“I understand that part,” Ferris interrupts. “I just don’ know what’s got ya all spookt. Talk to me, eh? I’m just a guy.”
From a breast pocket Brosnan anxiously pulls out a small packet with the words Na Bocklish scrawled on the front. He taps it and quickly withdraws a black cigar and holds it between his teeth. He lights the end of it with a matchstick and drags hard. Then turns round, “Look out there.”
Ferris turns with him and looks out the window.
Brosnan holds his face close to the glass until he points toward the whitened Jay Street Railyard on the waterfront below. Beyond lay the poorer quarters from Bridge Street all the way to the old wall of the Navy Yard. Irishtown, his beat since 1888.
“There,” Brosnan points through the passing suspender cables and tower bases. “Out over the river, the white mornin’ moon in a bright blue sky. It’s back.”
“Back? They’re kinda common, ain’t they? What do ya mean back?”
A shudder pulses from the back of Brosnan’s hair down his spine, through his legs and back up. It hovers unsettled in his stomach as goose prickles pebble on his skin.
“I don’t give a fiddler’s fart if ye think me psychopathic,” Brosnan side-glances a woman with indigenous features and a child swaddled inside her alpaca poncho while speaking to Ferris. “Just don’t ever repeat what I tell ye, understand?”
“Yeah, ya know me for my word.”
A plume of smoke flitters above Brosnan as he stares down toward Irishtown, “I was but a wild child on the streets o’ North Dublin when the president o’ the Supreme Council o’ the Irish Republican Brotherhood, James Francis Xavier O’Brien himself, had raised funds in a recruitin’ measure. Fifty street urchins were sent to the west o’ Ireland for a summer. No more than a fledgling lad o’ seven years, was I. The year was 1871. So long ago an’ so strange, it may have been another life.
“Into the west, I’d gone. The only thing I knew o’ that lot was that they were bog savages an’ culchies, but what I found was that West Ireland was a portal to a feudal past where an agrarian way o’ life remained unchanged for centuries. Where the industrial revolution that had taken the world’s economy was but a rumor. Where cattle was still a form o’ currency an’ the countryside was a vast criss-crossin’ o’ Medieval boreens and stone fences stretched about the wild, windswept hills. Nought but hints o’ homes here and there. Vacant, roofless places pockmarked the landscape; a reminder o’ Ireland’s long-idlin’ tragedy. Battles that took place durin’ the Dark Ages still lingered on the lips o’ locals, an’ superstitions that could not survive an ever-changin’, enlightened world yet thrived out there still, rehashed by aged augurs an’ blind seers. It was out there I was first called a ‘Souper.’ A word derived from the times o’ great hunger, pauper’s graves an’ exodus. For in those days Catholics were offered soup if they gave up their faith.”
A horn blows up ahead as the train begins to descend the Manhattan Bridge toward the big city.
“To a barren farm I was sent, my only companion was an ashen-faced, field-hardened distant cousin eight years my elder. I began to adjust to the new surroundings an’ all seemed well. Until a shanachie appeared of a silent night to speak over a peat fire.
“The storyteller told o’ dead generations an’ cycles o’ Irish heroes who died for honor’s sake against horrific monsters who sought to change them. Transform them into ghouls an’ murderers. To turn the sick an’ the old, children even, into the monsters themselves. There are many ways to do so, the shanachie proclaimed. But when the storm comes and exposes them, an exchange happens. A life passes on, an’ a dead man comes back in his stead at dawn, when the veil between life and death is thinnest. The shanachie had shifted in his seat and found my eyes across the fire, ‘Awakened from death,’ he said to me. ‘The mornin’ moon looms on the monster’s shoulder. But so too death is due when life is wrought, an’ on an’ on together they ride the same path.’
“The stories had sent my head into a spin. In tears I vomited on my breeches, the only pair I owned. Raised among the rookeries an’ the clatter o’ urban Dublin life, the void o’ the west an’ the ghosts that haunted the survivors after the famine left me with grim visions o’ skeletal mobs solicitin’ alms. An’ in the candlelight shadows I saw a wraith with a baby’s face that visited my dreams for many years.”
“A wraith?” Patrolman Ferris’s voice is colored with doubt.
