Light of the Diddicoy (19 page)

“I don't forget friends,” Dinny nodded, then looked at him.

“Done,” Tanner confirmed. “I'll give'm a bullet.”

“We still got things . . . in a couple days.”

“Yeah? A little action? How can we help? Ya wouldn't do it wit'out us, right Dinny? Dinny? Action is action, we're in wit' ya, Dinny. Like ol' days, me'n you runnin' around Hudson Street. You kid,” Tanner taps me with his fist. “Dinny tell ya about them ol' days, me'n him? He was my star. He didn' warn nobody, just action. That's Dinny Meehan. No threats, just fists and dornicks in the air,” turning to Dinny. “Then ya had to go an' move to Brooklyn.”

“Can you send me a few guys?” Dinny asks.

“Sure, just lemme know and we'll be there,” Tanner says, shaking Dinny's hand and slapping him on the shoulder with his left hand. “Thos Carmody's done, promise.”

“I'll get back to ya about some action.”

Dinny trusted Tanner. They embraced. Laughing like old war buddies. Looking down the street at the festivities, I watch the flickering shadows playing off the tall, oranged tenements that line the edges of Hudson Street in the lowering sky. As crazed, drunken men and women flail in front of the fire in celebration, their elongated shadows dancing with them along the face of the old dilapidated buildings like peasant tribal gods of another era, ghosts of themselves from ages ago. Like the ghosts of the war-loving Celts celebrating rebel risings as if it were some farce of reality. It all seems so right these days as I dwell upon the past: fighting against an empire for freedom. Like it was inevitable. Fixed in history. Fated. But back then it was against the grain, against everything that was. The shock like that of an earthquake tumbling down the ancient edifices that stand so tall, the symbols for law and order that have guided the life of generations, only now revealed as fallacious by the weakness in its fallen state.

I hear the sighing of a mare strapped to a wooden cart amidst the rumpus, her owner off somewhere with the drink. I come to her with my palms open to her snout, but she is untrusting. She bobs her head in the air and turns her eyes sideways to watch me. I talk to her the way my father taught me, real gentle like, and I open my arms out wide to show her that I am in control and knowledgable of her kind. Although she is close on eighteen hands tall to the withers, she has a docile streak in her. In a moment, she is letting me soothe her, but the sounds of angry and drunken men make her stamp in place and I can see the bonfire in her eye like a mirror. Like the ancient light inside her, and inside me too. She is no pure quarter, but of mixed blood like the rest of us.

“A beautiful one, you are,” I say to her.

Soon she nestles her long face along my shoulder and neck, pushing me playfully. Then she looks away. Then stamping happily, clicking her shoes on the paving stones. And I have a yearning to unstrap her from the dray. To let her free from her binds.

“You just want to be free, don't you girl? Don't you? You do. You just want to be home in the country where you can run and be yourself, not stuck here in some foreign land. You don't even know why you're here, do you? You just want to go home, but your home's not there anymore.”

I stand there next to her, and still I am shocked by the awe of rebelpoets and teachers storming Dublin and the dancing shadows and the bonfires and Manhattan and the gangs filling up my new life. Tanner comes upon me among the party to wrap an arm around me next to the mare, his other hand filled with a growler of ale. “Kiddo, not to worry. That man will take great, great care o' ya. Dinny Meehan's a great, great man. No shittin' ya. He'll love ya so hard he'll squeeze the tears outta ya. Stick wit' 'em and all'll be good for ya.”

Staring into the bonfire, I give a respect to my father who for so long stayed quiet about his plans. And I think on the pookas too, the ghosts that the shananchies told me about as a boy in the fields and hills and boreens of my youth. About how they haunt our successes, bringing us down again in rebellion and in flight too. Haunting us everywhere we go. I could see those ghosts on the walls of the New York tenements dancing above us under the sky. The shadow dancers from the barrel fires. Dancing over me. Dancing around Dinny Meehan's head too. Sometimes giving us hope only to yet again lay us flat on our backs in the slums of foreign lands.

It's family we have to think about first and foremost, I believe. Families. And I still do to this day many years from April 1916. Anything for the closeness felt by the family. All for it. And if Dinny is right that my father is off with the rebels, then that means my mother and sisters are all alone on the farm since my older brother, Timothy, probably went with him to the countryside, readying for the war with the Fifth Battalion of the East Clare Brigade, their brothers in arms for a real republic in Ireland.

