Blood in the Water

by Jack Flynn

  ‘What am I supposed to do with them?’

  ‘How should I know? Buy them plane tickets back to Moscow. Or get them real jobs. I don’t give a fuck.’

  ‘But that’s a waste, Cormack,’ Jimmy protested. ‘I paid good money for these girls.’

  ‘Consider it a fine for breaking the rules, and be thankful we go back a ways. Anybody else, Jimmy, and I’d have one of my boys take you out fishing, you understand? I hear a Russian accent on any girl in your club, or in one of your houses, or I see a girl on the street with a short skirt who even looks Russian, and I may change my mind. Got it?’

  ‘Shit, Cormack, half the girls I’ve already got working got accents.’

  ‘Then I’d get them elocution lessons if I were you, Jimmy.’

  ‘Electrocution lessons?’ Jimmy shook his head in confusion. He stared at Cormack, and Cormack ran a hand over his face. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘No, Jimmy, that’s true, you don’t.’ He looked down at the pile of work on his desk. Without looking up, he dismissed Jimmy with a flick of his wrist. ‘Leave the money on your way out.’

  Jimmy started to say something, but then held his tongue. Cormack O’Connell had made it clear that the meeting was over.

  Nine

  ‘Cormack still around?’

  Cookie glared at Buddy Cavanaugh, a young stevedore sitting at the bar nursing a Guinness. Nate Chaplain, another novice cargo man, sat next to him.

  ‘Who said anything about Cormack being here?’ Cormack almost never stayed at the Mariner into the evening. It wasn’t the sort of place he would want to be if something ugly transpired, as was often the case in the evening. And Cormack didn’t often telegraph his plans to anyone. He was very careful about that.

  ‘He called us,’ Buddy said, nodding at Nate. ‘He told us he might have some work for us tonight.’

  Cookie knew that Buddy moonlighted for Cormack, taking care of low-level muscle jobs, but his suspicion wouldn’t let go easily. ‘Then maybe you should wait for him to call again.’

  ‘Sure. He said if it didn’t happen by ten, it wasn’t gonna happen. We’ve got an offload tomorrow. But I don’t want to leave Cormack out in the lurch if he needs us is all. I just wanted to know if he was here.’

  ‘Greek freighter?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so. It’s the only one that’s in right now, so it’s gotta be, right?’

  ‘What’s the cargo?’

  ‘I don’t know, and I don’t care. I know I’m not gettin’ rich off whatever it is.’

  ‘No doubt,’ Nate grumbled.

  Cookie glared at Nate. He didn’t like the young man. There was something about his air of entitlement that set Cookie off. Cookie had been born just before the baby boom, and shared the attitude of the Greatest Generation that had stood firm against the onslaught of both the Nazism of Germany and the Communism of the Soviets. Cookie took his first job when he was seven, sweeping up the floors at Old Man Murphy’s shop out in Worcester, and he’d worked every day of his life since. He was loyal and trustworthy, and while he might fairly be described as taciturn at times, he’d never been heard to complain about his lot in life. Young men like Nate Chaplain, who felt that life owed them something, got under Cookie’s skin. Men like that could never have beat back the Nazis.

  ‘Could be worse,’ Buddy pointed out. ‘We got jobs at least.’

  ‘If you call it that,’ Nate said. ‘I was hoping to make some real coin tonight. Maybe not even have to show up tomorrow.’

  Buddy shook his head. ‘Showing up is half of it,’ he said. ‘Even if we had gotten some work tonight.’

  ‘Jesus, Buddy, live a little. You’ve never missed a goddamned day. I don’t think there’s anyone else who hasn’t played hooky at least once.’

  ‘And you’ve missed more days than anyone. You miss another, they’ll pull your union card.’

  Cookie looked at Buddy. He was all right, he decided after a moment. Buddy had his faults, no doubt. Like most young men he was a little too loud and a little too brash, and it was clear that he knew he was good looking. Vanity could be a dangerous vice, but it was a common sin. Even with his faults, though, it seemed as though Buddy had a decent work ethic, and that impressed Cookie. ‘Cormack’s here,’ Cookie said quietly. ‘But it doesn’t look like there’s any work tonight.’

