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?”
J
oe 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.”
While 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.
He opened the trapdoor and called down. “He’s done.”
“You hurt?” Basil Chigis called up.
“No. Gonna need clean clothes, though.”
Someone chuckled in the darkness.
“So, come on down.”
“Come on up. We got to get his body out of here.”
“We can—”
“The signal is your right hand, index and middle fingers raised and held together. You got anyone missing one of those digits, don’t send him up.”
He rolled away from the doorway before anyone could argue.
After about a minute, he heard the first of them climb up. The man’s hand extended out of the hole, two fingers raised as Joe had instructed. The tower light arced past the hand and then swung back over again. Joe said, “All clear.”
It was Pokaski, the roaster of his family, who stuck his head carefully up and looked around.
“Hurry,” Joe said. “And get the others up here. It’ll take two more to drag him. He’s deadweight and my ribs are busted up.”
Pokaski smiled. “I thought you said you weren’t hurt.”
“Not mortally,” Joe said. “Come on.”
Pokaski leaned back into the hole. “Two more guys.”
Basil Chigis followed Pokaski and then a small guy with a harelip came after him. Joe recalled someone pointing him out at chow once—Eldon Douglas—but couldn’t remember his crime.
“Where’s the body?” Basil Chigis asked.
Joe pointed.
“Well, let’s—”
The light hit Basil Chigis just before the bullet entered the back of his head and exited the center of his face, taking his nose with it. As his final act on earth, Pokaski blinked. Then a door opened in his throat and the door flapped as a wash of red poured through it and Pokaski fell on his back, and his legs thrashed. Eldon Douglas leapt for the opening to the staircase, but the tower guard’s third bullet collapsed his skull the way a sledgehammer would. He fell to the right of the door and lay there, missing the top of his head.
Joe looked into the light, the three dead men splattered all over him. Down below men shouted and ran off. He wished he could join them. It had been a naive plan. He could feel the gun sights on his chest as the light blinded him. The bullets would be the violent offspring his father had warned him about; not only was he about to meet his Maker, but he also was about to meet his children. The only consolation he could offer himself was that it would be a quick death. Fifteen minutes from now he’d be sharing a pint with his father and Uncle Eddie.
The light snapped off.
Something soft hit him in the face and then fell to his shoulder. He blinked into the darkness—a small towel.
“Wipe your face,” Maso said. “It’s a mess.”
When he finished, his eyes had adjusted enough to be able to make out Maso standing a few feet away, smoking one of his French cigarettes.
“You think I was going to kill you?”
“Crossed my mind.”
Maso shook his head. “I’m a low-rent wop from Endicott Street. I go to a fancy joint, I still don’t know what fork to use. So I might not have class or education, but I never double-cross. I come right at you. Just like you came at me.”
Joe nodded, looked at the three corpses at his feet. “What about these guys? I’d say we double-crossed them pretty good.”
“Fuck them,” Maso said. “They had it coming.” Stepping over Pokaski’s corpse, he crossed to Joe. “You’ll be getting out of here sooner than you think. You ready to make some money when you do?”
“Sure.”
“Your duty will always be to the Pescatore Family first and yourself second. Can you abide that?”
Joe looked into the old man’s eyes and was certain that they’d make a lot of money together and that he could never trust him.
“I can abide that.”
Maso extended his hand. “Okay, then.”
Joe wiped the blood off his hand and shook Maso’s. “Okay.”
“Mr. Pescatore,” someone called from below.
“Coming.” Maso walked to the trapdoor and Joe followed. “Come, Joseph.”
“Call me Joe. Only my father called me Joseph.”
“Fair enough.” As he descended the spiral staircase in the dark, Maso said, “Funny thing about fathers and sons—you can go forth and build an empire. Become king. Emperor of the United States. God. But you’ll always do it in his shadow. And you can’t escape it.”
Joe followed him down the dark staircase. “Don’t much want to.”
Chapter Ten
Visitations
After a morning funeral at Gate of Heaven in South Boston, Thomas Coughlin was laid to rest at Cedar Grove Cemetery in Dorchester. Joe was not allowed to attend the funeral but read about it in a copy of the Traveler that one of the guards on Maso’s payroll brought to him that evening.
Two former mayors, Honey Fitz and Andrew Peters, attended, as well as the current one, James Michael Curley. So did two ex-governors, five former district attorneys, and two attorney generals.
The cops came from all over—city cops and state police, retired and active, from as far south as Delaware and as far north as Bangor, Maine. Every rank, every specialty. In the photo accompanying the article, the Neponset River snaked along the far edge of the cemetery, but Joe could barely see it because the blue hats and blue uniforms consumed the view.
This was power, he thought. This was a legacy.
And in nearly the same breath—So what?
So his father’s funeral had brought a thousand men to a graveyard along the banks of the Neponset. And someday, possibly, cadets would study in the Thomas X. Coughlin Building at the Boston Police Academy or commuters would rattle over the Coughlin Bridge on their way to work in the morning.
Wonderful.
And yet dead was dead. Gone was gone. No edifice, no legacy, no bridge named after you could change that.
You were only guaranteed one life, so you’d better live it.
He placed the paper beside him on the bed. It was a new mattress and it had been waiting for him in the cell af
ter work detail yesterday with a small side table, a chair, and a kerosene table lamp. He found the matches in the drawer of the side table beside a new comb.
He blew out the lamp now and sat in the dark, smoking. He listened to the sounds of the factories and the barges out on the river signaling one another in the narrow lanes. He flicked open the cover of his father’s watch, then snapped it closed, then opened it again. Open-close, open-close, open-close as the chemical smell from the factories climbed over his high window.
His father was gone. He was no longer a son.
He was a man without history or expectation. A blank slate, beholden to none.
He felt like a pilgrim who’d pushed off from the shore of a homeland he’d never see again, crossed a black sea under a black sky, and landed in the new world, which waited, unformed, as if it had always been waiting.
For him.
To give the country a name, to remake it in his image so it could espouse his values and export them across the globe.
He closed the watch and closed his hand over it and closed his eyes until he saw the shore of his new country, saw the black sky above give way to a far-flung scatter of white stars that shone down on him and the small stretch of water left between them.
I will miss you. I will mourn you. But I am now newly born. And truly free.
Two days after the funeral, Danny made his last visit.
He leaned into the mesh and asked, “How you doing, little brother?”
“Finding my way,” Joe said. “You?”
“You know,” Danny said.
“No,” Joe said, “I don’t. I don’t know anything. You went to Tulsa with Nora and Luther eight years ago and I haven’t heard anything but rumors since.”
Danny acknowledged that with a nod. He fished for his cigarettes, lit one, and took his time before he spoke. “Me and Luther started a business together out there. Construction. We built houses in the colored section. We were doing all right. Weren’t booming, but okay. I was a sheriff’s deputy too. You believe that?”
Joe smiled. “You wear a cowboy hat?”
“Son,” Danny said with a twang, “I wore six-guns. One on each hip.”
Joe laughed. “String tie?”