We Were Kings (13 page)

Shaw shook his head, looked as if he were ready to say something but kept his mouth shut.

“We heard about the murder at that South End gambling den,” Dante said. “Old bastard was strangled with a wire, nearly had his head cut off. And that shitty bar in Quincy, up in flames and three men torn up with buckshot. Either you're lying or like Cal said, the old gang don't have much muscle anymore. Which is it?”

At the crack of a bat the men stopped talking and turned back to the game. Mickey Mantle had just launched one of Sullivan's fastballs out into the empty seats at right field, and Rizzuto and Collins crossed home plate.

Seven to one.

People around them left their seats and made for the exit ramps. As though the home run were a flame to a wick, a section of the bleachers erupted into another fight. Two groups of men were throwing wild, drunken fists at one another. Several ushers quickly rushed over the aisles and broke into the fray, only to get knocked down. Shielding their heads, they cowered by the stairs until a group of police bearing clubs moved in, got some good whacks in, and brought the brawl to an end. From afar, the violence of it seemed faked, and not very exciting at that.

Cal finished off his beer. “I hear Sully's in a bad way.”

“Rumors are rumors.” Shaw stamped out his cigarette.

“Dementia. That's what I'm hearing from people who know.”

“Good days, bad days. He'll be okay.”

“You don't sound too convincing,” Dante said.

With his eyes glistening somberly, Shaw looked at Dante and then at Cal. He rolled his shoulders and gestured to one of his men for another cigarette. The skinny old man pulled out an empty pack, crumpled it in his hands, and let it drop to the ground.

Shaw sighed and ran his fingers through his sweat-damp hair. “Between you and me, sometimes he's with it, sometimes he ain't. We're getting things in order, you know. We just don't have the army we used to have. Tough to tell who is who anymore. Everybody whispering this or that, talking shit behind our backs. Everybody thinking they can still be a king without putting any time in.”

“Can we see him?” Cal asked.

Shaw appeared to think about it for a moment, and his eyes glinted with remembrance as if he were pushing back through the years and visualizing an exact moment when they were young men from Fields Corner trying to make a name for themselves.

“I think he'd like that, Cal. He always said you'd have been a good soldier. Always said that you were like your father. Persistent, not knowing when to quit.” Shaw smirked, took his hat off his knee, and put it on, pushing the front brim far up on his forehead. His two men got the gesture and stood up from their seats. Dante looked at the two of them.
Fucking Laurel and Hardy,
he thought, the saddest two musclemen he'd seen in quite some time.

“Where is he?” Cal asked.

“At the rest home near Fields Corner. You know the one. It's been there forever.”

“When is a good time?”

“Tomorrow would be okay. Give me a call in the morning.”

Dante watched as Shaw stood up and in that moment saw him not as a soldier but as a stepchild of the former boss of Boston. He would inherit nothing of the empire, not that there was anything left to give or to take. He was as good as a servant at this point, a nurse, an errand boy. Dante wouldn't be surprised if he saw Shaw a year from now tending bar at some shithole on the Avenue, wearing the same ugly burgundy shirt he wore at this very moment, slinging weak drinks and singing the sad songs that only bums knew the words to.

“You boys take care,” Shaw said, and followed his two men out of the aisle and up the stairs.

_________________________

North End

FEELING AS THOUGH
he needed the exercise and also to escape the furnace-like heat of the subway, Dante got off at Boylston and walked north toward Scollay Square.

The sun was setting its dying embers over the city, filling its streets with a somber, otherworldly light. He fingered the change in his pocket and thought he'd get a cold beer or two at Kelly's Rose. But he'd had his share with Cal earlier, and only a block away from the bar, he decided against it. Instead he walked into a corner store, went to the magazine rack, grabbed a
Weird Tales,
a
Special Detective,
and a comic for Maria, paid for them, and then left.

One block up, an empty lot opened before him. There was a building halfway demolished; jagged spires of brick reached up into the fiery sky. Some windows and walls remained intact but without any rooms behind them, it looked to Dante like the photos he'd seen of London after the Blitz. Piles of rubble, slabs of serrated concrete, and chunks of ballast were scattered around the lot. Crickets buzzed in the random patches of green weeds that miraculously sprouted from the dust and dirt.

Deeper down on Prince Street, he spotted flashing reds and blues twirling on the hood of a parked squad car. Closer, he noticed yellow police tape hanging slack from a tree and looped around a telephone pole. A police sawhorse blocked off one end of the sidewalk. A young cop who was dwarfed inside his heavy wool uniform stood guard, his cherubic face pink from the heat. He didn't look much older than a senior in high school.

The storefront window, once stenciled white with the words
North End
Pharmaceuticals,
was shattered. Fangs of glass clung to the corners, and on the sidewalk, small fragments glimmered like jewels. A dark stain had pooled on the gray pavement. In the fading sunlight, it looked like something that would leak from a machine and not a human body. Drippings of it ran the length of the sidewalk. Whoever else was injured had made a run for it.

