We Were Kings (15 page)

“Lucid,”
Cal said slowly. “I think that's the word you're looking for.”

“Yeah, that's it. Lucid.” Shaw spit out his lozenge. It shattered into pieces on the pavement as if it were glass. He took a cigar from his pocket, unwrapped it, and bit off the end. He had to smoke his cigars outside—Sully couldn't stand the smell of them.

Cal looked back at Dante, who was several yards behind them, his hands in his pockets and his ill-fitting gray hat angled down over his eyes. Water from the sprinkler wet his pants legs, but he appeared numb to it. He seemed preoccupied with something.

“Sully's sick,” Cal said. “I can see that, and it's clear he doesn't know much of anything going on. You, though, you're out and about. You must have heard something. Rumors, drunk talk, anything. Nobody sits on a load of stolen guns and keeps it airtight.”

Shaw looked away and moaned with frustration. “Sully told you to see Father Nolan. I don't know shit, so stop thinking I do.”

When all three of them came to the sidewalk, Dante tapped Shaw on the shoulder and gestured with a raised chin across the street. “That car over there. Your boys?”

Shaw sucked on the cigar as if it were lit, squinted against the sunlight. “Not ours. Why you asking?”

“I saw them in the same spot over an hour ago,” Dante said.

“So?”

“When we got here, there were three guys in that car. Now there's only two.”

“So fucking what?”

Dante looked at Cal. “Seem suspicious to you?”

Cal eyed the black Chrysler Windsor parked a half a block away. “Yeah, it looks a bit off to me. Somebody should do his job and go check on them.”

“Just to be safe,” Dante said.

Shaw shook his head. “Could just be two people waiting for somebody. Go find a meter maid and let her know. I don't give a shit if they park there all day.”

“Do you have any other men watching this place?” Dante asked.

The cigar end crumbled in Shaw's mouth. He took it out and, spitting, threw the cigar to the ground. Black flecks of tobacco clung to his bottom lip. “Don't worry about it. We got this place covered. Plus, there's no visitors allowed in after six.”

Shaw paused, wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. “You two want me to do something about that car, don't you?”

He waited for them to say something, and when neither did, he stepped off the curb. Once there was a gap in the traffic, Shaw walked across the street to the parked Chrysler.

“It's probably nothing,” Cal said.

“Probably not, but it's good to keep the lazy bastard on his toes.”

Cal and Dante watched Shaw go to the driver's side and knock on the half-open window. From where they stood, Cal and Dante couldn't see the driver's face.

Something was off.

Cal felt his insides tense and tremor, a feeling he remembered from back in the war, before the first shot rang out or the first bomb tore through the earth around him. It was an odd sensation—the way nature seemed to slow, the sky pressing down and the sunlight flaring brighter, as if his pupils had suddenly dilated. Sounds both sharp and piercing cut through the humid air.

The shrill calls from crows atop the telephone lines.

The opening and shutting of a postal box as a pedestrian dropped off mail.

An old man whistling tunelessly as a nurse guided him along the sidewalk.

He looked to Dante, and Dante cocked his head slightly to one side, as if he too could sense something was off-kilter.

Across the street, Shaw leaned on the car, talking to the driver in a casual manner. The shadow of the driver sat erect and still, and they could see the silhouette of the passenger, who was broad-shouldered. The men in the car didn't seem too concerned with Shaw, nor did Shaw seem too worried about them.

Shaw shrugged his shoulders and let out a bark of laughter. Some more words were exchanged, and Shaw patted the hood of the car, turned around, and started walking back across the street. He was shaking his head as if embarrassed and pissed at the same time, and he was opening his mouth to say something.

An explosive crack rang out from inside the nursing home, followed by a second and a third. A quiet followed, disrupted by a woman's piercing scream. Dante and Cal looked up to the building and saw a nurse on the front steps, the same one that Shaw had given the X-ray treatment to. A black groundskeeper ran up to console her, and she pointed across the porch to the other side of the building.

Cal reached into his jacket and gripped the handle of his gun but didn't pull it all the way out from its holster. He walked down the sidewalk in the direction the nurse was pointing.

