We Were Kings (6 page)

Dante forced out a laugh. “Big decision, right. A forty-three-year-old man who still lives with his mother and works the short con because he can't work much else. Yeah, I'm sure he needed your opinion.”

“I'm not in the mood, Dante.”

“Well, I'm in a fucking mood. I'm in a mood, all right.”

She ran the faucet until the water was cold, took a glass from the counter, rinsed and then filled it. “I have to be at work early tomorrow. Maybe we can talk later.”

“I have to be up early too. I have an audition at the Commonwealth this week, and I need to practice. Then off to Uphams until eight. We'll talk now.”

“Tomorrow, let's just talk tomorrow.” She headed to the hallway.

“What is it, Claudia? You're not the same. Before, you acted like her mother, like you wanted to care for her. Now it's Vincent this, Vinny that.”

“It's not that. It isn't…” She trailed off, closing her eyes and pressing the palm of her hand against her forehead.

“Then what is it?” he asked.

“She's not mine, Dante. I never asked for her.”

Stunned for a moment, Dante drank straight from the bottle of wine and then shook his head. “For Christ's sake, you're her aunt.”

“That's what the papers say. They're faked, forged. Owen did you a favor, but not me. If anybody is the parent, it's probably you.”

“We said it's our responsibility.”

“No, it's
your
responsibility,” she said as she walked away.

“So you get your wish. That scum will knock you up, and then what will you do? Go off and leave us behind? Pretend none of this ever happened?”

“If that's what Vincent wants, then probably yes.”

He heard her voice from the dark hallway. “I'm tired, Dante. I'm really tired. We can talk tomorrow. Now's not the time.”

From the kitchen window, Dante watched as heat lightning flashed against low clouds. An uncomfortable silence pressed down on the room, making the heat and humidity even thicker.

In a couple of days he had an audition for a restaurant on Park Street, the Commonwealth. It was for three evenings a week, four to five hours on the grand piano, taking requests and playing for the tip jar. He should lie down and try to get some sleep, but with all the thoughts twisting around in his head, he knew it wouldn't come easy.

Dante smoked one cigarette after another, finished the bottle of wine and wished he had another. The loaf of bread remained on the counter untouched, and his stomach cried out in hunger. His eyes were getting heavy, and the smoke left his throat bitter and raw. As though he were back before the statue of Saint Maria, he lowered his head and tried to conjure up another prayer that would be able to hold him in place, but nothing came to him, nothing but a memory from long ago.

The day it all changed for him, the day he turned his back and walked away from that edge.

It was only the third week that Maria was with them. The winter still raged on into March, and he was holed up in the Scollay Square apartment with Claudia and the baby, day and night, waiting for something to go wrong. He caught some sleep when he could, ate when the hunger became too much. It was a Thursday, and for once the sun had broken through the heavy slate clouds, but it disappeared almost as quickly. Early night pressed at the windows, making the apartment so cold he swore he could see his breath fog the air before him. Claudia had had to leave for a few hours, said that she had to get out and move around, see a friend for dinner and run a few errands. She'd promised that when she got back, he could call Cal and meet him for a drink. It would be good for them to get out before they both went stir-crazy. She knew he was worried about being alone with Maria for the first time. She'd tried to soothe him, telling him, “You're a natural.”

To keep busy as the baby slept, he cleaned up the kitchen, towel-dried the dishes and cups and put them in their proper places. Then he sat on the couch flipping through one of Claudia's magazines and seeing nothing but women smiling, teeth flashing white, and men looking too dapper for their own good. He heard Maria cry out, and he tried to ignore it, but when she began to shriek, he got up quickly and ran into Claudia's bedroom.

Maria's face was pink and pinched as though in pain. Even before he could smell it, he realized she had shit her diaper again. Dante wanted to reach down and console her, but something had a hold of him, some invisible grip that clamped down on his muscles and even deeper, into his nerves, so that he felt paralyzed. Barely able to get any air into his lungs, he watched as the baby twisted and tried to turn over. From the edge of her cloth diaper, shit trickled out and spread across the thin mattress; the patchwork blanket and once-white sheet were soon soaked through with brown. His nostrils filled with the stench coming off her, and there was a moment where her eyes opened and focused on his, and in that look, beneath the desperation, he saw the eyes of Michael Foley, of Bobby Renza, even of Sheila and himself.

