Bomber's Law (20 page)

“Well, hey,” Dennison had said, “that's pretty serious, I think. We can't have stuff like that going on. Tolerate that kind of official naughtiness, at taxpayer expense? I don't think so, Mister Holmes. You may think it's chickenshit, compared to the awe-inspiring, stupefying grandeur of what you're maybe, could be, doing, even though you don't know what it is yet, or who might be involved, and maybe never will. But if the citizens in western Massachusetts snap their evening papers open some fine night come this summer, and discover on the front page a big story about how Harry caught the county boffins with their paws in the cash drawer, those taxpayers will be very pleased, and they will glorify your name.

“ ‘We want Harry,' they will cheer, at the band concert that evening. ‘All right,
Harry
, way to go, catch those thieving crooks.' They'll shower you with rose petals at the Eastern States Exposition, if takes you 'til next fall, and line up to shake your hand. ‘Hey, Harry, you're our main man.' ‘Harry-
kid
there, gimme
five.
' ‘Harry, move your
family out here from Whitman, okay? This's where your future is. Retire from the outfit and throw in your lot with us. We'll give you fifty grand a year, a Mercedes for your cruiser, and your official wardrobe will be Giorgio Armani, Armani minimum. Give 'em all hell for us. We can't afford to have those crooks picking our pockets while we pay them for their time.' ”

“We can afford it a hell of a lot better'n we can to close our eyes to the kind of funny business that I still think might be going on here,” Dell'Appa had said. “If there is someone who wants me to be somewhere else and pronto, and he's in a position to do that, that is dangerous, Brian. That kind of power? Enough to get me out of here in one fucking big hurry, no waiting until after Christmas, and keep me out of here for as long as it takes him to either shut down whatever he's been getting even richer doing, or pull up stakes and move it, hide it better somewhere else? That ain't no old video game.”

“Ahh,”
Dennison had said, his voice guttural, his right hand brushing the suggestion away, “you're hearing the mermaids sing, Harry. Becoming a conspiracy junkie. Seeing a plot behind every bush, finding schemes in old coffee-cups. Beginning to think you're man's last best hope. This ‘detachment' may actually turn out to be the best thing in the world for you right now. Not meant to be, no, but still it could be, a good personal thing for you, I mean. Let you decompress after your first year in here, recover your wits and your bearings.”

“Short Joey's a regular law-abiding citizen,” Dell'Appa said to the microphone as the turn signal began to flash on the right rear fender of the Cadillac. “We're still a good five-eighths of a mile north of the One-oh-six exit ramp, but he's slowin' on down and movin' on over into the right travel lane, just like a safe driver should. No sudden snap decisions for our boy here, no reckless-move stuff for Joey. Not after all of these halcyon years—'cept for the handgun reports, of course; the sharp cracks of the skulls being shattered, the crisp snaps of the fibulas breaking. No reason to change his ways now.”

Joseph John Mossi's history in the files made him fifty-one years old that day, three months shy of his fifty-second birthday. Both Teresa Coppola and Luigi Mossi had been born in the United States; the six-room
apartment on the first floor of the three-decker residence at 73 Pittman Street, West Roxbury, where Joey and Daniel had grown up and where they still lived, had been Luigi and Teresa's first home together; when she had been taken to Boston City Hospital for the last time, in 1988, she had left from that address.

She had done so very reluctantly, having been fearful of hospitals ever since, she was sure, the nurses had somehow damaged Daniel when they'd taken him from her at birth. “I can't get it out of my head, that's all, you know? I know something happened, one of them must've dropped him or something. Someone gave him the wrong medicine. And then when they see what'd happened to him, my poor
little
, brand-new baby boy, then, oh boy, I'm tellin' you, then they all got really scared. ‘These people, they find out, they'll kill us for this. The dagoes, that's what they do with things like this. It's just the way ghinnies think.' So they all got together, see? And they protected each other. They all used to do that stuff then, cover up when they made a mistake. Especially when it was one of us. Did something, and they don't even think about it, not for a minute, that they ruined someone's whole life. As long as it ain't them, that it happened to.”

