Live by Night (13 page)

But in the instant before he pulled that trigger, Thomas had seen something no one else had: the true nature of Maurice Dobson's intent. He would tell the hostage, Barrett W. Stanford II, about it first, and then relate the same tale to Eddie McKenna, then to his watch commander, and then to the members of the BPD Shooting Board. With their permission, he told the same story to the members of the press and also to Barrett W. Stanford Sr., who was so overcome with gratitude that he gave Thomas a watch that had been presented to him in Zurich by Joseph Emile Philippe himself. Thomas attempted three times to refuse such an extravagant gift, but Barrett W. Stanford Sr. wouldn't hear of it.

So he carried the watch, not with the pride that so many presumed, but with a gravely intimate respect. In the legend, Maurice Dobson's intent was to kill Barrett W. Stanford II. And who could argue with that interpretation, given that he'd placed a pistol to Barrett's throat?

But the intent Thomas had read in Maurice Dobson's eyes in that final instant—and it was that quick: an instant—was surrender. Thomas had stood four feet away, service revolver drawn and steady in his hand, finger on the trigger, so ready to pull it—and you had to be, or else why draw the gun in the first place?—that when he saw an acceptance of his fate pass through Maurice Dobson's pebble-gray eyes, an acceptance that he was going to jail, that this was over now, Thomas felt unfairly denied. Denied of what, he couldn't rightly say at first. But as soon as he pulled the trigger, he knew.

The bullet entered the left eye of the unfortunate Maurice Dobson, the
late
Maurice Dobson before he even reached the floor, and the heat of it singed a stripe into the skin just below Barrett W. Stanford II's temple. When the finality of the bullet's purpose conjoined with finality of its usage, Thomas understood what had been denied him and why he'd taken such permanent steps to rectify that denial.

When two men pointed theirs guns at each other, a contract was established under the eyes of God, the only acceptable fulfillment of which was that one of you send the other home to him.

Or so it had felt at the time.

Over the years, even in the deepest of his cups, even with Eddie McKenna, who knew most of his secrets, Thomas had never told another soul what kind of intent he'd actually seen in Maurice Dobson's eyes. And while he felt no pride in his actions that day and so took none in his possession of the pocket watch, he never left his house without it, because it bore witness to the profound responsibility that defined his profession—we don't enforce the laws of men; we enforce the will of nature. God was not some white-robed cloud king prone to sentimental meddling in human affairs. He was the iron that formed its core, and the fire in the belly of the blast furnaces that ran for a hundred years. God was the law of iron and the law of fire. God was nature and nature was God. There could not be one without the other.

And you, Joseph, my youngest, my wayward romantic, my prickly heart—it's now you who has to remind men of those laws. The worst men. Or die from weakness, from moral frailty, from lack of will.

I'll pray for you, because prayer is all that remains when power dies. And I have no power anymore. I can't reach behind those granite walls. I can't slow or stop time. Hell, at the moment, I can't even tell it.

He looked out at his garden, so close to harvest. He prayed for Joe. He prayed for a tide of his ancestors, most unknown to him, and yet he could see them so clearly, a diaspora of stooped souls stained by drink and famine and the dark impulse. He wished for their eternal rest to be peaceful, and he wished for a grandson.

J
oe found Hippo Fasini on the yard and told him his father had undergone a change of heart.

“That'll happen,” Hippo said.

“He also gave me an address.”

“Yeah?” The fat man leaned back on his heels and looked out at nothing. “Whose?”

“Albert White's.”

“Albert White lives in Ashmont Hill.”

“I hear he doesn't visit much lately.”

“So give me the address.”

“Fuck you.”

Hippo Fasini looked at the ground, all three chins dropping into his prison stripes. “Excuse me?”

“Tell Maso I'll bring it to the wall with me tonight.”

“You ain't in a bargaining position, kid.”

Joe looked at him until Hippo met his eyes. He said, “Sure I am,” and walked off across the yard.

