The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  “Two truckburgers rare and a large milk,” Harriman called to the counterman as he made his way the length of the diner to where Maddie waited. A “whole milk is holy” needlepoint by the same waitress decorated the milk dispenser. Harriman traded greetings, a handshake or slap on the back, a whisper, at every stool along the counter, every booth along the wall of windows.

  “So, my rose upon the rood of time,” he said when he reached her. “What witchery are you up to at this ungodly hour?”

  “I found this in the Chelsea synagogue.” She dropped the envelope with the identification bracelet in the middle of the table. “And the swastika stencil.”

  With a pencil, Harriman picked up the identification bracelet and held it to the light, then returned it to the envelope, sealing it. “Trojan horse,” he said.

  “Who’s Badger?” Maddie asked. The name Badger Thomas was engraved beside the Trojan horse.

  “Silvy Thomas’s brother. She’s Mabi’s woman.” The waitress brought the truckburgers and milk, sneering at Maddie as she set the order on the table.

  Maddie ignored her. “This is why Ugolino wanted a change of venue. He figured out the connection.”

  Harriman filled his mouth with truckburger. He ripped a napkin from the dispenser and wiped his chin. “I thought it was Levy’s absence from Capablanca.”

  Maddie continued, “The bracelet links Chelsea to the Trojans. I’m betting the stencil links the Trojans to Bumper’s murder. I’m betting it’s his blood on the stencil.”

  “Interesting theories.”

  “Worth investigating.”

  “By the police.”

  “I don’t trust Ugolino,” Maddie said, “especially after he handed off the case to Angelo the Sweeper.”

  “Why would Ugolino protect Mabi and the Trojans? A black, a Jew, one scalp’s as good as the other for him.”

  “Not when the black is fat on drug money and the Jew indigent.”

  “Speculation.”

  “Often the first step toward the truth.”

  Harriman chewed his truckburger. His facial expression, earnest as if he were trying to solve a puzzle, told Maddie his mind was not on his food. His eyes snapped back into focus, fixing on her as if she were a fugitive, armed and dangerous

  “If this is evidence,” he said, “you can’t withhold it. You could be disbarred. I could be fired and lose my pension. Your da would be the first to agree with me.”

  “If I’m right, and my gut tells me I am, you’ll be a hero and Ugolino will be doing time for obstructing justice. As for my da, I think he’d back me on this one.”

  Maddie wanted to believe her da would. She had last seen him more than nine years before on a Friday afternoon in September, a month after she sat for the bar exam, two months before the announcement of the results. Years of smoking cigarettes and inhaling the oily fumes of the punch press room had killed him. The afternoon of his wake, a few private moments before the arrival of the mourners, she leaned forward and kissed him on his forehead, leaving as their last tangible link a smudge caused by her lipstick. She examined her da’s face, searching the hollows of his cheeks and the shadow of his beard for clues as to the whereabouts of his soul. He looked so serene, so much the gentleman in his burial suit. He had finally escaped to the rural corner of his beloved Ireland, reunited in heaven with all who loved him and with all whom he loved.

  She had felt so abandoned that day nine years ago, standing alone beside her da’s open casket, greeting mourners, accepting their platitudes with the kindness with which they were offered. Being the only child of only children had never bothered her before. She never thought about it. Yet, now, her side of the Devlin family would go extinct like the dinosaurs with herself eternally shamed by the lies of a false informer. More than her da lay dead in the casket. She felt weightless, without substance, buffeted like a milkweed in a strong wind. The long line of mourners crowding the foyer of the funeral home and filling the parlor did not dispel her loneliness. Soon, these people would leave, go back to their own lives, their own problems, reducing their connection to her to a polite hello, how are you, on Sunday morning after Mass.

