We Were Kings (8 page)

And then he saw her, standing there on the walkway. She had stepped out from behind the tree and now she stumbled toward him, her eyes locked on to his. She was just a schoolgirl. He could tell by the checkered dress, the thick stockings up past the knees, and the black, clumsy shoes. Her hand gripped her stomach. Blood seeped through her fingers, and something pale and glistening slipped from her grasp. He squinted his eyes and saw that it was part of her lower intestine. Her eyes never left his, and she tried to speak, lips forming words, apparently saying the same thing over and over again, but no sound came to him. Her eyes were black against her skin, which shone white and vibrant like porcelain. She took one uneven step, and another, and then she stumbled to her knees. She stayed that way, upright, as if in some manner of penance. Bobby looked from side to side to see if anybody would help her. There was an older man dressed in a sopping tweed hat and a slicker standing there, but, like Bobby, he was immobile, nearly paralyzed.

The girl's body shuddered and she fell forward, her hands hitting the ground. She was trying her hardest not to fall down all the way, and for a moment, she held steady. Her stomach opened up and her innards uncoiled beneath her. Almost tenderly, she lowered herself to the ground, as if she were merely going to sleep, turned to her side, and rolled over onto her back. Her eyes remained open.

As the fiery wreck lost its strength, more people congregated in the middle of the road. The flames dimmed, exposing the blackened metal husk, the broken glass, the remains of two men smoking, hissing, as the rain came down harder. A high-pitched wail of an ambulance came from the south.

Bobby walked over to the girl's body. He took off his jacket, fanned it out, and placed it over her torso but not her face. He reached into his pants pocket, brought out his rosary beads, and knelt down beside her. He held her left hand, placed the rosary in her bloodied palm, and closed her fingers over them. The lifelessness of her body carried through him, momentarily possessed him.

He didn't care what side of the line her family stood on, whether they were nationalist or unionist, Catholic or Protestant. She needed something to accompany her, something that wouldn't leave her abandoned and alone. He reached down and parted the black hair above her dark eyes and he tried to say a prayer but the words caught in his throat. He held on tight to her hand. Only when an ambulance medic touched his shoulder and said, “Son, we'll take her now,” did he let go, noticing that the string holding the rosary had snapped, and some of the beads stuck to her while others fell to the road and were washed away by the rain toward the gaping hole of the sewer grate, back into the earth, forever.

_________________________

Scollay Square

CAL SAT AT
the desk in his office and stared at the two young men sitting opposite him. The ceiling fan above them turned its wooden slats slowly in the heat. The windows were open and the din of wrecking balls and pile drivers came to them, a steady
thump-thump-thump,
like a clanging iron heart sounding out the final days of the Square. Toward the harbor, a milky haze covered the low skyline, still and unmoving. The men were in their Pilgrim Security attire but he'd taken them off their regular shifts after they'd been caught gambling with the employees in the place they'd been hired to provide security for, the Chinese Merchants' Association Building on Hudson Street in Chinatown. After the pissed-off owner called and berated him in Mandarin and broken English, Cal had replaced them with new guards; these two had shown up to find their jobs taken, and now Cal was having to explain why he'd done what he'd done and he wasn't happy about it.

Albert was Polish and Jimmy was Greek, and each was bad medicine for the other; they had grown up in the Triangle, had been incarcerated together for transporting stolen goods across state lines, and in the past two years he'd moved them to and from more jobs than he could remember. Why he'd ever put the two of them together in the first place was beyond him. Their Pilgrim Security shirts were wrinkled, the armpits dark with sweat, and he wondered how long it had been since they'd washed them. He could smell the both of them from where he sat.

“I know you two think this is a joke,” he said, “but I'm not laughing. This company has been in the red for the better part of a decade and now that we're starting to get work again I'm not going to jeopardize everyone else's job for a couple of jokers. I got an earful from the owner and now you're going to get an earful from me.”

Albert, who'd been masticating a stick of gum, stopped chewing. “Yeah, but Cal, we won that money fair and square.”

“You took their paychecks from them!”

“It's not our fault those fucks bet their paychecks and they got nothing to bet on.”