Cal caught a glimpse of a man running at full sprint. He was short yet lean, and he wore the powder-blue pants and short-sleeved shirt of an orderly. He was running toward the parked Chrysler that Shaw had just come from. Its engine revved. Smoke pumped out black from its tailpipe as the car edged out into traffic. The man hit the back door, opened it, and leaped inside. The tires tore at the pavement, and with the clutch grinding loudly, the Chrysler pulled off and burned down the street.

Dante was already on his way back to the building. Shaw was right behind him, hobbling as he tried to keep up.

In the dank, carpeted hallways of the nursing home, an old man wearing a food-stained robe comforted a confused-looking woman in a wheelchair who was crying like a child. A nurse sat at the front desk with her face in her hands. Another worker barked into a phone, asking for help.

There was classical music playing from the radio in the recreation room. The canned orchestra and its strings added a surreal, haunted quality to the scene as Cal ran up the stairwell to the second floor.

He met Shaw and Dante at the door to Sully's room.

He was still alive. The nurse who had been in the room with Sully hadn't been so lucky. One bullet had gone through her temple, sprayed the wall with dark blood from her skull. After the first shot, she must have fallen forward, for the second shot had torn through her shoulder.

Now she lay on the carpeted floor, body twisted at the waist, eyes still open; her skin already appeared waxen. There was a doctor in the room, and he briefly looked up at Shaw in a strangely accusatory way before he went back to Sully. On the bed, the old man cursed, his thin arthritic hands clutching and twisting the bedsheets. His eyes were tightly clamped shut as the doctor ripped open his pants leg and pressed at the wound above the knee.

Dante took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow. He looked at Cal, and then at Shaw. “Who was it?”

Shaw shrugged. “I didn't recognize the two in the car. They could have been anybody.”

Above the bed, the crucifix stood out boldly against the wall. The arc of the nurse's blood had misted the lacquered wood and the figure of Christ. Cal grabbed Dante by the sleeve and they walked back into the hall. At this point they were just getting in the way, and without saying a word to each other, they went down the stairs to the lobby and waited for the police to arrive.

_________________________

Northampton and Washington Streets, Roxbury

CAL DESCENDED THE
narrow stairway from the Northampton El to the street. Beneath the shadow of the turn-of-the-century elevated station—the first elevated line in the country, once the architectural pride of the city—electric sparks and flakes of metal as fine as ash cascaded down through the massive steel uprights and arched trusses. The sidewalk tremored beneath his feet as trains passed overhead. In the shadows of the El sat Mitch's Bar, an anonymous brick façade with one small square window covered by a metal grille and a sign above it advertising Budweiser beer. You might pass by without noticing it unless the door was open, as it was on hot nights like tonight.

It was a mixed crowd of black and white at this convergence of two neighborhoods, a halfway house of sorts that had been there as long as Cal could remember. Father Nolan sat at the bar reading the paper and nursing a bottle of Extra Stout and a Jameson. Cal sat at the stool next to him and the priest looked up. The man never aged; he still had sharp, clear blue eyes and smartly swept-back silver hair kept close to his head with pomade.

“Cahal,” he said.
“Dia dhuit.”

“Dia is Muire dhuit, Athair.”

“What brings you down here? It can't be the beer.” He gestured to the taps behind the bar. “Warm as piss.”

The bartender came up, and Cal asked for the same as the priest. The bartender was from Lagos—he had come to the United States by way of London—and when he wasn't denouncing the British in a deep pidgin English, he sat at the far end of the bar reading the international papers.

“Hundreds of bars in the city and not a cold beer anywhere,” said Father Nolan.

“I haven't seen you down here in years.”

“Who told you I was here now?”

“The sexton at the Holy Cross. That your main gig?”

“No, no, not at all. The parish has been run ragged, not enough young men joining the priesthood, so the senior priests often have to do double duty at two or more other churches. I'm just blessed that I've been granted such a high order as the mother church of the Archdiocese. We'll get some new blood in soon, please God, and that will change.”

When the Jameson and Extra Stout came, Cal sipped the whiskey slow, like the priest, and then drank from the bottle. They were both silent, the priest waiting and Cal letting the heat of the whiskey shimmer in his throat and head.
Like a song,
he thought,
like a song.
He cautioned himself to have no more than one and, smiling, turned to Father Nolan, who was watching him with interest.

