Hours of Gladness (30 page)

Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Hours of Gladness

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SUCH DEVILS ARE DRIVEN OUT ONLY BY PRAYER AND FASTING

I
t was wrong, it was bad, it was evil, Trai thought as Mick and Phac bundled her and Suong into the car along with some hastily packed suitcases. It was just like Vietnam, people were being killed for political reasons, for ideas that dwelt in the distance like malign gods.

“Why are you doing this? Is there no other way?” she had asked Phac while he watched her collect clothes and food.

“I'm beginning to think Mick and I are bound to each other on the wheel of fate,” Phac said.

“If you told me, I would have prayed. I might have been some help.”

“If your God is so wonderful, why did he let you suffer those bestialities from the pirates?”

“So my heart would be torn open wide enough to hear my father's voice,” she said.

“Your father!”

Phac raised his hand to strike her. Mick rushed into the kitchen to hurry them and Phac changed his mind. They
drove deep into the Pines on the main concrete road and then even deeper into the trees along sandy roads that twisted and turned like corkscrews. Finally they reached a house surrounded by many ruined automobiles. An old man with a beautiful face met them at the door. Trai saw at a glance that he had achieved a rare thing: he had completed his soul. They sat at the table while Mick explained what he had done and what he hoped to do with the cocaine.

The old man shook his head. Trai had been praying he would dislike the idea as much as she did. “Get it out of here,” he said. “It won't work, Mick. Get it out of here and get yourself out of New Jersey. The thing's gone sour.”

“No, it hasn't!” Mick said.

“Yes, it has. You can't fight them and the whole U.S. government. They're going to be in this thing soon. You can't fight them. Hell, if you could, we would have declared Hog Wallow independent long ago.”

“I'm tired of taking bullshit advice from you,” Mick roared. “I'm doin' this my way. I'm gonna get Joe, and with Phac here and three M16s I can take on a regiment of those assholes. They've never fought in the woods.”

“Even if you kill them, what can you do with the stuff? Go down to Chatsworth and open a store?”

Chatsworth was the main town in the Pines. Suong and his friends sometimes drove there to drag-race on the roads around it. He used Mick's car and always won.

“I'll sell it in the city. My father will help me sell it.”

The old man shook his head. “The thing's gone sour.”

“My whole life's gone sour, Pop. I'm going to buy it back this way or no way.”

The words struck Trai's heart with awful force. She saw the desperation in Mick's soul. She also saw the battle fury turning his hazel eyes almost black. She had seen that in Vietnam and it had terrified her. Now it transported her. There was divinity in it; now she grasped the dimensions of Mick's warrior soul. A part of God was in that soul, working itself out here in this terrible way. Even if he died living out this divinity, she could no longer oppose him.

The old man saw it too. He sighed and ran his hand through his white hair. “What do you want me to do?”

“Talk Joe into it. Tell him to meet me at the head of Tulpohocken Creek. We'll camp there for the night.”

“All right.”

“I need some of those railroad flares and a couple of gallons of gasoline.”

“You gonna burn the woods?”

“Only as a last resort.”

“You could start a big fire. We haven't had much rain this month.”

“We'll let the rangers worry about it, if we have to do it. They've gotten good at putting them out.”

“Not the big ones.”

“I promise you, it'll be a last-ditch thing,” Mick said.

For the old man the woods were holy. It was a crime to burn them. Mick did not want to burn them. But he did not think anything was holy anymore. His belief in honor, in loyalty, in love, had been wounded by too many people. How could Trai give holiness back to him? The experience was essential for a soul to reach God.

Oh. Trai realized she did not want to save Mick's soul for God. She wanted it for her own sake, she wanted his love and her love to join again and never part for all of time and eternity. She loved him, sitting there, despair on his face, she loved him with all the wild, trembling desire she had known in Binh Nghai.

The old man gave them the gasoline and the railroad flares. He watched them drive into the Pines, hands on his hips, shaking his head, finally waving good-bye. Suddenly Trai saw him surrounded by a rainbow. She saw tiny figures dancing inside the colored stripes of the rainbow and she heard a marvelous humming song. She knew the old man was going to die.

Tears streamed down Trai's face. “What's the matter?” Mick said.

