The Burning Soul

by John Connolly

  The recession was bad for everyone, and Joey sympathized, but if he let his sympathies get in the way of common sense he’d be on the United Way list, he and the men and women who worked for him. It was all a question of balance. Joey had his competitors, just like anyone else, and they’d be happy to take disgruntled customers off his hands. In this city, the jungle drums beat all the time; an hour after someone mentioned that he was unhappy about the price per pound, you could be damn sure there would be a phone call, and the offer of a better rate. Joey himself wasn’t above hustling, so why should anyone else be? He didn’t like losing customers, though, and three times since the summer he’d been forced to offer gentle discouragement to a couple of restaurateurs who’d been tempted to take their business elsewhere, the threat made more palatable by some temporary sweeteners.

  Hard times for honest men, and some dishonest ones too.

  That evening, only the desk light burned in Joey’s office. The pot of tea on the electric ring had brewed to a rich yellow-brown, and tasted as strong as sucking on the leaves themselves, but Joey didn’t care. A mug of it sat at his right hand, and it was warming his bones. Joey didn’t touch alcohol. He wasn’t a prude about it, and he didn’t mind others doing it, but he’d seen the damage it had inflicted on friends and family, and had decided that it wasn’t for him. He had learned from the mistakes of the Winter Hill Gang, whose members he had watched succumb to some of the very vices they had encouraged in others. He also understood his own nature: He suspected that he had an addictive personality, and was afraid that if he started boozing, or gambling, or whoring he might never stop. So he drank tea, and ignored the horses, and remained faithful to his wife, and anyone who judged him by appearances only, and heard him joke about his fear of addiction, might wonder whether such a man, so self-aware, so mindful of his flaws, really had any reason to be concerned that, once he began to engage in a certain act, he might doubt his inability to pull back from it.

  But such an individual would not have seen Joey’s fists at work, because Joey Tuna liked to work with his hands. Once Joey started pounding on someone he didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, because his world would go black and there would be only the rhythm of flesh on flesh, over and over, methodical yet unreasoning, expelling the life from the body punch by punch. And when at last the light began to pierce the murk – a red beam, like a shepherd’s warning dawn – and he saw the work that his hands had wrought, his body aching, the muscles in his stomach and back on the verge of tearing, the meat that was left behind gave him no more pause for thought than a gutted fish or a headless shrimp.

  That was why Joey Tuna now left the beatings to others, although he tried to ensure that they were doled out only when absolutely necessary. Punishments of a more final kind were also strictly controlled; more than ever before, probably, now that Whitey had gone to ground. The necessity for them was less frequent, of course, and such acts less advisable even as a last resort. Oh, there were still young hotheads who thought nothing of waving a piece in someone’s face, who liked the feel of a gun in their waistband; the big men on the block who wanted to ‘make their bones,’ as the greasers would say, by putting one behind some poor bastard’s ear. But most young men like that didn’t live to be old, and a lot of those who survived would grow old with their permanent, limited view interrupted by the vertical lines of prison bars. Joey himself had done time when he was a young hothead and didn’t know any better, but the years inside had cooled him down some, and when he came out he was a different man. He was that rare breed: a man who learned from his mistakes, and didn’t repeat them. Rarer still, he was a criminal who thought that way. He had that in common with Tommy Morris, his protégé, along with the fact that they were both full Irish, a heritage that had marked them as outsiders for so long. In the Boston criminal circles through which they had moved, mongrels were the norm.

  Usually Joey enjoyed these moments in the silence of his office. He took pleasure in making the accounts balance, in knowing that his business was running efficiently and profitably. He craved order. He always had, even as a boy. He was neat, and he never lost anything. Everything in its place, and a place for everything. Tonight, though, he was distracted. This Tommy Morris thing was giving him a hernia, but he should have expected that Tommy wouldn’t just lie down and die.

