“Age ain’t pitchin’ horseshoes, son,” Dennison had said. “No leaners; close don’t count. Next May I turn forty-seven. That doesn’t make me ‘close to forty-five,’ all right? It is reasonably close, just about as close’s it is to forty-seven, but what it makes me’s forty-six. Eight years and a half from ‘Bye-bye, now; thanks loads’ from this outfit. When you get to my age, you’ll find you’re runnin’ the stables where the steeds come in to rest up and the fresh teams get hitched up. They don’t have to hurry any nearer, not a bit, when it’s my attention they want. Those horses’ve moved in with me.
“So that’s the first big difference between us,” Dennison had said. “The years really change your perspective. If they don’t you’ve got something wrong with you, because they should. So if I were in your place, with my first choice doing a full grovel and kissing ass right now—and also looking like I really mean it, which is the real hard part—because that’s the only way there is to save a great career doing something that I like and that I’m really good at; and with my second choice being to tell them: ‘Stick it up your ass,’ I’d most likely take the second. Because I’d be giving up about a third as many years in this work as you’ll be giving up, if that’s what you decide to do, and I’ve got my reputation made and cast in cement. With that record I can get myself a new job that will pay me slightly more than I’m making now, and the only reason I don’t take it now is that I’d get hurt retiring early on my pension from this job.
“You haven’t been in long enough to get that kind of security yet, so you’ve still got it to get. That’s a big-big difference, Harry. If each of us’s got twenty-five thousand dollars to spend on a car, and I can get myself a Porsche for that money, I’m not being extravagant. But if for some crazy reason the Porsche people tell you that same car is going to cost you four times what I’m paying, a hundred thousand dollars—they don’t like your looks or something, so your money’s not as good—you should be committed for observation if you buy the fucking thing.
“And besides that factor,” Dennison had said, “there’s another difference in our situations. Maybe even more important, when you come right down to it. There’s a reason, you see, for my ability to analyze your problem so quickly and incisively, and with such confidence. In fact I’m just a bit surprised that a bright lad like yourself hasn’t already figured it out for himself.”
“You’ve got to be shittin’ me,” Dell’Appa had said. “A well-behaved fellow like you are, such nice table manners and all? You actually fell in the toilet?”
“I am not shitting you, not a bit of it,” Dennison had said. “And I went in head-first, just like you did. I’m not saying what I did was exactly the same thing you’ve done now, or that I was precisely the same age as you are now when I fucked up good and proper. But the similarities are too big to overlook, and the differences’re too small to matter.”
“What’d you do?” Dell’Appa had said.
“Hah,” Dennison had said, “not a chance. Time and the gradual hardening of the arteries have combined to dim the memories of those of my superiors who witnessed my youthful indiscretions. Disrespectful acts, to be sure, but mitigated nonetheless by the fact they’d been committed in nothing more than sheer momentary excess of boyishly-exuberant, animal high spirits. In other words, if you think I’m gonna relive all of that embarrassment for you now, a good three-almost-now years since the last witness to it got shitfaced at his own retirement party and thanked me for driving him home afterwards by reminding me of the whole humiliating episode, in ignominious detail, all the way down Route Three to old Cape Cod, well, you’ve lost your mind, boy. There’s no other explanation.”
“I can find out, you know,” Dell’Appa had said.
“Not where you’re going, you can’t,” Dennison had said. “So if you try you’ll have to do it somewhere around this end of the world, and if you do that, I’ll find out, and I will take offense. Whereupon I’ll then proceed to fix your ass so good you’ll never get it back here. Your kid’ll have children of his own, swimming in your pool in Whitman, begging Doctor-Grammy Gayle to tell them once again the story that’s a legend in your family, bigger’n the one about good old Rip Van Winkle: how Grampy Harry left for Hampshire County one day, on a big hush-hush assignment, and never did come back.
“ ‘That was the last time that we ever saw him,’ she’ll say, with a tear in her eye. ‘None of us ever laid eyes on him again, the rotten son of a bitch, no-good, skip-town scalawag. Not once after that fateful day. He’s with God now, kiddies, down there with his God.’
