Prince of Thieves

by Chuck Hogan

  "If you think about it honestly," she said, choppy, dirty-blond hair falling off her ears in daggers, "is there anyone else for either of us? All this history that we have."

  The tilted bar mirror gave Doug a good scope on the room. Dez had retreated to his jukebox confessional. Joanie sat on a stack of Beck's cases, one hand gripping a Bud bottle, the other hooked in Gloansy's back pocket while her drunken fiance tossed off a nasty compliment at a woman walking past. Jem was back with the two unknowns-- Townie kids, young and eager-- regaling them with his stories, hands out like he was revving a Harley, getting laughs. The kids listened like bright-eyed disciples, and Doug felt an immediate distaste.

  Frank G. saying, Those faces you see staring back. The haze of the room and Krista's closeness was working on him like deja vu.

  "I don't want to spend the rest of my life down here," said Krista. "I really don't."

  Doug didn't quite believe that. He didn't quite believe anything Krista said, even the stuff he knew to be true.

  "Can I tell you a secret no woman should ever tell a man?" She leaned in close, her warm breath tickling his ear. "I'm starting to feel old here."

  She hung on Doug's reaction. "I'm feeling like I'm a hundred fucking years old," he admitted.

  "I think we're being replaced."

  Doug nodded and shrugged, dunking the lime wedge in his soda water. "Maybe that's not such a bad thing."

  Her beer was gone. "Not if you got someplace else to move on to. Someone else to be."

  So routine was the sensation of Krista's hand inside his thigh that Doug only registered the touch when her fingers started to creep along his inseam.

  "How long has it been for you?" she said.

  They say drowning men feel the water get warm before they slip under. The pull of familiarity here was like the tepid bath of sleep. That's who you are-- the people you attract, who you keep around you.

  "It's been too long for me." She had a magician's ability to keep talking into his ear while her trained hand worked. She was all over him now like the humidity of the room. "You know what I miss? Your high-mileage sofa. The grip I used to get on that armrest. I like thinking that every day you walk by it and see my nail marks there."

  Doug stayed focused on her forgotten bourbon and Coke, the stirrer standing in melting ice, its tip nibbled. He felt a stirring himself.

  He smelled her foxy grin along with the High Life on her breath and lips. "The strongest man I know...."

  As the first chords of "Mother Macree" reached him, Doug stood, her hand sliding off his leg. "Be right back," he told her. He set out in the direction of the john, but once in the crowd of merrymakers he cut back, slipping through the doorway and moving up the rubberized steps two at a time.

  * * *

  SURFACING UPSTAIRS WAS LIKE climbing out of a subway station into a cocktail party. A room full of pleated pants and necklace-twiddlers and roving, impatient eyes. Kids with drinks in their hands, aping their parents, trying to outshine one another. Guys pretending they cared, girls pretending they didn't. The big charade.

  The hand-stamper at the door asked if everything was all right, making Doug wonder what the look on his face said. An alcoholic's rage, his apartness. The line waiting to get inside stretched almost to the corner, and Doug walked fast, stuffing his hands deep inside his pockets so he wouldn't hit anybody, heading south on Main.

  Closer to Thompson Square, the sidewalk beneath his feet changed from cement to Colonial brick. He noticed a pale light inside the hazed glass of Fergie's flower shop across the street, glowing faintly like the withered power of the old mobs that, until just a few years ago, ruled the Town like royalty. Fergie, Doug figured, knew about as much about flowers as Doug did, which was zilch. The light winked out as he passed, the front door opened by a big white-haired mick in a tracksuit: Rusty, a supposed ex-IRA gunner who was Fergie's guy. Rusty scanned both sides of the street, warily tracking Doug's shadowed form-- then Fergie appeared behind him, a head shorter, his boxer's hands tucked into his sweatshirt pouch, the tight hood stretched like a cowl over his head. The old mobster filled out the zip-up pretty well, though Doug could recall his father telling him long ago that Fergie wore women's sweatshirts because the female cut accentuated his size.

