Hours of Gladness (23 page)

Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Hours of Gladness

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“We have to get it somewhere,” O'Gorman said.

“What about makin' sure Joey's dough isn't in the pocket of one of your underbosses?” O'Toole said.

“Nick here says it didn't happen. But he's gonna check around some more anyway. In the meantime I want mortgages on every fuckin' piece of property you guys own in Paradise Beach. That includes Grandpa Gumbah here. We got a very good line on what you got, so don't try to hide nothin' under the table. That especially goes for you, McBride. We want all them boats and that fuckin' fish factory and that marina. We can do a lot with that marina.”

“How can you issue a mortgage?” Desmond McBride said.

“Through a fuckin' bank, asshole!” snarled Giordano. “We own three of them.”

“What kind of terms are you offering?” Desmond whined.

“You want to go back in the fuckin' pool with fifty-pound weights on your feet?” Giordano roared.

“Tommy, wait a second,” quavered Sunny Dan. “I done you some favors in the old daysâ”

“Yeah, and I thought you was a pile of Irish shit then. Shut up. We're runnin' this fuckin' state now.”

Bill O'Toole drove home. Desmond McBride was in no shape to do anything. The police chief drove slowly down the winding lanes of Saddle Brook past the invisible houses to the Garden State Parkway. No one spoke until they had crossed the Raritan. For Bill O'Toole that river had once been a dividing line between North Jersey and its cities and its corruption and the south with its beaches and its mythical simplicity and purity.

“Jesus!”
Bill roared. He pounded the wheel with his huge fist.
“Jesus!”
He pounded the wheel again. “How did you let slime like that take it all away from us? How did you do it?”

He turned to glare at Sunny Dan in the backseat.
“You want to know?”
Bill roared. “You weren't tough enough. You were too busy listenin' to the goddamn Catholic Church. Too busy dippin' your miserable ass in holy water. Those guys don't give a shit about holy water, they don't give a shit about anything but money.”

Sunny Dan said nothing. He just stared between his two sons-in-law in the front seat. He stared down the Garden State Parkway with its budding trees and greening fields at a vision that had turned into a nightmare. “We didn't shoot people,” he said. “We didn't blow them up. We didn't do that kind of thing.”

“You give me a fookin' map and some money for gelignite and I'll blow that fooker from here to Canada,” Billy Kilroy said. “I'll put a bomb under his fookin' swimmin' pool that'll blow him higher than fookin' Westminster Abbey.”

“I'll go with you,” Mick said. “Give me an M16 and a dark night and I'll take on that whole lousy setup. I'll blow every one of them away.”

“That won't get us the money or the guns,” O'Gorman said.

“We was tough,” Sunny Dan said. “We was as tough as them once. I remember in 1928 they tried to bring some hooch through the city. The Big Man had searchlights above the railyards. We turned them on and told them
through a megaphone to leave the stuff and start runnin'. You shoulda seen the party we had with that stuff. It was the best. Straight from Scotland.”

“They're going to take it all away,” Desmond McBride said to O'Toole. “Everything we worked for all these years. Because you thought you were Mandrake the Magician in Atlantic City.”

“You put together this Mickey Mouse deal, not me.” O'Toole snarled. “You thought you were St. Patrick and Eamon De Valera.”

“We was tough,” Sunny Dan said. “But we didn't kill nobody. We didn't blow people up. That wasn't the way we played the game. You had to go to confession eventually, you know. You didn't want to confess things like that.”

“Gentlemen,” Dick O'Gorman said. “It seems to me our one hope of salvation is to find the original money. I have reason to believe it's still in Paradise Beach. Reason to believe it was stolen not by one of Mr. Giordano's thugs, but by the British Secret Service.”

He told them about the Chinese Type 64 silenced that Jackie Chasen had seen shooting Zaccaro and his bodyguard. Bill O'Toole managed to subdue the rage that was engulfing his brain and pretend to be interested in this revelation, which he had already heard on his surveillance tapes. He also knew something O'Gorman did not know. Melody had called the U.S. State Department about the SIS man and they had told her there was nothing they could do about him, if he existedâa fact they obviously doubted. In the era of Ronald Reagan, Senator Ted was not as powerful as Melody wanted everyone to believe.

