We Were Kings (30 page)

Dante tilted the sawed-off upward but otherwise kept it trained on the bar. “I'll be taking this,” he said, and stepped through the door. Cal followed, eyeing the bartender with the gun, his .45 aimed directly at his head, and backed out of the door. Willie pulled up with the van, brakes squealing, and Cal and Dante waited curbside while the others climbed in. Willie leaned out the window, and Cal said, “Drive a block and we'll meet you. We'll make sure no one's coming out.”

A little after eleven thirty Cal finally climbed the stairs to Pilgrim Security. He unlocked the door and deposited the van keys in his desk. Then, as he did most evenings when he'd been out of the office, Cal checked the answering service, just in case one of his men had called in sick or there was an emergency at a client's building. Tonight there was only one message, from a man named Martin Butler, and he'd left a Chelsea phone number.

It was late but he called the operator anyway. He waited for her to connect him. There was the warped ringing, and then someone lifted the receiver and the operator gave Cal's name and number. Then a voice, Irish in cadence and soft-spoken, said, “This is Martin Butler.”

Cal let the voice hang there, and the silence lengthened. On the other end of the phone he heard a radio playing a waltz.

“Detective Mackey may have spoken about me,” the voice continued.

The man must have known that Cal had been aiding Owen, and he seemed to think that Owen had told him more than he had. “Yes,” Cal said finally. “That's right. It's late to be calling, but I got your message.”

The man laughed softly. “I'm not one for much sleep. Besides, I think it's time we talked.”

“I agree.”

“Will you come to Chelsea? It's where I live.”

“I can do that,” Cal said.

“And is tomorrow good for you? Perhaps in the afternoon?” Butler asked in that soft, mannered way, like a schoolteacher or a librarian, Cal thought, and he wondered how Butler would respond if he said no. In the background the waltz continued but he thought he heard a wailing from a distant room and then a door slamming shut.

“I'll be there around two,” Cal said, and listened as the man gave his address, his accent stronger now as he emphasized the number and then the street and asked Cal if he knew it, and Cal said he did and then he put down the phone. In the office it was strangely quiet—sound reduced to singular sensations that briefly enveloped everything else. When he rose from the chair, the squeal of it seemed incredibly loud, as was the rustle of his pants as he moved to the watercooler, a static rubbing in his ears, the overhead fan turning erratically in its ratchets like metal washers tossed and rattling in a tin can. He poured himself water and gulped one cup down and then another, waiting for some manner of relief. In the end, he turned off the overheads, locked the door, limped down the stairs, and walked the dark waterfront, inhaling the putrid sea air and trying to clear his head. It took miles before he felt right again.

_________________________

Chelsea

BENEATH THE WIDE
trusses and vast shadows of the Mystic River Bridge, the small two-story house with gray asphalt cladding sat, separated from the other buildings along the terrace by empty plots on either side where houses had once been, their foundations still visible through tufts of withered grass. The man, slight and unassuming, opened the door. Cal had expected to recognize him—he'd been trying to place the name Martin Butler on his drive through the city, although nothing besides the talk in the back rooms of bars came to him—but his face elicited nothing new; Cal had never met him before.

The man led him down a narrow hall to a kitchen. Cracked linoleum peeled at the edges where it met the baseboards; stained prewar wallpaper bubbled in places on the walls. The room smelled of old milk and boiled foods, antiseptic cleaning solution, cigarette smoke, of strong tea brewing in a pot on the stove, and of the stale sweat of the old woman who passed in and out of the kitchen, the sharp snap of her thick wooden heels clattering on the floor as she attended to the young man in a catatonic state down the hall. Cal had seen him when he'd first come in, strapped into a wheelchair so that he wouldn't fall, head lolled to one side and rheum caked about his nostrils and at the side of his mouth.

“You'll have some tea?” the man asked.

“Sure,” Cal said, and the man turned back to the sink. Cal watched him and slowly it came to him. He'd been there the night of Owen's birthday at the Intercontinental, the accordion player leading the band onstage, directing everything from the edges. The man in the shadows. How could no one have mentioned his name until that night in the pub, and why would Donal not have spoken of him?

Cal watched him pour the tea into mugs, place the pot back on the sputtering flame on the stove, and sit opposite him.

“I'll let you take care of your own milk and sugar,” Butler said, looking at him and slowly turning the spoon in his mug. From outside came the deep, heady thrum of traffic passing on the metal girders two hundred feet above their heads. The sound of the boy hacking reverberated down the hall followed by the muttering Irish of the old woman.

“Donal says he's been seeing a lot of you and the other one, your friend there.”

Cal smiled but not with malice; he felt strangely comfortable talking to the man, although he knew he probably shouldn't. “And he'll be seeing a lot more of us.”

“Donal's not one to let slights go.”

“Neither am I.”

