Live by Night

CHAPTER ONE A Twelve O’Clock Fella in a Nine O’Clock Town

Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin’s feet were placed in a tub of cement. Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard, while Joe listened to the engine chug and watched the water churn white at the stern. And it occurred to him that almost everything of note that had ever happened in his life—good or bad—had been set in motion the morning he first crossed paths with Emma Gould.

They met shortly after dawn in 1926, when Joe and the Bartolo brothers robbed the gaming room at the back of an Albert White speakeasy in South Boston. Before they entered it, Joe and the Bartolos had no idea the speakeasy belonged to Albert White. If they had, they would have beat a retreat in three separate directions to make the trail all the harder to follow.

They came down the back stairs smoothly enough. They passed through the empty bar area without incident. The bar and casino took up the rear of a furniture warehouse along the waterfront that Joe’s boss, Tim Hickey, had assured him was owned by some harmless Greeks recently arrived from Maryland. But when they walked into the back room, they found a poker game in full swing, the five players drinking amber Canadian from heavy crystal glasses, a gray carpet of cigarette smoke hanging overhead. A pile of money rose from the center of the table.

Not one of the men looked Greek. Or harmless. They had hung their suit jackets over the backs of their chairs, which left the guns on their hips exposed. When Joe, Dion, and Paolo walked in with pistols extended, none of the men went for the guns, but Joe could tell a couple were thinking about it.

A woman had been serving drinks to the table. She put the tray aside, lifted her cigarette out of an ashtray and took a drag, looked about to yawn with three guns pointed at her. Like she might ask to see something more impressive for an encore.

Joe and the Bartolos wore hats pulled down over their eyes, and black handkerchiefs covered the lower halves of their faces. Which was a good thing because if anyone in this crowd recognized them, they’d have about half a day left to live.

A walk in the park, Tim Hickey had said. Hit them at dawn when the only people left in the place would be a couple of mokes in the counting room.

As opposed to five gun thugs playing poker.

One of the players said, “You know whose place this is?”

Joe didn’t recognize the guy, but he knew the guy next to him—Brenny Loomis, ex-boxer and a member of the Albert White Mob, Tim Hickey’s biggest rival in the bootlegging business. Lately, Albert was rumored to be stockpiling Thompson machine guns for an impending war. The word was out—choose a side or choose a headstone.

Joe said, “Everyone does as they’re told, no one gets so much as a scratch.”

The guy beside Loomis ran his mouth again. “I asked you know whose game this was, you fucking dunce.”

Dion Bartolo hit him in the mouth with his pistol. Hit him hard enough to knock him out of his chair and draw some blood. Got everyone else thinking how much better it was to be the one who wasn’t getting pistol-whipped than the one who was.

Joe said, “Everyone but the girl, get on your knees. Put your hands behind your head and lace the fingers.”

Brenny Loomis locked eyes with Joe. “I’ll call your mother when this is over, boy. Suggest a nice dark suit for your coffin.”

Loomis, a former club boxer at Mechanics Hall and sparring partner for Mean Mo Mullins, was said to have a punch like a bag of cue balls. He killed people for Albert White. Not for a living, exclusively, but rumor was he wanted Albert to know, should it ever become a full-time position, he had seniority.

Joe had never experienced fear like he did looking into Loomis’s tiny brown eyes, but he gestured at the floor with his gun nonetheless, quite surprised that his hand didn’t shake. Brendan Loomis laced his hands behind his head and got on his knees. Once he did, the others did the same.

Joe said to the girl, “Come over here, miss. We won’t harm you.”

She stubbed out her cigarette and looked at him like she was thinking about lighting another, maybe freshening her drink. She crossed to him, a girl near his own age, maybe twenty or so, with winter eyes and skin so pale he could almost see through it to the blood and tissue underneath.

He watched her come as the Bartolo brothers relieved the cardplayers of their weapons. The pistols made heavy thumps as they tossed them onto a nearby blackjack table, but the girl didn’t even flinch. In her eyes, firelights danced behind the gray.

She stepped up to his gun and said, “And what will the gentleman be having with his robbery this morning?”

Joe handed her one of the two canvas sacks he’d carried in. “The money on the table, please.”

“Coming right up, sir.”

As she crossed back to the table, he pulled one pair of handcuffs from the other sack, then tossed the sack to Paolo. Paolo bent by the first cardplayer and handcuffed his wrists at the small of his back, then moved on to the next.

The girl swept the pot off the center of the table—Joe noting not just bills but watches and jewelry in there too—then gathered up everyone’s stakes. Paolo finished cuffing the men on the floor and went to work gagging them.

Joe scanned the room—the roulette wheel behind him, the craps table against the wall under the stairs. He counted three blackjack tables and one baccarat table. Six slot machines took up the rear wall. A low table with a dozen phones on top constituted the wire service, a board behind it listing the horses from last night’s twelfth race at Readville. The only other door besides the one they’d come through was chalk-marked with a T for toilet, which made sense, because people had to piss when they drank.

Except that when Joe had come through the bar, he’d seen two bathrooms, which would certainly suffice. And this bathroom had a padlock on it.

He looked over at Brenny Loomis, lying on the floor with a gag in his mouth but watching the wheels turn in Joe’s head. Joe watched the wheels in Loomis’s head do their own turning. And he knew what he’d known the moment he saw that padlock—the bathroom wasn’t a bathroom.

It was the counting room.

Albert White’s counting room.

Judging by the business Hickey casinos had done the past two days—the first chilly weekend of October—Joe suspected a small fortune sat behind that door.

Albert White’s small fortune.

The girl came back to him with the bag of poker swag. “Your dessert, sir,” she said and handed him the bag. He couldn’t get over how level her gaze was. She didn’t just stare at him, she stared through him. He was certain she could see his face behind the handkerchief and the low hat. Some morning he’d pass her walking to get cigarettes, hear her yell, “That’s him!” He wouldn’t even have time to close his eyes before the bullets hit him.

He took the sack and dangled the set of cuffs from his finger. “Turn around.”

“Yes, sir. Right away, sir.” She turned her back to him and crossed her arms behind her. Her knuckles pressed against the small of her back, the fingertips dangling over her ass, Joe realizing the last thing he should be doing was concentrating on anyone’s ass, period.

He snapped the first cuff around her wrist. “I’ll be gentle.”

“Don’t put yourself out on my account.” She looked back over her shoulder at him. “Just try not to leave marks.”

Jesus.

“What’s your name?”

“Emma Gould,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Wanted.”

“By all the girls or just the law?”

He couldn’t keep up with her and cover the room at the same time, so he turned her to him and pulled the gag out of his pocket. The gags were men’s socks that Paolo Bartolo had stolen from the Woolworth’s where he worked.

“You’re going to put a sock in my mouth.”

“Yes.”

“A sock. In my mouth.”

“Never been used before,” Joe said. “I promise.”

She cocked one eyebrow. It was the same tarnished-brass color as her hair and soft and shiny as ermine.

“I wouldn’t lie to you,” Joe said and felt, in that moment, as if he were telling the truth.

“That’s usually what liars say.” She opened her mouth like a child resigned to a spoonful of medicine, and he thought of saying something else to her but couldn’t think of what. He thought of asking her something, just so he could hear her voice again.

Her eyes pulsed a bit when he pushed the sock into her mouth and then she tried to spit it out—they usually did—shaking her head as she saw the twine in his hand, but he was ready for her. He drew it tight across her mouth and back along the sides of her face. As he tied it off at the back of her head, she looked at him as if, until this point, the whole transaction had been perfectly honorable—a kick, even—but now he’d gone and sullied it.

“It’s half silk,” he said.

Another arch of her eyebrow.

“The sock,” he said. “Go join your friends.”

She knelt by Brendan Loomis, who’d never taken his eyes off Joe, not once the whole time.

Joe looked at the door to the counting room, looked at the padlock on the door. He let Loomis follow his gaze and then he looked Loomis in the eyes. Loomis’s eyes went dull as he waited to see what the next move would be.

Joe held his gaze and said, “Let’s go, boys. We’re done.”

Loomis blinked once, slowly, and Joe decided to take that as a peace offering—or the possibility of one—and got the hell out of there.

When they left, they drove along the waterfront. The sky was a hard blue streaked with hard yellow. The gulls rose and fell, cawing. The bucket of a ship crane swung in hard over the wharf road, then swung back with a scream as Paolo drove over its shadow. Longshoremen, stevedores, and teamsters stood at their pilings, smoking in the bright cold. A group of them threw rocks at the gulls.

Joe rolled down his window, took the cold air on his face, against his eyes. It smelled like salt, fish blood, and gasoline.

Dion Bartolo looked back at him from the front seat. “You asked the doll her name?”

Joe said, “Making conversation.”

“You cuff her hands like you’re putting a pin on her, asking her to the dance?”

Joe leaned his head out the open window for a minute, sucked the dirty air in as deep as he could. Paolo drove off the docks and up toward Broadway, the Nash Roadster doing thirty miles an hour easy.

“I seen her before,” Paolo said.

Joe pulled his head back in the car. “Where?”

“I don’t know. But I did. I know it.” He bounced the Nash onto Broadway and they all bounced with it. “You should write her a poem maybe.”

“Write her a fucking poem,” Joe said. “Why don’t you slow down and stop driving like we did something?”

Dion turned toward Joe, placed his arm on the seat back. “He actually wrote a poem to a girl once, my brother.”

“No kidding?”

Paolo met his eyes in the rearview mirror and gave him a solemn nod.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” Dion said. “She couldn’t read.”

They headed south toward Dorchester and got stuck in traffic by a horse that dropped dead just outside Andrew Square. Traffic had to be routed around it and its overturned ice cart. Shards of ice glistened in the cobblestone cracks like metal shavings, and the iceman stood beside the carcass, kicking the horse in the ribs. Joe thought about her the whole way. Her hands had been dry and soft. They were very small and pink at the base of the palms. The veins in her wrist were violet. She had a black freckle on the back of her right ear but not on her left.

The Bartolo brothers lived on Dorchester Avenue above a butcher and a cobbler. The butcher and the cobbler had married sisters and hated each other only slightly less than they hated their wives. This didn’t stop them, however, from running a speakeasy in their shared basement. Nightly, people came from the other sixteen parishes of Dorchester, as well as from parishes as far away as the North Shore, to drink the best liquor south of Montreal and hear a Negro songstress named Delilah Deluth sing about heartbreak in a place whose unofficial name was The Shoelace, which infuriated the butcher so much he’d gone bald over it. The Bartolo brothers were in The Shoelace almost every night, which was fine, but going so far as to reside above the place seemed idiotic to Joe. It would only take one legitimate raid by honest cops or T-Men, however unlikely that might be, and it would be nothing for them to kick in Dion and Paolo’s door and discover money, guns, and jewelry that two wops who worked in a grocery store and a department store, respectively, could never account for.

True, the jewelry usually went right back out the door to Hymie Drago, the fence they’d been using since they were fifteen, but the money usually went no further than a gaming table in the back of The Shoelace, or into their mattresses.

Joe leaned against the icebox and watched Paolo put his and his brother’s split there that morning, just pulling back the sweat-yellowed sheet to reveal one of a series of slits they’d cut into the side, Dion handing the stacks of bills to Paolo and Paolo shoving them in like he was stuffing a holiday bird.

At twenty-three, Paolo was the oldest of them. Dion, younger by two years, seemed older, however, maybe because he was smarter or maybe because he was meaner. Joe, who would turn twenty next month, was the youngest of them but had been acknowledged as the brains of the operation since they’d joined forces to knock over newsstands when Joe was thirteen.

Paolo rose from the floor. “I know where I seen her.” He slapped the dust off his knees.

Joe came off the icebox. “Where?”

“But he’s not sweet on her,” Dion said.

“Where?” Joe repeated.

Paolo pointed at the floor. “Downstairs.”

“In The Shoelace?”

Paolo nodded. “She come in with Albert.”

“Albert who?”

“Albert, the King of Montenegro,” Dion said. “Albert Who Do You Think?”

Unfortunately, there was only one Albert in Boston who could be referred to without a last name. Albert White, the guy they’d just robbed.

Albert was a former hero of the Philippine Moro Wars and a former policeman, who’d lost his job, like Joe’s own brother, after the strike in ’19. Currently he was the owner of White Garage and Automotive Glass Repair (formerly Halloran’s Tire and Automotive), White’s Downtown Café (formerly Halloran’s Lunch Counter), and White’s Freight and Transcontinental Shipping (formerly Halloran’s Trucking). Rumored to have personally rubbed out Bitsy Halloran. Bitsy got himself shot eleven times in an oak phone booth inside a Rexall Drugstore in Egleston Square. So many shots fired at such close range, they set the booth on fire. It was rumored Albert had bought the charred remains of the phone booth, restored it, and kept it in the study of the home he owned on Ashmont Hill, made all his calls from it.

“So she’s Albert’s girl.” It deflated Joe to think of her as just another gangster’s moll. He’d already had visions of them racing across the country in a stolen car, unencumbered by a past or a future, chasing a red sky and a setting sun all the way to Mexico.

“I seen them together three times,” Paolo said.

“So now it’s three times.”

Paolo looked down at his fingers for confirmation. “Yeah.”

“What’s she doing fetching drinks at his poker games then?”

“What else she going to do?” Dion said. “Retire?”

“No, but…”

“Albert’s married,” Dion said. “Who’s to say how long a party gal lasts on his arm?”

“She strike you as a party gal?”

Dion slowly thumbed the cap off a bottle of Canadian gin, his flat eyes on Joe. “She didn’t strike me as anything but a gal bagged up our money. I couldn’t even tell you what color her hair was. I couldn’t—”

“Dark blond. Almost light brown, but not quite.”

“She’s Albert’s girl.” Dion poured them all a drink.

“So she is,” Joe said.

“Bad enough we just knocked over the man’s joint. Don’t go getting any ideas about taking anything else from him. All right?”

Joe didn’t say anything.

“All right?” Dion repeated.

“All right.” Joe reached for his drink. “Fine.”

She didn’t come into The Shoelace for the next three nights. Joe was sure of it—he’d been there, open to close, every night.

Albert came in, wearing one of his signature pinstripe off-white suits. Like he was in Lisbon or something. He wore them with brown fedoras that matched his brown shoes which matched the brown pinstripes. When the snow came, he wore brown suits with off-white pinstripes, an off-white hat, and white-and-brown spats. When February rolled around, he went in for dark brown suits and dark brown shoes with a black hat, but Joe imagined, for the most part, he’d be easy to gun down at night. Shoot him in an alley from twenty yards away with a cheap pistol. You wouldn’t even need a streetlamp to see that white turn red.

Albert, Albert, Joe thought as Albert glided past his bar stool in The Shoelace on the third night, I could kill you if I knew the first thing about killing.

Problem was, Albert didn’t go into alleys much, and when he did he had four bodyguards with him. And even if you did get through them and you did kill him—and Joe, no killer, wondered why the fuck he found himself thinking about killing Albert White in the first place—all you’d manage to do would be to derail a business empire for Albert White’s partners, who included the police, the Italians, the Jew mobs in Mattapan, and several legitimate businessmen, including bankers and investors with interests in Cuban and Florida sugarcane. Derailing business like that in a city this small would be like feeding zoo animals with fresh cuts on your hand.

Albert looked at him once. Looked at him in such a way that Joe thought, He knows, he knows. He knows I robbed him. Knows I want his girl. He knows.

But Albert said, “Got a light?”

Joe struck a match off the bar and lit Albert White’s cigarette.

When Albert blew out the match, he blew smoke into Joe’s face. He said, “Thanks, kid,” and walked away, the man’s flesh as white as his suit, the man’s lips as red as the blood that flowed in and out of his heart.

The fourth day after the robbery, Joe played a hunch and went back to the furniture warehouse. He almost missed her; apparently the secretaries ended their shift the same time as the laborers, and the secretaries ran small while the forklift operators and stevedores cast wider shadows. The men came out with their longshoremen’s hooks hanging from the shoulders of their dirty jackets, talking loud and swarming the young women, whistling and telling jokes only they laughed at. The women must have been used to it, though, because they managed to move their own circle out of the larger one, and some of the men stayed behind, and others straggled, and a few more broke off to head toward the worst-kept secret on the docks—a houseboat that had been serving alcohol since the first sun to rise on Boston under Prohibition.

The pack of women stayed tight and moved smoothly up the dock. Joe only saw her because another girl with the same color hair stopped to adjust her heel and Emma’s face took her place in the crowd.

Joe left the spot where he’d been standing, near the loading dock of the Gillette Company, and fell into step about fifty yards behind the group. He told himself she was Albert White’s girl. Told himself he was out of his mind and he needed to stop this now. Not only should he not be following Albert White’s girl along the waterfront of South Boston, he shouldn’t even be in the state until he learned for sure whether or not anyone could finger him for the poker game robbery. Tim Hickey was down south on a rum deal and couldn’t fill in the blanks about how they’d ended up knocking over the wrong card game, and the Bartolo brothers were keeping their heads down and noses clean until they heard what was what, but here was Joe, supposedly the smart one, sniffing around Emma Gould like a starving dog following the scent of a cook fire.

Walk away, walk away, walk away.

Joe knew the voice was right. The voice was reason. And if not reason, then his guardian angel.

Problem was, he wasn’t interested in guardian angels today. He was interested in her.

The group of women walked off the waterfront and dispersed at Broadway Station. Most walked to a bench on the streetcar side, but Emma descended into the subway. Joe gave her a head start, then followed her through the turnstiles and down another set of steps and onto a northbound train. It was crowded on the train and hot but he never took his eyes off her, which was a good thing because she left the train one stop later, at South Station.

South Station was a transfer station where three subway lines, two el lines, a streetcar line, two bus lines, and the commuter rail all converged. Stepping out of the car and onto the platform turned him into a billiards ball on the break—he was bounced, pinned, and bounced again. He lost sight of her. He was not a tall man like his brothers, one of whom was tall and the other abnormally so. But thank God he wasn’t short, just medium. He stepped up on his toes and tried to press through the throng that way. It made the going slower, but he got a flash of her butterscotch hair bobbing by the transfer tunnel to the Atlantic Avenue Elevated.

He reached the platform just as the cars arrived. She stood two doors ahead of him in the same car when the train left the station and the city opened up in front of them, its blues and browns and brick red deepening in the onset of dusk. Windows in the office buildings had turned yellow. Streetlamps came on, block by block. The harbor bled out from the edges of the skyline. Emma leaned against a window and Joe watched it all unfurl behind her. She stared out blankly at the crowded car, her eyes alighting on nothing but wary just the same. They were so pale, her eyes, paler even than her skin. The pale of very cold gin. Her jaw and nose were both slightly pointed and dusted with freckles. Nothing about her invited approach. She seemed locked behind her own cold and beautiful face.

And what will the gentleman be having with his robbery this morning?

Just try not to leave marks.

That’s usually what liars say.

When they passed through Batterymarch Station and rattled over the North End, Joe looked down at the ghetto, teeming with Italians—Italian people, Italian dialects, Italian customs and food—and he couldn’t help but think of his oldest brother, Danny, the Irish cop who’d loved the Italian ghetto so much he’d lived and worked there. Danny was a big man, taller than just about anyone Joe had ever met. He’d been a hell of a boxer, a hell of a cop, and he knew little of fear. An organizer and vice president of the policemen’s union, he’d met the fate of every cop who’d chosen to go out on strike in September 1919—he’d lost his job without hope of reinstatement and been blackballed from all law enforcement positions on the Eastern Seaboard. It broke him. Or so the story went. He’d ended up in a Negro section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, that had burned to the ground in a riot five years ago. Since then, Joe’s family had heard only rumors about his whereabouts and those of his wife, Nora—Austin, Baltimore, Philadelphia.

Growing up, Joe had adored his brother. Then he’d come to hate him. Now, he mostly didn’t think about him. When he did, he had to admit, he missed his laugh.

Down the other end of the car, Emma Gould said “Excuse me, excuse me” as she worked her way toward the doors. Joe looked out the window and saw that they were approaching City Square in Charlestown.

Charlestown. No wonder she hadn’t gotten rattled with a gun pointed at her. In Charlestown, they brought .38s to the dinner table, used the barrels to stir their coffee.

He followed her to a two-story house at the end of Union Street. Just before she reached the house, she took a right down a pathway that ran along the side, and by the time Joe got to the alley behind the house, she was gone. He looked up and down the alley—nothing but similar two-story houses, most of them saltbox shacks with rotting window frames and tar patches in the roof. She could’ve gone into any of them, but she’d chosen the last walkway on the block. He assumed hers was the blue-gray one he was facing with steel doors over a wooden bulkhead.

Just past the house was a wooden gate. It was locked, so he grabbed the top of it, hoisted himself up, and took a look at another alley, narrower than the one he was in. Aside from a few trash cans, it was empty. He let himself back down and searched his pocket for one of the hairpins he rarely left home without.

Half a minute later he stood on the other side of the gate and waited.

It didn’t take long. This time of day—quitting time—it never did. Two pairs of footsteps came up the alley, two men talking about the latest plane that had gone down trying to cross the Atlantic, no sign of the pilot, an Englishman, or the wreckage. One second it was in the air, the next it was gone for good. One of the men knocked on the bulkhead, and after a few seconds, Joe heard him say, “Blacksmith.”

One of the bulkhead doors was pulled back with a whine and then a few moments later, it was dropped back in place and locked.

Joe waited five minutes, clocking it, and then he exited the second alley and knocked on the bulkhead.

A muffled voice said, “What?”

“Blacksmith.”

There was a ratcheting sound as someone threw the bolt back and Joe lifted the bulkhead door. He climbed into the small stairwell and let himself down it, lowering the bulkhead door as he went. At the bottom of the stairwell, he faced a second door. It opened as he was reaching for it. An old baldy guy with a cauliflower nose and blown blood vessels splayed across his cheekbones waved him inside, a grim scowl on his face.

It was an unfinished basement with a wood bar in the center of the dirt floor. The tables were wooden barrels, the chairs made of the cheapest pine.

At the bar, Joe sat down at the end closest to the door, where a woman with fat that hung off her arms like pregnant bellies served him a bucket of warm beer that tasted a little of soap and a little of sawdust, but not a lot like beer or a lot like alcohol. He looked for Emma Gould in the basement gloom, saw only dockworkers, a couple of sailors, and a few working girls. A piano sat against the brick wall under the stairs, unused, a few keys broken. This was not the kind of speak that went in for entertainment much beyond the bar fight that would open up between the sailors and the dockworkers once they realized they were short two working girls.

She came out the door behind the bar, tying a kerchief off behind her head. She’d traded her blouse and skirt for an off-white fisherman’s sweater and brown tweed trousers. She walked the bar, emptying ashtrays and wiping spills, and the woman who’d served Joe his drink removed her apron and went back through the door behind the bar.

When she reached Joe, her eyes flicked on his near-empty bucket. “You want another?”

“Sure.”

She glanced at his face and didn’t seem fond of the result. “Who told you about the place?”

“Dinny Cooper.”

“Don’t know him,” she said.

That makes two of us, Joe thought, wondering where the fuck he’d come up with such a stupid name. Dinny? Why didn’t he call the guy “Lunch”?

“He’s from Everett.”

She wiped the bar in front of him, still not moving to get his drink. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. We worked the Chelsea side of the Mystic last week. Dredge work?”

She shook her head.

“Anyway, Dinny pointed across the river, told me about this place. Said you served good beer.”

“Now I know you’re lying.”

“Because someone said you serve good beer?”

She stared at him the way she had in the payroll office, like she could see the intestines curled inside him, the pink of his lungs, the thoughts that journeyed among the folds of his brain.

“The beer’s not that bad,” he said and raised his bucket. “I had some once in this place this one time? I swear to you it—”

“Butter doesn’t melt on your tongue, does it?” she said.

“Miss?”

“Does it?”

He decided to try resigned indignation. “I’m not lying, miss. But I can go. I can certainly go.” He stood. “What do I owe you for the first one?”

“Two dimes.”

She held out her hand and he placed the coins in them and she placed them in the pocket of her man’s trousers. “You won’t do it.”

“What?” he said.

“Leave. You want me to be so impressed that you said you’d leave that I’ll decide you’re a Clear-Talk Charlie and ask you to stay.”

“Nope.” He shrugged into his coat. “I’m really going.”

She leaned into the bar. “Come here.”

He cocked his head.

She crooked a finger at him. “Come here.”

He moved a couple of stools out of the way and leaned into the bar.

“You see those fellas in the corner, sitting by the table made out of the apple barrel?”

He didn’t need to turn his head. He’d seen them the moment he walked in—three of them. Dockworkers by the look of them, ship masts for shoulders, rocks for hands, eyes you didn’t want to catch.

“I see ’em.”

“They’re my cousins. You see a family resemblance, don’t you?”

“No.”

She shrugged. “You know what they do for work?”

Their lips were close enough that if they’d opened their mouths and unfurled their tongues, the tips would have met.

“I have no idea.”

“They find guys like you who lie about guys named Dinny and they beat them to death.” She inched her elbows forward and their faces grew even closer. “Then they throw them in the river.”

Joe’s scalp and the backs of his ears itched. “Quite the occupation.”

“Beats robbing poker games, though, doesn’t it?”

For a moment Joe forgot how to move his face.

“Say something clever,” Emma Gould said. “Maybe about that sock you put in my mouth. I want to hear something slick and clever.”

Joe said nothing.

“And while you’re thinking of things,” Emma Gould said, “think of this—they’re watching us right now. If I tug this earlobe? You won’t make the stairs.”

He looked at the earlobe she’d indicated with a flick of her pale eyes. The right one. It looked like a chickpea, but softer. He wondered what it would taste like first thing in the morning.

Joe glanced down at the bar. “And if I pull this trigger?”

She followed his gaze, saw the pistol he’d placed between them.

“You won’t reach your earlobe,” he said.

Her eyes left the pistol and rose up his forearm in such a way he could feel the hairs parting. She sculled across the center of his chest and then up his throat and over his chin. When she found his eyes, hers were fuller and sharper, lit with something that had entered the world centuries before civilized things.

“I get off at midnight,” she said.

CHAPTER TWO The Lack in Her

Joe lived on the top floor of a boardinghouse in the West End, just a short walk from the riot of Scollay Square. The boardinghouse was owned and operated by the Tim Hickey Mob, which had long had a presence in the city but had flourished in the six years since the Eighteenth Amendment took effect.

The first floor was usually occupied by Paddys right off the boat with woolen brogues and bodies of gristle. One of Joe’s jobs was to meet them at the docks and lead them to Hickey-owned soup kitchens, give them brown bread and white chowder and gray potatoes. He brought them back to the boardinghouse where they were packed three to a room on firm, clean mattresses while their clothes were laundered in the basement by the older whores. After a week or so, once they’d gotten some strength back and freed their hair of nits and their mouths of poisoned teeth, they’d sign voter registration cards and pledge bottomless support to Hickey candidates in next year’s elections. Then they were set loose with the names and addresses of other immigrants from the same villages or counties back home who might be counted on to find them jobs straightaway.

On the second floor of the boardinghouse, accessible only by a separate entrance, was the casino. The third was the whore floor. Joe lived on the fourth, in a room at the end of the hall. There was a nice bathroom on the floor that he shared with whichever high rollers were in town at the moment and Penny Palumbo, the star whore of Tim Hickey’s stable. Penny was twenty-five but looked seventeen and her hair was the color bottled honey got when the sun moved through it. A man had jumped off a roof over Penny Palumbo; another had stepped off a boat; a third, instead of killing himself, killed another guy. Joe liked her well enough; she was nice and wonderful to look at. But if her face looked seventeen, he’d bet her brain looked ten. It was solely occupied, as far as Joe could tell, by three songs and some vague wishes about becoming a dressmaker.