Over the causeway they rolled into Paradise Beach at last. But it did not look like the same place. The clean streets, the neat houses, the fresh, salty air were all superfluous now. The safety, the peace, the quiet, all the contrasts to the city for which they had spent twenty-five years congratulating themselves, had vanished. All O'Toole could see was the sneer on Tommy Giordano's
face. All he could hear were the words
We're runnin'this fuckin' state now.

Something similar was happening in the soul of Sunny Dan. It blended with the water in his lungs and the memories of the old days. It was a deadly combination. In the house he said, “I'm goin' to bed.”

“Don't you want any supper, Papa?” Barbara O'Day asked.

“No. I'm goin' to bed.”

“What did you do to him?” Barbara said as Mick helped Sunny Dan up the stairs.

“I didn't do anything to him,” O'Toole said.

“The hell you didn't,” Mick said, coming back downstairs. He was glaring at Bill O'Toole without an iota of respect or affection on his face.

A twisting regret clutched O'Toole's chest. He was losing another son. A son he had never quite accepted because he had never accepted the death of his real son. But a son nevertheless.

Mick, give me a chance to explain, somehow explain everything, a crazy voice inside O'Toole's head pleaded. While his real voice snarled, “Shut up. You're in no position to start callin' anybody names.”

Kilroy and O'Gorman watched them, baffled expressions on their faces. They could not begin to understand this American brand of Ireland's sorrows.

PRAY FOR US SINNERS NOW AND AT THE HOUR OF OUR DEATHS

S
unny Dan Monahan was terribly confused. There was an awful racket in the next room. The place was full of echoes, as if people were shouting in an empty convention hall. Were they in Philadelphia, picking out good seats for the New Jersey delegation? The Big Man always had the kind of clout that got them right in front of the podium. They had been in all the newsreels at the last convention.

Suddenly a voice snarled,
We're runnin' this fuckin' state now.
Who the hell was that? Giordano, the wop numbers runner. He remembered him because he always wanted a bigger cut and if you didn't watch him, he stole it. He was a nasty ginzo, the type you had to let the cops beat up now and then to keep him in line.

Sunny Dan never went for beating people up. He never went for a lot of things the Big Man did. Dan was for Al Smith in 1932; it was rotten the way the Big Man dumped Al and switched to Roosevelt. It was rotten to do something
like that to your own kind. But it turned out to be a smart move.

What the hell? There was Barbara, crying her eyes out. Ohhh, Bobbie, I hated to see you cry. I'd give you anything to stop you from crying. You were my sweetheart, Bobbie, Daddy's sweetheart. I couldn't believe it when you let that Piney knock you up. Why are you crying now?

Dying? Did someone say that? Was that happening? He used to wonder what it would be like. Then you saw people die and you stopped worrying about it. In France guys died without a sound. His father just drifted away like a boat that had parted from its mooring. He had a smile on his face. Dan wanted to die that way, with a smile on his face. He wanted to live up to his nickname, Sunny Dan.

He gave his mother and father credit for it. They were the happiest people. They cried when they lost his brother Bill in the trolley car accident, but they were smiling a week later. Dan wanted to die like the old gent with a smile on his face, but it wasn't there. Why?

It was that voice:
We're runnin' this fuckin' state now.

Did they lose it because they weren't tough enough? No, they lost it because they got old. They got old and fat and self-satisfied. They lost it because they started fighting among themselves. They started double-crossing each other, they had double-crossers like Barbara's husband, that scrawny bastard O'Day, in their own families. I never should have let you marry that scumball, Bobbie. It would have been better to put the kid out for adoption. Have it in upstate New York and give it away. But then we wouldn't have Mick. What a hell of a mess life can be.

There was another reason why he wasn't dying with a Sunny Dan smile on his face. The bearer bonds. What did he have to leave anybody now? Especially poor Bobbie. She'd been supporting him for the last five years. How could that have happened? Who knew about them, outside the family? No one. Did that mean someone in the
family had ratted? Why? Everyone lost on the deal. Especially him. He had lost his interest in living. Now he was dying and everyone was saying good riddance. Instead of being surrounded by gratitude, love, it was good riddance.

There was Leo, his favorite grandson. The only one with enough brains to go into politics. What a charmer he had been when he was a kid. Not much guts but a charmer. Still a good-looking boy, even with tears streaming down his face. “Grandpa, I'm so sorry, so sorry,” he whispered.

