The Burning Soul

by John Connolly

  ‘Walking-around money. If he gives you more, just take it and keep your mouth shut.’

  ‘How much was in there?’ asked Ryan.

  ‘Two-five now, plus change.’

  Ryan laughed. It was that or pull over by the side of the road and beat his fists against the sidewalk in frustration.

  ‘All that for a lousy three grand?’

  ‘Hey, I had a good time.’

  Now Ryan did pull over, causing the driver behind them to honk his disapproval. He turned in his seat, ready to release his belt and tear Dempsey’s throat out, but Dempsey already had his hand on the butt of the gun. His left hand was raised, one finger extended in warning.

  ‘What? You going to kill me?’ asked Ryan. ‘You going to pull the trigger this time?’

  ‘No, but I’ll break your nose with it, and I’ll go further if you make me. You want to make me do that to you?’

  ‘You raped a woman, just for three grand.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I had the three grand anyway.’

  Ryan almost lost it again, but the sight of the gun revealing itself to him brought him back to his senses. His shoulders collapsed, and he laid his forehead against the steering wheel. He felt ill. His face was bathed in warm, clammy sweat.

  ‘Three grand,’ he whispered. ‘Three grand and change.’

  ‘Maybe you haven’t been keeping up with developments, Frankie, but Mr. Morris is hurting. Two grand here, a grand there, a couple of hundred from the junkies – it all adds up. It keeps him in business, and keeps us in a job. More to the point, it’s keeping us alive. Our credit isn’t so good right now, and the bank of goodwill has closed its doors.’

  ‘He’s drowning,’ said Ryan. ‘He’s going down.’

  ‘That’s not what I said, and if I was you I wouldn’t be saying things like that out loud either. It might get taken as disloyalty. It’s swings and roundabouts. Everybody’s hurting in this economy. He’ll come good again. He just needs time.’

  Ryan raised his head. Dempsey’s face was expressionless. It gave no clue to whether he believed a word that he was saying.

  ‘You’re going to start driving now, Frankie, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘We good?’

  Ryan nodded.

  ‘Let me hear you say it.’

  ‘We’re good.’

  ‘Right. Now let’s go see what he wants.’

  They drove in silence toward Cambridge. Eventually Dempsey let his head rest against the window, his eyes fixed on distant lights. Ryan smoked a cigarette, and thought about a boy he once knew, Josh Tyler, who died in a lake at some summer camp in New Hampshire when his canoe capsized. Josh could swim, but the kid in the canoe with him couldn’t, or not well enough. He panicked, and dragged Josh under the water. The kid was kicking, and one of the kicks caught Josh in the side of the head and knocked him unconscious. Somehow the kid made it to the canoe and managed to hold on to it, but by then Josh Tyler was dead. Drowning men will drag you down if you let them, thought Ryan. Sometimes, to survive, you have to let them sink.

  They found a spot not far from the entrance to the Brattle Street Theater, and sat back to wait.

  ‘What’s on there?’ asked Ryan.

  ‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle,’ said Dempsey. ‘I read about it in the paper.’

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know it?’

  ‘I said I don’t know it. I’ve never seen it, never even heard of it. It must be new.’

  ‘No, it’s not new. It’s old. Nineteen seventy-three. Robert Mitchum and that guy, the one from Everybody Loves Raymond. Boyle, Peter Boyle. He’s dead now. Real good in that movie. I can’t believe you never heard of it, you growing up in Boston and all.’

  ‘I didn’t go to movies much as a kid.’

  ‘Still, you should know it.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘A snitch.’

  Dempsey didn’t say anything else. Ryan felt him looking at him, but didn’t say anything, just waited for him to continue. Eventually, Dempsey did.

  ‘Eddie – that’s Mitchum – decides to rat out his buddies to avoid doing time. He’s old. He doesn’t want to go back in the can.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘How does it end?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you how it ends. Go rent it sometime.’