  Her mind drifted as she greeted the callers, reserving enough concentration to address each by name, to thank them for their condolences. She had spent too much of her life burying people, her ma, her daughter, her da. Who was left to bury her? Love wasn’t worth the sorrow it brought. Father Curry told her to remember the happy times, but how could she be truly happy knowing life was so ephemeral. Maybe the nuns had it right. In high school she believed only women afraid of happiness hid inside the nun’s habit. Maybe it wasn’t fear, but wisdom to realize the only true happiness was eternal happiness which only came from falling in love with God’s only begotten Son; but, the nuns didn’t seem so happy either. She could tell by the way they walked, slowly as if life had already passed them by.

  That day at her da’s wake she had asked for a glass of water and Moynihan led her into a private parlor reserved for immediate family. The mourners waiting their turn grumbled at the interruption. By the window of the parlor another couple sat, their heads bowed in prayer. Maddie was grateful for their presence. She closed her eyes and rested her head on her hands, trying to merge into the silence. Clothes rustled, people rising, as quietly as possible, tiptoeing so they wouldn’t disturb her. She raised her head out of politeness to acknowledge them.

  “Duncan!”

  “I’m sorry about your dad.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “My wife, Natalie.”

  “I feel like I knew your father, the way Duncan talked about him,” Natalie said. She had a soft, kind voice, the perfect voice to soothe a young child with a scraped knee or elbow.

  “I heard about Elizabeth,” Duncan said. “I was in California. I bought a card, but I couldn’t bring myself to mail it. I was going to call, but . . . I guess I figured you didn’t want to hear from me.”

  “I didn’t want to hear from anyone,” Maddie said. “When are you due?” she asked Natalie.

  “Five weeks.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “James if it’s a boy; Colleen for a girl.”

  Maddie wanted to keep her talking. The peacefulness of her voice, the soft, smooth flow of her words. “Are you here for a visit?”

  “We’re moving to Boston,” Duncan said. “I have a grant to do blood research. Somehow I ended up in hematology.”

  “I pegged you as a pediatrician,” Maddie said.

  “Hon.” Natalie leaned against the back of a couch.

  “She tires easily in the heat,” Duncan said.

  Maddie offered her hand, first to Natalie, then to Duncan, keeping her arm stiff so he couldn’t lean in and kiss her. “Thanks for coming. Good luck with the baby.”

  Maddie lingered in the parlor to give them a chance to leave. Something about Natalie’s voice told Maddie they could become great friends, not acquaintances who made believe they were friends by playing bridge; but Maddie knew they never would. It wouldn’t be fair to Duncan. Nor to herself.

  College had divorced her and Duncan; Boston College for her, Notre Dame for him. Maddie had also been accepted at Notre Dame, but she needed a scholarship and Boston College offered her one. Three days before Duncan left for Notre Dame, he came over to fix her bike. When he had finished, she invited him in for lemonade. They cuddled on the living room couch while he finished his drink, then she kissed him, enjoying the taste of lemonade in his mouth. When he closed his eyes, she pulled up her top and pressed his hand against her breast. The feeling of his hand on her breast gave her the same sense of being connected, being anchored, as when they held hands and she wondered if this was the difference between sex and love. As they kissed, she saw herself, sixty years in the future, flabby and wrinkled, and she wondered if Duncan would be there for her.

  Soon, they were naked, lying on the floor, and she could feel the summer breeze blowing against her skin. She guided him into her, the pain not as ba
d as the anticipation, and as he moved, she became wetter. She moved with him, answering each thrust with a thrust of her own until, like a flash of heat lightening in summer, he filled her with himself, then deflated, too limp to continue, and slipped out of her, his penis lying wet and shrunken against her thigh.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

  She guided his hand to her, but he jerked it away as if her wetness repelled him. He stood up, saying it was getting late. She reached for him; but he had started dressing, slipping into his underwear, then his shorts and jersey. “Hold me. Please.”

  He left quickly and she lay there on the damp towel in the middle of her living room floor listening to the click of the reflector in the spokes of the front wheel of his bike as he pedaled away. She felt as if she had been widowed before being married.

  Duncan neither phoned nor wrote from Notre Dame until President Kennedy’s assassination when he called and tried to comfort her. She also tried to comfort him, but all they could do was cry and, for the first time when it really mattered, she realized Duncan would never comfort her again.

