I sat in one of the two chairs in the lobby while he got on the phone. Less than a minute later a man about my height but much thicker in the trunk came out of the elevator to meet me. He was in his fifties, hard-looking, with ash-gray hair and a face that showed he had spent time in the ring when he was younger. He carried a clipboard in his left hand, and didn’t bother introducing himself or offering his free hand. Instead he told me I was late, that I was supposed to be there at seven-thirty.
“I was told eight.”
He stared at the clipboard before glancing back at me for as much as two seconds, his eyes darting back to his clipboard. “First day you’re supposed to be here at seven-thirty,” he said, repeating himself. “According to this, you know how to clean bathrooms, empty trash cans, and use a vacuum cleaner. That true?”
In my old days I would’ve answered him differently than I did, but those days were done with and whoever I was back then had been replaced by an old man. I told him it was true.
“Here’s the deal,” he said, his eyes fixed on his clipboard, almost as if he were afraid of catching another glimpse of me. “First three months you’re on probation. You miss work, you’re late or don’t do a good enough job, you’ll be fired, no notice, no nothing. Understand?”
“Yeah.”
He nodded, more to himself than to me. “I got paperwork for you to fill out. Afterwards I’ll show you where the supplies are kept and what you need to do. Okay?”
“Sure.” I hesitated for a moment, then asked him if he knew who I was. That caught him by surprise. He nodded, muttered uncomfortably that he did.
“Then why d’you hire me?”
Again, he was caught off guard. He showed a befuddled look while stumbling about for a moment, then asked me if I was planning to kill any more people.
“No.”
“Then if you can do the job, why shouldn’t I hire you?” He seemed relieved to have come up with that answer and he looked at me for a brief second, a thin smile having cracked his face. “I live by the rule that people deserve a second chance,” he muttered under his breath as if he were embarrassed by expressing these sentiments. With that, he turned from me expecting me to follow him, which I did. Instead of using the elevator, this time he took the stairs. I guess he figured he didn’t want to be confined in a small elevator with me.
After filling out the paperwork that he gave me, I followed him on a quick ten-minute tour of the building where he showed me the supply closet, the dumpster out behind the building, and each of the nine offices I’d be cleaning, as well as the shared bathrooms on each floor. At no time did he bother offering me his name, nor did I bother asking him for it. He seemed too uncomfortable with me for me to engage him in any conversation, and was clearly trying to rush things along and be done with an especially unpleasant task. When he was finished with the tour he told me that the tenants were usually out of their offices by six each evening so there was little chance I’d run into any of them.
“If they’re still working when you show up, skip their office and try again later,” he added gruffly. He handed me a set of keys, each one marked to indicate which door it was for. “When you’re done each night, check the keys in with the night guard. When you report to work pick up the keys from him also.”
He hesitated for a moment before telling me that he usually left by seven each night so I probably wouldn’t be seeing him again, at least not unless he needed to fire me. His stare drifted past me, as if he were looking for an escape route. He asked if I had any additional questions in a way which indicated that he hoped I didn’t, so I told him I didn’t, and he wasted no time in leaving. I gave him a head start so it wouldn’t look like I was following him, then I headed back to the first floor and the supply closet located there.
I took the cart out and loaded it with a bucket, mop and cleaners, figuring I’d do the bathrooms first while I still had the energy for it. I had a second wind after conking out earlier, but there was no telling how long that would last, especially given all the recent changes in the routine that I’d settled into over the last fourteen years.
I worked methodically; first cleaning the sinks, then toilets, then mopping the floors. While I did this I couldn’t help noticing how quiet it was. In prison I’d kept to myself and seldom talked with anyone, but there was always a buzz around me, always other inmates nearby, and I always had to be conscious of the threat that they posed. In a way that was good – it kept my mind occupied. It was only during those early morning hours when I’d be stuck alone with my thoughts. Early on when I had my reading light I could escape those hours with books, and later after I had to sell my light there’d still be enough noises coming from the cellblock to distract me – an inmate crying out in his sleep, threats being made, other sounds caused by God knows what. This was different. The only two people in the building were me and the kid playing security guard by the front door. The only noise breaking the quiet was what I made while I worked. I was going to have to buy a radio or portable compact disc player or something, because otherwise I didn’t think I’d be able to bear the quiet.
