by Don Winslow
“Jesus,” Siobhan asks as she scans the menu. “Can you afford this?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you do?” she asks. “For work?”
Which is an awkward question.
“This and that.”
“This” being labor racketeering, loan-sharking and contract murder; “that” being dope.
“It must be lucrative,” she says, “this and that.”
He thinks she’s maybe going to get up and walk out right then, but instead she orders the fillet of sole. Callan don’t know shit about wine, but he stopped by the restaurant that afternoon and let it be known that whatever the girl orders, the wine steward should bring the right bottle.
He does.
Compliments of the house.
Siobhan gives Callan a funny look.
“I do some work for them,” Callan explains.
“This and that.”
“Yeah.”
He gets up a few minutes later to go to the bathroom, finds the manager and says, “Look, I want the check, okay?”
“Sean, the owner would fucking kill me if I gave you a check.”
Because this isn’t the deal. The deal is, whenever Sean Callan and Stevie O'Leary come in they eat and no check appears and they leave a heavy cash tip for the waiter. That is just understood, just like it’s understood that they don’t come in too often, but spread their visits around the places on Restaurant Row.
He’s nervous—he don’t go out on a lot of dates, and when he does usually it’s to the Gloc or the Liffey and if they eat at all it’s a burger or maybe some lamb stew and they usually just get shit-faced and stagger back and screw and don’t hardly remember it. He only comes into a place like this on business, to—as O-Bop puts it—show the flag.
“That,” she says, wiping the final remnants of chocolate mousse off her lips, “was the best meal I’ve ever had in my entire life.”
The bill comes and it’s a fucking whopper.
When Callan looks at it he don’t know how the average guy can afford to live. He pulls a wad of bills from his pocket and lays them on the tray. This gets him another curious look from Siobhan.
Still, he’s surprised when she takes him to her apartment and leads him straight into the bedroom. She pulls her sweater over her head and shakes her hair out, then reaches behind herself to unsnap her bra. Then she kicks off her shoes, steps out of her jeans and gets under the covers.
“You still have your socks on,” Callan says.
“My feet are still cold,” she says. “Are you coming in?”
He strips down to his underwear and waits until he’s under the sheets to take off his shorts. She guides him inside her. She comes quickly, and when he’s about to come he tries to pull out, but she locks her legs around him and won’t let him. “It’s okay, I’m on the Pill. I want you to come in me.”
Then she rolls her hips and that settles it.
In the morning she gets up to go to confession. Otherwise, she tells him, she can’t take Communion on Sunday.
“Are you going to confess us?” he asks.
“Of course.”
“Are you going to promise not to do it again?” he asks, half-afraid the answer will be yes.
“I wouldn’t lie to a priest,” she says. Then she’s out the door. He falls back asleep. Wakes up when he feels her get back in bed with him. But when he reaches for her, she refuses him, telling him that he’ll have to wait until after Mass tomorrow because her soul has to be clean to take Communion.
Catholic girls, Callan thinks.
He takes her to midnight Mass.
Pretty soon they’re together most of the time.
Too much of the time, according to O-Bop.
Then they move in together. The actress Siobhan has been subletting from comes back from her tour, and Siobhan has to find a place to live, which is not easy in New York on what a waitress makes, so Callan suggests she just move in with him.
“I don’t know,” she says. “That’s a big step.”
“We sleep together almost every night anyway.”
“Almost being the operative word there.”
“You’ll end up living in Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn’s okay.”
“It’s okay, but it’s a long subway ride.”
“You really want me to move in with you.”
“I really want you to move in with me.”
The problem is, his place is a shit hole. A third-floor walk-up on Forty-sixth and Eleventh. One room and a bath. He’s got a bed, a chair, a TV, an oven he’s never turned on and a microwave.
“You make how much money?” Peaches asks. “And you live like this?”
“It’s all I need.”
Except now it isn’t, so he starts looking for another place.
He’s thinking about the Upper West Side.
O-Bop don’t like it. “It wouldn’t look good,” he says, “you leaving the neighborhood.”
“There’s no good places left here,” Callan says. “Everything’s taken.”
Turns out that’s not true. O-Bop drops a word to a few building managers, some deposits get returned and four or five nice apartments become available for Callan to choose from. He picks a place on Fiftieth and Twelfth with a small balcony and a view of the Hudson.
He and Siobhan start playing house.
She starts buying stuff for the place—blankets and sheets and pillows and towels and all the female shit for the bathroom. And pots and pans and dishes and dishcloths and shit, which freaks him out at first but then he kind of likes it.