“He's so good.”

“He's the best that ever was or will be,” Mick said.

FATHER, OH, FATHER, COME THROUGH FOR ME NOW

I
n his white 1970 American Motors Rebel, Mick roared up the New Jersey Turnpike in the dawn. The steamer trunk full of cocaine was in the backseat. Sleepy tolltakers let him pass without a glance, missing their chance to make headlines. In an hour he was rolling through the outskirts of Jersey City. Down the littered streets he zoomed to a house on Bayside Avenue, overlooking the cemetery where they had buried Sunny Dan Monahan. In the distance, the spires of New York City loomed in the 6 A.M. light.

Mick pounded on the door of 774 Bayside, noting the odd coincidence that they were the last three numbers of his marine dog tags. Buster O'Day spoke from somewhere inside the house. “Who the hell is that?”

“Mick. Your son.”

It took Buster about five minutes to open the door. He had a half dozen bolts and locks and chains on it. He stood there shivering in his underwear, glaring sullenly at Mick. “What the hell do you want?”

“Some help.”

“Find out if he's stolen anything. If he's wanted for anything,” cried a woman's voice from the top of the stairs.

“Shut up,” Buster said. He waved Mick into the house and spent another five minutes locking, bolting, and chaining the door again. The woman came down the stairs while he was doing this and glared at Mick. She looked exactly like Buster, except that she was not bald. The same button nose, sneering mouth, raw, reddish complexion.

“I tole you not to go that funeral. I tole you never to have nothin' to do with these people again. I knew he was gonna show up lookin' for you know what.”

“Shut up and make us some coffee,” Buster said.

Still in his underwear, Buster waved Mick into the living room, which was full of decrepit overstuffed furniture at least fifty years old. Springs popped through cushions, stuffing oozed from torn arms of the couches and easy chairs. “That's my sister, your aunt Mary,” he said, pulling on a pair of pants he must have carried downstairs when he answered Mick's knock.

Aunt Mary served them coffee with the glare of hatred still on her face. Mick gulped his cup down, hoping it would fight the exhaustion that was drying out his brain.

“What's on your mind?” Buster said.

“Cocaine. I've got about ten million bucks' worth of it, street value, in the back of the car.”

Buster spilled half his coffee on his undershirt. “What am I supposed to do about it?” he cried.

“Help me get rid of it.”

“Where did you get it?”

Mick started telling him. When he got to shooting Consigliere Perella and his bodyguard, Buster spilled the rest of his coffee down the front of his pants. “Get out of here!” he screamed. “If you tell anybody you came here, I'll personally hire guys to blow you away!”

“Jesus Christ! You're my father. My whole life, I never asked you for anything.”

“I'm not your father!” Buster screeched. “Your mother had you in her belly long before she married me. Nobody told me until after I married her. But I had to swallow it because her big-shot father said do it or else. Then suddenly he ain't a big shot anymore. He runs outta here with his money to that penny-ante suburb of Atlantic City and I'm supposed to go too? Give up the biggest numbers business in the state? A business my old man spent his life buildin' up? That's when I decided your goddamn mother wasn't worth it.”

In a frenzy, Buster pulled Mick out of the living room through the kitchen into a connected garage. A green 1952 Studebaker sat there, all four tires flat; rust had practically consumed the rear fenders. Buster flipped up the trunk and Mick stared at money. Thousand-dollar bills. Hundred-dollar bills. Five-hundred-dollar bills. The trunk was crammed to the top with them.

“See that?” Buster screamed. “There's maybe two million bucks in there. Why should I give that up for her? When she wouldn't let me touch her nine nights out of ten. Tell your mother what you saw here today, big shot. Tell her how we could've been livin' in Saddle Brook next door to Tommy the Top if she stuck with me. Tell her!”

“I'll tell her,” Mick said.

“Lemmy give you some advice. There's only one way to get rid of that cocaine. By givin' it back to Tommy Giordano. If you do that, maybeâand I can't guarantee itâhe'll let you go someplace like California without a contract on you.”

Buster wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Listen. Maybe in a couple of months I can talk him into payin' the hit guy off and pretendin' the punk did the job. Maybe you should tell your mother about this money and what I might do for you if she comes back to me. Here or in Saddle Brook or New York. I got the money to go anywhere she wants. I could set you up in California in a nice business.”

