Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (12 page)

She gathered her uneaten lunch, her unread book and the bottle of soda that was still three- quarters full, then set them back down and closed her eyes for a moment against the brightness of the sun. She took a breath, the smell of crushed ferns so pungent that she could taste it on her tongue.

Once she’d asked Jamie how he’d borne the pain of his marriage, the loss of three children and the sanity of a woman he’d loved most of his life. How he’d managed not to question the existence of a God who would allow such pain. He’d replied quietly that love didn’t ask a lot of questions, it just provided the answer that made life bearable. She could see him suddenly in her mind’s eye, with a sharp clarity that she had not allowed herself in a long time.

“Oh Jamie,” she whispered forlornly, “what do I do now?”

Against her hand, she felt a sudden tickle of movement and opened her eyes to find that a ladybug, jarringly bright and cheerful, had landed on the upturned palm of her left hand.

She watched as the bug spread its bright lacquered wings and a stray breeze set loose a waxen rain of chestnut bloom, tipping the glossy bug forward into the crease where the lines of heart and life merged.

“Don’t bother flying home, lady,” she said cupping her hand to shelter it from the wind, “the house is already in ashes.”

THE SNOTGREEN SEA. The scrotumtightening sea.

Casey Riordan, standing on the deck of
Jeannie’s Star
, recalled the words of his famous countryman, and thought Joyce had definitely been onto something in his description.

The contents of his own scrotum, had they the choice, would have gladly climbed up into his body and stayed there until he was back on land. Oddly enough, he had found his sea legs quickly, and after the first day hadn’t experienced any nausea. But a natural born sailor he would never be.

Jeannie’s Star
was an old tug, once used to haul warships and barges across the North Atlantic. She’d been found, bleeding rust and lying low and dull-eyed in the Scottish harbor of Perth. The inexperienced eye would have passed her over for junk, destined to go to a watery grave in a North Sea port. But Jack Blythe, a seaman from Petty Harbor, Newfoundland, saw the spirit in the abused tugboat and bought her for a song, had her refitted in Perth, and then took her home across the icy road of the North Atlantic. Once tucked in the rocky inlet of Petty Harbor, she was converted to a fishing boat.

At one hundred and fifty-six feet, and 650 gross tonnes,
Jeannie
was oversized for a stern trawler, but that was what she was fitted out as. Her below deck spaces were generous, with the living quarters aft and the freezers to the stern. She had a big open deck space to land and begin the processing of the fish on. Her hold would take 400 tons of cod. In Newfoundland, and on any boat that ported out of her, fishing meant cod fishing. The word fish itself was synonymous with cod, other fish would be called by their individual names, but a Newfoundlander who said fish meant one thing and one thing only—cod.

Jeannie’s
crew consisted of fifteen men, an oddly assortment of men from the brutal northern shores of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Labrador. There was also an Icelander named Hallbjorn, which roughly translated, Casey was given to understand, meant rock-bear. The name was apt, as Hallbjorn was an enormous man with a well-furred face and hands the size of dinner plates. He was as silent and taciturn as the rock he was named for, but when it came to sussing out the weather, he was akin to an Old Testament Prophet. As far as Casey could tell, the man didn’t speak to anyone other than Captain Jack, and even that was only when strictly necessary.

Olie had assured Casey, though, that the big Icelander liked him well, for he would occasionally clap Casey on the shoulder, fix him with a hard gaze and nod. This, Olie told Casey, was a sign that Hallbjorn considered him one of the crew.

Olie himself was of Norwegian descent, though his family had been in Petty Harbor for three generations.

“We were the only Norwegians in a miniature Ireland. Accents on the people there—three, four generations away from the old country an’ ye’d think they’d just come from Ireland the day afore.”

Casey wisely forebore to mention that Olie’s own accent sounded as though its roots were square and deep in the soil of County Kerry.

Olie had the ruddy skin of a seaman, and the intense blue eyes of his Nordic forebears. And like so many of those Norse ancestors, the sea flowed hard through his veins. He had fished all his life and the taste of saltcod was mother’s milk to him.