Some mornings, depending on who got down to the casino first, one brought the other coffee. This morning, she brought it to him and they sat by the window in his room looking out at Scollay Square with its striped awnings and tall billboards as the first milk trucks puttered along Tremont Row. Penny told him that last night a fortune-teller had assured her she was destined to either die young or become a Trinitarian Pentecostal in Kansas. When Joe asked her if she was worried about dying, she said sure, but not half as much as moving to Kansas.

When she left, he heard her talking to someone in the hall, and then Tim Hickey was standing in his doorway. Tim wore a dark pinstripe vest, unbuttoned, matching trousers, and a white shirt with the collar unbuttoned and no tie. Tim was a trim man with a fine head of white hair and the sad, helpless eyes of a death row chaplain.

“Mr. Hickey, sir.”

“Morning, Joe.” He drank coffee from an old-fashioned glass that caught the morning light rising off the sills. “That bank in Pittsfield?”

“Yeah?” Joe said.

“The guy you want to see comes in here Thursdays, but you’ll find him at the Upham’s Corner place most other nights. He’ll keep a homburg on the bar to the right of his drink. He’ll give you the lay of the building and the out-route too.”

“Thanks, Mr. Hickey.”

Hickey acknowledged that with a tip of his glass. “Another thing—’member that dealer we discussed last month?”

“Carl,” Joe said, “yeah.”

“He’s up to it again.”

Carl Laubner, one of their blackjack dealers, had come from a joint that ran dirty games, and they couldn’t convince him to run a clean game here, not if any of the players in question looked less than 100 percent white. So if an Italian or a Greek sat down at the table, forget it. Carl magically pulled tens and aces for hole cards all night, or at least until the swarthier gents left the table.

“Fire him,” Hickey said. “Soon as he comes in.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We don’t run that horseshit here. Agreed?”

“Absolutely, Mr. Hickey. Absolutely.”

“And fix the twelve slot, will you? It’s running loose. We might run a straight house, but we’re not a fucking charity, are we, Joe?”

Joe wrote himself a note. “No, sir, we are not.”

Tim Hickey ran one of the few clean casinos in Boston, which made it one of the most popular casinos in town, particularly for the high-class play. Tim had taught Joe that rigged games fleeced a chump maybe two, three times at the most before he got wise and stopped playing. Tim didn’t want to fleece someone a couple of times; he wanted to drain them for the rest of their lives. Keep ’em playing, keep ’em drinking, he told Joe, and they will fork over all their green and thank you for relieving them of the weight.

“The people we service?” Tim said more than once. “They visit the night. But we live in it. They rent what we own. That means when they come to play in our sandbox, we make a profit off every grain.”

Tim Hickey was one of the smarter men Joe had ever known. At the start of Prohibition, when the mobs in the city were split down ethnic lines—Italians mixing only with Italians, Jews mixing only with Jews, Irish mixing only with Irish—Hickey mixed with everyone. He aligned himself with Giancarlo Calabrese, who ran the Pescatore Mob while old man Pescatore was in prison, and together they started dealing in Caribbean rum when everyone else was dealing in whiskey. By the time the Detroit and New York gangs had leveraged their power to turn everyone else into subcontractors in the whiskey trade, the Hickey and Pescatore mobs had cornered the market on sugar and molasses. The product came out of Cuba mostly, crossed the Florida Straits, got turned into rum on U.S. soil, and took midnight runs up the Eastern Seaboard to be sold at an 80 percent markup.

As soon as Tim had returned from his most recent trip to Tampa, he’d discussed the botched job at the Southie furniture warehouse with Joe. He commended Joe on being smart enough not to go for the house take in the counting room (“That avoided a war right there,” Tim said), and told him when he got to the bottom of why they’d been given such a dangerously bad tip, someone was going to hang from rafters as high as the Custom House spire.

Joe wanted to believe him because the alternative was to believe Tim had sent them to that warehouse because he’d wanted to start a war with Albert White. It wouldn’t be beyond Tim to sacrifice men he’d mentored since they were boys with the aim of cornering the rum market for good. In fact, nothing was beyond Tim. Absolutely nothing. That’s what it took to stay on top in the rackets—everyone had to know you’d long ago amputated your conscience.

In Joe’s room now, Tim added a spot of rum from his flask to his coffee and took a sip. He offered the flask to Joe, but Joe shook his head. Tim returned the flask to his pocket. “Where you been lately?”

“I been here.”

Hickey held his gaze. “You’ve been out every night this week and the week before. You got a girl?”

Joe thought about lying but couldn’t see the point. “I do, yeah.”

“She a nice girl?”

“She’s lively. She’s”—Joe couldn’t think of the precise word—“something.”

Hickey came off the doorjamb. “You got yourself a blood sticker, huh?” He mimed a needle plunging into his arm. “I can see it.” He came over and clamped a hand on the back of Joe’s neck. “You don’t get many shots at the good ones. Not in our line. She cook?”

“She does.” Truth was, Joe had no idea.

“That’s important. Not if they’re good or bad, just that they’re willing to do it.” Hickey let go of his neck and walked back to the doorway. “Talk to that fella about the Pittsfield thing.”

“I will, sir.”

“Good man,” Tim said and headed downstairs to the office he kept behind the casino cashier.

Carl Laubner ended up working two more nights before Joe remembered to fire him. Joe had forgotten a few things lately, including two appointments with Hymie Drago to move the merch’ from the Karshman Furs job. He had remembered to get to the slot machine and tighten the wheels good, but by the time Laubner came in on his shift that night, Joe was off with Emma Gould again.

Since that night at the basement speakeasy in Charlestown, he and Emma had seen each other most nights. Most, not every. The other nights she was with Albert White, a situation Joe had thus far managed to characterize as annoying, though it was fast approaching the intolerable.

When Joe wasn’t with Emma, all he could think about was when he would be. And then when they did meet, keeping their hands off each other went from an unlikely proposition to an impossible one. When her uncle’s speakeasy was closed, they had sex in it. When her parents and siblings were out of the apartment she shared with them, they had sex in it. They had sex in Joe’s car and sex in his room after he’d snuck her up the back stairs. They had sex on a cold hill, in a stand of bare trees overlooking the Mystic River, and on a cold November beach overlooking Savin Hill Cove in Dorchester. Standing, sitting, lying down—it didn’t make much difference to them. Inside, outside—same thing. When they had the luxury of an hour together, they filled it with as many new tricks and new positions as they could dream up. But when they had only a few minutes, then a few minutes would do.

What they rarely did was talk. At least not about anything outside the borders of their seemingly bottomless addiction to each other.

Behind Emma’s pale eyes and pale skin lay something coiled and caged. And not caged in a way that it wanted to come out. Caged in a way that demanded nothing come in. The cage opened when she took him inside her and for as long as they could sustain their lovemaking. In those moments, her eyes were open and searching and he could see her soul back there and the red light of her heart and whatever dreams she may have clung to as a child, temporarily untethered and freed of their cellar and its dark walls and padlocked door.

Once he’d pulled out of her, though, and her breathing slowed to normal, he would watch those things recede like the tide.

Didn’t matter, though. He was starting to suspect he was in love with her. In those rare moments when the cage opened and he was invited in, he found a person desperate to trust, desperate to love, hell, desperate to live. She just needed to see he was worthy of risking that trust, that love, that life.

And he would be.

He turned twenty years old that winter and he knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He wanted to become the one man Emma Gould put all her faith in.

As the winter wore on, they risked appearing in public together a few times. Only on the nights when she had it on good authority that Albert White and his key men were out of town and only at establishments that were owned by Tim Hickey or his partners.

One of Tim’s partners was Phil Cregger, who owned the Venetian Garden restaurant on the first floor of the Bromfield Hotel. Joe and Emma went there on a frigid night that smelled of snow even though the sky was clear. They’d just checked their coats and hats when a group exited the private room behind the kitchen and Joe knew them for what they were by their cigar smoke and the practiced bonhomie in their voices before he ever saw their faces—pols.

Aldermen and selectmen and city councillors and fire captains and police captains and prosecutors—the shiny, smiling, grubby battery that kept the city’s lights on, barely. Kept the trains running and the traffic signals working, barely. Kept the populace ever aware that those services and a thousand more, big and small, could end—would end—were it not for their constant vigilance.

He saw his father at the same moment his father noticed him. It was, as it usually was if they hadn’t seen each other in a while, unsettling if for no other reason than how completely they mirrored each other. Joe’s father was sixty. He’d sired Joe late after producing two sons at a more respectably youthful age. But whereas Connor and Danny carried the genetic strains of both parents in their faces and bodies and certainly their height (which came from the Fennessey side of the family, where the men grew tall), Joe had come out the spitting image of his old man. Same height, same build, same hard jawline, same nose and sharp cheekbones and eyes sunk back in their sockets just a little farther than normal, which made it all the harder for people to read what he was thinking. The only difference between Joe and his father was one of color. Joe’s eyes were blue whereas his father’s were green; Joe’s hair was the color of wheat, his father’s the color of flax. Otherwise, Joe’s father looked at him and saw his own youth mocking him. Joe looked at his father and saw liver spots and loose flesh, Death standing at the end of his bed at 3 A.M., tapping an impatient foot.

After a few farewell handshakes and backslaps, his father broke from the crowd as the men lined up for their coats. He stood before his son. He thrust out his hand. “How are you?”

Joe shook his hand. “Not bad, sir. You?”

“Tip-top. I was promoted last month.”

“Deputy superintendent of the BPD,” Joe said. “I heard.”

“And you? Where are you working these days?”

You’d have to have known Thomas Coughlin a long time to spot the effects of alcohol on him. It was never to be found in his speech, which remained smooth and firm and of consistent volume even after half a bottle of good Irish. It wasn’t to be found in any glassiness of the eyes. But if you knew where to look for it, you could find something predatory and mischievous in the glow of his handsome face, something that sized you up, found your weaknesses, and debated whether to dine on them.

“Dad,” Joe said, “this is Emma Gould.”

Thomas Coughlin took her hand and kissed the knuckles. “A pleasure, Miss Gould.” He tilted his head to the maître d’. “The corner table, Gerard, please.” He smiled at Joe and Emma. “Do you mind if I join you? I’m famished.”

They got through the salads pleasantly enough.

Thomas told stories of Joe’s childhood, the point of which was invariably what a scamp Joe had been, how irrepressible and full of beans. In his father’s retelling, they were whimsical stories fit for the Hal Roach shorts at a Saturday matinee. His father left out how the stories had usually ended—with a slap or the strap.

Emma smiled and chuckled at all the right places, but Joe could see she was pretending. They were all pretending. Joe and Thomas pretended to be bound by the love between a father and son and Emma pretended not to notice that they weren’t.

After the story about six-year-old Joe in his father’s garden—a story told so many times over the years Joe could predict to a breath his father’s pauses—Thomas asked Emma where her family hailed from.

“Charlestown,” she said, and Joe worried he heard a hint of defiance in her voice.

“No, I mean before they came here. You’re clearly Irish. Do you know where your ancestors were born?”

The waiter cleared the salad plates as Emma said, “My mother’s father was from Kerry and my father’s mother was from Cork.”

“I’m from just outside Cork,” Thomas said with uncommon delight.

Emma sipped her water but didn’t say anything, a part of her missing suddenly. Joe had seen this before—she had a way of disconnecting from a situation if it wasn’t to her liking. Her body remained, like something left behind in the chair during her escape, but the essence of her, whatever made Emma Emma, was gone.

“What was her maiden name, your grandmother?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You don’t know?”

Emma shrugged. “She’s dead.”

“But it’s your heritage.” Thomas was flummoxed.

Emma gave that another shrug. She lit a cigarette. Thomas showed no reaction but Joe knew he was aghast. Flappers appalled him on countless levels—women smoking, flashing thigh, lowering necklines, appearing drunk in public without shame or fear of civic scorn.

“How long have you known my son?” Thomas smiled.

“Few months.”

“Are you two—?”

“Dad.”

“Joseph?”

“We don’t know what we are.”

Secretly he’d hoped Emma would take the opportunity to clarify what, in fact, they were, but instead she shot him a quick look that asked how much longer they had to sit here and went back to smoking, her eyes drifting, anchorless, around the grand room.

The entrées reached the table, and they passed the next twenty minutes talking about the quality of the steaks and the béarnaise sauce and the new carpeting Cregger had recently installed.

During dessert, Thomas lit his own cigarette. “So what is it you do, dear?”

“I work at Papadikis Furniture.”

“Which department?”

“Secretarial.”

“Did my son pilfer a couch? Is that how you met?”

“Dad,” Joe said.

“I’m just wondering how you met,” his father said.

Emma lit a cigarette and looked out at the room. “This is a real swank place.”

“It’s just that I’m well aware how my son earns a living. I can only assume that if you’ve come into contact with him, it was either during a crime or in an establishment populated by rough characters.”

“Dad,” Joe said, “I was hoping we’d have a nice dinner.”

“I thought we just did. Miss Gould?”

Emma looked over at him.

“Have my questions this evening made you uncomfortable?”

Emma locked him in that cool gaze of hers, the one that could freeze a fresh coat of roofing tar. “I don’t know what you’re on about. And I don’t particularly care.”

Thomas leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee. “I’m on about you being the type of lass who consorts with criminals, which may not be the best thing for your reputation. The fact that the criminal in question happens to be my son isn’t the issue. It’s that my son, criminal or no, is still my son and I have paternal feelings for him, feelings that cause me to question the wisdom of his consorting with the type of woman who knowingly consorts with criminals.” Thomas placed his coffee cup back on the saucer and smiled at her. “Did you follow all that?”

Joe stood. “Okay, we’re going.”

But Emma didn’t move. She dropped her chin to the heel of her hand and considered Thomas for some time, the cigarette smoldering next to her ear. “My uncle mentioned a copper he has on his payroll, name of Coughlin. That you?” She gave him a tight smile to match his own and took a drag off her cigarette.

“This uncle would be your Uncle Robert, the one everyone calls Bobo?”

She flicked her eyelids in the affirmative.

“The police officer to whom you refer is named Elmore Conklin, Miss Gould. He’s stationed in Charlestown and is known to collect shakedown payments from illegal establishments like Bobo’s. I rarely get over to Charlestown, myself. But as deputy superintendent, I’d be happy to take a more focused interest in your uncle’s establishment.” Thomas stubbed out his cigarette. “Would that please you, dear?”

Emma held out her hand to Joe. “I need to powder.”

Joe gave her tip money for the ladies’-room attendant and they watched her cross the restaurant. Joe wondered if she’d return to the table or grab her coat and just keep walking.

His father removed his pocket watch from his vest and flicked it open. Snapped it closed just as quickly and returned it to its pocket. The watch was the old man’s most prized possession, an eighteen-karat Patek Philippe given to him over two decades ago by a grateful bank president.

Joe asked him, “Was any of that necessary?”

“I didn’t start the fight, Joseph, so don’t criticize how I finished it.” His father sat back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other. Some men wore their power as if it were a coat they couldn’t get to fit or to stop itching. Thomas Coughlin wore his like it had been tailored for him in London. He surveyed the room and nodded at a few people he knew before looking back at his son. “If I thought you were just making your way in the world on an unconventional path, do you think I’d take issue with it?”

“Yes,” Joe said, “I do.”

His father gave that a soft smile and a softer shrug. “I’ve been a police officer for thirty-seven years and I’ve learned one thing above all else.”

“That crime never pays,” Joe said, “unless you do it at an institutional level.”

Another soft smile and a small tip of the head. “No, Joseph. No. What I’ve learned is that violence procreates. And the children your violence produces will return to you as savage, mindless things. You won’t recognize them as yours, but they’ll recognize you. They’ll mark you as deserving of their punishment.”

Joe had heard variations of this speech over the years. What his father failed to recognize—besides the fact that he was repeating himself—was that general theories need not apply to particular people. Not if the people—or person—in question was determined enough to make his own rules and smart enough to get everyone else to play by them.

Joe was only twenty, but he already knew he was that type of person.

But to humor the old man, if for no other reason, he asked, “And what exactly are these violent offspring punishing me for again?”

“The carelessness of their reproduction.” His father leaned forward, elbows on the table, palms pressed together. “Joseph.”

“Joe.”

“Joseph, violence breeds violence. It’s an absolute.” He unclasped his hands and looked at his son. “What you put out into the world will always come back for you.”

“Yeah, Dad, I read my catechism.”

His father tipped his head in recognition as Emma came out of the powder room and crossed to the coat-check room. His eyes tracking her, he said to Joe, “But it never comes back in a way you can predict.”

“I’m sure it doesn’t.”

“You’re not sure of anything except your own certainty. Confidence you haven’t earned always has the brightest glow.” Thomas watched Emma hand her ticket to the coat-check girl. “She’s quite easy on the eyes.”

Joe said nothing.

“Outside of that, though,” his father said, “I fail to grasp what you see in her.”

“Because she’s from Charlestown?”

“Well, that doesn’t help,” his father said. “Her father was a pimp back in the old days and her uncle has killed at least two men that we know of. But I could overlook all that, Joseph, if she weren’t so…”

“What?”

“Dead inside.” His father consulted his watch again and barely suppressed the shudder of a yawn. “It’s late.”

“She’s not dead inside,” Joe said. “Something in her is just sleeping.”

“That something?” his father said as Emma returned with their coats. “It never wakes up again, son.”

On the street, walking to his car, Joe said, “You couldn’t have been a little more…?”

“What?”

“Engaged in the conversation? Social?”

“All the time we been together,” she said, “all you ever talk about is how much you hate that man.”

“Is it all the time?”

“Pretty much.”

Joe shook his head. “And I’ve never said I hate my father.”

“Then what have you said?”

“That we don’t get along. We’ve never gotten along.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because we’re too fucking alike.”

“Or because you hate him.”

“I don’t hate him,” Joe said, knowing it, above all things, to be true.

“Then maybe you should climb under his covers tonight.”

“What?”

“He sits there and looks at me like I’m trash? Asks about my family like he knows we’re no good all the way back to the Old Country? Calls me fucking dear?” She stood on the sidewalk shaking as the first snowflakes appeared from the black above them. The tears in her voice began to fall from her eyes. “We’re not people. We’re not respectable. We’re just the Goulds from Union Street. Charlestown trash. We tat the lace for your fucking curtains.”

Joe held up his hands. “Where is this coming from?” He reached for her and she took a step back.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Okay.”

“It comes from a lifetime, okay, of getting the high hat and the icy mitt from people like your father. People who, who, who… who confuse being lucky with being better. We’re not less than you. We’re not shit.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“He did.”

“No.”

“I’m not shit,” she whispered, her mouth half open to the night, the snow mingling with the tears streaming down her face.

He put his arms out and stepped in close. “May I?”

She stepped into his embrace but kept her own arms by her sides. He held her to him and she wept into his chest and he told her repeatedly that she was not shit, she was not less than anyone, and he loved her, he loved her.

Later, they lay in his bed while thick, wet snowflakes flung themselves at the window like moths.

“That was weak,” she said.

“What?”

“On the street. I was weak.”

“You weren’t weak. You were honest.”

“I don’t cry in front of people.”

“Well, you can with me.”

“You said you loved me.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you?”

He looked in her pale, pale eyes. “Yes.”

After a minute she said, “I can’t say it back.”

He told himself that wasn’t the same as saying she didn’t feel it.

“Okay.”

“Is it really okay? Because some guys need to hear it back.”

Some guys? How many guys had told her they loved her before he came along?

“I’m tougher than them,” he said and wished it were true.

The window rattled in the dark February gusts and a foghorn bayed and down in Scollay Square several horns beeped in anger.

“What do you want?” he asked her.

She shrugged and bit a hangnail and stared across his body out the window.

“For a lot of things to never have happened to me.”

“What things?”

She shook her head, drifting away from him now.

“And sun,” she mumbled after a while, her lips sleep swollen. “Lots and lots of sun.”

CHAPTER THREE Hickey’s Termite

Tim Hickey once told Joe the smallest mistake sometimes casts the longest shadow. Joe wondered what Tim would have said about daydreaming behind the wheel of a getaway car while you were parked outside a bank. Maybe not daydreaming—fixating. On a woman’s back. More specifically, on Emma’s back. On the birthmark he’d seen there. Tim probably would have said, then again, sometimes it’s the biggest mistakes that cast the longest shadows, you moron.

Another thing Tim was fond of saying was when a house falls down, the first termite to bite into it is just as much to blame as the last. Joe didn’t get that one—the first termite would be long fucking dead by the time the last termite got his teeth into the wood. Wouldn’t he? Every time Tim made the analogy, Joe resolved to look into termite life expectancy, but then he’d forget to do it until the next time Tim brought it up, usually when he was drunk and there was a lull in the conversation, and everyone at the table would get the same look on their faces: What is it with Tim and the fucking termites already?

Tim Hickey got his hair cut once a week at Aslem’s on Charles Street. One Tuesday, some of those hairs ended up in his mouth when he was shot in the back of the head on his way to the barber’s chair. He lay on the checkerboard tile as the blood rolled past the tip of his nose and the shooter emerged from behind the coatrack, shaky and wide-eyed. The coatrack clattered to the tile and one of the barbers jumped in place. The shooter stepped over Tim Hickey’s corpse and gave the witnesses a hunched series of nods, as if embarrassed, and let himself out.

When Joe heard, he was in bed with Emma. After he hung up the phone, Emma sat up in bed while he told her. She rolled a cigarette and looked at Joe while she licked the paper—she always looked at him when she licked the paper—and then she lit it. “Did he mean anything to you? Tim?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said.

“How don’t you know?”

“It’s not one thing or the other, I guess.”

Tim had found Joe and the Bartolo brothers when they were kids setting fire to newsstands. One morning they’d take money from the Globe to burn down one of the Standard’s stands. The next day they’d take a payoff from the American to torch the Globe’s. Tim hired them to burn down the 51 Café. They graduated to late-afternoon home rips in Beacon Hill, the back doors left unlocked by cleaning women or handymen on Tim’s payroll. When they worked a job Tim gave them, he set a flat price, but if they worked their own jobs, they paid Tim his tribute and took the lion’s share for themselves. In that regard, Tim had been a great boss.

Joe had watched him strangle Harvey Boule, though. It had been over opium, a woman, or a German shorthaired pointer; to this day Joe had only heard rumors. But Harvey had walked into the casino and he and Tim got to talking and then Tim snapped the electric cord off one of the green banker’s lamps and wrapped it around Harvey’s neck. Harvey was a huge guy and he carried Tim around the casino floor for about a minute, all the whores running for cover, all of Hickey’s gun monkeys pointing their guns right at Harvey. Joe watched the realization dawn in Harvey Boule’s eyes—even if he got Tim to stop strangling him, Tim’s goons would empty four revolvers and one automatic into him. He dropped to his knees and soiled himself with a loud venting sound. He lay on his stomach, gasping, as Tim pressed his knee between his shoulder blades and wrapped the excess cord tight around one hand. He twisted and pulled back all the harder and Harvey kicked hard enough to knock off both shoes.

Tim snapped his fingers. One of his gun monkeys handed him a pistol and Tim put it to Harvey’s ear. A whore said, “Oh, God,” but just as Tim went to pull the trigger, Harvey’s eyes turned hopeless and confused, and he moaned his final breath into the imitation Oriental. Tim sat back on Harvey’s spine and handed the gun back to his goon. He peered at the profile of the man he’d killed.

Joe had never seen anyone die before. Less than two minutes before, Harvey had asked the girl who brought him his martini to get him the score of the Sox game. Tipped her good too. Checked his watch and slipped it back into his vest. Took a sip of his martini. Less than two minutes before, and now he was fucking gone? To where? No one knew. To God, to the devil, to purgatory, or worse, maybe to nowhere. Tim stood and smoothed his snow-white hair and pointed in a vague way at the casino manager. “Freshen everyone’s drinks. On Harvey.”

A couple of people laughed nervously but most everyone else looked sick.

That wasn’t the only person Tim had killed or ordered killed in the last four years, but it had been the one Joe witnessed.

And now Tim himself. Gone. Not coming back. As if he’d never been.

“You ever see anyone killed?” Joe asked Emma.

She looked back at him steadily for a bit, smoking the cigarette, chewing a hangnail. “Yeah.”

“Where do you think they go?”

“The funeral home.”

He stared at her until she smiled that tiny smile of hers, her curls dangling in front of her eyes.

“I think they go nowhere,” she said.

“I’m starting to think that too,” Joe said. He sat up and gave her a hard kiss and she returned it just as hard. Her ankles crossed at his back. She ran her hand through his hair and he looked into her, feeling if he stopped looking at her, he’d miss something, something important that would happen in her face, something he’d never forget.

“What if there is no After? And this”—she ground herself down on him—“is all we get?”

“I love this,” he said.

She laughed. “I love this too.”

“In general? Or with me?”

She put her cigarette out. She took his face in her hands when she kissed him. She rocked back and forth. “With you.”

But he wasn’t the only one she did this with, was he?

There was still Albert. Still Albert.

A couple days later, in the billiards room off the casino, Joe was shooting pool alone when Albert White walked in with the confidence of someone who expected an obstacle to be removed before he reached it. Walking in beside him was his chief gun monkey, Brenny Loomis, Loomis looking right at Joe like he’d looked at him from the floor of the gaming room.

Joe’s heart folded itself around the blade of a knife. And stopped.

Albert White said, “You must be Joe.”

Joe willed himself to move. He met Albert’s outstretched hand. “Joe Coughlin, yeah. Nice to meet you.”

“Good to put a face to a name, Joe.” Albert pumped his hand like the pumping would get water to a fire.

“Yes, sir.”

“This is Brendan Loomis,” Albert said, “a friend of mine.”

Joe shook Loomis’s hand, and it was like putting his hand between two cars as they backed into each other. Loomis cocked his head and his small brown eyes roamed over Joe’s face. When Joe got the hand back, he had to resist the urge to wring it. Loomis, meanwhile, wiped his own hand with a silk handkerchief, his face a rock. His eyes left Joe and looked around the room like he had plans for it. He was good with a gun, they said, and great with a knife, but most of his victims he just beat to death.

Albert said, “I’ve seen you before, right?”

Joe searched his face for signs of mirth. “I don’t think so.”

“No, I have. Bren’, you seen this guy before?”

Brenny Loomis picked up the nine ball and examined it. “No.”

Joe felt a relief so overpowering he worried he might lose control of his bladder.

“The Shoelace.” Albert snapped his fingers. “You’re in there sometimes, aren’t you?”

“I am,” Joe said.

“That’s it, that’s it.” Albert clapped Joe on the shoulder. “I run this house now. You know what that means?”

“I don’t.”

“Means I need you to pack up the room where you’ve been living.” He raised an index finger. “But I don’t want you to feel like I’m putting you on the street.”

“Okay.”

“It’s just this is a swell joint. We have a lot of ideas for it.”

“Absolutely.”

Albert put a hand on Joe’s arm just above the elbow. His wedding band flashed under the light. It was silver. Celtic snake patterns were etched into it. A couple of diamonds too, small ones.

“You think about what kind of earner you want to be. Okay? Just think about it. Take some time. But know this—you can’t work on your own. Not in this town. Not anymore.”

Joe turned his gaze away from the wedding band and the hand on his arm, looked Albert White in his friendly eyes. “I have no desire to work on my own, sir. I paid tribute to Tim Hickey, rain or shine.”