I needed to distract myself from the memories that were pushing through the silence, and I forced myself instead to think of my pop, to remember what he was like and how he would react if he were alive now to see me cleaning bathrooms. It had been a long time since I’d thought of him, but I knew he’d be happy to see me at a real job and I knew what he’d tell me: “Nothing wrong with an honest day’s work, son.”
My pop was only forty-three when he died of a heart attack. I was fifteen at the time. From what I could remember he was a gentle, soft-spoken man, and later my mom and others would tell me how he’d worked hard every day of his life. Honest work, too. Him and my Uncle Lou built houses all up and down Blue Hill Avenue. Neither of them ever made much money from it, several times getting ripped off enough by contractors to keep them buried in a financial hole, but I couldn’t remember either of them ever complaining about it. My Uncle Lou died young also. I think he was only forty-six when he bought it, and it was only a couple of years after my pop. Something about his lungs.
The last couple of years of my pop’s life there would be such an overwhelming sadness in his eyes when he’d look at me. By the time I was thirteen I was all he and my mom had left with my brother Tony being killed in Vietnam and my brother Jim dying only a few months afterwards in a stupid accident during a summer job – being pushed out a window while moving furniture. I knew I was a disappointment to him with the little interest I showed in school and all the fights I kept getting into and the petty thefts and other little crimes. As far as the fights went, what the fuck did he expect? We were living in a blue-collar Catholic neighborhood, and my mom was Jewish, which as far as the other neighborhood kids were concerned meant I was Jewish, even if I was going to church every Sunday. Ever since I was five I was having kids lining up to challenge me to fights, claiming that I killed our Lord. I wasn’t going to take that shit.
I don’t know how Tony and Jim ignored that crap when they were kids, but I sure as fuck wasn’t going to. Although I was small for my age, I was ruthless when I fought and went at it like a tornado being released. By the time I was fourteen I had enough strength where I could do some serious damage, as Tommy McClaughlin found out. It was brutal what I did to him – knocked unconscious, his jaw, cheekbones and skull all fractured, his face not much better than raw hamburger meat. I almost went into the juvenile system for that, probably would’ve except Tommy McClaughlin’s old man refused to press charges. He wanted his kid to be able to have another go at me when he recovered. After all, it was embarrassing for him with his kid forty pounds heavier than me, and me being practically a Jew. We never did have that rematch. When Tommy healed up, he kept away from me. He knew what I was capable of, as did the other kids in the neighborhood. The last few months my pop was still alive I rarely got into fights, and when I did it was only with kids outside the neighborhood who didn’t know any better,
and none of them ever fared much better than Tommy did. By this time I was more careful to make sure there weren’t any witnesses. I didn’t want to see that horror in my pop’s eyes again like I did that time when he was brought to the police station after Tommy.
I remember it was a week before he died when my pop took me out to dinner alone at a fancy steak house. He wanted to have a heart-to-heart with me, to impress on me the importance of an education and living a clean, honest life. I never much saw the point of being a wise ass, and tried to act as if I was buying what he was telling me. Maybe I convinced him, but more likely he knew it was going in one ear and out the other. After all, he and my Uncle Lou turned out to be examples of what you got from that type of hard work and honest lifestyle – you were taken advantage of your whole life and then you dropped dead before fifty. And it wasn’t just them – my pop’s father also died young, as did all my pop’s uncles. I don’t think any of them made it into their fifties, but they all worked hard each day of their life as laborers up until the moment they died. Fuck, my brothers who followed the rules and tried to live cleanly didn’t even make it into their twenties.