Jimmy shook his head. “I knew they were bluffin' all along.” He glanced at Albert for support. “They learned a valuable life lesson. Now they won't go and do something stupid like that again. You could say that we helped them out.”

“Watch it, Jimmy. Do you want this job or not?” Cal looked from one to the other. “Well, do you or don't you?”

“Of course we do,” said Jimmy.

“Then this is the first thing you're going to do. You're going to go around there directly after we're done talking and you're giving those people back their money.” He held up a hand when they began to protest. “After you've done that, you're going to go and apologize to the owner, Mr. Lin. I'll be calling him later today and if that apology isn't sincere, if he feels that it wasn't sincere, then we'll be having this talk again, but this time I'll be handing you your pink slips. Are we on the same page?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure thing, Cal,” Jimmy said, and the two nodded in unison. “We'll fix it.”

“Good. Now get out of here, you're ruining my appetite for lunch.”

They stood, scraping their chairs against the floor, took their plain, black-billed eight-point service hats off the table, put them aslant their heads, and left. “And,” Cal called after them, “make sure you wash and press those shirts. You two look like slobs!”

In the outer office, the door opened and Owen stepped in. He sat in one of the wooden chairs as the two men filed out into the hallway—he eyed them and they eyed him back—and then he came in, pulled a chair out from the desk, and sat heavily. His hair was slicked back and he was freshly shaved. Perspiration beaded on his upper lip.

“You must be getting desperate if you've resorted to hiring those two.”

“Ahh, they're all right.”

“Their rap sheets say different.”

“Their rap sheets don't see the whole picture.”

Owen smiled, amused. “Saint Cal, savior of the down and out and the misunderstood. You never change.”

“We all change but sometimes it just looks the same.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You look better than you did the other night, so that's something.”

“Well, that's good, because I don't feel better.” Owen held a fist to his chest. “Acid, it's keeping me awake at nights. I haven't been able to sleep since this boat business started.”

“That bad?”

“There's been five more murders.”

Cal whistled though his teeth and poured them coffee even though it was too hot for it and it tasted bitter and left a bad taste in his mouth.

“We managed to ID the first body, the one found tarred and feathered. His name was Mickey Flynn, a part-time night watchman for the docks. Played music around town. Some of the dockworkers knew him from the Irish Starlight Express. You know the band?”

“I've heard the name. You see their posters about. They're big in the Dudley scene, right?”

“Yeah, that's what everyone tells me. Anyway, it looks like someone killed him once the boat was unloaded.”

“Was he your tip-off?”

Owen sipped his coffee and grimaced. “No, he wasn't.” He took a deep breath and held it, rubbed at a spot over his heart. “I had to meet his wife—Mrs. Flynn—and tell her. She insisted on seeing the body, wouldn't believe he was dead until she saw for herself. I wish I hadn't let her see him like that. I doubt she'll ever forget it.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“And the others, what about them?”

“All in the one night.” Owen extended his arm and mimed holding a gun, then moved his arm left to right, his mouth sounding minor explosions: “
Boom! Boom! Boom!
One after the other,” he said. “Fierro says that the times of death were so close together—perhaps thirty to forty-five minutes apart—that it's difficult to tell who got it first and who got it last.”

“Someone's cleaning house, that's what it looks like.”

“Sure.”

“So what's the connection between all of them?”

“Besides the fact that they're all Irish?” Owen shook his head. “I assume it's the boat and like I said, that this is only the beginning.”

“Haven't the Feds taken over?”

“If the boat had been found with guns aboard and transporting them from New York to Boston, yeah, they would have, but no guns, no crime, and nothing to connect them to this, four murders in our jurisdiction. Even Giordano doesn't want to admit a connection.”

“Giordano couldn't see a connection if it hit him in the face.”

“He thinks this was a random night of violence in a city that has been turned upside down by it lately—he's blaming everything on the breakup of the Irish mobs, the Italians, the Chinese, the blacks, the heat.”

“He's like a Boston weather forecaster. What a gig! I don't know how he's managed to stay in his position for as long as he has.”

“He'll be superintendent in chief next.”

“Yeah, I believe it.”