Albert White got a look like he didn’t like hearing Tim Hickey’s name uttered in the place he now owned. He patted Joe’s arm. “I know you did. I know you did good work too. Top-notch. But we don’t do business with outsiders. And an independent contractor? That’s an outsider. We’re building a great team, Joe. I promise you—an amazing team.” He poured himself a drink from Tim’s decanter, didn’t offer anyone else one. He carried it over to the pool table and hoisted himself up on the rail, looked at Joe. “Let me just say one thing plain—you’re too smart for the stuff you’ve been pulling. You’re nickel-and-diming with two dumb guineas—hey, they’re great friends, I’m sure, but they’re stupid and they’re wops and they’ll be dead before they’re thirty. You? You can keep on the path you’re on. No commitments, but no friends. A house, but no home.” He slid off the pool table. “If you don’t want a home, that’s fine. I promise. But you can’t operate anywhere in the city limits. You want to carve something out on the South Shore, go ahead. Try the North Shore, if the Italians let you live once they hear about you. But the city?” He pointed at the floor. “That’s organized now, Joe. No tributes, just employees. And employers. Is there any part of this I’ve been unclear on?”

“No.”

“Vague about?”

“No, Mr. White.”

Albert White crossed his arms and nodded, looked at his shoes. “You got anything lined up? Any jobs I should know about?”

Joe had spent the last of Tim Hickey’s money to pay the guy who’d given him the info he needed for the Pittsfield job.

“No,” Joe said. “Nothing lined up.”

“You need money?”

“Mr. White, sir?”

“Money.” Albert reached into his pocket with a hand that had run over Emma’s pubic bone. Gripped her hair. He peeled two ten spots off his wad and slapped them into Joe’s palm. “I don’t want you thinking on an empty stomach.”

“Thanks.”

Albert patted Joe’s cheek with that same hand. “I hope this ends well.”

We could leave,” Emma said.

“Leave?” he said. “Like together?”

They were in her bedroom in the middle of the day, the only time her house was empty of the three sisters and the three brothers and the bitter mother and angry father.

“We could leave,” she said again, as if she didn’t believe it herself.

“And go where? Live on what? And do you mean together?”

She didn’t say anything. Twice he’d asked the question, twice she’d ignored it.

“I don’t know much about honest work,” he said.

“Who said it needs to be honest?”

He looked around the grim room she shared with two sisters. The wallpaper had come off the horsehair plaster by the window and two of the panes were cracked. They could see their breath in here.

“We’d have to go pretty far,” he said. “New York’s a closed town. Philly too. Detroit, forget about it. Chicago, KC, Milwaukee—all shut to a guy like me unless I want to join a mob as low man on the totem.”

“So we go west, as the man said. Or down south.” She nuzzled her nose into the side of his neck and took a deep breath, a softness seeming to grow in her. “We’ll need stake money.”

“We got this job lined up for Saturday. You free Saturday?”

“To leave?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve got to see You Know Who Saturday night.”

“Fuck him.”

“Well, yeah,” she said, “that’s the general plan.”

“No, I mean—”

“I know what you mean.”

“He’s a bad fucking guy,” Joe said, his eyes on her back, on that birthmark the color of wet sand.

She looked at him with a mild disappointment that was all the more dismissive for being so mild. “No, he’s not.”

“You stick up for him?”

“I’ll tell you he’s not a bad guy. He’s not my guy. He’s not someone I love or admire or anything. But he’s not bad. Don’t always try to make things so simple.”

“He killed Tim. Or ordered him killed.”

“And Tim, he, what, he made his living handing out turkeys to orphans?”

“No, but—”

“But what? No one’s good, no one’s bad. Everyone’s just trying to make their way.” She lit a cigarette and shook the match until it was black and smoldering. “Stop fucking judging everyone.”

He couldn’t stop looking at her birthmark, getting lost in its sand, swirling with it. “You’re still going to see him.”

“Don’t start. If we’re truly leaving town, then—”

“We’re leaving town.” Joe would leave the country if it meant no man ever touched her again.

“Where?”

“Biloxi,” he said, realizing as he said it that it actually wasn’t a bad idea. “Tim had a lot of friends there. Guys I met. Rum guys. Albert gets his supply from Canada. He’s a whiskey guy. So if we get to the Gulf Coast—Biloxi, Mobile, maybe even New Orleans, if we buy off the right people—we might be okay. That’s rum country.”

She thought about it a bit, that birthmark rippling every time she stretched up the bed to tap ash off her cigarette. “I’m supposed to see him for that new hotel opening. The one on Providence Street?”

“The Statler?”

She nodded. “Supposed to have radios in every room. Marble from Italy.”

“And?”

“And if I go to that, he’ll be with his wife. He just wants me there ’cuz, I dunno, ’cuz it excites him to see me when his wife’s on his arm. And after that, I know for a fact he’s going to Detroit for a few days to talk to new suppliers.”

“So?”

“So, it’ll buy us all the time we need. By the time he comes looking for me again, we’ll have a three- or four-day head start.”

Joe thought it through. “Not bad.”

“I know,” she said with another smile. “You think you can clean yourself up, get over to the Statler Saturday? Say, about seven?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then we’re gone,” she said and looked over her shoulder at him. “But no more talk about Albert being a bad guy. My brother’s got a job ’cuz of him. Last winter, he bought my mother a coat.”

“Well, then.”

“I don’t want to fight.”

Joe didn’t want to fight either. Every time they did, he lost, found himself apologizing for things he hadn’t even done, hadn’t even thought of doing, found himself apologizing for not doing them, for not thinking of doing them. It hurt his fucking head.

He kissed her shoulder. “So we won’t fight.”

She gave him a flutter of eyelashes. “Hooray.”

Leaving the First National job in Pittsfield, Dion and Paolo had just jumped in the car when Joe backed into the lamppost because he’d been thinking about the birthmark. The wet sand color of it and the way it moved between her shoulder blades when she looked back at him and told him she might love him, how it did the same thing when she said Albert White wasn’t such a bad guy. A fucking peach actually was ol’ Albert. Friend of the common man, buy your mother a winter coat as long as you used your body to keep him warm. The birthmark was the shape of a butterfly but jagged and sharp around the edges, Joe thinking that might sum up Emma too, and then telling himself forget it, they were leaving town tonight, all their problems solved. She loved him. Wasn’t that the point? Everything else was heading for the rearview mirror. Whatever Emma Gould had, he wanted it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. He wanted it for the rest of his life—the freckles along her collarbone and the bridge of her nose, the hum that left her throat after she’d finished laughing, the way she turned “four” into a two-syllable word.

Dion and Paolo ran out of the bank.

They climbed in the back.

“Drive,” Dion said.

A tall, bald guy with a gray shirt and black suspenders came out of the bank, armed with a club. A club wasn’t a gun, but it could still cause trouble if the guy got close enough.

Joe rammed the gearshift into first with the heel of his hand and hit the gas, but the car went backward instead of forward. Fifteen feet backward. The eyes of the guy with the club popped in surprise.

Dion shouted, “Whoa! Whoa!”

Joe stomped the brake and the clutch. He rammed the shift out of reverse and into first, but they still hit the lamppost. The impact wasn’t bad, just embarrassing. The yokel with the suspenders would tell his wife and friends for the rest of his life how he’d scared three gun thugs so bad they’d reversed a getaway car to get away from him.

When the car lurched forward, the tires kicked dust and small rocks off the dirt road and into the face of the man with the club. By now, another guy stood in front of the bank. He wore a white shirt and brown pants. He extended his arm. Joe saw the guy in the rearview mirror, his arm jumping. For a moment, Joe couldn’t comprehend why, and then he understood. He said, “Get down,” and Dion and Paolo dropped in the backseat. The guy’s arm jerked up again, then jerked a third or fourth time, and the side-view mirror shattered and the glass fell to the dirt street.

Joe turned onto East Street and found the alley they’d scouted last week, banged a left into it, and stood on the gas pedal. For several blocks he drove parallel to the railroad tracks that ran behind the mills. By now they could assume the police were involved, not enough so that they were setting up roadblocks or anything, but enough that they could follow tire tracks off the dirt road by the bank, know the general direction in which they’d headed.

They’d stolen three cars that morning, all in Chicopee, about sixty miles south. They’d picked up the Auburn they were in now, as well as a black Cole with bald tires and a ’24 Essex Coach with a raspy engine.

Joe crossed the railroad tracks and drove another mile along Silver Lake to a foundry that had burned down some years before, the black shell of it listing to the right in a field of weeds and cattails. Both cars were waiting for them when Joe pulled into the back of the building, where the wall was long gone, and they parked beside the Cole and got out of the Auburn.

Dion lifted Joe by his overcoat lapels and pushed him against the Auburn’s hood. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“It was a mistake,” Joe said.

“Last week it was a mistake,” Dion said. “This week it’s a fucking pattern.”

Joe couldn’t argue. But he still said, “Take your hands off me.”

Dion let go of Joe’s lapels. He breathed heavily through his nostrils and pointed a stiff finger at Joe. “You’re fucking up.”

Joe took the hats and the kerchiefs and the guns and put them in a bag with the money. He put the bag in the back of the Essex Coach. “I know it.”

Dion held out his fat hands. “We’ve been partners since we were little fucking kids, but this is bad.”

“Yeah.” Joe agreed because he didn’t see the point in lying about the obvious.

The police cars—four of them—came through a wall of brown weeds on the edge of the field behind the foundry. The weeds were the color of a riverbed and stood six or seven feet tall. The cruisers flattened them and revealed a small tent community behind them. A woman in a gray shawl and her baby leaned over a recently doused campfire, trying to scoop whatever heat was left into their coats.

Joe jumped into the Essex and drove out of the foundry. The Bartolo brothers drove past him in their Cole, the back end sliding away from them as they hit a patch of dry red dirt. The dirt spewed onto Joe’s windshield and covered it. He leaned out the window and wiped at the dirt with his left arm while he drove with his right. The Essex bounced high off the uneven ground and something took a bite out of Joe’s ear. When he pulled his head back in, he could see a lot better, but blood poured from his ear, sluicing under his collar and down his chest.

A series of pings and thunks hit the back window, the sound of someone skipping coins off a tin roof, and then the window blew out and a bullet sparked off the dashboard. A cruiser appeared on Joe’s left and then another on his right. The one to his right had a cop in the backseat who rested the barrel of a Thompson on the window frame and opened fire. Joe stepped on the brakes so hard the steel coils of his seat pressed against his back ribs. The passenger windows exploded. Then the front window. The dashboard spit pieces of itself all over Joe and the front seat.

The cruiser to his right tried to brake as it turned in toward him. It rose on its nose and left the ground like something lifted by a gust. Joe had time to see it land on its side before the other cruiser rammed the back of his Essex and a boulder appeared out of the weeds just before the tree line.

The front of the Essex collapsed and the rest of it snapped to the right, Joe snapping with it. He never felt himself leave the car until he hit the tree. He lay there for a long time, covered in glass pebbles and pine needles, sticky with his own blood. He thought of Emma and he thought of his father. The woods smelled like burning hair, and he checked his arm hair and head just in case, but he was fine. He sat in the pine needles and waited for the Pittsfield police to arrest him. Smoke drifted through the trees. It was black and oily and not too thick. It moved around the tree trunks like it was looking for someone. After a while, he realized the police might not be coming.

When he stood and looked past the mangled Essex, he couldn’t see the second cruiser anywhere. He could see the first, the one that had fired the tommy gun at him; it lay on its side in the field, a good twenty yards from where he’d last seen it bounce.

His hands had been chewed up by glass or fragments flying around inside the car. His legs were fine. His ear continued to bleed. When he found the rear window along the driver’s side of the Essex intact, he looked at his reflection and saw why—no more left earlobe. It had been removed as if by a flick of the barber’s blade. Past his reflection, Joe saw the leather satchel that held the money and the guns. The door wouldn’t open right away, and he had to put both feet on the driver’s door, which was unrecognizable as a door. He pulled hard though, pulled until he felt nauseated and light-headed. Just when he was thinking he should probably go find a rock, the door opened with a loud groan.

He took the bag and walked away from the field and deeper into the woods. He came upon a small, dry tree that was aflame, its two largest branches curving toward the fireball in its center, like a man trying to pat out his own burning head. A pair of oily black tire tracks flattened the brush in front of him, and some burning leaves listed in the air. He found a second burning tree and a small bush, and the black tire tracks grew blacker and more oily. After about fifty yards, he arrived at a pond. Steam curled along its edges and wisped off the surface, and at first Joe couldn’t tell what he was seeing. The police cruiser that had rammed him had entered the water on fire, and now it sat in the middle of the pond, the water up to its windowsills, the rest of it charred, a few greasy blue flames still dancing on the roof. The windows had blown out. The holes the Thompson gun had made in the rear panel looked like the butts of flattened beer cans. The driver hung halfway out his door. The only part of him that wasn’t black was his eyes, all the whiter for the charring of the rest of him.

Joe walked into the pond until he was standing on the passenger side of the cruiser, the water just below his waist. There was no one else inside the car. He stuck his head in through the passenger window even though it meant getting that much closer to the body. The heat radiated off the driver’s roasted flesh in waves. He leaned back out of the car, certain he’d seen two cops in that cruiser as they’d raced across the field. He got another whiff of cooked flesh and lowered his head.

The other cop lay in the pond at his feet. He looked up from the sandy floor, the left side of his body as blackened as his partner’s, the flesh on the right curdled but still white. He was about Joe’s age, maybe a year older. His right arm pointed up. He’d probably used it to pull himself out of the burning car and fell into the water on his back, and it had stayed that way when he died.

But it still looked like he was pointing at Joe, the message clear:

You did this.

You. No one else. No one living anyway.

You’re the first termite.

CHAPTER FOUR A Hole at the Center of Things

Back in the city, he dumped the car he’d stolen in Lenox and replaced it with a Dodge 126 he found parked along Pleasant Street in Dorchester. He drove it to K Street in South Boston and sat down the street from the house he’d grown up in while he considered his options. There weren’t many. By the time night fell, he’d probably be out of them.

It was in all the late editions:

The two men Joe had come across in the pond were identified as Donald Belinski and Virgil Orten. Both had left wives behind. Orten had left two children. After studying their photos for a bit, Joe decided that Orten had been the one driving the car and Belinski had been the one who pointed up at him from the water.

He knew the real reason they were dead was because one of their brother lawmen had been stupid enough to fire a fucking tommy gun from a car bouncing across uneven ground. He knew that. He also knew that he was Hickey’s termite and Donald and Virgil never would have been in that field if he and the Bartolo brothers hadn’t come to their small city to rob one of their small banks.

The third dead cop, Jacob Zobe, was a state trooper who’d pulled over a car along the edge of the October Mountain State Forest. He’d been shot once in the stomach, which bent him over, and once through the top of his skull, which finished him off. The killer or killers ran over his ankle as they sped away, snapping the bone in half.

The shooting sounded like Dion. It was how he fought—punched a guy in the stomach to fold him in half and then worked the head until he went down for good. Dion, to the best of Joe’s knowledge, had never killed a man before, but he’d come close a few times, and he hated cops.

Investigators had yet to identify any suspects, at least publicly. Two of the suspects were described as “heavyset” and “of foreign descent and odor,” while the third—possibly a foreigner as well—had been shot in the face. Joe looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror. Technically, he supposed, it was true; the earlobe was attached to the face. Or, in his case, it had been.

Even though no one had their names yet, a sketch artist with the Pittsfield Police Department had rendered their likenesses. So while most papers ran pictures of the three dead cops below the fold, above it they printed sketches of Dion, Paolo, and Joe. Dion and Paolo looked more jowly than normal and Joe would have to ask Emma if his face looked that thin and wolfish in the flesh, but otherwise, the resemblance was remarkable.

A four-state dragnet was in effect. The Bureau of Investigation had been consulted and was said to be joining the pursuit.

By now his father would have seen the papers. His father, Thomas Coughlin, deputy superintendent of the Boston Police Department.

His son, party to a cop killing.

Since Joe’s mother had passed two years ago, his father worked himself to numb exhaustion six days a week. With a dragnet in effect for his own son, he’d have a cot brought into his office, probably not come home until they closed the case.

The family home was a four-story row house. It was an impressive structure, a redbrick bowfront where all the center rooms looked out at the street and boasted curved window seats. It was a house of mahogany staircases, pocket doors, and parquet floors, six bedrooms, two bathrooms, both with indoor plumbing, a dining room fit for the great hall of an English castle.

When a woman once asked Joe how he could come from such a magnificent home and such a good family and still become a gangster, Joe’s answer was two-pronged: (a) he wasn’t a gangster, he was an outlaw; (b) he came from a magnificent house, not a magnificent home.

Joe let himself into his father’s house. From the phone in the kitchen, he called the Gould household and got no answer. The satchel he’d carried into the house with him contained sixty-two thousand dollars. Even split three ways, it was enough to last any reasonably frugal man ten years, maybe fifteen. Joe wasn’t a frugal man, so he figured it’d last him four regular years. But on the run, it would last him eighteen months. No more. By then, he’d figure something out. It was what he was good at, thinking on the fly.

Unquestionably, a voice that sounded suspiciously like his oldest brother’s said. It’s worked out so well so far.

He called Uncle Bobo’s blind pig but got the same result as the Gould house. Then he remembered that Emma was attending the opening soiree at the Hotel Statler tonight at six. Joe pulled his watch from his vest: ten minutes to four.

Two hours to kill in a city that was, by now, looking to kill him.

That was far too much time out in the open. In that time they’d learn his name, his address, and come up with a list of his known associates and favorite haunts. They’d lock down all the train and bus stations, even the rural ones, and put up every last roadblock.

But that could cut both ways. The roadblocks would prohibit entry into the city under the logic that he was still outside it. No one would ever assume he was here, planning to slip right back out again. And they wouldn’t assume that because only the world’s dumbest criminal would risk returning to the only city he’d ever called home after committing the biggest crime the region had seen in five or six years.

Which made him the dumbest criminal in the world.

Or the smartest. Because pretty much the only place they weren’t searching right now was the place right under their noses.

Or so he told himself.

What he could still do—what he should have done in Pittsfield—was vanish. Not in two hours. Now. Not wait around for a woman who might choose not to join him under the present circumstances. Just leave with the shirt on his back and a bag of money in his hand. The roads were all being watched, yes. Same for trains and buses. And even if he could get out to the farmlands south and west of the city and steal a horse, it wouldn’t do him any good because he didn’t know how to ride one.

That left the sea.

He’d need a boat, but not a pleasure craft and not an obvious rumrunner like a sea skiff or a garvey. He’d need a worker’s boat, one with rusted cleats and frayed tackle, a deck piled high with dented lobster traps. Something moored in Hull or Green Harbor or Gloucester. If he boarded by seven, it would probably be three or four in the morning before the fisherman noticed it missing.

So now he was stealing from workingmen.

Except the boat would be registered. Would have to be, or he’d move on to another. He’d get the address off the registration, mail the owner enough money to buy two boats or just get the fuck out of the lobster business altogether.

It occurred to him that thinking like this could explain why, even after all the jobs he’d pulled, he rarely had much money in his pockets. Sometimes it seemed like he stole money from one place just to give it away somewhere else. But he also stole because it was fun and he was good at it and it led to other things he was good at like bootlegging and rum-running, which is why he knew his way around boats in the first place. Last June, he’d run a boat from a no-name fishing village in Ontario across Lake Huron to Bay City, Michigan, another from Jacksonville to Baltimore in October, and just last winter ferried cases of newly distilled rum out of Sarasota and across the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans, where he’d blown his entire profit one weekend in the French Quarter on sins that, even now, he could only remember in fragments.

So he could pilot most boats, which meant he could steal most boats. He could walk out this door and be on the South Shore in thirty minutes. The North Shore would take a little longer, but this time of year there’d probably be more boats up there to choose from. If he set out from Gloucester or Rockport, he could reach Nova Scotia in three to four days. And then he’d send for Emma after a couple of months.

Which seemed a bit long.

But she’d wait for him. She loved him. She’d never said it, true, but he could feel her wanting to. She loved him. He loved her.

She’d wait.

Maybe he’d just swing by the hotel. Pop his head in real quick, see if he could spot her. If they both vanished, they’d be impossible to trace. But if he disappeared and then sent for her, by that point, the cops or the BI could have figured out who she was and what she meant to him and she’d show up in Halifax with a posse on her tail. He’d open the door to greet her, they’d both go down in bullet rain.

She wouldn’t wait.

He either went with her now or without her forever.

He looked at himself in the glass of his mother’s china cabinet and remembered why he’d come here in the first place—no matter where he decided to go, he wouldn’t get far dressed like this. The left shoulder of his coat was black with blood, his shoes and trouser cuffs were caked in mud, his shirt torn from the woods and speckled with blood.

In the kitchen, he opened the bread box and pulled out a bottle of A. Finke’s Widow Rum. Or, as most called it, Finke’s. He removed his shoes and carried them and the rum with him up the service stairs to his father’s bedroom. In the bathroom, he washed as much of the dried blood from his ear as he could, careful not to disturb the heart of the scab. When he was certain it wasn’t going to bleed, he took a few steps back and appraised it in relation to the other ear and the rest of his face. As deformities went, it wasn’t going to make anyone look twice once the scab fell away. And even now, the majority of the black scab clung to the underside of his ear; it was noticeable, no question, but not in the way a black eye or broken nose would have been.

He had a few sips of the Finke’s while he chose a suit from his father’s closet. There were fifteen of them, about thirteen too many for a policeman’s salary. Same with the shoes, the shirts, the ties and hats. Joe chose a striped malacca tan single-breasted suit from Hart Schaffner & Marx with a white Arrow shirt. The silk tie was black with diagonal red stripes every four inches or so, the shoes a pair of black Nettletons, and the hat a Knapp-Felt, as smooth as a dove’s breast. He stripped off his own clothes and folded them neatly on the floor. He placed his pistol and his shoes on top and changed into his father’s clothes, then returned the pistol to the waistband at the small of his back.

Judging by the length of the trousers, he and his father weren’t exactly the same height after all. His father was a little taller. And his hat size a bit smaller than Joe’s. Joe dealt with the hat problem by tilting it back off the crown a bit so it looked jaunty. As for the length of his trousers, he double-rolled the cuffs and used safety pins from his late mother’s sewing table to hold them in place.

He carried his old clothes and the bottle of good rum down into his father’s study. Even now he couldn’t deny that crossing the threshold into that room when his father wasn’t present felt sacrilegious. He stood at the threshold and listened to the house—the ticking of its cast-iron radiators, the scratch of the chime hammers in the grandfather clock down the hall as they prepared to strike four. Even though he was positive the house was empty, he felt watched.

When the hammers did, in fact, fall on the chimes, Joe entered the office.

The desk sat in front of tall bay windows overlooking the street. It was an ornate Victorian partners desk, built in Dublin in the middle of the last century. The kind of desk no tenant farmer’s son from the shitheel side of Clonakilty could have reasonably expected to ever grace his home. The same could be said for the matching credenza under the window, the Oriental rug, the thick, amber drapes, the Waterford decanters, the oak bookshelves and leather-bound books his father never bothered to read, the bronze curtain rods, the antique leather sofa and armchairs, the walnut humidor.

Joe opened one of the cabinets beneath the bookshelves and crouched to confront the safe he found there. He dialed the combination—3-12-10, the months in which he and his two brothers had been born—and opened the safe. Some of his mother’s jewelry was in it, five hundred dollars in cash, the deed to the house, his parents’ birth certificates, a stack of papers Joe didn’t bother examining, and a little more than a thousand dollars in treasury bonds. Joe removed it all and placed it on the floor to the right of the cabinet door. At the back of the safe was a wall made of the same thick steel as the rest of it. Joe popped it off by pressing his thumbs hard against the upper corners and lay it on the floor of the first safe while he faced the dial of the second.

The combination here had been much harder to figure out. He’d tried all the birthdays in the family and got nowhere. He tried the numbers of the stationhouses where his father had worked over the years. Same result. When he recalled that his father sometimes said good luck, bad luck, and death all came in threes, he tried every permutation of that number. No luck. He’d started the process when he was fourteen. One day when he was seventeen, he’d noticed some correspondence his father had left out on his desk—a letter to a friend who’d become fire chief in Lewiston, Maine. The letter was typed on his father’s Underwood and filled with lies that wrapped ’round and ’round the paper like ribbon—“Ellen and I are blessed, still as smitten as the day we met…” “Aiden recovered quite well from the dark events of 9/19… ” “Connor has made remarkable strides with his infirmity… ” and “Looks like Joseph will enter Boston College in the fall. He speaks of working in the bond trade…” At the bottom of all this bullshit, he’d signed it Yours, TXC. It was the way he signed everything. Never wrote out his full name, as if to do so would somehow compromise him.

TXC.

Thomas Xavier Coughlin.

TXC.

20-24-3.

Joe dialed the numbers now and the second safe opened with a sharp peep of the hinges.

It was roughly two feet deep. A foot and a half of that was filled with money. Bricks of it, tightly bound in red rubber bands. Some of the bills had entered the safe before Joe was born and some had probably been placed there in the last week. A lifetime of payoffs and kickbacks and graft. His father—a pillar of the City on the Hill, the Athens of America, the Hub of the Universe—was more a criminal than Joe could ever aspire to be. Because Joe had never figured out how to show more than one face to the world, whereas his father had so many faces at his disposal the question was which of them was the original and which the imitations.

Joe knew that if he cleaned out the safe tonight, he’d have enough to live on the run for ten years. Or, if he got to somewhere far enough that they stopped looking, he could buy his way into the refining of Cuban sugar and/or the distilling of molasses, turn himself into a pirate king within three years, never have to worry about shelter or a hot meal the rest of his days.

But he didn’t want his father’s money. He’d stolen his clothes because the idea of leaving the city dressed as the old son of a bitch appealed to him, but he’d break his own hands before he’d spend his father’s cash with them.

He placed his neatly folded clothes and muddy shoes on top of his father’s dirty money. He thought of leaving a note, but he couldn’t think of anything else he’d want to say, so he closed the door and spun the dial. He replaced the fake wall of the first safe and locked that up too.

He walked around the office for a minute, mulling it over one last time. To try to get to Emma during a function that most of the city’s luminaries would attend, where the guests would arrive by limousine and invitation only, would be the pinnacle of insanity. In the cool of his father’s study, maybe some of the old man’s pragmatism, merciless as it was, finally rubbed off. Joe had to take what the gods had given him—an exit route out of the very city he was expected to enter. Time was not on his side, though. He had to go out this front door, hop into the purloined Dodge, and scoot north like the road itself had caught fire.

He looked out the window at K Street on a damp spring evening and reminded himself that she loved him and she’d wait.

Out on the street, he sat in the Dodge and stared back at the house of his birth, the house that had shaped the man he was now. By Boston Irish standards, he’d grown up in the lap of luxury. He’d never gone to bed hungry, never felt the street press through the soles of his shoes. He’d been educated, first by the nuns, then by the Jesuits until he dropped out in eleventh grade. Compared to most he met in his line of work, his upbringing had been positively cushy.

But there was a hole at the center of it, a great distance between Joe and his parents that reflected the distance between his mother and his father and his mother and the world at large. His parents had fought a war before he was born, a war that had ended in a peace so fragile that to acknowledge its existence could cause it to shatter, so no one ever discussed it. But the battlefield had still lain between them; she sat on her side, he sat on his. And Joe sat out in the middle, between the trenches, in the scorched dirt. The hole at the center of his house had been a hole at the center of his parents and one day the hole had found the center of Joe. There was a time, several full years during his childhood actually, when he’d hoped things could be different. But he couldn’t remember anymore why he’d felt that way. Things weren’t ever what they were supposed to be; they were what they were, and that was the simple truth of it, a truth that didn’t change just because you wanted it to.

He drove over to the East Coast Bus Line Terminal on St. James. It was a small yellow-brick building surrounded by much taller ones, and Joe gambled that any laws looking for him would be stationed by the bus terminals on the northern side of the building, not the lockers in the southwestern corner.

