None of them saw Mulcahy as he shuffled out of the house and walked to the middle of the sidewalk and faced the building where he lived and hollered at the blackened windows, “Hey, Patsy, open the fuckin’ door, you dummy. I ain’t got no key. Patsy, open the fuckin’ door or I’ll kill ya.”
There was a sliding sound, a pale face appeared at a window, the voice was thin and frightened. “Timmy, come back tomorrow. Ya can’t come in tonight; ya been away so long and ya scared me just now. Come back in the mornin’ when you ain’t drunk, Timmy. Me and the kids’re sick; ya can’t come in tonight.” The window closed and Mulcahy lurched toward the house, then back.
He stood, shook his fist in the air at his wife, barricaded with their children against the rage with which he always returned from a drinking bout.
He cried out obscenities and threats, circled uncertainly, then headed up the street. Brian dropped the cigarette, stepped on it, shoved his hands in his pants pockets and followed Timmy Mulcahy at a safe distance.
Mulcahy stopped at a corner bar two blocks away, pounded with heavy fists at the closed door. He ripped a sign off the door and held it toward the streetlamp. “Closed due to death in family” the handprinted message explained. Mulcahy ripped the cardboard sign into several pieces, dropped the debris onto the sidewalk into a puddle of rain water. Brian hunched against a renewed onslaught of rain and walked close beside the line of parked cars as Mulcahy picked up speed toward a new destination.
It was a dank, tiny bar on Fordham Road and Third Avenue, empty except for an elderly couple who sipped beer wordlessly in one of the two booths and the beefy, bare-armed bartender who glanced at his wristwatch when Mulcahy entered. Brian watched from outside as Mulcahy swallowed a shot, followed by beer, which he guzzled, and reordered. After thirty minutes, the elderly couple emerged, walked stiff-legged and in matched slow stride, silently beneath the Third Avenue el. Then Mulcahy came out onto the black wet street and staggered up the hill of Fordham Road.
It was nearly 1 A.M. All the stores were closed; no loiterers or strollers were tempted by the cold, wet autumn night.
The terrible, building, anguished fury, held tightly within the deliberate coldness with which he regarded Mulcahy, nearly choked Brian. He knew he was going to get Mulcahy now, on this broad deserted street.
Mulcahy missed his footing, slipped on a paper bag, fell, his face hitting the sidewalk. He got to his feet, cursed, kicked at the paper bag, looked up toward the sky, seemed finally to realize that it was raining. He pulled his soaking jacket tightly around him, carefully turned his collar up, then sought some protection in the deep-recessed entrance to a shoe store. He leaned against the showcase of women’s shoes for a moment, then moved out of the entranceway and stopped in front of a jewelry store.
The window of the jewelry store glittered with the reflected light of the streetlamp. Small diamond rings glowed and sparkled. Wrist-watches took on luster from the gleaming raindrops which ran slowly in long slender rivulets down the length of the window. Mulcahy balanced with his fingers pressed heavily against the window, stared unseeing at the merchandise displayed before him.
“Turn around, Mulcahy,” Brian said hoarsely.
“Huh?”
Stupidly, slowly, face thrust forward, eyes narrowed to pierce the dark, Mulcahy turned. “Yeah? Who’s that?”
He wasn’t as tall as Brian but he was heavier, in the chest and shoulders, through his massive arms and muscled legs. Timmy Mulcahy, twenty-four, father of cretins, ex-amateur light heavyweight, dock-walloper, raper of little girls. It overwhelmed Brian for one shattering moment: the breathing, grunting, stinking physicality of the man.
He delivered the first essential blow swiftly. He hadn’t realized how huge Mulcahy was, and in the first breathless instant of confrontation, a cold, clear terror of reality sent Brian’s knee to Mulcahy’s unprotected and unprepared groin.
The rest was professional and methodical. Brian felt the leather covering of his blackjack grow damp in the palm of his hand as he delivered butt-end blows to Mulcahy’s face and throat.
Mulcahy moved heavily, hunched to protect himself, but Brian kicked his head hard enough to flatten Mulcahy to his back.
