Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

  The big black took the wheel of Desmond’s car and drove it away. Two large guys got out of the Mercedes and waved them into the house.

  Giordano was waiting for them beside his indoor swimming pool. He was wearing nothing but a towel. Black hair bristled on his bulky chest. Another big guy with a bald head was giving him a massage. Giordano let them stand there beside the steamy, overheated pool until the job was finished. He got up, put on a bathrobe, and told them to sit down.

  “Tommy, remember me?” Sunny Dan said, putting out his hand.

  “Siddown,” Tommy said.

  Erect, he looked like a bulldog on hind legs. A massive jaw, a wide, scowling mouth, protruding eyes. The body was pure gorilla. He was the old school. He had gotten where he was by breaking legs and arms and killing people. He looked it.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  O’Toole told him, while Tommy the Top paced up and down beside the pool. O’Toole let Mick supply some of the details. Giordano paced for another minute and a half. Finally he stopped in front of O’Toole and glared down at him. “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Then why’d you bury him in a fuckin’ swamp, without a priest, without a mass? How am I gonna tell my sister that?” Giordano roared.

  “We were shook, Tommy. We weren’t thinkin’ straight. We didn’t want to blow the whole setup.”

  “We wanted to get our fookin’ guns,” Billy Kilroy said.

  “I’ll show you what you’re gonna get, you fuckin’ Irish midget,” Giordano shouted. He grabbed Billy by the front of the shirt and threw him into the pool.

  “Halp,” he spluttered. “I can’t swim.”

  “Did you hear him?” Giordano shouted. He grabbed Desmond McBride by the collar and slung him into the pool on top of Billy. Whirling, he seized O’Gorman and threw him in headfirst. Next went Sunny Dan, with a croak of terror. He couldn’t swim either. Mick jumped in to help him. Leo McBride jumped in to help his father, who was also not exactly Johnny Weissmuller.

  Giordano headed for Bill O’Toole. He rose to his full six feet four. “You touch me and I’ll kill you,” he said.

  The two bozos from the Mercedes drew guns. Giordano swayed in front of O’Toole. Off to the right the chief glimpsed Melody Faithorne’s wide-eyed face. He reminded himself of his determination to stay alive until he had the pleasure of killing her. “I mean it, Tommy.”

  “They’re gonna stay in there till you tell the truth. You’re gonna be with them, face down, if you don’t tell me the fuckin’ truth. Who hit Joey?” Giordano screamed.

  “I told you we don’t know!” O’Toole roared. “I personally think it was one of your guys.”

  Mick was keeping Dan’s head out of the water. O’Gorman towed Billy to the side of the pool where he hung on like a water-soaked rat. The Irish matinee idol was trying to look tough, but it wasn’t easy to do in a pool with all his clothes on. In spite of Leo’s arm around him, Desmond McBride looked as if he might drown from fright.

  Mick wanted to climb out of the pool and dismember Tommy the Top. The rage on his face finally convinced O’Toole. He would not, he could not, throw Mick to this wop slime.

  Giordano swayed back and forth, from heels to toes. He still looked like he might try to get his hands around O’Toole’s throat. They were not friends. O’Toole had stopped Tommy at the boundaries of Paradise Beach. Tommy had never gotten a single prostitute, a single after-hours club, a single card game, into Paradise Beach while O’Toole was chief of police.

  “You were always a fuckin’ wise guy. If there’s anybody with the balls to try a double cross like this, it’s you,” Giordano said.

  “You don’t have any guys with balls? What kind of a show you runnin’ these days? A fuckin’ seminary?”

  Tommy the Top glared at the waterlogged sextet in the pool. “Get these guys dried off. I’ll see you all in my office,” he snarled.

  He vanished through a swinging door. The two bodyguards stashed their guns and helped O’Toole haul the others out of the pool. Poor old Dan was in bad shape. He was coughing and choking. His face was purple and blue. The bodyguards led them into a locker room and told them to take off their clothes. They left them sitting there naked until Mick found some robes in a closet. Melody joined them, but she had nothing to say. No one had anything to say.