  Doug took only that one brief glance before switching his focus to the lit point of the monument. Best not to gaze curiously at a gangster, especially not on a dark street at night, and especially not at one so paranoid and tweaked as Fergie. Triple especially if you're already feeling pissed off: true killers can read that shit and turn it back on you, and next thing you know there's rounds whistling into your chest. He heard the car doors close and the engine rumble as the living ghost of the old Town sank into his black, hearselike Continental and cruised away.

  If the Bunker Hill Monument was the needle of the Charlestown sundial-- the Town an irregular circle bleeding yolklike to the northwest-- Doug had left the Tap at about nine o'clock, now headed for eight. His mother's house on Sackville stood at just after eleven, Jem's mother's house on Pearl ticking closer to midnight.

  Packard Street, Claire Keesey's address, stood at about six thirty.

  That previous night, he had found her plum Saturn returned to its brick-walled space. The no-haggle, sporty-cute coupe had been parked nose-in, the wasted spoiler and happy-face Breathe! sticker turned to the alley. It was while sitting there in his car looking at her dimly lit, second-floor windows that the question Now what? had occurred to him. He was wasting his time cruising a stranger's house, looking for... yeah, for what?

  Pride had finally made him peel out of there, racing the Caprice up narrow Monument Avenue-- a tunnel of brick row houses rising to the stage-lit granite dick. He returned home and slid her driver's license out of its hiding place behind the sill of his kitchen window. The ID had seen a lot of action, its plastic laminate curled at the edges, creased from long nights in tight pockets. In the unflattering photograph she looked startled, like someone bumped from behind in mid-smile.

  The plastic blackened and sagged before it burned, her image melting, crying, the license suffering in his ashtray before curling up and surrendering oily black smoke. A simple ceremony to put an end to his wrongheaded infatuation.

  Then this very evening, on his way out to Malden for his meeting, as he pulled into the Bunker Hill Mall to grab a Mountain Dew-- there it was, pulled up to the curb outside the Foodmaster like a bomb waiting to go off, the bumper sticker screaming at him, Breathe!

  He parked one row away, sitting there, his hands relaxed on the steering wheel, watching the ticking Saturn in his rearview mirror. Then, cursing himself, he was out of the Caprice and cutting across the parking lot, guessing CVS and moving inside, checking the store aisle by aisle.

  He spotted her halfway down in Hair Care. She wore a red sweatshirt, gray sweatpants, Avia ballcap, running shoes, and amber sunglasses. It was a familiar look around Town, the frumpy weekend girl, yuppies doing their errands behind hats and glasses and baggy clothes, no one in the Town much worth impressing.

  He fooled with packs of playing cards at the end of the aisle while she weighed conditioners. Some ballcaps on women looked wrong, joyless, severe-- but Doug could see her running out a slow grounder up the first-base line, her sunny blond ponytail flying. She chose a tube the color of butterscotch, and Doug tailed her across two aisles to the magazine racks, where she pulled down People. She sidetracked into the wide central aisle, looking watchful all of a sudden, grabbing a quart-sized carton of Whoppers malted-milk balls and folding the magazine around it before walking to the front.

  Doug pulled a Cadbury creme egg out of the clearance bin and fell into line behind her. He smelled the vanilla that was maybe the last of her old conditioner and eyed the faintly freckled slope of her neck. He worried that she would pick up on his presence with some self-protective sixth sense of fear, but she looked only at her small, red key-chain purse, its plastic driver's license window empty.

  Do
ug stepped back for her as she left, then spilled some coins for his candy while she helped an old woman tug a handcart full of no-name toilet paper through the folding doors to the sidewalk outside. Doug exited after her, feeling like a ghost, watching her climb into her car and check her mirror before backing up and pulling away.

  See? Nothing special, said the class-conscious part of himself-- the thirty-two-year-old bachelor in him answering back, Yeah, right.

