Joe said, “There’s nothing wrong with them.”
“I promise,” the old man said, “if they send me to fight you, I’ll limit myself to grasping your ankles and holding on tight.”
Joe chuckled. “Just the ankles, uh?”
“Maybe the nose, if I sense an advantage.”
Joe looked over at him. He must have been here so long he’d seen every hope die and experienced every degradation, and now they left him alone because he’d survived all they’d thrown at him. Or because he was just a bag of wrinkles, unappealing for purposes of trade. Harmless.
“Well, to protect my nose . . .” Joe took a long drag off the cigarette. He’d forgotten how good one could taste if you didn’t know where your next one was coming from. “A few months ago, I broke six ribs and fractured or sprained the rest.”
“A few months ago. That leaves you only a couple months to go.”
“No. Really?”
The old man nodded. “Broken ribs are like broken hearts—at least six months before they heal.”
Is that how long it takes? Joe thought.
“If only meals lasted as long.” The old man rubbed his small paunch. “What do they call you?”
“Joe.”
“Never Joseph?”
“Just my father.”
The man nodded and exhaled a stream of smoke with slow relish. “This is such a hopeless place. Even in your limited time here, I’m sure you’ve come to the same conclusion.”
Joe nodded.
“It eats men. It doesn’t even spit them back out.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Oh,” the old man said, “I stopped counting years ago.” He looked up at the greasy blue sky and spit a piece of tobacco off his tongue. “There’s nothing about this place I don’t know. If you need help comprehending it, just ask.”
Joe doubted the old fella was as tuned to the pulse of the place as he imagined himself to be, but he saw no harm in saying, “I will. Thank you. I appreciate your offer.”
They reached the end of the yard. As they turned to walk back the way they’d come, the old man placed his arm around Joe’s shoulders.
The whole yard watched.
The old man flicked his cigarette into the dust and held out his hand. Joe shook it.
“My name is Tommaso Pescatore, but everyone calls me Maso. Consider yourself under my care.”
Joe knew the name. Maso Pescatore ran the North End and most of the gambling and women on the North Shore. From behind these walls, he controlled a lot of the liquor coming up from Florida. Tim Hickey had done a lot of work with him over the years and usually mentioned that extreme caution was the only sensible course of action when dealing with the man.
“I didn’t ask to be under your care, Maso.”
“How many things in life—good and bad—come to us whether we ask for them or not?” Maso removed his arm from Joe’s shoulders and placed a hand over his eyebrows to block the sun. Where Joe had just seen innocence in his eyes, he now saw cunning. “Call me Mr. Pescatore from now on, Joseph. And give this to your father next time you see him.” Maso slipped a piece of paper into Joe’s hand.
Joe looked at the address scrawled there: 1417 Blue Hill Ave. That was it—no name, no telephone number, just an address.
“Hand it to your father. Just this once. It’s all I’ll ask of you.”
“What if I don’t?” Joe asked.
Maso seemed genuinely confused by the question. He tilted his head to one side and looked at Joe and a small and curious smile found his lips. The smile widened and turned into a soft laugh. He shook his head several times. He gave Joe a two-finger salute and walked back to the wall where his men stood waiting.
In the visiting room, Thomas watched his son limp across the floor and take his seat.
“What happened?”
“Guy stabbed me in the leg.”
“Why?”
Joe shook his head. He slid his palm across the table, and Thomas saw the piece of paper under it. He closed his hand over his son’s for a moment, relishing the contact and trying to remember why he’d refrained from initiating it for over a decade. He took the piece of paper and placed it in his pocket. He looked at his son, at his dark-ringed eyes and sullied spirit, and he saw the whole of it suddenly.
“I’m to do someone’s bidding,” he said.
Joe looked up from the table and met his eyes.
“Whose bidding, Joseph?”
“Maso Pescatore’s.”
Thomas sat back and asked himself just how much he loved his son.
Joe read the question in his eyes. “Don’t try to tell me you’re clean, Dad.”
“I do civilized business with civilized people. You’re asking me to get under the thumb of a bunch of dagos one generation removed from a cave.”
“It’s not under their thumb.”
“No? What’s on the piece of paper?”
“An address.”
“Just an address?”
“Yeah. I don’t know any more than that.”
His father nodded several times, his breath exiting through his nostrils. “Because you’re a child. Some wop gives you an address to give your father, a member of police command, and you don’t grasp that the only thing that address could be is the location of a rival’s illicit supply.”
“Of what?”
“Most likely a warehouse filled to the bursting with liquor.” His father stared up at the ceiling and ran a hand over his trim white hair.
“He said just this once.”
His father gave him a malevolent smile. “And you believed him.”
He left the prison.
He walked down the path toward his car, surrounded by the smell of chemicals. Smoke rose from the factory stacks. It was dark gray in most places but it turned the sky brown and the earth black. Trains chugged along the outskirts; for some odd reason, they reminded Thomas of wolves circling a medical tent.
