Brothers and Bones (21 page)

Bonz paused longer than he had after any of my previous questions. He dropped his gaze to his left hand, to where his little finger used to be.

“Bonz? How do you know?”

A tic rippled across his face, distorting his features for a fleeting moment. Just when I thought he wasn’t going to answer, he said, “Because I was there. I was right there.”

Son of a bitch.

TWENTY-THREE

“I saw what they did to your brother,” Bonz said. “I was there.”

Now it was my turn to fall silent. Maybe half a minute later, I said, “Did you help?”

“Help what?”

“Help them torture Jake?”

Small hesitation, then, “No, but I was there through some of it. Not all of it, but a lot of it, I guess. Sometimes I carried him back to the room where he was kept—you know, if he couldn’t walk.”

I was stunned. We had just turned onto a side street. I jammed my foot on the brake and we screeched to a stop in the middle of the street. I turned to Bonz, crackling with anger. “You just stood by and let them torture an innocent man? My brother? You just stood there and watched?! You fucking coward.”

Bonz’s dark face turned my way. He said nothing. He might have been seething over my speaking to him that way. Maybe wanted to punch me. He might have seen the look in my eyes and decided against it. I might have been wrong about all of that. Nonetheless, all he said was, “I did what I could for him, when I could.”

“Yeah, like what?” I challenged. “What did you do for him?”

“What I could,” he repeated.

I thought about that for a second. “Why?” I demanded. “Why’d you help him at all, if you really did?”

He shrugged.

“Not good enough,” I said. “Why?”

He shrugged again and scratched at something near his hairline. “I knew him when we were kids. I guess that’s why.”

I pushed, and pushed hard, for more. It turns out that Bonz and Jake had known each other in their very early school years, up until the fourth grade or so. I realized that was when my father’s law practice started doing real well and he could afford to move us from Watertown to its more affluent next-door neighbor, Belmont. They weren’t friends, hadn’t known each other very well, but they were kids in school together and Bonz remembered my brother.

“But you didn’t try to save him?” I said. It was a stupid question, I guess. Did I expect Bonz to defy the Mafia for someone he didn’t really even know, someone he hadn’t seen since they were kids almost thirty years earlier?

“Like I said, I did what I could for him. You can believe me or not. It’s up to you. But I did what I could, when I could. And you better believe I fucking paid for it.” A tic raced across his face and was gone in an instant. I tried for more information but, apparently, that was all he was going to say on the subject. Finally, Bonz said, “You sit here in the middle of the street like this, somebody’s gonna notice soon, maybe call the cops.”

He was right. I took my foot off the brake and we drove on. I still needed a lot of information, so I moved past the fact that Bonz had witnessed my brother’s torture. I struggled to pull more from Bonz. Now and then he’d give me a direction to follow, told me where to turn, as we made our way through the streets of Charlestown. At one point I saw off to our left the pointy silhouette of a tall obelisk—the Bunker Hill Memorial. My car rattled and thumped along as best it could, apparently on its last legs.

I picked up the thread of the story again. “So Jake had this brilliant plan in place to protect the two of us. But I don’t get it. If they believed him, like you thought they might have, then—”

“They couldn’t risk that he was telling the truth.”

“—why’d they kill him? Weren’t they afraid the plan would kick in?”

He hesitated again, as usual, then said, “I don’t think they meant to, at least not yet. They just…went too far. And he died.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. It was too much. I pulled the car over to the curb and killed the engine.

“Charlie, we should probably—”

“Give me a second here, all right?” I snapped. I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. I’d been trying to distance myself from Jake’s death, trying to shut out the images my goddamned imagination was trying to shove in front of my mind’s eye, trying to focus on getting information, information that would help me figure out what was going on. But it was hard. Jake was dead. He’d died a horrible death at the hands of the scum of the earth, and some of his last moments were spent protecting me with his “brilliant plan,” which I wasn’t sure I believed even existed, though it seemed to have kept the wolves from my door until now.

I sucked in a deep breath, let it out slowly, and said, “So why are they coming after me now?”