  Why he went on to tell Frank G. he might have met someone, he still didn't know.

  And now here he was, back again, on foot this time, gazing up at her window. Mornings outside his mother's house, nights outside hers: Since when had he become such a sad sack? Was this what he had kicked the juice for? To spend his Saturday nights standing in alleyways like a bashful thief?

  This was all he had ahead of him. You couldn't even call it a dream. It was the opposite of a dream, and the opposite of a dream is not a nightmare but nothingness. Dead sleep. The Town was one big walk-in cooler, and her window up there, its yellow light, was the last cold one sitting on the shelf. The bottle he could not open; the one he was never to touch.

  * * *

  HE WAS FLIPPING DROWSILY through Vette magazine and watching the cable rebroadcast of that afternoon's Sox game when his door tapped sometime after 1 A.M. He walked barefoot in boxers and a T-shirt through the parlor that, one floor below, was Jem's playroom, and below that, Jem's mother's old dining room, now the ground floor domain of Krista and Shyne.

  Prison time had left Doug with a meticulous, almost military appreciation for order-- Jem called it fussiness-- and his place reflected this. Clean house, clean life, clean mind. By choice, he never had visitors anymore.

  He stopped before the locked hall door and the shadow in the stripe of light beneath it.

  "Duggy."

  Krista, her voice bar-hoarse and bourbon-hushed. The tapping became a fine scratching, and he could almost see her body leaning against the door, her ear pressed to it the same way she used to listen to his heart through his chest. Her hand would be close to her mouth, telling the door a secret.

  "I know you're in there."

  All the drinks he didn't drink that night, all the mistakes he could have made but didn't-- coming back for him now. Picking at his door, one last chance.

  "Tell me what you want me to do," she said. "Tell me why wanting you isn't enough."

  He lay his palm flat against the door, in the hope that some sort of current of understanding might pass between them. Then he turned off all the lights, passing by his sofa with her nail marks in the armrest, going to bed.

  8

  Frawley at the Tap

  "WHERE'D YOU GO?" asked Frawley.

  "Bathroom downstairs," said June, hanging her bag on the stool back and easing his knee aside with her hand as she returned to her seat. "No line."

  They sat together at a black Formica tabletop the size of a small steering wheel. The same people kept walking past.

  "There's a downstairs?"

  "Sure. All the girls know it."

  She had a lot invested in that word, girls, did June, a thirty-six-year-old Realtor whom Frawley had met one night at Store 24, she buying cream cheese, him size AA tape recorder batteries. They both lived in the navy yard, she in a water-view condo with glass furniture and indirect lighting, he in a highway-view, two-window sublet with milk-crate bookshelves and most of his clothes still in cardboard boxes. For some reason, being and remaining a girl was inordinately important to her, with streaked blond hair crowding both sides of her face, hiding-- like a terrible family secret-- the margins where lines and creases were starting to form.

  "You've never been here before," she said twinklingly, ever amused.

  Frawley shook his head, still looking for the stairs.

  "But you've been to the Warren," she said.

  "Nope."

  "Olives? Come on, you've at least been to Figs."

  "I've walked past both."

  "My God, Adam." She put her hand on his wrist, like offering a prayer for his speedy recovery. "Do you know that I had reservations at Olives last weekend, nine o'clock-- and it was still a forty-minute wait? When I moved here, in '92-- way ahead of the curve, by the way-- there were only two restaurants I would even think of setting foot in, the Warren and the Tavern on the Water. Now look." She gestured proprietarily at the room. "All this you see here-- this is happening right now. This is the hot neighborhood, the South End of a few years ago. Only instead of gay men, now it's single girls leading the charge." Girls again, thought Frawley. "The only drawback is the negative stigma, with the gangsters and dockworkers and all that-- which by the way is fading every week. This is boomtown right now, I'm fielding a dozen calls a day from girls looking for apartments." She sipped a fresh margarita, cleaning the salt off her lip with a small tongue, Frawley hearing Motley Crue's "Girls, Girls, Girls" in his head. "Even Thai food now. That says all you need to know right there. Thai food in Charlestown? Run up the white flag."