  He still struggled to pinpoint exactly when Tommy had begun to lose control of his operations, and why, but once the rot set in there were too many who were prepared to exploit his weakness, and Joey had tacitly, and then actively, encouraged them to do so. There was no room for sentimentality in business, but Joey wished that his relationship with Tommy hadn’t come to such an end. He had a soft spot for Tommy, always had, but Joey had backed his horse now, and the race was running. Oweny Farrell would win it in the end, for it had been rigged from the off, but Tommy needed to be removed quickly at the risk of leaving the track littered with dead riders. They might even have had Tommy by now if it wasn’t for Martin Dempsey. He was a cool one, make no mistake. Joey would almost be sorry to see him dead too.

  But Tommy Morris. What to do about Tommy Morris?

  And, as if he had summoned him from the darkness, Tommy answered.

  ‘How are you, Joey?’

  Joey looked up from his papers. There was a storage room to his left. He kept his records in there, along with reams of computer paper, and fresh stationery, and anything else that he didn’t want tainted by damp or the smell of the floor below. The door was always open, because his employees knew better than to be in there without his permission, and it was only the door to the office itself that he locked. Now Tommy Morris emerged from the storage room, what little hair he had left cut short, his face unshaved, his paunch lapping at his belt like a pale tongue, peeping out from beneath the fabric of his golf shirt, hairy and somehow obscene. He was wearing a pair of blue overalls from the fish market, open to his crotch. He must have been in there for the best part of an hour, waiting patiently until the market was quiet, until just the two of them were left.

  ‘Tommy,’ said Joey. ‘You scared the life out of me. What are you doing hanging around in closets. You turning queer on me, Tommy? You a Mary?’

  He smiled at his own joke, and Tommy smiled back. He seemed to have more wrinkles than before, and the beard that was coming in was entirely gray. Failure will do that to a man, thought Joey: failure, and the knowledge of the imminence of his own mortality.

  Except Tommy wasn’t alone in feeling the Reaper’s breath. In his right hand he held a pistol. The suppressor made it appear both sleeker and uglier than it already was. Not that he’d need it, not really. There was nobody to hear the gun, and the glass and walls were thick. But it was like Tommy to take care of the little details and fail to take account of the bigger picture. It was why he was broke, and running, and why he had only Ryan and Dempsey left at his side.

  ‘You know me better than that, Joey. I always had an eye for the girls.’

  That was true. Tommy was never without a couple of women on the go at the same time. Joey had had the devil of a time finding the girls in his current stable in the hope that he might catch Tommy with his pants around his ankles.

  ‘You should have settled down like me,’ said Joey. ‘If you do it right, it removes the need for all that kind of nonsense, or most of it. Why don’t you pull up a chair and take the weight off your soles?’

  Tommy stayed where he was. The gun hadn’t moved. It was still pointed at Joey, who was unarmed. There was no gun in his desk drawer. He had no call to have one. He was Joey Tuna, the go-between. When he had to be, he was Joey Tombs, the dispenser of justice, but it was justice that had been agreed upon beforehand, settled upon by wise heads. It was always the right thing to do.

  ‘This place hasn’t changed,’ said Tommy. ‘I think those may even be the same papers on your desk.’

  ‘There’s no cause to change what has always worked, Tommy. I make money. Until the downturn, we were even growing a little every
year. We do things right here. We dot the i’s and cross the t’s. We’re so clean, the IRS is sure that we’re dirty. It was like that when I took over the business from my uncle, and God willing it will stay like that when I’m gone.’

  He didn’t flinch as he spoke those words. He wasn’t going to give Tommy the satisfaction. Anyway, it wasn’t over yet. He might still talk the younger man around.

  ‘You remember when I gave you your first job here?’ he said.

  ‘I remember,’ said Tommy. ‘Cleaning up guts and scales and slime. I hated the smell of it. I could never get it off my hands.’

  ‘Clean work always smells dirty,’ said Joey. ‘Honest work.’

  ‘Sometimes dirty work smells dirty too. It smells of blood and shit. It smells like this place. I think you’ve been here so long that you’ve become confused. You can’t tell the difference anymore.’

  Joey looked affronted. ‘You know, you were always a lazy bastard. You didn’t like hard work.’

