Live by Night (12 page)

Maso looked at Naldo, then at Hippo Fasini. No one said anything for some time. Joe looked down at his food, aware that it was growing cold, aware he should eat it because if you skipped a meal in here, you'd grow weak very fast.

“Joseph, look at me.”

Joe looked across the table. The face staring back at him seemed amused and curious, like a wolf who'd come upon a nest of newborn chicks where he'd least expected.

“Why weren't you more convincing with your father?”

Joe said, “Mr. Pescatore, I tried.”

Maso looked back and forth between his men. “He tried.”

When Naldo Aliente smiled he exposed a row of teeth that looked like bats hanging in a cave. “Not hard enough.”

“Look,” Joe said, “he gave me something.”

“He . . . ?” Maso put a hand behind his ear.

“Gave me something to give to you.” Joe handed the watch across the table.

Maso took note of the gold cover. He opened it and considered the timepiece itself and then the inside of the dust cover where
Patek Philippe
had been engraved in the most graceful script. His eyebrows rose in approval.

“It's the 1902, eighteen karat,” he said to Naldo. He turned to Joe. “Only two thousand ever made. It's worth more than my house. How's a copper come to own it?”

“Broke up a bank robbery in '08,” Joe said, repeating a story his Uncle Eddie had told a hundred times, though his father never discussed it. “It was in Codman Square. He killed one of the robbers before the guy could kill the bank manager.”

“And the bank manager gave him this watch?”

Joe shook his head. “Bank president did. The manager was his son.”

“So now he gives it to me to save his own son?”

Joe nodded.

“I got three sons, myself. You know that?”

Joe said, “I heard that, yeah.”

“So I know something about fathers and how they love their sons.”

Maso sat back and looked at the watch for a bit. Eventually he sighed and pocketed the watch. He reached across the table and patted Joe's hand three times. “You get back in touch with your old man. Tell him thanks for the gift.” Maso stood from the table. “And then tell him to do what I fucking told him to do.”

Maso's men all stood together and they left the mess hall.

W
hen he returned to his cell after work detail in the chain shop, Joe was hot, filthy, and three men he'd never seen before waited inside for him. The bunk beds were still gone but the mattresses had been returned to the floor. The men sat on the mattresses. His mattress lay beyond them, against the wall under the high window, farthest from the bars. Two of the fellas he'd never seen before, he was sure of it, but the third looked familiar. He was about thirty, short, but with a very long face, and a chin as pointy as his nose and the tips of his ears. Joe ratcheted through all the names and faces he'd learned in this prison and realized he was looking across at Basil Chigis, one of Emil Lawson's crew, a lifer like his boss, no possibility of parole. Alleged to have eaten the fingers of a boy he'd killed in a Chelsea basement.

Joe looked at each of the men long enough to show he wasn't frightened, though he was, and they stared back at him, blinking occasionally but never speaking. So he didn't speak either.

At some point, the men seemed to tire of the staring and played cards. The currency was bones. Small bones, the bones of quail or young chickens or minor birds of prey. The men carried the bones in small canvas sacks. Boiled white, they clacked when they were gathered up in a winning pot. When the light dimmed, the men continued playing, never speaking except to say, “Raise,” or “See ya,” or “Fold.” Every now and then one of them would glance at Joe but never for very long, and then he'd go back to playing cards.

When full dark descended, the lights along the tiers were shut off. The three men tried to finish their hand but then Basil Chigis's voice floated out of the black—“Fuck this”—and cards scraped as they gathered them off the floor and the bones clicked as they returned them to their sacks.

They sat in the dark, breathing.

Time wasn't something Joe knew how to measure that night. He could have sat in the dark thirty minutes or two hours. He had no idea. The men sat in a half circle across from him, and he could smell their breath and their body odor. The one to his right smelled particularly bad, like dried sweat so old it had turned to vinegar.

As his eyes adjusted, he could see them, and the deep black became a gloaming. They sat with their arms across their knees, their legs crossed at the ankles. Their eyes were fixed on him.

