“Hey,” I said, “what about those Russian guys in back?”
“They won’t be up for a while,” Benedict said. “We’ve got time.” He stepped away from the windows, walking around me so he could see out if he looked past me. I kinda wished he would look past me—it felt like he was giving me some kind of inspection with that unflinching, unblinking stare. I tried to stare back at him, but I lasted about half a second. I was seventeen years old, and this guy scared the hell out of me.
“You’re gonna be all right, Jimmy,” he said. “Your father, too.”
“Yeah, I know how that works,” I mumbled, staring at a spot on the floor between Benedict’s feet.
“I don’t think you do,” Benedict said. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.” I dragged my eyes back up to meet his and wished my heart would quiet the fuck down so I would be sure not to miss anything he said. I got the impression he was a man who didn’t like to repeat himself.
“You don’t know anything about how this works,” he continued, “but I’m going to tell you. We’re gonna look out for this neighborhood. We’re gonna look out for your father, especially. Nobody’s gonna mess with him again. We’re gonna do this little service free of charge.” He paused to make sure he had my complete attention. He did. “You’re going to learn a few things from me.”
I summoned the last shred of that old street-fighting courage I could find. “What if I don’t want to?” It was a dumb question, without even any real intent behind it. I was in, all the way in, already. Had been since he’d helped me off the floor, really, but it seemed like I oughta make an effort to let him know I wasn’t the kind of guy he could push around, while he was pushing me around.
“Frankie and I will get out of your hair and leave you in peace.”
Ha. That was pretty funny, I thought. They probably would, and in ten minutes or an hour a couple of very pissed-off Russian gentlemen would wake up and pick up where they’d left off. Or I could call the cops before then, which would be a hand-engraved invitation for an even worse shitstorm the day after said Russian gentlemen made bail.
Still, I hesitated. “Why me?”
Benedict didn’t even answer that question, just gave me a hard look that said I should quit being a fucking moron.
“How’d you find me?”
“Lots of hard work,” Benedict said. “But if I found you, others can too, just as soon as they take the trouble to look.” The implication was clear—these “others” would be much less friendly to me and mine.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m in.”
Benedict took off a glove, and we sealed the deal with a handshake, skin on skin.
“Now go on in and check on your father. Frankie and I will take care of the guys in back. I’ll be around to see you tomorrow.”
Chapter 2. Benedict
Benedict was waiting for me at the shop the next day. He said a few nice words to my old man, kissed Ma’s hand, and bought a few pounds of sausage. The whole time, my old man never looked up at him once.
I followed Benedict out. He got in the back of a black Cadillac that idled at the curb. I stood for a moment, looking down the street. Two-story buildings of dull red brick lined the street, many just apartments, others with little shops on the ground floor and apartments on top. Farther east, the apartment buildings turned into little cracker-box houses full of people I’d grown up with, lots of whom stopped by my old man’s shop every day. I could name everyone on the street, and they all knew who I was. I wondered what they’d think, seeing me get in a car like this.
I got in the car, and the driver pulled smoothly away.
We rode in silence, and I looked out the window with mounting unease. There are parts of Southie that are more or less safe, there are parts you wouldn’t want to take your girl after dark, and there are parts you wouldn’t want to go armed with eight or ten of your meanest buddies even in broad daylight. Looked to me like Benedict’s driver was taking us to one of the last category, which didn’t do much to make my gut stop squirming. I didn’t think Benedict would have gone to all this trouble just to kill me and dump my body in a place nobody would notice, but it didn’t give me a nice warm and squishy feeling either. Maybe it was gonna be some kind of test. That was also not reassuring.
We rolled down past the housing projects, past the unemployed and shiftless hanging out on their stoops, and into an area where folks didn’t stay outside at all. Less than twenty minutes from my house, and it was like a different planet. The car pulled up in front of a six-story red brick apartment building that was only standing due to raw absentmindedness on the part of gravity. I wished the driver would pull forward a hundred feet or so, just in case gravity suddenly remembered.
