The Dogfather (17 page)

By this time, the love seat was in the van. Rita’s idea of moving broken cars is to call AAA, but everyone else helped to push the Bronco to the space on the street just beyond my driveway. To minimize the duration of my embarrassment, I insisted on leaving the Bronco there instead of trying to push it into the driveway. Steve, Sammy, Leah, her three friends, and the love seat departed. Rita went upstairs to her apartment. I ate dinner, puttered, checked my e-mail, took the dogs for a short walk, and went to bed early. Rowdy and Kimi slept on the bed. At three o’clock in the morning, both dogs were still dozing on the comforter. Almost nothing ever bothered them. Thunder didn’t scare them, and they were used to the Bronco’s habitual rumbling and backfiring. Regrettably, I am only half malamute. At three A.M. a thunderous BOOM not only jolted me awake, but terrified me. When I threw on jeans, a sweatshirt, and running shoes, the dogs finally got interested. They tagged after me as I dashed to the cellar, where everything there was normal. Neither the hot water heater nor the oil burner had exploded. But as I discovered when I finally looked outdoors, something of mine
had
blown up.

My Bronco.

I had good insurance. The car was worth more dead than alive. And it was now definitely dead.

CHAPTER 18

After running to the cellar to make sure that the house wasn’t on the verge of petrochemical detonation, I left the dogs indoors and sprinted outside, where I nearly collided with Kevin Dennehy. When the boom had jolted me awake, I’d experienced what I suspect is the almost universal impulse to react to unidentified blasts, roars, and smells of smoke by focusing on dangers affecting my loved ones and my own property. But asleep or awake, Kevin was all cop. Awakened by the same thunderous bang, Kevin had assumed that its source was an external threat, against which it was his duty to protect not only his mother, his house, and himself, but all the rest of us, too, including, if need be, the City of Cambridge, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the entire United States of America. In brief, by the time I’d finished investigating my cellar, Kevin had already gone outdoors, found the smoldering wreck of my car, and summoned what he casually called “backup.”

The minute I opened the back door, the stench hit me, and my own outside lights and the streetlights let me catch a glimpse of smoke coming from my car. Kevin refused to let me near it. I protested.

“You could’ve been in it,” he said.

“In the middle of the night? Kevin, really. It’s
my
car. I want to see what happened to it.”

“It blew up.”

“Kevin, I can smell what happened. I want to
see
it. Where was it?”

“On the street. And the first thing I want to know—”

“I know where I parked my car. Where in the car was the explosion?”

“Where?”

“What part of it?”

“The
car
part of it. The
vehicle.”

The wail of a fire truck drowned me out. It was the first of three. Kevin had also summoned many of his brothers in blue and, for no reason at all, an ambulance and, ridiculously, I thought at first, a truck that appeared to be hauling a cement mixer. I soon abandoned the fantasy that the spontaneous combustion of dog hair had delivered the coup de grace to my car. Malamute undercoat had killed a succession of my vacuum cleaners. When my stove had broken, the repairman had removed its top to reveal an inch-thick layer of fluff. But dog hair, even powerful malamute hair, was innocent of this destruction. As the reality hit me, I was frightened. Learning that the apparent cement mixer belonged to the bomb squad, I was glad to have the contraption there. I also felt grateful that Kevin had the clout to muster a massive amount of official help. An ordinary citizen might’ve screamed at the 911 operator to send every cop, firefighter, and EMT in the city; Kevin actually succeeded in jamming our narrow street with an amazing number of emergency vehicles and a slew of wonderfully calm, capable emergency professionals.

Residents were there, too. Kevin ordered the immediate evacuation of my house, his own, and the two across the street. I obeyed the order and, as probably goes without saying, imposed it on my animals. A uniformed officer carrying Tracker’s carrier shepherded the dogs and me out my back door and down the driveway. As the officer tried to hustle Rowdy, Kimi, and me down Appleton Street, we passed close enough to the Bronco’s earthly remains for me to get a good look. Ignorant though I was about all things automotive, I did know that the Bronco’s engine was in the front. My view of the car was pretty good, albeit somewhat weird and melodramatic. In addition to the ambient brightness in any city, illumination now came from the windows of the houses along Appleton Street, and from the headlights and the flashing red lights of the emergency vehicles. Oddly enough, although Rowdy and Kimi often answer the call of sirens with malamute howls, the dogs remained silent m the midst of the cacophony, perhaps because they could see that its sources, although big and noisy, were noncanine and, indeed, inanimate.

