A Drink Before the War

by Dennis Lehane

  Angie turned on her seat, followed him with her eyes. “Eventful morning.”

  Devin had reached the other end of the bar. One by one, the men sensed him and turned around. He stood with his legs spread slightly, planted on the rubber tile, his arms hanging loosely by his sides. His hands made small circular motions.

  Tommy said, “C’mon, Sarge. Not my place.”

  Devin said, “C’mere, Roy,” very quietly.

  Roy climbed off the bar. “Me?”

  Devin nodded.

  Roy stepped through his friends, pulling the shirt down over his belly. The second he let go of it, it rolled back up like a disobedient shade. Roy said, “Yeah?”

  Devin’s hand was back down by his side before most of us realized he’d used it. Roy’s head snapped back and his legs buckled and he was quite suddenly on the floor with a shattered nose and blood jetting above his face in a small fountain.

  Devin looked down at him, kicked his foot lightly. “Roy,” he said. He kicked the foot again, a little harder. “Roy, I’m talking to you.”

  Roy moaned something and tried to raise his head, his hands filling with blood.

  Devin said, “A nigger friend of mine asked me to give you that. He said you’d understand.”

  He walked back down the bar and took his seat again. He made another pint disappear and lit another cigarette. “So, whatta you think?” he said. “Is Roy concerned now?”

  19

  We left the bar about an hour later. Roy’s friends had already taken him out, presumably to the emergency room at City. They gave Angie and me their hard-guy stares as they dragged Roy past, but they avoided Devin’s flat gaze as if he were the Antichrist.

  Devin tossed an extra twenty on the bar for Tommy’s lost business. Tommy said, “You’re a real pisser, Sarge. You gonna come in, put money down for every other fucking day they don’t come back?”

  Devin grumbled, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and did a drunken shuffle toward the door.

  Angie and I caught up with him on the street. I said, “Let me give you a ride home, Dev.”

  Devin shuffled his way into the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot. He said, “Thanks anyway, Kenzie, but I got to stay in practice.”

  I said, “For what?”

  “Case I ever drink and drive again. I’ll want to remember how I managed this time.” He turned, walking backward, and I waited for him to tip.

  He reached his rusted Camaro, got his keys out of his pocket.

  I said, “Devin,” and stepped toward him, reaching for the keys.

  His hand closed around my shirt, the knuckles pressing into my Adam’s apple, and he walked me back a few feet, his eyes swimming with ghosts. He said, “Kenzie, Kenzie,” and pushed me back against a car. He tapped my cheek lightly with his other hand. He’s got big hands, Devin. Like steaks with fingers. “Kenzie,” he said again and his eyes grew hard. He shook his head from side to side slowly. “I’ll drive. OK?” He let go of my collar and brushed at the wrinkles he’d left behind in my shirt. He gave me a smile that had no soul. “You’re all right,” he said. He turned back to his car and nodded at Angie. “Take care of yourself, Stone Fox.” He opened the door and climbed in the car. It took two turns of the ignition for the engine to turn over, then the exhaust pipe banged off the small exit ramp and the car dropped into the street. He weaved into traffic, cut off a Volvo, and turned a corner.

  I raised my eyebrows and whistled softly. Angie shrugged.

  We drove downtown and got the Vobeast out of the parking lot for a little less than it would have cost me to put a kid through med school. Angie drove it, following me to the garage where I returned the Porsche to its happy home and climbed in with her. She slid across the seat and I chugged the rolling scrap metal onto Cambridge.

  We drove through downtown, past where Cambridge becomes Tremont, past the place where Jenna went down like a rag doll in the morning sunlight, past the remains of the old Combat Zone, dying a slow but sure death at the hands of development and the X-rated video boom. Why jack off in a scuzzy movie theater when you can jack off in the comfort of your own scuzzy home?