On and off all his life Mick had imagined coming to
this man to ask his help for something. It was part of his struggle to understand why his father had turned his back on him. Why he had never said a word to him between the ages of one and twenty-seven, when they had met in Atlantic City at Caesars.

Now Mick had his answer. He turned his back on this nonfather, on this slime who had made his deal with the Mafia to pile up the $1,000 bills in the trunk of this rusting car.

Mick strode to the front door and started turning the locks. But Buster had the keys to the bolts and chains. “Open this goddamed door!” Mick roared.

“It's your only chance, what I told you,” Buster whined.

Mick picked up one of the overstuffed chairs and threw it through the front window. “Call the cops!” screeched his bogus Aunt Mary.

“Shut up,” screamed Buster.

Mick climbed through the shattered window and gunned his Rebel down Bayside Avenue. In ten minutes he was on the New Jersey Turnpike, heading back to the Pines. Thundering in his mind was the worst question a man could ask himself. Who was he?

THE IRON CHANCELLOR

“Y
ou're sure it was McGinty's wife?” O'Gorman said. “Absolutely sure?”

“She said it was. Why don't you call her?”

“No. It isn't necessary. It's all coming together now.”

It was one o'clock in the afternoon of April 2. In his bedroom in the Monahan house, Dick O'Gorman hung up the telephone and gazed at himself in the mirror. The too handsome face, which he had always disliked, except when he was pursuing a woman, was seared and blistered by a half day on the ocean in the
Enterprise
's lifeboat. His lips were so swollen it was painful for him to smile, even to talk.

So be it, he thought. Farewell to Handsome Dick. All his life the face had been an obstacle to other men taking him seriously. Perhaps to taking himself seriously.

It was time to change, he told the man in the mirror. Time to live up to that nasty swollen mouth. Time to prove there was iron in his soul. He had always admired Bismarck. As chancellor of a united Ireland, he planned to pursue similar brink-of-war policies, use every weapon
from terrorism to piety to keep his enemies, above all England, demoralized. He would make Ireland more than an accidental island on the fringe of Europe.

For the moment he was in no danger of becoming chancellor of anything. The operation was a shambles. The Cuban freighter was pretending to have engine trouble off Cape May, seventy miles south of Paradise Beach. But this subterfuge was attracting the attention of the U.S. Coast Guard, which would soon make unloading the weapons out of the question. Coast Guard or no Coast Guard, the missiles would never come ashore unless they got the cocaine from Mick O'Day.

Now he had another reason for wanting to even the score with Mick. The $1,000 bill in his glove compartment was no accident. Nor was the gunfight with Kilroy. Mick was unquestionably working with McGinty and both of them with the FBI and the SIS, getting paid by the day or hour and making so much money Mick was careless with the take.

Where did that leave his mother, sweet Barbara Kathleen? Was she in with the son, laughing behind her hand at how easily she had seduced the Irish hero into smiling compliance?

Barbara burst into the bedroom. “What's happening?” she said. “I want to know what's happening.”

“Maybe you can tell me.”

“Mick telephoned me. He's in the Pines. He said there was a fight on the boat. You tried to kill him.”

“That's hardly the truth. He's alive and poor Kilroy is dead.”

He gave her a rapid summary of what Mick had done and why.

“He's become the three most despicable words in the history of Ireland: turncoat, traitor, informer.”

She swayed there, wanting to believe both of them, seeing the impossibility, wanting, as O'Gorman accurately predicted, to believe him more than her surly, perpetually defiant son.

“He's going to get killed,” O'Gorman said. “The Italians will kill him if we don't.”

Perfect. Just the right degree of concern for the bastard's survival. Conscience soothed, Barbara flung herself against him. “No, Dick, no. Don't let that happen.”

“I'll do my best, for your sake. What did he tell you on the phone?”

“He wants me to join him in the Pines. He's afraid you'll hold me hostage.”

“You see how sick he is, how vicious?”

“He said I shouldn't trust you. He said you made my father sign this house over to a bank that's controlled by the Mafia. Is that true?”

