His father removed his pocket watch from his vest and flicked it open. Snapped it closed just as quickly and returned it to its pocket. The watch was the old man’s most prized possession, an eighteen-karat Patek Philippe given to him over two decades ago by a grateful bank president.
Joe asked him, “Was any of that necessary?”
“I didn’t start the fight, Joseph, so don’t criticize how I finished it.” His father sat back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other. Some men wore their power as if it were a coat they couldn’t get to fit or to stop itching. Thomas Coughlin wore his like it had been tailored for him in London. He surveyed the room and nodded at a few people he knew before looking back at his son. “If I thought you were just making your way in the world on an unconventional path, do you think I’d take issue with it?”
“Yes,” Joe said, “I do.”
His father gave that a soft smile and a softer shrug. “I’ve been a police officer for thirty-seven years and I’ve learned one thing above all else.”
“That crime never pays,” Joe said, “unless you do it at an institutional level.”
Another soft smile and a small tip of the head. “No, Joseph. No. What I’ve learned is that violence procreates. And the children your violence produces will return to you as savage, mindless things. You won’t recognize them as yours, but they’ll recognize you. They’ll mark you as deserving of their punishment.”
Joe had heard variations of this speech over the years. What his father failed to recognize—besides the fact that he was repeating himself—was that general theories need not apply to particular people. Not if the people—or person—in question was determined enough to make his own rules and smart enough to get everyone else to play by them.
Joe was only twenty, but he already knew he was that type of person.
But to humor the old man, if for no other reason, he asked, “And what exactly are these violent offspring punishing me for again?”
“The carelessness of their reproduction.” His father leaned forward, elbows on the table, palms pressed together. “Joseph.”
“Joe.”
“Joseph, violence breeds violence. It’s an absolute.” He unclasped his hands and looked at his son. “What you put out into the world will always come back for you.”
“Yeah, Dad, I read my catechism.”
His father tipped his head in recognition as Emma came out of the powder room and crossed to the coat-check room. His eyes tracking her, he said to Joe, “But it never comes back in a way you can predict.”
“I’m sure it doesn’t.”
“You’re not sure of anything except your own certainty. Confidence you haven’t earned always has the brightest glow.” Thomas watched Emma hand her ticket to the coat-check girl. “She’s quite easy on the eyes.”
Joe said nothing.
“Outside of that, though,” his father said, “I fail to grasp what you see in her.”
“Because she’s from Charlestown?”
“Well, that doesn’t help,” his father said. “Her father was a pimp back in the old days and her uncle has killed at least two men that we know of. But I could overlook all that, Joseph, if she weren’t so . . .”
“What?”
“Dead inside.” His father consulted his watch again and barely suppressed the shudder of a yawn. “It’s late.”
“She’s not dead inside,” Joe said. “Something in her is just sleeping.”
“That something?” his father said as Emma returned with their coats. “It never wakes up again, son.”
On the street, walking to his car, Joe said, “You couldn’t have been a little more . . . ?”
“What?”
“Engaged in the conversation? Social?”
“All the time we been together,” she said, “all you ever talk about is how much you hate that man.”
“Is it all the time?”
“Pretty much.”
Joe shook his head. “And I’ve never said I hate my father.”
“Then what have you said?”
“That we don’t get along. We’ve never gotten along.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because we’re too fucking alike.”
“Or because you hate him.”
“I don’t hate him,” Joe said, knowing it, above all things, to be true.
“Then maybe you should climb under his covers tonight.”
“What?”
“He sits there and looks at me like I’m trash? Asks about my family like he knows we’re no good all the way back to the Old Country? Calls me fucking dear?” She stood on the sidewalk shaking as the first snowflakes appeared from the black above them. The tears in her voice began to fall from her eyes. “We’re not people. We’re not respectable. We’re just the Goulds from Union Street. Charlestown trash. We tat the lace for your fucking curtains.”
Joe held up his hands. “Where is this coming from?” He reached for her and she took a step back.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Okay.”
“It comes from a lifetime, okay, of getting the high hat and the icy mitt from people like your father. People who, who, who . . . who confuse being lucky with being better. We’re not less than you. We’re not shit.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“He did.”
“No.”
“I’m not shit,” she whispered, her mouth half open to the night, the snow mingling with the tears streaming down her face.
He put his arms out and stepped in close. “May I?”
She stepped into his embrace but kept her own arms by her sides. He held her to him and she wept into his chest and he told her repeatedly that she was not shit, she was not less than anyone, and he loved her, he loved her.
Later, they lay in his bed while thick, wet snowflakes flung themselves at the window like moths.
“That was weak,” she said.
“What?”
“On the street. I was weak.”
“You weren’t weak. You were honest.”
“I don’t cry in front of people.”
“Well, you can with me.”
“You said you loved me.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you?”
He looked in her pale, pale eyes. “Yes.”
After a minute she said, “I can’t say it back.”
He told himself that wasn’t the same as saying she didn’t feel it.
“Okay.”
“Is it really okay? Because some guys need to hear it back.”
