The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  That’s why you buried an empty coffin.

  Semper Fi,

  Roadkill

  Mabi folded the letter as neat as he could and gave it back to Hannah, who returned it to the inner compartment of her purse. He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to think. It didn’t seem real, Jim Ed eaten by a tiger. Maybe the letter was a fake, a forgery conjured up by the Marines to hide the truth. Maybe this Corporal Dickhead fragged Jim Ed. Mabi wished he had real names, names he could hunt down, names he could talk to.

  Hannah touched a tissue to the corners of her eyes.

  Another door opened, then closed. “I’m locking up now,” Virgil said.

  “Take Hannah home,” Mabi said to Silvy. “I got some heavy thinking to do.”

  As Silvy led Hannah out of the sanctuary of the African Meeting House down the front staircase through the decaying foyer on to Smith Court and into the heated heart of Nigger Hill, a sour feeling spread through Mabi’s body. Hannah was Leroy’s mother, he said to himself, not Mabi’s. Who be at fault he was Mabi? Not Jim Ed who did his damnedest to steer him away from the gangs. Not Hannah or Gideon because he would’ve become Priam, then Mabi, whether he knew what Wallaca meant or not. Al-Saffah. Who else but al-Saffah. He wished he was Leroy again when the holiest book he read was a comic book.

  -2-

  Later that afternoon, Mabi telephoned Silvy every five minutes, but no one answered and the ringing haunted him as if each ring set free evil spirits to prey upon his soul. He wished he had a frizzly chicken hanging over the phone. On the twentieth try, Cealy answered. After wailing about Badger, she said, “She’s daycaring. At the church. Hiding behind kids and crayons.”

  The door to the daycare center was locked and no one answered the bell so Mabi jimmied it open and let himself in. The center was empty. Toys and games and craft materials sat neatly on the shelves. Midget chairs were tucked under low tables like children put to bed for the night. Mabi slouched on a chair so low to the floor his knees bumped up against his chin. He opened the alphabet blocks and piled them on top of each other, a tower of letters. The letters became word fragments; the word fragments, phrases; the phrases, sentences. No paragraphs. No pages. If the blocks hid a message, he could not read it. He telephoned al-Saffah.

  “I’m quitting.” He pressed the phone against his chin and spoke quickly.

  “My son, my son.” Al-Saffah spoke slowly with a lowered voice.

  “Don’t son me none.”

  “Your work is not done.”

  “Find someone else to make your jihad.”

  “You were chosen because of the way your brother was stolen from you.”

  “Stop gaming me.”

  “Does the name Mary Ann Devlin mean anything to you?”

  “The Jew’s lawyer.”

  “She was the law student working for Claudius J. Antenor who railroaded your brother into the Marines. She was the instrument of his death. You were not chosen blindly. Jihad is the gift to you to avenge your brother.”

  Thoughts of jihad piled up inside Mabi’s head, then tumbled down like the alphabet blocks at his feet. The thoughts made no more sense than the jumble of letters.

  “What you doing here?” Silvy sounded like she came home and found a process server in her living room. “Kids coming back from their field trip and I need you to be leaving.” She herded the blocks together with her feet.

  Mabi rushed his words before his courage to say them disappeared. “I need you. I love you. I want you to have my baby.”

  Silvy faced a block with the letter X toward him. “I see Badger growing up without a father and I don’t want that for my children. I see my momma growing old without a husband and I don’t want that for me. You great for summer days, but no good for winter nights.”

  “Money’s no worry.”

  “You as dumb as a piece of charcoal is black. If you seriously talking marriage, I’m willing to become Mrs. Leroy Wallaca, not Mrs. Mabi or Mrs. Priam. I want my husband working an honest job with us living off honest pay even if it means we buying our furniture at the Goodwill and our ride be a Chevy shitbox. When you fit that description, phone me up. If I ain’t Mrs. Somebody Else, we can talk.”

  The outside door opened and the hallway filled with children, shouting, singing, laughing.

  “You better move on. People see you here I may lose this job.”

  “Silvy . . .”