Near Dante, two middle-aged women stood on the sidewalk chatting. One was especially attractive and the other the exact opposite, a raised and bumpy mole right under her nose and protuberant eyes under wiry, bushy brows. They were speaking to each other in Italian. His grasp of the language was still a bit rusty, but since he had moved into the neighborhood, it had gradually been getting better. He could tell they were talking of the crime scene being another one of those youth-gang incidents—the Irish kids from Charlestown starting up with the juvenile North Enders here. He'd already heard of the two rivals going at it once school got out in early June, but he knew it ran much deeper than that. One version he'd heard was that an Italian kid knocked up an Irish girl from Charlestown. He'd tried to solve the problem himself and beat her with a Louisville Slugger until she miscarried. He'd told her to say it was two blacks but once she recovered, she'd told her brother who it really was, and he went up higher, to the local mobsters, mostly Irish American thugs who were bodyguards to the unions and who on the side grafted immigrant-owned shops and manned the betting halls. A whole gang of them used baseball bats on the kid, and to shame him further, sodomized him with one of the bats and left him bleeding to death by the bocce courts along the pier overlooking the inner harbor. And then back and forth it went—no surprise there. Higher up the chain, the older regimes got wind of what was happening and had no choice but to protect their own. Baseball bats became knives, and the knives became guns. It was all part of that cycle that Cal knew so well, and it didn't matter if it was the IRA or the Italian mob, it would never stop. That's the way it worked; that's the way it would always work.

Dante put a cigarette in his mouth. As he lit a match a hand slapped hard against his back. The match fell from his fingers. He turned quickly. It was Vincent Antonelli, the boyfriend of his sister, Claudia.

“I thought it was you. Hell, man. How's it going, Dante?”

Dante stepped aside, still in shock from the slap to his back. Men who did that got under his skin. Hitting a man on the back when he wasn't looking, wasn't expecting it—something was wrong about it. It was almost no different than a sucker punch.

“Okay, Vinny. I'm doing fine.”

“I was just across the way, hanging out with the old-timers. Saw you standing here like you were police or something.”

Dante looked across the street to the stoop of a building where three hard guys in white T-shirts smoked cigars, talking loudly and gesturing with their hands as they argued. They were no good. Loudmouths, layabouts. The kind that fucked their teenage mistresses every Friday, beat their wives every Saturday, and then cursed out somebody who didn't go to church every Sunday.

“C'mon, let me buy you a drink.”

“Sorry, Vincent. I don't have the time.”

“Jesus. What are you, my fucking mother? Call me Vinny.”

“Okay, Vinny.”

“A quick one. Right over there. C'mon, Dante.” He pointed to a small restaurant in the building next to the stoop. Its façade was in dire need of a paint job. A wooden sign above the door read
Italian Social.
A heavy velvet shade covered the one storefront window. It was a place Dante had never seen anybody exit or enter.

Vinny wore a loud green shirt, the top two buttons undone, and a thick, gold chain glimmered against his sun-darkened skin. His short-brimmed hat was damp with sweat. He took it off and, with his arm, wiped at the moisture beading on his forehead. He stepped in closer to Dante. Beneath the vapors of a pungent musk, Dante could smell Vinny's breath, which was like dog shit from the cheap cigarillos he smoked, one after the other. Briefly, Dante wondered how Claudia could stand such a smell.

“C'mon, we've never really had a chance to catch up. We should talk and get to know each other a bit more. Man to man, without anybody else in the way.”

There was a youthful gleam in his eyes, but beyond that he looked unhealthy, and at one point he winced, apparently fighting off a lingering pain that had flared up somewhere in his body. He was a tall man, heavy-boned and slow. Dante followed him across the street, noticed how he walked with a limp, which Claudia told him came from his time fighting in the Guadalcanal campaign in 1942. There was nothing that showed Dante that Vinny had been a Marine, though.

The wooden bench in front of the restaurant was caked with pigeon shit, and the gravel of the walkway was cracked. Somebody had done a terrible job of filling in the cracks with black tar; swipes of it marked the concrete.

Vinny maneuvered a key into the door lock. Dante noticed that he had a hell of a lot of keys on a metal ring and wondered what they were for. Either Vinny was a janitor to the whole North End or he had a dupe ring, a set of random keys commonly found among low-level burglars and thieves.

“The place ain't a five-star joint but it does what it does right.”

When the door opened, a bell above chimed loudly. Dante walked in and immediately a rancid odor assaulted his senses—something was rotting. Vinny forced the door shut and then turned the lock.

The restaurant was empty. Six round tables were covered in red tablecloths, each sectioned off on a tiled floor. Some of the linoleum squares were missing and left behind were the remains of dry-set mortar. Several shaded lamps hung from the ceiling, and a tawny light came from them. One of the shades was torn, as if by a knife.

“Don't judge a book by its cover,” Dante said. “That's what they say, right?”

“Yeah, and they also say don't bite the hand that feeds you.”

On the floor were mousetraps. One was occupied and Dante could tell it was a fresh kill. The smell in the room was probably from several other rodents that hadn't been removed from their traps yet.