He slipped in through the exit door there and right into the rush-hour crowd. He let the crowd work for him, never bucking the flow, never trying to edge past anyone. And for once he had no complaints about not being tall. As soon as he got into the thick of the throngs, his was just another head bobbing alongside so many others. He counted two cops near the doors to the terminals and one in the crowd about sixty feet away.

He popped out of the streaming crowd into the quiet of the locker bank. This was where, simply by dint of being alone, he was most noticeable. He’d already removed three thousand dollars from the satchel and buckled it back up. He had the key to locker 217 in his right hand, the bag in his left. Inside 217 was $7,435, twelve pocket watches and thirteen wristwatches, two sterling silver money clips, a gold tie pin, and assorted women’s jewelry he’d never gotten around to selling because he’d suspected the fences were trying to fleece him. He took smooth strides to the locker, raised his right hand, which only trembled slightly, and opened it.

Behind him, someone called, “Hey!”

Joe kept his eyes straight ahead. The tremor in his hand turned into a spasm as he swung the locker door back.

“I said, ‘Hey!’ ”

Joe pushed the satchel into the locker, closed the door.

“Hey, you! Hey!”

Joe turned the key, locked the door, and pocketed the key.

“Hey!”

Joe turned, picturing the cop waiting for him, service revolver drawn, probably young, probably jumpy… .

A wino sat on the floor by a trash barrel. Bone thin, nothing to him but red eyes, red cheeks, and sinew. His jaw jutted in Joe’s direction.

“The fuck you looking at?” he asked.

The laugh left Joe’s mouth like a bark. He reached in his pocket, came back with a ten spot. He stooped and handed it to the old wino.

“Looking at you, Pops. Looking at you.”

The guy belched at that, but Joe was already moving away, lost in the crowd.

Outside, he walked east on St. James toward the two klieg lights crossing back and forth in the low clouds above the new hotel. It calmed him for a moment to imagine his money sitting safe and sound in the locker until he chose to return for it. A decision, he thought as he turned onto Essex Street, that was a bit unorthodox when a fella was planning a lifetime on the run.

If you’re leaving the country, why leave the money here?

So I can come back for it.

Why would you need to come back for it?

In case I don’t make it out tonight.

There’s your answer.

There’s no answer. What answer?

You didn’t want them to find the money on you.

Exactly.

Because you know you’re going to get caught.

CHAPTER FIVE Rough Work

He entered the Hotel Statler through the employee entrance. When a porter and then a dishwasher gave him curious glances, he lifted his hat and shot them confident smiles and two-finger salutes, a bon vivant avoiding the crowds out front, and they gave him nods and smiles in return.

Going through the kitchen, he could hear a piano, a peppy clarinet, and a steady bass coming from the lobby. He climbed a dark concrete staircase. He opened the door up top and came out by a marble staircase into a kingdom of light and smoke and music.

Joe had been in a few swank hotel lobbies in his time, but he’d never seen anything like this. The clarinetist and the cellist stood near brass entrance doors so unblemished the light bouncing off them turned the dust motes in the air gold. Corinthian columns rose from marble floors to wrought iron balconies. The molding was creamy alabaster, and every ten yards a heavy chandelier descended, the same pendant shape as the candelabras in their six-foot stands. Blood-dark couches perched on Oriental rugs. Two grand pianos, submerged in white flowers, sat on either side of the lobby. The pianists lightly tinkled the keys and carried on repartee with the crowd and each other.

In front of the center staircase, WBZ had placed three radiophones in their black stands. A large woman in a light blue dress stood by one of them, consulting with a man in a beige suit and yellow bow tie. The woman patted the buns of her hair repeatedly and sipped from a glass of pale, foggy liquid.

Most men in the crowd wore tuxedos or dinner jackets. There were a few in suits, so Joe wasn’t the only sore thumb in the gathering, but he was the only one still wearing a hat. He thought of removing it, but that would put the face on the front page of everyone’s evening edition in clear view. He glanced up at the mezzanine; there were plenty of hats up there because that’s where all the reporters and photographers mingled with the swells.

He dipped his chin and headed for the nearest staircase. It was slow going, the crowd pushing together, now that they’d seen the radiophones and the round woman in the blue dress. Even with his head down, he noticed Chappie Geygan and Boob Fowler talking with Red Ruffing. Joe, a Red Sox fanatic as long as he could remember, had to remind himself that it might not be a good idea for a wanted man to walk up to three baseball players and chat about their batting averages. He squeezed his way around the back of them, though, hoping he might hear a snippet to clear up the trade rumors about Geygan and Fowler, but all he heard was talk about the stock market, Geygan saying the only way to make real money was to buy on margin, any other way was for suckers who wanted to stay poor. That’s when the large woman in the light blue dress stepped up to the microphone and cleared her throat. The man beside her stepped to the other radiophone and raised an arm to the crowd.

“Ladies and gentlemen, for your listening pleasure,” the man said, “WBZ Radio, Boston, 1030 on your dial, is here live from the Grand Lobby of the landmark Hotel Statler. I’m Edwin Mulver and it gives me great pleasure to present to you Mademoiselle Florence Ferrel, mezzo-soprano with the San Francisco Opera.”

Edwin Mulver stepped back, his chin tilted up, as Florence Ferrel patted the buns of her hair one more time and then exhaled into her radiophone. The exhalation turned, without warning, into a mountain peak of a high note that thrummed through the crowd and climbed three stories to the ceiling. It was a sound so extravagant and yet so authentic it filled Joe with an awful loneliness. She was bearing forth something from the gods, and as it moved from her body into his, Joe realized he would die someday. He knew it in a different way than he’d known it coming through the door. Coming through the door, it had been a distant possibility. Now, it was a callous fact, indifferent to his dismay. In the face of such clear evidence of the otherworldly, he knew, beyond argument, that he was mortal and insignificant and had been taking steps out of the world since the day he’d entered it.

As she ventured deeper into the aria, the notes grew ever higher, ever longer, and Joe pictured her voice as a dark ocean, beyond end, beyond depth. He looked around at the men in their tuxedos and the women in their glittering taffeta and silk sheaths and lace wreaths, at the champagne flowing from a fountain in the center of the lobby. He recognized a judge and Mayor Curley and Governor Fuller and another infielder for the Sox, Baby Doll Jacobson. By one of the pianos, he saw Constance Flagstead, a local stage star, flirting with Ira Bumtroth, a known numbers man. Some people were laughing, and others tried so hard to look respectable it was laughable. He saw stern men with muttonchop sideburns and wizened matrons with skirts the shape of church bells. He identified Brahmins and blue bloods and Daughters of the American Revolution. He noted bootleggers and bootlegger lawyers and even the tennis player Rory Johannsen, who’d made it to the quarterfinals at Wimbledon last year before being knocked out by the Frenchman Henri Cochet. He saw bespectacled intellectuals trying not to get caught looking at frivolous flappers with insipid conversational skills but sparkling eyes and dazzling legs… and all of them soon to vanish from the earth. Fifty years from now, someone could look at a photograph of this night and most of the people in the room would be dead, and the rest would be on their way.

As Florence Ferrel finished her aria, he looked up toward the mezzanine and saw Albert White. Standing dutifully behind his right elbow was his wife. She was middle-aged and twig-thin, carrying none of the ample weight of a well-to-do matron. Her eyes were the biggest part of her, noticeable even from where Joe stood. They were bulging and frantic, even as she smiled at something Albert said to a chuckling Mayor Curley, who’d found his way up there with a glass of scotch.

Joe looked a few yards down the balcony and there was Emma. She wore a silver sheath dress and stood in a crowd near the wrought iron railing, a glass of champagne in her left hand. In this light, her skin was the white of the alabaster, and she looked stricken and alone, lost in a private grief. Was this who she was when she didn’t think he was looking? Was there some unnameable loss grafted to her heart? For a moment he feared she’d jump over the balcony rail, but then the sickness in her face turned to a smile. And he realized what had placed the grief in her face: she’d never expected to see him again.

Her smile widened and she covered it with her hand. It was the same hand that held the champagne glass, so the glass tipped and a few drops fell into the crowd below. One man looked up and touched the back of his head. A portly woman wiped at her brow then blinked her right eye several times.

Emma leaned back from the rail and tilted her head toward the staircase on his side of the lobby. Joe nodded. She moved away from the railing.

He lost her in the crowd above as he worked his way through the one below. He had noticed that most of the reporters on the mezzanine wore their hats back on their heads and their tie knots were crooked. So he pushed his hat back and loosened his tie as he squeezed through the last cluster of people and reached the staircase.

Officer Donald Belinski ran down toward him, a ghost who’d somehow risen from the pond floor, scraped the burned flesh from his bones, and now trotted down the staircase toward Joe—same blond hair, same blotchy complexion, same ridiculously red lips and pale eyes. No wait, this guy was fleshier, and his blond hair had already begun to recede and leaned a bit more toward red than pure blond. And even though Joe had only seen Belinski lying on his back, he was fairly certain the cop had been taller than this man. And probably smelled better too, this guy smelling of onions, Joe that close to him as they passed in the stairwell, the guy’s eyes narrowing. He swept a hank of oily red-blond hair off his forehead, his hat in his free hand, a Boston Examiner press ID tucked inside the grosgrain ribbon. Joe sidestepped him at the last moment, and the man fumbled with his hat.

Joe said, “Excuse me.”

The guy said, “My apologies,” but Joe could feel his eyes on him as he moved up the stairs fast, stunned at his own stupidity not only to have looked someone directly in the face but also to have looked a reporter directly in the face.

The guy called up the stairwell, “Excuse me, excuse me. You dropped something,” but Joe hadn’t dropped shit. He kept going, and a group entered the stairwell above him, already tipsy, one woman draped over another like a loose robe, and then Joe was passing through them and not looking back, not looking back, looking only forward.

At her.

She held a small purse that matched her dress and the silver feather and silver band in her hair. A small vein pulsed in her throat. Her shoulders rippled; her eyes flashed. It was all he could do not to clutch those shoulders and lift her off her feet until she wrapped her legs around his back and lowered her face to his. But instead he kept moving past her and said, “Guy just recognized me. Gotta move.”

She fell in beside him as he walked a red carpet past the main ballroom. The crowds were thick up here but not as jammed in as down below. You could move along the perimeter of the crowd easily enough.

“There’s a service elevator just past the next balcony,” she said. “Goes to the basement. I can’t believe you came.”

He took the right at the next opening, his head down, and pushed his hat to his forehead, pulled it down tight. “What else was I going to do?”

“Run.”

“To what?”

“I don’t know. Jesus. It’s what people do.”

“It’s not what I do.”

The crowd grew thicker as they passed along the back of the mezzanine. Down below, the governor had taken the radiophone and was proclaiming today Hotel Statler Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and a cheer went up, the crowd good and drunk now as Emma came abreast of him and nudged him to the left with her elbow.

He saw it now, past where their corridor intersected with another—a dark nook behind the banquet tables and the lights and the marble and red carpet.

Downstairs, a brass band struck its horns and the throngs in the mezzanine kicked up their heels and the flashbulbs flashed and popped and hissed. He wondered if any of the staff photographers would get back to their newsrooms and notice the guy in the background of some of their shots, the guy in the tan suit with the bounty on his head.

“Left, left,” Emma said.

He turned left between two banquet tables and the marble floor gave way to thin black tile. Another couple of steps and he reached the elevator. He pressed the down button.

Four drunken men passed along the edge of the mezzanine. They were a couple years older than Joe and singing “Soldiers Field.”

“O’er the stands of flaming Crimson,” the men crooned off-key, “the Harvard banners fly.”

Joe pressed the down button again.

One of the men met his eyes, then leered at Emma’s ass. He nudged a buddy as they continued to sing, “Cheer on cheer like volleyed thunder echoes to the sky.”

Emma grazed the side of his hand with her own. She said, “Shit, shit, shit.”

He pressed the button again.

A waiter banged through the two kitchen doors to their left, a large tray held aloft. He passed within three feet of them but never looked their way.

The Harvard guys had passed but they could still hear them:

“Then fight, fight, fight! For we win tonight.”

Emma reached past him and pressed the down button.

“Old Harvard forevermore!”

Joe considered slipping through the kitchen, but he suspected it was a box with, at best, a dumbwaiter to bring up food from the main kitchen two stories down. In retrospect, the smart thing would have been for Emma to come to him, not the other way around. If only he’d been thinking clearly, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that.

He reached for the button again, but then he heard the car rising toward them.

“If there’s anyone in it, just show them your back,” he said. “They’ll be in a rush.”

“Not once they see my back,” she said, and he smiled in spite of the weight of his worry.

The car arrived and he waited but the doors stayed closed. He counted five beats of his own heart. He slid back the gate. He opened the door on an empty car. He looked back over his shoulder at Emma. She stepped in ahead of him and he followed. He closed the gate and then the door. He turned the crank and they began their descent.

She placed the flat of her palm to his cock and it immediately hardened as she covered his mouth with her own. He slid his free hand under her dress and between the heat of her thighs and she groaned into his mouth. Her tears fell on his cheekbones.

“Why’re you crying?”

“Because I might love you.”

“Might?”

“Yes.”

“Then laugh.”

“I can’t, I can’t,” she said.

“You know the bus station on St. James?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What? Sure. Of course.”

He placed the locker key in her hand. “In case anything happens.”

“What?”

“Between here and freedom.”

“No, no, no, no,” she said. “No, no. You take this. I don’t want it.”

He waved it off. “Put it in your purse.”

“Joe, I don’t want this.”

“It’s money.”

“I know what it is and I don’t want it.” She tried handing it to him, but he held his hands high.

“Hold on to it.”

“No,” she said. “We’ll spend it together. I’m with you now. I’m with you, Joe. Take the key.”

She tried handing it to him again but they’d reached the basement.

The window in the door was black because the lights were off for some reason.

They weren’t off for “some” reason, Joe realized. There was only one reason.

He reached for the crank as the gate was thrown open from the other side and Brendan Loomis reached in and pulled Joe out of the car by his tie. He pulled Joe’s pistol free of the small of his back and tossed it off into the dark along the cement floor. Then he punched Joe in the face and the side of his head more times than Joe could count, all of it happening so fast Joe barely got his hands up.

Once he did, he reached back for Emma, thinking somehow he could protect her. But Brendan Loomis had a fist like a butcher’s mallet. Every time it hit Joe’s head—bap bap bap bap—Joe felt his brain go numb and his vision white out. His eyes slid through the white, unable to fix on anything. He heard his own nose break and then—bap bap bap—Loomis hit him in the same spot three more times.

When Loomis let go of his tie, Joe fell to all fours on the cement floor. He heard a series of steady drips, like leaky faucets, and opened his eyes to see his own blood dripping to the cement, the drops the size of nickels, but piling up so fast they turned into amoebas and the amoebas became puddles. He turned his head to see if somehow, some way, Emma had used his beating to slam the elevator door shut and make a run for it, but the elevator wasn’t where he’d left it, or he wasn’t where he’d left the elevator, because all he saw was a cement wall.

That’s when Brendan Loomis kicked him in the stomach hard enough to lift him off the floor. When he landed in a fetal position, he couldn’t find air. He gulped for it, but it wouldn’t come. He tried to rise to his knees, but his legs slid away from him, so he used his elbows to lift his chest off the cement and gulped like a fish, trying to get something down his windpipe but seeing his chest as a black stone, without openings, without gaps, nothing in there but the stone, no room for anything else, because he could not fucking breathe.

It pushed up his esophagus like a balloon through a fountain pen, squeezing his heart, crushing his lungs, closing off his throat, but then, finally, it punched up past his tonsils and out through his mouth. It had a whistle at its tail, a whistle and several gasps, but that was okay, that was fine, because he could breathe again, at least he could breathe.

Loomis kicked him in the groin from behind.

Joe ground his head into the cement floor and coughed and might have puked, he had no idea, the pain something he couldn’t have imagined prior to this. His balls were stuffed into his intestines; flames licked the walls of his stomach; his heart beat so fast it had to give out soon, just had to; his skull felt like someone had pried it open with their hands; his eyes bled. He vomited, vomited for certain, vomited bile and fire onto the floor. He thought he was done and then he did it again. He fell onto his back and looked up at Brendan Loomis.

“You look”—Loomis lit a cigarette—“unfortunate.”

Brendan swung from side to side with the room. Joe stayed where he was, but everything else was on a pendulum. Brendan looked down at Joe as he pulled on a pair of black gloves and flexed his fingers in them until they fit to his liking. Albert White appeared beside him, Albert on the same pendulum, and they both looked down at Joe.

Albert said, “I have to turn you into a message, I’m afraid.”

Joe looked up through the blood in his eyes at Albert in his white dinner jacket.

“To everyone out there who thinks it’s okay to disregard what I say.”

Joe looked for Emma, but he couldn’t find the elevator in all the swinging and swaying.

“It’s not going to be a nice message,” Albert White said. “And I’m sorry about that.” He squatted in front of Joe, his face sad, weary. “My mother always said everything happens for a reason. I’m not sure she was right, but I do think people often become what they’re supposed to be. I thought I was supposed to be a cop but then the city took my job and I became this. And most times I don’t like it, Joe. I fucking hate it to tell the truth, but I can’t deny that it comes natural to me. It fits. What comes natural to you, I’m afraid, is fucking up. All you had to do was run but you didn’t. And I’m sure—look at me.”

Joe’s head had lolled to the left. He rolled it back, met Albert’s kind gaze.

“I’m sure, as you die, you’ll tell yourself you did it for love.” Albert gave Joe a rueful smile. “But that’s not why you fucked up. You fucked up because it’s your nature. Because deep down you feel guilty about what you do, so you want to get caught. But in this line of work, you face your guilt at the end of every night. You turn it over in your hands, you make a ball of it. And then you pitch it into the fire. But you, you don’t do that, so you’ve spent your short life hoping someone will punish you for your sins. Well, I’m that someone.”

Albert rose from his crouch and Joe lost focus for a moment, everything turning to a blur. He caught a flash of silver and then another and he narrowed his eyes until the blurring sharpened and everything came into focus again.

And he wished it hadn’t.

Albert and Brendan still shimmied a bit, but the pendulum was gone. Emma stood beside Albert, her hand on his arm.

For a moment, Joe didn’t understand. And then he did.

He looked up at Emma and it no longer mattered what they did to him. He was okay with dying because living hurt too much.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“She’s sorry,” Albert White said. “We’re all sorry.” He gestured toward somebody Joe couldn’t see. “Take her out of here.”

A beefy guy in a coarse wool jacket and knit hat pulled down on his forehead put his hands on Emma’s arm.

“You said you wouldn’t kill him,” Emma said to Albert.

Albert shrugged.

“Albert,” Emma said. “That was the deal.”

“And I’ll honor it,” Albert said. “Don’t you worry.”

“Albert,” she said, her voice catching in her throat.

“Dear?” Albert’s voice was far too calm.

“I never would have led him here if—”

Albert slapped her face with one hand and smoothed his shirt with the other. Slapped her hard enough to split her lips.

He looked down at his shirt. “You think you’re safe? You think I’m going to be humiliated by a whore? You’re under the impression I’m mush for you. Maybe I was yesterday, but I’ve been up all night. And I’ve already replaced you. Get me? You’ll see.”

“You said—”

Albert wiped her blood off his hand with a kerchief. “Put her in the fucking car, Donnie. Now, Donnie.”

The beefy guy wrapped Emma in a bear hug and started walking backward. “Joe! Please don’t hurt him anymore! Joe, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She screamed and kicked and scratched Donnie’s head. “Joe, I love you! I love you!”

The elevator gate slammed shut and the car rose out of the basement.

Albert squatted beside him and put a cigarette between his lips. A match flared and the tobacco cackled and he said, “Inhale. You’ll get your wits back faster.”

Joe did. For a minute, he sat on the floor and smoked and Albert crouched beside him and smoked his own cigarette and Brendan Loomis stood there watching.

“What’re you going to do with her?” Joe asked once he trusted himself to speak.

“With her? She just sold you down the river.”

“For a good reason, I bet.” He looked at Albert. “There was a good reason, right?”

Albert chuckled. “You’re some kind of rube, aren’t you?”

Joe raised a split eyebrow and the blood fell in his eye. He wiped at it. “What’re you going to do with her?”

“You should be more worried about what I’m going to do to you.”

“I am,” Joe admitted, “but I’m asking what you’re going to do with her.”

“Don’t know yet.” Albert shrugged and pulled a speck of tobacco off his tongue, flicked it away. “But you, Joe, you’re going to be the message.” He turned to Brendan. “Get him up.”

“What message?” Joe said as Brendan Loomis slipped his arms under him from behind and hoisted him to his feet.

“What happened to Joe Coughlin is what will happen to you if you cross Albert White and his crew.”

Joe said nothing. Nothing occurred to him. He was twenty years old. That’s all he was going to get in this world—twenty years. He hadn’t wept since he was fourteen but it was all he could do, looking into Albert’s eyes, not to break down and beg for his life.

Albert’s face softened. “I can’t let you live, Joe. If I could see any way I could, I’d try to make it work. And it’s not about the girl, if that helps. I can get whores anywhere. Got a pretty new one waiting for me as soon as I’m done with you.” He studied his hands for a moment. “But you shot up a small town and stole sixty thousand dollars without my permission and left three cops dead. That brings a shit-brown rain down on all of us. Because now every cop in New England thinks Boston gangsters are mad dogs to be put down like mad dogs. And I need to make everyone understand that’s just not true.” He said to Loomis. “Where’s Bones?”

Bones was Julian Bones, another of Albert’s gun monkeys.

“In the alley, engine running.”

“Let’s go.”

Albert led the way to the elevator and opened the gate and Brendan Loomis dragged Joe into the car.

“Turn him around.”

Joe was spun in place and the cigarette fell from his lips when Loomis gripped the back of his head and pushed his face into the wall. They pulled his hands behind his back. Coarse rope snaked around his wrists, Loomis pulling it tight with every loop before he tied off the ends. Joe, something of an expert on the subject, knew a secure knot when he felt one. They could leave him alone in this elevator and not come back till April and he still wouldn’t have freed himself.

Loomis spun him back around, then went to work the crank, and Albert pulled a fresh cigarette from a pewter case and put it between Joe’s lips and lit it for him. In the flare of the match, Joe could see that Albert took no joy from any of this, that when Joe was sinking to the bottom of the Mystic River with a leather noose around his head and sacks full of rocks tied to his ankles, Albert would rue the price of doing business in a dirty world.

For tonight anyway.

On the first floor, they left the elevator and walked down an empty service corridor, the sounds of the party reaching them through the walls—dueling pianos and a horn section going full blast and lots of gay laughter.

They reached the door at the end of the corridor. DELIVERIES had been stamped across the center in fresh yellow paint.

“I’ll make sure it’s clear.” Loomis opened the door onto a March night that had grown much rawer. A light sprinkle fell and gave a tinfoil smell to the iron fire escapes. Joe could also smell the building, the newness of the exterior, as if limestone dust kicked up by the drills still hung in the air.

Albert turned Joe to him and fixed his tie. He licked both his palms and smoothed Joe’s hair. He looked bereft. “I never wanted to grow up to be a man who kills people to maintain my profit margin, and yet I am. I never get a single night’s decent sleep—not fucking one, Joe. I get up every day in fear and lay my head back to the pillow at night the same way.” He straightened Joe’s collar. “You?”

“What?”

“Ever wanted to be anything else?”

“No.”

Albert picked something off Joe’s shoulder, flicked it away with his finger. “I told her if she delivered you to us, I wouldn’t kill you. Nobody else believed you’d be stupid enough to show up tonight, but I hedged my bets. So she agreed to lead you to me to save you. Or so she told herself. But you and I know I have to kill you, don’t we, Joe?” He looked at Joe with heartbroken eyes, glassy with moisture. “Don’t we?”

Joe nodded.

Albert nodded as well. He leaned in and whispered in Joe’s ear, “And then I’m going to kill her too.”

“What?”

“Because I loved her too.” Albert raised his eyebrows up and down. “And because the only way you could have known to knock over my poker game on that particular morning? Would be if she tipped you.”

Joe said, “Wait.” He said, “Look. She didn’t tip me to anything.”

“What else would you say?” Albert fixed his collar, smoothed his shirt. “Look at it this way—if what you sweethearts have is true love? Then you’ll meet tonight in heaven.”

He buried a fist in Joe’s stomach, driving it up to the solar plexus. Joe doubled over and lost all his oxygen again. He jerked at the rope around his wrists and tried to butt Albert with his head, but Albert merely slapped his face away and opened the door to the alley.

He grabbed Joe by the hair and straightened him up, so Joe could see the car waiting for him, the back door open, Julian Bones standing by it. Loomis crossed the alley and grabbed Joe’s elbow, and they dragged him over the threshold. Joe could smell the backseat foot wells now. He could smell the oil rags and dirt.

Just as they were about to hoist him in, they dropped him. He fell to his knees on the cobblestones and he heard Albert yell, “Go! Go! Go!” and their footsteps on the cobblestones. Maybe they’d already shot him in the back of the head because the heavens descended in bars of light.

His face was saturated in white, and the buildings along the alley erupted in blue and red, and tires squealed and somebody shouted something through a megaphone and someone fired a gun and then another gun.

A man walked through the white light toward Joe, a trim and confident man, a man who wore command like a birthmark.

His father.

More men walked out of the white behind him, and Joe was soon surrounded by a dozen members of the Boston Police Department.

His father cocked his head. “So you’re a cop killer now, Joseph.”

Joe said, “I didn’t kill anybody.”

His father ignored that. “Looks like your accomplices were about to take you on the dead man’s drive. Did they decide you were too much of a liability?”

Several of the policemen had removed their billy clubs.

“Emma’s in the back of a car. They’re going to kill her.”

“Who?”

“Albert White, Brendan Loomis, Julian Bones, and some guy named Donnie.”

On the streets beyond the alley, several women screamed. A car horn blared, followed by the solid thump of a crash. More screams. In the alley, the rain turned from a drizzle to a heavy downpour.

His father looked at his men, then back at Joe. “Fine company you keep, son. Any other fairy tales you have for me?”

“It’s not a fairy tale.” Joe spit blood from his mouth. “They’re going to kill her, Dad.”

“Well, we won’t kill you, Joseph. In fact, I won’t touch you a’tall. But some of my coworkers would like a word.”

Thomas Coughlin leaned forward, hands on his knees, and stared at his son.

Somewhere behind that gaze of iron lived a man who’d slept on the floor of Joe’s hospital room for three days when Joe had the fever back in 1911, who’d read each of the city’s eight newspapers to him, cover to cover, who told him he loved him, who told him if God wanted his son, He’d have to go through him, Thomas Xavier Coughlin, and God would know, sure, what a rough proposition that could turn out to be.

“Dad, listen to me. She’s—”

His father spit in his face.

“He’s all yours,” he said to his men and walked away.

“Find the car!” Joe screamed. “Find Donnie! She’s in a car with Donnie!”

The first blow—a fist—connected with Joe’s jaw. The second, a shot from a billy club, he was pretty sure, hit his temple. After that, all light disappeared from the night.

CHAPTER SIX All the Sinners Saints

The ambulance driver gave Thomas his first hint of the publicity nightmare about to descend on the BPD.

As they strapped Joe to a wooden gurney and lifted him into the back of the ambulance, the driver said, “You throw this kid off the roof?”

The rain came down in a clatter so loud they all had to shout.

Thomas’s aide and driver, Sergeant Michael Pooley, said, “His injuries were sustained before we arrived.”

“Yeah?” The ambulance driver looked from one to the other, water pouring from the black brim of his white cap. “Horseshit.”

Thomas could feel the temperature rising in the alley, even in the rain, so he pointed at his son on the gurney. “This man was involved in the murders of those three police officers in New Hampshire.”

Sergeant Pooley said, “Feel better now, asshole?”

