We Were Kings (25 page)

_________________________

Day Boulevard, South Boston

THE MEN TOOK
the route they'd taken the three previous times, over the silent roads, the streetlamps still blazing, less bright now as day came on. The gray waters of the harbor on their right stretched out toward the sea, where the sky was beginning to lighten. In their laps they held their balaclavas and their weapons. Fitzgerald had his sawed-off at his side, half hidden in the shadows of the door panel. He'd loaded it with rat shot that could blow the hinges off doors, punch holes in mortar and plaster; Fitzgerald took a perverse pleasure in its pure brutality, in how close he needed to come to the man or woman he was about to kill.

Owen rose a little after dawn, a light mist coming in from the water chilling the still, gray air, but in it the suggestion of the heat that would come once the mist burned off and the sun was full in the sky. Dressed, he sat at the kitchen table with his coffee and the morning edition of the
Globe
as the streetlights went out along the Avenue and Anne came down the stairs with four-year-old Fiona. Anne had her blue terry-cloth robe wrapped tightly about her, and she looked haggard—Fiona had been waking in the night, calling out to Anne and insisting that some of her dolls be moved from where she'd placed them. In the end Anne had removed the dolls and lain down with Fiona. When Owen, groaning, glanced at the clock at two in the morning, he saw he was surrounded by the lot of them, half a dozen bushy-haired dolls with leering faces staring at him. It was no wonder Fiona was frightened; he'd been frightened himself, though eventually he fell into a fitful sleep.

He grinned sheepishly at Anne and made her coffee as she put Fiona in her chair and then sat heavily. “I'm sorry you had such a rotten night,” he said. “If I can get home early, I'll take night watch.”

Anne shook her head, took a sip of the coffee, then looked wearily at Fiona, who was spooning Cheerios into her mouth and looking at them both with large, wide eyes. “She'll do better tonight, now that the dolls are in our room.” She smiled. “How'd you like sleeping with them?”

“Oh, it was a fantastic change of scenery. Another night with them and you might as well send me up to Danvers.”

“If this case doesn't send you there first.”

Owen shrugged and pushed the newspaper across the table for her. The headlines declared that two more turf shootings had taken place during the night and that in the days ahead Boston was in for a record heat wave and that power consumption should be kept to a minimum.

“All the case takes is time, and with Cal and Dante helping me, we'll get it done. That's what I'm looking forward to, that and the expression on Giordano's face.”

“What about me?”

“What about you, girl?”

“When are you looking forward to coming home to your wife?”

“Ah,” Owen said, and he got up, crossed the linoleum, held her against him, and squeezed, and she wrapped an arm around his waist. “I look forward to that every day, every single day—you and Fiona, coming home to you two is the only thing that makes the job worthwhile.”

He kissed Anne at the front door with Fiona leaning against her mother's hip and looking up at the two of them. “You be good for Mama today, okay?” Owen said, and she nodded, and he bent and kissed her on her pursed, wet lips, held his mouth there until she pulled away, laughing.

He strode down the pathway to the sidewalk, glancing back once and waving. When the three hooded men stepped before him with raised guns, he was so taken by surprise that his first thought, which he realized was ridiculous, was
How on earth can they be wearing balaclavas in this summer heat?

The man before him held a sawed-off, and Owen registered this right before he heard the close gun blast, and his hand went to his face in self-protection but uselessly, as half his face was already gone. Owen fell forward and another shooter stepped up and pumped three bullets into him. The three stood there for a brief moment, hooded faces looking down at Owen's body, and then they took off at a sprint toward a gray car idling at the curb twenty yards down the Avenue.

Anne rushed from the porch, screaming for help, her robe fluttering madly about her, its belt undone. Fiona stood at the door, wide-eyed in fear, not really understanding what she'd just seen, and she began wailing. Anne knelt on the path and pulled Owen's body toward her so that he was lying with what was left of his bloodied head in her lap, and she tried to rouse him as if he might still be alive and continued to scream for help as the blood pooled around them and finally neighbors came rushing from their doors.