And with that, my only goal is for their arrival. All else matters less. The mare looked at me from the side of her head and I could feel that she felt me. That my mind had been made and that I now only have but one purpose, for my mother and sisters' safe coming. And the quicker the better, for everyone knows what'll be done on the isolated farms in Ireland when the Brits come round for their retaliations. One purpose for myself, and nothing less. I hug the mare's head with one arm under her large jaw and smell her mane. It reminds me of home, that smell of a horse. So pure it is too. Nothing purer than the place I'll always call home: the west of Ireland, but that I will never be able to get back to in my long life, sadly. And so it lives so gracefully in my mind and in the odors that sometimes come back to me in the form of burning turf or the wild gorse in the fields or the natural smell in the mane of a cob or a draft horse.

And I remember too one day not long before this April evening of song and drink, when a homeless and hopeless sort I was. When all that I longed for was a plan. Something to drive me. Because a man without a plan and a fixated need to lead his thoughts is a rudderless wanderer altogether. And now I have it. A plan for my thoughts. A fixation on my mother and sisters' health and well-being for it is I who was always thought of as the one who could open the doors for many, and open the door for my mother I will.

Although Dinny has offered me help, it is my family I need to turn to first. Kin before kith. Blood before all. And so Uncle Joseph, the brother of my father, is my first choice and maybe he has information, letters or news of some sort that will help me get my mother and sisters here as soon as it can be done. Only one goal now, nothing more. One plan for me is all, though a smart man always leaves himself options.

“Dinny,” I say, pulling out the knife across my hips. “I know what must be done.”

Turning my way among the circle of Tanner and friends, he looks at me with the sense of honor. And so do the others. The first time anyone in New York looked at me with the honor.

A
SNAP HAD COME IN THE
next morning. New York awoke to a mid-April chill uncommon to the city. It wasn't yet cold enough to snow, but the sky threatened a freezing rain in the gray and cobalt covering. The lilacs and the lily of the valleys that had emerged with the weeds recently were laid flat by the gusts and stripped of their scents. Men leaned forward and winced their eyes closed when it kicked up. The scrape of trolleys ached in the back of heads, below the ears.

A few blocks from the White Hand headquarters, inside the pilothouse of a tug backed to the shore alone under the cold clicking of the Manhattan Bridge, Dinny, Lumpy Gilchrist, and The Swede sat and waited, breathing in the flat steel air through wiggling, watery noses.

A little past four in the afternoon Head Patrolman William Brosnan, dressed in civilian clothes with a cap covering the eyes and a collar to the ears, came upon the tug and entered at the bridge. The pilothouse now shrunk as four men of varying sizes stood too close together.

As The Swede stared at the man without his tunic and copper, Dinny gives a few words. “After the shindig, Non Connors takes the fall. We'll have witnesses for yas. When the smoke clears in Red Hook, I want him in front o' Judge Denzinger as the leader o' the gang, photos for the papers'n all, dig?”

There was not a response, only a bobbing of the head and a pursing of the lips. Afterward Brosnan placed the envelope Dinny handed him deep into his trench-coat breast.

“Look at'm.” The Swede nodded toward the humbled patrolman. “When his hand's open, his mouth is buttoned.”

Dinny did not shut The Swede down.

“Seventeen years at Poplar Street, and ya still just a patrolman.”

“Head patrolman,” Brosnan said.

“Yeah, ya're a head, all right,” The Swede sneered. “When they gonna make ya a detective, Brosnan? That sounds good, don' it, Dinny? Detective Brosnan? Why don' ya make him a detective, Dinny? Why not? He does what he's told.”

Dinny just stared at Brosnan, who looked away.

The Swede mumbled, “Maybe den ya won't need us, eh Brosnan? Makin' all that dime.”

P
ADDY
K
EENAN ROLLS THE LAST OF
six kegs down the double planks at the back of an automobile truck in the alley of the Dock Loaders' Club. In the cutting drafts and in the chill, he and James Hart, the truck's driver, hoist it onto a squeaking wheel cart. Standing upright with hands on hips, their chests heave while the moisture is sucked out of their breathing by the nip in the thin air.