A
n hour before his meeting with Pescatore, he threw up twice into the oak bucket. His arms shook. Occasionally so did his chin and his lips. His blood became a steady pounding of fists against his ears. He'd tied the shank to his wrist with a leather bootlace Emil Lawson had provided. Just before he left his cell, he was to move it from there to between his ass cheeks. Lawson had strongly suggested he shove it all the way up his ass, but he envisioned one of Maso's goons forcing him to sit for whatever reason and decided it was the cheeks or nothing at all. He figured he'd make the transfer with about ten minutes to go, get used to moving with it, but a guard came by his cell forty minutes early to tell him he had a visitor.

It was dusk. Visiting hours were long over.

“Who?” he asked as he followed the guard down the tier, only then realizing the shank remained tied to his wrist.

“Someone who knows how to grease the right palms.”

“Yeah”—Joe tried to keep up with the guard, a brisk walker—“but who?”

The guard unlocked the ward gate and ushered Joe through. “Said he was your brother.”

H
e entered the room removing his hat. Coming through the doorway, he had to duck, a man who stood a full head taller than most. His dark hair had receded some and was lightly salted over the ears. Joe did the math and realized he'd be (thirty-five) now. Still fiercely handsome, though his face was more weathered than Joe remembered.

He wore a dark, slightly battered three-piece suit with cloverleaf lapels. It was the suit of a manager in a grain warehouse or a man who spent a lot of time on the road—a salesman or union organizer. Danny wore a white shirt under it, no tie.

He placed his hat on the counter and looked through the mesh between them.

“Shit,” Danny said, “you're not thirteen anymore, are you?”

Joe noticed how red his brother's eyes were. “And you're not twenty-five.”

Danny lit a cigarette and the match quivered between his fingers. A large scar, puckered in the center, covered the back of his hand. “Still whoop your ass.”

Joe shrugged. “Maybe not. I'm learning to fight dirty.”

Danny gave that an arch of his eyebrows and exhaled a plume of smoke. “He's gone, Joe.”

Joe knew who “he” was. Some part of him had known the last time he'd laid eyes on him in this room. But another part of him couldn't accept it. Wouldn't.

“Who?”

His brother looked at the ceiling for a moment, then back at him. “Dad, Joe. Dad's dead.”

“How?”

“My guess? Heart attack.”

“Did you . . . ?”

“Huh?”

“Were you there?”

Danny shook his head. “I missed him by half an hour. He was still warm when I found him.”

Joe said, “You're sure there was no . . .”

“What?”

“Foul play?”

“What the fuck are they doing to you in here?” Danny looked around the room. “No, Joe, it was a heart attack or a stroke.”

“How do you know?”

Danny narrowed his eyes. “He was smiling.”

“What?”

“Yeah.” Danny chuckled. “That small one of his? One looked like he was hearing some private joke or remembering something from the way back, before any of us? You know that one?”

“Yeah, I do,” Joe said and was surprised to hear himself whisper again, “I do.”

“No watch on him, though.”

“Huh?” Joe's head buzzed.

“His watch,” Danny said. “He didn't have it. Never knew him to—”

“I got it,” Joe said. “He gave it to me. In case I run into trouble. You know, in here.”

“So you've got it.”

“I got it,” he said, the lie burning his stomach. He saw Maso's hand closing over the watch and he wanted to beat his own head against concrete until he stove it in.

“Good,” Danny said. “That's good.”

“It's not,” Joe said. “It's shit. But it's about the size of things now.”

Neither of them spoke for a few moments. A factory whistle blew distantly from the other side of the walls.

Danny said, “You know where I can find Con?”

Joe nodded. “He's at the Abbotsford.”

“The blind school? What's he doing there?”

“Lives there,” Joe said. “He just woke up one day and quit on everything.”

“Well,” Danny said, “that kinda injury could make anyone bitter.”

“He was bitter long before the injury,” Joe said.

Danny shrugged in agreement and they sat in silence for a minute.

Joe said, “Where was he when you found him?”

“Where do you think?” Danny dropped his cigarette to the floor and stepped on it, the smoke leaving his mouth from under the curl in his upper lip. “Out back, sitting in that chair on the porch, you know? Looking out at his . . .” Danny lowered his head and waved at the air.

