mother-of-pearl inlay that had been treated with luminescent resin so that the figure glowed in the dark, keeping watch over him as he slept. It was sold by the foreign-mission headquarters of the Society of the Divine Savior and in the early 1940s you could buy a carton of them on the Avenue for two dollars—Cal's parents had had a similar one over their bed.

A large blond-wood Raytheon console television had been dragged into the room, presumably at Sully's request, and on its wavy screen was the hydrogen-bomb explosion at Bikini Atoll from back in March, a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that ended the war. Cal watched the detonation beneath the waves and the huge funnel of water, dwarfing the surrounding fleet of destroyers and frigates, and its massive, mushrooming head expanding outward, rising to the heavens. But Sully wasn't watching the screen.

Cal tried to see what Sully was seeing and followed his gaze. He saw a stretch of thin grass, a row of juniper bushes burned brown by the sun, the roofs of parked cars upon which the sun glinted harshly, and then, down the hill of Mount Bowdoin and past Ronan Park, the shopping district, the Supreme Foodmart, the library, the post office, and the Fields Corner trolley, which rattled along the overpass rails, bisecting the horizon.

“I remember when I was young,” Sullivan said, as if to himself, “playing ball at Ronan Park. We beat every other team in Boston. I played right field because of my arm. It was a cannon, my arm. Could take out a runner stealing home straight from deep right, no hop. They said I could have made it in the majors.”

He turned, and his eyes were surprisingly blue and bright, the lower lids damp from weeping. He blinked—his eyes adjusting from light to shadow—reached across to the bedside table, pulled a tissue from a box, and wiped at them self-consciously.

“The mick and the wop,” he said, shaking his head. “Haven't ever known it any other way, and now it's just the same, even after all these years. You boys make me laugh.”

“Hello, Sully,” Cal said, and smiled. “Thanks for meeting with us.”

“Ahh,” the old man said and he waved the comment away, pulled himself farther up in bed, and straightened the yellowed sheets about him. “Your request for an invite was a show of respect. You didn't have to do it. Hardly anyone does these days. For most of the people out there, I've been dead for years.”

“That's not true,” Dante said. “They might want it that way, but everyone still knows you're the one in charge.”

Sully looked at him, squinting in the dim light of the room. He picked up the smoldering cigarette and drew on it thoughtfully, pensively. When he was done, he lay it back in the tray. “They say I'm mad.”

Shaw chuckled from the corner, the lozenge rattling against his teeth as he moved it around in his mouth.

“What the hell are you laughing about?” Sully said.

“You
are
mad, boss, fucking loony most of the time. You've been mad your entire life.”

Sully shook his head. “See the shit I have to put up with? The only thing I get to look forward to these days is clean sheets and a regular bowel movement. The rest of the time I'm stuck listening to this fool.”

Cal took a chair from the reading table and pulled it close to the bed, and Dante did the same. Cal noted the scent of disinfectant bristling sharply in his nostrils, but underneath that another odor: soiled linens and unwashed bedpans, urine and vomit and feces. The smell was embedded in the blankets, the wallpaper, the sheets, the carpeting. He'd noticed it as they'd walked through the hallway and it had stayed with him and magnified his sense of unease, his dislike of such places where sickness had become palpable, as much a part of the building as the bricks and mortar, and the patients and nurses and doctors and nuns who wearily trudged the halls had resigned themselves to it. It reminded him of the institution where his father had spent the last two years of his life.

“When was the last time you got out?” Dante said.

“Before this fucking heat began, the beginning of the summer.”

“We can take you out, if you'd like.” Dante glanced at the wheelchair folded by the door.

“No, if I can't walk on my own, I don't need those fuckers seeing me in a wheelchair. I won't give them the satisfaction.”

There were many things that could have been said—a shared history of death and murder and blood spilled during one of the worst winters in Boston's history. Until this moment, Cal could almost have convinced himself those things had never happened, but they had, and look at where they were now. It was hard to believe that only three years had passed. Sully was looking at the both of them, and Cal knew that the same thoughts were running through his mind. A narrow vessel at Sully's right temple pulsed dully; his eyes seemed to be the only color in his face.

“Terrible business that,” Sully said, acknowledging what hadn't been spoken, and he picked up his pack of cigarettes, took his time lighting one. Shaw turned the page of his book and tsk-tsked at something happening in the world of his crime drama.

Cal considered saying something that might explain or justify their actions and the way Blackie had died, but no words would come to him. Shaw had stopped sucking on his candy and was looking at the three of them. Cal felt suddenly like a child waiting to be reprimanded by his father—his jaws tensed instinctively, as if he were about to be struck hard across the face. Here, now, Sully merely had to consider the punishment and then mete it out. As old and weak as Sully looked, Cal had no doubts about what he was capable of. For a moment he wondered if they'd made a mistake in coming to him, had perhaps put themselves in a dangerous position, but then he dismissed the notion. If Sully had wanted some manner of payback, he would have done it years ago. He had agreed to meet with them, and Shaw, sitting there by himself and watching, wasn't the type to project intimidation; in fact, his presence spoke to a trust that Cal doubted they deserved.

“I was disappointed that everything had to go down the way it did,” Sully said, “but you two weren't responsible for that, not entirely, anyway. That's the past, and I don't have time to think about the past anymore. Besides, you're here for something else.”

“You've heard about the boat that came into the harbor last week and the string of murders since?” Cal asked.