Through the rear room go Keenan and Hart, wheeling the sixth keg passed the stairwell and around the impassive Ragtime Howard, turning left behind the bar where it's to be tapped for another busy night under Dinny's office.

Mick Gilligan has been in the saloon since quarter to noon, drinking off the pay he gained the previous day in the Navy Yard with Red Donnelly. At that time of day there are only eight men scattered along the bar and against the wall, Gilligan is the only standing.

“Whadda fook d'ya think den?” he slurs. “Whadda ya think, Rag? Talk ta me!”

Ragtime Howard sits at the farthest part of the bar away from the front door and window. Not interested in Gilligan's blatting, he keeps his eyes trained on the drink in front him.

“Rag?” Gilligan continues. “D'ya think das right? Do ya? I'm gonna get my honor, Rag. You watsch. Even if I gotter pay a galoot forit. Appare'ly das whatcha gotta do around here to get honor. And I know jusht where da go . . . I do too!”

“Mick,” Keenan says. “Have a seat, aye? Here's a drop fer ye. To calm yer nerves, 'tis.”

“Ah, one on the house!” Gilligan announces victoriously. “About time I earned one o' dem yokes, ya're a real patriot, Paddy. A patriot! I don' care dat ya from . . .”

“'Tisn't from the house, Mick,” Keenan answers. “A man buys that one fer ye.”

“Who does?”

Standing relaxed while drying his hands on the apron round his waist, Paddy Keenan looks toward the end of the bar where Vincent Maher sits smiling through his toothpick, the door behind him. Next to Maher is the sandy-haired Richie Lonergan leering Gilligan's way, leaning on the mahogany with not a word to say, a small whiskey glass held limp over his frozen face etched with the cheekbone eyes. He drinks it down slowly, watching Gilligan all the while. Even watches him through the bottom of the empty glass until he rests it on the mahogany. A candle sways between Mick Gilligan at one end, Maher and Lonergan at the other, Paddy Keenan quiet and empty in his staring. The two men between them push away from the bar and disappear from the glares.

“Ahhh,” Gilligan says dumbly, unable to give the drink back now that it is in his hand. “Thanks then, Vincent. . . . Thanks.”

Gilligan's voice slows off when awareness sets in. The guilt of offering pay to Bill Lovett under Dinny's roof weighs on his eyes now, afraid and self-loathing. Beyond any guilt though, Mick Gilligan knows as well as anyone at the Dock Loaders' Club that Vincent Maher only buys a drink for one kind of man: A dead man. There is no apologizing now. No begging can resolve Maher's summoning.

Adrenaline running through him, coursing in waves and deep shivers like loose nerves on a fresh cadaver, he stands in place in the mesh of his terror. The iron-piped banshees singing at a high pitch when an immigrant walks in the door as a train passes overhead, Maher and Lonergan keep at a stare. Though he cannot move, Mick can feel his bowels turning and bubbling in him. A heat pulls up through his back, beads of sweat form in his hairline. He stands there still. One pace behind Ragtime Howard. On an island as far as he is concerned.

He looks away from the boys at the end of the bar and sees the quiet, uncaring face of Paddy Keenan. Cold. He knows by the look on Paddy's face that the tender is in on the gig too. He then looks toward Maher, who still sits smiling with both elbows on the bar engulfed in a long, terrible stare. Concentrated on him. Mick Gilligan. And nothing else. Behind Maher the gray light through the window offers a saintly appearance. His face almost completely obscured in shadow, the moment has turned religious for Mick Gilligan and the joining of the window joists behind Maher's tilted cap appears like a cross through the dull shine. A putrid epiphany has taken shape in Gilligan's awakening. Silence takes the saloon down to the smallest creaking sounds. That creaking sound! The sound that appears in the ears of travelers stacked inside the belly of a lost clipper. An Atlantic crosser. Like a pooka's whispering. Gilligan shivers. The adrenaline rushing through his body while he keeps still, still standing in the same place. The plot revealed: death in the creaking afternoon.

Someone opens the front door again behind the smiling Maher and the Lonergan kid. The sound of popping metals and rushing trolleys above, the underbelly of the gigantic Manhattan Bridge screaming off the water until the door is shut again. In an instant, Gilligan shoots down the whiskey, throws the glass onto the ground, and runs back through the rear room and out the back door.