“My father, God rest his soul, always used to say that. ‘Vinny,' he'd say, ‘don't bite the hand that feeds you.' But I didn't agree with it. It sounded dumb to me even when I was a kid. I got sick of hearing it so one day I told him that sometimes the hand that feeds you can't cook worth shit. And that I'd rather go hungry than shit my pants and throw up a lung, you know.”

“What'd your father say to that?”

“He said that I got a mouth on me, and that if I keep it up, what comes around will come around.”

“Sounds like your father had a way with words,” Dante said.

“He sure did. A fucking skipping record, my old man. God rest his soul.”

They took a seat at the round table closest to the back. Dante could tell the tables were set up for card games and not for eating—the cloth tablecloths had more cigarette burns than food stains, and there was a mildewed smell coming from them, as if they hadn't been washed in months. It was obvious this place was a cover-up, a place for drop-offs and pickups, small-time negotiations and gambling. There was nothing legal about it. It was as blatantly criminal as Vinny's key ring.

Vinny called out in Italian, and a young teenager came through the curtained doorway, hair slicked back from his forehead and a duck's ass cutting a V at the back of his neck. His denim pants were rolled up above his pristinely white sneakers.

“Get me and my friend a bottle of the house. And some ice on the side, like I like it, okay? And two cappuccinos. And some of those pistachios too.”

The wine bottle came out, its bottom encased in wicker. In the spaces that were frayed, there was dust, and lots of it. Vinny put a cube of ice in his glass. Dante drank his room temperature, the way you were supposed to. It tasted rich and heavy and very strong. It had been made in the neighborhood, he could tell.

“You okay, Dante?”

“I'm fine. And you?”

“I'm doing great. Really good.”

They both took another mouthful from their glasses.

“Looks like business is doing good here.”

“You're a comedian, Dante. I didn't think you were capable of making a joke. I'm glad you can. It's important to make jokes.”

“I've never eaten here. Is it good?”

Vinny gestured with his hand that it was okay. “
Mezza-mezza
. Some things better than others.”

There was awkward silence again as the kid brought out the cappuccinos. Dante blew on his and then took a sip. It was thick and muddy, extremely bitter on the tongue.

“So what's up?”

“Just thought it would be good to chat, that's all. Get acquainted.”

“Okay then.”

“Claudia tells me you're working for the police?”

Dante leaned back in his chair. “She told you that?”

“She did, yeah. She tells me all about you.”

Dante fingered his pack of smokes, lit one, and dropped the match in the cup of cappuccino, where it hissed in the pale foam.

“The stuff with the cops. What's that all about?”

“Nothing big. Nothing that concerns you.”

“What? I've met you like twice and you still treat me nose-up. C'mon, enough with the snooty bullshit. I could be your brother-in-law if things with Claudia keep going the way they're going. Let's not start off like this.”

“It's not what you think. I work on cars, Vinny. Sometimes Claudia doesn't know what she's talking about.”

“She tells me you're looking for steady work. I can help. Good, solid work. And you won't break your back doing it. The kid, too, you'll be able to give her more. Take care of her better.”

“The kid has a name.”

“Yeah—Maria. Like my mother. I ain't here to bust your balls, Dante. I'm just wanting to be gracious, to be good and offer you some help.”

“Just so you know, I'm not a criminal.” He tapped the ash in the cup.

“I wasn't saying you were. Relax, for Christ's sake. You're fucking wound tight. Real tight.” He grinned. “Tight like some young pussy crying to be fucked.”

“You got a nice way of saying things. Maybe you got it from your father.”

“I like jokes. They're okay. But I don't like sarcasm.” Vinny cracked some pistachio nuts, chewed at them voraciously, and left the shells scattered on the tablecloth.

“I don't mean to be rude, Vinny. You want to talk about Claudia, that's okay. But I didn't come in here to talk about me, or Maria.”

“That's actually what I wanted to talk about. Claudia. You know, she has come out of her shell. And I helped bring her out of it. I'm good for her. Some may say that I'm too good for her. But I love her, and because I do, I can say anything I want. You, you kept her in her head too much. I know you had your bad deal and all, you went through some serious shit, I know that. But she deserves a life of her own.”

“Claudia can make her own decisions. She's a grown woman.”

“Then treat her like one.”

“Are you serious? She has her responsibilities, and ever since she's been with you, she seems to be off in some other fucking universe. I don't like it.”

“Nobody said you had to like it.”

“She's a mother,” Dante said, his voice rising.

“Well, that ain't her kid. I know that. She told me everything.”

“Everything? What are you talking about?”

“You know. Don't play dumb Polack.”

Dante stood up from the chair and tucked it under the table where it hit the edge. The glass of wine shook precariously, drops of it spattering the tablecloth.

“She's going to be with me soon. I know you've been through a lot. She's told me about your wife, the shit you went through with the junk. And how Maria came into your life.”

“What did she tell you?”

“She was a bit drunk. You know her. She can't really handle her wine. Anyway, I'm a pretty good listener and I can put two and two together. She told me what you and your mick friend were up to a few years ago. All that business with those cocksucking Foley brothers. And suddenly you pretending the kids were your own. Uncle Dante, Auntie Claudia. What a joke.”