We were kings, p.19
We Were Kings, page 19
Dante pointed his thumb at the newspaper. “In the obituaries, there are half a dozen funerals, one after the other. And all of them are getting shipped back home to Ireland.”
Cal lit a cigarette and paused. “Doesn’t sound that odd to me.”
“But these are all at O’Flaherty’s, in Dorchester and Southie. There must be more Irish-owned funeral homes in this city, no? Here, take a look.”
Dante slid the newspaper across the bar. Ash from his cigarette crumbled off and dusted the pages. He leaned in and lowered his voice. “Maybe this is something we should look into.”
“I’d say it’s just coincidence.”
“It can’t be coincidence.” Dante slurred the last word. The beers he’d drunk earlier in the afternoon were getting to him. He had fed Maria this morning but forgotten to feed himself. He warned himself to slow it down. “Flynn? Connelly? Those names sound familiar?”
“Wait a minute.” Cal’s eyes flitted over the page. “People would notice something like this.”
“Perhaps people just check out the names in the obituaries. Maybe they don’t waste their time reading each one.”
“You’re wrong. Most Irish do. My father would get the paper and read them before anything else, even the headlines. And I know my fair share of people who do the same thing.”
Cal’s hand crept along the bar toward the shot glass of whiskey, which glistened in the afternoon sunlight like some kind of caramel-colored gemstone. Cal lifted it and held it still, perhaps questioning if it was worth it, especially at this time of day, but he swallowed the shot and winced, and Dante knew that Cal had instantly felt its effect winding through his system. He wiped at his mouth with his knuckles and then smiled.
“When I was young, my father dragged me to every funeral from Mission Hill to West Roxbury. Wherever it was, all those funeral homes looked the same to me. The same white paint on the outside, and inside the same crimson carpets lining each and every room. And the same smell too. All those flowers surrounding the dead but not doing shit to cover up the fact that they were rotting away. Jesus, even when I was a kid, the dead all looked the same to me.”
The new bartender was at the taps filling a glass. The Pickwick tap sputtered with foam and made a strangled, hissing noise.
“But one place that stood out was O’Flaherty’s. I remember my dad would sometimes take me to these even when there wasn’t a funeral going on.”
Cal paused. “Flynn. Cleland. Those are names of the victims. Jesus. They’re all getting shipped back together, aren’t they?”
29
_________________________
South Boston
NOT EVEN IN America for a full twenty-four hours, Bobby Myles sat in a small, square boardinghouse room with the weary desperation of a prisoner stuck inside his cell. Across from him there was a sink, discolored with rust, and its tap constantly dripped no matter how hard he tightened the ivory handle. Yellowed by decades of cigarette smoke, a length of wallpaper was curling away from the corner of the wall, the glue once binding it now pasty and smelling of mildew. On the bedside table there was a lamp that didn’t work and a vase that held dead flowers, the water at the bottom tea-colored and speckled white with mold. And worst of all, the cot mattress was festering with fleas, so much so that last night he’d slept on the floor with his jacket folded into a pillow. That he’d managed to get even a couple of hours of sleep amazed him.
Scratching at the bites on his arm, Bobby decided he couldn’t stand the place much longer—the rotten smell from the wallpaper, the stink of his own bitter sweat, and the savage heat that came through the window as though it were the grate of a blazing furnace. He decided to check the car that they were to use for the job. It should be ready by now. And then perhaps a stroll through the neighborhood, if one could call it that, and then, later, try to find something to eat and drink.
Perhaps he should have gone with Fitzgerald and the others into town. After five days of travel—four on the ocean and one in the air—he deserved at least some reprieve, some solid ground to stand on. But while they were enthusiastic about their first couple of days in Boston, he felt on edge. He had felt this way ever since he got on the plane and left the Dublin terminal, and then for the four days in the closet-size rooms three levels below deck on the Queen Elizabeth, the sea constantly lapping at the great hull as they dragged closer to America. The edgy feeling only got worse when the plane departed from New York and made its way north to Boston.