  ‘I’m not going to rent it.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to tell you how it ends.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Yeah, fine. You’re some asshole, you know that?’

  ‘You’re the asshole, not telling me how it ends.’

  ‘You want to know how it ends?’

  ‘No, I don’t care now.’

  ‘You want to know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You want to know. I know you want to know.’

  ‘Right, tell me.’

  ‘It ends with a guy being tied to a chair while another guy forces him to watch the fucking movie, that’s how it ends.’

  Ryan let a beat go by.

  ‘I don’t think that’s how it ends.’

  For the first time that evening, Dempsey smiled at something that didn’t involve another person’s misery.

  ‘Asshole.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ryan, and he was reminded of why sometimes he didn’t mind being in Dempsey’s company. It wouldn’t stop him from killing him if the time came, but he might make it quick. ‘All of this is so important, what’s he doing at a movie?’

  ‘He likes movies. He says they help him think more clearly. He always goes to a movie when he’s struggling with a problem. Then it ends and he has a solution. I guess it’s something to do with sitting in the dark and letting the pictures wash over you. And even if he doesn’t come up with an answer he’s got to spend some time hiding in the dark. It’s easier than hiding in the daylight.’

  ‘Amen to that.’

  ‘Yeah. Some good-looking women around here.’

  ‘College girls.’

  ‘They got no time for men like us, not unless you catch ’em drunk.’

  His words brought back to Ryan the look of fear on the girl’s face, and the way Dempsey had set out to humiliate the man with her, leaving him with a choice that was no choice: He could throw a punch, and Dempsey would beat him, and beat him bad, or he could suck up Dempsey’s poison and walk away with his body intact but his pride in tatters. His girlfriend had been forced to beg Dempsey to leave them in peace. Ryan had seen that happen before, and had often watched something die in the eyes of the woman involved when it did. Her boyfriend was weak, and his weakness had been publicly exposed. Somewhere deep inside, the woman always wanted the guy to fight back, to win or to take his beating. There was a strength in winning a fight like that, but there was a strength, too, in being unwilling to become another man’s bitch, win or lose, in not allowing him to break you down or paw your girlfriend without consequences.

  And what Dempsey had done in the bar had set him up for what he’d done later to Helen Napier. His blood had been up, and she’d suffered for it.

  ‘He’s coming out,’ said Dempsey, and Ryan followed his gaze to where Tommy Morris was slinking out of the movie theater, his head low, his hair hidden by a wool cap. Tommy Morris, carrying the stink of failure on him, the stink of death.

  Tommy Morris, the drowning man.

  Tommy Morris’s family had always been two-toilet Boston Irish. They had aspired to better things, which led them to leave behind the West Broadway projects of D Street in Southie for what they considered to be the more salubrious surroundings of a Somerville three-decker, even as their neighbors sneered at their aspirations. In Boston the working-class Irish distrusted success, political success aside, as that was just criminality by another name as practiced by the Boston School. General success, though, only made others feel bad about their own situation, their ambitions for betterment that stretched no further than winning the nigger
-pool lottery.

  So it was that the Morris family was spoken of in disparaging terms just for not wanting to stay mired in the mud at the bottom of the pond. When Tommy’s father, who owned a florist’s, bought a new delivery van, black paint was poured over it before it was even a week old. Tommy never forgot that, and years later he would visit his own kind of vengeance on South Boston, helping Whitey Bulger flood it and the rest of the city with cocaine. It was said of Tommy that he hated his own, which is always the sign of a man who secretly hates himself. It made him vulnerable, although he chose not to recognize that vulnerability, believing instead that by consolidating his position and acting cleverly he could somehow overcome the fault line that ran beneath the foundations of his life.