The ambulance driver was checking Joe’s pulse, eyes on his wristwatch. “I read the papers. All I do most days—sit up in my cab and read the fucking papers. And this kid was the driver. And while they were chasing him, they shot another police car all to hell.” He placed Joe’s wrist on his chest. “He didn’t do it, though.”

Thomas looked at Joe’s face—torn black lips, flattened nose, eyes swelled shut, a collapsed cheekbone, black blood crusted in his eyes and ears and nose and the corners of his mouth. Blood of Thomas’s blood. His creation.

“But if he hadn’t robbed the bank,” Thomas said, “they wouldn’t be dead.”

“If the other cops hadn’t used a fucking machine gun, they wouldn’t be dead.” The driver closed the doors, looked at Pooley and Thomas, and Thomas was surprised by the revulsion in his eyes. “Your guys probably just beat this kid to death. But he’s the criminal?”

Two guard units pulled in behind the ambulance, and all three vehicles drove off into the night. Thomas had to keep reminding himself to think of the beaten man in the ambulance as “Joe.” Thinking of him as “son” was too overwhelming. His flesh and blood, and a lot of that blood and some of that flesh lay in this alley.

He said to Pooley, “You put that APB out on Albert White?”

Pooley nodded. “And Loomis and Bones and Donnie No Last Name, but we assume it’s Donnie Gishler, one of White’s guys.”

“Make Gishler a priority. Get it out to all units that he might have a woman in the car. Where’s Forman?”

Pooley chin-gestured. “Up the alley.”

Thomas started walking and Pooley fell in line. When they reached the crowd of policemen by the service door, Thomas avoided looking at the puddle of Joe’s blood near his right foot, a puddle rich enough to receive the rain and still remain a bright red. Instead, he focused on his chief of detectives, Steve Forman.

“You got anything on the cars?”

Forman flipped open his steno notebook. “Dishwasher said there was a Cole Roadster parked in the alley between eight-fifteen and eight-thirty. After that, dishwasher said it was gone, said this Dodge replaced it.”

The Dodge was what they’d been trying to drag Joe into when Thomas and the cavalry had arrived.

“I want a priority APB on the Roadster,” Thomas said. “It’s being driven by Donald Gishler. There might be a woman in the backseat, Emma Gould. Steve, she’s of the Charlestown Goulds. Know who I mean?”

“Oh, yeah,” Forman said.

“Not Bobo’s kid. She’s Ollie Gould’s.”

“Okay.”

“Send someone to make sure she’s not safe and sound in bed on Union Street. Sergeant Pooley?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you seen this Donnie Gishler in the flesh?”

Pooley nodded. “He’s about five-six, a hundred ninety pounds. Usually wears black knit caps. Had a handlebar mustache last time I saw him. The One-Six would have his mug shot.”

“Send someone to get it. And get out the description to all units.”

He looked at the puddle of his son’s blood. A tooth floated in it.

He and his eldest son, Aiden, hadn’t spoken in years, though he did receive the occasional letter filled with bland facts but no personal reflections. He didn’t know where he lived or even if he was alive or dead. His middle son, Connor, had been blinded during the police strike riots of ’19. Physically, he’d adapted to his infirmity with commendable speed, but mentally it had set ablaze his inclination toward self-pity, and he’d quickly turned to alcohol. After he’d failed to drink himself to death, he found religion. Shortly after he abandoned that flirtation (God apparently demanded more from his worshippers than a love affair with martyrdom), he took up residence at the Silas Abbotsford School for the Blind and Crippled. They gave him a custodian’s job—this, for a man who’d been the youngest assistant district attorney in state history assigned as lead prosecutor on a capital case—and he lived out his days there, mopping floors he couldn’t see. Every now and then he was offered a teaching job at the school, but he’d declined them all under the pretense of shyness. There was nothing shy about any of Thomas’s sons. Connor had simply decided to shutter himself away from all who loved him. Which, in his case, meant Thomas.

And here now was his youngest son, given over to a life of crime, a life of whores and bootleggers and gun thugs. A life that always seemed to promise glamour and riches but rarely delivered either. And now, because of his compatriots and Thomas’s own men, he might not live through the night.

Thomas stood in the rain and could smell nothing but the stink of his own horrid self.

“Find the girl,” he said to Pooley and Forman.

A patrol officer in Salem spotted Donnie Gishler and Emma Gould. By the time the chase ended, nine cruisers were involved, all from small North Shore towns—Beverly, Peabody, Marblehead. Several of the policemen saw a woman in the backseat of the car; several didn’t; one claimed he saw two or three girls back there, but they later confirmed he’d been drinking. After Donnie Gishler had driven two cruisers off the road at high speed, damaging both, and after the officers had taken his fire (however poorly aimed), they’d fired back.

Donnie Gishler’s Cole Roadster left the road at 9:50 P.M. in heavy rain. They were racing down Ocean Avenue in Marblehead alongside Lady’s Cove when one of the policemen either fired a lucky shot into Gishler’s tire or—more likely at forty miles an hour in the rain—the tire simply blew out from wear and tear. At that part of Ocean Avenue, there was very little avenue and endless ocean. The Cole left the road on three wheels, dipped over the shoulder, and snapped back out, its tires no longer touching ground. It entered eight feet of water with two of its windows shot out and sank before most of the policemen had left their vehicles.

A patrolman from Beverly, Lew Burleigh, stripped down to his skivvies and dove in, but it was dark, even after someone got the idea to point the cruisers’ headlamps at the water. Lew Burleigh dove into the frigid water four times, enough to suffer hypothermia that landed him in the hospital for a day, but he never found the car.

The divers found it the next afternoon, shortly after two, Gishler still behind the wheel. A piece of the steering wheel had snapped off and entered his body through his armpit. The gearshift had perforated his groin. That’s not what killed him, though. One of the more than fifty bullets fired by police that night had hit the back of his head. Even if the tire hadn’t blown out, the car would have entered the water.

They found a silver band and matching feather stuck to the ceiling of the car but no other evidence of Emma Gould.

The gunfire exchanged between the police and three gangsters behind the Hotel Statler entered the city’s historic mist about ten minutes after it happened. This, even though no one was hit and, in all the confusion, few bullets were actually fired. The criminals had the good fortune to flee the alley just as the theater crowd exited the restaurants and headed toward the Colonial or the Plymouth. A revival of Pygmalion had been sold out at the Colonial for three weeks, and the Plymouth had incurred the wrath of the Watch and Ward Society by staging The Playboy of the Western World. The Watch and Ward dispatched dozens of protesters, dowdy women with lemon-sucker lips and tireless vocal cords, but this just drew attention to the play. The women’s loud and strident presence wasn’t only a boon for business; it was also a godsend for the gangsters. The trio came pinwheeling out of the alley and the police crashed out onto the street not far behind, but when the Watch and Ward women saw the guns, they screamed and shrieked and pointed. Several couples on their way to the theater took awkward, violent cover in doorways, and a chauffeur swerved his employer’s Pierce-Arrow into a streetlamp as a light drizzle turned suddenly into a heavy downpour. By the time the officers got their wits back, the gangsters had commandeered a car on Piedmont Street and slipped off into a city pelted by relentless rain.

The “Statler Shootout” made for good copy. The narrative started simply—hero coppers shoot it out with cop-killer thugs and subdue and arrest one. It soon grew more complicated, however. Oscar Fayette, an ambulance driver, reported that the thug under arrest had been so severely beaten by the police that he might not live through the night. Shortly after midnight, unconfirmed rumors spread through the newsrooms along Washington Street that a woman had been seen locked in a car that had entered the waters of Lady’s Cove in Marblehead at top speed and sank to the bottom in less than a minute.

Then word went round that one of the gangsters involved in the Statler Shootout was none other than Albert White, the businessman. Albert White had, until this point, occupied an enviable position in the Boston social scene—that of a possible bootlegger, a likely rumrunner, a probable outlaw. Everyone assumed he had a hand in the rackets, but most could believe he managed to stay above the mayhem now plaguing the streets of every major city. Albert White was considered a “good” bootlegger. A gracious provider of a harmless vice who cut a striking figure in his pale suits and could regale a crowd with tales of his war heroics and his days as a policeman. But after the Statler Shootout (a moniker E. M. Statler tried, unsuccessfully, to get the papers to reconsider), that sentiment vanished. Police filed a warrant for Albert’s arrest. Whether he eventually beat the rap or not, his days of hobnobbing with respectable people were over. Thrills born of the vicarious and the salacious, it was acknowledged in the parlors and drawing rooms of Beacon Hill, had limits.

Then there was the fate that befell Deputy Police Superintendent Thomas Coughlin, once considered a shoo-in for commissioner and quite possibly the State House. When it was revealed in the next day’s late editions that the thug arrested and beaten at the scene was Coughlin’s own son, most readers refrained from judging him on issues of paternity because most knew the travails of trying to raise virtuous children in such a Gomorrahan age. But then the Examiner columnist Billy Kelleher wrote of his encounter with Joseph Coughlin on the staircase at the Statler. It was Kelleher who’d called the police and reported his sighting and Kelleher who reached the alley in time to see Thomas Coughlin feed his son to the lions under his command. The public recoiled—failing to raise your child properly was one thing. Ordering him beaten into a coma was quite another.

By the time Thomas was called to the commissioner’s office in Pemberton Square, he knew he’d never occupy it.

Commissioner Herbert Wilson stood behind his desk and waved Thomas to a chair. Wilson had run the department since 1922, after the previous commissioner, Edwin Upton Curtis, who’d done more damage to it than the Kaiser had done to Belgium, graciously died of a heart attack. “Have a seat, Tom.”

Thomas Coughlin hated being called Tom, hated the diminutive nature of it, the callous familiarity.

He took the seat.

“How’s your son?” Commissioner Wilson asked him.

“In a coma.”

Wilson nodded and exhaled slowly through his nostrils. “And every day he remains that way, Tom, the more he resembles a saint.” The commissioner peered across the desk at him. “You look terrible. You’ve been sleeping?”

Thomas shook his head. “Not since…” He’d spent the last two nights at his son’s hospital bed, counting his sins and praying to a God he scarcely believed in anymore. Joe’s doctor had told him that even if Joe came out of the coma, brain damage was a possibility. Thomas, in a rage—that white-hot rage of which everyone from his shit of a father to his wife to his sons had been justifiably frightened—had ordered other men to bludgeon his own son. Now he pictured his shame as a blade left on hot coals until the steel was black and serpent-coils of smoke slithered along the edges. The point entered his abdomen below the rib cage and moved through his insides, cutting and cutting until he couldn’t see or breathe.

“Any more information on the other two, the Bartolos?” the commissioner asked.

“I would’ve thought you’d heard by now.”

Wilson shook his head. “I’ve been in budget meetings all morning.”

“Just came over the Teletype. They got Paolo Bartolo.”

“Who’s they?”

“Vermont State Police.”

“Alive?”

Thomas shook his head.

For some reason they might never understand, Paolo Bartolo had been driving a car stuffed with canned hams; they filled the back and were piled up in the foot well of the passenger seat. When he rolled a red light on South Main Street in St. Albans, about fifteen miles shy of the Canadian border, a state trooper tried to pull him over. Paolo took off. The trooper gave chase and other staties joined in and they eventually drove the car off the road near a dairy farm in Enosburg Falls.

Whether Paolo pulled a gun as he exited his car on a fine spring afternoon was still being ascertained. It was possible that he reached for his waistband. Also possible that he simply didn’t raise his hands fast enough. Given that either Paolo or his brother Dion had executed state trooper Jacob Zobe on the side of a road very similar to this one, the troopers took no chances. Every officer fired his service revolver at least twice.

“How many cops responded?” Wilson asked.

“Seven, I believe, sir.”

“And how many bullets struck the felon?”

“Eleven is the number I heard, but the truth awaits a proper autopsy.”

“And Dion Bartolo?”

“Holed up in Montreal, I’d assume. Or nearby. Dion was always the smarter of the two. Paolo’s the one you’d expect to stick his head up.”

The commissioner lifted a sheet of paper off one small pile on his desk and placed it atop another small pile. He looked out the window, seemed entranced by the Custom House spire a few blocks away. “The department can’t let you walk back out of this office carrying the same rank you carried in, Tom. You understand that?”

“I do, yes.” Thomas glanced around the office he’d coveted for the past ten years and felt no sense of loss.

“And if I demoted you to captain, I’d have to have a division house to hand over to you.”

“Which you don’t.”

“Which I don’t.” The commissioner leaned forward, his hands clasped together. “You can pray exclusively for your son now, Thomas, because your career just reached its highest floor.”

She’s not dead,” Joe said.

He’d come out of the coma four hours before. Thomas had arrived at Mass. General ten minutes after the doctor called. He’d brought the attorney Jack D’Jarvis with him. Jack D’Jarvis was a small, elderly man who wore wool suits of the most forgettable colors—tree bark brown, damp sand gray, blacks that appeared to have been left in the sun too long. His ties usually matched the suits; the collars of his shirts were yellowed, and on the rare occasions he wore a hat, it seemed too big for his head and perched on the tops of his ears. Jack D’Jarvis looked ready to be put out to pasture, and he’d looked that way for the better part of three decades, but no one but a stranger was stupid enough to believe it. He was the best criminal defense lawyer in the city, and few could name a close second. Over the years Jack D’Jarvis had dismantled at least two dozen ironclad cases Thomas had brought to the DA. It was said that when Jack D’Jarvis died, he’d spend his time in heaven springing all his former clients from hell.

The doctors examined Joe for two hours while Thomas and D’Jarvis cooled their heels in the corridor with the young patrolman manning the door.

“I can’t get him off,” D’Jarvis said.

“I know that.”

“Rest assured, though, the second-degree murder charge is a farce and the state’s attorney knows it. But your son will have to do time.”

“How much?”

D’Jarvis shrugged. “Ten years would be my guess.”

“In Charlestown?” Thomas shook his head. “There’ll be nothing left of him to walk back out those doors.”

“Three police officers are dead, Thomas.”

“But he didn’t kill them.”

“Which is why he won’t get the chair. But pretend this is anyone else but your son and you’d want him to get twenty years.”

“But he is my son,” Thomas said.

The doctors exited the room.

One of them stopped to talk to Thomas. “I don’t know what his skull is made of, but we’re guessing it’s not bone.”

“Doctor?”

“He’s fine. No cranial bleeding, no loss of memory or speech disability. His nose and half his ribs are broken, and it’ll be some time before he urinates without seeing blood in the bowl, but no brain damage that I can see.”

Thomas and Jack D’Jarvis went in and sat by Joe’s bed and he considered them through his swollen black eyes.

“I was wrong,” Thomas said. “Dead wrong. And, sure, there’s no excuse for it.”

Joe spoke through black lips crisscrossed with sutures. “You shouldn’t have let them beat me?”

Thomas nodded. “I shouldn’t have.”

“You going soft on me, old man?”

Thomas shook his head. “I should’ve done it myself.”

Joe’s soft chuckle traveled through his nostrils. “With all due respect, sir, I’m happy your men did it. If you’d done it, I might be dead.”

Thomas smiled. “So you don’t hate me?”

“First time I remember liking you in ten years.” Joe tried to raise himself off the pillow but failed. “Where’s Emma?”

Jack D’Jarvis opened his mouth, but Thomas waved him off. He looked his son steadily in the face as he told him what had happened in Marblehead.

Joe sat with the information for a bit, turning it over. He said, somewhat desperately, “She’s not dead.”

“She is, son. And even if we’d acted immediately that night, Donnie Gishler was not of the disposition to be taken alive. She was dead as soon as she got in that car.”

“There’s no body,” Joe said. “So she’s not dead.”

“Joseph, they never found half the bodies on Titanic, but the poor souls are no longer with us just the same.”

“I won’t believe it.”

“You won’t? Or you don’t?”

“It’s the same thing.”

“Far from it.” Thomas shook his head. “We’ve pieced together some of what happened that night. She was Albert White’s moll. She betrayed you.”

“She did,” Joe said.

“And?”

Joe smiled, sutured lips and all. “And I don’t give a shit. I’m crazy about her.”

“‘Crazy’ isn’t love,” his father said.

“No, what is it?”

“Crazy.”

“All due respect, Dad, I witnessed your marriage for eighteen years, and that wasn’t love.”

“No,” his father agreed, “it wasn’t. So I know whereof I speak.” He sighed. “Either way, she’s gone, son. As dead as your mother, God rest her.”

Joe said, “What about Albert?”

Thomas sat on the side of the bed. “In the wind.”

Jack D’Jarvis said, “But rumored to be negotiating his return.”

Thomas looked over at him, and D’Jarvis nodded.

“Who’re you?” Joe asked D’Jarvis.

The lawyer extended his hand. “John D’Jarvis, Mr. Coughlin. Most people call me Jack.”

Joe’s swollen eyes opened as wide as they had since Thomas and Jack had entered the room.

“Damn,” he said. “Heard of you.”

“I’ve heard of you too,” D’Jarvis said. “Unfortunately, so has the whole state. On the other hand, one of the worst decisions your father has ever made could end up being the best thing that could have happened to you.”

“How so?” Thomas asked.

“By beating him to a pulp, you turned him into a victim. The state’s attorney isn’t going to want to prosecute. He will but he won’t want to.”

“Bondurant is state’s attorney these days, right?” Joe asked.

D’Jarvis nodded. “You know him?”

“I know of him,” Joe said, the fear apparent on his bruised face.

“Thomas,” D’Jarvis asked, watching him carefully, “do you know Bondurant?”

Thomas said, “I do, yes.”

Calvin Bondurant had married a Lenox of Beacon Hill and had produced three willowy daughters, one of whom had recently married a Lodge to great notice in the society pages. Bondurant was a tireless advocate of Prohibition, a fearless crusader against all manner of vice, which he proclaimed was a product of the lower classes and inferior races who’d been washing ashore in this great land the last seventy years. The last seventy years of immigration had been primarily limited to two races—the Irish and the Italians—so Bondurant’s message wasn’t particularly subtle. But when he ran for governor in a few years, his donors on Beacon Hill and in Back Bay would know he was the right man.

Bondurant’s secretary ushered Thomas into his office on Kirkby and closed the doors behind them. Bondurant turned from where he stood by the window and gave Thomas an emotionless gaze.

“I’ve been expecting you.”

Ten years ago, Thomas had swept Calvin Bondurant up in a raid on a rooming house. Bondurant had been keeping time with several bottles of champagne and a naked young man of Mexican descent. In addition to a burgeoning career in prostitution, the Mexican turned out to be a former member of Pancho Villa’s División del Norte who was wanted in his homeland on charges of treason. Thomas had deported the revolutionary back to Chihuahua and allowed Bondurant’s name to vanish from the arrest logs.

“Well, here I am,” Thomas said.

“You turned your son the criminal into a victim. That’s an amazing trick. Are you that smart, Deputy Superintendent?”

Thomas said, “Nobody’s that smart.”

Bondurant shook his head. “Not true. A few people are. And you might be one of them. Tell him to plead. There are three dead cops in that town. Their funerals will be all over the front pages tomorrow. If he pleads to the bank robbery and, I don’t know, reckless endangerment, I’ll recommend twelve.”

“Years?”

“For three dead cops? That’s light, Thomas.”

“Five.”

“Excuse me?”

“Five,” Thomas said.

“Not a chance.” Bondurant shook his head.

Thomas sat in his chair and didn’t move.

Bondurant shook his head again.

Thomas crossed his legs at the ankle.

Bondurant said, “Look.”

Thomas cocked his head slightly.

“Let me disabuse you of a notion or two, Deputy Superintendent.”

“Chief inspector.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I was demoted yesterday to chief inspector.”

The smile never reached Bondurant’s lips but it slipped through his eyes. A glint and then gone. “Then we can leave unsaid the notion I was going to dispel for you.”

“I have no notions or illusions,” Thomas said. “I’m a practical man.” He removed a photograph from his pocket and placed it on Bondurant’s desk.

Bondurant looked down at the picture. A door, faded red, the number 29 in its center. It was the door to a row house in Back Bay. What fluttered through Bondurant’s eyes this time was the opposite of mirth.

Thomas placed one finger on the man’s desk. “If you move to another building for your liaisons, I’ll know within an hour. I understand you’re building quite the war chest for your run for the governor’s office. Make it deep, counselor. A man with a deep war chest can take on all comers.” Thomas placed his hat on his head. He tugged at the center of the brim until he was sure it sat straight.

Bondurant looked at the piece of paper on his desk. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Seeing what you can do is of little interest to me.”

“I’m one man.”

“Five years,” Thomas said. “He gets five years.”

It was another two weeks before a woman’s forearm washed up in Nahant. Three days after that, a fisherman off the coast of Lynn pulled a femur into his net. The medical examiner determined that the femur and the forearm came from the same person—a woman in her early twenties, probably of Northern European stock, freckle-skinned and pale of flesh.

In The Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Joseph Coughlin, Joe pled guilty to aiding and abetting an armed robbery. He was sentenced to five years and four months in prison.

He knew she was alive.

He knew it because the alternative was something he couldn’t live with. He had faith in her existence because not to believe left him feeling stripped and flayed.

“She’s gone,” his father said to him just before they transferred him from the Suffolk County Jail to Charlestown Penitentiary.

“No, she’s not.”

“Listen to yourself.”

“No one saw her in the car when it went off the road.”

“At high speed in the rain at night? They put her in the car, son. The car went off the road. She died and floated off into the ocean.”

“Not until I see a body.”

“The parts of the body weren’t enough?” His father held a hand up in apology. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “What will it take for you to accept reason?”

“It’s not reason that she’s dead. Not when I know she’s alive.”

The more Joe said it, the more he knew she was dead. He could feel it in the same way he could feel that she’d loved him, even as she’d betrayed him. But if he admitted it, if he faced it, what did he have left but five years in the worst prison in the Northeast? No friends, no God, no family.

“She’s alive, Dad.”

His father considered him for some time. “What did you love about her?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What did you love about this woman?”

Joe searched for the words. Eventually, he stumbled over a few that felt less inadequate than the rest. “She was becoming something with me that was different than what she showed to the rest of the world. Something, I dunno, softer.”

“That’s loving a potential, not a person.”

“How would you know?”

His father cocked his head at that. “You were the child that was supposed to fill the distance between your mother and me. Were you aware of that?”

Joe said, “I knew about the distance.”

“Then you saw how well that plan worked out. People don’t fix each other, Joseph. And they never become anything but what they’ve always been.”

Joe said, “I don’t believe that.”

“Don’t? Or won’t?” His father closed his eyes. “Every breath, son, is luck.” He opened his eyes and they were pink in the corners. “Achievement? Depends on luck—to be born in the right place at the right time and be of the right color. To live long enough to be in the right place at the right time to make one’s fortune. Yes, yes, hard work and talent make up the difference. They are crucial, and you know I’d never argue different. But the foundation of all lives is luck. Good or bad. Luck is life and life is luck. And it’s leaking from the moment it lands in your hand. Don’t waste yours pining for a dead woman who wasn’t worthy of you in the first place.”

Joe’s jaw clenched, but all he said was, “You make your luck, Dad.”

“Sometimes,” his father said. “But other times it makes you.”

They sat in silence for a bit. Joe’s heart had never beat so hard. It punched at his chest, a frantic fist. He felt for it the way he’d feel for something outside himself, a stray dog on a wet night, perhaps.

His father looked at his watch, put it back in his vest. “Someone will probably threaten you your first week behind the walls. No later than the second. You’ll see what he wants in his eyes, whether he says it or not.”

Joe’s mouth felt very dry.

“Someone else—a real good egg of a fella—will stand up for you in the yard or in the mess hall. And after he backs the other man down, he’ll offer you his protection for the length of your sentence. Joe? Listen to me. That’s the man you hurt. You hurt him so he can’t get strong enough again to hurt you. You take his elbow or his kneecap. Or both.”

Joe’s heartbeat found an artery in his throat. “And then they’ll leave me alone?”

His father gave him a tight smile and started to nod, but the smile went away and the nod went with it. “No, they won’t.”

“So what will make them stop?”

His father looked away for a moment, his jaw working. When he looked back his eyes were dry. “Nothing.”

CHAPTER SEVEN The Mouth of It

The distance from Suffolk County Jail to the Charlestown Penitentiary was a little more than a mile. They could have walked it in the time it took to load them into the bus and bolt their ankle manacles to the floor. Four of them went over that morning—a thin Negro and a fat Russian whose names Joe never learned, Norman, a soft and shaky white kid, and Joe. Norman and Joe had chatted a few times in jail because Norman’s cell was across from Joe’s. Norman had had the misfortune to fall under the spell of the daughter of the man whose livery stable he tended on Pinckney Street in the flat of Beacon Hill. The girl, fifteen, got pregnant, and Norman, seventeen and orphaned since he was twelve, got three years in a maximum security prison for rape.

He told Joe he’d been reading his Bible and was ready to atone for his transgressions. Told Joe the Lord would be with him and that there was good in every man, not the least of which could be found in the lowest of men, and that he suspected he might even find more good behind those walls than he’d found on this side of them.

Joe had never met a more terrified creature.

As the bus bounced along the Charles River Road, a guard rechecked their manacles and introduced himself as Mr. Hammond. He informed them that they would be housed in East Wing, except, of course, for the nigger, who would be housed in South Wing with his own kind.

“But the rules apply to all of you, no matter what your color or creed. Never look a guard in the eyes. Never question a guard’s order. Never cross over the dirt track that runs along the wall. Never touch yourselves or one another in an unwholesome manner. Just do your time like good fish, without complaint or ill will, and we’ll find harmonious accord along the pathway to your restitution.”

The prison was more than a hundred years old; its original dark granite buildings had been joined by redbrick structures of more recent vintage. Designed in cruciform style, the heart of it was comprised of four wings branching off a central tower. Atop the tower was a cupola, manned at all times by four guards with rifles, one for each direction a prisoner could run. It was surrounded by train tracks and factories, foundries, and mills that stretched from the North End down the river to Somerville. The factories made stoves and the mills made textiles and the foundries reeked of magnesium and copper and cast-iron gases. When the bus dropped down the hill and into the flats, the sky took cover behind a ceiling of smoke. An Eastern Freight train blew its whistle, and they had to wait for it to rattle past them before they could cross the tracks and travel the final three hundred yards onto the prison grounds.

The bus pulled to a stop and Mr. Hammond and another guard unlocked their manacles and Norman started to shiver and then he blubbered, the tears dripping off his jaw like sweat.

Joe said, “Norman.”

Norman looked across at him.

“Don’t do that.”

But Norman couldn’t stop.

His cell was on the top tier of East Wing. It baked in the sun all day long and held the heat through the night. There was no electricity in the cells themselves. They reserved that for the corridors, the mess hall, and the killing chair in the Death House. Cells were lit by candlelight. Indoor plumbing had yet to come to Charlestown Penitentiary, so cell mates pissed and shat in wooden buckets. His cell was built for a single prisoner, but they’d stacked four beds in it. His three cell mates were named Oliver, Eugene, and Tooms. Oliver and Eugene were garden-variety stickup guys from Revere and Quincy, respectively. They’d both done business with the Hickey Mob. They’d never had a chance to work with Joe or even hear about him, but after they all passed a few names back and forth, they knew he was legit enough not to turn him out just to make a point.

Tooms was older and quieter. He had stringy hair and stringy limbs, and something foul lived behind his eyes that you didn’t want to look at. As the sun set on their first night, he sat on his top bunk, legs dangling over the edge, and every now and then Joe found Tooms’s blank stare turned in his direction, and it was all he could do to meet it and then casually move off it.

Joe slept on one of the low bunks, across from Oliver. He had the worst mattress and the bunk sagged, and his sheet was coarse and moth-eaten and smelled like wet fur. He dozed fitfully but he never slept.