When they had stepped out onto the sweltering tarmac at Logan Airport, he had felt as if he couldn’t breathe. And later, when the four of them stood under the harsh fluorescent lights awaiting their luggage, the anxious feeling increased. Somebody should have been there to meet them, or at least to point them in the right direction.
Once they got their suitcases from the cart, Egan, Kinsella, and Fitzgerald had gone off to exchange some of their shillings and pounds for American dollars. Bobby already had two nickels in his pocket and he went off to find a pay phone and make a call. On his third try, a man picked up and told him to get the others and go to the drop-off area; somebody was on the way. Egan had purchased several packs of American cigarettes, and the four of them waited outside, watched the big Yank cars pulling in and out of the great asphalt parking lot, smoked, and said little to one another besides how big of a bitch the heat was here.
Two hours later, a man named O’Flaherty, a morose fellow who said he was born and raised in Tullamore, met them and drove them around the city—the Common, the waterfront and the piers, a place called Beacon Hill, down a long strip of desperate-looking road called Dorchester Avenue, and, last, to where they’d be staying, a boardinghouse in South Boston.
The mood during the car ride had been pensive, as though they were all strangers sharing a cab. The sites they’d passed were less grandiose than they had imagined, and O’Flaherty as a tour guide was far from captivating. He seemed unable, perhaps unwilling, to put a proper sentence together.
“We’ll be in touch with you before anything happens,” he had said to Myles as he stood by the car, and then he’d handed him a ring with two keys on it and a piece of paper with two addresses. The first was where he’d find the car they’d use, just a few blocks down from L Street, parked in a driveway of a triple-decker home, and the second was the home of Owen Mackey, 180 William Day Boulevard. There was a laminated photo of the man clipped to the note. It appeared to be cut from a group photo; a ghostly, disembodied arm was wrapped around Mackey’s shoulder. There was a boyish roundness to his face, and his bright eager eyes shone as if he was gripped in the swell of a celebration. Perhaps it was taken at a wedding, or some ball or banquet. Despite his innocent face, the man could have done terrible, awful things. And even though Bobby tried to convince himself that that was the truth, he knew that something was off. Why had they sent them all the way here to do this job?
To get out of his head, Myles sat up from the wooden chair, dropped to the floor, and did push-ups until his vision began to blur and his shoulders burned at the joints. He stretched and went to the beaten-up dresser, put on a shirt and his watch—four o’clock—grabbed the two keys, his wallet, the note and the photo, and slipped them all into his pocket. He combed through his hair with his fingers and left the room.
He walked down the hollow-sounding stairs and passed through a hallway that led to a bar called the Castlebar Inn. It was filling up with men arriving after a day of work, most of them with that wild look in their eyes as they started in on their evening drunk. A group of them cawed at one another with the brash accents of Bostonians. His stomach growled but he fought against the feeling. He’d seen what the food looked like here—it would probably look the same going out as it had coming in.
Outside, he surveyed the street and watched as the sun flared a septic light against the multifamily houses across the road. There was much disrepair to these homes, and the shoddy attempts by lax landlords to fix the damage on the cheap made the places look even worse. Patchwork molding, mismatched paints, bubbling tarpaper on porch roofs, shingles hanging at crooked angles, and gutters held in place by rope and twine.
On the second-floor porch of one home, a horribly stained carpet hung over a railing, and Bobby watched as a pink, rotund woman whacked at it with an iron rod and clouds of dust billowed in the thick, still air. A small girl wearing no shirt and a drooping cloth diaper held the screen door open and cried out hungrily.
He didn’t trust the area. Perhaps it was the narrow, nameless streets and the sharp, blind corners. And how the alleyways ran deep between the clapboard houses like secret passageways. And how the sidewalks and street corners were too thin, and how they appeared to be manned by hoodlums and juveniles looking for trouble.
Bobby asked a teenage boy where the ocean was, and without looking at him, the kid pointed ahead.