_________________________

South Boston

BOBBY MYLES SAT
on the cot, the whiskey gurgling as he drained the bottle. No matter how much he drank, it didn't help. Eyes closed or open, he could see all of the dead parade before him, like a film reel looped over and over, and he watched with relentless clarity the horror that clutched them in their last moments as living, breathing things. Skin cooked off the bone, faces torn open, limbs sheared off torsos; a young girl holding back her insides as she stumbled into the street. Now joining them was the man they'd killed this morning, a man who had just said good-bye to his family and then, in one loud flash of gunfire, tumbled down onto the walkway with half his head obliterated in a red mist.

Before Myles knew it, the pint bottle was almost empty. Bile burned his throat but he wanted more whiskey. He'd have to go downstairs to the bar and grab another. Maybe it would help knock him out and allow him a moment to hide from his thoughts and cower in a temporary blackness. Maybe it would just make it worse.

He stood from the bed and walked to the dresser to grab a cigarette. He got one in his mouth, and after lighting it, he realized he'd lit the wrong end. This made him laugh, but it was the laugh of a broken man. He dropped it to the ground, stamped on it, brought another to his mouth, and picked up the almost-empty pint.

The heat in the small room doubled, and the walls started to close in on him. His hand went numb and the bottle slid from his fingers and clattered to the floor. Voices came to him and he could hear somebody cursing through the walls, and for a brief moment, it was comforting to know that somebody else was suffering too.

The tobacco burned quickly and he found himself at the window, looking out at the street. It was the same shade of filth that he'd seen in the factory towns of England when he'd lived there with his father, a year in Manchester and two more in Liverpool.
Hell on earth,
he thought. Would he ever get to that place where he could breathe clean air again?

“Bobby.”

Myles turned from the window and saw Egan standing at the open door.

“Thought I'd ask if you wanted to go for a drink. But it looks like you're already on your way.” Egan gestured to the bottle on the floor.

Myles lowered his head. “Where are the others?”

“They went into town again.”

“With who?”

“Some men they met. Locals.”

Egan came in and closed the door behind him. “You don't look so good.”

Myles ran his fingers through his hair, which was damp with sweat. “I'll be fine once we leave this fucking city.”

Egan laughed uncomfortably. “It's not that bad.”

“You don't think?” He shook his head. “You know what we did today? Do you know?”

Egan could never pull off a stern, authoritative tone, but he tried anyway. “We don't ask questions, you know that, Bobby.”

“It was dirty, I tell you.”

“We were told to—”

“Fuck what we were told. What we did, that wasn't for Ireland.”

The short man turned away. “I'll go down and get you another bottle. And then you try to relax. We'll be going home soon.”

“Home, right.” Myles smirked. “I'll get my own bottle. Be off, then.”

“Suit yourself.”

Bobby shut his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. The dead were still there, waiting for him. He knew that no matter how far west he went, they would always follow. He took the bottle off the floor and sucked down the small amount of whiskey that remained.

_________________________

South Boston

CAL DROVE THEM
out of South Boston, leaving the funeral home and following the police down East Broadway. The going was slow but the traffic lights were held by police on motorbikes who somberly waved the procession through. Cal watched it stretching a half a mile ahead of them, squad cars and motorbikes from across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the rest of New England—Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut—and Cal recognized some black-and-whites from New York and Philly, Nevada and California, all with their spinning, flashing blues and reds.

As Cal drove, Dante, beside him, looked out of the window. Another storm had come through during the night—it had been a week of them in quick succession—and the rain was still coming down, pooling in gutters, on the awnings over storefronts, on the chrome of parked cars. Pedestrians lined the funeral route, many in their Sunday best, many curious, some impatient with the length of the cavalcade. Somewhere a driver honked his horn twice, bright and sharp, and he noticed the motorcycle cops looking in that direction. The driver didn't blow his horn a third time. Gulls floated down on unseen thermals and alighted on the buildings. The bells of St. Anne's continued to toll solemnly, as if marking Owen's final passage through Southie.

They passed the West Broadway police station, where uniformed officers stood assembled, saluting the passing hearse, then Amrheins, one of Owen's old haunts, where, standing curbside, four drunks hooted and hollered and held beers aloft as the cars passed by. Over the West Fourth Street Bridge, the Cabot rail yards, and into the South End, to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Washington, the mother church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. The inbound El, two stories above, squealed before the church's Gothic façade and its massive stained-glass rose window.