She had agreed to do that, go in and submit to the tests, only after she'd been worn down by weeks of nonstop nagging by Short Joey and her husband, who knew very well that irrational fear was the real reason for her resistance, but could not mention it and thus force her to confront it because she knew they knew and did not give them the chance. “Sure, Ma, we know it's nothin', but even so, you still gotta go, you know? Just have some tests, make sure. It's only for a couple of days, and then you'll be right back home here okay? And we'll all have peace of mind. You just got to do this thing.”

The morning after she left the house, the surgeon who made the small exploratory opening in her lower abdomen saw that the cancer which had started in her pancreas had metastasized to occupy the liver as well, and promptly closed her up again. But back in her room that afternoon she began to bleed internally, so that when she went back to West Roxbury the day after that, her transportation was the charcoal-gray Ford station wagon that J. S. Cardinale III employed as a service wagon in the undertaking business his grandfather had begun.

•  •  •

The old gray Cadillac displayed very little lateral lean on the ramp leading off Route 24 onto 106, recently-resurfaced two-lane blacktop stretching southwest through what had been mostly dairy-farming country until the 1980s. Then suddenly-prosperous, New Age, Quality-of-Lifers had discovered it as promising territory, virgin for construction of new brick-and-silvered-glass plants and office buildings, none of them exceeding thirty feet in height and all scrupulously designed to blend in with and complement the natural terrain. The kind of buildings, Dell'Appa had thought upon first noticing them scattered in the rolling fields around Northampton, that God would surely have included in the Pioneer Valley landscape, if He'd only had a little foresight, thought ahead a little to the day when His highest-ranking material creatures, His Yups, would require harmonious shelter during kicked-back working hours—along with, of course, on-site facilities for toddler-through-K2 day-care, lunchtime exercise, and quiet rooms for thought. Working hours in working places holistically and wholesomely far from madding crowds of extremely-numerous people who still drove old cars on leaded gasoline; salted fatty foods (bernaise-sauced, marbled beef; deep-fried, unranged, unskinned chicken) and ate them; smoked cigarettes (mostly filtered, as though that really mattered); drank hard liquor (sometimes neat); jogged not in midroadway, during twilight hours, nor worked out at least thrice a week on formidable machines; heard the chimes of midnight and cared not a whit for whales; distance from such people: that had been what they craved—
God
, what they
had
to have. What they'd contrived for themselves out in California, replicating moving east, and what they now had for themselves right here, in West Bridgewater as well—
yes
, well, exactly what they had.

“Pal Joey,” Dell'Appa said to his recorder as he settled the Lexus into the Cadillac's 50-mph groove, “he's a meticulous man. His car may look like a piece of shit, eight or ten years old and it's needed new paint for at least six, but the way it's handling for him it's got at least four new Monroes on the corners, maybe eight, nice new heavy-duty shocks. And I bet when I get a chance to look those tires over, they'll be near-new, topline, Goodyears-or-better, with plenty of tread on them. Joe Mossi's a right careful man.”

•  •  •

By the time Luigi and Teresa had set up housekeeping, in Boston's wet-wool heat of August, 1940, Luigi's parents had either become the owners of the building or legally surrendered to possession by it. The senior Mossis, Dominic and Philomena, had occupied the third floor as their first and only marital residence for almost nineteen years. Each month for sixteen of those years they had managed to hoard another mortgage payment together, almost always perilously close to the date after which Mr. Scannell at the bank would have called them in again for another dose of humiliation. He would have lectured them once more, as sternly as his reverential demeanor would permit, and warned them once again of the ever-brooding, mausoleum-stinking specter of foreclosure looming over them. Then he would have made what had been too hard to do on time that first and only time, in April '28 (when Philomena'd been flat on her back with the flu for the first three weeks back in March, unable to bring any money home)—make the regular payment—two brutal dollars even harder, terrifyingly harder, by imposing the penalty charge. That had never happened to them again, but neither of them had ever forgotten it. And neither did Luigi. He remembered it, too. Too young to understand it when it happened, at not-quite three-years-old, he had passively acquired from his parents, as soon as he was old enough, so vivid a recollection of the ignominy that for the rest of his lucid life he had personally suffered the aftermath of that disaster, and in pensive moments picked away at the crusted emotional scar.

