We Were Kings (21 page)

_________________________

Shrine of St. Anthony, Arch Street

CAL WALKED FROM
the Pilgrim Security offices to J. J. Foley's on Otis and had a warm beer in a room packed with loud suits from the business district, which soured his mood and made his head ache, then walked up Summer Street to Arch. The shrine and home to the Franciscan friars of Holy Name Province had been in Boston for a hundred years but the church was only a couple of months old; its foundation stone had been laid in '52. It was done in an art deco style with dozens of narrow panels of stained glass in the flat façade and a large stone effigy of Christ on the cross over the entrance.

In the chapel, Cal stood at the font and blessed himself with holy water. He looked casually about the room: candles and dimmed lights; penitents emerging from the confessional booths in the east chancel and others moving toward the front of the church with heads bowed in prayer after confession. He smelled the familiar scent of beeswax and incense from the censer during novenas and heard the muted thrum of whispered prayers bleeding one into the other, over and over again, until the room, despite the small number of parishioners, hummed with it.

The man sat by the votive candles at the statue of Saint Francis of Assisi, and Father Nolan had been right. Cal knew the look of him almost immediately. There wasn't another in the place like him. Even sitting, he looked tall, and almost emaciated, with a gaunt, ascetic stoniness to his face, something that Cal had seen in soldiers and in the faces of killers.

At the top of the aisle, facing the Eucharist, Cal genuflected, blessed himself again, and walked toward the pews where the man sat. He took a pew behind him and to his right so that he could see his profile. Lost to the world around him, the man muttered softly the Breastplate of Saint Patrick, candle flame flickering softly on his closed eyes:

“That's nice, that is,” Cal said from behind him, and the Pioneer slowly opened his eyes.

“We're in a church,” he said. “Will you fuck off till I'm done?”

“It's a beautiful church too,” Cal said, and as the Pioneer turned slightly to look at him, Cal craned his neck and regarded the marble columns rising to the arched ceiling, and then looked to the front of the chapel, at the exquisitely wrought depiction of Christ with His arms outstretched toward His Father in Heaven and, behind the altar, the elaborate marble and gilt reredos.

The Pioneer sighed. “What do you want?”

“Father Nolan said you were willing to speak to me. Or am I wasting my time?”

“Sure let's see if you can talk sense first, and then I'll speak to you.” The Pioneer reached into his pocket.

“Nice and easy now,” said Cal. “Take it slow.”

“What kind of man thinks I'm going to shoot him in a church?”

“If you were in my shoes, you wouldn't be saying that.”

“Why so?”

“I was shot at in a church before. Ended up being a bloodbath. I don't want that happening again. I'm sure you can appreciate my tone, yes?”

“Jaysus, in a church?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure what's wrong with this country altogether?”

“We're still figuring it out.”

The Pioneer nodded to himself and then sat still, not asking any more. If Cal hadn't known better, he might have thought the man was praying again or in a deep state of meditation. When it became clear that the Pioneer would volunteer nothing, he began again.

“Your boss, de Burgh, he has you set to cause a whole bunch of trouble.”

Still the man didn't respond; his head moved almost imperceptibly, as if he were indeed talking to himself or praying. Cal was about to say something when he spoke.

“My father raised pigs outside Cavan,” he said. “Pigs will eat anything. They're a great benefit to a farm. They don't cost much to keep, you just need the space for them. A proper run and a trough and another of their kind and they're happy. You keep them till they get fat and it's always pleasant in the spring when they birth a few bonhams. Other than that, you wait till they get fat and you keep them happy and when you put them down for slaughter, all the parts of the pig will see you through the winter. It's a grand, happy animal, a pig. As a boy, I always liked our pigs.”

This time, Cal remained silent. A woman began to cough, a long, wet hacking, and when the attack persisted, she stood with her hand to her mouth and made her way to the exit. There was the clatter of coins in the poor box, the hiss of a match being lit, the smell of a candle being extinguished, and the sound of kneelers being raised.

Finally the man spoke. “The priest said you wanted to talk about your father.”