“Home sweet home,” Benedict said.
“You live here?” I asked, but he was already out of the car and walking toward the entrance.
I scrambled after him, trying not to freak out as the Caddy rolled away and stranded me.
Benedict unlocked the door, and I followed him into a cramped lobby. The lights were busted out, and the only illumination came through the bars on the windows. To the left, a stairwell disappeared up into the gloom. Benedict started up the stairs before I could ask him anything or even get my bearings, and I followed.
No lights on any floor, not even emergency lights. At each landing, there was a door to the main hall, each with a small rectangular window crosshatched with steel wire, a blank eye looking onto darkness beyond.
Six flights of stairs, and by the top I was wheezing like I’d been smoking three packs a day for twenty years. “Does . . . Does anybody . . . live in this building?” I asked when we stopped.
“I do,” Benedict said. I noted with satisfaction that he was a little winded, though not as badly as me.
The door on this landing was made of dark, whorled wood, utterly unlike the institutional gray doors on the other floors. He waved his hands over it. The knob turned easily in his hand, and we went inside.
Stepping into Benedict’s home was an intimidating experience. I’d never been anywhere like it. Polished wood gleamed on the walls and floor, and slick leather chairs crouched in the middle of the living room. Wide doorways opened onto other spaces—a dark space on the right, the steel and white of a modern kitchen on the left, and what appeared to be an enormous library straight ahead. I would later learn that Benedict’s suite took up the whole top floor of the building.
Benedict hung his overcoat on a rack near the door and walked into the living room. I followed hesitantly, nervous that I was going to track dirt over that immaculate space. The air was filled with the scent of herbs—rosemary, I thought, and an acrid smell I couldn’t place. Under that, something foreign but foul churned faintly. I wrinkled my nose.
“There are things you need to know, Jimmy,” Benedict said. “Sit.”
I sat gingerly in one of the leather monsters, again worried I’d leave a stain somehow. Being in Benedict’s apartment was just like wearing my Sunday best, only in reverse.
“You live in a bad part of town,” he said. I bit back the obvious retort. “The Irish ran it for a while, and that probably wasn’t so bad, but now the Russians have a piece, and that piece keeps getting bigger. You don’t need me to tell you how bad that could get.”
No, I really didn’t. Dad was a mess, and I had a purple-black bruise the size of a grapefruit on the side of my head and another covering my midsection, and that was just them warming up, I was sure. It was a tight neighborhood—I’d known everybody on my street my whole life—and we tended to look after our own, but we were basically civilized in a way that the gangsters were not. Almost everybody who didn’t work down at the Gillette plant owned or worked in a little local shop, and those folks were terrorized. It was already getting plenty bad.
Benedict stroked his mustache. “We think there’s a lot of opportunity in your neighborhood, and the boss in Providence gave us the go-ahead to move in. That’ll be good for the neighborhood—and for
an enterprising young man like you.”
I wasn’t sure how enterprising I was, but I figured he was going to get to the good part any time now.
He leaned forward, narrowing his eyes. “So tell me what you can do, Jimmy. Do you burn things? Find things? Hear people from far away? How much have you figured out on your own?”
“I find things,” I said. My pulse quickened, and I realized this was the first time I’d ever been able to talk to anyone about it. “They talk to me sometimes—used to be a lot, but not so much anymore. And, yeah, sometimes they tell me stuff about other people, about stuff I can’t see. I used to be able to convince them to do stuff.”
He threw a cushion across the room. It spun on the floor and stopped in the corner. “Make that fly over here.”
“Um. I haven’t done anything like that for a long time.”
He was out of his chair in a blink, and his open hand connected with my face with a loud crack. It sounded worse than it was, but it pissed me off, and I started up out of the chair.
He planted his hand in the center of my chest and pushed me right back down. He was a thin guy, but a lot stronger than he looked.