In a lot of ways it didn’t make sense for me to give up Salvatore Lombard. With my family history I never expected to make it to forty-eight let alone sixty-two, so why make that deal?
I spent a lot of time thinking about it in prison. For years I tried to convince myself that I did it as payback for whoever it was inside of Lombard’s organization who gave me up to the Feds, especially since I had wanted to retire from that life and I’d let Lombard strong-arm me into running that business at the docks. Over time I realized that wasn’t the reason, as much as I wanted it to be. What was mostly behind my making that deal was that I needed a glimmer of hope, no matter how dim, of someday walking out of prison. I don’t think I could’ve managed inside without that. But that probably wasn’t the only reason; at that point in my life I needed to come clean with what I’d done. I don’t know, but I think that was behind what I did, at least at a subconscious level. But no matter how much I struggled over it, I could never be quite sure how much of a role that played in it, if any at all.
I had finished both bathrooms on the first floor and was pushing the cart towards the elevator when I realized I was mumbling under my breath, carrying on a one-sided conversation with my pop. Yeah, I was going to need a radio or something, otherwise this quiet would drive me nuts. Looking around sheepishly, I checked to see if the security guard was nearby and whether he could’ve overheard me. I didn’t see him, and I pushed the cart past the elevator until I spotted him sitting behind the same security desk he’d been at earlier. I doubt he had heard me, he seemed too engrossed in the paperback he was reading. When I started to push the cart back to the elevator, he looked up, startled, as if I had spooked him. Our eyes met for a brief moment before he glanced back towards his paperback, his round pink face turning flaccid. If it wasn’t clear enough earlier, it was clear then that the two of us were never going to have much of a conversation together while I worked there – he was terrified of me, and that wasn’t going to change.
I pushed the cleaning cart into the elevator and took it to the second floor and started on the bathrooms there. Once I was done with those I moved up to the third floor, and then after those were done, started emptying trash cans throughout the building, then vacuuming each office and the hallways.
I was finished by one o’clock. I had no better place to be, and besides, I was supposed to be working until two so I stayed holed up in the last office I had vacuumed. They had a plush leather sofa in their lobby that was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the cot I had waiting for me. A few times I almost drifted off, my eyelids heavy, but I stayed awake until two, and then trotted back to the front security desk and checked the keys in with the apple-cheeked youth working there. He didn’t say a word to me, nor me to him, and I knew that was the routine we had settled into, not that I should’ve expected much else.
Stepping outside I held my jacket collar tight against my throat, trying to seal off the cold. A wind was whipping about and I lowered my head against it. After half a block, I looked up, thinking that I had seen something out of the corner of my eye – a black sedan driving away with its headlights off. I must’ve imagined it because when I looked up the street was empty and the only noise I could hear was the wind. I stood staring bleary-eyed for a moment, then lowered my head again and quickened my pace.
chapter 7
1970
Carl Slagg’s a big fucker. Large ruddy face, barrel-chested, and a good sixty pounds heavier and a half-foot taller than I am. The two of us are in a dive in Charlestown, a walk-down bar off of Washington Street. It’s Saturday night and the place is packed with local toughs, sailors on leave, and chicks looking to drink free and maybe hook up for the night. I’m hoping Slagg doesn’t pick any of these girls up, but with the way he’s flashing his roll there’s a good chance of it, especially given how shitfaced he is. There are some tough broads in the crowd, and I’m sure a few of them have already given some thought to trying to take that roll off him. It would be unfortunate if that happens. This is my first official hit for DiGrassi and I’m hoping it goes down easy. If Slagg leaves with one of these girls I’ll have to take both of them out.
Slagg doesn’t know me, and the few times he’s glanced in my direction it’s been with alcohol-glazed eyes that weren’t paying much attention to anything. Word is that he ripped off a high-stakes poker game in Southie last Wednesday, walking away with twenty grand. Now he’s celebrating. I followed him into this dive three hours ago, almost took him out during one of his trips to the bathroom to return the Irish whiskey he’s been pouring down his throat, but I was told to take care of him outside the bar, so I’m waiting for him to leave.
