Live by Night

by Dennis Lehane

  They removed the shanks from his ears and throat.

  Emil leaned in close. “When you get close enough to whisper that address in Pescatore’s ear, you drive that shank right through his fucking brain.” He shrugged. “Or his throat. Whatever kills him.”

  “I thought you worked for him,” Joe said.

  “I work for me.” Emil Lawson shook his head. “I did some jobs for his crew when I was paid to. Now someone else is paying.”

  “Albert White,” Joe said.

  “That’s my boss.” Emil Lawson leaned forward and lightly slapped Joe’s cheek. “And now he’s your boss too.”

  In the small spit of land behind his house on K Street, Thomas Coughlin kept a garden. His efforts with it had, over the years, met with varying degrees of success and failure, but in the two years since Ellen had passed on, he’d had nothing but time; now the bounty of it was such that he made a small profit every year when he sold the surplus.

  Years ago, when he was five or six, Joe had decided to help his father harvest in early July. Thomas has been sleeping off a double shift and the several nightcaps he’d consumed with Eddie McKenna afterward. He woke to the sound of his son talking in the backyard. Joe had talked to himself a lot back then, or maybe he spoke to an imagined friend. Either way, he’d had to talk to somebody, Thomas could admit to himself now, because he certainly wasn’t being spoken to much around the house. Thomas worked too much, and Ellen, well, by that point Ellen had firmly established her fondness for Tincture No. 23, a cure-all first introduced to her after one of the miscarriages that had preceded Joe’s birth. Back then, No. 23 wasn’t yet the problem it would become for Ellen, or so Thomas had told himself. But he must have second-guessed that assessment more than he liked to admit because he’d known without asking that Joe was unattended that morning. He lay in bed listening to his youngest jabbering to himself as he tramped back and forth to the porch, and Thomas started to wonder what he tramped back and forth from.

  He rose from bed and put on a robe and found his slippers. He walked through the kitchen (where Ellen, dull-eyed but smiling, sat with her cup of tea) and pushed open the back door.

  When he saw the porch, his first instinct was to scream. Literally. To drop to his knees and rage at the heavens. His carrots and parsnips and tomatoes—all still green as grass—lay on the porch, their roots splayed like hair across the dirt and wood. Joe came walking up from the garden with another crop in his hands—the beets, this time. He’d transformed into a mole, his skin and hair caked with dirt. The only white left on him could be found in his eyes and his teeth when he smiled, which he did as soon as he saw Thomas.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  Thomas was speechless.

  “I’m helping you, Daddy.” Joe placed a beet at Thomas’s feet and went back for more.

  Thomas, a year’s work ruined, an autumn’s profit vanished, watched his son march off to finish the destruction, and the laugh that quaked up through the center of him surprised no one so much as him. He laughed so loud squirrels took flight from the low branches of the nearest tree. He laughed so hard he could feel the porch shake.

  He smiled now to remember it.

  He’d told his son recently that life was luck. But life, he’d come to realize as he aged, was also memory. The recollection of moments often proved richer than the moments themselves.

  Out of habit, he reached for his watch before he recalled that it was no longer in his pocket. He’d miss it, even if the truth of the watch was a bit more complicated than the legend that had arisen around it. It was a gift from Barrett W. Stanford Sr., that was true. And Thomas had, without question, risked his life to save Barrett W. Stanford II, the manager of First Boston in Codman Square. Also true was that Thomas had, in the performance of his duties, discharged his service revolver a single time into the brain of one Maurice Dobson, twenty-six, ending his life immediately.

  But in the instant before he pulled that trigger, Thomas had seen something no one else had: the true nature of Maurice Dobson’s intent. He would tell the hostage, Barrett W. Stanford II, about it first, and then relate the same tale to Eddie McKenna, then to his watch commander, and then to the members of the BPD Shooting Board. With their permission, he told the same story to the members of the press and also to Barrett W. Stanford Sr., who was so overcome with gratitude that he gave Thomas a watch that had been presented to him in Zurich by Joseph Emile Philippe himself. Thomas attempted three times to refuse such an extravagant gift, but Barrett W. Stanford Sr. wouldn’t hear of it.