“That face,” the words from Brosnan’s lips make steam circles on the train window. “That face. It haunted my dreams an’ sometimes, if I listened close enough to the gusts that crawl up the Navy Street hill, I could hear the ol’ shanachie’s words like birds whistlin’ in the wind.
“But when my wife became pregnant, the fear came back to me. An’ the baby’s face reappeared in life form one terrible morn in the year o’ 1888, my first on the force. Its eyes stared up at me when I found it, yet the light in them had been extinguished. It’s little arm extended in my direction as if reaching. His little palm open for alms.”
Detective William Brosnan scans meekly along the faces in the sway of the train. Russian men with open shirts. Dark brown women with angry cat’s eyes. All with that same cruel New York stare.
Patrolman Ferris tilts his head toward Brosnan without looking, “What happened next?”
“T’was the Great Blizzard o’ 1888 when a tenement had collapsed in Irishtown from the wind an’ the weight o’ the snow. In the wreckage the child was bleedin’ from the skull an’ ears an’ even its open eyes. Limp-limbed an’ breathless, the poor creature was dead. But with my own child on the way, I was filled with the love an’ the compassion, so I ran it all the way to Long Island College Hospital in the drivin’ snow. But while I was out there, my wife had to be rushed to the hospital when she’d suddenly been struck with pain.”
Patrolman Ferris hums to show he is following along.
“We had our whole life ahead o’ us,” Brosnan’s chin quivers until he gathers himself and straightens his tunic until his voice sounds sedated and calm again. “While at the hospital I was notified that my wife died givin’ birth. Now I don’t know if ye’re a religious man, but I believe in the spirit o’ Christ an’ that he died an’ come back. He was summoned for a reason, Jaysus was. Destiny. An’ that pattern o’ destiny can be found in our lives as well. Always repeatin’ itself. The exchange o’ life for death happens everyday on this earth. It’s a fact. Someone lives, another passes on. But there are gods o’ death an’ despair out there too. Some call him the devil, others Mephistopheles, Satan, an archangel, Beelzebub an’ even the demiurge, whatever it is, that god often wins in our world, here between heaven and hell,” Brosnan looks hard at Ferris. “My love. My love had been taken. I’d fallen to the floor o’ the hospital an’ was howlin’ like a crazed man. But then a nurse came upon me an’ said that the baby I had pulled from the tenement wreckage had survived. That outta the horror o’ losin’ a life, another had been saved. The baby that’d haunted my dreams for so long had its own destiny, do ye see it now? Ye know what the name o’ that baby was? Do ye?”
Patrolman Ferris turns his head sideways.
“T’was Garret Barry. Garry Barry took life from my family back then when he was assuredly dead. I prayed for god to intervene so this curse or prophecy, as some in Irishtown call it, would never return for me. But now he’s back. Back from the dead again. The wraith is back.”
“So ya’re worried that—”
“Death is due when life is wrought,” Brosnan turns and grabs Patrolman Ferris’s arm. “If I don’t talk Wolcott outta releasin’ my son Daniel from his employ, he will be next. Or worse!” Wolcott’s eyes go wide as he strains the words through clenched teeth. “My Little Doe is pregnant.”
An Asterism
“So Pope Clement excommunicated Henry VIII for marryin’ Anne Boleyn, right?” explains the man behind the counter with the bloody apron. “Not long after that the Pope was poisoned to death by a mushroom. The
m Protestants even got their evil fingers in Rome’s doin’s. But Pope Clement got the last word, ya know what it was?”
Thos Carmody hides his face as he mumbles, “This doesn’t taste right?”
“What?”
“He was poisoned, right? An’ died?”
“Yeah, poisoned by a mushroom.”
“Famous last words. Anyhow it wasn’t Clement VII who excommunicated Henry VIII, so he couldn’t’ve got the last word. It was Paul III. If I was a nun I’d clap ya ears like they did me at St. Veronica’s.”
The cook stares open-mouthed with a hand on the counter next to a disheveled newspaper with a headline that reads:
Volstead & Anti-Salooners
Contemplate Dry Law
The White Wings and the Sanitary Department had worked all morning to shovel out the freight tracks and the sidewalks on the West Side of Manhattan. No one wants a day off these days, so the small business owners were out there right next to the city workers piling five and six-foot snow banks along the sidewalk ledge to make paths for possible customers.