  An hour later, their clothes dried but not pressed, they trooped into Tommy Giordano’s office. It was as big as the entire ground floor of the Paradise Beach police headquarters. Bill O’Toole’s office could have fit into it about twenty-eight times. Row on row of leather-bound books rose to the ceiling. On the wall was a huge painting of a castle in Italy.

  This time, Giordano sat down. Nobody asked them to sit down. Standing beside Tommy’s desk was Nick Perella, the consigliere. He never looked happy. Now he was looking unhappy in capital letters ten feet tall.

  “Okay,” snarled Giordano. “You come up here to tell me your story because you want to keep walking around on this fuckin’ planet, right?”

  There was no need to answer.

  “If I found this out from someone else, none of you would have lived another twenty-four hours. Joey was a shit but he was my flesh and blood, you get it? Another reason, that fuckin’ money was mine. It wasn’t Joey’s.”

  “I thought you were shootin’ people for foolin’ around with drugs,” O’Toole said.

  “That was five years ago, wise guy. That million and a half was my money. Joey couldn’t raise that kind of money without robbin’ the fuckin’ Federal Reserve. So now you want another million and a half for the fuckin’ Cubans?”

  “We have to get it somewhere,” O’Gorman said.

  “What about makin’ sure Joey’s dough isn’t in the pocket of one of your underbosses?” O’Toole said.

  “Nick here says it didn’t happen. But he’s gonna check around some more anyway. In the meantime I want mortgages on every fuckin’ piece of property you guys own in Paradise Beach. That includes Grandpa Gumbah here. We got a very good line on what you got, so don’t try to hide nothin’ under the table. That especially goes for you, McBride. We want all them boats and that fuckin’ fish factory and that marina. We can do a lot with that marina.”

  “How can you issue a mortgage?” Desmond McBride said.

  “Through a fuckin’ bank, asshole!” snarled Giordano. “We own three of them.”

  “What kind of terms are you offering?” Desmond whined.

  “You want to go back in the fuckin’ pool with fifty-pound weights on your feet?” Giordano roared.

  “Tommy, wait a second,” quavered Sunny Dan. “I done you some favors in the old days—”

  “Yeah, and I thought you was a pile of Irish shit then. Shut up. We’re runnin’ this fuckin’ state now.”

  Bill O’Toole drove home. Desmond McBride was in no shape to do anything. The police chief drove slowly down the winding lanes of Saddle Brook past the invisible houses to the Garden State Parkway. No one spoke until they had crossed the Raritan. For Bill O’Toole that river had once been a dividing line between North Jersey and its cities and its corruption and the south with its beaches and its mythical simplicity and purity.

  “Jesus!” Bill roared. He pounded the wheel with his huge fist. “Jesus!” He pounded the wheel again. “How did you let slime like that take it all away from us? How did you do it?”

  He turned to glare at Sunny Dan in the backseat. “You want to know?” Bill roared. “You weren’t tough enough. You were too busy listenin’ to the goddamn Catholic Church. Too busy dippin’ your miserable ass in holy water. Those guys don’t give a shit about holy water, they don’t give a shit about anything but money.”

  Sunny Dan said nothing. He just stared between his two sons-in-law in the front seat. He stared down the Garden State Parkway with its budding trees and greening fields at a vision that had turned into a nightmare. “We didn’t shoot people,” he said. “We didn’t blow them up. We didn’t do
that kind of thing.”

  “You give me a fookin’ map and some money for gelignite and I’ll blow that fooker from here to Canada,” Billy Kilroy said. “I’ll put a bomb under his fookin’ swimmin’ pool that’ll blow him higher than fookin’ Westminster Abbey.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Mick said. “Give me an M16 and a dark night and I’ll take on that whole lousy setup. I’ll blow every one of them away.”

  “That won’t get us the money or the guns,” O’Gorman said.

  “We was tough,” Sunny Dan said. “We was as tough as them once. I remember in 1928 they tried to bring some hooch through the city. The Big Man had searchlights above the railyards. We turned them on and told them through a megaphone to leave the stuff and start runnin’. You shoulda seen the party we had with that stuff. It was the best. Straight from Scotland.”

  “They’re going to take it all away,” Desmond McBride said to O’Toole. “Everything we worked for all these years. Because you thought you were Mandrake the Magician in Atlantic City.”