  So he carried the watch, not with the pride that so many presumed, but with a gravely intimate respect. In the legend, Maurice Dobson’s intent was to kill Barrett W. Stanford II. And who could argue with that interpretation, given that he’d placed a pistol to Barrett’s throat?

  But the intent Thomas had read in Maurice Dobson’s eyes in that final instant—and it was that quick: an instant—was surrender. Thomas had stood four feet away, service revolver drawn and steady in his hand, finger on the trigger, so ready to pull it—and you had to be, or else why draw the gun in the first place?—that when he saw an acceptance of his fate pass through Maurice Dobson’s pebble-gray eyes, an acceptance that he was going to jail, that this was over now, Thomas felt unfairly denied. Denied of what, he couldn’t rightly say at first. But as soon as he pulled the trigger, he knew.

  The bullet entered the left eye of the unfortunate Maurice Dobson, the late Maurice Dobson before he even reached the floor, and the heat of it singed a stripe into the skin just below Barrett W. Stanford II’s temple. When the finality of the bullet’s purpose conjoined with finality of its usage, Thomas understood what had been denied him and why he’d taken such permanent steps to rectify that denial.

  When two men pointed theirs guns at each other, a contract was established under the eyes of God, the only acceptable fulfillment of which was that one of you send the other home to him.

  Or so it had felt at the time.

  Over the years, even in the deepest of his cups, even with Eddie McKenna, who knew most of his secrets, Thomas had never told another soul what kind of intent he’d actually seen in Maurice Dobson’s eyes. And while he felt no pride in his actions that day and so took none in his possession of the pocket watch, he never left his house without it, because it bore witness to the profound responsibility that defined his profession—we don’t enforce the laws of men; we enforce the will of nature. God was not some white-robed cloud king prone to sentimental meddling in human affairs. He was the iron that formed its core, and the fire in the belly of the blast furnaces that ran for a hundred years. God was the law of iron and the law of fire. God was nature and nature was God. There could not be one without the other.

  And you, Joseph, my youngest, my wayward romantic, my prickly heart—it’s now you who has to remind men of those laws. The worst men. Or die from weakness, from moral frailty, from lack of will.

  I’ll pray for you, because prayer is all that remains when power dies. And I have no power anymore. I can’t reach behind those granite walls. I can’t slow or stop time. Hell, at the moment, I can’t even tell it.

  He looked out at his garden, so close to harvest. He prayed for Joe. He prayed for a tide of his ancestors, most unknown to him, and yet he could see them so clearly, a diaspora of stooped souls stained by drink and famine and the dark impulse. He wished for their eternal rest to be peaceful, and he wished for a grandson.

  Joe found Hippo Fasini on the yard and told him his father had undergone a change of heart.

  “That’ll happen,” Hippo said.

  “He also gave me an address.”

  “Yeah?” The fat man leaned back on his heels and looked out at nothing. “Whose?”

  “Albert White’s.”

  “Albert White lives in Ashmont Hill.”

  “I hear he doesn’t visit much lately.”

  “So
give me the address.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Hippo Fasini looked at the ground, all three chins dropping into his prison stripes. “Excuse me?”

  “Tell Maso I’ll bring it to the wall with me tonight.”

  “You ain’t in a bargaining position, kid.”

  Joe looked at him until Hippo met his eyes. He said, “Sure I am,” and walked off across the yard.

  An hour before his meeting with Pescatore, he threw up twice into the oak bucket. His arms shook. Occasionally so did his chin and his lips. His blood became a steady pounding of fists against his ears. He’d tied the shank to his wrist with a leather bootlace Emil Lawson had provided. Just before he left his cell, he was to move it from there to between his ass cheeks. Lawson had strongly suggested he shove it all the way up his ass, but he envisioned one of Maso’s goons forcing him to sit for whatever reason and decided it was the cheeks or nothing at all. He figured he’d make the transfer with about ten minutes to go, get used to moving with it, but a guard came by his cell forty minutes early to tell him he had a visitor.