Two blocks down, Bobby was amazed to find how close the Atlantic actually was. In the apartment, it had felt like it was miles and miles away. He made it to a walkway lined with giant blocks of granite spackled white with bird droppings, and on the other side, a narrow curve of beach was nearly swallowed up by the incoming tide. Farther off, through the haze, were the humps of several islands that hugged close to the Boston coastline. For a moment, he wondered if anybody lived out there or if the islands were desolate, abandoned.
A seagull swooped down from its perch on a telephone pole and cried out with both aggression and hunger. Its target was a much smaller gull pecking at bits of trash down by the gutter. Facing off against each other, the birds flared their wings and shrieked. Bobby closed his eyes and saw the gulls of Wicklow, wide-breasted with a seafaring pureness to them, not polluted and squalid like the ones before him.
He fought against the homesick feeling percolating in his gut. He lit an American cigarette and dragged in the smoke, sighed it out, and walked away from the sea.
When he got to the car, he was perspiring heavily. O’Flaherty had told him the house where it was parked was close by the inn, but it took him almost a half an hour to find it. It was a brown triple-decker with a crooked front porch littered with broken furniture and crates of miscellaneous junk. The driveway was barely wide enough to fit one car. The Packard sedan sat far back beside the yard, which, in the heat, smelled of dog shit. Laundry hung from a clothesline, still looking unwashed and filthy. A dog leash coiled along the dirt next to the back steps, the collar split in two.
“Lovely,” he said to himself.
He walked around to the trunk. The key scraped inside the lock, and he pushed in hard and maneuvered it until he felt it click open. Inside was a stained canvas tarpaulin smelling of oil. The sensation of somebody watching made him turn back to the yard. Startled by the hanging laundry—the white undershirt of a large man, a pair of gabardine slacks—he inched back, turned around, and looked down the driveway. Nobody was there. He looked up to the windows of the houses pressing over him and saw only closed curtains and torn and patched screens.
At the trunk, he lifted the canvas and saw the guns. They were all there. Four pistols, a sawed-off shotgun, and several boxes of cartridges. There were also two maps, one for the city and the other for the state of Massachusetts. He took the maps, closed the trunk, and made sure the doors were locked.
It was time for a drink and then back to the room to go over the maps.
After walking for some time, he ended up where he’d started—in front of his boardinghouse and the Castlebar Inn. The loud talk of men came through the windows with the intensity of a crowd awaiting a prize fight, yet somewhere within its din, he found comfort.
Through the smoke and banter of the workingmen, he walked the hallway, but once at the stairwell, he had an immense urge to go back—Egan, Fitzgerald, and Kinsella, they were out having fun, why shouldn’t he? But he grabbed hold of the railing, feeling the immensity of this new, strange city press down on him, and took out the maps from his back pocket and pulled himself up the hollow stairs to his room on the second floor.
30
_________________________
Chelsea
WHEN THE KNOCK came at the door, Martin Butler had just finished singing his brother to sleep in his wheelchair by the bedroom window. Dymphna went to answer the door as Butler laid a light shawl over his brother’s chest. It was the latter part of the day and the room was mostly in the shadow of the bridge, a small breeze bothering the curtains, and he worried that even with the heat, Coleman might get a chill. He went to the kitchen, raised the flame beneath the teapot that was always simmering, and listened to the talk at the front door. After a moment Dymphna’s heels clicked on the linoleum followed by the sound of a man’s boots as she brought the guest the length of the hall and into the kitchen.
Bobby Myles stood in the doorway. “God bless all here,” he said and Butler smiled.
“I was wondering when you’d stop by.”
“Aye. We’ve been busy.”
Butler put two mugs of tea on the table, and Bobby pulled out a chair and sat. Spread across the kitchen table were a dozen pamphlets and brochures in bright colors advertising the desert: red sand and red buttes and blue pools in which rich, suntanned bathers were frolicking. Hope Springs in Arizona and New Well Ranch in Nevada—vacation spots and tourist getaways in the American West. Dymphna was still standing in the doorway, and Butler looked at the old woman and then nodded for her to go.
“You found your way back all right, then?” he said.
