Live by Night (14 page)

He opened the trapdoor and called down. “He's done.”

“You hurt?” Basil Chigis called up.

“No. Gonna need clean clothes, though.”

Someone chuckled in the darkness.

“So, come on down.”

“Come on up. We got to get his body out of here.”

“We can—”

“The signal is your right hand, index and middle fingers raised and held together. You got anyone missing one of those digits, don't send him up.”

He rolled away from the doorway before anyone could argue.

After about a minute, he heard the first of them climb up. The man's hand extended out of the hole, two fingers raised as Joe had instructed. The tower light arced past the hand and then swung back over again. Joe said, “All clear.”

It was Pokaski, the roaster of his family, who stuck his head carefully up and looked around.

“Hurry,” Joe said. “And get the others up here. It'll take two more to drag him. He's deadweight and my ribs are busted up.”

Pokaski smiled. “I thought you said you weren't hurt.”

“Not mortally,” Joe said. “Come on.”

Pokaski leaned back into the hole. “Two more guys.”

Basil Chigis followed Pokaski and then a small guy with a harelip came after him. Joe recalled someone pointing him out at chow once—Eldon Douglas—but couldn't remember his crime.

“Where's the body?” Basil Chigis asked.

Joe pointed.

“Well, let's—”

The light hit Basil Chigis just before the bullet entered the back of his head and exited the center of his face, taking his nose with it. As his final act on earth, Pokaski blinked. Then a door opened in his throat and the door flapped as a wash of red poured through it and Pokaski fell on his back, and his legs thrashed. Eldon Douglas leapt for the opening to the staircase, but the tower guard's third bullet collapsed his skull the way a sledgehammer would. He fell to the right of the door and lay there, missing the top of his head.

Joe looked into the light, the three dead men splattered all over him. Down below men shouted and ran off. He wished he could join them. It had been a naive plan. He could feel the gun sights on his chest as the light blinded him. The bullets would be the violent offspring his father had warned him about; not only was he about to meet his Maker, but he also was about to meet his children. The only consolation he could offer himself was that it would be a quick death. Fifteen minutes from now he'd be sharing a pint with his father and Uncle Eddie.

The light snapped off.

Something soft hit him in the face and then fell to his shoulder. He blinked into the darkness—a small towel.

“Wipe your face,” Maso said. “It's a mess.”

When he finished, his eyes had adjusted enough to be able to make out Maso standing a few feet away, smoking one of his French cigarettes.

“You think I was going to kill you?”

“Crossed my mind.”

Maso shook his head. “I'm a low-rent wop from Endicott Street. I go to a fancy joint, I still don't know what fork to use. So I might not have class or education, but I never double-cross. I come right at you. Just like you came at me.”

Joe nodded, looked at the three corpses at his feet. “What about these guys? I'd say we double-crossed them pretty good.”

“Fuck them,” Maso said. “They had it coming.” Stepping over Pokaski's corpse, he crossed to Joe. “You'll be getting out of here sooner than you think. You ready to make some money when you do?”

“Sure.”

“Your duty will always be to the Pescatore Family first and yourself second. Can you abide that?”

Joe looked into the old man's eyes and was certain that they'd make a lot of money together and that he could never trust him.

“I can abide that.”

Maso extended his hand. “Okay, then.”

Joe wiped the blood off his hand and shook Maso's. “Okay.”

“Mr. Pescatore,” someone called from below.

“Coming.” Maso walked to the trapdoor and Joe followed. “Come, Joseph.”

“Call me Joe. Only my father called me Joseph.”

“Fair enough.” As he descended the spiral staircase in the dark, Maso said, “Funny thing about fathers and sons—you can go forth and build an empire. Become king. Emperor of the United States. God. But you'll always do it in his shadow. And you can't escape it.”

Joe followed him down the dark staircase. “Don't much want to.”

Chapter Ten

Visitations

A
fter a morning funeral at Gate of Heaven in South Boston, Thomas Coughlin was laid to rest at Cedar Grove Cemetery in Dorchester. Joe was not allowed to attend the funeral but read about it in a copy of the
Traveler
that one of the guards on Maso's payroll brought to him that evening.

Two former mayors, Honey Fitz and Andrew Peters, attended, as well as the current one, James Michael Curley. So did two ex-governors, five former district attorneys, and two attorney generals.

The cops came from all over—city cops and state police, retired and active, from as far south as Delaware and as far north as Bangor, Maine. Every rank, every specialty. In the photo accompanying the article, the Neponset River snaked along the far edge of the cemetery, but Joe could barely see it because the blue hats and blue uniforms consumed the view.

This was power, he thought. This was a legacy.

And in nearly the same breath—So what?

So his father's funeral had brought a thousand men to a graveyard along the banks of the Neponset. And someday, possibly, cadets would study in the Thomas X. Coughlin Building at the Boston Police Academy or commuters would rattle over the Coughlin Bridge on their way to work in the morning.

Wonderful.

And yet dead was dead. Gone was gone. No edifice, no legacy, no bridge named after you could change that.