Nauseated, he felt his stomach spin. He broke free from the invisible grasp and stumbled down the hallway and into the bathroom, where he filled the sink with bile and the half-digested remnants of his lunch. The hoarse cries of Maria sounded throughout the apartment, and no matter how hard he pressed the heels of his hands against his ears, he couldn't block them out.

Claudia came home and found Dante sitting in the bedroom, head between his knees, crying softly. The baby still wept, but with her throat so raw and sore, she mewled like a small, wounded animal. Claudia shook him by the shoulders and told him she couldn't trust him anymore, cursed him out and said that he was still a junkie mess and that he wasn't, and would never be, suited to take care of the child. He tried to convince her that he was clean, that this was something he couldn't control, but she ignored him and took the baby to the bathroom to clean her up.

He left, and for a full day and night, Dante walked the frozen and desolate streets of the South End, moving from one flophouse to the next. Eventually he met up with his old friend Lawrence and tasted the junk for the last time. In the hazy half-slumber between dream and nightmare, he had neither revelation nor remorse for the awful thoughts that had come to him as he watched Maria turn in her own feces, but once the sun climbed into the sky, warming the flophouse room with its amber glow, he woke up, walked back to Scollay Square, and strangely calm and clearheaded opened the door to his apartment.

Claudia was sleeping, and carefully, he took the child from her crib and carried her to the living room. He reclined back on the couch with her laid upon on his chest, her soft breaths warming his neck. With his heart beating wildly, he held the child to him, feeling the spittle from her mouth wet his shirt through to his skin. He stroked her back and whispered in her ear, telling her that he was sorry and that he would never let it happen again.

_________________________

Fort Point Channel, South Boston

CAL WAS TIRED
of killing and tired of fighting; listening to Owen had sparked his interest at first, that need to know and discover—there used to be a pleasure in that and in the need for revenge, to make things right. He understood those things; they made sense to him. Payback for a wrong was as old as the Bible but it was the question of the wrong that interested him most of all—what deserved what manner of retribution, what manner of death, and by whom. But the cycle itself was unending, and he'd seen enough in his short lifetime already. He was sick of it and even more sickened that not only could he not prevent it but that he was, most often, its cause.

He lived in a boardinghouse in the Fort Point Channel—the site of the Boston Tea Party—that a century before had been a hotel for bargemen and skippers, a first stop for nearly penniless immigrants just off the boat, and a meat rack for the rough trade from the dockland wharves just over the bridges. The place had a regal-sounding name—the Excelsior—but knowing the area, Cal doubted it had ever been regal. Cal mused on the name, thought of the poem by Whitman and almost laughed. He spoke aloud: “‘Who has gone farthest? for I would go farther. And who has been just? for I would be the most just person of the earth.'”

He had a closet with a dozen shirts, five ties, and three suits, and his dresser was filled with clean clothes. He had lived in four hotels in the three years since Lynne had died and he knew better than to try to convince himself that this would be the last. It would do for now and he was in no rush to leave when there was no place he wanted to be. He'd been here for so many months that he'd earned the status of a long-timer, someone with no particular date by which he might leave and, most likely, no plans of anything better. His dreams of something better had died with Lynne.

He saw the other long-timers in the hall on his way to the bathroom. Unlike the weekly or monthly stays—junkies and drunks and johns with their male and female whores, grifters and sinners and those fleeing the law or a con gone bad, people who still seemed to have some manner of urgency about them, a need to be elsewhere, a desire to get on living—the long-timers looked as if the living had been knocked out of them. They shuffled in the hallways and remained mostly still and quiet behind their doors, perhaps listening to a baseball game on the radio, some old band tunes, or the Friday-night fights; they barely looked up when you passed them and some seemed surprised when you greeted them with a good morning or a hello.

He'd been here long enough to make the place comfortable even if he could never call it home. He had an icebox and a hot plate, and his heavy bag hung in the corner of the room near the window. By his radio, gleaming dully on a small end table, he had a reading chair, and should he have guests, although he never did—except for Dante bringing Maria over once—there was a small Formica table with a fold-down sleeve and two metal chairs with vinyl seats.

With his towel and toiletries he walked down the hall to the bathroom and had to wait for another tenant, who sounded as if he were wringing his guts out, to finish up. When the door finally opened, he let the tenant pass and then stepped in and the smell assaulted him. Cursing, he placed his towel on the rack and his shaving kit by the grime-encrusted sink, glanced in the toilet, and stopped. He stepped out again. The tenant was halfway down the hall.

“Hey,” Cal called. “You. Come here.”