“Garden,” Joe said.

Chapter Nine

As the Old Man Goes

E
ven in prison, news of the outside world trickled in. That year all the sports talk concerned the New York Yankees and their Murderers' Row of Combs, Koenig, Ruth, Gehrig, Meusel, and Lazzeri. Ruth alone hit a mind-boggling sixty home runs, and the other five hitters were so dominant that the only question left was by how humiliating a margin they'd sweep the Pirates in the World Series.

Joe, a walking encyclopedia of baseball, would have loved to see this team play because he knew their like might never come around again. And yet his time in Charlestown had also instilled in him a reactionary contempt for anyone who would call a group of ballplayers Murderers' Row.

You want a Murderers' Row, he thought that evening just after dusk, I'm
walking
it. The entrance to the walkway along the top of the prison wall was on the other side of a door at the end of F Block on the uppermost tier of North Wing. It was impossible to reach that door unobserved. A man couldn't even reach the tier without going through three separate gates. Once he did, he faced an empty tier. Even in a prison as overcrowded as this, they kept the twelve cells there empty and cleaner than a church font before a baptism.

As Joe walked along the tier now, he saw how they kept it so clean—each cell was being mopped by a convict trustee. The high windows in the cells, identical to the window in his own, revealed a square of sky. The squares were all a blue so dark it was nearly black, which left Joe to wonder how much the moppers could see in those cells. All the light was on the corridor. Maybe the guards would provide lanterns when dusk became night in a matter of minutes.

But there were no guards. Just the one leading him down the tier, the one who'd led him to and from the visiting room, the one who walked too fast, which would get him into trouble someday because the objective was to keep the convict ahead of you. If you got ahead of the convict, he could get up to all sorts of nefarious things, which is how Joe had moved the shank from his wrist to his butt five minutes ago. He wished he'd practiced it, though. Trying to walk with clenched ass cheeks and appear natural was no easy thing.

But where were the other guards? On nights when Maso walked the wall, they kept their presence light up here; it wasn't like every guard was on the Pescatore payroll, though those who weren't would never go pigeon on those who were. But Joe glanced around as they continued along the tier and confirmed what he'd feared—there were no guards up here right now. And then he got a close look at the inmates cleaning the cells:

Murderers' Row, indeed.

Basil Chigis's pointy head tipped him off. Not even the prison-issue watch cap could disguise it. Basil pushed a mop in the seventh cell on the tier. The foul-smelling guy who'd put his shank to Joe's right ear mopped the eighth. Pushing a bucket around the tenth empty cell was Dom Pokaski, who'd burned his own family alive—wife, two daughters, mother-in-law, not to mention three cats he'd locked in the fruit cellar.

At the end of the tier, Hippo and Naldo Aliente stood by the stairwell door. If they thought there was anything odd about the higher-than-usual inmate presence and lower-than-ever guard presence, they were doing a first-class job of masking it. Nothing showed on their faces, really, except the smug entitlement of the ruling class.

Fellas, Joe thought, you might want to brace for change.

“Hands up,” Hippo told Joe. “I gotta frisk you.”

Joe didn't hesitate, but he did regret not shoving the shank all the way up his ass. The handle, small as it was, rested against the base of his spine, but Hippo might feel an abnormal shape there, pull up his shirt and then use the shank on him. Joe kept his arms raised, surprised by how steady he seemed: no shakes, no sweat, no outward signs of fear. Hippo slapped his paws up Joe's legs and then along his ribs and ran one down his chest and the other down his back. The tip of Hippo's finger grazed the handle and Joe could feel it tilt back. He clenched harder, aware that his life depended on something as absurd as how tight he could clench his buttocks.

Hippo gripped Joe's shoulders and turned him to face him. “Open your mouth.”

Joe did.

“Wider.”

Joe complied.

Hippo peered into his mouth. “He's clean,” he said and stepped back.

As Joe went to pass, Naldo Aliente blocked the door. He looked into Joe's face like he knew all the lies behind it.