That degradation had been the reason why Dominic and Philomena had thereafter commenced to assemble their next bank payment the morning after making the one that the next day would become currently due, the day after that overdue, and the day after that one delinquent. At least as far as Mr. Scannell was concerned. Frantically they reported to each other the rents they remorselessly collected from their tenants on the second and first floors, grimly calculating weekly whether it seemed likely, as they always feared, that everyone who lived in their house would be laid off in a week and thus become unable to pay their rents.

Each of Dominic and Philomena's tenants became partners in that apprehensiveness soon after they moved in. They did not have much choice. They tended to be fortyish couples, the majority of
them childless, who had heard that the Mossis managed a quiet, respectable place and didn't show much interest in documentation establishing either whether they were legal aliens or had been legally married—or if so, to each other. They also tended to move as soon their circumstances improved even slightly, so long as the additional money looked like it would be enough to permit them to live somewhere else, “aw right,
any
place else,” equally clean and well kept. “No hurry, you know? But we're lookin' around. We got our eyes peeled, you know? With some luck, a little bigger. Maybe closer the Square, get the groceries home, huh? Anna subway-stop, right? Make it easier, wintertime there.”

It was not because they did not respect Dominic and Philomena. They always said “the owners're good people. Heat's good inna winter and the place's kept up, you know? Always painted and nice, nobody makin' a lotta damned noise alia time, fightin', playin' the TV, when you're just tryin', get some sleep there.” But they considered themselves also to be good, hardworking people, even if they didn't mind admitting that they did try to take a little pleasure out of life. They felt some resentment at what seemed like constant dunning. Sad-eyed (he also had unusually-long ears, with proportionately-large lobes), soft-spoken Dominic (“da bloodhound”; the tenants found his mournful inquiries entirely bad enough) and narrow-eyed, sawtooth-voiced Philomena (“craziness, aw right? An'
worse.
You wouldn't believe her, this woman”) worked them in relays. Correctly perceiving themselves to be less well-off than Luigi's parents (but refusing to see also that they were far less determined to become much better off, and that this might account in part for the financial imbalance), the tenants really didn't like this. So they had left as soon as they could, usually after four-plus years or so at 73 Pittman, without either bitterness or nostalgia.

Philomena and Dominic had always seen them off without regret, renting out their apartments to newcomers who moved in the day the veterans vacated them, the new occupants not knowing from firsthand experience what they were in for, the Mossis resigned by then to the familiar fugue, starting the cycle again. As long as they kept on paying the rent, the people who came to live in the house could think any damned thing they liked. So long as those rents, combined with their own wages, covered the mortgage each month, what anyone
else, outside of the house, cared to think of its owners would be all right. Luigi adopted that attitude too, as soon as he was old enough, and in turn passed it on to his sons. At least to one of the sons.

The senior Mossis combined those rents with every nickel they could sequester from their own earnings at hard physical labor. Luigi's father worked as a teamster for a man whom he correctly described to his own friends as “a biggah meanah bastard, even though he's a goombah himself, ghinny rattabass,” who when Dominic first went to work for him had just begun converting his horse-drawn cartage service (specializing in deliveries of heavy machinery) into a fleet of moving trucks. Philomena did scrubwork in the downtown-Boston financial district, washing stone floors with a fifteen-by-four-inch brush with coarse three-inch yellow bristles, pushing a three-gallon galvanized-steel pail of cold, soapy water ahead of her as she proceeded through the corridors on her hands and knees. They doggedly practiced self-denial every day (except Sundays, when they defiantly relished a bottle of Gabbiano and got slightly tipsy on it, Dominic when the mood was on him sometimes singing “Santa Lucia,” off-key but with enthusiasm), and so greatly had they impressed their son with the rigorous virtue of their lives that before Luigi had reached the age of fourteen he had made up his mind that he would do everything he had to do to show respect to his good parents by living just as they had, except for as many small improvements as God might permit him to make. His son Joseph in time developed a similar-but-not-identical ambition; he wanted to make larger improvements, and he was not interested at all in whether he might have God's permission to make them, or would have God's approval afterward of the means he had employed.