  ‘I had no problem with hard work, Joey. My old man worked the piers, and my mother cleaned office floors. They taught me the value of honest labor. It was you who dangled the soft option in front of me, the promise of easier money.’

  ‘So you’re blaming me for what you’ve become? There’s a coward talking, if ever I heard one.’

  ‘No, I’m not blaming you. It wouldn’t have mattered who suggested it to me first, I’d still have turned. I was a kid. Stealing from trucks, breaking into warehouses – that was all second nature to me. Still, you opened the door. You showed me the way. I was always going to fall, but you were the one who gave me the push.’

  Joey reddened. He licked at his lips, and the fighter in him was revealed. Under other circumstances, he would have been rolling up his shirt sleeves by now and balling his meaty fists.

  ‘I looked out for you too,’ he said. ‘Don’t you forget that. When you overstepped the line, when you got above yourself, I stopped them from hurting you. There were men who wanted to break a hand, a leg. That bastard Brogan wanted to blind you for dealing on the side, but I spoke up for you. I told them you were ambitious, that you could make something of yourself with the right guidance. You got off lightly: a bit of a beating, when it could have been much worse. And when they were done, I gave you the space to work. It was the making of you. I was the making of you. When Whitey thought you were a threat, I talked him down. You’d be rotting under Tenean Beach or in a shallow grave by the Neponset River if it wasn’t for me. I told him you were sound. I told them all that you were sound. I gave them my word on it, and no more could a man ask for than the word of Joey Tuna. It was always sound. You judge a man by his soundness, Tommy. You know that.’

  ‘And are you looking out for me now, Joey? Do you have my best interests at heart.’

  ‘You’re in trouble. You’re vulnerable. It’s when a man is vulnerable that temptation comes knocking. There are people who want to know that you’re sound, that’s all. A sound man has nothing to fear. So they came to me. They always come to Joey Tuna. I bear no grudge and no man bears a grudge against me. Both sides can always sit down in safety when Joey Tuna is involved. It’s been that way for forty years.’

  ‘Like you said, why change what’s always worked, right?’

  ‘That’s right. Never a truer word spoken.’

  ‘So why change now? I don’t see a neutral man here.’

  ‘I have everyone’s best interests at heart, Tommy. All we wanted to do was talk with you, clear the air.’

  ‘Is that why Oweny’s boys have been looking for me, to clear the air? I never took them for the conversational kind. Most of them can’t put two words together without stumbling or swearing.’

  ‘You’ve been keeping your head down, Tommy. People were worried. They didn’t know where you were. You could have been lying dead in a ditch by the side of the road.’

  ‘I could have been sitting in the Federal Building, you mean, spilling my guts like a fish on one of your blocks.’

  ‘People were concerned. They just wanted to be sure.’

  ‘That I was sound.’

  ‘Exactly, that you were sound. I knew you were, Tommy. I told them so. I said to them, “Tommy Morris is sound. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll bring him in, and we’ll talk, and you’ll see the kind of man he is: a sound man.” I came looking for you, Tommy, but I couldn’t find you. When that happens, well, you can’t blame someone for being concerned.’

  ‘So you enlisted Oweny’s boys to help you.’

  ‘Oweny has his own questions for you. He wants to buy you out. He wants to do it right.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘You know it. Oweny’s sound too. Always has been. Just like you. Two sound men.’

  ‘Oweny, sound? If Oweny was a fish you wouldn’t feed him to birds. He was always a traitorous little shit. You know that Oweny’s boys kicked down the door of a friend of mine? Two nights ago. They roughed her up. She lost teeth. They wanted to know where I was, but she couldn’t tell them. I hadn’t been to see her in weeks. I was keeping my distance from her to protect her, and look what happened.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Joey. ‘A man should only raise a hand to a woman as a last resort.’

  ‘Funny thing is, I didn’t think that Oweny knew about her. I’d been very careful. I’ll bet you knew about her, though. You know everyone’s affairs. That’s why you’re the man to turn to, because you have your finger on the pulse.’