  “Go! Now!”

  At home, the unseasonable heat wearied Mabi; his fatigue made him light-headed. He was angry with himself the same way he was with Hannah when she wouldn’t let him take down the frizzly chicken poisoning her kitchen. Shit. Silvy wanted downtown cooking from an uptown menu. He was Mabi. It took him how many years to become Mabi. He couldn’t fall asleep and wake up Leroy. Be easier for the sun to rise at night and Jim Ed to return from the dead. The phone rang and when Mabi answered it he heard Gideon’s voice competing with a PA system announcing a bus leaving for Philadelphia with stops in Newark, Trenton, and Atlantic City.

  “Don’t put too much meaning into that Falasha shit your momma shined you with. Sometimes she talks delirious, the heat and all.”

  Mabi slammed down the phone. Hannah, Silvy, Gideon, all wanting Leroy, none willing to break a sweat to get him, no one finger lifting for him but al-Saffah. Fuck! Shit! I be Mabi, he thought, as long as I be in god damn book and I be in that book as long as I be Mabi. The book filled his mind. He wanted to turn its pages, see how the story ended; but the pages were too heavy and he didn’t have the strength. Give me the rainbow sign, he prayed. No more water, the fire this time.

  PART III

  THE FIRE THIS TIME

  CHAPTER 13

  THURSDAY, APRIL 23, 1981

  -1-

  Out of deference to Jacob Moskovitzky’s age, Maddie Devlin visited him at his home to show him the blood grouping test results and to explain her strategy for using them in court. Stalled in traffic on Storrow Drive, she worked through her presentation in her mind, trying to decide what to tell Moskovitzky, what to leave out. She knew Duncan Siward would be cross-examined. Relentlessly. Absent a prosecutorial misstep, what she didn’t want disclosed would come out, namely how the stencil came into Siward’s possession. She could not base her strategy on the chance Bonturo would make a mistake. She needed Moskovitzky’s opinion. She had to tell him everything.

  She had gone to Duncan Siward’s lab the previous Monday, the 20th, and had not been welcomed.

  “Dr. Siward’s in his lab and he’s not to be disturbed under any circumstances,” his technician, a post-doc who felt more at home in the lab than in an office treating patients, had said. Her voice had been as sour as her lab greens.

  “Disturb him. It’s an emergency.”

  “What business could Dr. Siward possibly have with you?”

  Maddie had smiled. She was beginning to take perverse pleasure in the way people treated her. Being a pariah had its advantages. It liberated her from the constraints of socially acceptable behavior and freed her to be more aggressive, less ladylike, in pursuit of her goals. She had pushed through the swinging doors behind the desk where the technician wrote up her lab results, ignoring the ‘Staff Only’ sign, and forced her way into the hematology lab, evading the technician’s grasp.

  “What . . . Maddie!”

  “I’ll call security,” the technician said.

  “No,” Duncan said. “It’s all right.”

  “I tried to stop her.”

  “Not to worry. I was about to break for coffee.”

  Maddie waited for the technician to leave, then placed the stencil and slide on the lab bench with the care of a paleontologist handling an unclassified fossil. “I need a blood grouping.”

  He picked up the stencil by its edges. “Chelsea?”

  “The slide is from Bumper Sullivan’s autopsy.”

  “How . . . ”

  “Privileged information.” What he didn’t know wouldn’t come back to bite her.
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  He held the slide up to the light. “I’ve never done a blood grouping without live blood. I don’t even know if it’s possible. There’s more involved than blood typing. Categories you’ve never heard. Gm factors, five altogether, and two Kp factors. Thirty-nine factors in a complete test.”

  “I want all thirty-nine. How long?”

  “No idea.”

  “Tomorrow. I’ll bring lunch.”

  “I’d prefer you call.”

  “See you then.”

  “The director may not approve,” Duncan said. “I’ll come to you.”

  She missed the teenager who made out with her on her back porch. She felt a twinge of the happiness she once knew, the happiness of a high school girl who thought life was an endless summer; but, only the heat had come true. Except for Michelle Furey who had melted like a candle in a conflagration.