You were only guaranteed one life, so you'd better live it.

He placed the paper beside him on the bed. It was a new mattress and it had been waiting for him in the cell after work detail yesterday with a small side table, a chair, and a kerosene table lamp. He found the matches in the drawer of the side table beside a new comb.

He blew out the lamp now and sat in the dark, smoking. He listened to the sounds of the factories and the barges out on the river signaling one another in the narrow lanes. He flicked open the cover of his father's watch, then snapped it closed, then opened it again. Open-close, open-close, open-close as the chemical smell from the factories climbed over his high window.

His father was gone. He was no longer a son.

He was a man without history or expectation. A blank slate, beholden to none.

He felt like a pilgrim who'd pushed off from the shore of a homeland he'd never see again, crossed a black sea under a black sky, and landed in the new world, which waited, unformed, as if it had always been waiting.

For him.

To give the country a name, to remake it in his image so it could espouse his values and export them across the globe.

He closed the watch and closed his hand over it and closed his eyes until he saw the shore of his new country, saw the black sky above give way to a far-flung scatter of white stars that shone down on him and the small stretch of water left between them.

I will miss you. I will mourn you. But I am now newly born. And truly free.

T
wo days after the funeral, Danny made his last visit.

He leaned into the mesh and asked, “How you doing, little brother?”

“Finding my way,” Joe said. “You?”

“You know,” Danny said.

“No,” Joe said, “I don't. I don't know anything. You went to Tulsa with Nora and Luther eight years ago and I haven't heard anything but rumors since.”

Danny acknowledged that with a nod. He fished for his cigarettes, lit one, and took his time before he spoke. “Me and Luther started a business together out there. Construction. We built houses in the colored section. We were doing all right. Weren't booming, but okay. I was a sheriff's deputy too. You believe that?”

Joe smiled. “You wear a cowboy hat?”

“Son,” Danny said with a twang, “I wore six-guns. One on each hip.”

Joe laughed. “String tie?”

Danny laughed too. “Sure did. And boots.”

“Spurs?”

Danny narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Man's gotta draw the line somewhere.”

Joe was still chuckling when he asked, “So what happened? We heard something about a riot?”

The light blew out inside Danny. “They burned it to the ground.”

“Tulsa?”

“Black Tulsa, yeah. Section Luther lived in called Greenwood. One night at the jail, whites came to lynch a colored because he grabbed a white girl's pussy in an elevator? Truth was, though, she'd been dating the boy on the sly for months. The boy broke up with her, she didn't like it, so she filed her bullshit claim, and we had to arrest him. We were just about to turn him loose on lack of evidence when all the good white men of Tulsa showed up with their ropes. Then a bunch of coloreds, including Luther, they showed up too. The coloreds, well, they were armed. No one expected that. And that backed off the lynch mob. For the night.” Danny stubbed his cigarette out under his heel. “Next morning, the whites crossed the tracks, showed the colored boys what happens when you raise a gun to one of them.”

“So that was the riot.”

Danny shook his head. “Wasn't no
riot
. It was a massacre. They gunned down or lit on fire every colored they saw—kids, women, old men, didn't make a difference. These were the pillars of the community doing the shooting, mind you, the churchgoers and the Rotarians. In the end, the fuckers flew overhead in crop dusters, dropping grenades and homemade firebombs onto the buildings. The colored folk would run out of the burning buildings and the whites had machine gun nests set up. Just mowed 'em down in the fucking street. Hundreds of people killed. Hundreds, just lying in the streets. Looked like nothing more than piles of clothes gone red in the wash.” Danny laced his hands together behind his head and blew air through his lips. “I walked around afterward, you know, loading the bodies onto flatbeds? I kept thinking, Where's my country? Where'd it go?”

Neither spoke for a long time until Joe said, “Luther?”

Danny held up one hand. “He survived. Last I saw him, him and his wife and kid were heading for Chicago.” He said, “Thing about that kind of . . . event, Joe? You survive it and it's like you've got this shame. I can't even explain it. Just this shame, big as your whole body. And everyone else who survived? They have it too. And you can't look each other in the eye. You're all wearing the stink of it and trying to figure out how to live the rest of your life with the odor. So you sure as hell don't want anyone else who smells the same as you getting close enough to stink you up even more.”

Joe said, “Nora?”

Danny nodded. “We're still together.”

“Kids?”

Danny shook his head. “You think you'd be walking around an uncle without me telling you?”

“I haven't seen you but once in eight years, Dan. I don't know what you'd do.”

Danny nodded, and Joe saw what until now he'd only suspected—something in his brother, something at the core, was broken.

But just as he thought it, a piece of the old Danny returned with a sly grin. “Me and Nora have been in New York the last few years.”

“Doing what?”

“Making shows.”

“Shows?”

“Movies. That's what they call them there—shows. I mean, it's a little confusing because a lotta people call plays shows too. But anyway, yeah, movies, Joe. Flickers. Shows.”

“You work in movies?”

