Cape Diamond

by Ron Corbett

  Though there was no physical resemblance to his father, Sean Morrissey was a Shiner in every other way. The first entry in his police record was 1985, when he would have been eleven years old. He had broken into the back of Quinn’s Tavern and stolen eight crates of liquor. All whisky. They had joked about that at the police station, and the boy had asked the cops what he was supposed to steal, “Beer?”

  He said it with such a sneer the desk sergeant got stomach cramps from laughing. Morrissey was released into Augustus’s care and never stopped stealing, in any meaningful way, for the next twenty years. In the ’90s he ran a heist crew with his cousin Tommy Bangles, robbing jewellery stores and banks up and down the Divide and as far away as Montreal and New York State.

  A lot of the stores were robbed at night, with Bangles finding the way into the building and Morrissey emptying the safe. The Anthony’s vault in Montreal was one of their jobs, the head of security for Anthony’s fired three days later, still insisting it was impossible. Other jobs were straightforward smash-and-grabs, with Morrissey holding a sawed-off shotgun on sales girls who should have been more frightened than they were. The cousins took only the best gems in the store, both Morrissey and Bangles having good eyes for that sort of thing, and then they were gone in whatever time they had given themselves, working off a stopwatch, never caught in any roadblock or on any surveillance tape outside a shopping mall, mysteries no cop could ever figure out.

  Although it was no secret around Springfield who was doing the robberies. The Popeyes motorcycle gang tried to muscle in on what the cousins were doing, seeing Sean as a possible weak link in the Shiners organization. The privileged and reckless son of Augustus, a boy who would crumple at the first swing of a bat. “Put the fear of God into those boys,” Papa Paquette had said when he dispatched a crew to track them down and explain how things worked if you were a thief in Springfield. The Popeyes needed to have their tithe. It was a scheme that looked good on paper. It should have worked. But as with many schemes that look good on paper and should have worked, there was a variable missing. In this case the variable went by the name of Tommy Bangles.

  The two Popeyes in the crew cornered the young robbers on Mission Road one evening, forcing Morrissey’s Cadillac to the curb. The Popeyes were big men, with the thunderbolt tattoos of men who worked security for the gang. They exited their truck with sawed-off shotguns shouldered and lecherous smiles on their faces, strode toward the car they had just run off the road.

  Tommy Bangles exited the passenger-side door and strode to greet them. When the bikers were fifteen feet away, Bangles drew his handgun and shot them. Then he walked up to the men, as they lay writhing on the ground, and shot each two more times in the head. Morrissey already had the sedan turned around when Bangles got back into the passenger seat. He switched out the clip in the handgun, stuck it back in his waistband, and said to his cousin, “You didn’t need to hear what they were going to say, right?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  The next crew Papa sent for the boys was more cautious, more methodical, looked for a way to ambush Morrissey and Bangles, pistols pushed to their heads before they knew what was happening. Another scheme that looked good on paper. Problem this time was the crew couldn’t find the cousins. They did stakeouts at the Silver Dollar, at the high-rise apartment building where Morrissey lived, at the walk-up apartment on Belfast Street where Bangles lived. Nothing. They ran computer checks on their credit cards. Nothing. Straight-armed several of Morrissey’s girlfriends. Nothing. After six days of searching, they finally found his Cadillac sedan in a long-term lot next to the airport. Papa sneered when he heard that news. “So they have run.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Augustus will be proud. His son starts a fight and then runs away like a punk.”

  “They’re both fuckin’ punks. Turn-tail-and-run fuckin’ punks.”

  That was the last conversation Papa had with his crew. The next morning, the men were found on the front stoop of the Popeyes’ clubhouse, their bodies riddled with bullets. In the mouth of one man was shoved a parking stub for the long-term lot. When the stub was brought to Papa, he laughed.

  So it had been his crew that was ambushed. Lured to an isolated parking lot by a car Morrissey knew the Popeyes would eventually find. All they had to do was hunker down and wait. They had been hiding in the woods nearly a week.

  Papa stopped the hustle after that. Sent word to Morrissey through an intermediary that the game was finished, no debts outstanding, well-played, and maybe they could do business one day. To those closest to him, he said Sean Morrissey and Tommy Bangles were Shiners you needed to respect, the Tough Men from lore, and it didn’t look like that gang of Irish misfits was disappearing anytime soon if that was the next generation. The Popeyes needed to be smarter if they were ever going to get rid of those bastards.

  And Sean Morrissey was smart. Smart enough to already be wondering about his father’s eyes. Both of them scooped out as neatly as dollops of ice cream dispensed by some pimple-faced teenager standing behind a dairy counter. Yakabuski watched until the sun slipped behind the escarpment and night had come again to the city of Springfield. He started his Jeep. He knew the person he needed to see, and he called on the way to let him know he was coming.

  . . .

  George Yakabuski had been a cop in High River for thirty-three years, until the day he went to a Stedman’s department store to purchase mosquito netting for his hunt cabin and was followed two minutes later by a stick-up crew from Montreal. Yakabuski’s father watched two of the crew take up positions by the front door while another two started walking toward the back office.

