“Hey, Meyers.” Ritter puts a flame to one of his cigarettes, motions with his hand for Will to roll down the window. “That heads-up game last night?”
“What about it?”
“That last card. What was it?”
“You really want to know?”
Ritter eviscerates him with butcher’s eyes, reduces Will’s anatomy to a diagram with dotted cutting lines.
“I didn’t look.”
“Like hell you didn’t.” Ritter rasps a cold laugh through smoke. “You’re a degenerate, Meyers. You couldn’t stop yourself if your fucking hands were tied behind your back.”
“It was my third seven,” Will says, swallowing hard.
Ah, so that’s what a catbird smile on Ritter’s face looks like. Hopefully he’ll never see it again.
“You’re fucking pathetic, Meyers.” Ritter’s cigarette glows like a stick of lava between his long fingers. “What was it?”
“A king of hearts.” Will gives Ritter the fullness of his black eyes.
“Get used to the feeling.” Ritter flicks the cigarette off Will’s forehead.
It’s true. Will acknowledges he’s lost this game and will lose again, but what Ritter has yet to learn is knowing you are going to lose provides a serenity that allows you to absorb that bad beat on the horizon, that flush on the river that paralyzes those trip-nines you had on the turn. There’s freedom in loss, the empty well. And anyhow, Will’s plan has always been liquid because nothing lasts forever.
When Diane returns home, she’ll provide the details, though at this juncture they hardly matter. For one reason or another, McKenna is making his move right now and has them both drawing dead.
Which means the time has come to change the game.
FORTY-SIX
Back at the loft, nobody’s home. Nicolette could be anywhere, and David’s left a note saying he’ll be at his girlfriend’s until the power is restored. In general, roommate notes tend to be exercises in passive-aggressive communication; I’ve opened the refrigerator door to find death threats related to cheese consumption, peered into mirrors to read lipstick scrawls detailing the sanctity of personalized towels. What David means by “I won’t be back until the electric is on” is really “don’t make me pay this bill, because you won’t be happy when you see me in the light.”
There are candles throughout my room, and I light them. My bed’s half stripped, my two Persian rugs bunched and shredded at the corners courtesy of the cat, who has the uncanny ability to find the most expensive item in a room and ruin it.
The candle glow is soothing, the lights flickering off the worn spines of the plays and novels plucked from my father’s once vast collection: Steinbeck leaning heavily on Arthur Miller, leaning on Tim O’Brien; the crime and mystery writers he enjoyed—Chandler, Cruz, Parker, Block—lurking in dark corners with Carver and Burroughs teetering drunkenly over the edge, competing to see who can hang the farthest off the shelf without falling down and out. Books are heaped on the floor, piled in corners; take a ticket, maybe I’ll read you next.
Actually, that’s a lie. I’m not nearly the reader my father was. My sole motive for salvaging his collection is rooted in a desire to stay connected to him. See, my father didn’t just read books, he folded pages he enjoyed, circled whole paragraphs in pen, wrote responses, comments, and questions in the margins as if the stories were ongoing conversations he was having with the writers, arguments with the characters. I read my father’s books to talk to him still, to resurrect a voice that’s mostly gone missing, to remind myself of the man who lived on the sharp edges of a city that changed the rules on the fly, playing the middle in a lifelong game where the margin for error was as thin as the blade of a razor.
How much has changed? My father grew up in the West End, a neighborhood razed and replaced by parking garages and sterile high-rises that taunt commuters with a sign outside the gates that reads IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME NOW and that Zero and I would occasionally vandalize in his honor with alterations such as IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D HAVE NO SOUL NOW or IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE SUCKING DICK NOW. Who remembers the West End anymore? For all I know, my father resides there again—the distant past is so much closer for him than the present, the neighborhood streets alive and calling to him, the echo of the dead still ringing in his ears.