  “You put together this Mickey Mouse deal, not me.” O’Toole snarled. “You thought you were St. Patrick and Eamon De Valera.”

  “We was tough,” Sunny Dan said. “But we didn’t kill nobody. We didn’t blow people up. That wasn’t the way we played the game. You had to go to confession eventually, you know. You didn’t want to confess things like that.”

  “Gentlemen,” Dick O’Gorman said. “It seems to me our one hope of salvation is to find the original money. I have reason to believe it’s still in Paradise Beach. Reason to believe it was stolen not by one of Mr. Giordano’s thugs, but by the British Secret Service.”

  He told them about the Chinese Type 64 silenced that Jackie Chasen had seen shooting Zaccaro and his bodyguard. Bill O’Toole managed to subdue the rage that was engulfing his brain and pretend to be interested in this revelation, which he had already heard on his surveillance tapes. He also knew something O’Gorman did not know. Melody had called the U.S. State Department about the SIS man and they had told her there was nothing they could do about him, if he existed—a fact they obviously doubted. In the era of Ronald Reagan, Senator Ted was not as powerful as Melody wanted everyone to believe.

  Over the causeway they rolled into Paradise Beach at last. But it did not look like the same place. The clean streets, the neat houses, the fresh, salty air were all superfluous now. The safety, the peace, the quiet, all the contrasts to the city for which they had spent twenty-five years congratulating themselves, had vanished. All O’Toole could see was the sneer on Tommy Giordano’s face. All he could hear were the words We’re runnin’this fuckin’ state now.

  Something similar was happening in the soul of Sunny Dan. It blended with the water in his lungs and the memories of the old days. It was a deadly combination. In the house he said, “I’m goin’ to bed.”

  “Don’t you want any supper, Papa?” Barbara O’Day asked.

  “No. I’m goin’ to bed.”

  “What did you do to him?” Barbara said as Mick helped Sunny Dan up the stairs.

  “I didn’t do anything to him,” O’Toole said.

  “The hell you didn’t,” Mick said, coming back downstairs. He was glaring at Bill O’Toole without an iota of respect or affection on his face.

  A twisting regret clutched O’Toole’s chest. He was losing another son. A son he had never quite accepted because he had never accepted the death of his real son. But a son nevertheless.

  Mick, give me a chance to explain, somehow explain everything, a crazy voice inside O’Toole’s head pleaded. While his real voice snarled, “Shut up. You’re in no position to start callin’ anybody names.”

  Kilroy and O’Gorman watched them, baffled expressions on their faces. They could not begin to understand this American brand of Ireland’s sorrows.

  PRAY FOR US SINNERS NOW AND AT THE HOUR OF OUR DEATHS

  Sunny Dan Monahan was terribly confused. There was an awful racket in the next room. The place was full of echoes, as if people were shouting in an empty convention hall. Were they in Philadelphia, picking out good seats for the New Jersey delegation? The Big Man always had the kind of clout that got them right in front of the podium. They had been in all the newsreels at the last convention.

  Suddenly a voice snarled, We’re runnin’ this fuckin’ state now. Who the hell was that? Giordano, the wop numbers runner. He remembered him because he always wanted a bigger cut and if you didn’t watch him, he stole it. He was a nasty ginzo, the type you had to let the cops beat up now and then to keep him in line.

  Sunny Dan never went for beating people up. He never went for a lot of things the Big Man did. Dan was for Al Smith in 1932; it was rotten the way the Big Man dumped Al and switched to Roosevelt. It was rotten to do something like that to your own kind. But it turned out to be a smart move.

  What the hell? There was Barbara, crying her eyes out. Ohhh, Bobbie, I hated to see you cry. I’d give you anything to stop you from crying. You were my sweetheart, Bobbie, Daddy’s sweetheart. I couldn’t believe it when you let that Piney knock you up. Why are you crying now?

  Dying? Did someone say that? Was that happening? He used to wonder what it would be like. Then you saw people die and you stopped worrying about it. In France guys died without a sound. His father just drifted away like a boat that had parted from its mooring. He had a smile on his face. Dan wanted to die that way, with a smile on his face. He wanted to live up to his nickname, Sunny Dan.