  We drove through South Boston—Southie to everyone who isn’t a tourist or a newscaster—past strings of drab three-deckers, packed like a line of Port-o’-Potties at a rock concert. Southie amazes me. A good percentage of it is poor, overcrowded, relentlessly unkempt. The D Street housing projects are as bad as anything you’ll find in the Bronx—dirty, poorly lit, teeming with angry, crew-cut punks who roam its streets with bloodlust and baseball bats. During a St. Patrick’s Day parade a few years ago, a very Irish kid with a shamrock on his T-shirt wandered in there. He ran into a pack of other Irish kids who also had shamrocks on their T-shirts. Only difference between his T-shirt and theirs was that his said “Dorchester” in green over the shamrock and theirs said “Southie.” The D Street kids solved the difference by tossing the kid off a roof.

  We were driving up Broadway, past the babies in curlers pushing babies in carriages, past the double- and triple-parked cars and the “Niggers Stay Out” spray-painted on a store grate. Broken glass glittered from the darkness of filthy curbs and trash blew from under cars into the street. I thought of how I could step from this car and poll twenty people here, ask them why they hated “the niggers” so bad, and maybe half would probably tell me, “’Cause they got no fucking pride in their communities, man.” So what if Broadway in Southie was identical to Dudley in Roxbury, if slightly lighter?

  We crossed into Dorchester, rode up around Columbia Park and down into the neighborhood. I pulled in front of the church and we could hear the phone ringing as we climbed the stairs. Busy day. I caught it on the tenth ring. “Kenzie-Gennaro,” I said.

  Angie dropped into her seat as the voice on the other end said, “Hold on. Someone here want to talk with you.”

  I took the receiver with me as I went around the desk and sat down. Angie gave me a “Who is it?” look and I shrugged.

  A voice came on the line. “Mr. Kenzie?”

  “Last time I checked.”

  “This Patrick Kenzie?” The voice had an edge to it, someone not used to dealing with smart-asses.

  “Depends,” I said. “Who’s this?”

  “You’re Kenzie,” the voice said. “How’s the breathing?”

  I inhaled audibly, sucking it way back and expelling it in a long rush. I said, “Much better since I quit smoking, thanks.”

  “Uh-huh,” the voice said, slow like freshly sapped maple. “Well, don’t get too used to it. Might be all that more depressing when you can’t do it no more.” The maple voice was thick but light, a hint of lazy Southern afternoons hidden behind years of Northern living.

  I said, “You always talk this way, Socia, or you just in a particularly elliptical mood today?”

  Angie sat up and leaned forward.

  Socia said, “Only reason you’re still walking, Kenzie, is because we got things to talk about. Hell, I might just send someone over anyway, have them take a hammer to your spine. All I need’s your mouth as it is.”

  I sat up and scratched an itch near the small of my back. I said, “Send them by, Socia. I’ll do some more amputations. Pretty soon you’ll have an army of cripples. The Raven Gimps.”

  “Easy to talk that way, sitting nice and safe in your office.”

  “Yeah, well look, Marion, I got a business to run.”

  “You sitting down?” he said.

  “Sure am.”

  “In that chair by the boom box?”

  Everything went cold inside of me, a flush of chipped ice spilling through my arteries.

  Socia said, “You sitting in that chair, I wouldn’t get up anytime soon, less you want to see your ass blow past your head on its way out the window.” He chuckled. “Was nice knowing you, Kenzie.”

  He hung up and I looked at Angie and said, “Don’t move,” even though her moving wasn’t the problem.

  “What?” She stood up.

  The room didn’t
explode, but I damn near fainted. At least we knew he didn’t put a bomb under her chair too, just for fun. I said, “Socia said there’s a bomb under my chair.”

  She froze, a wax statue in mid-stride. The word “bomb” will do that to people. She took a deep breath. “Call the bomb squad?”

  I tried not to breathe. The possibility existed, I told myself, that the weight of the oxygen going into my lungs could put pressure on my lower extremities and detonate the bomb. It also occurred to me how ludicrous that was since the bomb was obviously triggered by a release of pressure, not a gain. So now, I couldn’t exhale. Either way I wasn’t breathing.

  I said, “Yeah, call the bomb squad.” It sounded funny, talking while I held my breath, like Donald Duck with a cold. Then I closed my eyes and said, “Wait. Look under the chair first.”

  It was an old wooden chair, a teacher’s chair.