Was my mother’s voice calling out to him too? She certainly wasn’t calling out to me. When was the last time I heard from my mother? That’s a cruel question to ask someone whose family history you have stuffed deep on a hard drive in some bureaucratic office. I can smell her, though, her scent familiar to me still because my father kept articles of her clothes when I was younger, the alchemy of her skin and perfume—rosewater and something like chamomile—a forever scent in my memory.
The bottle from her perfume is on my father’s dresser, empty now, and it was years before I realized that every so often he’d been spraying my pillow, his covert way of keeping her present for me and maybe for him as well, her scent lingering into my teens as if she was always nearby, watching over us all. If my father still retains that olfactory memory, would the scent spark something in him if he caught it nearby, would he recognize her in mist, invisible, alive?
What I’d told Wells and Brill about my conversation with Agent Wellington Lee was the truth, but it wasn’t the complete conversation by far. Lee had an interesting story to tell me, most of which I already knew, but parts of which read like some Bizarro World parallel universe: Following the Harvard bombing, my mother fell off the FBI’s radar as if she’d suddenly stepped into a black hole and vanished off the face of the planet. Until Bank of Boston.
Bank of Boston changed everything for my mother, because even as former activists surfaced to resume their lives, she stayed under the radar, maybe traveling across the country, precursor to those sporadic postcards I would later receive when I was a boy, stamped in different states and then, without fail, confiscated by the FBI, who were also listening in on the static-filled phone calls I would sometimes get from her up until my tenth birthday, every word bugged and recorded; my mother playing with the FBI’s feverish desire to find a rhythm to her contacts, a deep code as she defied habit and predictability.
She would call on Christmas Eve, even though we are Jewish. Three days after New Year’s. Twelve days after my sixth birthday. Nine in the morning. Eleven thirty at night. Happy Kwanzaa. Mommy loves you. Take care of your father. He needs you.
Agent Wellington Lee is a fresh face, but the FBI is no stranger to me. Their presence, ironically, is one of the few constants in my life, something I could depend on. In a way, the FBI made missing my mother easier to deal with—her powers to thwart such a vast and organized entity breathed life into my imagination, my ability to cope with a highly irregular upbringing.
By 1980 my mother was living full-time in Boston—a fact that must rub salt into the wounds of the local FBI who failed to apprehend her—which is a few years before Zero, abandoned and left to the streets, was rescued by my parents. My father’s deep connections in city and state government facilitated his legal adoption, but the paperwork was a mere formality; fate had thrown them together, and my brother’s loyalty to my father has always been unyielding.
Some of this history is what the FBI has pieced together from a variety of sources, Lee admitted; some by what my father had proffered in his yearly debriefings, the FBI a constant presence in his life as well. He met my mother at a bar named Jack’s on Mass Ave., where he ran a weekly Thursday-night poker game and my mother waitressed. A year later, they were married and living in Joan Baez’s former apartment on the corner of Bow and Arrow Streets in Cambridge.
My father either never knew of my mother’s radical past—unlikely, considering the personal narrative Brill shared with me in his car—or he knew and never spoke of it with us. Zero and I opted not to press him for any information in any capacity, our adolescent fears being that he would interpret our curiosity as a rebuke of the sac
rifices he’d made to raise us on his own. Everything makes sense. Nothing makes sense. When was the last time I heard from my mother? How about when was the last time I cleaned my room?
I start by marrying trash and bringing it to the kitchen barrel. I stretch fresh sheets on the bed and light a stick of pine incense off a melting candle. I carry stacks of my father’s books and find places for them on the shelves, pausing once in a while to reflect on a lurid cover or obscure subject I’d never known my father took an interest in.
“More books,” I say out loud as the cat saunters into the room, fresh off a twenty-hour nap. “Less cats. Whattaya think of them apples?”
Not much. But he does regard the room with a quizzical look, trying to figure out how to take up three quarters of the blanket now that it’s spread evenly over the futon. When he figures it out, I join him with an edition of Hamlet I pulled from under the novel My Ántonia, good company even for a Danish prince.
