Live by Night

by Dennis Lehane

  They wrenched the door off its hinges and went into the boiler room and through the boiler room into the distillery and the kitchen beyond. The door between the kitchen and the manager’s office had a circular window in the center that looked out onto a small access way with a rubber floor. The manager’s door was ajar, and the office beyond showed evidence of a recent war party—wax paper with crumbs on top, coffee cups, an empty bottle of rye, overflowing ashtrays.

  Dion took a look and said to Joe, “Never expected to see old age, myself.”

  Joe exhaled through his mouth and went through the door. They went through the manager’s office and came out behind the front desk and by that point they knew the hotel was empty. It didn’t feel ambush-empty, it felt empty-empty. The place for an ambush had been the boiler room. If they’d wanted to draw them in a little farther just to be sure they caught any stragglers, the kitchen would have been the spot. The lobby, though, was a logistical nightmare—too many places to hide, too easy to scatter, and ten steps from the street.

  They sent some men up to the tenth in the elevator and a few more by way of the stairs, just in case Maso had come up with an ambush plan Joe simply couldn’t fathom. The men came back and reported that the tenth was cleaned out, though they had found both Sal and Lefty laid out on the beds in 1009 and 1010.

  “Bring ’em down,” Joe said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And have someone bring Carmine in from the ladder too.”

  Dion lit a cigar. “I can’t believe I shot Carmine in the face.”

  “You didn’t shoot him,” Joe said. “Ricochets.”

  “Splitting hairs,” Dion said.

  Joe lit a cigarette and allowed Pozzetta, who’d been an army medic in Panama, to take another look at his arm.

  Pozzetta said, “You need to get that treated, boss. Get you some drugs.”

  “We got drugs,” Dion said.

  “The right drugs,” Pozzetta said.

  “Go out the back,” Joe said. “Go get me what I need or find the doc’.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pozzetta said.

  Half a dozen members of the Tampa PD on their payroll were called and came down. One of them brought a meat wagon and Joe said good-bye to Sal and Lefty and Carmine Parone, who just ninety minutes ago had dug Joe out of a cement bucket. It was Sal who got to him the most, though; only in retrospect did the full measure of their five years together hit him. He’d had him into the house for dinner countless times, sometimes brought sandwiches to him in the car at night. He’d entrusted him with his life, with Graciela’s life.

  Dion put a hand on his back. “This is a tough one.”

  “We gave him a hard time.”

  “What?”

  “This morning in my office. You and me. We gave him a hard time, D.”

  “Yeah.” Dion nodded a couple of times and then blessed himself. “Why’d we do that again?”

  “I don’t even know,” Joe said.

  “There had to be a reason.”

  “I wish it meant something,” Joe said and stepped back so his men could load them into the meat wagon.

  “It means something,” Dion said. “Means we should settle up with the fucks who killed him.”

  The doctor was waiting at the front desk when they got back from the loading dock and he cleaned Joe’s wound and sutured it while Joe got his reports from the police officers he’d sent for.

  “The men he had working for him today,” Joe said to Sergeant Bick of the Third District, “they on his permanent payroll?”

  “No, Mr. Coughlin.”

  “Did they know they were going after my men in the streets?”

  Sergeant Bick looked at the floor. “I gotta assume so.”

  “I gotta too,” Joe said.

  “We can’t kill cops,” Dion said.

  Joe was looking into Bick’s eyes when he said, “Why not?”

  “It’s frowned upon,” Dion said.

  Joe said to Bick, “You know of any cops who are with Pescatore now?”

  “Everyone who shot it out today, sir? They’re writing reports right now. The mayor’s not happy. The chamber of commerce is livid.”

  “The mayor’s not happy?” Joe said. “The chamber of fucking commerce?” He slapped Bick’s hat off the top of his head. “I’m not happy! Fuck everyone else! I’m not happy!”

  There was an odd silence in the room, and no one knew where to put their eyes. To the best of anyone’s recollection, even Dion’s, no one had ever heard Joe raise his voice before.

  When he spoke to Bick again, his voice had returned to its normal pitch. “Pescatore doesn’t fly. He doesn’t like boats, either. That means he’s got only two ways out of this city. So he’s either part of a convoy heading north on Forty-one. Or he’s on the train. So, Sergeant Bick? Pick up your fucking hat and find him.”

  A few minutes later, in the manager’s office, Joe called Graciela.

  “How you feeling?”

  “Your child is a brute,” she said.

  “My child, uh?”

  “He kick, kick, kick. All the time.”

  “On the bright side,” Joe said, “only four more months to go.”

  “You,” she said, “are so very funny. I would like to get you pregnant next time. I would like you to feel your stomach in your windpipe. And have to pee more times than you blink.”

  “We’ll give that a try.” Joe finished his cigarette and lit another.

  “I heard about a gunfight on Eighth Avenue today,” she said, and her voice was much smaller and much harder.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it over?”

  “No,” Joe said.

  “You are at war?”

  “We are at war,” Joe said. “Yes.”

  “When will you be finished?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ever?”

  “I don’t know.”