“It was the only way to raise the money for the guns,” he said, silently cursing Mick again in his mind. “Your father did it out of his love for Ireland.”

“How can we go away? How can we do anything now?” Barbara cried.

“We can only do it by getting the cocaine from Mick. Will you go see him and try to talk him into giving it up?”

“He says you're going to use the money to pay for the guns.”

O'Gorman picked up the telephone and dialed the safe number of the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York. “I'm sending the ship back to Cuba.”

The operator came on the line and he spoke rapidly to her in Spanish. In a moment he was talking to the Cuban intelligence man who was handling the liaison. He told him in Spanish that there was a problem and the freighter should wait for a new rendezvous. Paradise Beach was blocked by the FBI.

He hung up and smiled at Barbara. “Does that convince you? Tell Mick I'll meet him anywhere he says and guarantee his safety with the Italians. We'll give them the cocaine and our money worries will be over.”

“You promise not to hurt him?”

“All will be bygones. No one in Belfast will miss Billy Kilroy, believe me. He was a spent bullet.”

As he spoke, O' Gorman saw himself placing the Chinese Type 64 silenced to Mick's head and pulling the trigger. Now you know the whole truth, he exulted, now you accept the ultimate meaning of your nickname. It's your soul that is black, O'Gorman. As black as Satan's and you're proud of it. Are you listening, Captain Littlejohn?

“Mick says he'll be at Pop Oxenford's house in the Pines. He says Alex Oxenford knows where it is. He can bring me there.”

“He will, depend on it.”

An anxiety that O'Gorman mistook for fear swept Barbara's face. “I'd rather go alone. But I'd never find it”

“Oxenford'll take you. And he'll behave. He knows the consequences if he doesn't. We explained quite a lot to him while we were bobbing around in that damned boat.”

O'Gorman went down the street to Bill O'Toole's house. Giordano, the Mafia boss, was there, raging up and down the living room. The police chief slumped in a stuffed chair, his fair-skinned face practically raw from their sojourn on the ocean. He had a patch over his gashed eye. His damaged leg was laid across a leather footrest. He looked exhausted or disgusted or both.

“What the fuck do you mean you can't find him?” Giordano shouted.

“There's six hundred thousand acres of woods over there and Mick knows them better than anybody except a Piney,” Bill O'Toole said. “They know him and they're not gonna squeal on him. Especially if he promises them a cut of the take. If you want my advice, make a deal with him. Take the coke and call it even and let the stupid Cubans rot out there on that rust bucket. Let this son of a bitch go home and try to explain it to the IRA.”

“You do that and I'll see to it that you're both dead in a month,” O'Gorman said.

“Blow it out your ass,” O'Toole said.

O'Gorman saw that O'Toole's self-disgust and his disgust with the messed-up deal had blended into a massive indifference. He did not care whether he lived or died. If
he had to die, he was going to go defiantly. It was the only piece of his manhood left.

Giordano blinked at O'Gorman, amazed. No one had dared to make such a threat to him for a long time. “Do you know who you're talkin' to?” he growled.

“I do. I know both your names. Let's keep our heads and our patience a bit longer,” O'Gorman said. He told them about Mick's call to Barbara.

“I know where Pop Oxenford lives,” Bill O'Toole said.

“Let's pay him a visit now. Maybe we can locate your double-crossin' nephew before it gets dark,” Giordano said.

“Pop won't tell us a thing,” O'Toole said.

“You give me five minutes with the guy and I guarantee he'll answer every question in the fuckin' catechism. Even if he's a fuckin' Baptist,” Giordano said.

“Let's save that for later,” O'Gorman said. “Let's see if his mother can arrange a meeting at which we promise to give Mick the money for the cocaine. That's when we strike. When he has the stuff with him.”

“I like that,” Giordano said.

“Where are your men?” O'Gorman asked.

“In Atlantic City. Twenty.”

“They're well armed?”

“Uzis.”

“A good gun. The Israelis make very good guns.”

“Yeah. What do we do in the meantime?”

“You can watch television. O'Toole and I will go see the fellows with the trucks. Hughie McGinty and I have a lot to talk about.”

O'Gorman's hand caressed the Chinese Type 64 silenced in his pocket. The Iron Chancellor was in charge.