“I fished with my father everyday afore school. Was good times, those. Afternoons, if the clouds come scuddin’ in, we’d have to leave school, run down to the harbor to the fish flakes an’ turn the salt cod skin side up to save it from ruinin’ in the rain.”

Unlike Olie, Casey did not have seawater in his veins. The work of fishing was hard and often brutal,  particularly when the weather took an unkind turn. Being no stranger to physical labor, however, Casey had picked it up quickly enough. Though a man, or woman as the case might be, could be forgiven, he supposed, for thinking he was completely out of his element in the undertaking of such a job.

In fact, Pamela’s response when broached with the notion had been distinctly unflattering. “
FISHING?! Fishing?! Have you completely lost your fucking mind?”
The conversation had gone progressively downhill after that.

The answer to his wife’s question might well be a resounding and heartfelt yes, Casey thought, standing upon
Jeannie’s
slimy deck, the reek of fish enveloping him. Hallbjorn had been on deck minutes before, had stared long at the sea, sniffed the wind, and shook his head at the horizon. As far as Casey could see, this was tantamount to a normal man breaking down and having full-blown hysterics.

The sea was relatively calm that morning, though there was a long low swell like the ripple of birthing pains that lofted the boat and then dropped it in a deceptively gentle manner. Something about the weather made Casey uneasy, and it wasn’t just Hallbjorn’s actions, but rather an electricity that jumped along the surface of his skin. When he related these fears to Olie, the reply was succinct and not made to ease his nerves.

“Aye, weather breeder, that’s what a day like this is, me son, damned weather breeder. Means something ugly is brewin’ herself up below the surface for tomorrow.”

Casey gazed up at the clouds, lit like pale gray pearls on their undersides. The sea was exactly the same color; he shivered beneath his layers of fog-dewed wool, the small hairs on his neck rising. Olie was right; he could feel something brewing dark and furious beneath the surface of the water.

“No worries boy, we’ll get ye drunk enough, ye’ll pay no mind to the weather.”

This didn’t do a great deal to comfort Casey either. He’d already had one hangover out on the water, and didn’t relish the thought of another.

The rum Olie had shared with him, two nights out from St. John’s, was the blackest, foulest concoction that Casey had ever drank. And considering that he was no stranger to
poitin—
that lethal Irish brew that many said was the cause for such an abundance of leprechaun sightings in the Emerald Isle—that was really saying something.

When he had, in what was his last intelligent act of that night, attempted to re-cork the rum, Olie had shaken his head vehemently. Casey was quite certain he could hear the contents sloshing about in the man’s skull as he did so, though perhaps it was only his own wits trying to surface before being drowned completely.

“Ack,” Olie croaked around a mouthful of the fiendish brew, “don’t be after doin’ that, son.”

“Doin’ what?” Casey asked, numb brow furrowed.

“Puttin’ the cork back in the rum, ‘tis ill luck to do so. Ye uncork it an’ ye drink it to the dregs, no mistake or the evil spirits will be loosed.”

“I think,” Casey said, forehead still wrinkled in an effort to marshal his thoughts. “Th’ evil spirits are loosed already.”

“Nay,” Olie shook his head with the vehement seriousness of someone in the clutches of a royal piss-up, “ye have to drink it all down so’s the bastards are trapped in yer belly. ‘Tis the only way to be certain yer safe.”

To Casey’s reeling mind, this had the form and substance of fuzzy genius. And so they drank the bottle to the dregs. In the morning, Casey had wished—with every fiber of his being—that God would take him, quickly and without hesitation. For the demons, no doubt unaware of the rules governing these things, were trapped (and seemed very unhappy about their incarcerated state) firmly inside his skull. Where they stayed for three full days.

A great hissing exhalation in the mist pulled him back to the present. The sound was followed shortly by the musky scent of the deeps. There, only thirty feet out from the starboard rail, was the great misty balloon of a humpback whale surfacing. He wondered if it was the one he’d taken to calling Soot, for the deep gray, speckled with paler ash, color of it. He was an old male, to judge by the numerous scars that carved a long and elaborate story in his back and tail flukes.