  For a minute they said nothing. He heard her smoking from her end and she could hear him smoking from his. He checked his father’s watch and saw that it was now running a full half an hour behind, even though he’d reset it on the boat.

  “You don’t see it,” she said eventually.

  “See what?”

  “That you have been at war since the day we met. And why?”

  “To make a living.”

  “Is dying a living?”

  “I’m not dead,” he said.

  “By the end of the day you could be, Joseph. You could. Even if you win today’s battle and the next one and the one after that, there is so much violence in what you do, that it must—it must—come back for you. It will find you.”

  Just what his father had told him.

  Joe smoked and blew it up toward the ceiling and watched it evaporate. He couldn’t say there wasn’t truth in her words, just as there may have been some in his father’s. But he didn’t have the time for the truth right now.

  He said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say here.”

  “I don’t either,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “What?”

  “How do you know it’s a boy?”

  “Because he’s kicking at things all the time,” she said. “Just like you.”

  “Ah.”

  “Joseph?” She inhaled on her cigarette. “Don’t leave me to raise him on my own.”

  The only train scheduled to leave Tampa that afternoon was the Orange Blossom Special. Seaboard’s two standard trains had already left and no more were scheduled until tomorrow. The Orange Blossom Special was a deluxe passenger train that ran to and from Tampa in the winter months only. The problem for Maso, Digger, and their men was that it was booked solid.

  While they were working on bribing the conductor, the police showed up. And not
the ones on their payroll.

  Maso and Digger were sitting in the back of an Auburn sedan in a field just west of Union Station, where they had a clear view of the redbrick building and its cake-icing white trim and the five tracks that ran from the back of it, gunmetal rails of hot rolled steel that stretched from this small brick building and endlessly flat land to points north and east and west, splaying like veins across the country.

  “Should’ve gotten into railroads,” Maso said. “When there was still a chance back in the teens.”

  “We got trucks,” Digger said. “That’s better.”

  “Trucks ain’t getting us out of this.”

  “Let’s just drive,” Digger said.

  “You don’t think they’ll notice a bunch of wops in swell cars and black hats driving through the fucking orange groves?”

  “We drive at night.”

  Maso shook his head. “Roadblocks. By now? That Irish cocksucker has them set up on every road from here to Jacksonville.”

  “Well, a train ain’t the way to go, Pop.”

  “Yes,” Maso said, “it is.”

  “I can get us a plane out of Jacksonville in—”

  “You fly on one of those fucking deathtraps. Don’t ask me to.”

  “Pop, they’re safe. They’re safer than . . . than—”

  “Than trains?” Maso pointed. As he did, the air popped with a percussive echo and smoke rose from a field about a mile away.

  “Duck hunting?” Digger said.

  Maso looked over at his son and thought how sad it was that a man this stupid was the smartest of his three offspring.

  “You seen any ducks around here?”

  “So then . . . ?” Digger’s eyes narrowed. He actually couldn’t figure it out.

  “He just blew up the tracks,” Maso said and looked across at his son. “You get your retard from your mother, by the way. Woman couldn’t win a game of checkers against a bowl of fucking soup.”

  Maso and his men waited by a pay phone on Platt while Anthony Servidone went on ahead with a suitcase full of money to the Tampa Bay Hotel. He called an hour later to report that the rooms were taken care of. There was no police presence and no local hoods as far as he could see. Send in the security detail.

  They did. Not that there was much of one left after whatever had happened on that tugboat. They’d sent twelve guys out on that boat, thirteen if you counted that Slick Sammy fuck, Albert White. That left a security detail of seven men plus Maso’s personal bodyguard, Seppe Carbone. Seppe was from the same town Maso had grown up in, Alcamo, on the northwest coast of Sicily, though Seppe was much younger, so he and Maso had grown up there in different times. Still, Seppe was a man from that town—merciless, fearless, and loyal to the death.

  After Anthony Servidone called back to confirm that the security detail had cleared the floor and the lobby, Seppe drove Maso and Digger to the back of the Tampa Bay Hotel, and they took the service elevator to the seventh floor.

  “How long?” Digger said.

  “Day after tomorrow,” Maso said. “We keep our heads down until then. Even that mick son of a bitch doesn’t have the pull to keep roadblocks up that long. We drive down to Miami, catch the train from there.”

  “I want a girl,” Digger said.

  Maso slapped his son hard in the back of the head. “What part of lying low don’t you understand? A girl? A fucking girl? Why don’t you ask her to bring some friends, maybe a couple of guns, you dumb fuck.”

  Digger rubbed his head. “A man has needs.”

  “You see a man around here,” Maso said, “you point him out to me.”

  They arrived at the seventh floor and Anthony Servidone met the lift. He handed Maso his room key and Digger his.

  “You clear the room?”

  Anthony nodded. “They’re clean. Every one. Whole floor.”

  Maso had met Anthony in Charlestown, where everyone was loyal to Maso because it was death if you weren’t. Seppe, on the other hand, had come from Alcamo with a letter from Todo Bassina, the local boss, and had distinguished himself more times than Maso could count.

  “Seppe,” he said now, “give the room another look.”