  It was dusk. Visiting hours were long over.

  “Who?” he asked as he followed the guard down the tier, only then realizing the shank remained tied to his wrist.

  “Someone who knows how to grease the right palms.”

  “Yeah”—Joe tried to keep up with the guard, a brisk walker—“but who?”

  The guard unlocked the ward gate and ushered Joe through. “Said he was your brother.”

  He entered the room removing his hat. Coming through the doorway, he had to duck, a man who stood a full head taller than most. His dark hair had receded some and was lightly salted over the ears. Joe did the math and realized he’d be (thirty-five) now. Still fiercely handsome, though his face was more weathered than Joe remembered.

  He wore a dark, slightly battered three-piece suit with cloverleaf lapels. It was the suit of a manager in a grain warehouse or a man who spent a lot of time on the road—a salesman or union organizer. Danny wore a white shirt under it, no tie.

  He placed his hat on the counter and looked through the mesh between them.

  “Shit,” Danny said, “you’re not thirteen anymore, are you?”

  Joe noticed how red his brother’s eyes were. “And you’re not twenty-five.”

  Danny lit a cigarette and the match quivered between his fingers. A large scar, puckered in the center, covered the back of his hand. “Still whoop your ass.”

  Joe shrugged. “Maybe not. I’m learning to fight dirty.”

  Danny gave that an arch of his eyebrows and exhaled a plume of smoke. “He’s gone, Joe.”

  Joe knew who “he” was. Some part of him had known the last time he’d laid eyes on him in this room. But another part of him couldn’t accept it. Wouldn’t.

  “Who?”

  His brother looked at the ceiling for a moment, then back at him. “Dad, Joe. Dad’s dead.”

  “How?”

  “My guess? Heart attack.”

  “Did you . . . ?”

  “Huh?”

  “Were you there?”

  Danny shook his head. “I missed him by half an hour. He was still warm when I found him.”

  Joe said, “You’re sure there was no . . .”

  “What?”

  “Foul play?”

  “What the fuck are they doing to you in here?” Danny looked around the room. “No, Joe, it was a heart attack or a stroke.”

  “How do you know?”

  Danny narrowed his eyes. “He was smiling.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah.” Danny chuckled. “That small one of his? One looked like he was hearing some private joke or remembering something from the way back, before any of us? You know that one?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Joe said and was surprised to hear himself whisper again, “I do.”

  “No watch on him, though.”

  “Huh?” Joe’s head buzzed.

  “His watch,” Danny said. “He didn’t have it. Never knew him to—”

  “I got it,” Joe said. “He gave it to me. In case I run into trouble. You know, in here.”

  “So you’ve got it.”

  “I got it,” he said, the lie burning his stomach. He saw Maso’s hand closing over the watch and he wanted to beat his own head against concrete until he stove it in.

  “Good,” Danny said. “That’s good.”

  “It’s not,” Joe said. “It’s shit. But it’s about the size of things now.”

  Neither of them spoke for a few moments. A factory whistle blew distantly from the other side of the walls.

  Danny said, “You know where I can find Con?”

  Joe nodded. “He’s at the Abbotsford.”

  “The blind school? What’s he doing there?”

  “Lives there,” Joe said. “He just woke up one day and quit on everything.”

  “Well,” Danny said, “that kinda injury could make anyone bitter.”

  “He was bitter long before the injury,” Joe said.

  Danny shrugged in agreement and they sat in silence for a minute.

  Joe said, “Where was he when you found him?”

  “Where do you think?” Danny dropped his cigarette to the floor and stepped on it, the smoke leaving his mouth from under the curl in his upper lip. “Out back, sitting in that chair on the porch, you know? Looking out at his . . .” Danny lowered his head and waved at the air.

  “Garden,” Joe said.