“ ‘But God isn’t “down there, Grammy,’ ” the kiddies will then clamor, ‘God’s up there, in Heaven, with the angels. It’s the Devil who’s down there in Hell, Doctor Grammy, with the bad men: all the bad men and the Devil.’
“ ‘Don’t contradict me, you fresh little bastards,’ Doctor-Grammy Gayle’ll say to the kiddies, giving each of the tykes a smart cuff. ‘Doc Grammy knew her old Harry lots better’n you did and needs no cheap lip from you ilk. Harry had his own God: he worshipped the Devil, he did. That’s what “full of the old Harry” means.’
“And, coincidentally enough, that is now exactly what you’ve got to convince the Man or Someone Who Knows Him that you really aren’t full of. That you’re basically an extremely nice guy, and if you somehow gave him the impression that you’re a real wise-ass, and a rule-breaker and scape-grace, which in fact you are, in spades, that was totally inadvertent and entirely incorrect. Or, in the alternative, if someone else, some malicious, underhanded, lying, treacherous sneak, deliberately gave him the impression that is what you are, well, all you can say is that you really regret that and you’re sure he knows, from his own experience, it’s pretty hard to go through life in this kind of job without picking up some enemies along the way.” Dennison had made wet kissing sounds, like someone calling a cat.
Dell’Appa had sighed, slapped his palms on his thighs and stood up. “Okay,” he had said, “what’s done is done. No help for it, I guess. It just seems awful strange to me, is all. I came in here fifteen months ago. I survived Bob Brennan’s hazing without even getting in a fistfight with him, let alone shooting him or tampering with the brakes on his car. I took over that Salem arson thing that’d gone nowhere for almost a year, had Cannon going nuts, got it modeled, and now right after Christmas it’s going to the grand jury. Wrapped up. Finished. Complete. Last couple weeks I’ve been doing what you told me, pulling up all the data that we’ve got on those small-banking interests, and we’ve really got a lot of it, to see if it looks any different when we get it integrated, as of course it will. It’s begun to already. And now all of a sudden here I’m getting shipped out for more seasoning in the minor leagues.
“I dunno, Bry,” he had said. “I still don’t really know what to make of it. If it wasn’t you sitting there, if it was someone that I didn’t know and trust like I do you, who was sitting in that chair right now and telling me what you just told me, that it’s strictly personal, just someone that I happened to piss off without even knowing I was doing it at the time, and he’s getting even now, I would almost have to think that there was something funny going on. That the reason for this memo, for the decision to do this, this sudden so-called ‘detachment,’ has to be that I’ve gotten someone somewhere very fucking nervous about something he’s been doing for a good while, or he did ’til pretty recently, that made him a lot of money—but that no one’s found out about yet. And he doesn’t want them to, either. That’s why he’s been so careful to cover his tracks, up to now, and he’s done a good job of it, too. I don’t even know myself yet what it is I’ve gotten into, that in time’d lead me to him if I kept on with what I’m doing.
“As I won’t, of course, keep on, not if I’m going to be out there in Northampton, catching someone in the sheriffs office padding county purchase orders, for eighty pounds of powdered eggs to feed the House inmates breakfasts in August, when they only used seventy-two. Invoicing fif
ty gallons of green-vomit paint to redecorate the basement of the courthouse when the job only took eight, and the other forty-two weren’t even green paint; those were the cans of various colors chosen by county employees having their own homes redone. Using the labor of ten of those inmates who didn’t eat all of the eggs, and who promised not to run away if they could have conjugal visits while they were out on the jobs.”
“Well, hey,” Dennison had said, “that’s pretty serious, I think. We can’t have stuff like that going on. Tolerate that kind of official naughtiness, at taxpayer expense? I don’t think so, Mister Holmes. You may think it’s chickenshit, compared to the awe-inspiring, stupefying grandeur of what you’re maybe, could be, doing, even though you don’t know what it is yet, or who might be involved, and maybe never will. But if the citizens in western Massachusetts snap their evening papers open some fine night come this summer, and discover on the front page a big story about how Harry caught the county boffins with their paws in the cash drawer, those taxpayers will be very pleased, and they will glorify your name.