  Joey laid an index finger on his desk, the pulse finger itself, and tapped it hard on the wood to emphasize each word as he spoke: ‘People. Were. Concerned! You weren’t going to come in of your own volition. You had to be made to come in.’

  ‘Is that why they took my niece?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I told your boy Martin the same.’

  ‘She’s my sister’s girl. She lives in a quiet little town, far away from any of this. Did you find her? Did Oweny find her?’

  There was something in Tommy’s tone, a kind of madness, as he spoke about his niece, that sent a deep ache of fear through Joey’s belly, as though Tommy, knowing that he himself was doomed, had fixed upon the girl as his salvation. Joey had seen it before in men who were about to die. They began obsessing upon a friend, a parent, a picture in a wallet, a Miraculous Medal, anything to keep out the reality of what was coming.

  ‘We don’t kidnap little girls, Tommy. That’s not our style.’

  ‘Yeah? Since when?’

  ‘Jesus, Tommy, what do you think we are, pedophiles? Deviants? Oweny doesn’t have her. People don’t do that, not to their own, not sound people. They just wanted to talk. If they had the girl, they’d have let you know. A message would have been sent, and then the girl would have been allowed to go home once you’d come in. Our people wouldn’t behave any other way. We’re not like the Russians. We’re not animals.’

  Tommy nodded. The gun wavered in his hand. Joey saw his advantage, and pressed it.

  ‘Come on, now, Tommy. Put the gun away and we’ll forget about this. I’ll make some calls. I’ll let everyone know they can relax. I’ll tell them that Tommy Morris is as sound as he ever was. Sound as a bell, eh, Tommy? Sound as a bell.’

  Tommy began to button the overalls. They were too small for him, and he struggled with the buttons, but he didn’t look down.

  ‘And the meet? The sit-down where Oweny didn’t show but you did? Martin seemed to think that a message was being sent.’

  ‘A message? Sure, Tommy, there’s always a message. The message was that you should come in and clear all this up, put people’s minds at rest. Now you’ve had it from the horse’s mouth.’

  ‘No,’ said Tommy. ‘That wasn’t the message Martin picked up at all.’

  ‘Well, he was wrong, Tommy. My mind is at rest.’

  ‘Good,’ said Tommy. ‘Then your body can join it.’

  He kept the gun low and against his belly as he fired, so that the overalls took the blowback.
The first shot took Joey in the belly. Joey said, ‘Ah.’ He sounded disappointed, as though he’d caught Tommy doing something shameful. He supported himself against the desk and Tommy shot him again. Joey tumbled to the floor, taking a handful of invoices with him. His mug fell to the floor and broke. He lay beside the shards of broken crockery, the tea dripping through the gaps in the boards. His breath came in short gasps, and there was blood in his mouth. His hands hovered above his wounds, for he could not quite bring himself to touch them. He kept blinking, like a man fearful of facing a bright light.

  ‘Ah,’ he said again. ‘Ah, no.’

  Tommy stood over him. ‘I never liked you anyway,’ he said. ‘You were never sound.’

  And he left Joey Tuna to die in that place, with his face against the cool boards and the taste of it infusing his final breaths, his last gift to the old thug who had created him.

  17

  Acold night in Boston, and the rain now beating down. It had fallen continuously throughout the day, varying only in its intensity, as though the heavens were determined to sluice the world clean. The lights of the taller buildings, always out of place in Beantown, seemed to brush the clouds above, piercing them and letting the rain pour through the holes. Tonight it was a city of sodden clothing, of suspect shoes that welcomed the damp, of plastered hair that curled and frizzed, and raindrops cold-kissing necks and breasts, of fuzzed neon reflected in puddles like swirls of paint, of slow-moving traffic and impatient pedestrians skipping dangerously past wheels and fenders, ignoring warning beeps and flashing lights. Even the girls heading for the clubs and bars had been forced to swathe their legs and arms for fear of goose bumps, and their frustration was writ large on their faces. Later, the ones who hadn’t found a partner for the night would give up the fight and let the rain ruin their coiffure and smear their mascara, and they’d swear and giggle as they struggled to find a cab, for the cabdrivers would make a killing that night.