“I wanted to talk about the IRA and those involved in Boston.”

“Then you want to talk about your father.”

“What about him?”

“He was top man for us here. Directly after the war.”

“I assume you don't mean World War One?”

“Your father was fighting another war.”

Confessions were over and the priest exited the confessional and walked toward the sacristy, nodding and smiling at those in the pews who looked up or addressed him as he passed, his footfalls reverberating on the marble tile. The Pioneer seemed content in the stillness, and he acted as if Cal were a familiar, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be talking in a church about the past in this way, reminiscing about death and murder. Cal let the stillness stretch. He was surprised to find that he too took a strange comfort in it.

After a while, the Pioneer spoke. “You didn't know your father, then,” he said, and Cal's mood soured.

“I knew my father plenty well. What the fuck are you talking about?”

The Pioneer shook his head, seeming amused but also pitying; Cal took it as mocking. “Ahh, you didn't know that man half as well as you think you did,” the man said.

“And you did?”

“We knew each other—a lot of people in this town knew each other, before, in the old times, back home.”

The Pioneer half turned to regard him, took in his face for a moment, and then looked forward again. He frowned as if he were considering something.

“You would have been very young then,” he said, rubbing absently at the medallion on his lapel, “during the time your father made a name for himself.

“I told you he was a top man, but what I meant to say was that he was a top killer. Did you know that about your father?”

Cal watched the bowed backs and bent heads of the penitents kneeling in the pews alongside the confessional. The cloying, thick smell of incense fogged his thoughts, and he closed his eyes briefly, trying to will himself alert.

“Father Nolan hinted at it.”

“That was good of him,” he said, musing. “It would have saved you some of the shock of hearing it directly, I suppose.

“So, what do you want to know? How many men he killed? The way he killed them? He was known as a vicious man, your father was. A lot of people turned away from the Cause because of men like him.”

As if remembering Cal's father's acts, the Pioneer shivered, shook his head, and blessed himself; Cal couldn't tell if it was real or a performance.

“So much anger and violence. I assume he probably brought a lot of that home to you and your mother. It's tragic what parents put on their children. I remember one time—”

“I want to know who's running the show in Boston,” Cal said, more loudly than he had intended. The smell of incense burned in his nostrils like formaldehyde, and the lights from the chancel seemed to be growing brighter even as the flickering lights in the aisle seemed to dim. He was aware of his own breathing, of the knot tightening in his chest. He forced himself to exhale long and slow, and gradually the pressure eased.

“I want to know who killed those men last week,” he said, more calmly, “and I want to know where the guns are.”

The Pioneer's head rocked back as if he were laughing. “Guns? I have no information about that.”

“So it wasn't the IRA?”

“Haven't I already said that I have nothing for you?”

“I suppose you and my father made a great team.”

“Aye, we did. For a while there.”

“And you still work for them.”

“No one
works
for them.”

Cal gritted his teeth. The man was infuriating with his penchant for talking around things. “Right, but you're with them, you're in the organization.”

“I'm in no such thing. Father Nolan said you wanted to know about the past, about your father. That's why I'm here, that's why I'm sparing my time for you. If you have something to ask, ask it and be quick.”

Cal persisted. “You're a contact man for the IRA in Boston.”

“I'm an employee of Mr. Vincent de Burgh and I work hard for a living. I've worked hard ever since I came to this country twenty years ago. I've come here tonight at the request of Father Nolan and owing to the past I had with your father, a past that most of us, including the priest, have done a good job leaving behind. If you're done, I have nothing else to talk to you about.”

“What about de Burgh?”

“What about him?”

“He's a hard man to track down. What's his role in all this?”

“Mr. de Burgh's a successful man, a busy man. He doesn't have time for this nonsense.”

“Do you know of a Detective Owen Mackey?”

The Pioneer stiffened, but only slightly and so fleetingly that if Cal hadn't been searching for some manner of response, he might not have seen it.

“Detective Owen Mackey,” the Pioneer repeated.