“I’ve been studying the maps. I had no problems.”
Butler nodded. “That’ll be a good thing for the job, it’ll help you acclimate quickly. Still, you were the last person I expected they’d send.”
“I think it came as a surprise to a whole lot of them.”
“Why then?”
“Because I was told to. I didn’t have much choice in it.”
“We like to think we have no choices in what we do in life.”
Bobby eyed him but remained quiet. He had a keen dislike for such philosophizing. Sure, a man knew he had choices: to be killed or to kill and suffer the penance and the guilt for doing the killing. He noted that philosophers rarely got their hands dirty; they let others do the work for them. He thought of all the commandants he’d taken orders from. So many of them soft, weak men who loved violence and reveled in the carnage it left behind. But then, he knew Butler and the struggles the man had experienced, how hard he’d worked at protecting his brother, whom Bobby had recognized in the wheelchair through the window on the night he’d arrived in Boston. The man he’d once seen as a boy being treated at the Temple Street children’s hospital next to the Mater Misericordiae in Dublin, where his own sister had succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of twelve. Martin Butler had been all the rage then, the mysterious man from County Kerry playing the big ballrooms around the city, and he and Bobby would see each other, sometimes two and three times a week, as they attended to their siblings in the hospital. Even then he’d been talking about America.
From the other room came the sound of Butler’s brother coughing, wheezing like an asthmatic, and then moaning softly. Butler was watching Myles; carefully he collected the tourist pamphlets and brochures and placed them in a single stack.
“The doctors say the best place for Colie would be the desert,” he said. “They have these spas, natural springs and the like. Dry, clean desert air is what he needs, but here we’re underneath a bridge with all manner of traffic belching its fumes and the ships steaming up the Mystic and the empty metalworks and paint companies down the waterfront still polluting the city.”
“I’ve always wanted to go out west meself,” Bobby said.
“With the cowboys.”
Bobby grinned. “Oh, aye, the fecking cowboys.”
He sipped his tea. It was strong and bitter and left an oily taste on his tongue. He could hear the old woman’s footsteps on the floorboards above them, moving back and forth. “Do you think you’ll ever go?” he said.
“Go?”
“West, I mean, with your brother?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps. Ah sure, it might just be wishful thinking. There’s a lot of work to be done here but in the end the family should come first, don’t you think?”
“Family,” Bobby repeated and nodded absently. The word meant very little to him these days. Briefly, he considered his sister buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, and his mother, and those who would tend their graves without him.
“Your sister—” Butler began.
Bobby shook his head. “No, the consumption took her. She didn’t live to see her thirteenth birthday.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
He looked at Butler and they held each other’s gaze and then Bobby dipped his head to his mug of tea and Butler rose, pushed back his chair, picked up the stack of brochures, and placed them in a drawer by the sink. He glanced through the window.
“Why don’t we go for a walk?” he said. “Some of the heat is gone out of the day and it would be good for Colie to get some fresh air. He’s been cooped up in the house for too long. Besides, he’s sick of looking at my sorry face. He likes new company.”
They walked with Butler pushing Coleman in his wheelchair down to the Chelsea waterfront and along Marginal, where the traffic passed over the recently built McArdle Bridge into East Boston, and then they threaded through the narrow cobbled backstreets off Broadway by old brownstones and along the Mystic River, where the remnants of Chelsea’s once-thriving industry remained: decrepit and crumbling warehouses and pitched smokestacks.
As they walked, Butler pointed to places out in the channel where this or that had happened during the Revolutionary War; where the battle of the Chelsea Estuary occurred, where the British ship Diana was taken by colonists, where George Washington was stationed during the siege of Boston. Bobby didn’t know if it was for his benefit or for Coleman’s—perhaps this was something they did together every day, and perhaps for Butler it was a penance of sorts. The sound of Butler’s voice did seem to soothe Coleman and it wasn’t until they went below the supports of the bridge, darkness and heat melding with the sound of cars passing invisibly above them, that Coleman became agitated and tossed his head so violently that it banged against the back of his wheelchair.