My father folded many of the play’s pages, and there are notes written in the margins in his loopy script, but there’s no message in his words, no discourse on betrayal or loyalty; they’re just notes, an aha! here, a not to be trusted there. By the time I skip to the ghost of Hamlet’s father crying out for revenge, the cat’s gathered the lion’s share of the blanket.
“Murder?” says Hamlet. Wake up! wrote my father.
The candles dwindle. The cat rolls over and sticks his nose between his paws. Ophelia drowns herself in the stream. Cry me a river, scribbled my father. The queen drinks poisoned wine. Laertes and Hamlet take turns cutting each other with poisoned swords. My father’s parting words: An empty stage.
It strikes me how simple those words are, yet in the context of his torturously slow exit, the observation is prescient. Only the ghosts remain. Or maybe I’m giving him too much credit, bending his words to fit the mess I’ve written myself into.
In 2004, when the Red Sox won their first championship in nearly a century, someone printed up T-shirts that read What would Johnny do?, a playful note referencing Johnny Damon, the messianic-looking BoSox center fielder who bore a remarkable resemblance to Jesus Christ. This is the question I would ask my father if I knew he could truly hear my voice. What would you do, Pops, if the legendary Boston mobster Devlin McKenna was back in town, dropping bodies and desperate enough now to trust someone like Darryl Jenkins to wash his blood money, yet still vicious and calculating enough to chase it down like a terrier going after a cornered rat? I’m listening. What would you do?
Well, here’s what I do. I blow out what’s left of the flames, nudge the cat, reclaiming my turf, and look toward the night sky on the second of what feels like the longest two days of my life. Though it’ll be light in a couple of hours, the moon is still hanging in the corner of my window, a few clouds transparent as gauze drifting past, as stars surrounded by stars flicker high up in the heavenly distance, like Wells and Brill and Lee, just doing their goddamn jobs.
FORTY-SEVEN
I dream of my father.
He is in his element, whole again, sitting in the dealer’s slot of an oval poker table, green felt, black border, smoke. I sit directly across from him, men in dark suits filling the other seats, their faces hidden inside a darkness that envelops the table’s outer ring. Equal piles of black, red, green, and blue chips sit on the table just inside the border, stacked neatly in front of each player. My chips are a mess; that’s how I always play them.
Superstitious.
“Seven Stud.” My father spins cards around the table, the corners sticking like ninja stars. Another round makes two down and then he dishes faceup. Seven players. My up card is a three of spades; lowest card showing is forced into the initial bet. I throw in two black chips. I have no idea what they’re worth.
“In the blind,” my father says, meaning I’ve yet to peek my down cards. He smiles at me, the long crooked scar under his lip glowing. The table calls. My father deals another round of up cards. I get a black king to go with my three. A spade.
“Schizoid,” my father says to me, “but spading.” He taps the felt in front of the player directly to his right, showing a pair of queens. “Ladies,” he says.
Ladies bets a stack of greens. I look at my down cards for the first time. Four of spades. King of diamonds. I have the queens beat. I call. The whole table calls.
“Family pot.” My father peels off another round of up cards. Queens gets the king I was looking for. Somebody pairs up tens. I get a seven of hearts.
“Tens are new,” my father says. He smiles, his off-color front teeth showing. “Queens still high and betting.”
“It’s good to be the queen,” I say. “She gets high and she gets to bet.”
“Shush.” My father’s smile is gone. “Queens high.” He taps the space in front of the queens with a king.
“Queens high,” I say. “I know someone who went to Queens High. Didn’t graduate, though. I heard he was the joker of the class.”
My father stares at me. I mime locking it up, tossing the key. Queens bets five blacks. Everybody calls.
“Pot’s right. Last up card.”
I get a five of spades. I have four cards to a flush, a gut-shot pull of any six to get a straight; a pair of kings. Queens gets another up queen.
“Triple ladies,” my father says. “Betting.”
Triple Queens pushes his whole stack forward. The table folds out of turn, grunts, and curses, the darkness and smoke swallowing the men whole. Except for me. I look at my down cards again.