“He went to see Mr. de Burgh last week sometime. You wouldn't forget him. Anyway, I was talking to him and he has all these interesting ideas about de Burgh and, I suppose, about you.

“See, whether you talk to me or not doesn't really matter. Detective Mackey has already got a really good picture of what happened on the night of the Fourth, and pretty soon he'll be able to prove it, because we all know that those guns haven't left Boston yet, and the longer they remain here, the more antsy your real bosses are going to get. If I were you, I'd start praying a whole lot harder.”

Shoes dragged on the marble—someone with a limp much like Cal's. At the head of the nave someone sat heavily in a pew, and Cal felt the vibration through the wood. The thrum of muted prayer still held the space, but something, Cal felt, had shifted—something within himself. At his rear, a match was struck and a votive lit, and he smelled the sulfur of the extinguished match. He watched the Pioneer's chest rise and fall slowly. Again, Cal had the sense that he was meditating, so when the man spoke, low and deep, it surprised him.

“You should stay out of our business. We will do what we have to do. And son of Luke O'Brien or not, you'll have plenty of trouble coming down on you if you get in our way.”

Cal smiled at the Pioneer's use of
we
. As calm as the man seemed, Cal had gotten under his skin. It didn't mean much, but it meant something, and that was enough for now.

“I'm used to it,” he said, and he rose from the pew, leaving the man to his prayers.

Cal stepped out of the church and paused for a moment on the street, staring up into the Savior's anguished face near the hour of His death. It was hard not to stare at His face—at the severity and extent of His pain—for Cal could never tell or decide if His was a look of acceptance, a powerful embrace of what was to come and the knowledge that He would soon be with His Father, or simply a giving-up, a weary and resigned, pain-washed succumbing to events over which He had no control. At times there seemed to be an incredible power in that sacrifice—the thought of it, when Cal conceived of it fully, as he had as a child performing the Stations of the Cross, contemplating each moment of Christ's suffering before the end, was overwhelming. And yet, at other times, it seemed as if there was no power at all in it, that it was the antithesis of power—that it was powerlessness.

He tried to conjure up an image of his father's face but it would not come to him—the man remained amorphous, perhaps even more so now that Cal had parts of the man's life and nowhere to put them. If anything, he was more fragmented and Cal further estranged from him. The only times he could see his father's face clearly lately were in the nightmares of the beatings he'd given him, the shattered cheekbone and the ruptured spleen at eleven that had required emergency surgery at Boston City Hospital, the broken nose and arm that had kept him from boxing for six months. He wanted to be done with those terrors and have something else to associate with the man, something that might begin the forgiveness that Father Nolan always talked so much about, but it seemed as if that would never happen. Leaving aside his own abuse, he now had the knowledge that his father had been a murderer and good at what he did. No matter how much penance Cal did, no matter how much love he tried to seek within himself, there would never be enough for him to forgive that.

_________________________

O'Flaherty's Funeral Home, Dorchester

OWEN AND CAL
sat in the last row of hard-back chairs put before the coffin, watching the mourners filing into and out of the room. After an hour Cal grew restless; he'd had his fill of grievers, the interested, the excited, the death flies of funeral homes. He'd seen enough of them and of the insides of dozens of funeral homes as a child, when his father had hauled him to a different wake every weekend during his years as a ward boss and union rep and then, later, when he campaigned for city councilman. This was the death flies' drinking hole, the bar that delivered their drug and fed their obsessions. An old woman in a black shawl entered, and he recognized her from when he was young. A stranger to the bereaved, she'd been coming to these things all her life.

“I can't believe this is your fourth this week,” Cal said to Owen.

“It's been a busy week. I wanted to see just who might show up to these things.”

“You're waiting for the killers?”

“Killers do strange things—some of them are like pyromaniacs. They like to return to the scene of the fire, to see the carnage they've wrought, to relive it.”

Cal lit a cigarette and shook out the match. “I know. But I don't think that's this lot.”

“Perhaps not, but I've still got to see.”

Owen craned his neck around to look at the crowd, grunted, then turned back. “I would have thought de Burgh would make an appearance,” he said.