Maher jumps up and runs after him while Lonergan swings backward and limps out the front door as if it were all planned beforehand. The alley behind 25 Bridge Street is blocked by James Hart's automobile truck in back.

As Gilligan rips the back door open, Abe Harms laughs and surprises Gilligan by wrapping both his arms around the frantic man. Hart laughs too as he sits in the driver's seat of the truck that forces Gilligan to run one way down the alley, toward the water and the Manhattan Bridge.

“Hello thele, Mr. Mick Gilligan,” Harms says with a hun's guttural accent, then pulls out a .38 and points it to Gilligan's throat. “Vat's wrong, man? Not zo much talk flom you now, no?”

Gilligan screams, ducks out of the way of the gun, and runs down the alley toward the water.

As Maher opens the back door and stands next to the young Harms, he pulls out a .45 and takes a potshot from his hip at Gilligan's back. Following Maher's lead, Harms let one go down by his hip as well.

“Right where we want him to run,” Maher says, patting the new kid on the back. “Let's go.”

Mick Gilligan is running for his life and jumps a fence in a paranoid state as he hears a bang from a .38 in the air, then the bullet smacking a metal garbage can in front of him. Then a second slug goes off behind him. While at the top of a second fence, Gilligan looks behind him and sees Maher and the German kid running after him. Quickly, he crawls up a water-pipe to the roof of a building and jumps across it to the face of the Kirkman Soap Factory and enters through an open shudder at the side of the building on the second floor. Inside, a few factory workers notice Gilligan but keep themselves busy as they are anticipating the end of their workday at the five o'clock whistle.

Richie Lonergan watches from the front of the factory as Gilligan enters at the second floor of the building, which reaches up at least ten flights high. After jumping two fences and waiting for an empty railcar to pass in front of them, Maher and Harms come upon Richie staring high.

“He's inside.” Richie motions.

“I saw,” Maher said. “Abe, you stay out here and if you see him crawlin' out a window again, start firin'. We'll hear ya. Richie, come wit' me.”

Maher and Lonergan walk inside the front door of the old factory and are immediately met by the manager in the middle of a wide, recently swept concrete floor.

“Vincent, 'ow goes it?” The manager asks with a heavy cockney accent. “What can we do for yu? Yu lookin' for that cabbage that just run up 'ere?” he said, pointing up the stairs.

“Listen,” Maher said in a low tone. “We gotta runner up here in the upper floors. He's gotta be taken care of. I'm sorry to have to make ya do this, but you know how things gotta be.”

“No, no fine,” the manager agrees obediently. “What can I do?”

“I gotta have you clear these people outta here. Like now.”

“Okay.” The manager thought. “We'll knock off early. I'll blow the whistle and everybody'll be 'appy to let outta 'ere early.”

“Make sure to lock all exit doors, 'cept this one.” Maher points behind him to the front door. “We gotta check 'em all first, make sure this bug doesn't try and sniff the cracks through here.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Maher and Lonergan stand on each side of the single-file line of happy workers who got out ten minutes earlier than expected. They come upon the gangsters with a smile, then the smile turns fearful when they see the look on the two guys' faces that stand at the door. Hoping beyond all hopes that they don't get picked out for some unknown reason. After all the employees exit, Maher instructs the manager to lock the front door and for Richie to wait downstairs.

“Nah,” Richie says. “I'm goin' upstairs wit' ya.”

“I ain't waitin' for ya, Richie,” Maher says, walking toward the metal stairwell to the left. “Just so ya know.”

“Ya don' have to wait for nobody.”

Maher sprinted up the stairs, skipping a step at each leap and was up to the second floor before Richie had made it to the first step. Before starting, Richie looked up. He hated steps, but was forced on them every day of his life, especially the three floors of the Sands Street station.

“Can yu tell Dinny what I done for yus? Can yu?” The manager said. “'E gots me this jobba, Dinny Meehan. Sadie Leighton's me cousin and . . .”

“Who's Sadie Leighton?” Richie asked.

“Oh, sorry,” the manager said in a heavy cockney chop.