  ‘OK. Thanks.’ Buddy threw a ten on the bar. ‘Keep it, Cookie,’ he said. ‘Let’s bail,’ he said to Nate.

  Cookie watched the two of them amble across the barroom and out the door. A shiver ran through the entire place as they pushed out into the cold and an icy breeze blew in. Cookie supposed that Nate could be forgiven for wanting something better for himself; working the docks was a hard life, and during the winter months it was brutal and dangerous. It wasn’t unreasonable for him to try to make a few bucks on the side, even if it wasn’t strictly legal work. Still, he thought, there was something about the lad that didn’t sit right with him. Cookie supposed it was not his concern. He kept out of everyone’s business along the shore. That was how he’d survived for so long.

  He glanced around the bar and saw that the only ones left were the Greeks in the far corner. It looked as though they were losing steam, and Cookie was guessing it would only be a half hour or so before he could lock up. Cormack might want him to stay later, but considering how slow the night had been, he would more likely tell him to head home. Cookie hoped so; the Bruins were playing the Canadiens, and he planned to catch the replay in the warmth of his shabby little apartment a few blocks away. A quiet life was all he’d ever wanted, and he had it now. He reflected on how lucky he was as he started to ring out the register.

  * * * * *

  Nate was pissed. He’d hoped that the work for Cormack would be lucrative enough to pay for a decent night out. ‘This is bullshit,’ he said under his breath as he and Buddy walked along the shore.

  ‘There’ll be other jobs,’ Buddy said. ‘As long as you don’t piss people off.’

  ‘As long as I don’t piss people off? What about when people piss me off? Why is it that I’m always the one who’s gotta hold his tongue? That’s bullshit.’

  ‘We’re low men on the totem pole, but it won’t always be that way, trust me.’

  Nate Chaplain wasn’t so sure. It sure as hell felt like it would always be that way.

  Buddy pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed a number. ‘Hey.’ He paused. ‘No, I can’t really talk right now.’ Another pause. ‘Yeah, he’s still there.’

  Nate’s mind began to wander. What would he have done with the money if the score had materialized tonight? It was pointless to think about. That was just torturing himself.

  ‘OK, I don’t know if I can tomorrow, but I’ll think about it,’ Buddy said. He tapped the phone off and put it in his pocket.

  ‘They say it’s gonna be even colder tomorrow,’ Nate said, burying his hands deeper into his pockets. ‘You should really think about calling in sick. You’ve earned it, and tomorrow’s really gonna suck.’

  Buddy nodded. ‘Tomorrow may suck,’ he agreed. ‘But like I said, it won’t always be this way. Trust me.’

  Ten

  Cormack sat alone in the office over the bar, poring over a large set of books that tracked all of the cargo traffic in and out of Boston Harbor. It was all he could do not to think about his daughter.

  Pregnant.

  He’d been tempted to ask who the asshole who’d knocked her up was, but he knew that would be counterproductive. He had tight reign over his emotions except when it came to Diamond, and it would do her no good if he did a long stint in the joint for killing her baby-daddy.

  Normally he would never be at the decrepit bar at this hour, but after dismissing Jimmy he’d been waiting on a call about some cargo that had ‘fallen off’ a freighter and might be available for purchase at a steep discount. Opportunities like that always interested Cormack, and he liked to know about everything that went on in his harbor. The call had come late, a
nd it was clear that the opportunity wasn’t worth the time, but he was still glad to have been given the option. It meant that he still had control over the waterfront, and that felt right.

  He would have gone home after the call, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to be there just now. His conversation with Diamond had been brief and tense. He hadn’t given her the money, and hadn’t asked again what it was for specifically – because he knew. He knew, and that was why he hadn’t given it to her. Not yet. He had too much to digest before he could be a part of that. So staying at the Mariner to work seemed like the best way to occupy his mind at the moment.

  He looked down at the paperwork in front of him to move his mind off the subject.