  Frawley nodding, still wondering where those stairs were.

  "There's a new bistro and wine bar opening up next month-- where the old Comella's was? The space was vacant for almost a year. We'll have to try it."

  "Great," he said, thinking, Uh, no.

  "And you have to take me running with you sometime. They say it's great training for cardio-boxing."

  Training for a workout class, that was something new. Frawley touched the "fun" margarita she had talked him into ordering. A bad experience in his freshman year at Syracuse-- he had never before or again since vomited purple-- had taught him never, ever to trust tequila. "So," he said, "what was it that made you move here in '92?"

  "Honestly? The parking. And now this whole neighborhood has exploded around me. My first place, before I bought in the yard, was over on Adams, this rickety condo with a girl who answered phones for Harvard Health. She lived in her pajamas all weekend and cried every Monday morning before work. Utterly manic, and I mean up until three in the morning painting walls. She had this absolutely dreadful, hopeless affair with one of the jerks who lived over us-- got herself pregnant and was lucky that was all she got from him-- then wanted me to go with her, you know, to get it taken care of, and I had to cross the protest lines with her, outside the clinic through all these crazy-- what are you looking for?"

  "Oh. Nothing. Our server."

  "He'll be back," she said, grabbing a strand of her streaked hair and twirling it. "But why do you live here, Special Agent Frawley?" She loved that. "Your commute sounds insane. It's not really about the bank robbers, is it?"

  "I guess it is."

  "You're like some Sigourney Weaver observing the apes by living among them?"

  He deserved this for trying way too hard to impress her on their first date. "Just like that," he said.

  "Because that's all fading away. That meteor that killed off all the old dinosaurs? Coming down on this town like thigh-high boots with a thirty-foot heel. That's girl power." A shrill tone rang between them, barely audible. "Ah," she said, a smiling frown, tugging her bag off the stool back and sliding out a flip phone, pulling up the antenna. "I was afraid this might happen." She answered it, covering her opposite ear. "Hi, Marie." Eye roll. "I can barely-- hold on-- " She covered the mouthpiece. "A client, signed a purchase-and-sale today, a two-bed with roof deck on Harvard, court parking, my exclusive. Needs some hand-holding." She unfolded a pair of flat-framed specs and slid them on. "Two minutes, cross my heart." She resumed the phone call. "Okay, Marie, June's here..."

  Frawley excused himself and wandered through the crowd until he found the stairs near the entrance, a downward flight of beer-slicked, rubber steps without a sign. It looked like he was headed into the Tap's storage basement until a twist cut off the clatter Upstairs, blending in laughter, yells, and music below.

  He came off the steps into a catacomb of brick walls and sticky stone floor. There was a short, dirty-mirrored bar, a jukebox pumping in the far corner
, stacks of empty cases, a plastic-domed foosball table, and plenty of hothouse sweat. The music beat a blood pulse through the crowd, Frawley recognizing "Bullet the Blue Sky," placing it somewhere around law school: faculty-student cocktail hours, driving his guacamole green diesel Rabbit to his FBI interview. The Joshua Tree album? Or Rattle and Hum?

  A fair-haired type in comically thick-rimmed eyeglasses was grooving at the jukebox, mimicking Bono's midsong rap, "Peelin' off those dollar bills / Slappin' 'em down..." Then every voice in the room cheered as one:

  One hundred!

  Two hundred!

  Frawley noticed the tequila in his system now, tasting it in the sweat along his upper lip. This was where Frawley needed to be, not Upstairs with the smart set but underground, in the furnace room where the beast was nightly fed-- the real Charlestown, the authentic Charlestown-- Bono growling, "Outside it's America..."