“I've heard they think the boat was carrying guns.”

“That's what they think. Guns bound for Ireland that are now gone. We think they're still somewhere in the city.”

“And the murders are because they're trying to remove all evidence of it.”

“Something like that—all the murdered have been Irish.”

“So far,” Sully said, exhaling smoke and squinting through the haze.

Cal nodded. “So far.”

“I agreed to see the two of you,” Sully said, “because I've known you both a long time, because you know how things work and you're from the neighborhood and you have some manner of respect, because of what happened with Blackie, and Cal, because I knew your father. In one way or another, we're all connected in this town, and I don't even mean this neighborhood, I mean all of it. We may not like the others, but everything we do has repercussions and it affects us all.

“You need to keep your heads low. From what you've said, they've already begun to clean house. They won't leave any loose ends and they won't want people going around drawing attention to their activities. There's a reason I haven't heard anything on the streets—they're keeping it tight in the Irish communities. I was always against having anything to do with them—it's not good business and we're not here to further causes—but for a while there, Blackie, unaware that I knew, was trying his hand at getting them guns. I think he liked the idea of it more than anything, liked to say he was supporting the Irish cause like a good son of Erin, a Boston-Irish kid who hadn't forgot his heritage, but even he knew he was treading on dangerous ground. In the end he put up some of his own money to get them guns and get them to Ireland.”

“What happened?”

“I don't know. I don't think the guns ever made it and there was some type of falling-out. What I do know is that Blackie never tried to get involved again. The thing is, and what you two have to understand, is that fanatics will do just about anything.”

Cal watched him; he could feel his face go rigid. His heartbeat quickened and the smells and the light in the room became more sharply defined.

“I know, I know,” Sully said and held up a placating palm. Again, it was as if he were reading Cal's mind. “You're thinking of Blackie, you're thinking of all the crazy bastards out there right now killing to get a piece of the city, but”—and he frowned and shook his head—“that's not fanaticism. A lot of those killers are psychos—Blackie was psycho. Mary, Mother of God! They're the ones hired to kill people because no one else will do it! But a fanatic needs nothing to make him kill other than his belief in a particular ideology. It gives him a higher moral ground, a place where he can rationalize what he does, and it makes him expendable—he knows this. It's the belief in this other thing that motivates him. To work with those types of people is not just bad for business, it's dangerous. There's no profit in it and you can't trust that they won't turn against you.”

Shaw brought a plastic cup of orange juice to Sully's bedside and Sully sipped it slowly through a straw. As he leaned forward his white tufts of hair caught in the rectangle of sunlight before the window and it softened his features, made him look, momentarily, less decrepit. From down the hall came the sound of clattering trays and cutlery, the bland, watery smell of boiled food and diluted sauces.

Sully finished the juice, put the cup on the table, and wiped at his chin. “I'll keep my ear to the ground,” he said, “and I'll have Shaw and his boys listening, but I wouldn't put much hope in that. There is one person who might be able to help you, though.”

“Who's that?”

“Your friend there, the priest.”

“Father Nolan?”

“Of course, he's the original Irish gunrunner. I'm surprised they let him into the country at all.”

“But that was years before he came to Boston, before he joined the seminary,” Dante said. “What could he know about that now?”

“Ahh, you two. You're like the Keystone Cops.” Sully shook his head and then began coughing. When his hacking had subsided he pulled up phlegm in his throat, thick and wet-sounding, and spit into the empty cup at his side; Shaw put down his book and retrieved the cup, threw it into the wastebasket.

When Sully spoke again, he wheezed slightly and he seemed tired by the effort. “You two make me laugh. You think that once you're in with that lot, you ever truly get out? Nolan's your guy. There's a reason he became a priest—why many men become priests—a reason that has nothing to do with God's calling. It's to hide from their pasts. He'll know a thing or two about what's going on. I'd lay money on it.”

Sully closed his eyes and put his head back against the pillow. In the soft light cast from the window, he looked at peace, content, a fatherly and benevolent figure, almost. You'd never know the type of man he was, had been. The crucifix's mother-of-pearl sparkled. On the far wall, the fan clicked and whirred through its revolutions. Shaw unwrapped a lozenge with a rustling, popped it in his mouth, and began sucking loudly. Cal and Dante watched as Sully sighed deeply and then smiled, and for a moment they thought he might be asleep, his cigarette smoke twining lazily toward the open window.

“Now, you two,” Sully said, his eyes still closed, “get the fuck out and let an old man rest.”

Shaw joined Cal and Dante outside, and the three of them left the shade of the front porch and walked down to the street. On the lawns, metal sprinklers clicked and grinded as they spun, and staggered streams of water hissed out over the dry grass, wetting the pavement before them.

“He didn't seem too bad to me,” Cal said to Shaw.

“There's a word I'm looking for.” Shaw stepped to the side to avoid the spray of water. “The doctor said he'd have clear moments. Like he's normal. But then,
wham,
he's all confused and doesn't want to talk to anybody. You caught him at a good time.”

A young nurse wearing a crisp white uniform, hat pinned into hair that was stiff with some aerosol product, hurried past them to the building. It looked to Cal like she had encountered Shaw before and was doing her best to avoid him. Shaw eyed her legs, the shimmering nylons covering them, and then her hips as they pulsed from side to side beneath the bleached fabric. He sniffed the air like an animal and then grinned to himself.

“Lucid,”
Cal said.

Shaw turned. “What's that?”