“Listen up, Jimmy. When your superiors give you an order, you don’t question. You don’t bitch. You don’t even say anything—you just get right on it. You and I will have a different relationship than that, in time, but forgetting that rule with others is a good way to end up hanging on a meat hook in your father’s freezer. I’m telling you this for your own good—you never want to show any disrespect. Do you understand?”
I understood that my face stung and that Benedict was showing himself to be the asshole I expected him to be, but I nodded.
“Now, the cushion.”
It was a good thing my face was already red from the slap, because I could feel heat rushing to my cheeks from embarrassment. It had been a long time since I’d done anything like this—and I’d never done it in front of anybody before.
I mumbled something. The cushion didn’t move. Christ. If the cushion was going to hear me, Benedict would as well. Fucking humiliating.
I chanced a glance up at him. His eyes were hard, impatient. I looked back at the cushion.
“Hey, hey, little cushion, fly on over here,” I sang, improvising the melody, and I swear it felt like my cheeks and forehead were going to ignite, embarrassment burning me to cinders right where I sat. “Fly on over here, fly on over here.”
Like I said, it had been a long time, and the last time I tried anything of the kind, I got it to work with dumb little songs. Hey, I was seven fucking years old.
The cushion hitched toward me a few inches, then stopped.
God damn it. I made sure not to look at Benedict. Second verse, same as the first. I sang that idiotic song a few more times. The cushion didn’t fly, but it dragged itself over, using its corners like paws. After three or four refrains, it reached my feet. A little thrill ran through my body, despite the foolishness of the whole ordeal, and I picked up the cushion and handed it to Benedict.
He was biting his bottom lip, his cheeks all pinched in, tiny globules of tears forming at the corners of his eyes, and as soon as I met his gaze, he exploded with laughter. “Oh Jesus, Jimmy, you’re gonna be some tough guy like that!” he said once he found spare breath, and that set him off again.
A second later, I was laughing with him.
“All right,” Benedict said when we’d finished. “You got a lot to learn, so let’s get started.”
Chapter 3. The Social Club
“I don’t want you goin’ back there,” my old man said. He was looking at my hand or the doorknob or some damn thing—hadn’t looked me in the face for the week or so I’d been going to Benedict’s.
“Huh?”
“You heard me.” I hadn’t, not over the squawk and blather of the evening news Ma had turned up so she could hear it as she walked between the kitchen and the living room on a series of targeted tidying errands, but it wasn’t hard to get the idea.
“Dad, I . . .” How to explain it to him? “I don’t think that would be smart.”
Ma stopped in the kitchen doorway and crossed her arms. Dad was all heart and no brains, and Ma knew it. Her eyes held a distant melancholy, but she knew the score, and I took strength from that.
I squared my shoulders. “I heard Mr. Peluso got put in the hospital yesterday.” There’d be a reckoning for that, too. Mr. Peluso ran the corner store down the block, he was seventy-five years old, and somebody’d come by and broken three of his ribs for God knows what reason. Just thinking about it made me so angry I could hear my heart pound in my ears.
Dad nodded. He knew. Everybody knew.
I continued, though. “You know the Russians will be back one of these days. What do you want me to do? Wait around so I can watch you get the shit kicked out of you again?”
Dad moved his head away from me, and I glanced back at Ma. I could see the anger in her eyes—I probably shouldn’t have said “shit,” she didn’t like that kind of talk—but she didn’t interrupt. Dad didn’t have much to say, either, since his face was still all bruised and cut up from the Russians’ last visit.
“Dinner’ll be in the fridge when you get home,” Ma said, and that was the end of it. I left my old man standing on the living room rug, lost, and looking much older than his forty years.
The car was waiting for me downstairs, out front of the shop, and I got in without a word. It was just me and the driver—Benedict had given me the driver’s number, and he came by whenever I called—and I didn’t feel much like talking. That short confrontation with my old man had put me off my feed.