In one of the factories behind him, a whistle blew.

Even if he'd had a shank, he doubted he could have stabbed all three of them. Given that he'd never stabbed anyone in his life, he might not have been able to get to one of them before they took it away and used it on him.

He knew they were waiting for him to speak. He didn't know how he knew, but he knew. That would be the signal for them to do whatever they intended to do to him. If he spoke, he'd be begging. Even if he never asked for anything or pleaded for his life, speaking to these men would be a plea in itself. And they'd laugh at him before they killed him.

Basil Chigis's eyes were the blue a river got not long before it froze. In the dark, it took a while for the color to return, but eventually it did. Joe imagined feeling the burn of that color on his thumbs when he drove them into Basil's eyes.

They're men, he told himself, not demons. A man can be killed. Even three men. You just need to act.

Staring into Basil Chigis's pale blue flames, he felt their sway over him diminish the more he reminded himself these men held no special powers, no more so than he anyway—the mind and the limbs and willpower, all working as one—and so it was entirely possible that he could overpower them.

But then what? Where would he go? His cell was seven feet long and eleven feet wide.

You have to be willing to kill them. Strike now. Before they do. And after they're down, snap their fucking necks.

Even as he imagined it, he knew it was impossible. If it was just one man and he acted before one assumed he would, he
might
have had a chance. But to successfully attack three of them from a sitting position?

The fear spread down through his intestines and up through his throat. It squeezed his brain like a hand. He couldn't stop sweating and his arms trembled against his sleeves.

The movement came from the right and left simultaneously. By the time he sensed it, the tips of the shanks were pressed against his eardrums. He couldn't see the shanks but he could see the one Basil Chigis pulled from the folds of his prison uniform. It was a slim metal rod, half the length of a pool cue, and Basil had to cock his elbow when he placed the tip to the base of Joe's throat. He reached behind him and pulled something out of the back of his waistband, and Joe wanted to un-see it because he didn't want to believe it was in the room with them. Basil Chigis raised a mallet high behind the butt end of the long shank.

Hail Mary, Joe thought, full of grace . . .

He forgot the rest of it. He'd been an altar boy for six years and he forgot.

Basil Chigis's eyes had not changed. There was no clear intent in them. His left fist gripped the shaft of the metal rod. His right clenched the mallet handle. One swing of his arm and the metal tip would puncture Joe's throat and drive straight down into his heart.

. . . the Lord is with thee. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts . . .

No, no. That was grace, something you said over dinner. The Hail Mary went differently. It went . . .

He couldn't remember.

Our Father, who art in Heaven, forgive us our trespasses as we—

The door to the cell opened and Emil Lawson entered. He crossed to the circle, knelt to the right of Basil Chigis, and cocked his head at Joe.

“I heard you were pretty,” he said. “They didn't lie.” He stroked the stubble on his cheeks. “Can you think of anything I
can't
take from you right now?”

My soul? Joe wondered. But in this place, this dark, they could probably get that too.

Damned if he'd answer, though.

Emil Lawson said, “You answer the question or I'll pluck an eye out and feed it to Basil.”

“No,” Joe said, “nothing you can't take.”

Emil Lawson wiped the floor with a palm before sitting. “You want us to go away? Leave your cell tonight?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“You were asked to do something for Mr. Pescatore and you refused.”

“I didn't refuse. The final decision wasn't up to me.”

The shank against Joe's throat slipped in his sweat and bumped along the side of his neck, taking some skin with it. Basil Chigis returned it to the base of his throat again.

“Your daddy.” Emil Lawson nodded. “The copper. What was he supposed to do?”

What?

“You know what he was supposed to do.”

“Pretend I don't and answer the question.”

Joe took a long, slow breath. “Brendan Loomis.”

“What about him?”

“He's in custody. He gets arraigned day after tomorrow.”

Emil Lawson laced his hands behind his head and smiled. “And your daddy was supposed to kill him but he said no.”

“Yeah.”

“No, he said yes.”

“He said no.”