After a brief pause, the jackhammers, sounding like machine-gun fire, and the pile drivers started up again, and Owen squinted.

“Sorry about the racket. It's too hot to close the windows.”

“It's always that loud?”

“Yeah, I suppose it'll be that way until they've torn down every last brick of the Square. Look at what they did to the West End and the North End.”

From the window Owen could see the Central Artery that now cut the North End and the waterfront off from the rest of the city. The government had seized properties and demolished them to make way for the monstrosity. McAllister had had a part in that and he'd gotten even richer because of it, sucking on the ruin of Boston and growing fat and bloated like a leech feeding on blood. In the end, Senator-Elect Foley had served his purpose—people rarely spoke of his brutal death or his years in political office; they spoke only of the corrupt and twisted connection between him and his murderer brother and how they'd both gotten theirs in the end.

It had been a year since construction began, workers driving the concrete piles to support the steel columns that would hold up the elevated roadway. The destruction of homes had displaced over twenty thousand people, and the excavation of land—what had been billed as redevelopment—had deeply traumatized the city. Seeing what had once been sprawling immigrant neighborhoods reduced to six square miles of blight and ruin had been too much for many, especially those who'd already experienced similar destruction in the war in Europe. Not a building left, the area flattened and leveled, as if those places had never existed. A black smog from the cranes and derricks and dump trucks had turned the sky toward the harbor gray and soot-colored. Every day he smelled the fumes; they seemed to come through the open windows and coat the furniture, his clothes, his skin. When Cal left Scollay at the end of the day, the Square looked grayer, dirtier, and more beaten down because of it.

Cal poured Owen some water in a paper cup, reached into a drawer, took out the vial of bennies, and pushed it across the desktop. “Take two,” he said. “It'll help.”

Cal rubbed his brow, where the sound of the machines continued to pound. “So, the body count has gone up, and you're slumming in Scollay.”

“Giordano says I have a short leash to find something that I can string together to make sense of all this, if it can be made sense of—he doesn't want to call it a case, not yet, and he's not supplying any men. We're stretched too thin as it is. I need some legs on the street, legs of guys who have a clue about what we're dealing with and who know people who they can get to talk.”

“You want to see what Dante and I can dig up?”

“If you can, I'd be grateful. Any little thing will help.”

Owen pushed a manila envelope across the table. “That's the basic info we've scrounged together, including pictures of the crime scenes, the name and address of one victim, possibles for the other five, definitely Irish, non-Nationals. There's pictures of the boat in there as well as my info from the informant on what they were carrying and, from the Feds, the names of New York and Boston gunrunners. Their info was old, so who knows if it still holds up.”

Cal looked at the envelope and then widened his eyes quizzically. “You came prepared. What if I'd said no?”

Owen shook his head, smiling, and stood, yanking his tie lower on his neck. At the door he turned. More perspiration beaded on his upper lip. “I knew you wouldn't say no.”

“You're pretty sure of yourself.” Cal leaned back in the wooden chair, the springs underneath the seat creaking.

“I'm not promising anything, but you do some good on this, word will get around.”

“What word is that?”

“With people…” Owen paused and cleared his throat. “With people who could get you your job back.”

Without amusement, Cal laughed. “That's real funny, Owen.”

“I'm being serious. You get us some solid info to work on, it can help you get your old job back. I mean it.”

“Stop fucking with me.”

“I ain't fucking with you. You've always been good police.”

“You forget about me and Giordano?”

“Don't worry about him. There are other people I know who can pull the right strings. And me, I'm not just a lowly patrolman anymore. I have my own connections. Trust me, Cal. That envelope there can help you leave this shit show behind.”

“Maybe I like this shit show.”

“Yeah, dealing with dirtbags like those Greek and Polack fools day in and day out.”

Owen gestured to the stenciling on the frosted-glass window of the door:
Pilgrim Security
. “Shit, with all the ex-cons on your payroll you might as well change the sign to
Bondsman
. It's a pain-in-the-ass life you live, and you know it.”

Cal leaned over the desk, grabbed a silver pen, and pressed his thumb against it hard. “I'll let you know if I find anything out.”

Owen opened the door. “I need all the help I can get.”