“You know that sooner or later this will have to come to a head. There's no other way.”

“That's what I'm counting on.”

“You were close with Detective Mackey.”

“He was my cousin.”

“Family is important.”

“That's what they tell me.”

Martin Butler held his mug to his lips, tilted his head slightly, quizzically. “You're not a family man?”

“I was. Not so much anymore.”

“Is it on account of your father?”

Cal wondered if Butler was trying to bait him, and he frowned. It had been a simple question, a direct one, and he realized there was no hidden intent. “On account of a lot of things,” he said, “but yeah, my father didn't set the best example.”

Butler nodded and didn't push it further. Cal wondered what Donal had told him about his father, and though Butler seemed inclined to let the subject drop, Cal asked, “Did you know him?”

“No.” Butler sipped his tea and placed it back on the saucer. “I didn't know the man, but I've heard about him.”

“From Donal?”

“From Donal, and others. They say he was good at what he did.”

“Like Donal.”

“Yes. Like Donal.”

From down the hall came a long, tremulous wail, like a dog trying to pull its paw from a metal trap. It raised goose bumps on Cal's skin and he felt a sudden chill, although he was sweating.

“The boy,” Cal said. “What—”

“My brother,” Butler said. “It happened when he was young. Thirty years ago now, but to look at him you would never think so.

“My father, Gerard, went to fight in the Great War, served in the Irish Guards—have you heard of them?”

“No.”

“They're an Irish regiment in the British army. Earned their regimental colors in the Boer War from Queen Victoria.
Quis separabit
is their motto. It means ‘Who shall separate us?'

“He fought because he believed it was the right thing to do, he fought as an Irishman, but when he came back after the war, he came back to the War of Independence, and his countrymen treated him as a traitor.”

“Why would they do that?”

“We were at war also, with the English.” He sipped his tea and then smiled grimly. “Before the British executed some of the Irish leaders of the uprising in 1916, you'd barely find a man or woman who didn't denounce the rebels. During the War of Independence and after, our country was divided. And we became a smaller people, I think. More guarded, more vicious, less kind to one another. When men like my father came back from the Great War, men who'd actually done something heroic—and so many didn't come back, lost at Marne, Ypres, and the Somme—I think it ate at the hearts of those small-minded, shameful people. Suddenly we had a new scapegoat for our woes and our struggle.”

“Your father didn't do well after the war, then.”

“He tried. Dear God he tried, but they wouldn't let him. No one would give him any work. He faced their abuse every day and took it because he knew his family depended on him, the cowards who had never braved anything in their lives, who only knew how to gossip and speak ill and condemn men with their tongues. So many little men who'd shoot you in the back from the shadows of an alley rather than show their faces. My father finally found a job, cleaning pigsties for a farmer out on the Muckross road, six miles out in the morning and six miles back in the evening on his pushbike. And they paid him half nothing and yet he never complained—we always heard his whistling as he came up the lane, and I think that he began to whistle only once he was within earshot and that there had been no whistling in his day at all before that. He never told us about the type of abuse he faced from his own, but we guessed. We were frightened for him every day and then the day came.

“One night after Mammy had just bathed Colie and was preparing to put him to bed and Daddy was sitting by the fire in the front room, a knock came at the door, and Daddy put down the paper and rose to answer it. At the last moment Colie rushed to his side and took his hand, tried to pull him away from the door for some reason, as if he knew what was going to happen, as if he could sense it, but Daddy just laughed and opened the door, and four men came in wearing balaclavas and shot him dead in front of Colie. We heard Colie scream and when he was done screaming, that was it. We never heard him say another word.

“They don't really know what happened to his mind, but the shock of seeing our father killed—the terror and brutality of it—they say it caused a seizure, and the seizure left him like this. I like to think, and I often pray, that with the advances they have in medicine, one day they'll be able to help him recover. That's what my life is about now.

“I spent decades looking for my father's murderers. One by one, I tracked them down. First in England and then in Europe. I even went to Australia. I found the last one here in America many years ago.”

“And you killed him?” Cal said.

Butler sipped slowly from his tea and nodded. He put the mug gently on the table. “I did,” he said.

“I've worked for Mr. de Burgh for a long time now and he's been good to me, just as he has to many Irish in this city, and I've done what he's asked of me.”

He paused, and in the shadowed, stifling room, he seemed to be listening to the sonic thrum of the traffic upon the bridge—it entered the air like the electricity that hummed through the condensers and cables stretched along the street. A tanker passing beneath the bridge on its slow trawl along the Mystic blared its horn in the distance once, twice, and, after a moment, it was echoed by another boat farther out in the channel.

“A great man,” he said, “a great man for”—and he slowed and pronounced the words bitterly—“the Cause.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because,” Butler began, and he stared at Cal, his pale blue eyes unblinking, “I want to convince you of my intent. This is my truth and I want you to understand it. I want you to know me, to trust me, to let you know that what I say is what I mean.”

