by Mike Lupica
“My name is Spike, Mr. Antonioni,” Spike said.
It was all part of the dance. Albert Antonioni knew I was bringing Spike because I had told Mike Stanton to tell his people that I was. And if he knew I was bringing Spike, he knew who he was and what he did and maybe even his password on Amazon.
“Oh, yes,” Albert said. “The strano.”
I knew enough Italian to know that meant queer.
Spike smiled, brilliantly. “And proud of it!” he said.
The old man let it go. He pointed at the cups and said, “You want something?” I told him that what he was having would be lovely.
Antonioni made a brief wave of his hand. The bartender was at our table like a sprinter, collecting our cups, returning just as quickly with espresso. I decided to drink it straight. No girly girl, I.
“You cost me some money the last time we were together,” the old man said. “And kept me from making a very big move into Boston.”
“There was no point once it became clear that I was going to be governor before that moron Brock Patton was,” I said.
He shrugged and took a sip of espresso. “He ever try anything with you?” he said. “Patton?”
“He did,” I said, “until I pulled out my gun and threatened to shoot him.”
He looked over at the guys at the next table. “You hear that?” he said. “This is one tough cookie.”
“As I recall,” I said, “that isn’t the first time you have made that observation about me.”
I casually looked around the room. The other men seemed to have their eyes mostly fixed on Spike. Somehow Spike had his own eyes on all of them at once.
“So to what do I owe the honor?” Antonioni said.
“I am told that you still know about everything illegal from here to Canada and back,” I said. “And because you do, I was wondering if you had any theories about who might be coming for the Burke family.”
“For Desmond, you mean,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
The old man said, “I am frankly confused by this, as I am sure you are, Miss Randall. Desmond is an old man, the way I am. I had just assumed that all old fights that needed to be fought had already been fought.”
“But you both have business interests that are still quite active,” I said.
“Ones that we have mostly managed to keep separate, Desmond and me,” he said.
“In the interest of mutual profit,” I said.
“And respect,” he said. He smiled. “It always comes down to that in our world, does it not? Respect. Or lack of respect. Or earning respect. Or avenging the lack of respect.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Sometimes I think we are all still children,” he said.
“Would you tell me if you knew who has been doing the shooting?” I said.
“For mutual profit?” he said.
“I am told that Desmond is getting more into guns,” I said, “and that such an action might have angered you.”
“Angered me in what way?”
“Perhaps he beat you out of making a similar action.”
The old man waved a hand.
“Maybe there was a time when Desmond Burke beat me to things,” he said. “But not for a very long time.”
“He says you have hated him for a very long time,” I said. “Why is that?”
“We were both full of piss and vinegar once,” he said. There was a small smile. “When we could still piss.”
Spike made a brief snorting sound.
Antonioni nodded at the bartender, who came for his cup, went back over to the espresso machine behind the bar, refilled it, brought it back. Antonioni sipped and nodded. The bartender looked relieved, as if maybe that meant his family could live. Spike wasn’t looking at the other men now. He was looking at Antonioni, fascinated.
“If I thought the risk was worth the reward with guns,” Antonioni said, “that Iron Pipeline about which people speak would be running through me, and fuck Desmond Burke. But it does not.”
“Okay, let’s assume it’s not about guns,” I said. “Who out of Desmond’s past would shoot his son and kill his brother?”
“At last an easy question,” Albert Antonioni said. “Anybody Desmond ever fucked over.”
I started to say something, but he held up an old, veiny hand.
“We’re done here now,” he said.
“Evidently,” I said.
“You have obviously taken it upon yourself to find out who is doing this to Desmond and his family, and why.”
“I have,” I said.
Antonioni stood and nodded.
“Tough cookie,” he said.
“All due respect, sir?” Spike said. “You have no fucking idea.”
“One last thing, Miss Randall,” the old man said. “It is my experience that the Irish in Boston only forget grudges when they are dead.”
“Is that a suggestion?” I said.
“More of an observation,” he said. “The answers you seek are likely there, not here.”
He gave me a long look, with dark eyes suddenly full of light.
“By the way?” he said. “Brock Patton might have gotten elected, as much of a stunad as he is. As you have probably noticed, just about anybody can in this country.”
He and his men left the room first. They had all been his. Spike and I remained at the table until we were certain they were gone from the Old Canteen. When we were outside and walking back underneath the arch, Spike said, “Did Albert’s boys scare you as much as they did me?”
“Not as much as Albert does,” I said.
“Fuckin’ ay,” Spike said.
EIGHTEEN
RICHIE’S MOTHER HAD DIED in her thirties, from uterine cancer. Desmond had never remarried. If there had been women after his wife died, Richie knew nothing of it. Or it was just more of Desmond Burke’s secret life.