Sorry about what? Dan almost quipped. You're not the one who's dying. But it wasn't an appropriate thing to say. Especially with Leo's WASP wife frowning behind him. So Dan just reached out and touched his cheek. “It's all right, Leo, it's all right,” he whispered.

What was that sound? Like a car motor that wouldn't start in January. It was his own breath. Who's that now beside Barbara? The little guy in blackâthe priest. The Irish priest. Better him than that mealymouthed wimp Father Hart. He wouldn't confess his sins to him. Had he told someone that? Maybe.

“Papa,” Barbara was saying between her sobs. “Papa. Here's the priest. Father McAvoy. Father Hart's sick. Father McAvoy'll hear your confession and give you Communion.”

“Hello, Father.”

“Hello, Mr. Monahan,” McAvoy said. “Are you sorry for all the sins of your past life?”

“Oh, yes, Father. I've committed some lulus.”

What were they? The women at the conventions? They were the only ones, after he married Helen. He hadn't touched Helen before the wedding. She barely let him kiss her. The ones in France, did they count? When you're fighting a goddamn war, the rules are different, aren't they? He had never felt bad about the women at the conventions. They had helped him put up with Helen's big mouth. Without them she might have driven him nuts. A
man needed some consolation for a mouth like Helen's. He could swear she didn't talk that much before they got married. He would never have married her.

“Say an act of contrition now.”

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Father McAvoy was raising his hand to bless him. Suddenly an awful thing happened. McAvoy's face turned into Giordano's. Instead of saying the words of forgiveness, he was saying,
We're runnin' this fuckin' state now.

Then something even more terrible happened. Giordano's face turned into the face of a creature with blackened skin and ghastly fanged teeth and glowing green eyes. The face of a movie monster, an outer-space alien, Satan.

He saw Leo's face going the same way. The two of them side by side, a twin horror show. Why? What was God trying to tell him? Was it all his fault, this evil nightmare? Were those sins he committed that serious? Could being on the take all those years lead to this?

“Oh my God,” Sunny Dan cried, and reached out for Barbara's hand, her arm. He crawled up it toward a memory of happiness. He curled his trembling old arms around her neck. “Oh, Bobbie, Bobbie, oh my God,” he cried.

He let go and fell back on the pillow, dead.

Without a smile on his face.

MARCHING ORDERS

C
langing through Mick's brain was the old Rolling Stones song about a guy who had nothing in his head but the four letter word that rhymed with luck. He nipped at a pint of Southern Comfort as he drove through the night to Jackie Chasen's house. He had to tell somebody. He had to talk to somebody.

“You're drunk!”

Jackie sat up in bed, those lovely breasts lifting their nipples to his hungry hands like young deer welcoming the dawn in the Pines.

“Aw, Jackie. I jus' wantaâI meanâ”

“Get out. I don't let anybody touch me while he's drunk.”

Jesus, who could he tell? Who would believe they killed poor old Sunny Dan? Who could believe what these IRA communist bastards were pulling off? A million and a half Mafia bucks worth of heroin or cocaine or some goddamn thing. To buy missiles to shoot down
British planes and helicopters. His Uncle Bill, his Uncle Desmond, up to their eyes in a deal like that? Bill said it was to clear his goddamn gambling debts, he didn't give a shit for the IRA. So what? So you cleared your lousy debts and gave Ireland to these communist bastards?

Except they weren't bastards. His mother was in love with that smoothie, Tyrone Power O'Gorman. She was in the sack with him every night. The other guy, Billy Kilroy, he was like Minus One Haines, the little marine in his Parris Island company. Minus One had been a loser from the start. He tried so goddamn hard but he never made it. You could see why. Someone had told him he was a loser from birth. Kilroy was a loser from Belfast.

Mick reeled back to his car. Who could he tell? No one left now but the Professor. You couldn't tell the FBI. You couldn't tell the state cops. They'd put Uncle Bill in jail. He didn't want to see Uncle Bill go to jail. He didn't want to see him go down for the count. He just wanted to tell someone. It was exploding inside him.

He found the Professor at the Golden Shamrock, half in the bag as usual, holding forth on the failure of Western civilization. Mick tried to tell him what was happening. Alex Oxenford was not having one of his better nights. Instead of listening to Mick, he started telling him to stop drinking, to straighten out his head once and for all and do something with his life beside drive around in that stupid patrol car.