In the morning, Norman approached him in the yard. Both of his eyes were black and his nose looked to be broken and Joe was about to ask him about it when Norman scowled, bit down on his lower lip, and punched Joe in the neck. Joe two-stepped to his right and ignored the sting and thought of asking why, but he didn’t have enough time. Norman came for him, both arms awkwardly raised. If Norman avoided his head and started punching his body, Joe was done. His ribs weren’t healed; sitting up in the morning still hurt so much he saw stars. He shuffled, his heels scrabbling the dirt. High above them, the guards in their watchtowers watched the river to the west or the ocean to the east. Norman drilled a punch into the other side of his neck and Joe raised his foot and brought it down on Norman’s kneecap.

Norman fell onto his back, his right leg at an awkward angle. He rolled in the dirt, then used his elbow to try to stand. When Joe stomped the knee a second time, half the yard heard Norman’s leg break. The sound that left his mouth wasn’t quite a scream. It was something softer and deeper, a huffing noise, something a dog would make after it crawled under a house to die.

Norman lay in the dirt and his arms fell to his sides, and the tears leaked from his eyes into his ears. Joe knew he could help Norman up, now that he was no danger, but that would be seen as weakness. He walked away. He walked across the yard, already sweltering at 9 A.M., and felt the eyes on him, more than he could count, everyone looking, deciding what the next test would be, how long they’d toy with the mouse before they took a real swipe with their claws.

Norman was nothing. Norman was a warm-up. And if anyone here got a sense of how badly Joe’s ribs were damaged—it hurt to fucking breathe at the moment; it hurt to walk—there’d be nothing but bones left by morning.

Joe had seen Oliver and Eugene over by the west wall, but now he watched their backs melt into a crowd. They wanted no part of him until they saw how this played out. So now he was walking toward a group of men he didn’t know. If he stopped suddenly and looked around, he’d look foolish. And foolish in here was the same thing as weak.

He reached the group of men and the far side of the yard, by the wall, but they walked away too.

It went that way all day—no one would talk to him. Whatever he had, no one wanted to catch it.

He returned that night to an empty cell. His mattress—the lumpy one—lay on the floor. The other mattresses were gone. The bunks had been removed. Everything had been removed except the mattress, the scratchy sheet, and the shit bucket. Joe looked back at Mr. Hammond as he locked the door behind him.

“Where’d everyone else go?”

“They went,” Mr. Hammond said and walked down the tier.

For the second night in a row, Joe lay in the hot room and barely slept. It wasn’t just his ribs and it wasn’t simply fear—the reek of the prison was matched only by the reek of the factories outside. There was a small window at the top of the cell, ten feet up. Maybe the thought behind placing it there had been to give the prisoner a merciful taste of the outside world. But now it was just a conduit for the factory smoke, for the stench of textiles and burning coal. In the heat of the cell, as vermin scuttled along the walls and men groaned in the night, Joe could not fathom how he could survive five days here, never mind five years. He’d lost Emma, he’d lost his freedom, and now he could feel his soul beginning to flicker and wane. What they were taking from him was all he had.

The next day, more of the same. And the day after that. Anyone he approached walked away from him. Anyone he made eye contact with looked away. But he could feel them watching as soon as his gaze moved on. It was all they did, every man in the prison—they watched him.

Waiting.

“For what?” he said at lights-out as Mr. Hammond turned the key in the cell door. “What are they waiting for?”

Mr. Hammond stared through the bars at him with his lightless eyes.

“The thing is,” Joe said, “I’m happy to straighten things out with whoever I offended. If I did, in fact, offend somebody. Because if I did, I didn’t do so knowingly. So I’m willing to—”

“You’re in the mouth of it,” Mr. Hammond said. He looked up at the tiers arrayed above and behind him. “It decides to roll you around on its tongue. Or it bites down real hardlike, grind its teeth into you. Or it lets you climb over them teeth and jump out. But it decides. Not you.” Mr. Hammond swung his enormous ring of keys in a circle before hooking them to his belt. “You wait.”

“For how long?” Joe asked.

“Till it says so.” Mr. Hammond walked up the tier.

The boy who came for him next was just that, a boy. Trembling and jump-eyed and no less dangerous for it. Joe was walking to the Saturday shower when the kid dislodged himself from the line about ten men up and walked down toward Joe.

Joe knew from the moment the kid left the line that he was coming for him, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. The kid wore his striped prison pants and coat and carried his towel and soap bar like the rest of them, but he also had a potato peeler in his right hand, its edges sharpened by a whetstone.

Joe stepped to meet the kid and the kid acted like he was moving on, but then he dropped his towel and soap, planted his foot, and swung his arm at Joe’s head. Joe feinted to his right and the kid must have anticipated that because he went to his left and sank the potato peeler into Joe’s inner thigh. Joe didn’t have time to register the pain before he heard the kid pull it back out. It was the sound that enraged him. It sounded like fish parts sucked into a drain. His flesh, his blood, his meat hung off the edges of the weapon.

On his next pass, the kid lunged for Joe’s abdomen or groin: Joe couldn’t tell in all the ragged breathing and left-right, right-left scrabbling. He stepped inside the kid’s arms and gripped the back of his head and pulled it to his chest. The kid stabbed him again, this time in the hip, but it was a feeble stab with no momentum behind it. Still hurt worse than a dog bite. When the kid pulled his arm back to get a better thrust, Joe ran him backward until he cracked the kid’s head against the granite wall.

The kid sighed and dropped the potato peeler, and Joe banged his head off the wall twice more to be sure. The kid slid to the floor.

Joe had never seen him before.

In the infirmary, a doctor cleaned his wounds, sutured the one in his thigh, and wrapped it tightly in gauze. The doctor, who smelled of something chemical, told him to keep off the leg and the hip for a while.

“How do I do that?” Joe asked.

The doctor went on as if Joe had never spoken. “And keep the wounds clean. Change the dressing twice a day.”

“Do you have more dressing for me?”

“No,” the doctor said, as if embittered by the stupidity of the question.

“So… ”

“Good as new,” the doctor said and stepped back.

He waited for the guards to come and mete out their punishment for the fight. He waited to hear if the boy who’d attacked him was alive or dead. But no one said anything to him. It was as if he’d imagined the whole incident.

At lights-out, he asked Mr. Hammond if he’d heard about the fight on the way to the showers.

“No.”

“No, you didn’t hear?” Joe asked. “Or, no, it didn’t happen?”

“No,” Mr. Hammond said and walked away.

A few days after the stabbing, an inmate spoke to him. There was little special about the man’s voice—it was lightly accented (Italian, he guessed) and a bit gravelly—but after a week of almost total silence it sounded so beautiful that Joe’s throat closed up and his chest filled.

He was an old man with thick glasses too big for his face. He approached Joe in the yard as Joe limped across it. He’d been in the line to the showers on Saturday. Joe remembered him because he’d looked so frail one could only imagine the horrors this place had foisted upon him over the years.

“Do you think they’ll run out of men to fight you soon?”

He was about Joe’s height. He was bald up top, a shade of silver on the sides that matched his pencil-thin mustache. Long legs and a short, pudgy torso. Tiny hands. Something delicate about the way he moved, almost tiptoeing, like a cat burglar, but eyes as innocent and hopeful as a child’s on his first day of school.

“I don’t think they can run out,” Joe said. “Lot of candidates.”

“Won’t you get tired?”

“Sure,” Joe said. “But I’ll go as long as I can, I guess.”

“You’re very fast.”

“I’m fast, I’m not very fast.”

“You are, though.” The old man opened a small canvas pouch and removed two cigarettes. He handed one to Joe. “I’ve seen both your fights. You’re so fast most of these men haven’t noticed you’re protecting your ribs.”

Joe stopped as the man lit their cigarettes with a match he struck off his thumbnail. “I’m not protecting anything.”

The old man smiled. “A long time ago, in another life, before this”—he gestured past the walls and the wire—“I promoted a few boxers. A few wrestlers too. I never made much money, but I met a lot of pretty women. Boxers attract pretty women. And pretty women travel with other pretty women.” He shrugged as they began walking again. “So I know when a man is protecting his ribs. Are they broken?”

Joe said, “There’s nothing wrong with them.”

“I promise,” the old man said, “if they send me to fight you, I’ll limit myself to grasping your ankles and holding on tight.”

Joe chuckled. “Just the ankles, uh?”

“Maybe the nose, if I sense an advantage.”

Joe looked over at him. He must have been here so long he’d seen every hope die and experienced every degradation, and now they left him alone because he’d survived all they’d thrown at him. Or because he was just a bag of wrinkles, unappealing for purposes of trade. Harmless.

“Well, to protect my nose…” Joe took a long drag off the cigarette. He’d forgotten how good one could taste if you didn’t know where your next one was coming from. “A few months ago, I broke six ribs and fractured or sprained the rest.”

“A few months ago. That leaves you only a couple months to go.”

“No. Really?”

The old man nodded. “Broken ribs are like broken hearts—at least six months before they heal.”

Is that how long it takes? Joe thought.

“If only meals lasted as long.” The old man rubbed his small paunch. “What do they call you?”

“Joe.”

“Never Joseph?”

“Just my father.”

The man nodded and exhaled a stream of smoke with slow relish. “This is such a hopeless place. Even in your limited time here, I’m sure you’ve come to the same conclusion.”

Joe nodded.

“It eats men. It doesn’t even spit them back out.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Oh,” the old man said, “I stopped counting years ago.” He looked up at the greasy blue sky and spit a piece of tobacco off his tongue. “There’s nothing about this place I don’t know. If you need help comprehending it, just ask.”

Joe doubted the old fella was as tuned to the pulse of the place as he imagined himself to be, but he saw no harm in saying, “I will. Thank you. I appreciate your offer.”

They reached the end of the yard. As they turned to walk back the way they’d come, the old man placed his arm around Joe’s shoulders.

The whole yard watched.

The old man flicked his cigarette into the dust and held out his hand. Joe shook it.

“My name is Tommaso Pescatore, but everyone calls me Maso. Consider yourself under my care.”

Joe knew the name. Maso Pescatore ran the North End and most of the gambling and women on the North Shore. From behind these walls, he controlled a lot of the liquor coming up from Florida. Tim Hickey had done a lot of work with him over the years and usually mentioned that extreme caution was the only sensible course of action when dealing with the man.

“I didn’t ask to be under your care, Maso.”

“How many things in life—good and bad—come to us whether we ask for them or not?” Maso removed his arm from Joe’s shoulders and placed a hand over his eyebrows to block the sun. Where Joe had just seen innocence in his eyes, he now saw cunning. “Call me Mr. Pescatore from now on, Joseph. And give this to your father next time you see him.” Maso slipped a piece of paper into Joe’s hand.

Joe looked at the address scrawled there: 1417 Blue Hill Ave. That was it—no name, no telephone number, just an address.

“Hand it to your father. Just this once. It’s all I’ll ask of you.”

“What if I don’t?” Joe asked.

Maso seemed genuinely confused by the question. He tilted his head to one side and looked at Joe and a small and curious smile found his lips. The smile widened and turned into a soft laugh. He shook his head several times. He gave Joe a two-finger salute and walked back to the wall where his men stood waiting.

In the visiting room, Thomas watched his son limp across the floor and take his seat.

“What happened?”

“Guy stabbed me in the leg.”

“Why?”

Joe shook his head. He slid his palm across the table, and Thomas saw the piece of paper under it. He closed his hand over his son’s for a moment, relishing the contact and trying to remember why he’d refrained from initiating it for over a decade. He took the piece of paper and placed it in his pocket. He looked at his son, at his dark-ringed eyes and sullied spirit, and he saw the whole of it suddenly.

“I’m to do someone’s bidding,” he said.

Joe looked up from the table and met his eyes.

“Whose bidding, Joseph?”

“Maso Pescatore’s.”

Thomas sat back and asked himself just how much he loved his son.

Joe read the question in his eyes. “Don’t try to tell me you’re clean, Dad.”

“I do civilized business with civilized people. You’re asking me to get under the thumb of a bunch of dagos one generation removed from a cave.”

“It’s not under their thumb.”

“No? What’s on the piece of paper?”

“An address.”

“Just an address?”

“Yeah. I don’t know any more than that.”

His father nodded several times, his breath exiting through his nostrils. “Because you’re a child. Some wop gives you an address to give your father, a member of police command, and you don’t grasp that the only thing that address could be is the location of a rival’s illicit supply.”

“Of what?”

“Most likely a warehouse filled to the bursting with liquor.” His father stared up at the ceiling and ran a hand over his trim white hair.

“He said just this once.”

His father gave him a malevolent smile. “And you believed him.”

He left the prison.

He walked down the path toward his car, surrounded by the smell of chemicals. Smoke rose from the factory stacks. It was dark gray in most places but it turned the sky brown and the earth black. Trains chugged along the outskirts; for some odd reason, they reminded Thomas of wolves circling a medical tent.

He had sent at least a thousand men here over the course of his career. Many of them had died behind the granite walls. If they arrived with any illusions about human decency, they lost those straightaway. There were too many prisoners and too few guards for the prison to run as anything but what it was—a dumping ground, and then a proving ground, for animals. If you went in a man, you left a beast. If you went in an animal, you honed your skills.

He feared his son was too soft. For all his transgressions over the years, his lawlessness, his inability to obey Thomas or the rules or much of anything, Joseph was the most open of his sons. You could see his heart through the heaviest winter coat.

Thomas reached a call box at the end of the path. His key was attached to his watch chain and he used it now to open the box. He looked at the address in his hand: 1417 Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan. Jew Country. Which meant the warehouse was probably owned by Jacob Rosen, a known supplier of Albert White.

White was back in the city now. He’d never spent a night in jail, probably because he’d hired Jack D’Jarvis to handle his defense.

Thomas looked back at the prison his son called home. A tragedy but not surprising. His son had chosen the path that had led him here over years of Thomas’s strenuous objection and disapproval. If Thomas used this call box, he was wedded to the Pescatore mob for life, to a race of people who had brought to the shores of this country anarchism and its bombers, assassins, and the Black Hand and now, organized in something rumored to be called omertà organiza, they had overtaken by force the entire business of illegal liquor.

And he was supposed to give them more?

Work for them?

Kiss their rings?

He closed the call box door, returned his watch to his pocket, and walked to his car.

For two days, he considered the piece of paper. For two days, he prayed to the God he feared didn’t exist. Prayed for guidance. Prayed for his son behind those granite walls.

Saturday was his day off, and Thomas was up on a ladder, repainting the black trim of the windowsills of the K Street row house, when the man called up for directions. It was a hot and humid afternoon, a few purple clouds undulating in his direction. He looked through a window on the third floor into what had once been Aiden’s room. It had stood empty for three years before his wife, Ellen, had taken it over as a sewing room. She had passed in her sleep two years ago, so now it sat empty except for a pedal-charged sewing machine and a wooden rack from which hung the items that had been awaiting mending two years ago. Thomas dipped his brush into the can. It would always be Aiden’s room.

“I’m a bit turned around.”

Thomas looked down the ladder at the man standing on the sidewalk thirty feet below. He wore a light blue seersucker, white shirt, and a red bow tie, no hat.

“How can I help?” Thomas said.

“I’m looking for the L Street Bathhouse.”

From up here, Thomas could see the bathhouse, and not just the roof—the whole of its brick edifice. He could see the small lagoon beyond it, and beyond the lagoon, the Atlantic, stretching all the way to the land of his birth.

“End of the street.” Thomas pointed, gave the man a nod, and turned back to his paintbrush.

The man said, “Right down the end of the street, huh? Right down there?”

Thomas turned back and nodded, his eyes on the man now.

“Sometimes, I can’t get out of my own way,” the man said. “Ever happen to you? You know what you should do, but you just can’t get out of your own way?”

The man was blond and bland, handsome in a forgettable way. Neither tall nor short, fat nor thin.

“They won’t kill him,” he said pleasantly.

Thomas said, “Excuse me?” and dropped the brush into the paint can.

The man put his hand on the ladder.

From there, it wouldn’t take much.

The man squinted up at Thomas and then looked down the street. “They’ll make him wish they did, though. Make him wish that every day of his life.”

“You understand my rank with the Boston Police Department,” Thomas said.

“He’ll think about suicide,” the man said. “Of course he will. But they’ll keep him alive by promising to kill you if he does. And every day? They’ll think of a new thing to try on him.”

A black Model T pulled off the curb and idled in the middle of the street. The man left the sidewalk, climbed in, and they drove away, taking the first left they found.

Thomas climbed down, surprised to see the shakes in his forearms even after he entered his house. He was getting old, very old. He shouldn’t be up on ladders. He shouldn’t be standing on principle.

The way of the old was to allow the new to push you aside with as much grace as you could muster.

He called Kenny Donlan, the captain of the Third District in Mattapan. For five years, Kenny had been Thomas’s lieutenant at the Sixth in South Boston. Like many of the department command staff, he owed his success to Thomas.

“And on your day off no less,” Kenny said when his secretary patched Thomas through.

“Ah, there’s no days off for the likes of us, boy.”

“That’s the truth of it,” Kenny said. “How can I help you, Thomas?”

“One-four-one-seven Blue Hill Avenue,” Thomas said. “It’s a warehouse, supposedly for gaming parlor equipment.”

“But that’s not what’s in there,” Kenny said.

“No.”

“How hard do you want it hit?”

“Down to the last bottle,” Thomas said, and something inside him cried out as it died. “Down to the last drop.”

CHAPTER EIGHT In the Gloaming

That summer at Charlestown Penitentiary the Commonwealth of Massachusetts prepared to execute two famous anarchists. Global protests didn’t deter the state from its mission, nor did a flurry of last-minute appeals, stays, and further appeals. In the weeks after Sacco and Vanzetti were taken to Charlestown from Dedham and housed in the Death House to await the electric chair, Joe’s sleep was interrupted by throngs of outraged citizens gathered on the other side of the dark granite walls. Sometimes they remained there through the night, singing songs and shouting through megaphones and chanting their slogans. Several nights Joe assumed they brought torches to add a medieval flavor to the proceedings because he’d wake to the smell of burning pitch.

Other than a few nights of fitful sleep, however, the fate of the two doomed men had no effect on the lives of Joe or anyone he knew except for Maso Pescatore, who’d been forced to sacrifice his nightly strolls atop the prison walls until the world stopped watching.

On that famous night in late August, the excess voltage used on the hapless Italians sapped the rest of the electricity in the prison, and the lights on the tiers flickered and dimmed or snapped off entirely. The dead anarchists were taken to Forest Hills and cremated. The protestors dwindled and then went away.

Maso returned to the nightly routine he’d been following for ten years—walking the tops of the walls along the thick, curled wire and the dark watchtowers that overlooked the yard within and the blasted landscape of factories and slums without.

He often took Joe with him. To his surprise, Joe had become some kind of symbol to Maso—whether as the trophy scalp of the high-ranking police officer now under his thumb or as a potential member of his organization or as a puppy, Joe didn’t know, and he didn’t ask. Why ask when his presence on the wall beside Maso at night clearly stated one thing above all others—he was protected.

“Do you think they were guilty?” Joe asked one night.

Maso shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is the message.”

“What message? They executed two fellas who might have been innocent.”

“That was the message,” Maso said. “And every anarchist in the world heard it.”

Charlestown Penitentiary spilled blood all over itself that summer. Joe first believed the savagery to be innate, the pointless dog-eat-dog viciousness of men killing each other over pride—in your place in line, in your right to continue walking to the yard on the path you’d chosen, in not being jostled or elbowed or having the toe of your shoe scuffed.

It turned out to be more complicated than that.

An inmate in East Wing lost his eyes when someone clapped handfuls of glass into them. In South Wing, guards found a guy stabbed a dozen times below his ribs, entrance wounds that, judging by the odor, had perforated his liver. Inmates two tiers down smelled the guy die. Joe heard of all-night rape parties on the Lawson block, the block so named because three generations of the Lawson family—the grandfather, one of his sons, and three grandsons—had all been jailed there at the same time. The last one, Emil Lawson, had once been the youngest of the Lawson inmates but always the worst of them, and he was never getting out. His sentences added up to 114 years. Good news for Boston, bad news for Charlestown Pen. When he wasn’t leading gang rapes of new fish, Emil Lawson did murder for whoever paid him, though he was rumored to be working exclusively for Maso during the recent troubles.

The war was fought over rum. It was fought on the outside, of course, to some public consternation, but also on the inside, where no one thought to look and wouldn’t have shed a tear if they had. Albert White, an importer of whiskey from the north, had decided to branch out into importing rum from the south before Maso Pescatore was released from prison. Tim Hickey had been the first casualty in the White-Pescatore war. By the end of the summer, though, he was one of a dozen.

On the whiskey end of things, they shot it out in Boston and Portland and along the back roads that branched off the Canadian border. Drivers were run off roads in towns like Massena, New York; Derby, Vermont; and Allagash, Maine. Some were hijacked with just a beating, though one of White’s fastest drivers was forced to his knees in a bed of pine needles and had his jaw blown off at the hinge because he’d talked sass.

As for rum, the battle was waged to keep it out. Trucks were waylaid as far south as the Carolinas and as far north as Rhode Island. After they were coaxed to the shoulder and the drivers were convinced to vacate their cabs, White’s gangs set fire to the trucks. Rum trucks burned like Viking funeral boats, yellowing the underside of the night sky for miles in every direction.

“He’s got a stockpile somewhere,” Maso said on one of their walks. “He’s waiting until he’s bled New England of rum, and then he’ll ride in, the savior, with his own supply.”

“Who’d be stupid enough to supply him?” Joe knew of most of the suppliers in South Florida.

“It’s not stupid,” Maso said. “It’s smart. It’s what I’d do if I had to choose between a slick operator like Albert and an old man who’s been inside since before the czar lost Russia.”

“But you’ve got eyes and ears everywhere.”

The old man nodded. “But they’re not exactly my eyes and they’re not exactly my ears so they’re not connected to my hand. And my hand wields the power.”

That night, one of the guards on Maso’s payroll was off duty in a South End speakeasy when he left with a woman no one had ever seen before. A real looker, though, and definitely a pro. The guard was found three hours later in Franklin Square, sitting on a bench, a canyon cut through his Adam’s apple, deader than Thomas Jefferson.

Maso’s sentence ended in three months, and it was all starting to feel a bit desperate on Albert’s part, and the desperation only made things more dangerous. Just last night, Boyd Holter, Maso’s best forger, had been tossed off the Ames Building downtown. He’d landed on his tailbone, pieces of his spine spitting up into his brainpan like gravel.

Maso’s people responded by blowing up one of Albert’s fronts, a butcher’s shop on Morton Street. The hairdresser and the haberdashery on either side of the butcher also burned to the ground, and several cars along the street lost their windows and paint.

So far, no winner, just a lot of mess.

Along the wall, Joe and Maso stopped to watch an orange moon as big as the sky itself rise over the factory smokestacks and the fields of ash and black poison, and Maso handed Joe a folded piece of paper.

Joe didn’t look at them anymore, just folded them another couple of times and hid them in a slot he’d cut in the sole of his shoe until he saw his father next.

“Open it,” Maso said before Joe could pocket it.

Joe looked at him, the moon making it feel like daylight up here.

Maso nodded.

Joe turned the piece of paper in his hand and thumbed the top edge back. At first, he couldn’t make sense of the two words he saw there:

Brendan Loomis.

Maso said, “He was arrested last night. Beat a man outside of Filene’s. Because they both wanted to buy the same coat. Because he’s a savage who doesn’t think. The victim has friends, so Albert White’s right hand is not returning to Albert’s wrist anytime in the immediate future.” He looked at Joe, the moon turning his flesh orange. “You hate him?”

Joe said, “Of course.”

“Good.” Maso patted his arm once. “Give the note to your father.”

At the bottom of the copper mesh screen between Joe and his father was a gap big enough to slide notes back and forth. Joe meant to place Maso’s note on his side of the gap and push, but he couldn’t bring himself to lift it off his knee.

That summer his father’s face had grown translucent, like onion skin, and the veins in his hands had turned unreasonably bright—bright blue, bright red. His eyes and shoulders sagged. His hair had thinned. He looked every day and more of his sixty years.

But that morning something had put a bit of snap back into his speech and some life into the broken green of his eyes.

“You’ll never guess who’s coming to town,” he said.

“Who?”

“Your brother Aiden himself.”

Ah. That explained it. The favorite son. The beloved prodigal.

“Danny’s coming, uh? Where’s he been?”

Thomas said, “Oh, he’s been all over. He wrote me a letter that took fifteen minutes to read. He’s been to Tulsa and Austin and even Mexico. Of late, he’s apparently been in New York. But he’s coming to town tomorrow.”

“With Nora?”

“He didn’t mention her,” Thomas said in a tone that suggested he would prefer to do the same.

“Did he say why he was coming to town?”

Thomas shook his head. “Just said he’d be passing through.” Hi trailed off as he looked around at the walls like he couldn’t get used to them. And he probably couldn’t. Who could, unless they had to? “You holding up?”

“I’m…” Joe shrugged.

“What?”

“Trying, Dad. Trying.”

“Well, that’s all you can do.”

“Yeah.”

They stared through the mesh at each other and Joe found the courage to remove the note from his knee and push it across to his father.

His father unfolded it and looked at the name there. For a long moment, Joe wasn’t sure if he was still breathing. And then…

“No.”

“What?”

“No.” Thomas pushed the note back across the table and said it again. “No.”

“‘No’ isn’t a word Maso likes, Dad.”

“So it’s ‘Maso’ now.”

Joe said nothing.

“I don’t do murder for hire, Joseph.”

“That’s not what they’re asking,” Joe said, thinking, Is it?

“How naive can you be before it becomes unforgivable?” His father’s breath exited through his nostrils. “If they give you the name of a man in police custody, then they want that man found hanging in his cell or shot in the back ‘trying to escape.’ So, Joseph, given the degree of ignorance you seem willfully to cling to in such matters, I need you to hear exactly what I have to say.”

Joe met his father’s stare, surprised by the depths of love and loss he saw there. His father, it seemed quite clear, now sat at the culmination of a life’s journey, and the words about to leave his mouth were a summation of it.

“I will not take the life of another without cause.”

“Even a killer?” Joe said.

“Even a killer.”

“And the man responsible for the death of a woman I loved.”

“You told me you think she’s alive.”

“That’s not the point,” Joe said.

“No,” his father agreed, “it’s not. The point is that I don’t engage in murder. Not for anyone. Certainly not for that dago devil you’ve sworn your allegiance to.”

“I’ve got to survive in here,” Joe said. “In here.”

“And you do what you have to.” His father nodded, his green eyes brighter than usual. “And I’ll never judge you for it. But I won’t commit homicide.”

“Even for me?”

“Especially for you.”

“Then I’ll die in here, Dad.”

“That’s possible, yes.”

Joe looked down at the table, the wood blurring, everything blurring. “Soon.”

“And if that happens”—his father’s voice was a whisper—“I’ll die soon after of a broken heart. But I won’t murder for you, son. Kill for you? Yes. But murder? Never.”

Joe looked up. He was ashamed how wet his voice sounded when he said, “Please.”

His father shook his head. Softly. Slowly.

Well, then. There was nothing left to say.

Joe went to stand.

His father said, “Wait.”

“What?”

His father looked at the guard standing by the door behind Joe. “That screw, is he in Maso’s pocket?”

“Yeah. Why?”

His father removed his watch from his vest. He removed the chain from the watch.

“No, Dad. No.”

Thomas dropped the chain back into his pocket and slid the watch across the table.

Joe tried to keep the tears in his eyes from falling. “I can’t.”

“You can. You will.” His father stared through the screen at him like something on fire, all the exhaustion swept from his face, all the hopelessness too. “It’s worth a fortune, that piece of metal. But that’s all it is—a piece of metal. You buy your life with it. You hear me? You give it to that dago devil and buy your life.”