“What are you thinking?” my father says.
“Lotta outs,” I say. One more card coming if I call. A spade of any kind would give me a flush, the six would bring a small straight like Waltzing Matilda, and another king would make it triple kings. Any pair to go with the queens, a king or another queen has me beat even if I river one of the cards I’m looking for.
Devlin McKenna hunches forward over his cards, staring at me under lids frozen at half-mast.
“What are you thinking?” There’s no judgment in my father’s voice, just asking. I stare into McKenna’s dead eyes, see my reflection.
“Pot value?” I say, calculating the pile in the middle, the odds.
Devlin McKenna’s fingers are bony claws. He bends the cards as he holds them. His pupils dilate into skulls.
“Zesty?” my father says.
“All in.” I push my mess into the middle. McKenna leans back into darkness.
“Last one down,” my father says.
FORTY-EIGHT
Britta slips into my dream on a wave of vanilla surf, navigating the obstacle course of my room as if she’s been here before, can pierce the dark with her vampire eyes. I breathe her in before I sense her physical presence, before I hear her clothes falling off like the rustle of a breeze through dune weeds, before she slips through the darkness into my bed and I open my eyes to see the eclipse of the snub-nosed revolver in her hand, feel the warmth of her body molding to mine, her bare chest pressed tightly against my back. We lie that way in the dark, the gun held loosely over my shoulder, the warm metal brushing against my chest, until the rhythm of our breathing becomes one, her warmth flooding my wounds, my pain evaporating, the tug of the stitches melting into flesh.
I want to tell her that Gus has been murdered, that Darryl will kill her if he finds her, that their greed has set into motion events that have spiraled out of control, forced me to make promises I can’t keep, write checks I can’t cash.
“Britta—”
“Shhh. Not now.” She slips the gun past my head under the pillow, runs her hand down my chest, flat-palming the ridges of my stomach.
“They’re looking for you,” I say.
“But not here.”
“Darryl—”
“What part of not now don’t you understand?” Her hand slides lower, finds me. “This part of you understands just fine. You always ready this quick, Zesty?”
“Fastest messenger in Boston,” I remind her.
“I hope not.”
I turn over and she straddles me, bends forward and plants her forehead squarely between my clavicles under my chin, her hair splayed over the top of her head, exposing the white nape of her neck. Her elbows dig into my chest. With one arm she reaches under herself, the back of her wrist brushing me as she shudders and starts grinding her hips, the flesh of her thighs clamped tight against mine.
“You sure you need me for this?” The top of her head forces my chin toward the ceiling. I try to crane free, pulling her hair back hard.
“I want to watch,” I say in a voice that belongs to Kermit the Frog.
“Don’t, you’ll go blind. Hold my hips.” With her free hand, she pries my fingers loose from her hair. “Tighter.”
She slides her hands under my waist, digs her nails into my lower spine, searching my eyes in the darkness, swaying in predatory rotations as I hold her. Her lips glisten. If she touches me, I swear this will be over in an instant.
“I’ve been a baaad girl, Zesty,” she purrs, her nails sinking deeper as she slides her tongue around my ear. “Can you handle a bad girl, baby?”
“I committed three felonies yesterday.” I arch my back trying to avoid puncture wounds.
“Not bad enough,” she says, suddenly driving all her weight backward, pulling me off the sheets on top of her, her hair whipping past my face as a liquid heat envelops me. Too fast! Her movements are way too fast, her hips arched too high, too tight, and it’s been way too long.
“Oh no, not yet!” she pleads, pulling me down to her breasts, as if that’ll help prolong things.
Distraction. I need distraction, bad thoughts: Desk job. Khakis and polo shirts. Telemarketing. Retail sales. Not good enough: Collin Sullivan, a bloodied Cyclops splattered across a Wells Fargo truck. Derrick Coney bled out under a rusted hoop. Gus sprawled out in his piss-stained foyer on a bed of broken glass. An intersection marked with my own blood.
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