Danny nodded, animated now. “Nora started it. She got a job with this company, Silver Frame? Jews, but good guys. She was handling all their bookkeeping and then they asked her to do some side work with publicity and even costumes. It was that kinda outfit back then, just everyone pitching in, the directors making coffee, the camera guys walking the lead actress's dog.”

“Movies?”
Joe said.

Danny laughed. “So, wait, it gets better. Her bosses meet me and one of them, Herm Silver, great guy, lot on the ball, he asks me—you ready?—he asks me if I ever did stunts.”

“Fuck are stunts?” Joe lit a cigarette.

“You see an actor fall off a horse? It ain't him. It's a stuntman. A professional. Actor slips on a banana peel, trips over a curb, hell, runs down a street? Look close at the screen next time because it ain't him. It's me or someone like me.”

“Wait,” Joe said, “how many movies have you been in?”

Danny thought about it for a minute. “I'm guessing seventy-five?”

“Seventy-five?” Joe took the cigarette from his mouth.

“I mean, a lot of them were shorts. That's when—”

“Jesus, I know what shorts are.”

“You didn't know what stunts were, though, did you?”

Joe raised his middle finger.

“So, yeah, I've been in a bunch. Even wrote a few of the shorts.”

Joe's mouth opened wide. “You wrote . . . ?”

Danny nodded. “Little things. Kids on the Lower East Side try to wash a dog for a rich lady, they lose the dog, the rich lady calls the cops, high jinks ensue, that sort of thing.”

Joe dropped his cigarette to the floor before it could burn his fingers. “How many have you written?”

“Five so far, but Herm thinks I got a knack for it, wants me to try for a full-length feature soon, become a scenarist.”

“What's a scenarist?”

“Guy who writes movies, genius,” Danny said and flipped his own middle finger back at Joe.

“So, wait, where's Nora in all this?”

“California.”

“I thought you were in New York.”

“We
were
. But Silver Frame made a couple of movies real cheap lately that turned out to be hits. Meanwhile, Edison's fucking suing everyone in New York over camera patents, but those patents don't mean shit in California. Plus the weather there is nice three hundred sixty days out of three sixty-five, so everyone's heading out there. The Silver brothers? They just figured now's the time. Nora headed out a week ago because she's become head of production—I mean, just flying up their ladder—and they've got me scheduled for stunts on a show called
The Lawmen
of the Pecos
in three weeks. I just came back to tell Dad I was heading west again, tell him to come visit maybe, once he retired. I didn't know when I'd ever see him again. Hell, see you again.”

“I'm happy for you,” Joe said, still shaking his head at the absurdity of it. Danny's life—boxer, cop, union organizer, businessman, sheriff's deputy, stuntman, budding writer—was an American life, if ever there was one.

“Come,” his brother said.

“What?”

“When you get out of here. Come join us. I'm serious. Fall off a horse for money and pretend to get shot and fall through sugar windows made up to look like glass. Lie in the sun the rest of the time, meet a starlet by the pool.”

For a moment, Joe could see it—another life, a dream of blue water, honey-skinned women, palm trees.

“Only a brisk, two-week train ride away, little brother.”

Joe laughed some more, picturing it.

“It's good work,” Danny said. “You ever want to come out and join me, I could train you.”

Joe, still smiling, shook his head.

“It's honest work,” Danny said.

“I know,” Joe said.

“You could stop living a life where you look over your shoulder all the time.”

“It's not about that.”

“What's it about?” Danny seemed authentically curious.

“The night. It's got its own set of rules.”

“Day's got rules too.”

“Oh, I know,” Joe said, “but I don't like them.”

They stared through the mesh at each other for a long time.

“I don't understand,” Danny said softly.

“I know you don't,” Joe said. “You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy's leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there's a difference, like the banker's just doing his job but the loan shark's a criminal. I like the loan shark because he doesn't pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be sitting where I'm sitting right now. I'm not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a men's club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kid's grades. Die at my desk, and they'll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirt's hit the coffin.”

“But that's life,” Danny said.

“That's
a
life. You want to play by their rules? Go ahead. But I say their rules are bullshit. I say there are no rules but the ones a man makes for himself.”

Again, they considered each other through the mesh. His whole childhood, Danny had been Joe's hero. Hell, his god. And now god was just a man who fell off horses for a living, pretended to be shot for a living.

“Wow,” Danny said softly, “did you ever grow up.”

“Yeah,” Joe said.

Danny placed his cigarettes in his pocket and put his hat on.

“Pity,” he said.

W
ithin the prison, the White-Pescatore War was partially won the night three White soldiers were shot on the roof while “trying to escape.”

Skirmishes continued to occur, however, and bad blood festered. Over the next six months, Joe learned that wars don't really end. Even as he and Maso and the rest of the Pescatore prison crew consolidated their power, it was impossible to tell if this guard or that guard had been paid to move against them or if this or that convict could be trusted.

Micky Baer was shanked in the yard by a guy who, it turned out, was married to the late Dom Pokaski's sister. Micky survived, but he'd have problems pissing for the rest of his life. They heard from the outside that Guard Colvin was laying off bets with Syd Mayo, a White associate. And Colvin was losing.