He had sent at least a thousand men here over the course of his career. Many of them had died behind the granite walls. If they arrived with any illusions about human decency, they lost those straightaway. There were too many prisoners and too few guards for the prison to run as anything but what it was—a dumping ground, and then a proving ground, for animals. If you went in a man, you left a beast. If you went in an animal, you honed your skills.
He feared his son was too soft. For all his transgressions over the years, his lawlessness, his inability to obey Thomas or the rules or much of anything, Joseph was the most open of his sons. You could see his heart through the heaviest winter coat.
Thomas reached a call box at the end of the path. His key was attached to his watch chain and he used it now to open the box. He looked at the address in his hand: 1417 Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan. Jew Country. Which meant the warehouse was probably owned by Jacob Rosen, a known supplier of Albert White.
White was back in the city now. He’d never spent a night in jail, probably because he’d hired Jack D’Jarvis to handle his defense.
Thomas looked back at the prison his son called home. A tragedy but not surprising. His son had chosen the path that had led him here over years of Thomas’s strenuous objection and disapproval. If Thomas used this call box, he was wedded to the Pescatore mob for life, to a race of people who had brought to the shores of this country anarchism and its bombers, assassins, and the Black Hand and now, organized in something rumored to be called omertà organiza, they had overtaken by force the entire business of illegal liquor.
And he was supposed to give them more?
Work for them?
Kiss their rings?
He closed the call box door, returned his watch to his pocket, and walked to his car.
For two days, he considered the piece of paper. For two days, h
e prayed to the God he feared didn’t exist. Prayed for guidance. Prayed for his son behind those granite walls.
Saturday was his day off, and Thomas was up on a ladder, repainting the black trim of the windowsills of the K Street row house, when the man called up for directions. It was a hot and humid afternoon, a few purple clouds undulating in his direction. He looked through a window on the third floor into what had once been Aiden’s room. It had stood empty for three years before his wife, Ellen, had taken it over as a sewing room. She had passed in her sleep two years ago, so now it sat empty except for a pedal-charged sewing machine and a wooden rack from which hung the items that had been awaiting mending two years ago. Thomas dipped his brush into the can. It would always be Aiden’s room.
“I’m a bit turned around.”
Thomas looked down the ladder at the man standing on the sidewalk thirty feet below. He wore a light blue seersucker, white shirt, and a red bow tie, no hat.
“How can I help?” Thomas said.
“I’m looking for the L Street Bathhouse.”
From up here, Thomas could see the bathhouse, and not just the roof—the whole of its brick edifice. He could see the small lagoon beyond it, and beyond the lagoon, the Atlantic, stretching all the way to the land of his birth.
“End of the street.” Thomas pointed, gave the man a nod, and turned back to his paintbrush.
The man said, “Right down the end of the street, huh? Right down there?”
Thomas turned back and nodded, his eyes on the man now.
“Sometimes, I can’t get out of my own way,” the man said. “Ever happen to you? You know what you should do, but you just can’t get out of your own way?”
The man was blond and bland, handsome in a forgettable way. Neither tall nor short, fat nor thin.
“They won’t kill him,” he said pleasantly.
Thomas said, “Excuse me?” and dropped the brush into the paint can.
The man put his hand on the ladder.
From there, it wouldn’t take much.
The man squinted up at Thomas and then looked down the street. “They’ll make him wish they did, though. Make him wish that every day of his life.”
“You understand my rank with the Boston Police Department,” Thomas said.
“He’ll think about suicide,” the man said. “Of course he will. But they’ll keep him alive by promising to kill you if he does. And every day? They’ll think of a new thing to try on him.”
A black Model T pulled off the curb and idled in the middle of the street. The man left the sidewalk, climbed in, and they drove away, taking the first left they found.
Thomas climbed down, surprised to see the shakes in his forearms even after he entered his house. He was getting old, very old. He shouldn’t be up on ladders. He shouldn’t be standing on principle.
The way of the old was to allow the new to push you aside with as much grace as you could muster.
He called Kenny Donlan, the captain of the Third District in Mattapan. For five years, Kenny had been Thomas’s lieutenant at the Sixth in South Boston. Like many of the department command staff, he owed his success to Thomas.
“And on your day off no less,” Kenny said when his secretary patched Thomas through.
“Ah, there’s no days off for the likes of us, boy.”
“That’s the truth of it,” Kenny said. “How can I help you, Thomas?”
“One-four-one-seven Blue Hill Avenue,” Thomas said. “It’s a warehouse, supposedly for gaming parlor equipment.”
“But that’s not what’s in there,” Kenny said.
“No.”
“How hard do you want it hit?”
“Down to the last bottle,” Thomas said, and something inside him cried out as it died. “Down to the last drop.”
Chapter Eight
In the Gloaming
That summer at Charlestown Penitentiary the Commonwealth of Massachusetts prepared to execute two famous anarchists. Global protests didn’t deter the state from its mission, nor did a flurry of last-minute appeals, stays, and further appeals. In the weeks after Sacco and Vanzetti were taken to Charlestown from Dedham and housed in the Death House to await the electric chair, Joe’s sleep was interrupted by throngs of outraged citizens gathered on the other side of the dark granite walls. Sometimes they remained there through the night, singing songs and shouting through megaphones and chanting their slogans. Several nights Joe assumed they brought torches to add a medieval flavor to the proceedings because he’d wake to the smell of burning pitch.