Joe closed his hand over the watch and it was still warm from his father’s pocket, ticking against his palm like a heart.

He told Maso in the mess hall. He hadn’t intended to; he hadn’t guessed it would come up. He thought he’d have time. During meals, Joe sat with members of the Pescatore crew, but not with the ones at the first table who sat with Maso himself. Joe sat at the next one over with guys like Rico Gastemeyer, who ran the daily number, and Larry Kahn, who made toilet gin in the basement of the guards’ quarters. He came back from his meeting with his father and took a seat across from Rico and Ernie Rowland, a counterfeiter from Saugus, but they were pushed down the bench by Hippo Fasini, one of the soldiers closest to Maso, and Joe was left looking across the table at Maso himself, flanked on one side by Naldo Aliente and on the other by Hippo Fasini.

“So when will it happen?” Maso asked.

“Sir?”

Maso looked frustrated, as he always did when asked to repeat himself. “Joseph.”

Joe felt his chest and throat clench around his answer. “He won’t do it.”

Naldo Aliente chuckled softly and shook his head.

Maso said, “He refused?”

Joe nodded.

Maso looked at Naldo, then at Hippo Fasini. No one said anything for some time. Joe looked down at his food, aware that it was growing cold, aware he should eat it because if you skipped a meal in here, you’d grow weak very fast.

“Joseph, look at me.”

Joe looked across the table. The face staring back at him seemed amused and curious, like a wolf who’d come upon a nest of newborn chicks where he’d least expected.

“Why weren’t you more convincing with your father?”

Joe said, “Mr. Pescatore, I tried.”

Maso looked back and forth between his men. “He tried.”

When Naldo Aliente smiled he exposed a row of teeth that looked like bats hanging in a cave. “Not hard enough.”

“Look,” Joe said, “he gave me something.”

“He…?” Maso put a hand behind his ear.

“Gave me something to give to you.” Joe handed the watch across the table.

Maso took note of the gold cover. He opened it and considered the timepiece itself and then the inside of the dust cover where Patek Philippe had been engraved in the most graceful script. His eyebrows rose in approval.

“It’s the 1902, eighteen karat,” he said to Naldo. He turned to Joe. “Only two thousand ever made. It’s worth more than my house. How’s a copper come to own it?”

“Broke up a bank robbery in ’08,” Joe said, repeating a story his Uncle Eddie had told a hundred times, though his father never discussed it. “It was in Codman Square. He killed one of the robbers before the guy could kill the bank manager.”

“And the bank manager gave him this watch?”

Joe shook his head. “Bank president did. The manager was his son.”

“So now he gives it to me to save his own son?”

Joe nodded.

“I got three sons, myself. You know that?”

Joe said, “I heard that, yeah.”

“So I know something about fathers and how they love their sons.”

Maso sat back and looked at the watch for a bit. Eventually he sighed and pocketed the watch. He reached across the table and patted Joe’s hand three times. “You get back in touch with your old man. Tell him thanks for the gift.” Maso stood from the table. “And then tell him to do what I fucking told him to do.”

Maso’s men all stood together and they left the mess hall.

When he returned to his cell after work detail in the chain shop, Joe was hot, filthy, and three men he’d never seen before waited inside for him. The bunk beds were still gone but the mattresses had been returned to the floor. The men sat on the mattresses. His mattress lay beyond them, against the wall under the high window, farthest from the bars. Two of the fellas he’d never seen before, he was sure of it, but the third looked familiar. He was about thirty, short, but with a very long face, and a chin as pointy as his nose and the tips of his ears. Joe ratcheted through all the names and faces he’d learned in this prison and realized he was looking across at Basil Chigis, one of Emil Lawson’s crew, a lifer like his boss, no possibility of parole. Alleged to have eaten the fingers of a boy he’d killed in a Chelsea basement.

Joe looked at each of the men long enough to show he wasn’t frightened, though he was, and they stared back at him, blinking occasionally but never speaking. So he didn’t speak either.

At some point, the men seemed to tire of the staring and played cards. The currency was bones. Small bones, the bones of quail or young chickens or minor birds of prey. The men carried the bones in small canvas sacks. Boiled white, they clacked when they were gathered up in a winning pot. When the light dimmed, the men continued playing, never speaking except to say, “Raise,” or “See ya,” or “Fold.” Every now and then one of them would glance at Joe but never for very long, and then he’d go back to playing cards.

When full dark descended, the lights along the tiers were shut off. The three men tried to finish their hand but then Basil Chigis’s voice floated out of the black—“Fuck this”—and cards scraped as they gathered them off the floor and the bones clicked as they returned them to their sacks.

They sat in the dark, breathing.

Time wasn’t something Joe knew how to measure that night. He could have sat in the dark thirty minutes or two hours. He had no idea. The men sat in a half circle across from him, and he could smell their breath and their body odor. The one to his right smelled particularly bad, like dried sweat so old it had turned to vinegar.

As his eyes adjusted, he could see them, and the deep black became a gloaming. They sat with their arms across their knees, their legs crossed at the ankles. Their eyes were fixed on him.

In one of the factories behind him, a whistle blew.

Even if he’d had a shank, he doubted he could have stabbed all three of them. Given that he’d never stabbed anyone in his life, he might not have been able to get to one of them before they took it away and used it on him.

He knew they were waiting for him to speak. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. That would be the signal for them to do whatever they intended to do to him. If he spoke, he’d be begging. Even if he never asked for anything or pleaded for his life, speaking to these men would be a plea in itself. And they’d laugh at him before they killed him.

Basil Chigis’s eyes were the blue a river got not long before it froze. In the dark, it took a while for the color to return, but eventually it did. Joe imagined feeling the burn of that color on his thumbs when he drove them into Basil’s eyes.

They’re men, he told himself, not demons. A man can be killed. Even three men. You just need to act.

Staring into Basil Chigis’s pale blue flames, he felt their sway over him diminish the more he reminded himself these men held no special powers, no more so than he anyway—the mind and the limbs and willpower, all working as one—and so it was entirely possible that he could overpower them.

But then what? Where would he go? His cell was seven feet long and eleven feet wide.

You have to be willing to kill them. Strike now. Before they do. And after they’re down, snap their fucking necks.

Even as he imagined it, he knew it was impossible. If it was just one man and he acted before one assumed he would, he might have had a chance. But to successfully attack three of them from a sitting position?

The fear spread down through his intestines and up through his throat. It squeezed his brain like a hand. He couldn’t stop sweating and his arms trembled against his sleeves.

The movement came from the right and left simultaneously. By the time he sensed it, the tips of the shanks were pressed against his eardrums. He couldn’t see the shanks but he could see the one Basil Chigis pulled from the folds of his prison uniform. It was a slim metal rod, half the length of a pool cue, and Basil had to cock his elbow when he placed the tip to the base of Joe’s throat. He reached behind him and pulled something out of the back of his waistband, and Joe wanted to un-see it because he didn’t want to believe it was in the room with them. Basil Chigis raised a mallet high behind the butt end of the long shank.

Hail Mary, Joe thought, full of grace…

He forgot the rest of it. He’d been an altar boy for six years and he forgot.

Basil Chigis’s eyes had not changed. There was no clear intent in them. His left fist gripped the shaft of the metal rod. His right clenched the mallet handle. One swing of his arm and the metal tip would puncture Joe’s throat and drive straight down into his heart.

…the Lord is with thee. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts…

No, no. That was grace, something you said over dinner. The Hail Mary went differently. It went…

He couldn’t remember.

Our Father, who art in Heaven, forgive us our trespasses as we—

The door to the cell opened and Emil Lawson entered. He crossed to the circle, knelt to the right of Basil Chigis, and cocked his head at Joe.

“I heard you were pretty,” he said. “They didn’t lie.” He stroked the stubble on his cheeks. “Can you think of anything I can’t take from you right now?”

My soul? Joe wondered. But in this place, this dark, they could probably get that too.

Damned if he’d answer, though.

Emil Lawson said, “You answer the question or I’ll pluck an eye out and feed it to Basil.”

“No,” Joe said, “nothing you can’t take.”

Emil Lawson wiped the floor with a palm before sitting. “You want us to go away? Leave your cell tonight?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“You were asked to do something for Mr. Pescatore and you refused.”

“I didn’t refuse. The final decision wasn’t up to me.”

The shank against Joe’s throat slipped in his sweat and bumped along the side of his neck, taking some skin with it. Basil Chigis returned it to the base of his throat again.

“Your daddy.” Emil Lawson nodded. “The copper. What was he supposed to do?”

What?

“You know what he was supposed to do.”

“Pretend I don’t and answer the question.”

Joe took a long, slow breath. “Brendan Loomis.”

“What about him?”

“He’s in custody. He gets arraigned day after tomorrow.”

Emil Lawson laced his hands behind his head and smiled. “And your daddy was supposed to kill him but he said no.”

“Yeah.”

“No, he said yes.”

“He said no.”

Emil Lawson shook his head. “You’re going to tell the first Pescatore hood you see that your father got word back to you through a guard. He’ll take care of Brenny Loomis. He also found out where Albert White’s been sleeping at night. And you’ve got the address to give to Old Man Pescatore. But only face-to-face. You following me so far, pretty boy?”

Joe nodded.

Emil Lawson handed Joe something wrapped in oilcloth. Joe unwrapped it—another shank, almost as thin as a needle. It had been a screwdriver at one point, the kind people used on the hinges of their eyeglasses. But those weren’t sharp like this. The tip was like a rose thorn. Joe ran his palm over it lightly and cut a path there.

They removed the shanks from his ears and throat.

Emil leaned in close. “When you get close enough to whisper that address in Pescatore’s ear, you drive that shank right through his fucking brain.” He shrugged. “Or his throat. Whatever kills him.”

“I thought you worked for him,” Joe said.

“I work for me.” Emil Lawson shook his head. “I did some jobs for his crew when I was paid to. Now someone else is paying.”

“Albert White,” Joe said.

“That’s my boss.” Emil Lawson leaned forward and lightly slapped Joe’s cheek. “And now he’s your boss too.”

In the small spit of land behind his house on K Street, Thomas Coughlin kept a garden. His efforts with it had, over the years, met with varying degrees of success and failure, but in the two years since Ellen had passed on, he’d had nothing but time; now the bounty of it was such that he made a small profit every year when he sold the surplus.

Years ago, when he was five or six, Joe had decided to help his father harvest in early July. Thomas has been sleeping off a double shift and the several nightcaps he’d consumed with Eddie McKenna afterward. He woke to the sound of his son talking in the backyard. Joe had talked to himself a lot back then, or maybe he spoke to an imagined friend. Either way, he’d had to talk to somebody, Thomas could admit to himself now, because he certainly wasn’t being spoken to much around the house. Thomas worked too much, and Ellen, well, by that point Ellen had firmly established her fondness for Tincture No. 23, a cure-all first introduced to her after one of the miscarriages that had preceded Joe’s birth. Back then, No. 23 wasn’t yet the problem it would become for Ellen, or so Thomas had told himself. But he must have second-guessed that assessment more than he liked to admit because he’d known without asking that Joe was unattended that morning. He lay in bed listening to his youngest jabbering to himself as he tramped back and forth to the porch, and Thomas started to wonder what he tramped back and forth from.

He rose from bed and put on a robe and found his slippers. He walked through the kitchen (where Ellen, dull-eyed but smiling, sat with her cup of tea) and pushed open the back door.

When he saw the porch, his first instinct was to scream. Literally. To drop to his knees and rage at the heavens. His carrots and parsnips and tomatoes—all still green as grass—lay on the porch, their roots splayed like hair across the dirt and wood. Joe came walking up from the garden with another crop in his hands—the beets, this time. He’d transformed into a mole, his skin and hair caked with dirt. The only white left on him could be found in his eyes and his teeth when he smiled, which he did as soon as he saw Thomas.

“Hi, Daddy.”

Thomas was speechless.

“I’m helping you, Daddy.” Joe placed a beet at Thomas’s feet and went back for more.

Thomas, a year’s work ruined, an autumn’s profit vanished, watched his son march off to finish the destruction, and the laugh that quaked up through the center of him surprised no one so much as him. He laughed so loud squirrels took flight from the low branches of the nearest tree. He laughed so hard he could feel the porch shake.

He smiled now to remember it.

He’d told his son recently that life was luck. But life, he’d come to realize as he aged, was also memory. The recollection of moments often proved richer than the moments themselves.

Out of habit, he reached for his watch before he recalled that it was no longer in his pocket. He’d miss it, even if the truth of the watch was a bit more complicated than the legend that had arisen around it. It was a gift from Barrett W. Stanford Sr., that was true. And Thomas had, without question, risked his life to save Barrett W. Stanford II, the manager of First Boston in Codman Square. Also true was that Thomas had, in the performance of his duties, discharged his service revolver a single time into the brain of one Maurice Dobson, twenty-six, ending his life immediately.

But in the instant before he pulled that trigger, Thomas had seen something no one else had: the true nature of Maurice Dobson’s intent. He would tell the hostage, Barrett W. Stanford II, about it first, and then relate the same tale to Eddie McKenna, then to his watch commander, and then to the members of the BPD Shooting Board. With their permission, he told the same story to the members of the press and also to Barrett W. Stanford Sr., who was so overcome with gratitude that he gave Thomas a watch that had been presented to him in Zurich by Joseph Emile Philippe himself. Thomas attempted three times to refuse such an extravagant gift, but Barrett W. Stanford Sr. wouldn’t hear of it.

So he carried the watch, not with the pride that so many presumed, but with a gravely intimate respect. In the legend, Maurice Dobson’s intent was to kill Barrett W. Stanford II. And who could argue with that interpretation, given that he’d placed a pistol to Barrett’s throat?

But the intent Thomas had read in Maurice Dobson’s eyes in that final instant—and it was that quick: an instant—was surrender. Thomas had stood four feet away, service revolver drawn and steady in his hand, finger on the trigger, so ready to pull it—and you had to be, or else why draw the gun in the first place?—that when he saw an acceptance of his fate pass through Maurice Dobson’s pebble-gray eyes, an acceptance that he was going to jail, that this was over now, Thomas felt unfairly denied. Denied of what, he couldn’t rightly say at first. But as soon as he pulled the trigger, he knew.

The bullet entered the left eye of the unfortunate Maurice Dobson, the late Maurice Dobson before he even reached the floor, and the heat of it singed a stripe into the skin just below Barrett W. Stanford II’s temple. When the finality of the bullet’s purpose conjoined with finality of its usage, Thomas understood what had been denied him and why he’d taken such permanent steps to rectify that denial.

When two men pointed theirs guns at each other, a contract was established under the eyes of God, the only acceptable fulfillment of which was that one of you send the other home to him.

Or so it had felt at the time.

Over the years, even in the deepest of his cups, even with Eddie McKenna, who knew most of his secrets, Thomas had never told another soul what kind of intent he’d actually seen in Maurice Dobson’s eyes. And while he felt no pride in his actions that day and so took none in his possession of the pocket watch, he never left his house without it, because it bore witness to the profound responsibility that defined his profession—we don’t enforce the laws of men; we enforce the will of nature. God was not some white-robed cloud king prone to sentimental meddling in human affairs. He was the iron that formed its core, and the fire in the belly of the blast furnaces that ran for a hundred years. God was the law of iron and the law of fire. God was nature and nature was God. There could not be one without the other.

And you, Joseph, my youngest, my wayward romantic, my prickly heart—it’s now you who has to remind men of those laws. The worst men. Or die from weakness, from moral frailty, from lack of will.

I’ll pray for you, because prayer is all that remains when power dies. And I have no power anymore. I can’t reach behind those granite walls. I can’t slow or stop time. Hell, at the moment, I can’t even tell it.

He looked out at his garden, so close to harvest. He prayed for Joe. He prayed for a tide of his ancestors, most unknown to him, and yet he could see them so clearly, a diaspora of stooped souls stained by drink and famine and the dark impulse. He wished for their eternal rest to be peaceful, and he wished for a grandson.

Joe found Hippo Fasini on the yard and told him his father had undergone a change of heart.

“That’ll happen,” Hippo said.

“He also gave me an address.”

“Yeah?” The fat man leaned back on his heels and looked out at nothing. “Whose?”

“Albert White’s.”

“Albert White lives in Ashmont Hill.”

“I hear he doesn’t visit much lately.”

“So give me the address.”

“Fuck you.”

Hippo Fasini looked at the ground, all three chins dropping into his prison stripes. “Excuse me?”

“Tell Maso I’ll bring it to the wall with me tonight.”

“You ain’t in a bargaining position, kid.”

Joe looked at him until Hippo met his eyes. He said, “Sure I am,” and walked off across the yard.

An hour before his meeting with Pescatore, he threw up twice into the oak bucket. His arms shook. Occasionally so did his chin and his lips. His blood became a steady pounding of fists against his ears. He’d tied the shank to his wrist with a leather bootlace Emil Lawson had provided. Just before he left his cell, he was to move it from there to between his ass cheeks. Lawson had strongly suggested he shove it all the way up his ass, but he envisioned one of Maso’s goons forcing him to sit for whatever reason and decided it was the cheeks or nothing at all. He figured he’d make the transfer with about ten minutes to go, get used to moving with it, but a guard came by his cell forty minutes early to tell him he had a visitor.

It was dusk. Visiting hours were long over.

“Who?” he asked as he followed the guard down the tier, only then realizing the shank remained tied to his wrist.

“Someone who knows how to grease the right palms.”

“Yeah”—Joe tried to keep up with the guard, a brisk walker—“but who?”

The guard unlocked the ward gate and ushered Joe through. “Said he was your brother.”

He entered the room removing his hat. Coming through the doorway, he had to duck, a man who stood a full head taller than most. His dark hair had receded some and was lightly salted over the ears. Joe did the math and realized he’d be (thirty-five) now. Still fiercely handsome, though his face was more weathered than Joe remembered.

He wore a dark, slightly battered three-piece suit with cloverleaf lapels. It was the suit of a manager in a grain warehouse or a man who spent a lot of time on the road—a salesman or union organizer. Danny wore a white shirt under it, no tie.

He placed his hat on the counter and looked through the mesh between them.

“Shit,” Danny said, “you’re not thirteen anymore, are you?”

Joe noticed how red his brother’s eyes were. “And you’re not twenty-five.”

Danny lit a cigarette and the match quivered between his fingers. A large scar, puckered in the center, covered the back of his hand. “Still whoop your ass.”

Joe shrugged. “Maybe not. I’m learning to fight dirty.”

Danny gave that an arch of his eyebrows and exhaled a plume of smoke. “He’s gone, Joe.”

Joe knew who “he” was. Some part of him had known the last time he’d laid eyes on him in this room. But another part of him couldn’t accept it. Wouldn’t.

“Who?”

His brother looked at the ceiling for a moment, then back at him. “Dad, Joe. Dad’s dead.”

“How?”

“My guess? Heart attack.”

“Did you…?”

“Huh?”

“Were you there?”

Danny shook his head. “I missed him by half an hour. He was still warm when I found him.”

Joe said, “You’re sure there was no…”

“What?”

“Foul play?”

“What the fuck are they doing to you in here?” Danny looked around the room. “No, Joe, it was a heart attack or a stroke.”

“How do you know?”

Danny narrowed his eyes. “He was smiling.”

“What?”

“Yeah.” Danny chuckled. “That small one of his? One looked like he was hearing some private joke or remembering something from the way back, before any of us? You know that one?”

“Yeah, I do,” Joe said and was surprised to hear himself whisper again, “I do.”

“No watch on him, though.”

“Huh?” Joe’s head buzzed.

“His watch,” Danny said. “He didn’t have it. Never knew him to—”

“I got it,” Joe said. “He gave it to me. In case I run into trouble. You know, in here.”

“So you’ve got it.”

“I got it,” he said, the lie burning his stomach. He saw Maso’s hand closing over the watch and he wanted to beat his own head against concrete until he stove it in.

“Good,” Danny said. “That’s good.”

“It’s not,” Joe said. “It’s shit. But it’s about the size of things now.”

Neither of them spoke for a few moments. A factory whistle blew distantly from the other side of the walls.

Danny said, “You know where I can find Con?”

Joe nodded. “He’s at the Abbotsford.”

“The blind school? What’s he doing there?”

“Lives there,” Joe said. “He just woke up one day and quit on everything.”

“Well,” Danny said, “that kinda injury could make anyone bitter.”

“He was bitter long before the injury,” Joe said.

Danny shrugged in agreement and they sat in silence for a minute.

Joe said, “Where was he when you found him?”

“Where do you think?” Danny dropped his cigarette to the floor and stepped on it, the smoke leaving his mouth from under the curl in his upper lip. “Out back, sitting in that chair on the porch, you know? Looking out at his…” Danny lowered his head and waved at the air.

“Garden,” Joe said.

CHAPTER NINE As the Old Man Goes

Even in prison, news of the outside world trickled in. That year all the sports talk concerned the New York Yankees and their Murderers’ Row of Combs, Koenig, Ruth, Gehrig, Meusel, and Lazzeri. Ruth alone hit a mind-boggling sixty home runs, and the other five hitters were so dominant that the only question left was by how humiliating a margin they’d sweep the Pirates in the World Series.

Joe, a walking encyclopedia of baseball, would have loved to see this team play because he knew their like might never come around again. And yet his time in Charlestown had also instilled in him a reactionary contempt for anyone who would call a group of ballplayers Murderers’ Row.

You want a Murderers’ Row, he thought that evening just after dusk, I’m walking it. The entrance to the walkway along the top of the prison wall was on the other side of a door at the end of F Block on the uppermost tier of North Wing. It was impossible to reach that door unobserved. A man couldn’t even reach the tier without going through three separate gates. Once he did, he faced an empty tier. Even in a prison as overcrowded as this, they kept the twelve cells there empty and cleaner than a church font before a baptism.

As Joe walked along the tier now, he saw how they kept it so clean—each cell was being mopped by a convict trustee. The high windows in the cells, identical to the window in his own, revealed a square of sky. The squares were all a blue so dark it was nearly black, which left Joe to wonder how much the moppers could see in those cells. All the light was on the corridor. Maybe the guards would provide lanterns when dusk became night in a matter of minutes.

But there were no guards. Just the one leading him down the tier, the one who’d led him to and from the visiting room, the one who walked too fast, which would get him into trouble someday because the objective was to keep the convict ahead of you. If you got ahead of the convict, he could get up to all sorts of nefarious things, which is how Joe had moved the shank from his wrist to his butt five minutes ago. He wished he’d practiced it, though. Trying to walk with clenched ass cheeks and appear natural was no easy thing.

But where were the other guards? On nights when Maso walked the wall, they kept their presence light up here; it wasn’t like every guard was on the Pescatore payroll, though those who weren’t would never go pigeon on those who were. But Joe glanced around as they continued along the tier and confirmed what he’d feared—there were no guards up here right now. And then he got a close look at the inmates cleaning the cells:

Murderers’ Row, indeed.

Basil Chigis’s pointy head tipped him off. Not even the prison-issue watch cap could disguise it. Basil pushed a mop in the seventh cell on the tier. The foul-smelling guy who’d put his shank to Joe’s right ear mopped the eighth. Pushing a bucket around the tenth empty cell was Dom Pokaski, who’d burned his own family alive—wife, two daughters, mother-in-law, not to mention three cats he’d locked in the fruit cellar.

At the end of the tier, Hippo and Naldo Aliente stood by the stairwell door. If they thought there was anything odd about the higher-than-usual inmate presence and lower-than-ever guard presence, they were doing a first-class job of masking it. Nothing showed on their faces, really, except the smug entitlement of the ruling class.

Fellas, Joe thought, you might want to brace for change.

“Hands up,” Hippo told Joe. “I gotta frisk you.”

Joe didn’t hesitate, but he did regret not shoving the shank all the way up his ass. The handle, small as it was, rested against the base of his spine, but Hippo might feel an abnormal shape there, pull up his shirt and then use the shank on him. Joe kept his arms raised, surprised by how steady he seemed: no shakes, no sweat, no outward signs of fear. Hippo slapped his paws up Joe’s legs and then along his ribs and ran one down his chest and the other down his back. The tip of Hippo’s finger grazed the handle and Joe could feel it tilt back. He clenched harder, aware that his life depended on something as absurd as how tight he could clench his buttocks.

Hippo gripped Joe’s shoulders and turned him to face him. “Open your mouth.”

Joe did.

“Wider.”

Joe complied.

Hippo peered into his mouth. “He’s clean,” he said and stepped back.

As Joe went to pass, Naldo Aliente blocked the door. He looked into Joe’s face like he knew all the lies behind it.

“Your life goes as that old man’s goes,” he said. “You understand?”

Joe nodded, knowing that whatever happened to him or Pescatore, Naldo was living the final minutes of his life right now. “You bet.”

Naldo stepped aside, Hippo opened the door, and Joe stepped through. There was nothing on the other side but an iron spiral staircase. It rose from the concrete box to a trapdoor that had been left open to the night. Joe pulled the shank out of the back of his pants and placed it in the pocket of his coarse striped shirt. When he reached the top of the staircase, he made a fist of his right hand, then raised the index and middle fingers and thrust the hand out of the hole until the guard in the nearest tower could get a look. The light from the tower swung left, right, and left-right again in a quick zigzag—the all clear. Joe climbed through the opening and out onto the walkway and scanned his surroundings until he made out Maso about fifteen yards down the wall in front of the central watchtower.

He walked to him, feeling the shank bouncing lightly against his hip. The only blind spot to the central watchtower was the space directly below it. As long as Maso stayed where he was, they’d be invisible. When Joe reached him, Maso was smoking one of the bitter French cigarettes he preferred, the yellow ones, and looking west across the blight.

He looked at Joe for a bit and said nothing, just inhaled and exhaled his cigarette smoke with a wet rattle.

And then he said, “I’m sorry about your father.”

Joe stopped fishing for his own cigarette. The night sky dropped over his face like a cloak and the air around him evaporated until the lack of oxygen squeezed his head.

There was no way Maso could know. Even with all his power, all his sources. Danny had told Joe he’d reached out to no less than Superintendent Michael Crowley, who’d come up on foot patrol with their father and whose job their father had been expected to inherit before that night behind the Statler. Thomas Coughlin had been whisked out the back of his house into an unmarked police car and taken into the city morgue by the underground entrance.

I’m sorry about your father.

No, Joe told himself. No. He can’t know. Impossible.

Joe found his cigarette and placed it between his lips. Maso struck a match off the parapet and lit it for him, the old man’s eyes taking on the generous cast they were capable of when it suited.

Joe said, “What’re you sorry about?”

Maso shrugged. “No man should ever be asked to do what’s against his nature, Joseph, even if it’s to help a loved one. What we asked of him, what we asked of you, it wasn’t fair. But what’s fucking fair in this world?”

Joe’s heartbeat slid back out of his ears and throat.

He and Maso leaned their elbows on the parapet and smoked. Lights from the barges along the Mystic scudded through the thick, distant gray like exiled stars. White snakes of foundry smoke pirouetted toward them. The air smelled of trapped heat and a rain that refused to fall.

“I won’t ask anything so hard of you or your father again, Joseph.” Maso gave him a firm nod. “I promise you that.”

Joe locked eyes with him. “Sure you will, Maso.”

“Mr. Pescatore, Joseph.”

Joe said, “My apologies,” and his cigarette fell from his fingers. He bent to the walkway to pick it up.

Instead, he wrapped his arms around Maso’s ankles and pulled up hard.

“Don’t scream.” Joe straightened and the old man’s head entered the space beyond the edge of the parapet. “You scream, I drop you.”

The old man’s breath came fast. His feet kicked against Joe’s ribs.

“I’d stop struggling too, or I won’t be able to hold on.”