  He caught up with the two heading to the office and yelled, “Cops, put your hands where I can see them,” thinking that was all that needed to be said, all that needed to be done, being old school like that, even though he wasn’t carrying his service pistol.

  When the two robbers heard him yell, they turned and stared at him. Craned their necks to see if they might be missing something. Then they took out the sawed-off shotguns hidden beneath their coats, pointed them at Yakabuski’s father, and fired. They left him for dead in the toy aisle, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and My Little Pony toys scattered around his prone body.

  But George Yakabuski didn’t die. He was a big man, like his only son, and he took the shotgun blasts not in his chest but his hips and lower spine, the metal shards missing every internal organ but ensuring he would never walk again.

  He had left High River three years ago, to be closer to his doctors in Springfield, and he now lived on Albert Street, where there were many subsidized apartment buildings and police responded to calls just about every night. A cop’s pension — especially when most of it went to medical expenses — did not allow for much better than Albert Street. He lived in one of the better buildings for that street, and Yakabuski tried not to let his father’s home address worry him more than it should. Although he hadn’t decided yet where that line might be. He spoke to his dad just about every day. Never went a week without seeing him.

  Yakabuski had a key to the apartment and let himself in. He found his father sitting in front of his kitchen window, a teapot on the table and an empty cup in front of the seat where Yakabuski was expected to sit. Although Yakabuski’s father had once been one of the largest men in High River, there was hardly any indication of that today, little more than the rolls of skin beneath his chin and the length of his useless legs, which ran past the foot rests of his wheelchair and which he usually had covered with a blanket.

  “Long day?” he asked, when Yakabuski was sitting at the table.

  “Didn’t start out that way. Took a bit of a turn.”

  “The North Shore projects. That’s about the last place in the world I would have imagined Augustus Morrissey ending his days.”

  “You interviewed him a few times, di
dn’t you?”

  “Several times. You’d get dead Shiners up in High River from time to time. They’d turn up in some farmer’s field or in the trunk of some burned-out car ditched down a back road. So someone had to come down to Springfield and talk to Augustus. Listen to him talk his sweet bullshit and smile at you, a lawyer sitting beside him who probably got paid more for a day’s work than most cops make in a month.”

  His dad motioned to the teapot, and Yakabuski poured himself a cup. It was herbal tea of some sort. He didn’t care much for herbal tea. His dad didn’t care for herbal tea either. A doctor said he should drink it.

  “I’ve heard some things that weren’t on the radio,” continued his dad. “The fact you’re here makes me think they must be true.”

  “The body was in pretty bad shape.”

  “The eyes?”

  “Both gone. Nice and smooth. Probably about as clean as you can do a thing like that, I figure.”

  His dad stirred his tea but didn’t speak.

  “Didn’t look like a first-time thing to me,” Yakabuski continued. “It looked ritualistic.”

  “Is there a reason you’re not coming right out and asking me, Frank?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe asking the question will make it real, and I don’t want it to be real.”

  “Well, I can’t blame you for that.”

  His dad took a sip of the tea. His lips winced and his eyes closed for a second. He put down the teacup and pushed it away from him. “I’ll say it then. Cutting out a man’s eyes was a form of desecration once practised around here by people who came to the Divide a long time ago. It’s done to make sure your enemies spend all eternity blind and lost in purgatory. There’s still some people in Springfield who would believe in that sort of stuff, and you’d most likely find them on the North Shore.”

  “Have you seen it before?”

  “Never. I’ve just heard about it. The same way you’ve just heard about it, Frank. These are old stories. About as old as they get around here. I suspect someone is just being a copycat.”

  “What if that’s not the case?”

  “What if this is real, you mean? What if the North Shore Travellers have just killed Augustus Morrissey and hung him from a fence in Filion’s Field?”

  “Yes.”

  His dad laughed and adjusted the blanket around his legs. “Then you’ve got a shitload of problems, Frank.”

  Chapter Nine

  The driver of the campervan was known by many names, but most people in Heroica, the Village of Heroes, his hometown fifty miles south of Brownsville, knew him as Cambino. He spent the twilight hours of his first day on the road thinking of the woman he had killed. Not with regret. Not with remorse. Idle thoughts about where she had gone wrong. Why fate had decided her time on the planet should end in a sugar-beet shack on the outskirts of Corpus Christi.

  Cambino figured she had brought it upon herself. Life had been too easy for her. Her experiences had been too limited, likely little more than accepting the gifts and sexual demands of rich men. Without adversity, you are weak. Unprepared for what is coming.

  It was nearly 8 p.m., and the sun was setting to the west of the coastal highway, throwing shadows across the road that grew and twisted until they were lost at sea. Traffic was heavy with trade vans making their way between the rigs and ports that dotted this stretch of the gulf, and long-haul truckers who knew enough to avoid the midday sun in Southeast Texas were just awakening and bringing their rigs back out on the highway.