Felix had never married, despite what Richie said had always been an extremely active romantic life for his uncle until he just stopped giving a shit about women. According to Richie, the only meaningful and enduring relationship of Felix Burke’s adult life had been his marriage to the family business. Felix now lived in a condominium at the marina in Charlestown, Charlestown being the second-oldest neighborhood in Boston, and more Irish than St. Patrick’s Day. But it had become gentrified over time. The city had not only expanded the residential life of the marina, it had developed the Navy Yard as well.
As much as Charlestown always had been, and always would be, associated with the Bunker Hill Monument, there were so many lovely parts of it, located as it was on the banks of Boston Harbor and the Mystic River. So it was both a historic Boston address and a fashionable one these days, particularly if your address was on the water. I remember how surprised Richie had been when he’d learned Felix was moving out of the home he had lived in for forty years to a newer and much trendier one.
“Next he’s going to get an electric-powered car,” Richie said.
That morning Felix had met Desmond, as always, for seven-o’clock Mass at St. Frances de Sales Church on Bunker Hill Street, before they would have breakfast at the Grasshopper Café, on the same street. Desmond and Felix each had two bodyguards with them, as they had since Richie was shot.
And sometime after the black Lincoln with Felix and his men inside had left for church, someone had walked up to Felix Burke’s condominium on the water side and blown out the ground-floor windows with a shotgun. No one saw who did it. There was the thought that he might even have come by small boat. All the neighbors heard the blast, muted slightly by the loud wind and rain that was blowing off the water at the time.
When those with the same view as Felix’s looked out their own windows to see what had caused the commotion, all they saw was the water.
* * *
—
RICHIE WAS THE ONE who called me, saying over the phone, “You would’ve found out. And I wouldn’t have been able to keep you away.”
I told him I would meet him there, which I did forty-five minutes later. There were two police cruisers at the end of Felix’s block. Another, lights flashing, was directly in front of the condominium. There were onlookers in the street, even in the rain, the crowd of them roped off by cops. Richie was waiting for me near the entrance to his uncle’s place. By then the cops knew he was Felix Burke’s nephew, and let us both pass. Richie didn’t even take me inside, just walked me around to the back.
Desmond and Felix were both there, both wearing tan, half-raincoats and the same kind of scally caps I imagined them wearing on the boat that brought them to America in the first place.
Frank Belson was with them. No one had died, but Felix was a Burke and his brother had already been shot dead this week, after Richie had been shot in the back. What had happened here was a part of all that, clearly. But the randomness of it all, I thought, continued. Richie had been wounded. Peter had been murdered. Now it was only a residence that had been hit. Felix’s residence.
Belson, as he often did and without greeting or salutation, made it sound as if we were halfway into a conversation when I went walking over to him.
“Shotguns are good,” he said, “even though you have to get close to do any good damage with them. Usually no rifling or markings that can be traced or give you anything consistent enough for a match. Maybe my guys will find something we can trace back to a manufacturer. But it won’t do shit.”
“Another warning shot,” I said.
“More than one, from the looks of the place,” Belson said.
He took a small cigar out of the corner of his mouth, both he and it oblivious to the rain. Or perhaps impervious.
“Somebody,” Belson said, “wanted to make a big, loud fucking statement to get somebody’s attention. As if they didn’t have it already.”
Felix had come up next to me, like a ghost appearing.
“They wanted me to know that they could come to my house,” Felix said. “They wanted me to know and my brother to know.”
Belson said, “You saw nothing before you and your men left for church?”
“Marty and Padraig take shifts in the night,” he said. “A way to make sure the perimeter is secure. But once it’s time to leave for Mass, they just walk me out and into the car.”
Belson nodded. At the same time he was focused on what Felix was telling him he was taking in everything around him, even the water in the distance.
He turned to me.
“Drip, drip, drip,” he said.
“I am assuming,” I said, “that is not an assessment of the current weather.”
“You miss nothing,” he said.
He walked over to Desmond Burke. I walked with him. The rain came harder. I tried not to imagine what my hair looked like.
“I am going to ask you again if there is anything you wish to tell me, Desmond,” Belson said. I had seen this before with him. Nothing about his posture or tone had changed, and yet it had become more aggressive anyway. “For fuck’s sake, is there anything that you know and I do not that might help me put an end to this?”
Desmond looked at him, his face impassive. I knew he wasn’t used to people talking to him this way. But Frank Belson had because he could and Desmond knew that he could, whether he liked it or not. It was as if all the animosity that had always existed between Boston cops and the Burkes was now in the air between these two men, even in a moment like this, when their interests should have been aligned.
“If I knew,” Desmond Burke said, in a voice that seemed to be made of razor blades, “I would have already ended this myself. For fuck’s sake.”
Felix was behind him. I saw him reach into the pocket of his khaki pants, the parts of them below the knee not covered by his coat splotched with rain.
He came out with his phone, brought it closer to his face, squinted as he stared at it. Then he wordlessly handed it to his brother.