Some guys? How many guys had told her they loved her before he came along?
“I’m tougher than them,” he said and wished it were true.
The window rattled in the dark February gusts and a foghorn bayed and down in Scollay Square several horns beeped in anger.
“What do you want?” he asked her.
She shrugged and bit a hangnail and stared across his body out the window.
“For a lot of things to never have happened to me.”
“What things?”
She shook her head, drifting away from him now.
“And sun,” she mumbled after a while, her lips sleep swollen. “Lots and lots of sun.”
Chapter Three
Hickey’s Termite
Tim Hickey once told Joe the smallest mistake sometimes casts the longest shadow. Joe wondered what Tim would have said about daydreaming behind the wheel of a getaway car while you were parked outside a bank. Maybe not daydreaming—fixating. On a woman’s back. More specifically, on Emma’s back. On the birthmark he’d seen there. Tim probably would have said, then again, sometimes it’s the biggest mistakes that cast the longest shadows, you moron.
Another thing Tim was fond of saying was when a hou
se falls down, the first termite to bite into it is just as much to blame as the last. Joe didn’t get that one—the first termite would be long fucking dead by the time the last termite got his teeth into the wood. Wouldn’t he? Every time Tim made the analogy, Joe resolved to look into termite life expectancy, but then he’d forget to do it until the next time Tim brought it up, usually when he was drunk and there was a lull in the conversation, and everyone at the table would get the same look on their faces: What is it with Tim and the fucking termites already?
Tim Hickey got his hair cut once a week at Aslem’s on Charles Street. One Tuesday, some of those hairs ended up in his mouth when he was shot in the back of the head on his way to the barber’s chair. He lay on the checkerboard tile as the blood rolled past the tip of his nose and the shooter emerged from behind the coatrack, shaky and wide-eyed. The coatrack clattered to the tile and one of the barbers jumped in place. The shooter stepped over Tim Hickey’s corpse and gave the witnesses a hunched series of nods, as if embarrassed, and let himself out.
When Joe heard, he was in bed with Emma. After he hung up the phone, Emma sat up in bed while he told her. She rolled a cigarette and looked at Joe while she licked the paper—she always looked at him when she licked the paper—and then she lit it. “Did he mean anything to you? Tim?”
“I don’t know,” Joe said.
“How don’t you know?”
“It’s not one thing or the other, I guess.”
Tim had found Joe and the Bartolo brothers when they were kids setting fire to newsstands. One morning they’d take money from the Globe to burn down one of the Standard’s stands. The next day they’d take a payoff from the American to torch the Globe’s. Tim hired them to burn down the 51 Café. They graduated to late-afternoon home rips in Beacon Hill, the back doors left unlocked by cleaning women or handymen on Tim’s payroll. When they worked a job Tim gave them, he set a flat price, but if they worked their own jobs, they paid Tim his tribute and took the lion’s share for themselves. In that regard, Tim had been a great boss.
Joe had watched him strangle Harvey Boule, though. It had been over opium, a woman, or a German shorthaired pointer; to this day Joe had only heard rumors. But Harvey had walked into the casino and he and Tim got to talking and then Tim snapped the electric cord off one of the green banker’s lamps and wrapped it around Harvey’s neck. Harvey was a huge guy and he carried Tim around the casino floor for about a minute, all the whores running for cover, all of Hickey’s gun monkeys pointing their guns right at Harvey. Joe watched the realization dawn in Harvey Boule’s eyes—even if he got Tim to stop strangling him, Tim’s goons would empty four revolvers and one automatic into him. He dropped to his knees and soiled himself with a loud venting sound. He lay on his stomach, gasping, as Tim pressed his knee between his shoulder blades and wrapped the excess cord tight around one hand. He twisted and pulled back all the harder and Harvey kicked hard enough to knock off both shoes.
Tim snapped his fingers. One of his gun monkeys handed him a pistol and Tim put it to Harvey’s ear. A whore said, “Oh, God,” but just as Tim went to pull the trigger, Harvey’s eyes turned hopeless and confused, and he moaned his final breath into the imitation Oriental. Tim sat back on Harvey’s spine and handed the gun back to his goon. He peered at the profile of the man he’d killed.
Joe had never seen anyone die before. Less than two minutes before, Harvey had asked the girl who brought him his martini to get him the score of the Sox game. Tipped her good too. Checked his watch and slipped it back into his vest. Took a sip of his martini. Less than two minutes before, and now he was fucking gone? To where? No one knew. To God, to the devil, to purgatory, or worse, maybe to nowhere. Tim stood and smoothed his snow-white hair and pointed in a vague way at the casino manager. “Freshen everyone’s drinks. On Harvey.”
A couple of people laughed nervously but most everyone else looked sick.
That wasn’t the only person Tim had killed or ordered killed in the last four years, but it had been the one Joe witnessed.
And now Tim himself. Gone. Not coming back. As if he’d never been.
“You ever see anyone killed?” Joe asked Emma.
She looked back at him steadily for a bit, smoking the cigarette, chewing a hangnail. “Yeah.”