  Now, Maddie sounded her horn at the car in front of her which had stopped, afraid to merge into traffic. One opening passed; then a second, a third. Maddie sighed. Siward’s visit to her office with the test results had also been problematic.

  She had cleared a seat for him in her cubicle at the offices of Suffolk County Legal Services by taking a mountain of files from her extra chair and stacking them on the floor: Sanchez for breaking and entering, Figone for assault and battery on a police officer, O’Leary for possession of a controlled substance, Goralla for larceny over, Lombard for driving to endanger, and Ferraro for being a common nightwalker. People whose lives intersected hers–some once, others many times–so briefly she couldn’t associate their names with their faces and, without first names, she did not remember which were men, which were women. She made space on her desk for the lunch Duncan had picked up at the Bread Loaf Deli. He placed the napkins and plastic forks on a copy of Warren Bixler’s treatise Defending the Juvenile.

  Maddie had reached for her purse.

  “My treat,” he had said.

  “I insist.” She had stuffed a ten dollar bill in his shirt pocket.

  A calendar featuring an advertisement for an insurance agency hung on the partition behind her desk, its blocks black with tiny printing. The third week of June with a single entry, “Levy trial, Suffolk Sup.”, stood out like empty squares in a nearly completed crossword puzzle.

  “Quiche isn’t good for you,” Siward said, “cholesterol and all.”

  “Better than a hot pastrami sandwich.”

  “Both samples may come from the same person.”

  “May? Is that the best you can do?”

  “I don’t have live blood.”

  “Can you testify in court?”

  “Would I survive cross-examination?”

  “Are the results more probable than not?”

  “Don’t know. I’ve never seen it referenced in the literature.”

  “It’ll be a first. Write it up.”

  “If this were peer reviewed, it would probably be rejected.”

  “You doctors are all alike. You’ll say anything to avoid going to court.”

  “I’m being honest with you, Maddie. I’m sorry if it doesn’t fit your agenda. Both samples may come from the same person. Or may not. If I had live blood, I could give you a more definitive answer.”

  “Guilt and innocence may turn on this.”

  “It’s the best I can do.”

  She gave him another dollar. “Now that you’ve been paid by the defense, it’s privileged as attorney work product and you have to keep it confidential.”

  Because of the way Ugolino had curtailed the police investigation, Maddie knew what would happen if word leaked out. The police pathologist would discover a labeling mistake on the slide. The stencil would now match a bag lady found dead in an abandoned subway station. What Rabbi ben Reuben had said after finding the defaced Torah unrolled on the floor of the sanctuary on the night of the seder now roiled her mind: “When I was done, I thought I had cut myself.”

  Now, after several additional openings in the traffic, the car in front of her still hesitated. Maddie leaned on her horn. She was tempted to inch forward and kiss bumpers, anything to get that car to move. An oncoming driver, so unlike the typical Boston driver, slowed and waved for the car to merge ahead of him. About fucking time, Maddie thought. About fucking time.

  Jacob Moskovitzky’s home health aide showed her to a room on whose walls hung dozens of photographs, old, soft focus, many sepia-toned from the era of big boxy cameras, hoods that draped the photographer, additional light not always synchronized with the opening and closing of the shutter. The photographs were of people, not places, all posed against a plain backdrop in a studio where conditions could be controlled. Photographs of men and women alone, men and women in couples, couples surrounded by a horde of children, multi-generational groupings, Moskovitzky’s family tree, Maddie assumed. She studied each photograph with children, searching for the one small child who had aged into the attorney who now told her that in his opinion Duncan Siward’s blood grouping test results were inadmissible into evidence at trial.

  “I think I can coax Dr. Siward into testifying more probable than not.”

  “If the judge did admit it, in this climate no juror would believe it.” Moskovitzky had said the same thing when Maddie told him Levy denied he had made the notations of the chess game in Bumper Sullivan’s spiral notebook.

  “You only need one for a mistrial,” Maddie reminded him.

  “The Messiah will return before someone open-minded enough to consider Avram innocent is seated on that jury.”