“We could eat at home more,” she says, “and save a lot of money.”
“Eat at home more?” he asks. “We don’t eat at home at all.”
“That’s what I mean,” she says. “It adds up. We spend a fortune we could be saving.”
“Saving for what?”
He don’t get it.
Peaches sets him straight. “Men live in the now. Eat now, drink now, get laid now. We’re not thinking about the next meal, the next drink, the next fuck—we’re just happy now. Women live in the future—and this you better learn, you dumb mick: The woman is always building the nest. Everything she does, what she’s really doing is gathering twigs and leaves and shit for the nest. And the nest is not for you, paisan. The nest is not even for her. The nest is for the bambino.”
So Siobhan starts cooking more and at first he don’t like it—he misses the crowds and the noise and the chatter—but then he gets to liking it. Likes the quiet, likes looking at her as she eats and reads the paper, likes wiping the dishes.
“The hell you drying dishes for?” O-Bop asks him. “Get a dishwasher.”
“They’re expensive.”
“No they’re not,” O-Bop says. “You go to Handrigan's, pick out a dishwasher, it comes off the back of the truck, Handrigan gets the insurance.”
“I’ll just wipe the dishes.”
But a week later, him and O-Bop are out taking care of business and Siobhan’s at home when the buzzer buzzes and two guys come up with a dishwasher in the box on a hand truck.
“What’s this?” Siobhan asks.
“A dishwasher.”
“We didn’t order a dishwasher.”
“Hey,” one of the guys says, “we just humped this thing up here, we ain’t humping it back down. And I ain’t telling O-Bop I didn’t do what he said for me to do, so why don’t you just be a nice girl and let us hook up the dishwasher for you?”
She lets them put it in, but it’s a topic of discussion when Callan gets home.
“What’s this?” she asks.
“It’s a dishwasher.”
“I know what it is,” she says. “I mean, what is it?”
I’m going to give fucking Stevie a beating is what it is, Callan thinks, but he says, “A housewarming present.”
“It’s a very generous housewarming present.”
“O-Bop’s a generous guy.”
“It’s stolen, isn�
��t it?”
“Depends on what you mean by stolen.”
“It’s going back.”
“That would be complicated.”
“What’s complicated about it?”
He don’t want to explain to her that Handrigan has probably already put in a claim for it, and for three or four others just like it, which he’s sold for half-price in a “soup-and-sandwich” scam. So he just says, “It’s complicated is all.”
“I’m not stupid, you know,” she says.
No one’s said anything to her, but she gets it. Just living in the neighborhood—going to the store, to the cleaner's, dealing with the cable guy, the plumber—she feels the deference with which she’s treated. It’s little things—a couple of extra pears tossed into the basket, the clothes done tomorrow instead of the day after, the uncharacteristic courtesy of a cabbie, the man at the newsstand, the construction guys who don’t hoot or whistle.
That night in bed she says, “I left Belfast because I was tired of gangsters.”
He knows what she means—the Provos have become little more than thugs, controlling in Belfast most of the things that, well, most of the things that he and O-Bop control in the Kitchen. He knows what she’s telling him. He wants to beg her to stay, but instead says, “I’m trying to get out.”
“Just get out.”
“It’s not that simple, Siobhan.”
“It’s complicated.”
“That’s right, it is.”
The old myth about only leaving toes-up is just that—a myth. You can walk away, but it is complicated. You can’t just up and stroll. You have to ease out, otherwise there are dangerous suspicions.
And what would I do? he thinks.
For money?
He hasn’t put much away. His is the businessman’s lament—a lot of money comes in, but a lot goes out, too. People don’t understand—there’s Calabrese’s cut, and Peaches’, right off the top. Then the bribes—to union officials, to cops. Then the crew gets taken care of. Then he and O-Bop cut up whatever’s left, which is still a lot but not as much as you think. And now they have to kick into the Big Peaches Defense Fund . . . well, there ain’t enough to retire on, not enough to open a legit business.
And anyway, he wonders, what would that be? What the hell am I qualified for? All I know about is extortion and strong-arm and—face it—turning the lights out on guys.
“What do you want me to do, Siobhan?”
“Anything.”
“What? Wait tables? I don’t see myself with a towel over my arm.”
One of them long silences in the dark before she says, “Then I guess I don’t see myself with you.”
He gets up the next morning, she’s sitting at the table drinking tea and smoking a cig. (You can take the girl out of Ireland, but . . . he thinks.) He sits down across the table and says, “I can’t get out just like that. That’s not how it works. I need a little more time.”
