Live by Night (6 page)

TXC.

Thomas Xavier Coughlin.

TXC.

20-24-3.

Joe dialed the numbers now and the second safe opened with a sharp peep of the hinges.

It was roughly two feet deep. A foot and a half of that was filled with money. Bricks of it, tightly bound in red rubber bands. Some of the bills had entered the safe before Joe was born and some had probably been placed there in the last week. A lifetime of payoffs and kickbacks and graft. His father—a pillar of the City on the Hill, the Athens of America, the Hub of the Universe—was more a criminal than Joe could ever aspire to be. Because Joe had never figured out how to show more than one face to the world, whereas his father had so many faces at his disposal the question was which of them was the original and which the imitations.

Joe knew that if he cleaned out the safe tonight, he'd have enough to live on the run for ten years. Or, if he got to somewhere far enough that they stopped looking, he could buy his way into the refining of Cuban sugar and/or the distilling of molasses, turn himself into a pirate king within three years, never have to worry about shelter or a hot meal the rest of his days.

But he didn't want his father's money. He'd stolen his clothes because the idea of leaving the city dressed as the old son of a bitch appealed to him, but he'd break his own hands before he'd spend his father's cash with them.

He placed his neatly folded clothes and muddy shoes on top of his father's dirty money. He thought of leaving a note, but he couldn't think of anything else he'd want to say, so he closed the door and spun the dial. He replaced the fake wall of the first safe and locked that up too.

He walked around the office for a minute, mulling it over one last time. To try to get to Emma during a function that most of the city's luminaries would attend, where the guests would arrive by limousine and invitation only, would be the pinnacle of insanity. In the cool of his father's study, maybe some of the old man's pragmatism, merciless as it was, finally rubbed off. Joe had to take what the gods had given him—an exit route out of the very city he was expected to enter. Time was not on his side, though. He had to go out this front door, hop into the purloined Dodge, and scoot north like the road itself had caught fire.

He looked out the window at K Street on a damp spring evening and reminded himself that she loved him and she'd wait.

O
ut on the street, he sat in the Dodge and stared back at the house of his birth, the house that had shaped the man he was now. By Boston Irish standards, he'd grown up in the lap of luxury. He'd never gone to bed hungry, never felt the street press through the soles of his shoes. He'd been educated, first by the nuns, then by the Jesuits until he dropped out in eleventh grade. Compared to most he met in his line of work, his upbringing had been positively cushy.

But there was a hole at the center of it, a great distance between Joe and his parents that reflected the distance between his mother and his father and his mother and the world at large. His parents had fought a war before he was born, a war that had ended in a peace so fragile that to acknowledge its existence could cause it to shatter, so no one ever discussed it. But the battlefield had still lain between them; she sat on her side, he sat on his. And Joe sat out in the middle, between the trenches, in the scorched dirt. The hole at the center of his house had been a hole at the center of his parents and one day the hole had found the center of Joe. There was a time, several full years during his childhood actually, when he'd hoped things could be different. But he couldn't remember anymore why he'd felt that way. Things weren't ever what they were supposed to be; they were what they were, and that was the simple truth of it, a truth that didn't change just because you wanted it to.

He drove over to the East Coast Bus Line Terminal on St. James. It was a small yellow-brick building surrounded by much taller ones, and Joe gambled that any laws looking for him would be stationed by the bus terminals on the northern side of the building, not the lockers in the southwestern corner.

He slipped in through the exit door there and right into the rush-hour crowd. He let the crowd work for him, never bucking the flow, never trying to edge past anyone. And for once he had no complaints about not being tall. As soon as he got into the thick of the throngs, his was just another head bobbing alongside so many others. He counted two cops near the doors to the terminals and one in the crowd about sixty feet away.

He popped out of the streaming crowd into the quiet of the locker bank. This was where, simply by dint of being alone, he was most noticeable. He'd already removed three thousand dollars from the satchel and buckled it back up. He had the key to locker 217 in his right hand, the bag in his left. Inside 217 was $7,435, twelve pocket watches and thirteen wristwatches, two sterling silver money clips, a gold tie pin, and assorted women's jewelry he'd never gotten around to selling because he'd suspected the fences were trying to fleece him. He took smooth strides to the locker, raised his right hand, which only trembled slightly, and opened it.

Behind him, someone called, “Hey!”

Joe kept his eyes straight ahead. The tremor in his hand turned into a spasm as he swung the locker door back.

“I said, ‘Hey!' ”

Joe pushed the satchel into the locker, closed the door.