They parked southeast of the church, beneath the Dover Street Station, and climbed out of the car. Men and women, all nursing their own private grievings, raced beneath the overhead rails and before the traffic to escape the rain, newspapers and umbrellas held over their heads. Outside Harry the Greek's, its windows steamed over, a homeless beggar rattled his pail for coins.

Without speaking Cal and Dante walked the three blocks to the cathedral, toward the flashing lights of the halted police procession, merging with other mourners attired in black, the rain slanting at angles through the El's lumbering metalwork above them.

Cal glanced at his reflection in the windows of cars parked along the curb but did not recognize himself—it could have been someone else, a stranger, walking in his shoes. But there was Dante, he could see that, walking on his right, in his dark suit and black tie, head slightly bowed to avoid the rain, his features pinched, either in thought or in consternation. But this other person with Dante—the one reflected back in the rain-stippled glass—he simply could not place. Even when he grinned and showed his teeth to see if the reflection was really him, he could not convince himself that it was he who had made the expression. He told himself that perhaps he had the DTs or some nagging mental fatigue that a shot of whiskey would set right and quick, but he knew it was not that at all.

He felt panicked; a sudden instinctual urge to flee grasped him, an irrational fear telling him that he must run, that they were heading into danger, that their lives were threatened—he eyed the passersby stepping from storefronts and alleys, splashing through puddles beneath the El, convinced that one of them was an assailant, and he worked to keep his nerves in check. He forced himself to continue moving toward the lights. The blurry pinpricks of red and blue coalesced into small halos narrowing and growing smaller, as if they were receding, pulling farther and farther away from them, and the distance continued to widen. He squinted against the sensation, which felt like a migraine pressing at his skull, like an ice pick through his eyes, and he closed them for a moment and focused on his breathing, slow and measured, and his and Dante's footfalls upon the sidewalk.

“You all right?” Dante at his shoulder, but his voice was muffled, as if it were penetrating a fog.

Cal nodded but didn't open his eyes immediately. The concrete smelled of rain, of wet cigarette butts, and there was the sluice rushing from a sewer, the blare of car horns, of voices, the grinding of the subway car's brakes, metal and sparks above them in a darkness he could sense beyond his closed eyelids. When the curb ended, Dante reached for him and Cal opened his eyes. Everything still seemed too bright even though the hulking tresses and supports of the El blocked out most of the light and when he looked up it was still overcast and gray. Neon beer signs shone in bar windows, merging with the lights of the traffic signals before them and the swirling blue and red of the parked procession a half a block ahead. Dante took his hand away. He was looking at him with concern.

“Are you sure you're okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, I'm all right, I'm all right.”

They crossed beneath the El at the intersection as the cathedral's bells began their shimmering peal. On the sidewalk they could hear the grand pipe organ from within the cathedral sounding Mozart's Requiem Mass.

After the Mass they followed the hearse and police procession to the grave and another rain shower came on suddenly and Cal was glad for it. There was a numbing effect to watching the rain beading down the glass, hearing the metronome-like thump of the wipers, seeing the bleary train of cars before them, the red and blue police lights fractured and split by the rain so that they shimmered like prisms, and he could dissociate from what they were doing: burying Owen. His heart was a flat thump in his chest that he recognized dully; surely it was failing him, he thought. He had the sense that he and Dante had spoken during the trip to and from the cathedral but he couldn't remember what they'd spoken about.

At Cedar Grove Cemetery they laid Owen in the earth and Father Nolan said the final prayers and now Owen was back with his father and mother and their parents before them.

There had been no traditional laying-out and viewing for Owen, not with half his face gone, and the coffin had remained in state in the front parlor, but Cal knew that Anne had had the funeral home place a crucifix at his breast and rosary beads in his hands, with the beads slipped through his fingers. Cal had stopped in at their house the previous three days and nights and said the rosary with those present, and the prayer and response had been a calming balm of sorts, if not a numbing one.

Fierro came by on the final night to pay his respects, and Giordano also, talking to the men charged with the honor of the casket watch, holding vigil over the coffin. Little Fiona peered around the doorway and Anne took her into the kitchen, where Cal heard the metal hinge on the refrigerator opening, the brief clink of a glass taken from the cupboards, and the sound of a glass of milk being poured. Then their soft footfalls on the carpeted stairs.