She gets right down to it, one of the things he loves about her—she’s bottom-line. “How much time?”
“A year, I dunno.”
“That’s too long.”
“But it might take that long.”
She nods several times, then says, “As long as you’re headed toward the door.”
“Okay.”
“I mean steadily toward the door.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
So now, a couple of months later, he’s trying to explain it to O-Bop. “Look, this is all fucked-up. You know, I don’t even know how it all got started. I’m sitting in a bar one afternoon and Eddie Friel walks in and then it all just gets out of hand. I don’t blame you, I don’t blame anybody, all I know is this has got to end. I’m out.”
As if to put a period on it he puts all his hardware into a brown-paper grocery bag and gives it to the river. Then goes home to have a talk with Siobhan. “I’m thinking of carpentry,” he says. “You know, storefronts and apartments and shit like that. Maybe, eventually, I could build cabinets and desks and stuff. I was thinking of going to talk with Patrick McGuigan, maybe see if he’d take me on as an unpaid apprentice. We have enough money set aside to see us over until I can get real work.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“We’re gonna be poor.”
“I’ve been poor,” she says. “I’m good at it.”
So the next morning he goes to McGuigan’s loft on Eleventh and Forty-eighth.
They went to Sacred Heart together and talk about high school for a few minutes, and about hockey for a few more minutes, and then Callan asks if he can come to work for him.
“You’re shitting me, right?” McGuigan says.
“No, I’m serious.”
Hell yes he is—Callan works like a mother learning the trade.
Shows up at seven sharp every morning with a lunch bucket in his hand and a lunch-bucket attitude in his head. McGuigan wasn’t sure what to expect, but what he really didn’t expect was for Callan to be a workhorse. He figured him to be a drunk or a hungover druggie, maybe, but not the citizen who walks through the door on time every morning.
No, the guy came to work, and he came to learn.
Callan finds he likes working with his hands.
At first he’s all thumbs—he feels like a jerk, a mook—but then it starts coming along. And McGuigan, once he sees that Callan is serious, is patient. Takes the time to teach him things, brings him along, gives him small jobs to screw up until he gets to the point where he can do them without screwing up.
Callan goes home at night tired.
End of the day, he’s physically worn out—he’s sore, his arms ache—but mentally he feels good. He’s relaxed, he’s not worried about anything. There’s nothing he’s done during the day he’s going to have bad dreams about that night.
He stops going around to the bars and pubs where he and O-Bop used to hang out. He don’t go around the Liffey or the Landmark no more. Mostly he comes home and he and Siobhan have a quick supper, watch some TV, go to bed.
One day O-Bop shows up at the carpentry studio.
He stands there in the doorway, looking stupid for a minute, but Callan ain’t even looking at him, he’s paying attention to his sanding, and then O-Bop turns around and leaves, and McGuigan thinks maybe he should say something but there don’t seem to be nothing to say. It’s like Callan just took care of it, that’s all, and now McGuigan don’t have to worry about the West Side boyos coming by.
But after work, Callan goes and searches out O-Bop. Finds him on the corner of Eleventh and Forty-third, and they walk over to the waterfront together.
“Fuck you,” O-Bop says. “What was that?”
“That’s me telling you that my work is my work.”
“What, I can’t come say hello?”
“Not when I’m working.”
“We ain’t, what, friends no more?” O-Bop asks.
“We’re friends.”
“I dunno,” says O-Bop. “You don’t come around, no one sees you. You could come have a pint sometimes, you know.”
“I don’t hang in the bars no more.”
O-Bop laughs. “You’re gettin’ to be a regular fuckin’ Boy Scout, aren’t you?”
“Laugh if you want.”
“Yeah, I will.”
They stand there looking across the river. It’s a cold evening. The water looks black and hard.
“Yeah, well, don’t do me any favors,” O-Bop says. “You’re not any fuckin’ fun anyway since you’re on this working-class-hero, Joe-Lunchbucket thing. It’s just that people are asking about you.”
“Who’s asking about me?”
“People.”
“Peaches?”
“Look,” O-Bop says. “There’s a lot of heat right now, a lot of pressure. People getting edgy about other people maybe talking to grand juries.”
“I’m not talking to anybody.”
“Yeah, well, see that you don’t.”
Callan grabs Stevie by the lapels of his pea coat.
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“Are you getting heavy with me, Stevie?”
“No.”
A hint of a whine.
“Because you don’t get heavy with me, Stevie.”