Thos pushes at the kippered herring and the shad-roe omelet on his plate and looks out the window to the wet cobblestones of Laight Street a block from the Hudson River, then turns a cold leopard-like eye to the dirty-aproned man, “An’ why talk to me about poisonin’ food when I’m tryin’ to eat?”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah well, the thing about bein’ a well-meanin’ fool is that ya’re ignorant of it. An’ anyway, conspiracy theories are as likely as findin’ gold in a glitter mine.”
“Gee sorry, Thos.”
Ever since Thos had returned from the war, the taste for food had been lost to him. Avoiding it, he has grown weaker of late. But even when he forced himself to chew and swallow the copper and metallic-tasting items, he never felt nourished. It was as if he ate nothing. Weaker and weaker he has gotten since his discharge from the Army, though his mind is sharper than ever. A torture all its own.
Maybe the Army took my strength too, he pushes the plate away, and that is when Tanner Smith comes to mind.
Thos looks out the window for his informant, who is late. There will be much to learn about Tanner Smith through the informant.
There is no way to make peace with Tanner now. Back in 1916 allegiances were very different and Tanner had been hired by Dinny Meehan to kill Thos. But Tanner had parlayed it instead. He told Thos to go on the lam, then told Dinny he killed him. By saving Thos’s life Tanner wanted to be named Vice President of the ILA in return. An impossible, desperate demand.
Thos had always believed that to weaken your enemy you must turn his friends against him. And so Thos came back to Brooklyn and exposed Tanner’s lie to Dinny. That of course got Tanner banished from the White Hand. Tanner then vowed revenge, another desperate act, but by that time Thos turned the tables completely when he proved himself an ally of the Brooklyn gang by brokering a monumental deal where he got the Black Hand and White Hand to shake under the ILA’s banner. A masterful succession of chess moves performed by the fellow many on the westside of Manhattan call the Tenth Avenue Prodigy.
Like a hunter, Thos had already outmaneuvered his prey by taking the high ground.
Now I have to move in for the kill. Because if I don’t kill him, he’ll kill me.
All Thos’s thoughts seem to go back to Tanner Smith recently. The weaker he gets, the stronger his desire to murder him becomes.
But why? It’s as if I’m being driven by something, or someone else.
With Tanner under White Hand protection again, Thos turns his attention to another pressing need.
I only have one job, per the International Longshoreman’s Association: To keep ALL of Brooklyn’s waterfront loyal to the ILA.
But to do that Thos must choose between the two Irish factions: Dinny Meehan or Bill Lovett. Both demand he take their side, but he can only choose one.
Meehan had sent Vincent Maher as his emissary. A tactical move. Vincent had taken Thos on his very first murder. And the ability to murder is a good thing to have notched on your belt before a war. But a common thing in the 77th Infantry, which pulled from the Lower East Side and other parts of the city.
Yes, he and Vincent go back. And a killer like Thos Carmody never forgets his first. That fluttering feeling in the stomach. That sense of winning against death. Silverman was his name, Jonathan G. Wolcott’s follower. Silverman had begged Thos for his life and put up a hand in front of his face as if he could stop the bullet, but it went through the hand and into the brain.
Now Silverman’s soul resides inside me, Thos thinks.
The elation he felt in killing was better than sexual climax, and he had Vincent Maher to thank.
Brooklyn, Thos shakes his head. The biggest challenge of my life.
Manhattan is bad enough, but Brooklyn is like reasoning with rhinos. Even the weather is worse despite the proximity; you get on the train in Manhattan and there’s a bit of cloud cover, you get off in Brooklyn and it’s been raining two hours.
Bill Lovett is back one day and he kills Dinny Meehan’s cousin in north Red Hook and takes south Red Hook from the Italians to obliterate my peace deal, Thos laments with an elbow on the counter and a hand on his forehead. Now The White Hand is split in two, the Black Hand has a finger cut off and Wolcott and the Waterfront Assembly want to sever them all off at the wrist.
The rumors Thos had always heard that Dinny Meehan never sleeps makes a pound of sense when you see how hard it is to take a nap when the crown of Irishtown is on your head.