“Listen,” Mick said. “Somethin' really bad's goin' down, you get me? It's so bad I need advice.”

“You've never taken any advice from me before,” Oxenford said.

“I know. Because I thought you were full of shit most of the time. But now I need to talk to someone.”

“Try Father Hart. Or your mother.”

“My mother!”

Mick drove into the Pines to Pop Oxenford's. He got the old man out of bed. He had done it before, when he first came back from Nam and thought about killing himself.
He'd go out there and sit and talk to him with the gun on the table. Pop was the only one who knew the whole story of him and Trai and the court-martial. Pop was the only one who knew what had happened when the photographers and newshounds had come rushing to Binh Nghai to tell everyone how the Viet Cong had overrun the fort.

As if the VC had ever overrun anything. They shot people in the dark, but it was the NVA, the goddamn North Vietnamese, who did the overrunning. Anyway, it didn't matter, six marines were dead, his men, and he should have died with them. The next day Phac told him about Trai and her father. It drove him crazy. He told the reporter from the
LA Times
to hang around, he'd see some fireworks tomorrow.

That night Mick and Phac waited in the safe hooch down the river where Trai met Le Quan Chien and blew about twenty holes in him. The next day at noon Mick walked up to Trai's hut with Le's head in his hand and threw it in the door and asked her how much she was going to pay him.

The reporter took it all down, his cameraman took pictures. It didn't matter, Mick was crazy with grief and revenge. That night he watched Phac hang Trai's father in the ruins of the fort. Next Phac started tying a hangman's knot around Trai's throat.

No, Mick had said, no, and backed it up with his M16. He had let her live for some crazy, romantic reason. For the way she had cried and followed him into the lane saying, “I didn't love him. I loved you.”

A month later with the fort rebuilt and the VC on the runâwithout Le Quan Chien they fell apartâthe big shots in the dry-cleaned uniforms arrived from Saigon with the reporter's story in their hands. They asked people in the village if it had happened, but no one remembered anything. No one but Trai. She told them it was true. She tried to tell them it was her fault, but that was the last thing they were interested in hearing. They just wanted to confirm that Sergeant Michael Peter O'Day
was guilty as charged of mutilating an enemy corpse.

“Mutilating?” Mick said. “Mutilating? I cut off the son of a bitch's head and I should have cut off his balls too and made her cook them for supper. I hung his goddamn corpse in the village square and let it rot there for a week. What else do you want to know?”

It was perfect. He got exactly what he wanted, what he deserved, a dishonorable discharge. It was for the wrong reason, of course. But if they had given it to him for the right reason, he would have shot himself in Nam instead of waiting to think about it until he got home.

The unreeling stopped. Mick stared into Pop Oxenford's lined, solemn face in the lantern light. He felt as if he had been underwater for an hour. As if he had drowned and been pumped out and brought back to life somehow.

“Aw, Pop, Pop, why am I tellin' you all this again? You've heard it.”

“Hey, Mikey, a man my age don't sleep worth a damn. It's the most entertainin' story I've heard since Alf Burns shot twenty-two holes in one of them goddamn Navy blimps during World War II. Thought they was lookin' for his still. Alf hadn't even heard about the war. He never read a newspaper in his life.”

“Pop, what the hell do you make of all this?”

Mick had told him the story, somewhere between the time he had said good-bye to the Professor and the unreeling of Binh Nghai. “What the hell should I do?”

“Nothin'.”

“Nothin'? The Professor says they're goddamn communists.”

“The Professor always was full of shit. Funny how you can spot that. I saw he was full of shit when he was six years old. I spotted that exactly right. I spotted him from the start.”

“Nothin'?”

“Just play the game through. You owe that much to your uncle Bill. He took a lot of heat when he put you on the force. You owe him somethin' for that. You don't owe
the Professor nothin'. He's never done a thing for you but shovel shit in your ears. That's all he's good for. So bring the stuff ashore. Finish the job. But when it's done, get the hell out of here and take that Jewish piece with you. Maybe marry her.”

“She hates my guts, Pops. She's still fighting the goddamn Vietnam War.”

“So are you. Maybe if you stop, she'll stop.”

“I don't love her, Pops. There's only one woman in this lousy world I love. You know who she is.”

“I was the same way at your age. Loved a married woman. But I didn't let it stop me from livin'.”

“You're not Irish, Pops.”

“Thank God for small favors.”