The man turned; he looked to be a year or two older than Cal and had about twenty pounds on him and a couple of inches. His curly brown hair was tight on the sides and high on top. He had a low, wide forehead and a constant squint. There were red-and-black-plaid slippers on his feet with the stuffing poking out of them.

“You didn't flush. Finish your business.”

“What?”

“I ain't your mother. I'm not here to flush after you.”

“What's your problem, man?”

“Everyone cleans up after themselves. That's how it works.”

“Fuck you.”

“Come flush your shit or I'll take it and smear your face in it.”

“You've got a real big mouth for a little man.”

“I'm not asking you again.”

The man stared at him, frowning, undecided, and then he wavered, sighed deeply, and came back toward the bathroom. Cal noticed the drawn look to his face, the tightness in the skin about his eyes.

Cal waited in the hall as the man flushed. When he was done, he walked past Cal.

“You're an asshole,” the man muttered. “And I know what room you're in.”

“That's okay, sunshine. I know what room you're in too.”

Freshly bathed and back in his room, Cal stood in his pants and undershirt before the ironing board and moved the steaming iron slowly and methodically across his shirt. His skin was tight from his morning shave, stinging slightly from aftershave. Coffee steamed from the decanter on the double-burner hot plate. This was part of his daily ritual: he rose just after first light and performed the rosary, kneeling at the side of his bed, then he put the coffee on and let it brew, tuned the radio to the morning news, and showered and shaved and dressed.

At the center of his thoughts, like a prayer itself, was the memory, the word: Lynne. Sometimes he spoke to her, imagined her with him, and other times, it was more difficult to draw her essence—the sense of her—and though she felt farther away from him than he liked to imagine, he knew she was there regardless, listening, and so he talked to her as he went about his day. He made sure he rose from the bed and dressed like a man should to start his day of work, to be one of the living, as only she would have expected of him. He knew it was the memory of her, the need to respect that memory, to not allow it to become something cheap, tarnished, or diminished, that kept him rising, climbing from his bed, one day after the other, until days joined days and became weeks and months and then years. And in this illusory way, he created the structures and rhythms of a life.

This morning as he stared through his open window and sipped his coffee, there was no sense of her, only the still water of the channel glimmering silver with sunlight and oil-belching fish trucks passing over the Northern Ave and Congress Street Bridges and the haze already lifting from the tar rooftops of the derelict textile buildings across the channel and the sweat trickling down his spine. His undershirt stuck to his back. “It's gonna be a hot one, Lynne,” he said to the emptiness. “Too damn hot.”

_________________________

Galway, Ireland

IN THE KITCHEN
of a stone cottage overlooking the slate-blue waters of the bay, Sean Mullen stood before a large butcher-block table, an apron spotted with blood tied tightly around his waist. In one hand he held a large carving knife and in the other a whetstone. He moved the blade across the stone as if tuning some long-lost instrument, and only once did he look across the kitchen to the man sitting in a chair beside the window.

The man watched Sean, sometimes called the General, pull a large salmon from a wicker basket, the silver of its scales shimmering and speckled with black.

Sean Mullen was a short, stocky man with the build of an ironworker or a boxer; he'd been both in his life, among many other things. What hair he had left was raked over his scalp. His skin was dark and weathered but not deeply wrinkled, and his face was clean-shaven but already filling in with a coarse stubble. His hands were thick, roped with veins, and while his fingers appeared stubby and callused, they could maneuver with the dexterity of a well-trained embroiderer's. Nearing sixty, he had a boyish twinkle in his eyes that betrayed others into believing he was a pleasant man. He could be, from time to time, especially around his sons and daughters and a few select friends whom he trusted.

Low clouds passed above the cottage, and the midday light staggered from shadow back to the sun again. Wind pressed against the window, making the screen clatter in its frame.

The man in the chair coughed into his hand and watched as Mullen sliced into the fish, running the blade smoothly along its belly, cutting up to the backbone, turning the fish over, and removing its head with ease. He scraped out the guts and cut off the fins.

“Pat, mind fetching two ales out of the icebox?” he asked.

The man grabbed two brown bottles, gently placed each one down on the table, found the iron church key nearby, and fumbled with the caps until they opened. He returned to his seat and didn't say a word.

After he deboned the fillets, Mullen wrapped them in brown paper, took some string, and diligently tied them into a package. He placed it at the edge of the table. “For your wife to cook for supper.”

“Thank you.”