He rose from the table, chair squeaking on the linoleum. “Come, I'd like to introduce you to my brother Coleman.”

The boy wasn't really a boy at all but a man who looked like a boy because his face was devoid of emotion or response. In the years since the incident, Cal doubted a line of worry had ever creased his features or a laugh had ever shaped the skin about his mouth and eyes. Up close he could see the fair stubble on his jaw and chin. He smelled slightly of urine and sour milk.

Butler stroked his head as he spoke to him. “Colie,” he said, “I have a man here I'd like you to meet. His name is Cal O'Brien. He's been looking into the shootings I told you about.”

Cal was surprised to see something flicker in the man's eyes, and his head shifted slightly on his neck, but it might have been merely a muscle spasm. Cal came close to the young man and looked at Butler, who nodded for him to proceed. He laid his hand over Coleman's and told him that he was glad to meet him, and he watched for a moment as the eyes—the same pale blue as Butler's, with large, dark pupils—regarded him, saw his own face in miniature in those irises staring back, and when the man blinked, Cal knew that he could see him.

Cal stepped back and Butler swiveled the wheelchair so that it was facing the bay window, where sunlight had forced its way through the towering shadow of the bridge and shone on the terrace houses on the far side of the street. In silence they watched two municipal trucks rumbling toward the warehouses down along the docks while Butler absently stroked his brother's hair.

“Why did you stay here, in America?” Cal said. “Once you were done, once you'd found your man, why didn't you simply return home?”

“Home,” Butler repeated, letting the word fill the silence, considering it. “Coleman is my home. We were here and I thought we might have a shot at something, a grand life together where I might provide for him the way I'd always wanted and where I could get him the care and help he needed. I didn't see that happening back in Ireland. I wanted an end to the vendettas and the violence.”

“Well, you certainly don't have an end to it here. Your boy Phelan there, he's not stepping quietly into the New World. He's brought a ton of trouble with him.”

“He's not my boy, and trouble isn't something you always go looking for.”

“But sometimes it is. And it seems as if you've gone looking for plenty of your share.”

“Sometimes,” Butler said, and sighed. “Ah, Boston, sure it always seemed like a good place to start.”

“Start?”

“Start a beginning, start over, when it was all done.”

“But isn't it all done? The last man to be a part of your father's death is dead himself. You're finished. There's nothing more for you to do.”

“I still hear that sound at nights sometimes,” he said and he nodded toward his brother, sunlight glancing and bending through the shadows and brightening the side of the young man's face, setting sparks alight in his hair; Cal wondered if Coleman could hear them and if he was listening. “And I suppose that's what he still hears, stuck in his skull the way he is, the memories of it as sharp and bright as they were then, all those years ago.”

The old woman's shoes sounded in the hallway and she came into the room carrying a tray with a cloth napkin, a bowl of broth, steaming vegetables she'd cut up, and some buttered bread. She laid the tray on a side table beside the wheelchair and turned on a lamp, suddenly brightening the room. As he'd listened to Butler, Cal had been unaware of the lengthening shadows across the street as clouds had moved in. The air seemed to be charged, as if the skies were about to open in a storm. Cal could smell it distinctly but knew that it would merely swirl above them, pushed by the coastal winds, and then move on without providing any relief.

The woman looked at Cal, said something in Irish to Butler, and he nodded. “Dymphna says it's time for Coleman's dinner,” he said, but Cal suspected that wasn't what Dymphna had said at all. She continued to stare at him and he didn't see any kindness in her face, but he'd seen good people who'd suffered so much hardness and grief that the kindness had been wiped from their features even when it still remained in their hearts. She reminded him of some of his father's sisters, the ones that had never gotten along in America and had remained outcast, isolated, and alone the rest of their lives, the estranged caste of the immigrant. “I'll show you to the door,” Butler said; he held an open palm toward the hallway, indicating that their meeting was done.

“That's all right. I can see myself out.”

“As you wish,” Butler said and he turned away, reached for a stool, and pulled it up alongside his brother's wheelchair. He draped the cloth napkin over his forearm and began to spoon the broth into his brother's mouth, blowing on it briefly before pressing it between the man's lips.

Outside a sputtering rain fell; it seemed filled with the ashen traffic exhaust it had come through and was warm and greasy on Cal's skin. Thunderheads moved above the rooftops and kept going like promises of something better intended for other people and other places. Cal looked toward the bay window of the house, the rain lightly stippling the glass where Martin Butler sat feeding his younger brother, wiping at the food that dribbled out of his slack mouth and down his cheek. Somewhere in there was the old Irish maid also, standing beyond the glare of the side lamp and, he felt, staring back at him. He didn't believe that Martin Butler was done, not by a long shot. But he had no sense of what was coming next.