“You bastard, you bastard, you dirty fucking bastard,” Brian whispered over and over again. “I want to kill you, you dirty fucking bastard.”
Mulcahy peered at him through swollen lids, shook his head from side to side as though trying to clear it. Unable to defend himself, taken too swiftly and without warning, he absorbed the battering without comprehension.
Who the hell is this guy anyways?
Mulcahy’s torn and bloody mouth formed some words and finally Brian heard him say, “A mistake, mister; you’re making some mistake. Hey, a mistake, a mistake.”
“Yeah, a mistake, Mulcahy. You made a mistake you’re not gonna forget for the rest of your life.”
Mulcahy’s head fell heavily to the sidewalk, unconscious.
Brian, breathing in short, quick, unsatisfying gasps, looked up and down both sides of the street. No one. Silence. Just rain and some wind and his own breathing and some groaning from Mulcahy. He felt a sudden empty hollowness.
It wasn’t enough. Beating Mulcahy wasn’t enough. He could kill him, right here, right now, but that wouldn’t be enough. He wanted to shake Mulcahy conscious, stand him up, start again.
Brian pressed his forehead against the cool wet window and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, his eyes fastened on the small twinkling diamond rings, a display box, right down in the front of the window, with unreadable little price tags attached to each ring.
It came to him full-blown, and as the plan came, he acted on it immediately and without hesitation.
With the butt end of his jack, Brian smashed the jeweler’s window three times, four times before the glass cracked and shattered into the display case. Carefully, he reached in, grabbed rings and watches indiscriminately, turned and jammed them into Mulcahy’s jacket pocket. He reached for a little jeweled music box, small enough to fit the palm of his hand, and he shoved that into Mulcahy’s pocket.
He dragged Mulcahy, dead weight, comatose, halfway to his feet and shoved his right arm along the broken glass edge of the window. Blood burst through Mulcahy’s torn wrist and smeared the satin lining on which the jewelry rested inside the window. He forced a few gold rings inside Mulcahy’s fist, then let him fall back to the sidewalk.
Brian dug in his back pocket and found his throwaway: the .32, caliber gun he had acquired on advice of his uncles.
Listen, kid, you never know when the hell you’ll find yourself in a situation that calls for some quick protective thinking. If you damage some bastard, always make sure he has a weapon on him.
He carefully wiped the gun with his handkerchief, then forced it into Mulcahy’s hand, then dropped it inside the jeweler’s window: the butt of the gun had served as Mulcahy’s burglar tool. Then Brian turned and walked quickly away without turning back.
Two blocks away, Brian walked over to a small green police call box, opened it, picked up the receiver and in a low muffled voice he said very quickly, “Hey, listen, there’s some man and he’s robbing the window of Fox’s Jewelry Store on Fordham Road and Webster Avenue. Yeah, he’s there right now. I just went past him on the other side of the street. And hey, listen, the guy’s got a gun.”
He hung up without waiting for the inevitable questions, closed the little metal door, walked across Fordham Road and down to the Valentine Theater, where he waited and watched as the patrol car pulled up three minutes later.
He knew just how they felt, the patrolmen, as they leaped from the patrol car, guns drawn, flashlights picking out the scene. He knew how tense and excited and ready they were.
“Holy Christ,” the patrolman closest to Mulcahy said, “the guy musta fallen through the window. He’s all cut up. Better call an ambulance, Frank. Hold it a minute till I get the bum’s gun.”
Brian moved silently,
unseen, along the wet street, up to the Grand Concourse, where he turned left and headed directly into the rain and toward home.
They never mentioned it among them. His mother’s mouth tightened, her face went pale when she read about Timmy Mulcahy’s arrest in the Bronx Home News, and later when she read that he had been sentenced to fifteen years in prison for armed robbery, she said nothing but Brian noticed a strange, unfamiliar hard glow in her eyes.
Kit was quiet and seemed thoughtful and withdrawn and she developed an odd hesitation when she spoke, not quite a stutter but a pause between words. One Saturday, Brian heard his mother tell Kit to go out and play and he heard his sister’s response, slow and tortured and not like Kit at all.
There was a sudden explosion of sound and Brian lay still on his back, unable to believe it was his mother’s voice.