  As that weekend unfolded, the weekend of Dallas and Oswald and Ruby and a new president being sworn in on an airplane flying toward Washington, Maddie sat in front of the television, feeling the grief of Carolyn and John John, adding it to her own; and when John John saluted his fallen father, she gathered her own personal grief around her like a winter coat, tied it around her throat like a scarf, and rode the Green Line into Park Street, walking down the stairs to Park Street Under where the Harvard Square-Ashmont line stopped, a true subway with a live third rail. She sat on a bench beneath a no-smoking sign pushing at cigarette butts with the toes of her shoes, buttoned up against the November cold, which came from within. Two, three, four trains, some for Harvard Square, some for Ashmont, arrived, stopped, departed. With each, she thought about jumping on the tracks, electrocuting herself, being crushed.

  The day passed and the trains continued arriving, stopping, departing, mostly empty because everyone was home watching history on television. Soon, though it really wasn’t soon, a police officer told her the station would be closing for the night, the last train would be arriving in a few minutes. She caught the last train home where, still wrapped tightly in her coat and scarf, she climbed into bed, too numb to dream, too tired to sleep.

  Sunrise, she tossed and turned, exhausted. Downstairs, over the soft sound of the television, she heard her da and Uncle George talking quietly about how worried they were at her reaction to Jack Kennedy’s assassination, how it seemed so much more extreme than her reaction to her ma’s death, and whether Father Curry should be asked to counsel her. Listening to their voices, Maddie realized her da, for all his silences, for all his solitude, for the way he dragged her hither and thither in Dublin, loved her in the special way fathers love daughters. She stripped off her winter coat and unwound the scarf from around her neck. She smelled from sleeping in her clothes and she wanted to shower for her da, then hug him and cry on his shoulder and tell him that she loved him and that she would be all right and to thank him for being her da. The shower felt good and, for the first time since Kilmainham, since Traitor’s Hell, she felt clean.

  As those memories retreated back into storage and memories of her da’s wake replaced them, she remembered that Harriman had joined her in the sitting room on that day nine years earlier.

  “You holding up okay?”

  “I saw Duncan Siward. He’s married. His wife is pregnant.”

  “People are waiting.”

  She offered her hand so he could help her stand. “Have you chosen a reading?”

  “I was leaning toward The Second Coming, but I wonder if it’s too political. Would you prefer something else?”

  “One of the early poems,” she said. “Maybe The Song of Wandering Aengus. ‘ . . . the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun . . .’” She drew a deep breath. “The Christmas after ma died, we went to Ireland, Kilmainham, Traitor’s Hell, Glasnevin. He made me promise . . . ”

  “He’s finally free, Maddie.” Harriman had placed his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t take his place in the cell.”

  Now, nine years later, April of 1981, she had become her father’s proxy in the prison of the past, a pariah to everyone for whom St. Patrick’s Day was a holy day of obligation. Sitting across from Harriman in the back booth of Behan’s, she said, “I want you to arrest Badger Thomas.”

  “Charges?” Yellow yoke dried on Harriman’s chin.

  “The bracelet is more than enough probable cause for an arrest. I should know.”

  “Not if the police don’t know about it. Not if it’s not logged into the evidence room.” He bit into his second truckburger. “What’s your theory?”

  “It puts him at the scene the way the skull-cap put Levy at the scene and you arrested him.”

  Harriman lowered his half-eaten truckburger.

  “Keep the bracelet, but . . . ”

  “Chain of custody, Maddie,” he interrupted. “How will I establish chain of custody?”

  “I’m taking the stencil to Duncan Siward at Mass. General,” Maddie continued, “so he can run blood grouping tests.”

  “You’re playing a dangerous game, Maddie. A call from Ugolino and the DA will charge you with withholding evidence, tampering with evidence, interfering with a police investigation, God knows what else.”