How do you get three hands to shake? Picking the right man to sit atop the Dock Loaders’ Club will be like milking a unicorn.
A motor car’s horn blows Thos Carmody out of his daydreaming. The Klaxon horn had wound up like some wounded animal in its last gasps, bleating in his ears. He glares over his upturned lapel through the diner’s front window at the man in the convertible Studebaker Big Six with the boater’s hat and the pencil mustache.
Even the cold won’t stop a guy from showin’ off his convertible.
The gold limousine with the whitewall tires had been waiting for the old industrial rail cars to round the snowy tracks in the street. But the train is stopped halfway into the brick freight station building of the Grocers Steam Sugar Refining Company because a side door had been left open in one of its cars, spilling thirty pound bags onto Laight street and blocking the roadway. The horn bleats and bleats as the man cusses the workers.
Thos wraps his hand round the coffee so the man with the bloody apron behind the counter doesn’t see it shaking. He sinks back into himself. Into his coat and his thoughts. Lowering the floppy cap to hide his war-wounded face.
The easiest thing to do is to have Lovett killed. But then all the men who follow Bill would rally behind Richie Lonergan. I’m not sure I can ever bet against Bill Lovett again. He’s already fooled me once when we warred together. Twice, and shame on me.
He brings the cup of weak coffee to the left side of his mouth and looks out the front window through the snow drifts from a cloaked face.
It was a Cricket Ball grenade that changed Thos Carmody forever. He never saw it. He woke up after multiple surgeries as if he was in another time and space. In another man’s body. Everything felt different. The grenade that sent him cart-wheeling through the air had exploded on his right side, shooting hot metal into him, leaving small bald spots in his head and, most noticeably, ripped open his lip which had been hastily sewn only after his more concerning wounds to the head, heart and major organs. It had turned a once handsome man into a grim stranger all too aware of himself when people glower at him.
When he awoke in a field hospital, he had surprised the surgeons. They had told him that during surgery to remove metal fragments from his body his heart stopped and he was pronounced dead. They placed a bloody sheet over him and the nursing staff moved on to the next patient. When the Graves Registration Unit came to take his body away, they were shocked to find his eyes open.
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“I died?” Thos had asked the field surgeons.
“You and that one over there,” the doctor turned and pointed at Bill Lovett a few beds down. “Weren’t you in the 77th too? He had gas poisoning, shot twice. He was left for dead miles behind the gap your infantry courageously held. You’re heroes, you know? How anyone survived what your companies were put through, the world will never understand. I’ve never seen anything like it. Dead men, walking. . . Chosen, you could say.”
Chosen? But why? For what?
The surgeons sewed him back together, but the nuns brought him back among the living. When he wanted to die, they gathered round him and told him he is marked for greatness. They touched his neck gently.
“You have an asterism,” Sister Alice told him. “A grouping of stars on your neck in the shape of the Big Dipper. You’ve been scarred for greatness. It’s god’s autograph on you. It has to be from god, it is formed around your jugular. Completely improbable. If one of them nicked your jugular, you would not be here with us. You have been reclaimed, now you must find out why. Look to god.”
Thos looks round the diner, It isn’t god who haunts me, it’s something else.
When he got back to New York he didn’t waste time wearing his Army uniform in the city. He threw away the crude sheepskin pelt as soon as he got a suitable replacement; Coal gray coat with a long lapel to hide his face, a tweed waistcoat, E. & W detachable linen collar and a starched white shirt with a narrow black tie over workman boots. The uniform of the longshoreman union rep. He didn’t want the attention of being a veteran. None of it.
Out the window, across the street at 79-101 Laight Street, his informant finally appears outside the refining factory he manages and stands between the freight tracks in the cobblestoned street. Thos leaves a half-crumpled dollar bill by the coffee cup and pushes the glass door open and walks between great hills of snow on the sidewalk.
“’Ow are yu Thos?” Says Frank Leighton in a thick East-end London cockney. “Yu know, I was readin’ the ova day about the lost battalion, the 77th Infantry. That was yu company, yeah? My god Thos, what ‘appened to yu face? Wounded, were yu?”
Divide the Dawn- Fight Page 14