Some wiseass once said everybody’s got two reasons for doing the things they do—a good reason, and the real reason. I’d given my folks the good reason for going to see Benedict, and that would be enough, but I wondered about the real reason. I hadn’t learned much from Benedict, not yet, but even the little things I had picked up made me feel like the whole universe was opening up at my feet. No, it was more than that. The dumb rhymes and songs I got by with before were a half-assed way of doing things, and when Benedict got me straightened out, it was a hell of a rush. Each time I did even the smallest magic, it was like the first time I’d made it past second base with a girl, that crazy intense feeling of oh, THIS is how everything fits together, this is what completes me—not that I could explain that to my folks. Ma would kill me for the analogy alone—and she’d want to know who the little tramp was—and Dad wouldn’t get it. Couldn’t get it, if Benedict was to be believed.
It nagged at me, but I tried not to worry about it. I mean, jeez, there was a good reason, regardless of anything else. If that was enough for my folks, it ought to be good enough for me, right?
Benedict and another guy were waiting in the long shadow of Benedict’s tenement when we pulled up. The car had barely stopped, and the two men got in, Benedict in front and the other guy in next to me.
“You remember Frankie Lazzaro, right, Jimmy?” Benedict asked me.
“Sure. Handy guy with a baseball bat,” I said. Lazzaro grinned. I didn’t like him there, and I didn’t know what we were doing. Usually, I went up to Benedict’s and he taught me a few things, and that was it. Now this Lazzaro guy was here, and we were going God-knew-where, and I wanted to ask what was going on just slightly less than I wanted to avoid getting popped in the mouth for asking questions.
I kept my mouth shut.
We stopped in front of a one-story building that a sign proclaimed to be the Palazzo, but natural human instinct would have guessed to be more of an inverted bomb crater. I’m not as religious as Ma, but I’m not too proud to admit I crossed myself before following Benedict and Lazzaro into that shithole.
Thanks to a thousand movies, when you think of a Mafia social club, you might think of a swanky gentlemen’s club, all dark wood paneling and fancy but subdued lights, tables near the walls where slick guys in designer suits lounge around smoking cigars and telling lies about their
last big jobs. Or maybe you think of a strip club—you can almost see the camera shot right between some leggy broad’s ankles, pole on the right, looking down on a dark floor where a handful of good-looking guys in nice jackets drink expensive drinks and tell lies about their last big jobs.
Maybe some of them are like that. I wouldn’t know. This place was dark and smoky, there were puddles of black water in the corners, and, thanks to the corrugated metal roof and walls, the world’s worst echoes raced around the room, ringing my head like a doorbell. There were half a dozen sweaty fat guys in expensive threads telling lies about their last big jobs, though—I have to give it that.
Some guys got up and kissed Benedict on the cheeks while I stood around trying to avoid attracting any attention.
“Who’s the shrimp?” some loud bastard asked, and, just like that, I got my first official mob nickname. In less time than it takes to scratch your ass, I became Jimmy the Shrimp. I almost groaned out loud as it went around the room. You can tell when these things will stick. Great, I thought. When you hear that a guy like Tony the Hatchet is looking for you, you fucking leave town. When you have a meeting with Jimmy the Shrimp, you’re more likely to ask “Scampi or cocktail?”
In short order I got introduced to everyone, and, remembering Benedict’s warning about showing disrespect, I tried my damnedest to etch all their names in my memory. There was a guy named Sam, two Joeys—Left Foot Joey and Joey the Slob—a guy named Patsy, and Big George and Tinkerbell. Big George’s nickname wasn’t very clever, but it sure was appropriate—he looked like he’d passed six foot at age ten and hadn’t looked down that far since, and he was built like a forklift. Tinkerbell—most everybody just called him Tink—was clearly my toughest competition for worst nickname. I don’t know how the hell he got stuck with that one. He was a balding, weasely little guy, way too fond of plaid, and he squinted at everything. I never did learn his real name, first or last.
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