“Sadie Meehan nows'er name, since they married now an' t'all. So loike I was sayin', 'elpin' yu boys out is just a pleasure since I owe yus. I keeps me 'air on though; don't see nor 'ear nuffink . . .”

“Who are Darby and Pickles Leighton to ya, then?” Richie wonders, putting together the connection.

“Theys me younga brothas,” he continued as Richie turned his back and inched up the stairwell. “We came 'ere from St. Giles. Pickles? 'E's barmy; lost the plot a'long toime ‘go an' e's banged up now, course. Sing Sing. But Darby narrrr . . . ‘e's no plonka, narrrr. Darby's got it right in 'is 'ead. Just nippers off the boat 'ere from Lond'n, they was. Real Brooklynas now, them two. . . .”

Richie had stopped listening after a moment and as quickly as he could, kept himself concentrated on lifting the wooden leg up after planting his normal leg. The manager saw that he was being ignored and turned around, walked to his office by the front door, and waited quietly until the job was done and the two Whitehanders told him it was all right to leave. However long that took, he didn't mind.

Richie looked at the twenty-foot-wide silos that were in the lobby. The silos also connected to the second floor, then the third, and all the way to the eighth. He felt one, they were extremely hot to the touch as the batches were being boiled during the day, left for the next morning where they would be vacuum-sprayed into bars to be shipped up the harbor to the Erie Canal and sold throughout New York and beyond to a thousand different retailers across the state, country.

Richie followed Maher's path and walked gingerly up the stairs, using the handrail with his left hand and his gun held straight out ahead of him with his right hand. He stared upward as he climbed, listening closely to any movements and only hearing the pop of settling hot metal echoing through the halls of the building. Wherever Maher had climbed, Richie couldn't tell. It was quiet in the factory. Quieter by each flight of stairs. All the cackling of the happy workers had dissolved and any sounds Richie heard could be considered the movements of his prey, as far as he was concerned.

While the employees had caused a din of sound and confusion, Mick Gilligan climbed straight to the roof of the building only to find there was no fire escape on the outside. Feeling trapped by height and thinking it too obvious to his predators that he'd be hiding on the roof, Mick had worked his way down to the ninth floor where he was hiding in a closet. There, he hoped Maher and the two boys that had been hired to kill him would quit their search out of frustration, at which time he could make his escape after the soap factory opened again in the morning. Mick knew this was not a good plan. Inside the closet it was hot and his mouth watered for another whiskey, just one more whiskey and he could fall asleep and forget all of this was happening to him.

“Why?” Mick cried to himself under his breath. “Why did ya ever talk like a babblin' idiot? Why? Idiot! And after Dinny sent Christmas tidings and everything? Why did I do that? Why? Idiot.”

“
Miiiiiiiccckkeeeyyyy
,” Richie yelled as he climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. “Mickey
fooooookin' Gilligaaaaan!
” He sarcastically blew, allowing the echo to work itself into a fervor throughout the empty building.

Mick Gilligan shook uncontrollably as if he'd been stuck in a freezing, icy rain. He could hear Richie walk on the floor, but he couldn't tell if he was on the ninth floor or below. All he could hear was the crack of his right boot on the metal stairwells and the drag of his left leg. It was that crack and drag that drove Mick Gilligan to the point of insanity. Out of nowhere, he felt the need to relieve his bowels. His stomach turned and made struggling sounds in his lower belly. He tightened his cheeks and held them closed with both his hands and shook and shook.

“Mickey fookin'
Gilligaaaaaaaaaaaaan!
” Richie yelled at the top of his lungs in a seething fury. A voice so haunting and deep, so full of animalistic joy and violent mysticism that Mick Gilligan could no longer hold his bowels. Bursting out, he shat himself in the closet and cried while the relief he felt turned into the symbol of the most absolute terror when he realized that he was now stuck in a closet with the smell of his own fear. His body began to give in. A sweat had pierced his skin and brought over him the greatest heat followed by a wet chill. He could feel the shit sliding down his pant leg toward his boots and again he was stung by the fiercest heat, only to be shimmered with a new freeze. He gagged, burped suddenly, and the whiskey in his belly burst through his fingers. When he smelled the rot of his inner stomach in his hands, his body pushed more vomit through his cough.