He hesitated. “Because of me, I think.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Somehow they know we’ve been talking. They didn’t want that.”

“Why?”

“They probably think I know where to find the tape, or maybe I have information you could use to find it.”

“Why would they think that?”

Bonz fell silent again. He stared out the passenger window. Finally, he said, “I tried to be…kind to your brother. He didn’t deserve what they were doing to him. Maybe I still thought of him as that skinny little kid with the baseball cap, I don’t know. Anyway, I did what I could. When I’d take him back to the room we kept him in, I tried to be…human to him. Talk to him.”

“Comfort him?”

Bonz shrugged. “I’d sit with him a minute, get him water, tell him he was gonna be okay. Tried to convince him to just fucking tell ’em what they wanted to know, that he’d be all right then, we’d let him go.”

“But you knew that was a lie.”

Bonz turned his face toward me. In the dim light, under his bushy hair, his eye sockets were empty holes. “Yeah. But I didn’t want him to…suffer anymore. Or be scared all the time. He was a tough son of a bitch, I’ll tell you that.”

I nodded.

Bonz said, “Stupid to sit here like this.”

I turned the key and the Corolla sputtered to life. I pulled away from the curb with a rattling from the front end and a thumping from the back. Bonz directed me through a couple of turns to Harvard Street, where he instructed me to pull over. We left the car and started walking along the block. Every now and then we passed someone—a couple walking arm in arm, a few teenagers looking for fun or trouble or some combination of the two. As we walked, Bonz casually looked at the cars we passed.

“You haven’t answered my question,” I said. “Why did they think you’d have any info about the tape? You barely knew my brother.”

He answered while keeping his eyes moving, watching the other late-night pedestrians, checking out the parked cars. “They found out I was being decent to your brother. They learned from Jake that we were kids together. I think they thought we knew each other better than we did.” He stopped talking, as if he had completely and clearly answered my question.

“And?”

“I was with your brother at the end. Right before he died. They figured, with our history, and my having tried to help him, maybe he told me something.”

“Did he?”

“Nothing about the tape.”

Bonz slowed his steps and looked around quickly. No one else on the street at the moment. He walked over to a Honda Accord and bent down to look in the window.

“Alarm,” he said.

“So? Are we looking to steal it?”

“No.”

He walked away. I caught up with him. “Then what?”

“Huh?”

“What happened next? After they killed my brother and thought you knew something. What happened after that?”

Bonz’s face grew as dark as I’d ever seen it, and that was damned dark. It was the difference between the darkness of night here on Earth and the absolute blackness on the far side of the moon.

“They put me in your brother’s place. Gave me his room. His chair in the interrogation room. Tortured me every day for, I don’t know, I think it was a couple of weeks. I kind of lost track.”

“Jesus Christ. What did they…I mean, how…” I trailed off.

We walked in silence for a few moments, then Bonz said, “The guy did everything to me, used anything to hurt me. Cut me, burned me, broke bones. Did some fucking creative shit, too, let me tell you. They even started using drugs of some kind, fucked with my head, twisted my goddamned mind.”

I looked at Bonz’s heavily scarred face, then dropped my eyes to his hands. He was missing a finger on his left hand, of course, and the nine he had left weren’t the prettiest I’d ever seen. Bonz followed my gaze and said, “Yeah, he took my fucking finger, the asshole.”

“But why so much, for so long? After a while they must have figured you didn’t know anything.”

Bonz was still staring down at his damaged hand as he walked, flexing his remaining digits, as if to ensure himself that they were still there, that he still had use of them, at least.

“Bonz?”

He looked up. “Huh? Oh. Maybe, maybe not. They knew I was pretty tough, could take a lot of punishment. Also, after a while, I think they did it for fun. I mean, you cross the mob, especially if you’re one of them, which I was, I guess, and well, they really come down on you. And they thought I crossed them, the way I was, uh, looking after your brother like I did. Plus, I was starting to think about leaving the job, you know? Leaving the mob. Getting tired of doing their shit work. They might have found out about that.” He looked at me. “It may not sound like much, what I did for your brother, but like I said, I did what I could. It wasn’t easy.”