“Your life goes as that old man's goes,” he said. “You understand?”

Joe nodded, knowing that whatever happened to him or Pescatore, Naldo was living the final minutes of his life right now. “You bet.”

Naldo stepped aside, Hippo opened the door, and Joe stepped through. There was nothing on the other side but an iron spiral staircase. It rose from the concrete box to a trapdoor that had been left open to the night. Joe pulled the shank out of the back of his pants and placed it in the pocket of his coarse striped shirt. When he reached the top of the staircase, he made a fist of his right hand, then raised the index and middle fingers and thrust the hand out of the hole until the guard in the nearest tower could get a look. The light from the tower swung left, right, and left-right again in a quick zigzag—the all clear. Joe climbed through the opening and out onto the walkway and scanned his surroundings until he made out Maso about fifteen yards down the wall in front of the central watchtower.

He walked to him, feeling the shank bouncing lightly against his hip. The only blind spot to the central watchtower was the space directly below it. As long as Maso stayed where he was, they'd be invisible. When Joe reached him, Maso was smoking one of the bitter French cigarettes he preferred, the yellow ones, and looking west across the blight.

He looked at Joe for a bit and said nothing, just inhaled and exhaled his cigarette smoke with a wet rattle.

And then he said, “I'm sorry about your father.”

Joe stopped fishing for his own cigarette. The night sky dropped over his face like a cloak and the air around him evaporated until the lack of oxygen squeezed his head.

There was no way Maso could know. Even with all his power, all his sources. Danny had told Joe he'd reached out to no less than Superintendent Michael Crowley, who'd come up on foot patrol with their father and whose job their father had been expected to inherit before that night behind the Statler. Thomas Coughlin had been whisked out the back of his house into an unmarked police car and taken into the city morgue by the underground entrance.

I'm sorry about your father
.

No, Joe told himself. No. He can't know. Impossible.

Joe found his cigarette and placed it between his lips. Maso struck a match off the parapet and lit it for him, the old man's eyes taking on the generous cast they were capable of when it suited.

Joe said, “What're you sorry about?”

Maso shrugged. “No man should ever be asked to do what's against his nature, Joseph, even if it's to help a loved one. What we asked of him, what we asked of you, it wasn't fair. But what's fucking fair in this world?”

Joe's heartbeat slid back out of his ears and throat.

He and Maso leaned their elbows on the parapet and smoked. Lights from the barges along the Mystic scudded through the thick, distant gray like exiled stars. White snakes of foundry smoke pirouetted toward them. The air smelled of trapped heat and a rain that refused to fall.

“I won't ask anything so hard of you or your father again, Joseph.” Maso gave him a firm nod. “I promise you that.”

Joe locked eyes with him. “Sure you will, Maso.”

“Mr. Pescatore, Joseph.”

Joe said, “My apologies,” and his cigarette fell from his fingers. He bent to the walkway to pick it up.

Instead, he wrapped his arms around Maso's ankles and pulled up hard.

“Don't scream.” Joe straightened and the old man's head entered the space beyond the edge of the parapet. “You scream, I drop you.”

The old man's breath came fast. His feet kicked against Joe's ribs.

“I'd stop struggling too, or I won't be able to hold on.”

It took a few moments, but Maso's feet stopped moving.

“Do you have any weapons on you? Don't lie.”

The voice floated back from the edge to him. “Yes.”

“How many?”

“Just one.”

Joe let go of his ankles.

Maso waved his arms like he might, in that moment, learn to fly. He slid forward on his chest, and the dark swallowed his head and torso. He probably would have screamed, but Joe sank his hand into the waistband of Maso's prison uniform, dug a heel into the wall of the parapet, and leaned back.

Maso made a series of strange huffing sounds, very high-pitched, like a newborn abandoned in a field.

“How many?” Joe repeated.

Nothing but that huffing for a minute and then, “Two.”

“Where are they?”

“Razor at my ankle, nails in my pocket.”

Nails? Joe had to see this. He patted the pockets with his free hand, found on odd lump. He reached in gingerly and came back with what he might have mistaken for a comb at first glance. Four short nails were soldered to a bar that was, in turn, soldered to four misshapen rings.