“Now.” He paused, took a big draw off the bottle. “Now, how much of a mess is it?” He took the flat end of the knife and scraped the guts across the cutting board and into a pile of innards from the other fish he'd cleaned moments ago.

“It's a mess, yes. But one that can be fixed.”

“Is that so, Patrick?” He wiped both sides of the knife against his apron.

“I believe so. I wouldn't worry.”

From the basket, Mullen grabbed a net full of oysters still glistening wetly from the Atlantic. He laid down the fillet knife, picked up a small shucking knife, and, holding it as if he were a surgeon, went into a large oyster, splitting it open quickly and placing the half shell on a chipped porcelain plate.

“Let's be honest.”

Patrick cleared his throat. “Five men gone. No word from a couple of others. They may turn up yet.”

“Gone, eh? Just like that?” He opened two more oysters with ease. “You've been there before, haven't you?”

“I've been to Boston, New York…quite a few times.”

“So tell me, in Boston, on a scale from one to ten, how likely is it that things will be back in order by the end of the week?”

“Can't really say yet.”

“Can't really
say
yet,” Mullen said, mimicking him. “Well, when
can
you say it, then?”

“I know it's not what you want to hear. I wouldn't be sitting here otherwise. Nearly half the shipments are gone. The men, we can replace. But I think we wait it out. Let the heat from the police die down. We stay patient and we watch.”

“You've known me a long time, right? Have you ever took me for a fool who sits and watches the paint dry?” Mullen shoved the knife into a large, knobby oyster twice the size of the others. His forearm tightened and his upper body bent low over the table. He sucked through his teeth and then hissed. The oyster shell cracked in his hand.

He looked down at his finger, watched as the blood began to bead out of the wound and drip down onto the table. “God Almighty, will you look at that?”

Patrick hesitated and then stood up from the chair. “Is it deep?”

“I've had much worse.” He raised the knife and pointed it across the table. “I got to say, I'm having a bit of a problem with your casual attitude toward all this. You make it sound like we just lost a crate or two. That tomorrow will be a new day, a glorious new fucking day.”

“I told you not to worry. We have men there that can take care of it. Believe me on this.”

“Who do we have in Boston with de Burgh?”

“That would be Donal Phelan.”

The General nodded and paused for a moment, looking down at the blood flowing from his finger, considering.

“It's important to remember,” he said, “that de Burgh is a sympathizer, not a martyr—that when it comes down to it, he has nothing to lose, it's merely an investment, just like much of his philanthropy work. Still, as long as Donal is working with him, I suppose we can live with that.

“We've seen a drop in American funds. We need their money more than ever, but more important, we need the shipments. Our stockpiles are still depleted and Ruairí's border campaign can't proceed without them being filled. I'm not about to go to him and the rest of the leadership and tell them we've bollixed this up.”

He clenched his hand tightly around the handle of the knife, and the blood flowed freely from the slice in his finger.

“To be honest, I don't trust many over there in Boston. And even here, I'm losing more faith each day in our own.”

“Sean, it's going to be fixed. I trust Donal implicitly and de Burgh's a businessman—he won't do anything that would jeopardize business.”

The General took a deep breath, sighed, and then spoke. “I'm not sending an army. Just the four of them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I'm taking care of it on my own. They're already on their way. Myles and the others.”

“Myles and the others? Now you're talking mad.”

“Myles will be on a plane from Dublin to London. Fitzgerald, Kinsella, and Egan will meet him there and they'll all take a ship to New York. And then from there they'll go to Boston.”

“I say we just wait it out. Fitzgerald's the only one who knows that city well enough. Myles and Kinsella will be lost there.”

Mullen went into another oyster, cracked it cleanly open. Blood dripped into the gelatinous gray and white meat. He put the shell to his mouth and sucked down the oyster, chewing it and then swallowing.

“All will be settled with the Yanks the right way. My way, Patrick.”

Patrick took an oyster off the porcelain plate, chewed at it, left the half-full bottle of ale on the table, and picked up the salmon neatly wrapped in brown paper.

Mullen watched him. “It's funny to think about all the times somebody goes to America and they can't help but get greedy. That country does that, doesn't it? No matter how hard you try.”

With his face flushed, Patrick offered a mere nod. He realized he was at a point in the conversation where he could say no more to the General.

Mullen smiled, flashed his bright white teeth. “Now, you take the fish to your wife. Tell her I caught the fish, I gutted the fish, and I dressed the fish. Tell her that I told you not to worry. So you go home. Go home and give my best to your family.”