“Now, you listen to me, Katherine O’Malley, I’ve put up with your silences and your whispers and your tripping on your tongue all I’m going to. I’ll shake your head off your shoulders and take the strap to you myself if you don’t quit this moping around and mooning over yourself. Now take yourself up to the schoolyard and take your basketball and go find Bobby Kelly. The poor lad must think you’ve lost your sense you’ve neglected him so.” There was a softening in the harsh voice, just slightly, “Go on now, Kit. I’m telling you that you must!”
Kit ran through the house, slammed out the door. He heard the basketball bounce as she ran, then he heard Kit’s voice call out, “Hey, Bobby. Hey, Bobby, wait up, will ya?”
In the silence that followed, Brian heard a gasp, a great swallowing sound, as though his mother had held her hands over her mouth not quite in time. Then he heard the soft sounds of her prayer and he leaned back in bed to wait until she returned to the kitchen.
THIRTY
HE HADN’T SEEN ARTHUR Pollack for a long time and his first impression was that Arthur was lost inside his uniform. The coat was too long at hem and sleeve; the visor of his cap practically covered his forehead and the earflaps obscured most of his neck. Arthur enthusiastically offered Brian half of a mittened hand.
“Hey, Brian, gee, kid. Gee, it’s great to see you.”
Actually, it seemed that Arthur was having difficulty in seeing anything. He wore small, round steel-rimmed tinted glasses which steamed over as soon as he came into the heated storeroom. Arthur shrugged and his narrow body shivered inside the large coat.
“God, it’s cold out there. I don’t know how those crazy people can sit through these football games week after week.”
“We’ve got some hot coffee, Arthur. One of the guys keeps a hot plate here. Jesus, you look like you need a bucket of hot coffee.”
When Brian handed him a mug of coffee, he felt a surprising warmth of affection for his friend. He shook his head good-naturedly. “Gimme your coat; I’ll put it over here with mine. My God, what have you got, five sweaters?”
Arthur held up his fingers. “Three, plus long underwear. I am not what you’d call a fan of winter.” He wrapped his hands around the mug and smiled up at Brian. “So. Well, Brian, kid, how are you doing?”
The small gray eyes, one turned in slightly, searched his face candidly and Brian recalled the last time they had met and he remembered vividly, painfully, but now somewhat sadly and wistfully, Rita Wasinski.
It was a funny thing. They hadn’t seen each other in more than six months yet Brian felt the exchange, unspoken, between them. He had learned what Arthur had known all along. You live with what you have to live with; time heals; things work out. Wordlessly, Arthur was asking him : Wasn’t I right, kid?
Brian smiled, nodded, just the way Arthur had nodded to him. It was a peculiar thing. When he was around Arthur, some essence of Arthur, his mannerisms, his method of communicating, flowed into Brian. While not consciously imitating Arthur, Brian found himself adopting his gestures, his nuances. This seemed to relieve him of the necessity of too many words.
“Things are good, Art. Hey, what’s with the glasses? I never saw you with glasses before.”
Arthur’s hand went up and he touched the frame lightly with his fingertips. “I had some kind of infection in my eyes for a few weeks so I got to wear these tinted glasses for a while. They’re actually just windowpanes. You know, Brian, I don’t know why everybody is surprised when they hear I got 20-20 vision. Even the eye doctor I went to was surprised. I don’t know why.”
There was a deep rolling sound rising upward toward the little room where they were. The floorboards rumbled as one team or the other made a good play. Arthur turned toward the door and shrugged.
“Now if it was baseball and it was the Dodgers and the Giants, then, I’m interested. Football? Forget it. So, Brian, how come you’re up in my precinct? Isn’t the Polo Grounds a little far afield for a Clinton Street man?”
Brian shrugged without answering. He’d had a lot of good assignments that Arthur knew nothing about; he’d seen prize fights, the rodeo, the President of the United States, a few movie stars up close.
They exchanged a few bits of gossip about mutual acquaintances, bantered back and forth good-naturedly, then Arthur said, “Well, Brian, I guess you don’t know, but I’m getting married.”