Emil Lawson shook his head. “You're going to tell the first Pescatore hood you see that your father got word back to you through a guard. He'll take care of Brenny Loomis. He also found out where Albert White's been sleeping at night. And you've got the address to give to Old Man Pescatore. But only face-to-face. You following me so far, pretty boy?”

Joe nodded.

Emil Lawson handed Joe something wrapped in oilcloth. Joe unwrapped it—another shank, almost as thin as a needle. It had been a screwdriver at one point, the kind people used on the hinges of their eyeglasses. But those weren't sharp like this. The tip was like a rose thorn. Joe ran his palm over it lightly and cut a path there.

They removed the shanks from his ears and throat.

Emil leaned in close. “When you get close enough to whisper that address in Pescatore's ear, you drive that shank right through his fucking brain.” He shrugged. “Or his throat. Whatever kills him.”

“I thought you worked for him,” Joe said.

“I work for me.” Emil Lawson shook his head. “I did some jobs for his crew when I was paid to. Now someone else is paying.”

“Albert White,” Joe said.

“That's my boss.” Emil Lawson leaned forward and lightly slapped Joe's cheek. “And now he's your boss too.”

I
n the small spit of land behind his house on K Street, Thomas Coughlin kept a garden. His efforts with it had, over the years, met with varying degrees of success and failure, but in the two years since Ellen had passed on, he'd had nothing but time; now the bounty of it was such that he made a small profit every year when he sold the surplus.

Years ago, when he was five or six, Joe had decided to help his father harvest in early July. Thomas has been sleeping off a double shift and the several nightcaps he'd consumed with Eddie McKenna afterward. He woke to the sound of his son talking in the backyard. Joe had talked to himself a lot back then, or maybe he spoke to an imagined friend. Either way, he'd had to talk to somebody, Thomas could admit to himself now, because he certainly wasn't being spoken to much around the house. Thomas worked too much, and Ellen, well, by that point Ellen had firmly established her fondness for Tincture No. 23, a cure-all first introduced to her after one of the miscarriages that had preceded Joe's birth. Back then, No. 23 wasn't yet the problem it would become for Ellen, or so Thomas had told himself. But he must have second-guessed that assessment more than he liked to admit because he'd known without asking that Joe was unattended that morning. He lay in bed listening to his youngest jabbering to himself as he tramped back and forth to the porch, and Thomas started to wonder what he tramped back and forth
from
.

He rose from bed and put on a robe and found his slippers. He walked through the kitchen (where Ellen, dull-eyed but smiling, sat with her cup of tea) and pushed open the back door.

When he saw the porch, his first instinct was to scream. Literally. To drop to his knees and rage at the heavens. His carrots and parsnips and tomatoes—all still green as grass—lay on the porch, their roots splayed like hair across the dirt and wood. Joe came walking up from the garden with another crop in his hands—the beets, this time. He'd transformed into a mole, his skin and hair caked with dirt. The only white left on him could be found in his eyes and his teeth when he smiled, which he did as soon as he saw Thomas.

“Hi, Daddy.”

Thomas was speechless.

“I'm helping you, Daddy.” Joe placed a beet at Thomas's feet and went back for more.

Thomas, a year's work ruined, an autumn's profit vanished, watched his son march off to finish the destruction, and the laugh that quaked up through the center of him surprised no one so much as him. He laughed so loud squirrels took flight from the low branches of the nearest tree. He laughed so hard he could feel the porch shake.

He smiled now to remember it.

He'd told his son recently that life was luck. But life, he'd come to realize as he aged, was also memory. The recollection of moments often proved richer than the moments themselves.

Out of habit, he reached for his watch before he recalled that it was no longer in his pocket. He'd miss it, even if the truth of the watch was a bit more complicated than the legend that had arisen around it. It was a gift from Barrett W. Stanford Sr., that was true. And Thomas had, without question, risked his life to save Barrett W. Stanford II, the manager of First Boston in Codman Square. Also true was that Thomas had, in the performance of his duties, discharged his service revolver a single time into the brain of one Maurice Dobson, twenty-six, ending his life immediately.