  “Which is why I say a plea-bargain . . . ”

  “Avram will not plead guilty to a crime he did not commit.”

  Maddie detected a hitch in his voice. Chelsea had not persuaded him of Levy’s innocence as it had her. She decided to let it pass. Every difficult case needed to be leavened by the yeast of skepticism.

  Moskovitzky struggled to lift himself out of his chair, refusing Maddie’s offer of help. Supporting himself with his cane, he walked over to a photograph of a man and woman and young child, a boy, wearing a dress as young boys often did in that era. A tear drained from his eye. In that tear, Maddie suddenly understood the symmetry between Levy and her grand da Michael, both victims of someone who bore false witness for profit. She wondered what her grand da would have done if the IRB had offered exile and banishment rather than death on the condition he admit being an informer, a traitor. Would he have confessed guilt to a crime he did not commit to save his life? Logic said he should, the same logic she had urged upon Moskovitzky moments ago, the same logic she had urged on the rabbi, the same logic both had rejected and rejected again, the same logic Levy had also rejected.

  She had spent her career defending people for whom lying was as ordinary as jaywalking or running a stop sign, people for whom the truth was as disposable as a used condom or a wad of chewed gum. She wanted to believe her grand da was not one of those people. Levy’s courage, made it possible for her to do so. That was Levy’s gift to her. And what was her gift to him? A plea-bargain born of cowardice, rationalized by cowardice. No, her gift to him would be to transform what she knew to be true into admissible evidence so strong, so persuasive, that beyond a reasonable doubt it would convince the most Jew-hating juror, the most ardent member of Bumper’s Brigade, that Levy did not murder Bumper Sullivan.

  Or to die trying.

  -2-

  Maddie Devlin drove around Roxbury, unable to locate the streets on her map because the street signs had been stolen from most of the intersections. When she asked for directions, people delighted in misleading her, if they responded at all. After an hour, she found Livermore Place and parked across from Blackbird’s. All neighborhoods had local bars, she thought, recalling how her da had frequented O’Driscoll’s several nights a week, always after dinner because her da insisted the family gather around the table at least once a day to share a meal. Small talk grew into large talk as conversation about what had happened in school or at work expanded into discussions of the
difficulties of the Irish assimilating in nineteenth century Boston, the current troubles in Northern Ireland, and politics, always politics, Boston’s favorite blood sport.

  Named for a poem by Yeats, O’Driscoll’s was her da’s local bar. Trish’s side of the family went to Mangan’s, opposite side of the street one block down. Although her da threw second darts for O’Driscoll’s, the team captain substituted for him when they threw at Mangan’s. Charlie, before he was mayor and still had time, never threw at O’Driscoll’s. Neither team agreed to throw against the other at a neutral site unless those substitutions were made. When Maddie came of age, she occasionally accompanied her da on Thursdays when O’Driscoll’s welcomed women. She drank her first Guinness there and remembered how everyone laughed when she spit up her first mouthful. She knew she would not be welcome now.

  But, O’Driscoll’s wasn’t surrounded by vacant lots overflowing with bricks and cinder blocks, sheet rock and lumber, shingles and tar paper, the skeletons of so many buildings. And trash. Garbage. The decomposing bodies of dead household pets. The rats those decomposing bodies attracted. It reminded her of the South Bronx which as a child she had gawked at through the windows of the elevated subway on the way to the Bronx Zoo during the family’s one and only visit to New York. “America’s Dresden,” her da had said. She didn’t know what he meant then; she did now.

  Like O’Driscoll’s, Blackbird’s had booths along the walls and tables in the center. A tall black man behind the bar polished glasses. Two customers, sat in a corner booth in the back, one in his late teens, the other in his early or middle twenties. Maddie doubted the alcohol police ran sting operations for underage drinkers in a bar like Blackbird’s. Nor did they have the balls to barge in and demand a bribe. She walked the length of the bar to where the bartender stood. “You Stilts? I’m looking for Mabi.” She handed him her business card which he discarded without a glance.