“Tasted that good, did it?”

“It did, yeah. Was it that obvious?”

“I take it you've been dry for a while—that's a good thing, Cal. One day at a time is the best most of us can manage, and sometimes that's enough, that's all it needs to be.”

“You mean for drunks.”

“I mean for people like us.”

Cal nodded, threw back the whiskey so that it swelled his cheeks. He put the glass on the bar and motioned for another. “I need to know something,” he said, and he glanced at the priest. “Something about my father.”

“Your father?” The priest looked down at the rim of his glass, tilted it so that the amber liquid moved back and forth.

“A boat came into the harbor last week. It was smuggling guns intended for Ireland. The guns are gone now and a lot of men are dead. I spoke with Sully and he said I should talk to you.”

“He did, did he?”

“He said you and my father were both involved, deeply involved.”

Two whiskeys came, but the priest continued to swirl what he had left. Cal watched him, and after a moment he put the whiskey back, smacked his lips, and set the almost-empty glass down softly on the bar.

“As a longshoreman, your father played a big part in getting weapons over to Ireland during the late twenties and early thirties. Everyone on the docks knew how it worked and that if there was a way to move freight, your father could get it done.”

“I'm surprised he didn't work for Sully.”

“Oh, I think Sully wanted him to. Your father could make contraband disappear”—Father Nolan looked at Cal and snapped his fingers—“like that.

“Your father was one of our top men before he came over, so he was, and for a while, it continued here.”

Cal noted the way the priest had said
our
instead of
their,
and he considered the priest more intently, thinking, as he often did, how little he knew about people he'd spent a large part of his life around. “Even after he got into the politics?” he asked.

“Oh, that was a great boon when your father got on the city council and became a councilman for Ward Eight. A great boon.”

“What happened?”

The priest shrugged and folded his paper slowly, as if he were putting the past together in his memory.

“What ever happens with things like this? You see a world of death and pain and you wake up out of the darkness. You decide you want no more part in it. You realize that by what you've done, you've put your soul at risk. You try to make amends. America changes you—America is always working at changing you—and you let it.”

“Are you speaking about yourself?”

“I suppose I am.”

“And my father?”

The priest harrumphed and shook his head disdainfully, sadly. “Your father was in it till the end.”

Cal nodded. “That would be my old man, all right.” He sipped slowly from the remaining whiskey and then the Extra Stout. Through the open doorway came the sounds of the subway rattling and squealing. He watched its movement by the shadows that trembled and shook beneath the elevated tracks. The cars passing through that dark latticework flared briefly with embers and sparks. A black woman with lacquered hair and long legs walked by the doorway, and one of the old-timers sitting by the entrance playfully called out to her. From other corners of the bar, the sound of laughter, belly-deep and jovial.

“Over the years, I've heard lots of things about my father,” Cal said. “Everyone says he was a good man, but I know better. I know when they say
good,
they mean something else entirely.”

Father Nolan remained silent.

“Would you call him good, Father?”

“Ah, Cal, are any of us good?”

“No, I don't suppose we are.” Cal smiled bitterly and finished his whiskey. “I need to talk to one of them. Can you arrange that?”

Father Nolan clasped his hands together, rubbed them as if they were cold. His lips tightened. His fingers laced around the whiskey glass, and he held it so that the skin shone white at the knuckles.

“I know a man,” he said, “and he might talk to you because I know him and he knew your father. They were both proficient at what they did. And this man still is. I'll see if I can set up a meeting. But in the meantime, you shouldn't be talking to anyone. As far as they're concerned, an informer's an informer. Their allegiance is to country—a united Ireland—and then to God.”

“When could you set it up?”

“Two days should be enough time.”

Cal nodded and rose, pushing back the bar stool.

“And Cal,” the priest said, and he gently grasped Cal's arm. “Don't forget that to them, they're not in America. They're three thousand miles away but they're still home. This isn't about America. Don't forget that.”

“Maybe it's time we reminded them,” Cal said, and he rapped the bar with his knuckles. The sound of it was startling and bright, like nails being pounded into hard wood.