“Hey, you! Hey!”

Joe turned the key, locked the door, and pocketed the key.

“Hey!”

Joe turned, picturing the cop waiting for him, service revolver drawn, probably young, probably jumpy. . . .

A wino sat on the floor by a trash barrel. Bone thin, nothing to him but red eyes, red cheeks, and sinew. His jaw jutted in Joe's direction.

“The fuck you looking at?” he asked.

The laugh left Joe's mouth like a bark. He reached in his pocket, came back with a ten spot. He stooped and handed it to the old wino.

“Looking at you, Pops. Looking at you.”

The guy belched at that, but Joe was already moving away, lost in the crowd.

Outside, he walked east on St. James toward the two klieg lights crossing back and forth in the low clouds above the new hotel. It calmed him for a moment to imagine his money sitting safe and sound in the locker until he chose to return for it. A decision, he thought as he turned onto Essex Street, that was a bit unorthodox when a fella was planning a lifetime on the run.

If you're leaving the country, why leave the money here?

So I can come back for it.

Why would you need to come back for it?

In case I don't make it out tonight.

There's your answer
.

There's no answer. What answer?

You didn't want them to find the money on you
.

Exactly.

Because you know you're going to get caught.

Chapter Five

Rough Work

H
e entered the Hotel Statler through the employee entrance. When a porter and then a dishwasher gave him curious glances, he lifted his hat and shot them confident smiles and two-finger salutes, a bon vivant avoiding the crowds out front, and they gave him nods and smiles in return.

Going through the kitchen, he could hear a piano, a peppy clarinet, and a steady bass coming from the lobby. He climbed a dark concrete staircase. He opened the door up top and came out by a marble staircase into a kingdom of light and smoke and music.

Joe had been in a few swank hotel lobbies in his time, but he'd never seen anything like this. The clarinetist and the cellist stood near brass entrance doors so unblemished the light bouncing off them turned the dust motes in the air gold. Corinthian columns rose from marble floors to wrought iron balconies. The molding was creamy alabaster, and every ten yards a heavy chandelier descended, the same pendant shape as the candelabras in their six-foot stands. Blood-dark couches perched on Oriental rugs. Two grand pianos, submerged in white flowers, sat on either side of the lobby. The pianists lightly tinkled the keys and carried on repartee with the crowd and each other.

In front of the center staircase, WBZ had placed three radiophones in their black stands. A large woman in a light blue dress stood by one of them, consulting with a man in a beige suit and yellow bow tie. The woman patted the buns of her hair repeatedly and sipped from a glass of pale, foggy liquid.

Most men in the crowd wore tuxedos or dinner jackets. There were a few in suits, so Joe wasn't the only sore thumb in the gathering, but he was the only one still wearing a hat. He thought of removing it, but that would put the face on the front page of everyone's evening edition in clear view. He glanced up at the mezzanine; there were plenty of hats up there because that's where all the reporters and photographers mingled with the swells.

He dipped his chin and headed for the nearest staircase. It was slow going, the crowd pushing together, now that they'd seen the radiophones and the round woman in the blue dress. Even with his head down, he noticed Chappie Geygan and Boob Fowler talking with Red Ruffing. Joe, a Red Sox fanatic as long as he could remember, had to remind himself that it might not be a good idea for a wanted man to walk up to three baseball players and chat about their batting averages. He squeezed his way around the back of them, though, hoping he might hear a snippet to clear up the trade rumors about Geygan and Fowler, but all he heard was talk about the stock market, Geygan saying the only way to make real money was to buy on margin, any other way was for suckers who wanted to stay poor. That's when the large woman in the light blue dress stepped up to the microphone and cleared her throat. The man beside her stepped to the other radiophone and raised an arm to the crowd.

“Ladies and gentlemen, for your listening pleasure,” the man said, “WBZ Radio, Boston, 1030 on your dial, is here live from the Grand Lobby of the landmark Hotel Statler. I'm Edwin Mulver and it gives me great pleasure to present to you Mademoiselle Florence Ferrel, mezzo-soprano with the San Francisco Opera.”

Edwin Mulver stepped back, his chin tilted up, as Florence Ferrel patted the buns of her hair one more time and then exhaled into her radiophone. The exhalation turned, without warning, into a mountain peak of a high note that thrummed through the crowd and climbed three stories to the ceiling. It was a sound so extravagant and yet so authentic it filled Joe with an awful loneliness. She was bearing forth something from the gods, and as it moved from her body into his, Joe realized he would die someday. He knew it in a different way than he'd known it coming through the door. Coming through the door, it had been a distant possibility. Now, it was a callous fact, indifferent to his dismay. In the face of such clear evidence of the otherworldly, he knew, beyond argument, that he was mortal and insignificant and had been taking steps out of the world since the day he'd entered it.