  He knew his disappearance had now been confirmed. His brother would have made the necessary checks throughout the day. The beachfront home in Cancun. The penthouse in Mexico City. All his vehicles and planes would have been searched. All his women as well.

  Once Raphael had confirmed the disappearance, his brother would have taken control of the family business. Started the protocols that needed to be followed. His brother could no longer sleep in his bed at his villa in the gated community outside Heroica. Could not sleep anyplace for three consecutive nights, a rule their father had taught them both and which they had adhered to all their adult lives. His brother would not search for him. Nor would Cambino’s enemies, who once saw his disappearances as a weakness, a way to take advantage of the family. They no longer believed that, and they no longer tried to find him. He could disappear at will.

  To disappear is to have power. Another thing his father taught him. The philosophy. The technique. His father had learned from his own father, a trench fighter from the first Great War, a small man with large hands covered with yellow veins, expressive hands that flapped like the wings of a bird, full of life and creativity. His grandfather once told Cambino he never purchased cigarettes in the Great War, even though he was a man who had always smoked. When Cambino asked how that was possible, his grandfather explained that when you lit a match in the trenches, a sniper from the enemy side would see the light, aim his rifle as the flame was brought to the mouth of the second smoker, fire when the third man bent toward the light.

  “You never needed to buy cigarettes,” he laughed. “You could pluck them, unlit, from the mouths of every third smoker. All you needed were matches.”

  So his father had learned from the trench fighter, and one day it was Cambino’s turn to learn the trick of disappearance. How to become a ghost and strike from the shadows. How to disappear before the eyes of your enemies. If you can do this, his father said, you will have a powerful tool that is beyond all imagining, for men who can disappear are considered demons by other men and have dominion over other men merely by having their names whispered into a frightened ear.

  His father thought the skill of disappearing was the most graceful of all the various forms of power. When Cambino was a young man, his father disappeared for two years, after a gang from a neighbouring village went to war against his family. Hjs father could not be found, although he struck back almost every night. By the end of the war, the other gang surrendered without conditions. The three brothers that led the war knelt like madmen in the piazza of their village, feverish, and delusional from sleepless nights, from two years of waiting for death from an enemy they never saw, and everyone in their village accepted their executions as a necessary thing. Cambino’s father moved behind the men with his handgun, and no one who watched — and the entire village was rounded up to watch — was sure if the brothers were even aware they were leaving one world for another.

  “The trick is to make it real.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Cambino.

  “You must be prepared to never come back. It is the only way the trick works.”

  Disappearance was the first of many things his father taught him. When he was ready, his father also taught him the philosophies and techniques of death. How death is another powerful tool, not so serene, not so graceful, but still a beautiful and powerful tool and one that, like disappearance, rarely needed to be used. It was sufficient in most cases simply to let your enemies know you had brought it with you.

  A useful tool: that was how Cambino had been taught to see death. Not as something to fear or deny but as something to embrace and turn to utility. It was why he travelled in this campervan, with its stainless-steel fillet tables and its reciprocal saws, its ligatures and carving knives, its buckets of bleach and its commercial-size freezer. It was not ostentation. It was not depravity. It was simply the acceptance of death as a tool, by a man who needed a quiet place to work.

  Chapter Ten

  The North Shore Travellers were one of the great mysteries of the Divide. Most people were unsure if they were even real. Those who believed said they were descended from Central European gypsies, from a fierce sub-sect of the Yenish or the Roma, no one was quite sure, but they were gypsies that did not travel in caravans with red and white flags, inviting people to come and have their fortunes told, their ironware repaired, their pockets fleeced.

 
They were criminals who plundered and killed to get what they needed, gypsies who scared other gypsies, who travelled in caravans that flew black flags and that decamped every night on high land, wagons and horses not circled but positioned like an artillery line, ready not to defend but to charge. In time, people began to call the black-flagged gypsies “Travellers.”

  In the seventeenth century, Travellers were in the port cities of southern France — in La Rochelle and Brouage — and it was then that they boarded ships going to the New World. They were there during the voyages of Samuel de Champlain and de La Salle, and some believe Champlain’s great scout, Étienne Brûlé, was a Traveller. It was a story with the whiff of truth to it, as Brûlé was an urchin from a tent city on the outskirts of Paris, and he disappeared into the woods as soon as he reached the New World. Something a Traveller would do.

  The Travellers had an affinity for the New World no other settler could match, had skills and passions that were transposable and served them well. For nearly two centuries, the fur trading companies of the New World used them as guides and explorers, as deep-bush trappers, and, when it was necessary, as private militia, to protect their furs as they were brought to market. Many of the Travellers wore red sashes around their waists, and before New France fell, they were often called by the French translation of their historic name — voyageurs.

  That was the story. If you believed it. And there was not much on the public record to make you believe it, until one night, fifteen years ago, George Yakabuski raided a brothel in High River. In the backroom of the brothel was a meeting room of some sort, what newspapers later described as a church, and Yakabuski’s father thought that was a fair enough description of the room.