“He doesn't need to when he has him.” Cal gestured to a man who had just stepped through a doorway bearing a wreath of white carnations and roses in each arm, his hair shorn tight to his skull and his mouth hard-set in a gaunt face—the severe mask of dignity required for such occasions.

“That the guy who warned you off at St. Anthony's?”

“Yeah, that's him.” O'Flaherty met Donal Phelan at the casket and together they arranged the bouquets on pedestals, one on either side of the coffin. They spoke briefly and then Donal turned to leave, pausing as he caught sight of Cal and Owen. He held their gaze for a moment, then nodded and left the way he'd come.

“I met him in Dudley Square,” Owen said, “when I was inquiring about Mickey Flynn. He's got an edge to him, for sure.”

“My father used to quote Martin Michael Lomasney to me all the time: ‘Never write if you can speak. Never speak if you can nod. Never nod if you can wink.' You know that one?”

Owen nodded but continued to stare after the man. Cal flicked his ash into the standing black and brass ashtray next to his chair. “Well, to my father, it was a code. If you could follow those simple rules, one day you'd be a congressman, a senator, mayor of Boston. He always said that politics was a game and if you played it well and always kept the other fella thinking that you had a better hand than you did, you'd win.”

“The Lomasney quote doesn't sound much like your father.”

“No, my father liked to speak, and if he could use his fists rather than nod, he would.”

Two old women in heavy black dresses and with black kerchiefs about their heads genuflected and then slowly lowered themselves onto the kneeler before the coffin and began to pray. They were there for a long time and much of the queue behind them simply blessed themselves before the coffin and then went to offer their condolences to the family standing by the table that held the Mass cards. Cal watched as O'Flaherty moved about the room, shaking a hand here and there as people left, speaking with another funeral director, receiving flowers arriving at the front door. Cal had been in this room when he was younger, and it looked and smelled the same. He stared at the floral-patterned wallpaper. There was a sickness in his stomach that he could not describe or put a name to, as if the place—the memories from childhood—were making him ill. He ground his cigarette into the ashtray and popped a mint in his mouth, waited for the acid in his stomach to settle.

“His connections to the IRA,” Cal said, referring to the Pioneer, “do you think de Burgh knows?”

“I'd like to talk to de Burgh and find out.”

They waited until the room had mostly cleared and then rose and went before the coffin. Family and friends had placed photographs of the dead man and his children and grandchildren against its base. Someone had been thoughtful enough to leave a fifth of Powers. “Nice flowers,” Owen said, lifting the card on the bouquet and looking at it.

“What is it?”

“They're from de Burgh, from a florist he owns. Quite distinct. I've been seeing arrangements from them all over the place.”

“He
is
the Irish philanthropist. You said he paid the first victim's funeral expenses?”

“Yeah, and I'm pretty sure he paid for the others' as well,” Owen said.

“But some of these guys—I looked at the obituaries, they'd lived here their entire lives. Every single one of them is going back to the home country?”

“I talked to the funeral director, O'Flaherty, and he confirmed it. He doesn't seem to like me much.” Owen laughed, and the old woman in the black shawl looked in their direction and glared balefully at them.

“All of the funeral homes belong to de Burgh,” Cal said. “That doesn't seem strange to you?”

“It does, yes.”

“What do you think the connection is?”

“Right now,” Owen said, tapping the casket, “only the dead know.”

He saw the woman still looking at them and lowered his voice. “I've had enough. Let's leave him to his family.”

Cal genuflected before the coffin and blessed himself, then placed his hat on his head. “I've known her since I was little and my father dragged me around to every wake in town. She's no family to this man. This is like a hobby for her. It's how she gets her kicks.”

“Well, let's leave her to it, then.”

At the entrance to the vestibule Cal looked back. The old woman had her head lowered and was praying loudly, fervently, hands clasped together so hard that her knuckles showed white, a rosary entwined in her fingers. She'd be here until they kicked her out, helping the dead along in their passage to God.

Christ, how he hated funeral homes.