  Detailed manifests from every ship that pulled into port were distributed in triplicate each day to the Customs and Border Patrol agency, to the harbormaster, and to the head of the CUPD – the Consolidated Union of Pilots and Dockworkers.

  Customs needed the manifests nominally to track tariffs, collect duties, and prevent smuggling of any illegal material into the country – though with fewer than a half-dozen agents in Boston, there was no way that the agency could actually keep track of the contents of the more than two million shipping containers unloaded every year on the docks in and around the city. Everyone knew that the agency had more or less given up on any sort of effective monitoring.

  Historically, the harbormaster oversaw all traffic patterns and dockage in the harbor, and needed the manifests to figure out when to schedule arrivals and departures, how to allocate dock space in port, and the best way to ensure that traffic lanes stayed open. In practice, however, as the ships became larger and fewer over time, the need for the kind of coordination required in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries no longer existed. The position of harbormaster had devolved into a patronage job controlled by the mayor’s office, requiring little actual skill, knowledge or competence. It was rumored that none of the past six harbormasters had ever been on a boat before taking office.

  The only copy of the manifests that served a practical purpose was the one delivered to the head of the CUPD. The CUPD was the union to which all of the workers within the harbor system belonged. The system included the pilots of the tug boats that guided ships and barges all the way from the Atlantic, through the quirky passages of Boston’s outer harbor, to the tight lanes of the inner harbor, to the docks. It included the deckhands who worked the tugs and who were responsible for ensuring a smooth transition for ships from sea run, to tug, to dock. It included the dock masters who oversaw the operations on shore, and the stevedores who unloaded the ships, as well as all of the workers within the storage and holding facilities along the shoreline. The CUPD used the manifests to direct the human resources necessary to keep the blood of commerce coursing through the harbor’s arteries in a reasonably efficient manner.

  As a result, the President of the CUPD had an enormous amount of power, and endless opportunities to line his own pockets, as well as the pockets of others. Shipping companies were always willing to pay to have their cargo unloaded more quickly; importers were happy to pay to have their goods undercounted so that the tariffs they had to fork over to the government would be reduced; local politicians and power brokers were always looking to have sons or nephews of influential friends given their union cards and steady employment; and smugglers of everything from grey-market Asian goods to counterfeit products, to drugs, to people were always looking to strike a deal to make passage all the easier.

  Cormack had been the President of the CUPD for twelve years, and he knew all of the ways money could be made, both legally and not. He had immigrated to the United States alone when he was twelve. He’d spent his youth on the docks, and learned quickly to fight for what he wanted. By the time he was eighteen, he was running the Charlestown offshoot of the Winter Hill Gang, the Irish mob that controlled most of Boston’s illegal trade. When the Winter Hill Gang collapsed in the 1990s, Cormack took the opportunity to consolidate power along the waterfront. He had close connections to the men who worked the shoreline, and he had a reputation for getting things accomplished – no matter what the obstacle. By the turn of the millennium, Cormack had taken control of the union. A few years later he was officially elected its president. Now he was the man who controlled the movement of every piece of cargo into and out of Boston. Along the waterfront there was no one with more power.

  The position suited Cormack, who, in spite of his reputation for ruthlessness and brutality when required, was generally affable and treated people fairly. It was his belief that a certain amount of illegal activity like drug trafficking and smuggling was inevitable – healthy, even – in a port as large and central as Boston. The important thing was to ensure that it was managed and controlled. And if he and his men took a skim from the profits to make sure that control was maintained … well, they were serving the public good. Cormack kept the crazier criminal elements off the waterfront, and limited any violence to those who chose to play the game and break the rules.

  Cormack always knew that he had the talent to handle the human aspect of controlling the union. He had a knack for balancing the ability to instill fear and the ability to inspire loyalty. What had surprised him was how much talent he also had for the administrative aspects of the job. He loved keeping track of the resources necessary to keep the harbor running smoothly – moving men around the piers and cargo around the shore, tracking units and tonnage and dollars. He handled almost all of it himself, with some help from Toby White, an assistant who’d been with him for years and was always loyal. It was Cormack, though, that made it all fit together.