  Angie put the phone down. She knelt by the chair. It took a few moments for her to do that. No one wants their eyes an inch from an explosive. She bent her head under the chair and I heard her exhale loudly. She said, “I don’t see anything.”

  I started to breathe again, then stopped. Possibly it was in the wood itself. I said, “Look like someone might have tampered with the wood?”

  She said, “What? I can’t understand you.”

  I took a chance and let out my breath and repeated the question.

  She was down there for six or seven hours, or so it seemed, before she said, “No.” She slid back out from under the chair and sat back on the floor. “There’s no bomb under the chair, Patrick.”

  “Great.” I smiled.

  “So?”

  “So, what?”

  “Are you going to stand up?”

  I thought of my ass flying over my head. “There’s a rush?”

  “No rush,” she said. “Why don’t you stand up?”

  “Maybe I like it here.”

  “Stand up,” she said and stood herself. She held her arms out to me.

  “I’m working up to it.”

  “Stand,” she said. “Come to me, baby.”

  I did. I put my arms on the chair and did it. Except, somehow, I was still sitting. My brain had moved, but my body was of another opinion. How professional were Socia’s people? Could they fit a bomb seamlessly into a wooden chair? Of course not. I’ve heard of people dying in a lot of ways, but getting blown up by a completely undetectable bomb in a thin wooden chair isn’t one of them. Course, maybe I was being honored by being the first.

  “Skid?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Anytime you’re ready.”

  “OK. Well, see I—”

  Her hands grabbed mine and she yanked me up out of the chair. I fell against her and we banged into the desk and didn’t blow up. She laughed, an explosion in itself, and I realized she hadn’t been entirely sure herself. But she’d pulled me out anyway. She said, “Oh, Jesus!”

  I started to laugh too, the laugh of someone who hasn’t slept in a week, a laugh along a razor blade. I held on to her, my hands tight around her waist, her breasts rising and falling against my chest. We were both drenched in sweat, but her eyes were pulsing, the dark pupils large and drunk with the taste of a moment that wasn’t our last on earth.

  I kissed her then and she returned it. For a moment, everything was heightened—the sound of a car horn four stories below, the smell of fresh summer air mingling with spring’s dust in the window screen, the salty whiff of fresh perspiration at our hairlines, the slight pain from my still swollen lips, the taste of her lips and tongue still slightly cool from the pale ale we’d drunk an hour before.

  Then the phone rang.

  She pulled back, her hands on my chest, and slid away from me along the desk. She was smiling, but it was one of disbelief and her eyes were already taking on a spectre of regret and fear. God only knows what mine looked like.

  I answered the phone with a hoarse, “Hello.”

  “You still sitting down?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m looking out the window for my ass.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, just remember, Kenzie—anyone can get to anyone, and anyone can get to you.”

  “What can I do for you, Marion?”

  “You gone come see me, have a chat with me.”

  “I am, am I?”

  “Bet your ass.” He chuckled softly.

  “Well, Marion, I’ll tell you, I’m booked solid till October. Why don’t you try back around Halloween?”

  All he said was, “Two-oh-five Howe Street.” It was all he had to say. It was Angie’s address.

  I said, “Where and when?”

  He gave it another soft chuckle. He’d read me perfectly and he knew it and knew I knew it too. “We’ll meet someplace crowded so you have the illusion of safety.”

  “Damn white of you.”

  “Downtown Crossing,” he said. “Two hours. In front of Barnes and Noble. And you come alone, or I might just have to pay a visit to that address I mentioned.”

  “Downtown Crossing,” I repeated.

  “In two hours.”

  “So I’ll feel safe.”

  He chuckled again. I figured it was a habit of his. “Yeah,” he said, “so you’ll feel safe.” He hung up.

  I did the same and looked at Angie. The room was still overcrowded with the memory of our lips touching, of my hand in her hair and her breasts swelling against my chest.

  She was in her seat, looking out the window. She didn’t turn her head. She said, “I won’t say it wasn’t nice, because it was. And I won’t try and blame it on you, because I was just as guilty. But I will say, it won’t happen again.”

  Hard to find a loophole in that.