As she ventured deeper into the aria, the notes grew ever higher, ever longer, and Joe pictured her voice as a dark ocean, beyond end, beyond depth. He looked around at the men in their tuxedos and the women in their glittering taffeta and silk sheaths and lace wreaths, at the champagne flowing from a fountain in the center of the lobby. He recognized a judge and Mayor Curley and Governor Fuller and another infielder for the Sox, Baby Doll Jacobson. By one of the pianos, he saw Constance Flagstead, a local stage star, flirting with Ira Bumtroth, a known numbers man. Some people were laughing, and others tried so hard to look respectable it was laughable. He saw stern men with muttonchop sideburns and wizened matrons with skirts the shape of church bells. He identified Brahmins and blue bloods and Daughters of the American Revolution. He noted bootleggers and bootlegger lawyers and even the tennis player Rory Johannsen, who'd made it to the quarterfinals at Wimbledon last year before being knocked out by the Frenchman Henri Cochet. He saw bespectacled intellectuals trying not to get caught looking at frivolous flappers with insipid conversational skills but sparkling eyes and dazzling legs . . . and all of them soon to vanish from the earth. Fifty years from now, someone could look at a photograph of this night and most of the people in the room would be dead, and the rest would be on their way.

As Florence Ferrel finished her aria, he looked up toward the mezzanine and saw Albert White. Standing dutifully behind his right elbow was his wife. She was middle-aged and twig-thin, carrying none of the ample weight of a well-to-do matron. Her eyes were the biggest part of her, noticeable even from where Joe stood. They were bulging and frantic, even as she smiled at something Albert said to a chuckling Mayor Curley, who'd found his way up there with a glass of scotch.

Joe looked a few yards down the balcony and there was Emma. She wore a silver sheath dress and stood in a crowd near the wrought iron railing, a glass of champagne in her left hand. In this light, her skin was the white of the alabaster, and she looked stricken and alone, lost in a private grief. Was this who she was when she didn't think he was looking? Was there some unnameable loss grafted to her heart? For a moment he feared she'd jump over the balcony rail, but then the sickness in her face turned to a smile. And he realized what had placed the grief in her face: she'd never expected to see him again.

Her smile widened and she covered it with her hand. It was the same hand that held the champagne glass, so the glass tipped and a few drops fell into the crowd below. One man looked up and touched the back of his head. A portly woman wiped at her brow then blinked her right eye several times.

Emma leaned back from the rail and tilted her head toward the staircase on his side of the lobby. Joe nodded. She moved away from the railing.

He lost her in the crowd above as he worked his way through the one below. He had noticed that most of the reporters on the mezzanine wore their hats back on their heads and their tie knots were crooked. So he pushed his hat back and loosened his tie as he squeezed through the last cluster of people and reached the staircase.

Officer Donald Belinski ran down toward him, a ghost who'd somehow risen from the pond floor, scraped the burned flesh from his bones, and now trotted down the staircase toward Joe—same blond hair, same blotchy complexion, same ridiculously red lips and pale eyes. No wait, this guy was fleshier, and his blond hair had already begun to recede and leaned a bit more toward red than pure blond. And even though Joe had only seen Belinski lying on his back, he was fairly certain the cop had been taller than this man. And probably smelled better too, this guy smelling of onions, Joe that close to him as they passed in the stairwell, the guy's eyes narrowing. He swept a hank of oily red-blond hair off his forehead, his hat in his free hand, a
Boston Examiner
press ID tucked inside the grosgrain ribbon. Joe sidestepped him at the last moment, and the man fumbled with his hat.

Joe said, “Excuse me.”

The guy said, “My apologies,” but Joe could feel his eyes on him as he moved up the stairs fast, stunned at his own stupidity not only to have looked someone directly in the face but also to have looked a reporter directly in the face.

The guy called up the stairwell, “Excuse me, excuse me. You dropped something,” but Joe hadn't dropped shit. He kept going, and a group entered the stairwell above him, already tipsy, one woman draped over another like a loose robe, and then Joe was passing through them and not looking back, not looking back, looking only forward.

At her.