“This goes over your fist?” Joe said.

“Yes.”

“That's nasty.”

He placed it on the parapet and then found the straight razor in Maso's sock, a Wilkinson with a pearl handle. He placed it beside the nail knuckles.

“Getting light-headed yet?”

A muffled “Yes.”

“Expect so.” Joe adjusted his grip on the waistband. “Are we agreed, Maso, that if I open my fingers you're one dead guinea?”

“Yes.”

“I got a hole in my leg from a fucking
potato peeler
because of you.”

“I . . . I . . . you.”

“What? Speak clearly.”

It came out a hiss. “I saved you.”

“So you could get to my father.” Joe pushed down between Maso's shoulders with his elbow. The old man let out a squeak.

“What do you want?” Maso's voice was starting to flutter from lack of oxygen.

“You ever hear of Emma Gould?”

“No.”

“Albert White killed her.”

“I never heard of her.”

Joe wrenched him back up and then flipped him on his back. He took one step back and let the old man catch his breath.

Joe held out his hand, snapped his fingers. “Give me the watch.”

Maso didn't hesitate. He pulled it from his trouser pocket and handed it over. Joe held it tight in his fist, its ticking moving through his palm and into his blood.

“My father died today,” he said, aware he probably wasn't making much sense, jumping from his father to Emma and back again. But he didn't care. He needed to put words to something there weren't words for.

Maso's eyes skittered for a moment and then he went back to rubbing his throat.

Joe nodded. “Heart attack. I blame myself.” He slapped Maso's shoe and that jolted the old man enough that he slammed both palms down on the parapet. Joe smiled. “Blame you too, though. Blame you a whole fucking lot.”

“So kill me,” Maso said, but there wasn't much steel in his voice. He looked over his shoulder, then back at Joe.

“That's what I was ordered to do.”

“Who ordered you?”

“Lawson,” Joe said. “He's got an army down there waiting for you—Basil Chigis, Pokaski, all of Emil's carny freaks. Your guys? Naldo and Hippo?” Joe shook his head. “They're definitely tits-up by now. You've got a whole hunting party at the bottom of that staircase there in case I fail.”

A bit of the old defiance returned to Maso's face. “And you think they'll let you live?”

Joe had given that plenty of thought. “Probably. This war of yours has put a lot of bodies in the earth. Ain't too many of us left who can spell
gum
and chew it at the same time. Plus, I know Albert. We used to have something in common. This was his peace offering, I think—kill Maso and rejoin the fold.”

“So why didn't you?”

“Because I don't want to kill you.”

“No?”

Joe shook his head. “I want to destroy Albert.”

“Kill him?”

“Don't know about that,” Joe said. “But destroy him definitely.”

Maso fished in his pocket for his French cigarettes. He removed one and lit it, still catching his breath. Eventually he met Joe's eyes and nodded. “You have my blessing on that ambition.”

“Don't need your blessing,” Joe said.

“I won't try to talk you out of it,” Maso said, “but I never saw much profit in revenge.”

“Ain't about profit.”

“Everything in a man's life is about profit. Profit, or succession.” Maso looked up at the sky and then back again. “So how do we get back down there alive?”

“Any of the tower guards fully in your debt?”

“The one right above us,” Maso said. “The other two are faithful to the money.”

“Could your guard contact guards inside, get them to flank Lawson's crew, raid them right now?”

Maso shook his head. “If just one guard is close to Lawson, then word will get to the cons below and they'll storm up here.”

“Well, shit.” Joe exhaled a long slow breath and looked around. “Let's just do it the dirty way.”

W
hile Maso talked to the tower guard, Joe walked back down the wall to the trapdoor. If he was going to die, this was probably the moment. He couldn't shake the suspicion that every step he took was about to be interrupted by a bullet drilling through his brain or cracking through his spine.

He looked back down the way he'd come. Maso had left the pathway, so there was nothing to see but the gathering dark and the watchtowers. No stars, no moon, just the stone dark.