  20

  I took the subway to Downtown Crossing, climbed up some steps that hadn’t been hosed down since the Nixon years, and stepped onto Washington Street. Downtown Crossing is the old shopping district, before there were malls and shopping plazas, back when stores were stores and not boutiques. It was refurbished in the late seventies and early eighties like most of the city, and after they opened a few boutiques, business came back. Mostly younger business—kids who were bored with the malls, or too cool or too urban to be caught dead in the suburbs.

  Washington Street is blocked off to auto traffic for three blocks where most of the shops are, so the sidewalks and streets teem with people—people going to shop, people returning from shopping, and most of all, people hanging out. The sidewalk in front of Filene’s was lined with merchant carts and packed with teenage girls and boys, black and white, leaning against display windows, goofing on adult passersby; a few couples French-kissed with the desperation of those who don’t share a bed yet. Across the street, in front of The Corner—a minimall with shops like The Limited and Urban Outfitters, plus a large food court where three or four brawls break out a day—a pack of black kids manned a radio. Chuck D and Public Enemy pounded “Fear of a Black Planet” from speakers the size of car tires, and the kids settled back and watched people walk around them. I looked at all the black faces in the massive crowd and tried to guess which ones were Socia’s crew, but I couldn’t tell. A lot of the black kids were part of the coming-from-shopping or going-to-shop crowd, but just as many were packed together in gangs, and some had that lazy, lethal look of street predators. There were plenty of white kids strewn throughout the crowd who looked similar, but worrying about them wasn’t a concern now. I didn’t know much about Socia, but I doubted he was an equal opportunity employer.

  I saw immediately why Socia had picked this location. A person could be dead ten minutes, lying facedown on the street, before someone paused to wonder what he was stepping on. Crowds are only slightly safer meeting places than abandoned warehouses, and in abandoned warehouses, you sometimes have room to move.

  I looked across the street, past The Corner, my eyes bouncing along the heads in the crowd like sheet music, slowing as they reached Barnes and Noble. The crowd thinned somewhat here, a few less teenagers. Guess bo
ok-stores aren’t ideal places to pick up babes. I was ten minutes early and I figured Socia and his crew had gotten here twenty minutes before me. I didn’t see him, but then I didn’t expect to. I had the feeling he would suddenly appear an inch away from me, a gun between my shoulder blades.

  It didn’t come between my shoulder blades. It came between my left hip and the bottom of my rib cage. It was a big .45 and seemed even bigger because of the nasty-looking silencer on the end. Socia wasn’t the one holding it either. It was a kid, sixteen or seventeen, but hard to tell with the black leather watch cap pulled down low over a pair of red Vuarnets. He had a lollipop in his mouth that he shifted from one side of his tongue to the other. He was smiling around it, like he’d just lost his virginity, and he said, “Bet you feel seriously fucking retarded about now, don’t you?”

  I said, “Compared to what?”

  Angie stepped out of the crowd with her gun against Lollipop’s crotch. She was wearing a cream-colored fedora on her head, and her long black hair was tied in a bun under it. She wore sunglasses that were bigger than Lollipop’s and ran the gun muzzle over Lollipop’s balls. She said, “Hi.”

  Lollipop’s smile faded, so I replaced it with my own. “Having fun yet?”

  The crowd all around us kept moving at their escalator pace, oblivious. Urban myopia. Angie said, “So what’s our next move?”

  Socia said, “That depends.”

  He was standing behind Angie and by the way her body tensed, I knew there was another gun back there with him too. I said, “This is getting ridiculous.”

  Four of us stood in a crowd of thousands, all interconnected like blood cells by fat squat pieces of metal. Someone in the crowd jostled my shoulder, and I hoped like hell no one had a hair trigger.

  Socia was watching me, a benign expression on his worn face. He said, “Somebody start shooting, I’ll be the one walks away. How ’bout that?”

  He almost had a point—he’d shoot Angie, Angie would shoot Lollipop, and Lollipop would definitely shoot me. Almost.

  I said, “Well, Marion, seeing how this is already about as crowded as a Japanese camera convention, I don’t figure one more body’ll hurt. Look at Barnes and Noble.”