  “What police investigation? Angelo the Sweeper’s dog and pony show spoon fed to the press? Ugolino himself told me he had his man as soon as Charlie found the skull-cap. No. I turn this in and Procaccino will make it disappear faster than the booze at a cop’s retirement party.”

  “I’ll have your back.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. The DA will charge you as my co-conspirator. I don’t want you to sacrifice your pension over something that’s my responsibility.”

  Maddie twitched as the caffeine roiled her nervous system. She had scooped up the bracelet and sealed it in the envelope without showing it to the rabbi or Moskovitzky. She doubted they had seen her do it. The argument was so obvious: a plant, a frame, the same argument she planned to use to explain Levy’s skull-cap. She cursed the stupidity of her haste.

  “Brand me a traitor, but I’m an honest traitor. Ugolino may lie to prove Levy guilty, but I won’t lie to prove him innocent.”

  “I’ll need to take your statement tonight because I’m leaving for Dublin after early Mass.”

  “Why now? I need you here.”

  “Ugolino. Some conference on international extradition procedures. I think he suspects something and wants me out of the way. I’ll be a phone call and a five-hour flight away.” Harriman covered her hands with his. “You’ll have to sign off on it under the pains and penalties of perjury.”

  “Is my credibility that low?”

  “Standard operating procedure.”

  “Not in any witness statements I’ve been given.”

  “Yes, your credibility’s that low.”

  “With you, too?” When Harriman did not reply, she asked, “Who’ll make the arrest?”

  “If there’s an arrest,” he spoke slowly to emphasize the iffy nature of the situation, “the gang unit. It’s their play whether I’m here or not. There’s hell to pay if anyone trespasses into their jurisdiction.”

  “Will they?”

  “I’ll call in an IOU.”

  “They know what they’re doing?”

  “Ever overturn one of their collars?”

  “Thank you, Uncle George.”

  For the first time since she could remember, Maddie didn’t notice the heat.

  PART II

  MABI

  CHAPTER 9

  EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 19, 1981

  -1-

  Mabi felt trapped inside a light bulb he couldn’t turn off.

  Chelsea had been perfectly executed. The Trojans had assembled at their home base in the cellar of the tenement where Gabe Tucker once lived. Mabi had stolen the n
ame of the gang from a comic book Gideon, his old man but not his old head, had long ago thrown in his face. When Gabe Tucker lived there, a lily-white slumlord from lily-white Lexington owned the building, but now the Trojans owned it, trading it for a promise not to firebomb the slumlord’s house or office. The gang had acquired several other buildings the same way. It held title to all in the names of straws, nominee realty trusts dreamed up by one of the lawyers the Trojans had on retainer, another scam like Ta-Kome Pizza, a store front that sold Sicilian pizza by the square or by the pie, to launder drug money. Lighting, plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, and building supplies to renovate the buildings were tithed by whites doing business in the black community. For the Trojans’ chill pad, local merchants donated furniture, appliances, and assorted play-things such as pool tables, stereos, televisions, and video games. Cates for Carpets contributed floor covering, tile in the kitchen and bathroom, wall-to-wall in the other rooms; Bendet’s Home Furnishings, couches, chairs, and accessories.

  For Chelsea, the Trojans had worn light weight running shoes with black rubber soles, black dungarees, black jerseys decorated with the silhouette of a Trojan horse in a dusky shade of gray so dark it was invisible to anyone more than a few feet away, and black gloves. Lampblack smeared on their cheeks and foreheads absorbed the glare from their sweat. Theatrical make-up blackened their teeth. They costumed themselves to be as visible as ravens on a moonless night.

  “Everything ready?” Mabi had asked.

  “The pig it’s gutted and iced, the blood bottled,” Spider, Mabi’s warlord, had said. “We jacked a truck-load of crystal glasses and they be smashed.”

  “Firebombs?”

  “Three dozen,” Spider replied.

  “Explosives?”

  “The sun be shining tonight,” Scorpion, the explosives expert, replied.

  “We need an hour inside,” Mabi said. “Nothing goes down ’til we done and clear. Badger! Grab that shoe box and ride with me.”