DiGrassi didn’t tell me the reason for taking Slagg out, nor was I going to ask him, but it wasn’t too hard to figure out. I’d heard one of Lombard’s boys was in the poker game that got ripped off, that the next day Lombard sent one of his men to let Slagg know there was a contract on his head but for half the money taken from the game – ten grand – he could fix the contract and see that it went away. Slagg, the dumb fuck, had to tell the guy to go fuck himself.
Slagg is one boisterous son of a bitch. He’s slamming down shot after shot, all the while his voice booming through the bar as he argues Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins with anyone who’ll listen to him. Now it’s how without Bobby Orr the Bruins would still have won the Stanley Cup. Christ, the guy keeps proving over and over again that he’s too dumb to live.
His voice dies away. He wipes a thick hand across his mouth, his eyes intent on a blonde dye-job standing near him, and she’s eyeing him back. I’m sure she noticed his roll earlier.
He approaches her. His neck bends so his mouth is against her ear. She’s buying what he’s selling her, and I’m thinking how I’m going to be leaving two bodies later, but then Slagg goes too far. Whatever he tells her, it leaves her eyes like hard stones and her mouth showing hurt. He tries to physically move her from her barstool, but then a group of sailors standing nearby come to her rescue. It’s four against one and I’m waiting for the first punch to be thrown, but Slagg’s too fucking drunk and loses his train of thought and ends up stumbling away. He stops for a moment, then continues until he’s heading up the stairs and out of the bar. I leave through a back door, moving fast to catch up with him.
He makes things easy for me, the dumb fuck. After walking half a block, he turns down an alley. Sure enough he’s swaying a bit on his feet while he takes a leak in the alleyway. Watching him, it’s like he’s on a boat that’s listing badly from side to side.
I have a. 38 snub nose, but I see no reason to use it. Instead I take out a nine-inch stiletto blade and I have it in and out of his back before he ever realizes I’m behind him. He totters for a moment, then falls to his knees and pitches forwards, his face smacking against the brick wall before landing in the puddle he made. I know he�
��s dead, I know I pierced his heart. I bend over anyway to check, and while I’m checking I also take the roll out of his pocket. Sixty-three hundred bucks. A nice bonus for the night, although I’m going to have to cough a good part of it up to Vincent DiGrassi.
It’s three days later when I meet up with DiGrassi. We’re being careful at this point to keep my connection with him and Lombard hidden. For six months I’ve been on the books at a liquor store over on Lansing Street so it looks like I’m gainfully employed. DiGrassi eyes me carefully. He knows things went smoothly with the hit. No witnesses, no fuss, no problems. What he wants to know is how I’m taking the killing and he’s looking hard into my eyes to figure it out. There’s nothing in there for him to see. He asks me anyway how I’m feeling and I tell him I’m sleeping as well as ever and eating even better. He grunts, satisfied, and as he gets up I hand him an envelope. Inside is three grand. He arches an eyebrow, and I tell him it’s from the sixty-three hundred I took off Slagg. For a second I can see the calculating look in his eyes as he figures I should be handing over more than three grand – after all I’m being paid well for the hit, but the look fades and instead he nods and tells me he’ll be in touch when needed.
My first official hit. As smooth as silk. And an extra thirty-three hundred to boot. Overall I’m feeling pretty good.
chapter 8
present
I had a restless night of it where I slept at most in five-minute stretches. I think the combination of the dank mustiness of the room and the smell of the mattress kept waking me. By morning I was tired but also alert with little chance of getting any more sleep. My back was stiffer than usual, and it took a while to maneuver myself off the bed, and then to simply straighten myself to the point where I could stand normally. I decided then I was going to buy a new bed. I wasn’t going to be left with much once I bought the things I needed.
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