As she had for the past nights, shortly after the clock on the mantel in the living room chimed ten o'clock, Anne came back down from Fiona's room, and an old man with a tuft of white hair brushed back with oil on either side of his head—a cousin of Anne's on her mother's side—said the Rosary for the Dead. As Cal prayed, he asked God to bear Owen's soul directly to Heaven and to allow some manner of peace through His love to enter Anne's and Fiona's hearts. He asked that God look after them and keep them in His blessing and in His care.

As the old man spoke, eyes downcast and brow furrowed, focused on his intentions or on those he prayed for, his false teeth moved and slipped in his mouth, creating a soft, wet smacking sound that Cal tried to ignore. “We implore Thee, O Lord,” he prayed, “to absolve all their sins from the souls of Thy faithful, so after that having risen again, they may live in the glory of the Resurrection, amid the saints and the elect. Through Christ Our Lord, Amen.” And all of them made the sign of the cross, then rose from their kneeling positions. They slowly said their farewells to Anne, who was sitting before the coffin and staring at it as the mourners left, and Fiona cried out from some new horror that had come to her in her sleep.

Father Nolan was done with the final words. He clasped his hands together and they watched as Anne and Fiona came forward. Anne took up the shovel, and Fiona placed her hand over her mother's, and they tilted a blade of dirt and stone down upon the coffin. Owen's captain began the Last Radio Call; he talked of Owen's Irish background, his length of service, his many commendations and medals, his love of family.

“Gone, but not forgotten,” the men in blue chorused, their badges shrouded in mourning with black cloth, and Cal echoed it. “Gone, but not forgotten.”

The honor guard stepped forward without rifles—Cal had spoken with Anne and then conveyed her wishes to the liaisons: there was to be no gunfire, not again and not with Fiona present. Instead, there would be a twenty-one-bell salute. As the bell was solemnly rung—a sweet, clear resounding chime—the honor guard, one by one, turned to face the grave and, upon each peal, snapped a salute to their fallen comrade, white gloves held to their caps.

The color guard took the flags that had draped the coffin, folded them, one after the other, and handed them to Anne. Two bagpipers, each dressed in traditional kilt, sporran, and feather bonnet, filled the bellows and played “Amazing Grace,” then “Loch Lomond,” and finally “Danny Boy.”

During the last refrain, a holder released a dove, and Cal watched the bird climb above the trees, over the Dorchester skyline, and then, in a flickering white blur, it disappeared into the gray. He gazed after it for a long while and then it began to rain again, and the drops fell softly on his face. The umbrellas came up as the mourners filed out of the graveyard. Anne's brother was at her side, and she and Fiona were flanked by police liaisons who escorted them to the waiting cars. Cal had seen the officers during the wake, standing guard outside the house in black-and-whites and, in dress uniform, performing the casket watch, two of them facing each other and keeping vigil at each end of Owen's fallen body, relieved by another team every thirty minutes, all through the day and night, up until this moment, when their vigil and Owen's journey was finally over.

Fierro was still smoking after all these years, or at least he took every opportunity to smoke when his wife wasn't present. A butt, thick with white ash, dangled from the side of his mouth. His eyebrows were meager things receding into his brow that looked as if they'd been singed by a close flame. He took out the cigarette and tapped the ash to the ground, lifted his hat and ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Cal,” he said. “Dante.”

They watched the slow skein of family and then the cortege of police from the cemetery grounds, black umbrellas glistening with rain, the color guard lowering their flags and winding them tight against their poles. Cal, Dante, and Fierro stood in a comfortable silence—the
familiáritátés
of mourners at funerals—listening to the bells from the small chapel across the grounds, their usual peal on the quarter hour echoing the twenty-one-bell salute of the honor guard. Cal knew that this must be difficult for Fierro—he and Owen were friends and he'd seen the body and done the autopsy. Cal could only create images in his mind of what that must have been like, how Owen would have looked. He wondered if, using putty, Fierro had tried to reconstruct Owen's face before they put him in the coffin. Before they'd arranged him in the front parlor of the house on Day Boulevard with his rosary. To make him resemble the man he remembered.