“Where do you think they go?”
“The funeral home.”
He stared at her until she smiled that tiny smile of hers, her curls dangling in front of her eyes.
“I think they go nowhere,” she said.
“I’m starting to think that too,” Joe said. He sat up and gave her a hard kiss and she returned it just as hard. Her ankles crossed at his back. She ran her hand through his hair and he looked into her, feeling if he stopped looking at her, he’d miss something, something important that would happen in her face, something he’d never forget.
“What if there is no After? And this”—she ground herself down on him—“is all we get?”
“I love this,” he said.
She laughed. “I love this too.”
“In general? Or with me?”
She put her cigarette out. She took his face in her hands when she kissed him. She rocked back and forth. “With you.”
But he wasn’t the only one she did this with, was he?
There was still Albert. Still Albert.
A couple days later, in the billiards room off the casino, Joe was shooting pool alone when Albert White walked in with the confidence of someone who expected an obstacle to be removed before he reached it. Walking in beside him was his chief gun monkey, Brenny Loomis, Loomis looking right at Joe like he’d looked at him from the floor of the gaming room.
Joe’s heart folded itself around the blade of a knife. And stopped.
Albert White said, “You must be Joe.”
Joe willed himself to move. He met Albert’s outstretched hand. “Joe Coughlin, yeah. Nice to meet you.”
“Good to put a face to a name, Joe.” Albert pumped his hand like the pumping would get water to a fire.
“Yes, sir.”
“This is Brendan Loomis,” Albert said, “a friend of mine.”
Joe shook Loomis’s hand, and it was like putting his hand between two cars as they backed into each other. Loomis cocked his head and his small brown eyes roamed over Joe’s face. When Joe got the hand back, he had to resist the urge to wring it. Loomis, meanwhile, wiped his own hand with a silk handkerchief, his face a rock. His eyes left Joe and looked around the room like he had plans for it. He was good with a gun, they said, and great with a knife, but most of his victims he just beat to death.
Albert said, “I’ve seen you before, right?”
Joe searched his face for signs of mirth. “I don’t think so.”
“No, I have. Bren’, you seen this guy before?”
Brenny Loomis picked up the nine ball and examined it. “No.”
Joe felt a relief so overpowering he worried he might lose control of his bladder.
“The Shoelace.” Albert snapped his fingers. “You’re in there sometimes, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Joe said.
“That’s it, that’s it.” Albert clapped Joe on the shoulder. “I run this house now. You know what that means?”
“I don’t.”
“Means I need you to pack up the room where you’ve been living.” He raised an index finger. “But I don’t want you to feel like I’m putting you on the street.”
“Okay.”
“It’s just this is a swell joint. We have a lot of ideas for it.”
“Absolutely.”
Albert put a hand on Joe’s arm just above the elbow. His wedding band flashed under the light. It was silver. Celtic snake patterns were etched into it. A couple of diamonds too, small ones.
“You think about what kind of earner you want to be. Okay? Just think about it. Take so
me time. But know this—you can’t work on your own. Not in this town. Not anymore.”
Joe turned his gaze away from the wedding band and the hand on his arm, looked Albert White in his friendly eyes. “I have no desire to work on my own, sir. I paid tribute to Tim Hickey, rain or shine.”
Albert White got a look like he didn’t like hearing Tim Hickey’s name uttered in the place he now owned. He patted Joe’s arm. “I know you did. I know you did good work too. Top-notch. But we don’t do business with outsiders. And an independent contractor? That’s an outsider. We’re building a great team, Joe. I promise you—an amazing team.” He poured himself a drink from Tim’s decanter, didn’t offer anyone else one. He carried it over to the pool table and hoisted himself up on the rail, looked at Joe. “Let me just say one thing plain—you’re too smart for the stuff you’ve been pulling. You’re nickel-and-diming with two dumb guineas—hey, they’re great friends, I’m sure, but they’re stupid and they’re wops and they’ll be dead before they’re thirty. You? You can keep on the path you’re on. No commitments, but no friends. A house, but no home.” He slid off the pool table. “If you don’t want a home, that’s fine. I promise. But you can’t operate anywhere in the city limits. You want to carve something out on the South Shore, go ahead. Try the North Shore, if the Italians let you live once they hear about you. But the city?” He pointed at the floor. “That’s organized now, Joe. No tributes, just employees. And employers. Is there any part of this I’ve been unclear on?”
“No.”
“Vague about?”
“No, Mr. White.”
Albert White crossed his arms and nodded, looked at his shoes. “You got anything lined up? Any jobs I should know about?”
Joe had spent the last of Tim Hickey’s money to pay the guy who’d given him the info he needed for the Pittsfield job.
“No,” Joe said. “Nothing lined up.”
“You need money?”
“Mr. White, sir?”
“Money.” Albert reached into his pocket with a hand that had run over Emma’s pubic bone. Gripped her hair. He peeled two ten spots off his wad and slapped them into Joe’s palm. “I don’t want you thinking on an empty stomach.”