  He gave his mother and father credit for it. They were the happiest people. They cried when they lost his brother Bill in the trolley car accident, but they were smiling a week later. Dan wanted to die like the old gent with a smile on his face, but it wasn’t there. Why?

  It was that voice: We’re runnin’ this fuckin’ state now.

  Did they lose it because they weren’t tough enough? No, they lost it because they got old. They got old and fat and self-satisfied. They lost it because they started fighting among themselves. They started double-crossing each other, they had double-crossers like Barbara’s husband, that scrawny bastard O’Day, in their own families. I never should have let you marry that scumball, Bobbie. It would have been better to put the kid out for adoption. Have it in upstate New York and give it away. But then we wouldn’t have Mick. What a hell of a mess life can be.

  There was another reason why he wasn’t dying with a Sunny Dan smile on his face. The bearer bonds. What did he have to leave anybody now? Especially poor Bobbie. She’d been supporting him for the last five years. How could that have happened? Who knew about them, outside the family? No one. Did that mean someone in the family had ratted? Why? Everyone lost on the deal. Especially him. He had lost his interest in living. Now he was dying and everyone was saying good riddance. Instead of being surrounded by gratitude, love, it was good riddance.

  There was Leo, his favorite grandson. The only one with enough brains to go into politics. What a charmer he had been when he was a kid. Not much guts but a charmer. Still a good-looking boy, even with tears streaming down his face. “Grandpa, I’m so sorry, so sorry,” he whispered.

  Sorry about what? Dan almost quipped. You’re not the one who’s dying. But it wasn’t an appropriate thing to say. Especially with Leo’s WASP wife frowning behind him. So Dan just reached out and touched his cheek. “It’s all right, Leo, it’s all right,” he whispered.

  What was that sound? Like a car motor that wouldn’t start in January. It was his own breath. Who’s that now beside Barbara? The little guy in black—the priest. The Irish priest. Better him than that mealymouthed wimp Father Hart. He wouldn’t confess his sins to him. Had he told someone that? Maybe.

  “Papa,” Barbara was saying between her sobs. “Papa. Here’s the priest. Father McAvoy. Father Hart’s sick. Father McAvoy’ll hear your confession and give you Communion.”

  “Hello, Father.”

  “Hello, Mr. Monahan,” McAvoy said. “Are you sorry for all the sins of your past life?”

&n
bsp; “Oh, yes, Father. I’ve committed some lulus.”

  What were they? The women at the conventions? They were the only ones, after he married Helen. He hadn’t touched Helen before the wedding. She barely let him kiss her. The ones in France, did they count? When you’re fighting a goddamn war, the rules are different, aren’t they? He had never felt bad about the women at the conventions. They had helped him put up with Helen’s big mouth. Without them she might have driven him nuts. A man needed some consolation for a mouth like Helen’s. He could swear she didn’t talk that much before they got married. He would never have married her.

  “Say an act of contrition now.”

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  Father McAvoy was raising his hand to bless him. Suddenly an awful thing happened. McAvoy’s face turned into Giordano’s. Instead of saying the words of forgiveness, he was saying, We’re runnin’ this fuckin’ state now.

  Then something even more terrible happened. Giordano’s face turned into the face of a creature with blackened skin and ghastly fanged teeth and glowing green eyes. The face of a movie monster, an outer-space alien, Satan.

  He saw Leo’s face going the same way. The two of them side by side, a twin horror show. Why? What was God trying to tell him? Was it all his fault, this evil nightmare? Were those sins he committed that serious? Could being on the take all those years lead to this?

  “Oh my God,” Sunny Dan cried, and reached out for Barbara’s hand, her arm. He crawled up it toward a memory of happiness. He curled his trembling old arms around her neck. “Oh, Bobbie, Bobbie, oh my God,” he cried.

  He let go and fell back on the pillow, dead.

  Without a smile on his face.

  MARCHING ORDERS

  Clanging through Mick’s brain was the old Rolling Stones song about a guy who had nothing in his head but the four letter word that rhymed with luck. He nipped at a pint of Southern Comfort as he drove through the night to Jackie Chasen’s house. He had to tell somebody. He had to talk to somebody.