“ ‘We want Harry,’ they will cheer, at the band concert that evening. ‘All right, Harry, way to go, catch those thieving crooks.’ They’ll shower you with rose petals at the Eastern States Exposition, if takes you ’til next fall, and line up to shake your hand. ‘Hey, Harry, you’re our main man.’ ‘Harry-kid there, gimme five.’ ‘Harry, move your family out here from Whitman, okay? This’s where your future is. Retire from the outfit and throw in your lot with us. We’ll give you fifty grand a year, a Mercedes for your cruiser, and your official wardrobe will be Giorgio Armani, Armani minimum. Give ’em all hell for us. We can’t afford to have those crooks picking our pockets while we pay them for their time.’ ”
“We can afford it a hell of a lot better’n we can to close our eyes to the kind of funny business that I still think might be going on here,” Dell’Appa had said. “If there is someone who wants me to be somewhere else and pronto, and he’s in a position to do that, that is dangerous, Brian. That kind of power? Enough to get me out of here in one fucking big hurry, no waiting until after Christmas, and keep me out of here for as long as it takes him to either shut down whatever he’s been getting even richer doing, or pull up stakes and move it, hide it better somewhere else? That ain’t no old video game.”
“Ahh,” Dennison had said, his voice guttural, his right hand brushing the suggestion away, “you’re hearing the mermaids sing, Harry. Becoming a conspiracy junkie. Seeing a plot behind every bush, finding schemes in old coffee-cups. Beginning to think you’re man’s last best hope. This ‘detachment’ may actually turn out to be the best thing in the world for you right now. Not meant to be, no, but still it could be, a good personal thing for you, I mean. Let you decompress after your first year in here, recover your wits and your bearings.”
8
“Short Joey’s a regular law-abiding citizen,” Dell’Appa said to the microphone as the turn signal began to flash on the right rear fender of the Cadillac. “We’re still a good five-eighths of a mile north of the One-oh-six exit ramp, but he’s slowin’ on down and movin’ on over into the right travel lane, just like a safe driver should. No sudden snap decisions for our boy here, no reckless-move stuff for Joey. Not after all of these halcyon years—’cept for the handgun reports, of course; the sharp cracks of the skulls being shattered, the crisp snaps of the fibulas breaking. No reason to change his ways now.”
Joseph John Mossi’s history in the files made him fifty-one years old that day, three months shy of his fifty-second birthday. Both Teresa Coppola and Luigi Mossi had been born in the United States; the six-room apartment on the first floor of the three-decker residence at 73 Pittman Street, West Roxbury, where Joey and Daniel had grown up and where they still lived, had been Luigi and Teresa’s first home together; when she had been taken to Boston City Hospital for the last time, in 1988, she had left from that address.
She had done so very reluctantly, having been fearful of hospitals ever since, she was sure, the nurses had somehow damaged Daniel when they’d taken him from her at birth. “I can’t get it out of my head, that’s all, you know? I know something happened, one of them must’ve dropped him or something. Someone gave him the wrong medicine. And then when they see what’d happened to him, my poor little, brand-new baby boy, then, oh boy, I’m tellin’ you, then they all got really scared. ‘These people, they find out, they’ll kill us for this. The dagoes, that’s what they do with things like this. It’s just the way ghinnies think.’ So they all got together, see? And they protected each other. They all used to do that stuff then, cover up when they made a mistake. Especially when it was one of us. Did something, and they don’t even think about it, not for a minute, that they ruined someone’s whole life. As long as it ain’t them, that it happened to.”
She had agreed to do that, go in and submit to the tests, only after she’d been worn down by weeks of nonstop nagging by Short Joey and her husband, who knew very well that irrational fear was the real reason for her resistance, but could not mention it and thus force her to confront it because she knew they knew and did not give them the chance. “Sure, Ma, we know it’s nothin’, but even so, you still gotta go, you know? Just have some tests, make sure. It’s only for a couple of days, and then you’ll be right back home here okay? And we’ll all have peace of mind. You just got to do this thing.”