Other than a few nights of fitful sleep, however, the fate of the two doomed men had no effect on the lives of Joe or anyone he knew except for Maso Pescatore, who’d been forced to sacrifice his nightly strolls atop the prison walls until the world stopped watching.
On that famous night in late August, the excess voltage used on the hapless Italians sapped the rest of the electricity in the prison, and the lights on the tiers flickered and dimmed or snapped off entirely. The dead anarchists were taken to Forest Hills and cremated. The protestors dwindled and then went away.
Maso returned to the nightly routine he’d been following for ten years—walking the tops of the walls along the thick, curled wire and the dark watchtowers that overlooked the yard within and the blasted landscape of factories and slums without.
He often took Joe with him. To his surprise, Joe had become some kind of symbol to Maso—whether as the trophy scalp of the high-ranking police officer now under his thumb or as a potential member of his organization or as a puppy, Joe didn’t know, and he didn’t ask. Why ask when his presence on the wall beside Maso at night clearly stated one thing above all others—he was protected.
“Do you think they were guilty?” Joe asked one night.
Maso shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is the message.”
“What message? They executed two fellas who might have been innocent.”
“That was the message,” Maso said. “And every anarchist in the world heard it.”
Charlestown Penitentiary spilled blood all over itself that summer. Joe first believed the savagery to be innate, the pointless dog-eat-dog viciousness of men killing each other over pride—in your place in line, in your right to continue walking to the yard on the path you’d chosen, in not being jostled or elbowed or having the toe of your shoe scuffed.
It turned out to be more complicated than that.
An inmate in East Wing lost his eyes when someone clapped handfuls of glass into them. In South Wing, guards found a guy stabbed a dozen times below his ribs, entrance wounds that, judging by the odor, had perforated his liver. Inmates two tiers down smelled the guy die. Joe heard of all-night rape parties on the Lawson block, the block so named because three generations of the Lawson family—the grandfather, one of his sons, and three grandsons—had all been jailed there at the same time. The last one, Emil Lawson, had once been the youngest of the Lawson inmates but always the worst of them, and he was never getting out. His sentences added up to 114 years. Good news for Boston, bad news for Charlestown Pen. When he wasn’t leading gang rapes of new fish, Emil Lawson did murder for whoever paid him, though he was rumored to be working exclusively for Maso during the recent troubles.
The war was fought over rum. It was fought on the outside, of course, to some public consternation, but also on the inside, where no one thought to look and wouldn’t have shed a tear if they had. Albert White, an importer of whiskey from the north, had decided to branch out into importing rum from the south before Maso Pescatore was released from prison. Tim Hickey had been the first casualty in the White-Pescatore war. By the end of the summer, though, he was one of a dozen.
On the whiskey end of things, they shot it out in Boston and Portland and along the back roads that branched off the Canadian border. Drivers were run off roads in towns like Massena, New York
; Derby, Vermont; and Allagash, Maine. Some were hijacked with just a beating, though one of White’s fastest drivers was forced to his knees in a bed of pine needles and had his jaw blown off at the hinge because he’d talked sass.
As for rum, the battle was waged to keep it out. Trucks were waylaid as far south as the Carolinas and as far north as Rhode Island. After they were coaxed to the shoulder and the drivers were convinced to vacate their cabs, White’s gangs set fire to the trucks. Rum trucks burned like Viking funeral boats, yellowing the underside of the night sky for miles in every direction.
“He’s got a stockpile somewhere,” Maso said on one of their walks. “He’s waiting until he’s bled New England of rum, and then he’ll ride in, the savior, with his own supply.”
“Who’d be stupid enough to supply him?” Joe knew of most of the suppliers in South Florida.
“It’s not stupid,” Maso said. “It’s smart. It’s what I’d do if I had to choose between a slick operator like Albert and an old man who’s been inside since before the czar lost Russia.”
“But you’ve got eyes and ears everywhere.”
The old man nodded. “But they’re not exactly my eyes and they’re not exactly my ears so they’re not connected to my hand. And my hand wields the power.”
That night, one of the guards on Maso’s payroll was off duty in a South End speakeasy when he left with a woman no one had ever seen before. A real looker, though, and definitely a pro. The guard was found three hours later in Franklin Square, sitting on a bench, a canyon cut through his Adam’s apple, deader than Thomas Jefferson.
Maso’s sentence ended in three months, and it was all starting to feel a bit desperate on Albert’s part, and the desperation only made things more dangerous. Just last night, Boyd Holter, Maso’s best forger, had been tossed off the Ames Building downtown. He’d landed on his tailbone, pieces of his spine spitting up into his brainpan like gravel.
Maso’s people responded by blowing up one of Albert’s fronts, a butcher’s shop on Morton Street. The hairdresser and the haberdashery on either side of the butcher also burned to the ground, and several cars along the street lost their windows and paint.