I’ve drifted from the point, which isn’t the intelligence and unflappability of my wonderful dogs, but the postexplosion condition of my horrible car. As I was starting to say, even my scant knowledge of automobiles led me to expect that if a Bronco’s engine combusted, the subsequent damage would be worse toward the front of the car. In fact, my Bronco’s hood was intact, but the rear and side windows were shattered, and jagged metal fragments framed a new and large hole in the rusty body behind the doors. Kevin’s reaction now made sense. The engine hadn’t exploded. Yet.

I quit dawdling and gaping, and instead of ignoring the hurry-up shouts of the cop who had Tracker’s crate, I screamed back at him over the din, and with Rowdy and Kimi leading the way, ran down Appleton Street toward Huron Avenue. Fear drove me, fear inspired less by the sight of my ruined car than by hideous visions of the possibilities. My car hadn’t just exploded; it had been blown up; someone had rigged it to detonate. Deitz? Alternatively, the vaporization of my Bronco could have been a Mob favor. If so, it could easily have become no favor at all. Had the bomb been on a timer? What if there’d been a miscalculation and the explosion had occurred during the previous evening? What if I’d declared the car fit for use and Leah and her friends had loaded the love seat into it instead of into Steve’s van? What if Steve and little Sammy had been standing on the sidewalk next to the car when it exploded?

Reaching the crowd at the far end of the block, I sank to my knees and wrapped my arms around my dogs. I could feel the strong beat of Rowdy’s heart. The initial boom, the excitement, the lights, the sirens, and the dash down the street simply
must
have elevated his heart rate. But what I felt through my fingertips was a steady, slow rhythm. Out of curiosity, I felt for Kimi’s heart. Its rate matched Rowdy’s. I let myself sink between the dogs. I like to imagine that I’m half malamute: rugged and brave. Unfortunately, I belong to a lesser breed. Proof: I was frightened and frantic. No matter how long I live with this breed of breeds, I’ll never become even half malamute. I’m incredibly uncool. The Alaskan malamute is ultimately Arctic, too cool for words.

“You know what, guys?” I said. “If I’d set out to destroy that car and nothing else, I couldn’t have done a better job than this. And that, I think, is exactly what someone did.”

CHAPTER 19

Translated into English, the typical dog message takes the form of a single present-tense first-person sentence: I like that, I hate that, I feel sick, I feel stressed, I’m thirsty, I’m rivalrous, I need to go out. As a dog professional, I allow myself the freedom of rich interpretation. In particular, I’m willing to shift the canine present to the future. The change of tense inevitably entails— no pun intended—muddying the plainspoken all-about-me here-and-now of canine sentences with messy human attributions of conditionality and probability. If I reach toward a dog’s neck and he bares his teeth at me, what he means is
I’m scared.
According to my rich interpretation, he also means,
Grab my collar, and I’ll nail you.
To avoid getting bitten, I’ll act on my interpretation, but it will remain
mine-,
all the dog will actually have told me is that he’s desperately frightened.

As a dog trainer, I’d never claimed expertise in decoding human messages. Now, as dog trainer to the Mob, I had no clear idea how to interpret the cryptic message delivered by whoever had blown up my car. According to Kevin, the culprit was no amateur. Like everyone else in dogs, I know hundreds of professional dog trainers, dog writers, dog photographers, dog artists, pet-food company representatives, veterinarians, vet techs, groomers, and handlers. By comparison, my acquaintanceship in the world of automobile exploders was pitifully small.