The morning after she left the house, the surgeon who made the small exploratory opening in her lower abdomen saw that the cancer which had started in her pancreas had metastasized to occupy the liver as well, and promptly closed her up again. But back in her room that afternoon she began to bleed internally, so that when she went back to West Roxbury the day after that, her transportation was the charcoal-gray Ford station wagon that J. S. Cardinale III employed as a service wagon in the undertaking business his grandfather had begun.
• • •
The old gray Cadillac displayed very little lateral lean on the ramp leading off Route 24 onto 106, recently-resurfaced two-lane blacktop stretching southwest through what had been mostly dairy-farming country until the 1980s. Then suddenly-prosperous, New Age, Quality-of-Lifers had discovered it as promising territory, virgin for construction of new brick-and-silvered-glass plants and office buildings, none of them exceeding thirty feet in height and all scrupulously designed to blend in with and complement the natural terrain. The kind of buildings, Dell’Appa had thought upon first noticing them scattered in the rolling fields around Northampton, that God would surely have included in the Pioneer Valley landscape, if He’d only had a little foresight, thought ahead a little to the day when His highest-ranking material creatures, His Yups, would require harmonious shelter during kicked-back working hours—along with, of course, on-site facilities for toddler-through-K2 day-care, lunchtime exercise, and quiet rooms for thought. Working hours in working places holistically and wholesomely far from madding crowds of extremely-numerous people who still drove old cars on leaded gasoline; salted fatty foods (bernaise-sauced, marbled beef; deep-fried, unranged, unskinned chicken) and ate them; smoked cigarettes (mostly filtered, as though that really mattered); drank hard liquor (sometimes neat); jogged not in midroadway, during twilight hours, nor worked out at least thrice a week on formidable machines; heard the chimes of midnight and cared not a whit for whales; distance from such people: that had been what they craved—God, what they had to have. What they’d contrived for themselves out in California, replicating moving east, and what they now had for themselves right here, in West Bridgewater as well—yes, well, exactly what they had.
“Pal Joey,” Dell’Appa said to his recorder as he settled the Lexus into the Cadillac’s 50-mph groove, “he’s a meticulous man. His car may look like a piece of shit, eight or ten years old and it’s needed new paint for at least six, but the way it’s handling for him it’s got at least four new Monroes on the corners, maybe eight, nice new heavy-duty shocks. And I bet when I get a chance to look those tires over, th
ey’ll be near-new, topline, Goodyears-or-better, with plenty of tread on them. Joe Mossi’s a right careful man.”
• • •
By the time Luigi and Teresa had set up housekeeping, in Boston’s wet-wool heat of August, 1940, Luigi’s parents had either become the owners of the building or legally surrendered to possession by it. The senior Mossis, Dominic and Philomena, had occupied the third floor as their first and only marital residence for almost nineteen years. Each month for sixteen of those years they had managed to hoard another mortgage payment together, almost always perilously close to the date after which Mr. Scannell at the bank would have called them in again for another dose of humiliation. He would have lectured them once more, as sternly as his reverential demeanor would permit, and warned them once again of the ever-brooding, mausoleum-stinking specter of foreclosure looming over them. Then he would have made what had been too hard to do on time that first and only time, in April ’28 (when Philomena’d been flat on her back with the flu for the first three weeks back in March, unable to bring any money home)—make the regular payment—two brutal dollars even harder, terrifyingly harder, by imposing the penalty charge. That had never happened to them again, but neither of them had ever forgotten it. And neither did Luigi. He remembered it, too. Too young to understand it when it happened, at not-quite three-years-old, he had passively acquired from his parents, as soon as he was old enough, so vivid a recollection of the ignominy that for the rest of his lucid life he had personally suffered the aftermath of that disaster, and in pensive moments picked away at the crusted emotional scar.
That degradation had been the reason why Dominic and Philomena had thereafter commenced to assemble their next bank payment the morning after making the one that the next day would become currently due, the day after that overdue, and the day after that one delinquent. At least as far as Mr. Scannell was concerned. Frantically they reported to each other the rents they remorselessly collected from their tenants on the second and first floors, grimly calculating weekly whether it seemed likely, as they always feared, that everyone who lived in their house would be laid off in a week and thus become unable to pay their rents.
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