I didn’t know if he was trying to convince me or himself that he’d done all he could for Jake. I said nothing.

Bonz said, “So they thought I might know something and, at the very least, they figured I’d been disloyal. So they did what they did.”

Bonz stopped beside an old, ugly, gold-colored Mazda 626, probably from the early 1980s.

“Give me back my coat.”

As I took it off, glad to be rid of it, frankly, Bonz picked up one of the bricks that had been laid end to end in a decorative circle around the base of a small tree in front of the apartment building next to us. Yellow flowers that were a few weeks past their prime clustered around the tree trunk inside their little brick fence.

Bonz quickly scanned the empty street, then held his coat up to the driver’s window of the car and pounded the brick into it. The garment deadened a lot of the sound of the breaking glass. Bonz hit the coat again and the brick dropped into the car. Bonz leaned far inside and a moment later the trunk popped open. I was now an accessory to breaking into a car. They’d probably tuck that right under “murder” on my rap sheet.

Bonz walked back to the trunk, rummaged in it, and came out with a small canvas pouch tied with a strap. He closed the trunk and we walked away. Slowly. Calmly. I wanted to run like hell. As we walked, Bonz untied the pouch, revealing a basic tool set—screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers.

“Good enough,” he said.

“You weren’t worried about a car alarm?”

“Too old a model. No one would bother to put an alarm in it.”

“And what made you think I didn’t have a tool kit in my trunk?” I asked.

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Well, there you go.”

We kept walking, a little more quickly now.

“How come they didn’t kill you?” I asked.

“Didn’t give them the chance.”

I waited for more, not expecting it, of course, just hoping. My hopes weren’t realized, so I pressed. “What do you mean?”

“They got sloppy. I wasn’t as far gone as they thought I was one day. They left me alone, thinking I was unconscious. They’d already untied me to drag me to my cell, then got interrupted for some reason. When they came back, I was ready for them. There were things in the room, things that asshole had tortured me with, still in the room with me. Knives, a hammer, an ice pick. And I was ready. I can’t remember everything that happened, but I’m pretty sure I killed some people.”

I was a federal prosecutor, an officer of the law. I shouldn’t have been hearing any of that. But if there was ever a case of justifiable homicide, that was it.

“And the guy who’d been doing all the torturing,” Bonz said, “Grossi was his name…I hurt him, but I didn’t manage to kill him. Anyway, I got away. I’m not sure how I got out of there exactly, but I took down a bunch of goons on my way. I have to say, I’m not a popular person with the mob in Boston.”

“And they never looked for you?”

“They probably did. When I didn’t turn up, and Jake’s tape was never made public, they probably figured I’d either disappeared for good or I’d died somewhere, either from what’d been done to me or from something else.”

“Instead, you were…”

“Crazy. A bum. Living on the streets, in plain fucking sight, in an unintentional disguise. A disguise that, after a while, I guess, wasn’t really a disguise anymore. Even if they’d dropped a buck in my cup, I doubt they’d have recognized me. I’d changed, and probably changed more and more, and not for the better, as the years went by. After a while, they must have thought I was gone for good.”

He grew quiet again. He’d talked more in the past ten minutes than he probably had in the past ten years.

“They made a mistake,” I said, “thinking that.”

He turned to me and gave me a dark, crooked smile. “And they’re gonna find out just how big a mistake they made. I’m gonna burn them alive.”

The look in his eyes was one I imagined the Devil gives to newly arriving souls. It was black, it was cruel, it was eager, and it was utterly without mercy. I felt myself shiver again. I was scared to death of this guy, and he was on
my
side. I almost pitied Siracuse and anyone else who got in our way.

Actually…screw them.

We turned the corner onto Main Street and walked until we came to a thrift shop. “Aunt Fannie’s Slightly Used Stuff,” the sign over the door read. It was closed, of course, and dark inside. The streetlamp nearby threw enough light onto the storefront that I could make out several items in the shop’s windows—a gold-painted bust of Elvis, a woman’s faux-fur hat, a box of eight-track tapes, a battered black briefcase, a neon Coke sign.