It took a few moments, but Maso’s feet stopped moving.

“Do you have any weapons on you? Don’t lie.”

The voice floated back from the edge to him. “Yes.”

“How many?”

“Just one.”

Joe let go of his ankles.

Maso waved his arms like he might, in that moment, learn to fly. He slid forward on his chest, and the dark swallowed his head and torso. He probably would have screamed, but Joe sank his hand into the waistband of Maso’s prison uniform, dug a heel into the wall of the parapet, and leaned back.

Maso made a series of strange huffing sounds, very high-pitched, like a newborn abandoned in a field.

“How many?” Joe repeated.

Nothing but that huffing for a minute and then, “Two.”

“Where are they?”

“Razor at my ankle, nails in my pocket.”

Nails? Joe had to see this. He patted the pockets with his free hand, found on odd lump. He reached in gingerly and came back with what he might have mistaken for a comb at first glance. Four short nails were soldered to a bar that was, in turn, soldered to four misshapen rings.

“This goes over your fist?” Joe said.

“Yes.”

“That’s nasty.”

He placed it on the parapet and then found the straight razor in Maso’s sock, a Wilkinson with a pearl handle. He placed it beside the nail knuckles.

“Getting light-headed yet?”

A muffled “Yes.”

“Expect so.” Joe adjusted his grip on the waistband. “Are we agreed, Maso, that if I open my fingers you’re one dead guinea?”

“Yes.”

“I got a hole in my leg from a fucking potato peeler because of you.”

“I… I… you.”

“What? Speak clearly.”

It came out a hiss. “I saved you.”

“So you could get to my father.” Joe pushed down between Maso’s shoulders with his elbow. The old man let out a squeak.

“What do you want?” Maso’s voice was starting to flutter from lack of oxygen.

“You ever hear of Emma Gould?”

“No.”

“Albert White killed her.”

“I never heard of her.”

Joe wrenched him back up and then flipped him on his back. He took one step back and let the old man catch his breath.

Joe held out his hand, snapped his fingers. “Give me the watch.”

Maso didn’t hesitate. He pulled it from his trouser pocket and handed it over. Joe held it tight in his fist, its ticking moving through his palm and into his blood.

“My father died today,” he said, aware he probably wasn’t making much sense, jumping from his father to Emma and back again. But he didn’t care. He needed to put words to something there weren’t words for.

Maso’s eyes skittered for a moment and then he went back to rubbing his throat.

Joe nodded. “Heart attack. I blame myself.” He slapped Maso’s shoe and that jolted the old man enough that he slammed both palms down on the parapet. Joe smiled. “Blame you too, though. Blame you a whole fucking lot.”

“So kill me,” Maso said, but there wasn’t much steel in his voice. He looked over his shoulder, then back at Joe.

“That’s what I was ordered to do.”

“Who ordered you?”

“Lawson,” Joe said. “He’s got an army down there waiting for you—Basil Chigis, Pokaski, all of Emil’s carny freaks. Your guys? Naldo and Hippo?” Joe shook his head. “They’re definitely tits-up by now. You’ve got a whole hunting party at the bottom of that staircase there in case I fail.”

A bit of the old defiance returned to Maso’s face. “And you think they’ll let you live?”

Joe had given that plenty of thought. “Probably. This war of yours has put a lot of bodies in the earth. Ain’t too many of us left who can spell gum and chew it at the same time. Plus, I know Albert. We used to have something in common. This was his peace offering, I think—kill Maso and rejoin the fold.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Because I don’t want to kill you.”

“No?”

Joe shook his head. “I want to destroy Albert.”

“Kill him?”

“Don’t know about that,” Joe said. “But destroy him definitely.”

Maso fished in his pocket for his French cigarettes. He removed one and lit it, still catching his breath. Eventually he met Joe’s eyes and nodded. “You have my blessing on that ambition.”

“Don’t need your blessing,” Joe said.

“I won’t try to talk you out of it,” Maso said, “but I never saw much profit in revenge.”

“Ain’t about profit.”

“Everything in a man’s life is about profit. Profit, or succession.” Maso looked up at the sky and then back again. “So how do we get back down there alive?”

“Any of the tower guards fully in your debt?”

“The one right above us,” Maso said. “The other two are faithful to the money.”

“Could your guard contact guards inside, get them to flank Lawson’s crew, raid them right now?”

Maso shook his head. “If just one guard is close to Lawson, then word will get to the cons below and they’ll storm up here.”

“Well, shit.” Joe exhaled a long slow breath and looked around. “Let’s just do it the dirty way.”

While Maso talked to the tower guard, Joe walked back down the wall to the trapdoor. If he was going to die, this was probably the moment. He couldn’t shake the suspicion that every step he took was about to be interrupted by a bullet drilling through his brain or cracking through his spine.

He looked back down the way he’d come. Maso had left the pathway, so there was nothing to see but the gathering dark and the watchtowers. No stars, no moon, just the stone dark.

He opened the trapdoor and called down. “He’s done.”

“You hurt?” Basil Chigis called up.

“No. Gonna need clean clothes, though.”

Someone chuckled in the darkness.

“So, come on down.”

“Come on up. We got to get his body out of here.”

“We can—”

“The signal is your right hand, index and middle fingers raised and held together. You got anyone missing one of those digits, don’t send him up.”

He rolled away from the doorway before anyone could argue.

After about a minute, he heard the first of them climb up. The man’s hand extended out of the hole, two fingers raised as Joe had instructed. The tower light arced past the hand and then swung back over again. Joe said, “All clear.”

It was Pokaski, the roaster of his family, who stuck his head carefully up and looked around.

“Hurry,” Joe said. “And get the others up here. It’ll take two more to drag him. He’s deadweight and my ribs are busted up.”

Pokaski smiled. “I thought you said you weren’t hurt.”

“Not mortally,” Joe said. “Come on.”

Pokaski leaned back into the hole. “Two more guys.”

Basil Chigis followed Pokaski and then a small guy with a harelip came after him. Joe recalled someone pointing him out at chow once—Eldon Douglas—but couldn’t remember his crime.

“Where’s the body?” Basil Chigis asked.

Joe pointed.

“Well, let’s—”

The light hit Basil Chigis just before the bullet entered the back of his head and exited the center of his face, taking his nose with it. As his final act on earth, Pokaski blinked. Then a door opened in his throat and the door flapped as a wash of red poured through it and Pokaski fell on his back, and his legs thrashed. Eldon Douglas leapt for the opening to the staircase, but the tower guard’s third bullet collapsed his skull the way a sledgehammer would. He fell to the right of the door and lay there, missing the top of his head.

Joe looked into the light, the three dead men splattered all over him. Down below men shouted and ran off. He wished he could join them. It had been a naive plan. He could feel the gun sights on his chest as the light blinded him. The bullets would be the violent offspring his father had warned him about; not only was he about to meet his Maker, but he also was about to meet his children. The only consolation he could offer himself was that it would be a quick death. Fifteen minutes from now he’d be sharing a pint with his father and Uncle Eddie.

The light snapped off.

Something soft hit him in the face and then fell to his shoulder. He blinked into the darkness—a small towel.

“Wipe your face,” Maso said. “It’s a mess.”

When he finished, his eyes had adjusted enough to be able to make out Maso standing a few feet away, smoking one of his French cigarettes.

“You think I was going to kill you?”

“Crossed my mind.”

Maso shook his head. “I’m a low-rent wop from Endicott Street. I go to a fancy joint, I still don’t know what fork to use. So I might not have class or education, but I never double-cross. I come right at you. Just like you came at me.”

Joe nodded, looked at the three corpses at his feet. “What about these guys? I’d say we double-crossed them pretty good.”

“Fuck them,” Maso said. “They had it coming.” Stepping over Pokaski’s corpse, he crossed to Joe. “You’ll be getting out of here sooner than you think. You ready to make some money when you do?”

“Sure.”

“Your duty will always be to the Pescatore Family first and yourself second. Can you abide that?”

Joe looked into the old man’s eyes and was certain that they’d make a lot of money together and that he could never trust him.

“I can abide that.”

Maso extended his hand. “Okay, then.”

Joe wiped the blood off his hand and shook Maso’s. “Okay.”

“Mr. Pescatore,” someone called from below.

“Coming.” Maso walked to the trapdoor and Joe followed. “Come, Joseph.”

“Call me Joe. Only my father called me Joseph.”

“Fair enough.” As he descended the spiral staircase in the dark, Maso said, “Funny thing about fathers and sons—you can go forth and build an empire. Become king. Emperor of the United States. God. But you’ll always do it in his shadow. And you can’t escape it.”

Joe followed him down the dark staircase. “Don’t much want to.”

CHAPTER TEN Visitations

After a morning funeral at Gate of Heaven in South Boston, Thomas Coughlin was laid to rest at Cedar Grove Cemetery in Dorchester. Joe was not allowed to attend the funeral but read about it in a copy of the Traveler that one of the guards on Maso’s payroll brought to him that evening.

Two former mayors, Honey Fitz and Andrew Peters, attended, as well as the current one, James Michael Curley. So did two ex-governors, five former district attorneys, and two attorney generals.

The cops came from all over—city cops and state police, retired and active, from as far south as Delaware and as far north as Bangor, Maine. Every rank, every specialty. In the photo accompanying the article, the Neponset River snaked along the far edge of the cemetery, but Joe could barely see it because the blue hats and blue uniforms consumed the view.

This was power, he thought. This was a legacy.

And in nearly the same breath—So what?

So his father’s funeral had brought a thousand men to a graveyard along the banks of the Neponset. And someday, possibly, cadets would study in the Thomas X. Coughlin Building at the Boston Police Academy or commuters would rattle over the Coughlin Bridge on their way to work in the morning.

Wonderful.

And yet dead was dead. Gone was gone. No edifice, no legacy, no bridge named after you could change that.

You were only guaranteed one life, so you’d better live it.

He placed the paper beside him on the bed. It was a new mattress and it had been waiting for him in the cell after work detail yesterday with a small side table, a chair, and a kerosene table lamp. He found the matches in the drawer of the side table beside a new comb.

He blew out the lamp now and sat in the dark, smoking. He listened to the sounds of the factories and the barges out on the river signaling one another in the narrow lanes. He flicked open the cover of his father’s watch, then snapped it closed, then opened it again. Open-close, open-close, open-close as the chemical smell from the factories climbed over his high window.

His father was gone. He was no longer a son.

He was a man without history or expectation. A blank slate, beholden to none.

He felt like a pilgrim who’d pushed off from the shore of a homeland he’d never see again, crossed a black sea under a black sky, and landed in the new world, which waited, unformed, as if it had always been waiting.

For him.

To give the country a name, to remake it in his image so it could espouse his values and export them across the globe.

He closed the watch and closed his hand over it and closed his eyes until he saw the shore of his new country, saw the black sky above give way to a far-flung scatter of white stars that shone down on him and the small stretch of water left between them.

I will miss you. I will mourn you. But I am now newly born. And truly free.

Two days after the funeral, Danny made his last visit.

He leaned into the mesh and asked, “How you doing, little brother?”

“Finding my way,” Joe said. “You?”

“You know,” Danny said.

“No,” Joe said, “I don’t. I don’t know anything. You went to Tulsa with Nora and Luther eight years ago and I haven’t heard anything but rumors since.”

Danny acknowledged that with a nod. He fished for his cigarettes, lit one, and took his time before he spoke. “Me and Luther started a business together out there. Construction. We built houses in the colored section. We were doing all right. Weren’t booming, but okay. I was a sheriff’s deputy too. You believe that?”

Joe smiled. “You wear a cowboy hat?”

“Son,” Danny said with a twang, “I wore six-guns. One on each hip.”

Joe laughed. “String tie?”

Danny laughed too. “Sure did. And boots.”

“Spurs?”

Danny narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Man’s gotta draw the line somewhere.”

Joe was still chuckling when he asked, “So what happened? We heard something about a riot?”

The light blew out inside Danny. “They burned it to the ground.”

“Tulsa?”

“Black Tulsa, yeah. Section Luther lived in called Greenwood. One night at the jail, whites came to lynch a colored because he grabbed a white girl’s pussy in an elevator? Truth was, though, she’d been dating the boy on the sly for months. The boy broke up with her, she didn’t like it, so she filed her bullshit claim, and we had to arrest him. We were just about to turn him loose on lack of evidence when all the good white men of Tulsa showed up with their ropes. Then a bunch of coloreds, including Luther, they showed up too. The coloreds, well, they were armed. No one expected that. And that backed off the lynch mob. For the night.” Danny stubbed his cigarette out under his heel. “Next morning, the whites crossed the tracks, showed the colored boys what happens when you raise a gun to one of them.”

“So that was the riot.”

Danny shook his head. “Wasn’t no riot. It was a massacre. They gunned down or lit on fire every colored they saw—kids, women, old men, didn’t make a difference. These were the pillars of the community doing the shooting, mind you, the churchgoers and the Rotarians. In the end, the fuckers flew overhead in crop dusters, dropping grenades and homemade firebombs onto the buildings. The colored folk would run out of the burning buildings and the whites had machine gun nests set up. Just mowed ’em down in the fucking street. Hundreds of people killed. Hundreds, just lying in the streets. Looked like nothing more than piles of clothes gone red in the wash.” Danny laced his hands together behind his head and blew air through his lips. “I walked around afterward, you know, loading the bodies onto flatbeds? I kept thinking, Where’s my country? Where’d it go?”

Neither spoke for a long time until Joe said, “Luther?”

Danny held up one hand. “He survived. Last I saw him, him and his wife and kid were heading for Chicago.” He said, “Thing about that kind of… event, Joe? You survive it and it’s like you’ve got this shame. I can’t even explain it. Just this shame, big as your whole body. And everyone else who survived? They have it too. And you can’t look each other in the eye. You’re all wearing the stink of it and trying to figure out how to live the rest of your life with the odor. So you sure as hell don’t want anyone else who smells the same as you getting close enough to stink you up even more.”

Joe said, “Nora?”

Danny nodded. “We’re still together.”

“Kids?”

Danny shook his head. “You think you’d be walking around an uncle without me telling you?”

“I haven’t seen you but once in eight years, Dan. I don’t know what you’d do.”

Danny nodded, and Joe saw what until now he’d only suspected—something in his brother, something at the core, was broken.

But just as he thought it, a piece of the old Danny returned with a sly grin. “Me and Nora have been in New York the last few years.”

“Doing what?”

“Making shows.”

“Shows?”

“Movies. That’s what they call them there—shows. I mean, it’s a little confusing because a lotta people call plays shows too. But anyway, yeah, movies, Joe. Flickers. Shows.”

“You work in movies?”

Danny nodded, animated now. “Nora started it. She got a job with this company, Silver Frame? Jews, but good guys. She was handling all their bookkeeping and then they asked her to do some side work with publicity and even costumes. It was that kinda outfit back then, just everyone pitching in, the directors making coffee, the camera guys walking the lead actress’s dog.”

“Movies?” Joe said.

Danny laughed. “So, wait, it gets better. Her bosses meet me and one of them, Herm Silver, great guy, lot on the ball, he asks me—you ready?—he asks me if I ever did stunts.”

“Fuck are stunts?” Joe lit a cigarette.

“You see an actor fall off a horse? It ain’t him. It’s a stuntman. A professional. Actor slips on a banana peel, trips over a curb, hell, runs down a street? Look close at the screen next time because it ain’t him. It’s me or someone like me.”

“Wait,” Joe said, “how many movies have you been in?”

Danny thought about it for a minute. “I’m guessing seventy-five?”

“Seventy-five?” Joe took the cigarette from his mouth.

“I mean, a lot of them were shorts. That’s when—”

“Jesus, I know what shorts are.”

“You didn’t know what stunts were, though, did you?”

Joe raised his middle finger.

“So, yeah, I’ve been in a bunch. Even wrote a few of the shorts.”

Joe’s mouth opened wide. “You wrote…?”

Danny nodded. “Little things. Kids on the Lower East Side try to wash a dog for a rich lady, they lose the dog, the rich lady calls the cops, high jinks ensue, that sort of thing.”

Joe dropped his cigarette to the floor before it could burn his fingers. “How many have you written?”

“Five so far, but Herm thinks I got a knack for it, wants me to try for a full-length feature soon, become a scenarist.”

“What’s a scenarist?”

“Guy who writes movies, genius,” Danny said and flipped his own middle finger back at Joe.

“So, wait, where’s Nora in all this?”

“California.”

“I thought you were in New York.”

“We were. But Silver Frame made a couple of movies real cheap lately that turned out to be hits. Meanwhile, Edison’s fucking suing everyone in New York over camera patents, but those patents don’t mean shit in California. Plus the weather there is nice three hundred sixty days out of three sixty-five, so everyone’s heading out there. The Silver brothers? They just figured now’s the time. Nora headed out a week ago because she’s become head of production—I mean, just flying up their ladder—and they’ve got me scheduled for stunts on a show called The Lawmen of the Pecos in three weeks. I just came back to tell Dad I was heading west again, tell him to come visit maybe, once he retired. I didn’t know when I’d ever see him again. Hell, see you again.”

“I’m happy for you,” Joe said, still shaking his head at the absurdity of it. Danny’s life—boxer, cop, union organizer, businessman, sheriff’s deputy, stuntman, budding writer—was an American life, if ever there was one.

“Come,” his brother said.

“What?”

“When you get out of here. Come join us. I’m serious. Fall off a horse for money and pretend to get shot and fall through sugar windows made up to look like glass. Lie in the sun the rest of the time, meet a starlet by the pool.”

For a moment, Joe could see it—another life, a dream of blue water, honey-skinned women, palm trees.

“Only a brisk, two-week train ride away, little brother.”

Joe laughed some more, picturing it.

“It’s good work,” Danny said. “You ever want to come out and join me, I could train you.”

Joe, still smiling, shook his head.

“It’s honest work,” Danny said.

“I know,” Joe said.

“You could stop living a life where you look over your shoulder all the time.”

“It’s not about that.”

“What’s it about?” Danny seemed authentically curious.

“The night. It’s got its own set of rules.”

“Day’s got rules too.”

“Oh, I know,” Joe said, “but I don’t like them.”

They stared through the mesh at each other for a long time.

“I don’t understand,” Danny said softly.

“I know you don’t,” Joe said. “You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy’s leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there’s a difference, like the banker’s just doing his job but the loan shark’s a criminal. I like the loan shark because he doesn’t pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be sitting where I’m sitting right now. I’m not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a men’s club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kid’s grades. Die at my desk, and they’ll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirt’s hit the coffin.”

“But that’s life,” Danny said.

“That’s a life. You want to play by their rules? Go ahead. But I say their rules are bullshit. I say there are no rules but the ones a man makes for himself.”

Again, they considered each other through the mesh. His whole childhood, Danny had been Joe’s hero. Hell, his god. And now god was just a man who fell off horses for a living, pretended to be shot for a living.

“Wow,” Danny said softly, “did you ever grow up.”

“Yeah,” Joe said.

Danny placed his cigarettes in his pocket and put his hat on.

“Pity,” he said.

Within the prison, the White-Pescatore War was partially won the night three White soldiers were shot on the roof while “trying to escape.”

Skirmishes continued to occur, however, and bad blood festered. Over the next six months, Joe learned that wars don’t really end. Even as he and Maso and the rest of the Pescatore prison crew consolidated their power, it was impossible to tell if this guard or that guard had been paid to move against them or if this or that convict could be trusted.

Micky Baer was shanked in the yard by a guy who, it turned out, was married to the late Dom Pokaski’s sister. Micky survived, but he’d have problems pissing for the rest of his life. They heard from the outside that Guard Colvin was laying off bets with Syd Mayo, a White associate. And Colvin was losing.

Then Holly Peletos, a White button man, rotated in to do five years for involuntary manslaughter and started running his mouth in the mess hall about regime change. So they had to throw him off the tier.

Some weeks Joe went two or three nights without sleep because of the fear, or because he was trying to figure out all the angles, or because his heart wouldn’t stop banging inside his chest like it was trying to break free.

You told yourself it wouldn’t get to you.

You told yourself this place wouldn’t eat your soul.

But what you told yourself above all else was, I will live.

I will walk out of here.

Whatever the cost.

Maso was released on a spring morning in 1928.

“Next time you see me,” he said to Joe, “will be Visitors’ Day. I’ll be on the other side of that mesh.”

Joe shook his hand. “Be safe.”

“I got my mouthpiece working on your case. You’ll be out soon. Stay alert, kid, stay alive.”

Joe tried to take comfort in the words, but he knew that if that’s all they were—words—then he was in for a sentence that would feel twice as long because he’d allowed hope in. As soon as Maso left this place behind, he could very easily leave Joe behind.

Or he could give him just enough of the carrot to keep Joe running his operation behind these walls for him with no intention of hiring him once he reached the outside.

Either way, Joe was powerless to do anything but sit and wait to see how things shook out.

When Maso hit the street, it was hard not to notice. What had been simmering on the inside got splashed with gasoline on the outside. Murderous May, as the rags dubbed it, left Boston looking for the first time like Detroit or Chicago. Maso’s soldiers hit Albert White’s bookies, distillers, trucks, and soldiers like it was open season. And it was. Within one month, Maso chased Albert White out of Boston, his few remaining soldiers scurrying after him.

In prison, it was as if harmony had been injected into the water supply. The stabbings stopped. For the rest of ’28, no one got thrown off a tier or shanked in the chow line. Joe knew that peace had truly come to Charlestown Penitentiary when he was able to forge a deal with two of Albert White’s best incarcerated distillers to ply their trade behind the walls. Soon, the guards were smuggling gin out of Charlestown Penitentiary, the shit so good it even picked up a street name, Penal Code.

Joe slept soundly for the first time since he’d walked through the front gates in the summer of ’27. It also gave him time to mourn his father and mourn Emma, a process he’d held at bay when it would have pulled his thoughts to places they shouldn’t have gone while others plotted against him.

The cruelest trick God played on him through the second half of ’28 was sending Emma to visit him while he slept. He’d feel her leg snake between his, smell the single drops of perfume she placed behind each ear, open his eyes to see hers an inch away, feel her breath on his lips. He’d raise his arms off the mattress so he could run his palms down her bare back. And his eyes would open for real.

No one.

Just the dark.

And he’d pray. He’d ask God to let her be alive, even if he never saw her again. Please let her be alive.

But, God, alive or dead, could you please, please stop sending her to my dreams? I can’t lose her again and again. It’s too much. It’s too cruel. Lord, Joe asked, have mercy.

But he didn’t.

The visitations continued—and would continue—for the rest of Joe’s incarceration at Charlestown Penitentiary.

His father never visited. But Joe felt him in a way he never had while the man was alive. Sometimes he sat on his bunk, flicking the watch cover open and closed, open and closed, and he imagined conversations they might have had if all the stale sins and withered expectations hadn’t stood in the way.

Tell me about Mom.

What do you want to know?

Who was she?

A frightened girl. A very frightened girl, Joseph.

What was she afraid of?

Out there.

What’s out there?

Everything she didn’t understand.

Did she love me?

In her own way.

That’s not love.

For her it was. Don’t look at it as if she left you.

How am I supposed to look at it?

That she hung on because of you. Otherwise, she would have left us all years ago.

I don’t miss her.

Funny. I do.

Joe looked into the dark. I miss you.

You’ll see me soon enough.

Once Joe had streamlined the prison’s distillery and smuggling operations as well as its protection rackets, he had plenty of time to read. He read just about everything in the prison library, which was no small feat, thanks to Lancelot Hudson III.

Lancelot Hudson III had been the only rich man anyone could ever remember who’d been sentenced to hard time in Charlestown Pen’. But Lancelot’s crime had been so outrageous and so public—he’d thrown his unfaithful wife, Catherine, from the roof of their four-story Beacon Street town house into the Independence Day Parade of 1919 as it flowed down Beacon Hill—that even the Brahmins had put down their bone china long enough to decide that if there was ever a time to feed one of their own to the natives, this was it. Lancelot Hudson III served seven years at Charlestown for involuntary manslaughter. If it wasn’t exactly hard labor, it was hard time, mitigated only by the books he’d had shipped into the prison, a deal dependent on his leaving them behind when he left. Joe read at least a hundred books of the Hudson collection. You knew they were his because, in the top right corner of the title page, he’d written in tiny, cramped penmanship, “Originally the Property of Lancelot Hudson III. Fuck you.” Joe read Dumas and Dickens and Twain. He read Malthus, Adam Smith, Marx and Engels, Machiavelli, The Federalist Papers, and Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms. When he’d burned through the Hudson collection, he read whatever else was on hand—dime novels and Westerns mostly—as well as every magazine and newspaper they allowed in. He became something of an expert at figuring out what words or whole sentences they’d censored.

Browsing an issue of the Boston Traveler, he came across a story about a fire at the East Coast Bus Line Terminal on St. James. A frayed electrical cord had sent sparks into the terminal Christmas tree. In short order, the building caught fire. The breath in Joe’s body went small and trapped as he studied the photographs of the damage. The locker where he’d stashed his life’s savings, including the $62,000 from the Pittsfield job, was in the corner of one shot. It lay on its side under a ceiling beam, the metal as black as soil.

Joe couldn’t decide which felt worse—the sensation that he’d never breathe again or the feeling that he was about to vomit fire through his windpipe.

The article claimed the building was a total loss. Nothing salvaged. Joe doubted that. Someday, when he had the time, he was going to track down which employee of the East Coast Bus Line had retired young and was rumored to be living abroad and in style.

Until then, he was going to need a job.

Maso offered it to him late that winter, the same day he told Joe his appeal was proceeding apace.

“You’ll be out of here soon,” Maso told him through the mesh.

“All due respect,” Joe said, “how soon?”

“By the summer.”

Joe smiled. “Really?”

Maso nodded. “Judges don’t come cheap, though. You’re going to have to work that off.”

“Why don’t we call us even for me not killing you?”

Maso narrowed his eyes, a natty figure now in his cashmere topcoat and a wool suit complete with a white carnation in his lapel that matched his silk hatband. “Sounds like a deal. Our friend, Mr. White, is making a lot of noise in Tampa, by the way.”

“Tampa?”

Maso nodded. “He still held on to a few places here. I can’t get them all because New York owns a piece and they’ve made it clear I don’t fuck with them right now. He runs the rum up on our routes and there’s nothing I can do about that, either. But because he’s infringing on my turf down there, the boys in New York gave us permission to push him out.”

“What level of permission?” Joe said.

“Short of killing him.”

“Okay. So what’re you going to do?”

“Not what I’m going to do. It’s what you’re going to do, Joe. I want you to take over down there.”

“But Lou Ormino runs Tampa.”

“He’s gonna decide he doesn’t want the headache anymore.”

“When’s he going to decide that?”

“About ten minutes before you get there.”

Joe gave it some thought. “Tampa, huh?”

“It’s hot.”

“I don’t mind hot.”

“You ain’t never felt hot like this hot.”

Joe shrugged. The old man had a penchant for exaggerating. “I’m going to need somebody I can trust there.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“Yeah?”

Maso nodded. “It’s already done. He’s been there six months.”

“Where’d you find him?”

“Montreal.”

“Six months?” Joe said. “How long you been planning this?”

“Since Lou Ormino started putting some of my cut in his pocket and Albert White showed up to grub up the rest.” He leaned forward. “You go down there and make it right, Joe? Spend the rest of your life living like a king.”

“So if I take over, are we equal partners?”

“No,” Maso said.

“But Lou Ormino’s an equal partner.”

“And look how that’s going to end up.” Maso stared through the mesh at Joe with his true face.

“How much do I get then?”

“Twenty percent.”

“Twenty-five,” Joe said.

“Fine,” Maso said with a twinkle in his eye that said he’d have gone to thirty. “But you better earn it.”