Then Desmond handed it to Richie.
I looked at the text message on the screen as he did.
“Ask Desmond,” it said, “how he likes it when it’s ones he loves.”
Belson reached over, without asking, took the phone from Richie, read the text himself, put the phone in the pocket of his raincoat, and told Felix he would return it after his people looked at it.
“Probably came from a burner,” he said.
“The way to bet,” I said.
“Gotta check anyway.”
Belson turned to Desmond again.
“You got any idea what that means?” he said.
Desmond’s answer was to simply walk away from Frank Belson and the rest of us toward the water.
“He seems to be having some difficulty processing the fact that we are on the same side here,” Belson said.
“Gee,” I said, “you think?”
NINETEEN
TALKING TO DESMOND Burke and Tony Marcus and Albert Antonioni,” my father said, “seems to be working out splendidly for you. The only people who haven’t been shot at so far this week are riding Duck Boats.”
“You left out Vinnie Morris,” I said.
“He is a separate category,” Phil Randall said. “Vinnie falls on the right side of things more often than not, despite some of the crum-bums for whom he has worked in the past. In addition to being a very natty dresser.”
“‘Crum-bums’?” I said.
“It’s an expression older and nattier dressers like myself still use,” he said.
We were in my living room having coffee that I had made with a Keurig that I’d owned for a month but was just learning to operate properly, having finally figured out when to close the lid. My father was wearing a gray V-neck sweater over a Tattersall shirt, underneath a navy blazer. His gray pants were pressed and cuffed. Black tasseled loafers. Argyle socks. There was the faint whiff in the room of the sandalwood cologne he had been wearing for as long as I had been alive. I called it the dad scent.
It was the morning after someone shot up Felix Burke’s condo. My father had stopped at the Flour Bakery and Café on Dalton Street, down near the Hynes Convention Center, for cranberry-orange scones.
As far as I could determine, he was giving Rosie a bite for every one he took. There was no point in telling him to stop, it was like trying to stop the ocean when the two of them were together.
“Where’s my sainted mother this morning?” I said.
“Don’t try to change the subject,” he said. “But since you asked, it is her turn to host her bridge group.”
My mother, who was resistant to just about everything new except chin tucks, had shocked us all recently by announcing that she was going to learn how to play bridge. My father, who had always been a wonderful bridge player, now lived in fear that she would eventually ask him to partner with her in a separate couples group. This from a man who wasn’t afraid of ISIS.
“How’s that working out for her?” I said.
He sighed and sipped some of his coffee. “Bridge too far,” he said.
I giggled.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Laugh.”
Then he said, “You still haven’t told me about your meeting with Albert.”
We were supposed to have had coffee yesterday, until the shooting in Charlestown. I told him now. I told him about the Old Canteen and Albert suggesting that if this were an ancient grudge, it might be an Irish one.
“An Italian saying that,” he said, grinning. “Old boy’s got balls on him still.”
“This whole thing,” I said, “has become a mishegoss.”
He smiled. It always made his face young.
“I’m not sure I remember that particular expression from our old
country,” he said.
“My therapist is Jewish,” I said.
My father fed Rosie again, saw me watch him do it, winked.
“I’m going to tell you things I know you’ve already thought about, and Belson has thought about, and I’ve thought about,” he said. “The guy could have killed Richie, didn’t. Then he only murders some windows and furniture at Felix’s. But he does murder Peter in between.”
“Peter wasn’t as close to Desmond as Richie and Felix are,” I said.
“But them he spares.”
“Makes no sense,” I said. “But then little about this does.”
“Richie would prefer you stay out of it,” my father said.
“But he knows I can take care of myself, Daddy,” I said. “I actually think there’s a part of him that doesn’t want me poking around in his father’s past. Like even now, even though he’s all grown up, he doesn’t want to know what he doesn’t want to know about Desmond.”
“Desmond and Felix,” my father said, shaking his head. “Still acting like knockaround guys even when they should be sitting on the front porch at a retirement community.”
“Old men operating off all the old codes,” I said.
“You still don’t want to piss off any of them,” he said.
“May have already,” I said.
“Desmond loves Richie,” he said. “Richie loves you. These are immutable facts, and will always count for something.”
“You sound like a Jewish therapist,” I said.
“Imagine that,” he said. “An old flatfoot like myself.”
“All we know for sure is that someone is slowly squeezing Desmond,” I said.
“What does that text message to Felix really mean?” Phil Randall said.
“Perhaps just another way of talking about sins of the father,” I said. “Even though Felix is Desmond’s brother.”
“Maybe Albert Antonioni is right about the Irish,” he said. “Maybe this is something whose reach makes it all the way back to Winter Hill.”
“I’ve got it!” I said, slapping my thigh. “I’ll just call Whitey Bulger and ask him.”