  Tommy had started out with stealing, and hijacking truckloads, the way most of his peers did, then briefly graduated to bank jobs before realizing that shakedowns were easier to plan, harder to trace, and carried less chance of serious jail time or having his head blown off. Tommy Morris, they used to say, was always smart like that. He wasn’t like the other project rats. The real wolves, the ones like Whitey and his sidekick Stevie Flemmi, used to scoff at Tommy. They called him ‘Two-Bit’ Tommy, and sometimes ‘Mary’ Morris because of his preference for avoiding violence. It made him appear less of a threat to them, and so he survived Whitey’s relentless purging of his rivals, the bullets to the head and the slow strangulations that left Whitey as top dog, aided by a nickel stretch in Cedar Junction that spanned the worst of the killing, during which he kept his head down and his mouth closed.

  When Tommy came out, Whitey’s cocaine operation had been brought to its knees by the DEA, decades of collusion between rogue FBI agents and Whitey were being revealed, and so many guys were turning federal witness that there weren’t enough tape recorders to go around. Meanwhile, the Italians were a shadow of their former selves, ruined by internal squabbles and by Whitey’s willingness to sell them out to the feds. Tommy Caci and Al Z, the now-departed linchpins of the Boston Mafia, were trying to rebuild, but there was a gap in the market, a vacuum to be filled, that Tommy and his peers were able to exploit, particularly once Whitey, facing indictment, fled the jurisdiction. Tommy – solid, careful, reliable – prospered.

  But he was growing old, and there were hungry young men who felt that their time had come, led by Oweny Farrell, the most ruthless of them all. Quickly, so fast that Tommy barely had time to register the threat before it was upon him, his operation began to fall apart. That old fault line, whose existence he had denied for so long, widened, and his world crumbled into it. He was isolated, and the whispering started. Tommy Morris was no longer solid. Tommy Morris wasn’t sound. Tommy Morris was a threat, because Tommy Morris knew too much. Men whom he had trusted began to keep their distance from him, so that they would not catch a stray bullet when the end came. Money disappeared, and with it his allies. Tommy knew his history. He remembered Donald Killeen, who had been top dog in Southie until, in 1972, Whitey decided that Killeen’s reign was over and had him shot to death on the evening of his son’s fourth birthday party. As if to emphasize the ease of the transition, and a sense of continuity, Whitey had subsequently taken over Killeen’s former headquarters, the Transit Café, as his own base, renaming it the Triple O’s.

  Tommy had no intention of going out like Killeen.

  But still they kept chipping away at him – the cops, the feds, his own kind. He had been forced to seek a sit-down, and one had been agreed for a bar in Chelsea after hours.

  On the day of the proposed meet, Tommy had received an anonymous call advising him not to attend.

  And that was when Tommy Morris had gone to ground.

  Tommy slipped into the back of the car.

  ‘Drive,’ he said.

  ‘Drive where?’ said Ryan.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Just drive.’

  Ryan pulled out and headed away from the city. Dempsey handed over the shoebox filled with money. Tommy counted it and passed them another two hundred dollars each from the stash.

  ‘You can add it to what you took already,’ he said.

  ‘I’m hurt, Tommy,’ said Dempsey.

  ‘You will be if I catch you with your hand in the register again,’ said Tommy. Dempsey said nothing, but he cocked an eyebrow at Ryan.

  ‘You got news?’ asked Dempsey.

  ‘Yeah, I have news.’

  ‘About Oweny?’

  ‘No,’ said Tommy. He seemed distant, confused. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

  Dempsey looked at the older man in the rearview mirror. ‘What is it, Tommy?’ he asked, and there was genuine solicitude in his voice.

  ‘It’s personal,’ said Tommy at last. ‘It’s blood.’

  II

  Don’t ask us what it’s like

  In that moment when the body

  skitters away

  from that stupid

  sheepy shape of breath.

  Down here, no one asks.

  We all died

  boot to throat.

  We all went out

  Shrieking some bloody name.

  from The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

  by Danielle Pafunda

  10

  There are places along the Maine coast that are stunningly beautiful, often in a picture-postcard way that attracts tourists and snowbirds. Those stretches of the shoreline are dotted with expensive houses masquerading as summer cottages, and the towns that service them offer gourmet delicacies in the grocery stores, and chichi restaurants with waitstaff who make their efforts at service feel like hard-won favors for the undeserving.