She held a small purse that matched her dress and the silver feather and silver band in her hair. A small vein pulsed in her throat. Her shoulders rippled; her eyes flashed. It was all he could do not to clutch those shoulders and lift her off her feet until she wrapped her legs around his back and lowered her face to his. But instead he kept moving past her and said, “Guy just recognized me. Gotta move.”

She fell in beside him as he walked a red carpet past the main ballroom. The crowds were thick up here but not as jammed in as down below. You could move along the perimeter of the crowd easily enough.

“There's a service elevator just past the next balcony,” she said. “Goes to the basement. I can't believe you came.”

He took the right at the next opening, his head down, and pushed his hat to his forehead, pulled it down tight. “What else was I going to do?”

“Run.”

“To what?”

“I don't know. Jesus. It's what people do.”

“It's not what I do.”

The crowd grew thicker as they passed along the back of the mezzanine. Down below, the governor had taken the radiophone and was proclaiming today Hotel Statler Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and a cheer went up, the crowd good and drunk now as Emma came abreast of him and nudged him to the left with her elbow.

He saw it now, past where their corridor intersected with another—a dark nook behind the banquet tables and the lights and the marble and red carpet.

Downstairs, a brass band struck its horns and the throngs in the mezzanine kicked up their heels and the flashbulbs flashed and popped and hissed. He wondered if any of the staff photographers would get back to their newsrooms and notice the guy in the background of some of their shots, the guy in the tan suit with the bounty on his head.

“Left, left,” Emma said.

He turned left between two banquet tables and the marble floor gave way to thin black tile. Another couple of steps and he reached the elevator. He pressed the down button.

Four drunken men passed along the edge of the mezzanine. They were a couple years older than Joe and singing “Soldiers Field.”

“O'er the stands of flaming Crimson,” the men crooned off-key, “the Harvard banners fly.”

Joe pressed the down button again.

One of the men met his eyes, then leered at Emma's ass. He nudged a buddy as they continued to sing, “Cheer on cheer like volleyed thunder echoes to the sky.”

Emma grazed the side of his hand with her own. She said, “Shit, shit, shit.”

He pressed the button again.

A waiter banged through the two kitchen doors to their left, a large tray held aloft. He passed within three feet of them but never looked their way.

The Harvard guys had passed but they could still hear them:

“Then fight, fight, fight! For we win tonight.”

Emma reached past him and pressed the down button.

“Old Harvard forevermore!”

Joe considered slipping through the kitchen, but he suspected it was a box with, at best, a dumbwaiter to bring up food from the main kitchen two stories down. In retrospect, the smart thing would have been for Emma to come to him, not the other way around. If only he'd been thinking clearly, but he couldn't remember the last time he'd done that.

He reached for the button again, but then he heard the car rising toward them.

“If there's anyone in it, just show them your back,” he said. “They'll be in a rush.”

“Not once they see my back,” she said, and he smiled in spite of the weight of his worry.

The car arrived and he waited but the doors stayed closed. He counted five beats of his own heart. He slid back the gate. He opened the door on an empty car. He looked back over his shoulder at Emma. She stepped in ahead of him and he followed. He closed the gate and then the door. He turned the crank and they began their descent.

She placed the flat of her palm to his cock and it immediately hardened as she covered his mouth with her own. He slid his free hand under her dress and between the heat of her thighs and she groaned into his mouth. Her tears fell on his cheekbones.

“Why're you crying?”

“Because I might love you.”

“Might?”

“Yes.”

“Then laugh.”

“I can't, I can't,” she said.

“You know the bus station on St. James?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What? Sure. Of course.”

He placed the locker key in her hand. “In case anything happens.”

“What?”

“Between here and freedom.”

“No, no, no, no,” she said. “No, no. You take this. I don't want it.”

He waved it off. “Put it in your purse.”

“Joe, I don't want this.”

“It's money.”

“I know what it is and I don't want it.” She tried handing it to him, but he held his hands high.

“Hold on to it.”

“No,” she said. “We'll spend it together. I'm with you now. I'm with you, Joe. Take the key.”

She tried handing it to him again but they'd reached the basement.

The window in the door was black because the lights were off for some reason.

They weren't off for “some” reason, Joe realized. There was only one reason.

He reached for the crank as the gate was thrown open from the other side and Brendan Loomis reached in and pulled Joe out of the car by his tie. He pulled Joe's pistol free of the small of his back and tossed it off into the dark along the cement floor. Then he punched Joe in the face and the side of his head more times than Joe could count, all of it happening so fast Joe barely got his hands up.