  Chapter Nine

  As the Old Man Goes

  Even in prison, news of the outside world trickled in. That year all the sports talk concerned the New York Yankees and their Murderers’ Row of Combs, Koenig, Ruth, Gehrig, Meusel, and Lazzeri. Ruth alone hit a mind-boggling sixty home runs, and the other five hitters were so dominant that the only question left was by how humiliating a margin they’d sweep the Pirates in the World Series.

  Joe, a walking encyclopedia of baseball, would have loved to see this team play because he knew their like might never come around again. And yet his time in Charlestown had also instilled in him a reactionary contempt for anyone who would call a group of ballplayers Murderers’ Row.

  You want a Murderers’ Row, he thought that evening just after dusk, I’m walking it. The entrance to the walkway along the top of the prison wall was on the other side of a door at the end of F Block on the uppermost tier of North Wing. It was impossible to reach that door unobserved. A man couldn’t even reach the tier without going through three separate gates. Once he did, he faced an empty tier. Even in a prison as overcrowded as this, they kept the twelve cells there empty and cleaner than a church font before a baptism.

  As Joe walked along the tier now, he saw how they kept it so clean—each cell was being mopped by a convict trustee. The high windows in the cells, identical to the window in his own, revealed a square of sky. The squares were all a blue so dark it was nearly black, which left Joe to wonder how much the moppers could see in those cells. All the light was on the corridor. Maybe the guards would provide lanterns when dusk became night in a matter of minutes.

  But there were no guards. Just the one leading him down the tier, the one who’d led him to and from the visiting room, the one who walked too fast, which would get him into trouble someday because the objective was to keep the convict ahead of you. If you got ahead of the convict, he could get up to all sorts of nefarious things, which is how Joe had moved the shank from his wrist to his butt five minutes ago. He wished he’d practiced it, though. Trying to walk with clenched ass cheeks and appear natural was no easy thing.

  But where were the other guards? On nights when Maso walked the wall, they kept their presence light up here; it wasn’t like every guard was on the Pescatore payroll, though those who weren’t would never go pigeon on those who were. But Joe glanced aro
und as they continued along the tier and confirmed what he’d feared—there were no guards up here right now. And then he got a close look at the inmates cleaning the cells:

  Murderers’ Row, indeed.

  Basil Chigis’s pointy head tipped him off. Not even the prison-issue watch cap could disguise it. Basil pushed a mop in the seventh cell on the tier. The foul-smelling guy who’d put his shank to Joe’s right ear mopped the eighth. Pushing a bucket around the tenth empty cell was Dom Pokaski, who’d burned his own family alive—wife, two daughters, mother-in-law, not to mention three cats he’d locked in the fruit cellar.

  At the end of the tier, Hippo and Naldo Aliente stood by the stairwell door. If they thought there was anything odd about the higher-than-usual inmate presence and lower-than-ever guard presence, they were doing a first-class job of masking it. Nothing showed on their faces, really, except the smug entitlement of the ruling class.

  Fellas, Joe thought, you might want to brace for change.

  “Hands up,” Hippo told Joe. “I gotta frisk you.”

  Joe didn’t hesitate, but he did regret not shoving the shank all the way up his ass. The handle, small as it was, rested against the base of his spine, but Hippo might feel an abnormal shape there, pull up his shirt and then use the shank on him. Joe kept his arms raised, surprised by how steady he seemed: no shakes, no sweat, no outward signs of fear. Hippo slapped his paws up Joe’s legs and then along his ribs and ran one down his chest and the other down his back. The tip of Hippo’s finger grazed the handle and Joe could feel it tilt back. He clenched harder, aware that his life depended on something as absurd as how tight he could clench his buttocks.

  Hippo gripped Joe’s shoulders and turned him to face him. “Open your mouth.”

  Joe did.

  “Wider.”

  Joe complied.

  Hippo peered into his mouth. “He’s clean,” he said and stepped back.

  As Joe went to pass, Naldo Aliente blocked the door. He looked into Joe’s face like he knew all the lies behind it.

  “Your life goes as that old man’s goes,” he said. “You understand?”