  But there are other places that speak of the ferocity of the sea, of communities sheltering behind buttresses of black rock and shingle beaches against which the waves throw themselves like besieging armies, gradually eroding the defenses over centuries, millennia, certain in the knowledge that eventually the ocean will triumph and smother the land. In those places the trees are bent, testament to the force of the wind, and the houses are weathered and functional, as sullen and resigned as the dogs that prowl their yards. Such towns do not welcome tourists, for they have nothing to offer them and the tourists have nothing to give, except to serve as a mirror for the natives’ own disappointments. Theirs is a hardscrabble existence. Those with youth and ambition leave, while those with youth but without ambition stay, or drift away for a time before returning, for small towns have their lures and a way of sinking deep hooks into skin and flesh and spirit.

  Yet there is a balance to be maintained in such locales, and there is strength in unity. New blood will be welcomed as long as it plays its part in the great extended scheme of daily life, finding its level, its part in the complex machinery that powers the town’s existence: giving enough at the start to show willing, but not so much as to appear ingratiating; listening more than speaking, and not disagreeing, for here to disagree may be construed as being disagreeable, and one has to earn the right to be disagreeable, and then only after long years of cautious, mundane, and well-chosen arguments; and understanding that the town is both a fixed entity and a fluid concept, a thing that must be open to small changes of birth and marriage, of mood and mortality, if it is ultimately to stay the same.

  And so there were communities like Pastor’s Bay along the Maine seaboard, each different, each similar. If Pastor’s Bay was distinctive, it was only in its comparative lack of beauty, elemental or otherwise. There was no beach, merely a pebbled shore. A tangle of jagged rocks ringed the peninsula at its eastern extreme and made any approach by boat hazardous if one didn’t know the tides. From there, a road led through a mix of old- and new-growth forest, past houses old and houses new, houses abandoned and houses reclaimed (including the one in which Anna Kore’s mother sat, red-eyed and hauntingly, terrifyingly still, her head filled with the thousand deaths of her child and a thousand visions of her safe return, each conclusion to the tale fighting for supremacy) until it found the town, its buildings almost leaning inward over the m
ain street, the shades on the windows lowered slightly in pain, the skies above cloud-heavy and lowering, all life now tainted by the absence of one girl. Finally, leaving the town behind, the road undulated over uneven, rocky ground before arriving at the bridge to the mainland at a point almost half a mile to the south of the causeway of rock and dirt and scrub grass that, before the building of the first bridge, offered the sole path for those who wished to leave, either permanently or temporarily, and preferred to do so without paying the ferry toll.

  The first bridge, the old wooden construct erected by the Heardings in 1885 with the proceeds of a tax levied on the residents, seemed set to put paid to the ferry forever, but the Heardings sank their pilings incorrectly, and a big storm in 1886 set the bridge to swaying, and people heard it moaning in its torments and went back to using the old path for foot traffic and the ferry for the transport of goods and livestock. The Heardings were forced to look again at the bridge, and the ferry continued its service while the repairs were made. By the time they had resunk the pilings, and reassured the natives of the bridge’s solidity, their business had gone belly-up because they had lost the trust of their neighbors. The Heardings closed their lumberyard and departed for Bangor, where they opened up for business under a new name, and denied any knowledge of bridges, or unsound pilings, or Pastor’s Bay. Still, the Heardings’ bridge stood for eighty years, until the passage of trucks and cars began to tell upon it, and its moans and cries resumed, and a new bridge began to take shape alongside it. Now all that was left of the Heardings’ bridge were the old pilings, for say this about the Heardings, if nothing else: They might have botched the job the first time, but they got it right the second. It was simply their misfortune to find themselves in a town where folk preferred things to be done right from the get-go, especially where their personal safety was concerned, and most particularly when it came to bridges and water, for they had the fear of drowning that comes from living close to the sea.