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 stro
ked 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.
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