He wondered if the humpbacks were the Sirens of the old Greek myths. The ones whose haunting song drew sailors to their death on the rocks. He shivered. Two nights before, the whales had been floating around the boat, their long misty exhalations drifting out over the strangely calm water. Overhead had been a sky drenched with stars, and all the men had stood on the open deck, silent, small and fragile. And he’d had a sense then of the planet, moving, drifting, unanchored in space, itself a lost seafarer borne along the currents of a universe so merciless that it took the breath from a man’s body in pure terror and wonder.

Near the boat, small slick patches had formed on the water. They were the strange footprint- like shapes that humpbacks left in the wake of their dives, glassy patches on the surface of the water, as though a ghost walked upon the cold, gray waves.

The Anglo-Saxons had called the ocean the Whale Road, and Casey could certainly see why. This realm belonged to the Leviathan, those big, half-dreamed creatures that swam among mountains higher than anything ever seen by man. Through great rift valleys and salty abyssal plains, over steaming jets and through wonders both beautiful and terrible.

Aye, it was a water world indeed, with the continents only minor intrusions in the vast seas. So why then, out here on the limitless deeps, did he still have the sense that someone was watching him?

He turned from the railing. It would be time to haul in the nets soon, and then he would be too busy to feel the hairs rising on the back of his neck.

The scrotumtightening sea
indeed.

THE ITALIANS WERE THE KINGS of the Boston underworld. The Irish, princes in their own small principalities. The Italians ran their criminal vassals on the hard and fast rules of an army. Capos, soldiers, consiglieres. The Irish still ran on tribal rules, with the attendant internecine warfare, and thus had become subcontractors to the more powerful
La Cosa Nostra
. It was a reverse of natural order, for the roots of American organized crime were not in the rich soil of Italy, but rather in Famine stricken Ireland.

The Irish countryside, long the victim of failed rebellion and squashed political uprisings, spawned many resistance societies: the Molly Malones, the Peep o’Day Boys, the Whiteboys and the Ribbonmen—underground movements in which membership was a fiercely guarded secret. They professed to be the guardians of their own communities, but were as likely to prey upon their own people as they were to rebel against the Crown. This was the mentality that survived the brutal Atlantic crossing and found succor in the tarnished coin of American politics.

By the time the Italians began to emigrate in search of the elusive American Dream, the Irish mob was already established along the eastern shore of the United States. They were the gangs that strong-armed for Tammany Hall; that provided the struts for the infrastructure of a corrupt political machine. Tammany was the machine, and the Machine was the only way to achieve the dream. The Irish found their way through the cogs and wheels, becoming ward bosses, aldermen and precinct captains. Extending favors, exerting control, building a cultural dynasty that had begun in small turf-roofed cabins, muddy laneways and pestilential fields.

Despite the initial dominance of the Irish, though, it was the Italians who seized the ascendancy in Boston during the Prohibition. When the Irish tried to take over bootlegging operations in Boston Harbor, the Italians sent them a very clear message by murdering two of their gang leaders. The Irish mob retreated to South Boston, making it their private fiefdom, and hiring out as enforcers and hit men for the Italians.

In the early ‘70s, the Italians still ruled out of a small office in Boston’s cobble-streeted North End. Their undisputed head a tiny, aged man with glasses so thick they gave him the appearance of a myopic gnome. He looked entirely harmless, but anyone who had ever crossed him knew the lie of appearances. He behaved like an old world gentleman, but he had the soul of a Sicilian butcher. Lovett Hagerty might control South Boston, but it was only a small corner of the empire that Guilio Bassarelli ruled over, and it was he to whom Love Hagerty owed his allegiance.

Pamela knew this acknowledgement of the godfather chafed at Love’s very soul. And that his ambition, as such fires will, was rapidly outpacing his common sense. That, as far as Pamela could see, was the biggest chink in his armor. It was here that his pride and ego might well get him into trouble from which his charm and connections could not extract him.

She was beginning to feel a little like a bird attempting to build a solid nest out of invisible thread and faint whispers. Every time she managed to grasp hold of one, it led nowhere, or petered out in denials and shrugged shoulders. She knew that with every question she asked she was putting herself in greater and greater danger. For whatever else he might be, Lovett Hagerty was not a stupid man.