For one sharp breath-catching instant, Rita Wasinski’s face, pale, startled, frightened, flashed through his mind and kept the words of congratulations from getting any farther than his throat. He knew that Arthur had seen the hardly discernible hesitation.
“I’m one hell of a lucky guy, too, I’ll tell you,” Arthur said smoothly. “Naomi is a schoolteacher and she comes from a complete, large family, the whole works: father, mother, one sister, one brother and even a grandmother. She accuses me of proposing because I want a ready-made family.” He reached out, tapped Brian’s shoulder and winked. “When you meet her, don’t tell her she’s right!”
Brian shook Arthur’s hand and spoke in a rush of words, all the right things he was supposed to say. He spoke warmly and quickly, as though he owed Arthur an apology for something he could not define.
Surprisingly, he found himself speaking about Mary Ellen Crowley, and as he spoke about her, she became more real than she seemed at times when he was with her.
Arthur studied him carefully, tilted his head to one side and smiled warmly. “Brian, that’s great. Really great. I knew there had to be a reason for you to look so good.” Arthur straightened up and thrust his head back. “You notice the change in me? Everybody says I look great and that I must be in love!”
“Arthur, you’re beautiful. Really, buddy, I hardly knew you.”
“So, when are you setting the date, kid?”
“Hell, I’m in no position yet, Arthur. I still got my kid sister and brothers, you know. Family.” Unexpectedly, he added, “But I’m pretty sure she’s gonna be the one.”
He’d never said that before to anyone, never really thought much about it, but as he said the words, he knew them for fact. He’d marry Mary Ellen Crowley sometime, in the future. That was as definite as if it had been decided so long ago he couldn’t remember the exact time or place.
A guy named Walsh, big, red-faced, twice as wide as Arthur Pollack, shoved the door open and the room filled with a cold blast of air.
“Shit,” Walsh said, “it’s almost as cold in here. Some goddamn place they give us for a relief.”
“There’s some coffee,” Arthur offered.
“Shit, that ain’t gonna warm me up.” He moved clumsily, dug inside his bulky blue-serge coat, came up with a flat canteen. He unscrewed the cap, took a deep swallow, sighed with appreciation, then offered the others a swallow.
“Thanks, but I’ve got a look coming from my sergeant in about ten minutes,” Brian said.
Walsh opened his tight collar, took off his hat, rubbed a large raw hand over his short red hair and squinted at Brian. He made a deep throat sound which was not quite a laugh. “Shit, no sergeant’s gonna go worryin’ about what’s on your breath, O’Malley. Who you kiddin’?”
&nb
sp; Brian’s eyes glazed and Arthur saw his mouth tighten and his head come up slightly. “I’m not kidding anybody, friend,” he said. “There’s nobody around worth kidding.”
Walsh considered this for a moment, examined it and decided it was not worth bothering with. He scanned the small room and grumbled at the lack of comfort. “Well,” he conceded, “at least they got a radio. I wonder if the fucking thing works.”
He twisted the knob, then adjusted the tuner. There was some heavy static until Walsh zeroed in on the station he sought. The familiar laugh and narrow metallic voice filled the small room: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? (laugh”) The Shadow knows! (laugh-laugh-laugh)...
“For Christ’s sake, Walsh, you gonna listen to that?”
Walsh puffed his stub of a cigar to life and ignored Brian.
Arthur stretched and flexed his thin arms, ready to do battle with his heavy uniform overcoat. He eyed it sadly. “I wish this was as warm as it is heavy,” he said. He seemed to sink an inch or two under its weight. He jotted down his schedule for the next few weeks and handed the scrap of paper to Brian. “Let’s get together, kid, maybe with our girls, maybe a little restaurant hopping, huh? Or maybe just the two of us for a drink or something, okay?”
Walsh abruptly turned the volume of the radio up.
Arthur took the hint and said, “I better get back on post.”
Brian buttoned his coat. “Wait, I’ll go with you. I’m on meal relief. Gotta see if I can catch a hot dog before my time is up.”
“Don’t eat the hot dogs here, Brian,” Arthur advised. “Did I ever tell you about the time I worked for a hot-dog company? Well, it was the company that sells to the stadium and—”
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