  That was what he was doing when he heard Cookie call from the bar. ‘Skip!’ Cookie yelled up the stairs.

  ‘Yeah, Cookie?’ Cormack called back.

  ‘Down to the last few, here.’

  ‘You thinkin’ ’bout last call, then?’

  ‘I am, unless you’re not.’

  ‘Nah, go ahead, Cook. Clear ’em out and clean ’er up. I have to touch base with Toby to schedule some men for tomorrow, but I’ve only got another half hour.’

  ‘Aye, Skip,’ Cookie called up. ‘Thanks.’

  Cormack picked his head up from the books on his desk and glanced at the clock on the wall. It was just after eleven thirty. It would be good for Cookie to get a break tonight – get home early and have a bit of a rest. He’d known the bartender for more than fifteen years, and the man was one of the hardest working people he’d met. He’d never uttered a complaint and never asked for a raise. He didn’t play the game, but he knew enough to keep his eyes and ears to himself, and Cormack had no doubt that if he ever needed to depend on someone, Cookie would be at the top of his list. He was the kind of a man who would gladly give up his own life for a friend. Men like that were few and far between, in Cormack’s experience, and not to be taken for granted.

  Cormack made a mental note to find a way to express his appreciation. He wasn’t sure how to do that; after all, what do you get for a man who wants nothing? He was sure he could figure out something, though. He had time.

  Eleven

  T’phong Soh stood at the base of Pier Six, looking out at the Mariner. Juan Suarez, his chief lieutenant, stood beside him. A group of Greek infidels had just passed them coming from the bar, their voices raised, their gait unsteady. For a moment, as they passed, Soh thought they might be spoiling for a fight – a complication for which he had no contingency. One of the tall, fat Greek sailors looked at Soh with malevolence, and Soh could feel the man’s desire for confrontation. Under other circumstances Soh would have welcomed the opportunity to make clear what a mistake it was to underestimate a smaller man. Soh’s hand was in his pocket, and he rubbed his thumb lightly across the curved blade. It would have taken him less than two seconds to gut the Greek from pelvis to Adam’s apple. He imagined with pleasure the look that would cross the man’s face as his guts spilled across the pier. And yet it was not an option. Not tonight.

  ‘He is s
till there?’ Suarez asked in Spanish. He was from El Salvador, and therefore considered more loyal to the organization than Soh, who was thought of as a foreigner. He’d been sent by the MS-13 captains from his prior assignment in Los Angeles nearly two years ago to keep an eye on Soh for the organization. In less than six months, Soh had come to trust Suarez as much as he supposed he would ever trust anyone.

  ‘That is what my informant has said.’

  Soh whistled, and could sense a shifting in the shadows around the pier. Eight more men emerged from different angles, converging on the base of the structure. With the ten of them walking toward the Mariner, anyone exiting would either have to go through them, or into the water. Boston’s historic cold snap was hanging on, with Fahrenheit air temperatures reaching only into the high single digits at the warmest part of the day. The nights had dipped below zero for more than a week. Chunks of ice wandered the surface of the harbor, crashing into each other to form large ice floats, separating and heading off on their own again. Anyone going into the water wouldn’t last more than a few moments before succumbing to the cold.

  Soh made a hand gesture, and ten silhouettes started moving slowly toward the tavern.

  * * * * *

  Cookie had almost finished closing up the bar when they came in. He’d finished the last run of the dishwasher and hung the glasses; wiped the tables down and stacked the chairs; given the floors a cursory, though adequate, mopping; and counted out the register. The cash had been placed in the large plastic money pouch with a slip for the next morning’s deposit. All he had to do was put out the creosote candles and wipe down the bar, and he was done for the night. He’d just glanced at his watch – it was eleven forty – and was looking forward to sitting and watching the hockey game. It would be just ending as he got home, but that didn’t matter; he’d upgraded his cable account to add a state-of-the-art, unlimited storage DVR. It was not like him to splurge on technology, but the ease of recording and playback had changed his life in the short time he’d had the gadget.