“Not that I want to expand it,” I told Tracker, who wasn’t listening. It was Tuesday morning. I felt better than you might expect, shaken but also relieved: scared about what might happen next, but glad that my horrible car would never again endanger anyone. The dogs felt dandy. The emotional casualty was Tracker, who was in the kitchen huddled over the saucer of canned cat food I’d offered her in the hope of soothing her frayed nerves. The dogs were in the yard so that Tracker could have the run of the house. Instead of displaying a healthy curiosity about her surroundings, she alternately chomped at her Fancy Feast and glanced fearfully left and right.

I kept talking, not because poor Tracker actually liked my voice, but because I couldn’t believe that any creature was impervious to my soothing tones. I said, “As to decoding the message, the problem, you see, is that I can’t tell what effect the explosion was supposed to have on me. Most people are about as delighted to have their cars blown up as they are to be shot at. I, as you know, am an exception. As I did not inform the insurance company when I called this morning, I am immensely happy to be rid of that damned rattletrap. Furthermore, I’d’ve had to pay a dealer to take it as a trade-in, whereas now, the insurance company is going to pay me for my supposed loss.”

To hold my audience, I sprinkled Tracker’s food with Kitty Kaviar.

“Ah, but not everyone knows that I’m the exception. Agents Deitz and Mazolla, for example. The Boston office of the FBI, my dear Tracker, has an impure record. Shocking! The corruption there consisted primarily of recruiting the notorious Blackie Lanigan as an informant. The quarry then was Enzio Guarini. The quarry
now
is Enzio Guarini. Asking me to spy on him didn’t work. Blowing up my car was, I remind you, a professional job. And FBI agents
are
professionals.”

Having gulped down all the Fancy Feast and Kitty Kaviar, Tracker bolted for my study. I closed the door behind her. It would’ve been kinder, really, to let her enjoy the treats in solitude in that one little room. People newly sprung from prison are popularly believed to suffer from anxiety and disorientation induced by unaccustomed freedom. In the TV footage I’d seen of Enzio Guarini’s arrival home after his release, he’d looked relaxed and cheerful, probably because he’d already put down a deposit on an elkhound puppy.

After letting in the dogs, I called Guarini, not to inquire about the power of puppy purchase to cure post-prison stress syndrome, but to cancel today’s puppy kindergarten. Before placing the call, I’d debated about how to phrase the tidings of my Bronco’s demise. The news wouldn’t necessarily be news to Guarini, but I in- j tended to present it as such. Unlike Deitz and Mazolla, Guarini knew all about my wreck of a car. So did his men. At Saturday’s show, in front of Zap, Favuzza, and the monster twins, I’d complained about discovering the rusted-out hole in the floor.

Guarini was grateful to me. The steaks. The wine. The Bronco?

I settled on saying, “My car’s out of commission. Per- < manently. It’s been towed off. I’m sorry to cancel, but I’m sure there’s a mess out on the street from it that I’ll have to clean up, and I have to figure out what I’m going to do.”

Guarini was a model of paternal solicitude. “Rowdy and Kimi, they’re safe. You’re safe. That’s what matters.”

As I’ve said, Guarini was a real dog person. His concern for my dogs and me, in that order, may have explained his failure to inquire about the cause of the car’s demise.

He went on to update me on Frey and to thank me for helping Carla with the horrible little Anthony.
Horrible
is my word, not Guarini’s. Guarini had nothing bad to say about Anthony, and on the subject of Carla, he was practically effusive. “Carla’s a nice girl,” he said. He repeated the phrase. “A nice girl. A beautiful girl. Too young to be a widow. It’s a shame.”

I was tempted to utter a platitude about the heartbreak of heart attacks, thereby demonstrating my acceptance of the boss’s declaration that Joey’s murder hadn’t happened. But Guarini wouldn’t want mere compliance; he’d want obedience. Consequently, I said nothing about Joey’s death. In that respect, this conversation was typical of every interchange I ever had with Enzio Guarini: Except when we talked about dogs, everything important always went unsaid. In that sense, my relationship with the Dogfather bore an unsettling resemblance to my relationship with Steve Delaney. And just what would Rita have to say about that observation?