  “Subito, capo. Subito.” Seppe’s Thompson cleared his raincoat and he walked through the men gathered outside Maso’s suite and let himself inside.

  Anthony Servidone stepped in close. “They were seen at the Romero.”

  “Who?”

  “Coughlin, Bartolo, a bunch of Cubans and Italians on their side.”

  “Coughlin, definitely?”

  Anthony nodded. “No question.”

  Maso closed his eyes for just a moment. “He even get a scratch?”

  “Yeah,” Anthony said quickly, excited to deliver some good news. “Big cut on his head and took a slug to his right arm.”

  Maso said, “Well, I guess we should wait for him to die of fucking blood poisoning.”

  Digger said, “I don’t think we got that kind of time.”

  And Maso closed his eyes again.

  Digger walked down to his room with a man on either side of him as Seppe came back out of Maso’s suite.

  “It’s all clear, boss.”

  Maso said, “I want you and Servidone on the door. Everyone else better act like centurions on the Hun border. Capice?”

  “Capice.”

  Maso entered the room and removed his raincoat and his hat. He poured himself a drink but from the bottle of anisette they’d sent up. Booze was legal again. Most of it, anyway. And what wasn’t, would be. The country had found sanity again.

  A fucking shame, what it was.

  “Pour me one, would ya?”

  Maso turned, saw Joe sitting on the couch by the window. He had his Savage .32 sitting on his knee with a Maxim silencer screwed onto the muzzle.

  Maso wasn’t surprised. Not even a little bit. Just curious about one thing.

  “Where were you hiding?” He poured Joe a glass and brought it to him.

  “Hiding?” Joe took the glass.

  “When Seppe cleared the room?”

  Joe used his .32 to point Maso to a chair. “I wasn’t hiding. I was sitting on the bed over there. He walked in and I asked him if he wanted to work for someone who’d be alive tomorrow.”

  “That’s all it took?” Maso said.

  “It took you wanting to place a fucking dunce like Digger in a position of power. We had a great thing here. A great thing. And you come in and fuck it all up in one day.”

  “That’s human nature, isn’t it?”

  “Fixing what ain’t broke?” Joe said.

  Maso nodded.

  “Well, shit,” Joe said, “it doesn’t have to be.”

  “No,” Maso said, “but it usually is.”

  “You know how many people died today because of you and your fucking greed? You, the ‘simple Wop from Endicott Street’? Well, you ain’t that.”

  “Someday, maybe you’ll have a son and then you’ll understand.”

  “Will I?” Joe said. “And what will I understand?”

  Maso shrugged, as if to put it into words would sully it. “How is my son?”

  “By now?” Joe shook his head. “Gone.”

  Maso pictured Digger lying facedown on a floor in the next room over, a bullet in the back of his head, the blood pooling on the carpet. He was surprised by how deep and suddenly the grief overtook him. It was so black, so black and hopeless and horrific.

  “I’d always wanted you for a son,” he said to Joe and heard his voice break. He looked down at his drink.

  “Funny,” Joe said, “I never wanted you for a father.”

  The bullet entered Maso’s throat. The last thing he ever saw was a drop of his blood landing in his glass of anisette.

  Then it all went back to black.


  When Maso fell, he dropped the glass and landed on his knees and his head hit the coffee table. It lay on the right cheek, empty eye staring at the wall to his left. Joe stood and looked at the silencer he’d picked up at the hardware store for three bucks that afternoon. Rumor was Congress was going to raise the price to $200 and then outlaw them entirely.

  Pity.

  Joe shot Maso through the top of the head just to be sure.

  Out in the hall, they’d disarmed the Pescatore guns without a fight as Joe suspected they might. Men didn’t like to fight for a man who thought so little of their lives he’d put an idiot like Digger in charge. Joe exited Maso’s suite and closed the doors behind him and looked at everyone standing around, unsure what would happen next. Dion exited Digger’s room, and they stood in the hallway for a moment, thirteen men and a few machine guns.

  “I don’t want to kill anyone,” Joe said. He looked at Anthony Servidone. “You want to die?”

  “No, Mr. Coughlin, I do not want to die.”

  “Anyone?” Joe looked around the hallway and got a bunch of solemn head shakes. “If you want to go back to Boston, head back with my blessing. You want to stay down here, get some sun, meet some pretty ladies, we got jobs for you. Ain’t too many people offering those these days, so let us know if you’re interested.”

  Joe couldn’t think of anything else to say. He shrugged, and he and Dion got on the lift and took it down to the lobby.

  A week later, in New York, Joe and Dion walked into an office at the back of an actuarial firm in Midtown Manhattan and sat across from Lucky Luciano.

  Joe’s theory that the most terrifying men were also the most terrified went right out the window. There was no fear in Luciano. There was very little that resembled emotion, in fact, except a hint of black and endless rage in the furthest depths of his dead sea gaze.

  The only thing this man knew about terror was how to infect other people with it.

  He was dressed impeccably and would have been a handsome man if his skin didn’t look like veal that had been pounded with a meat tenderizer. His right eye drooped from a failed hit on him back in ’29 and his hands were large and looked like they could squeeze a skull until it popped like a tomato.