Serpents in the Cold (26 page)

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Scollay Square, Downtown

CAL WORKED TO
keep himself busy, but there was little to do at Pilgrim Security, and he found himself staring blankly out the window, from which he had to wipe condensation every few minutes, looking down on the Square. Shortly before the noon spill of bodies from the subway and the heave of pedestrians along Cambridge Street, an old rummy of an ex-cop named Casey came in, looking to see if Cal had any work going. Cal made a point of looking at his watch and then at Casey. Finally he shook his head. “Jesus, you come looking for a job at lunchtime? You booze through the night and snore it off while the rest of us working stiffs are up at dawn? How'd you think you're gonna get a job like that?”

Casey licked at his lips savagely and blinked dumbly at him. He looked pretty rough. Cal could smell the booze coming off of him from where he sat. It seemed to float in slow waves of heat and stale sweat, and his skin looked patchy and purple-hued as if he'd spent the better part of the night in a frozen alley being blasted by the cold. Casey's parboiled eyes gazed blankly back at him. The last time they'd talked, Casey had still had a wife and a teenage daughter; he didn't even want to ask how that was going, and he stopped himself from asking.

There was no work for him, and after the two guards Cal had sent out earlier that morning to Necco, there was nothing about to come in on the books, although he had hopes for some of the parking lot details down on Causeway once the winter broke. In the end, he gave Casey a quarter to get a burger and a cup of coffee at Joe and Nemo's, and told him to go see Charlie. He knew that Charlie needed someone to jump for the
Herald
trucks, counting papers and running them into stores. Charlie had been complaining all winter about his paperboys quitting the morning shift because of the cold—and the morning setup, when the local newspaper delivery trucks dumped their stacks, was his busiest time of the day. As long as Casey stayed on the straight and narrow, he could probably do him for at least an hour every morning, perhaps more, and perhaps some in the evening, too. It wasn't much, but it might see him through until the winter was over.

When he was gone, Cal looked at the schedule for the week. It had barely changed in months; he called the men on detail for the week to confirm their assignments, then called the operator and asked for an answering service for the following week. He didn't know when he'd be picking up a phone again.

THERE WAS A
rumor that people were disappearing from the low-rent streets of the West End on Scollay's skid row border, and when Cal walked Warren Street, he saw it was true. In the lower end the buildings became even more decrepit and abandoned, as if someone had spread the word that the Bomb was going to drop. The alleys were filled with garbage, and many of the stores were vacant. Along one half of the street the destruction of two buildings was near completion. Their front façades were gone and only the brick and wood shell remained, the bedrooms and living rooms where people had once lived snow-covered and visible to the street; on one fourth floor, tattered wallpaper and window draperies flapped in the wind. He'd had friends who'd grown up here in the tenements and played ball in the bustling, narrow streets and alleyways filled with the chatter of Jews, Irish, Italians, Chinese, Polish, Greeks, Albanians, Syrians, and Ukrainians.

Cal walked between the tightly packed four-story tenements, desolate and empty of families. It was like walking through a ghost town, even as he heard the distant sounds of traffic and the rest of the city moving through its day. He stared at the curtainless windows and looked in at empty rooms through the smeared glass. He knocked on a door and it swung open when he tried it. Inside, vandals and vagrants had already been here. Fires had been lit in the living room, the ceilings scorched and blackened with soot, and in one house what looked to be animal sacrifices and black magic rituals: a pentagram sketched on the floor in blood red, a wall covered with unintelligible words.

The West End wasn't a slum, although McAllister and Foley made it out that way and wanted the public to believe it. It was low rent because the landlords didn't care about their immigrant tenants, but now it looked so far gone, no one would be convinced it was worth saving. It looked like McAllister would have his way. There was no one left to battle the redevelopment, and if the houses were in such disrepair they couldn't be sold, they'd be condemned by the city, and that fit McAllister's plan as well.

Cal stood on a stoop smoking a cigarette. At the end of the street an old woman pushed a cart of groceries along the pavement, the wheels of the cart buckling and squealing. He watched her work the lock of a door, pull the cart in behind her, and then the door closed and the street was empty again.

McAllister and Foley were doing it, all right, either through intimidation or payoff. They were displacing thousands of people, just as the plats at City Hall suggested.

IN THE EVENING
he attended vespers at Mission Church but, too distracted to pray, he rode the trolley downtown and walked four blocks to the Littlest Bar, where he passed the next two hours sitting by the window drinking whiskey and staring out through the ice-covered windowpanes at the business district stiffs passing. The bar was warm and smelled slightly of tobacco, burnt coffee grounds, and greasy sirloin; familiar, comforting smells that did not seem all that different to him than the incense in the church he'd just come from. He wanted to think about Sheila's murder and the dead girls, about Renza, Foley, and McAllister, knew he needed to be thinking about them, but his mind was empty, a sieve through which only blackness fell. He and Lynne were getting out after all, and none of it was his concern anymore. He simply had to kill a man, which he'd done in the war, but now someone was going to pay him to do it, and that made it different, made him into something other.

At a news kiosk at the corner of Fulton, he bought a pint of whiskey and then caught a trolley home. He trudged down the Avenue past the brightly lit storefronts wreathed with faded Christmas decorations, past bars and corner markets. Crowley's Funeral Home still blazed its Christmas lights, and small candles sputtered and sparked blearily through the ice-covered windows.

Cal lowered his head. The temperature had dropped, and with it came a windchill that felt like ten below. Everything sparkled and shone beneath a sheen of ice: the gutters and trash cans, the dented fenders and worn, weather-beaten shingles of the three-story houses, twinkling in much the same way as, when he leaned his head back, the first stars coming out where the day ended, high in the winter sky. Shouting children, smears of snot frozen on their upper lips, ran and ducked between parked cars along the curb, hurled packed snow hard as rocks at one another.

A trolley sparked electric on the Avenue. A mother called from a porch for her child. And then came the blaring of sirens. As he climbed the hill past Nash's Pub, two fire engines and a cop car roared past him, sirens wailing. Flames, a shifting reddish glow through the tops of the black frozen elms that lined the Avenue, settled like a hazy sun over the tops of the triple-deckers. Black smoke churned upward in wide-spiraling funnels into the sky. The smell of ash and gunite and of roof tar heated as if it were summer.

He walked faster now, forcing the taut tendons in his hip and thigh to bend and flex, his eyes fixed on the end of his street, where two fire engines, lights swirling, had formed a V before his triple-decker. On the third floor, smoke mushroomed from the windows of their apartment, consuming the rooftop and obliterating it from view. He ran lurchingly then and the pint bottle fell from the folds of his coat and shattered upon the street. Ignoring the pain in his hip, he raced toward the fire engines and the flames that seemed to grow larger and more violent as he neared. At the house he stumbled to the side of the engines and charged the front door, but two firemen grabbed him and pushed him onto the street.

The hose water rushed in great twining ropes that turned black as they fell back from the burning building. Icicles hung from the fire hydrants and from the moisture that beaded upon the firemen's faces. Their eyes seemed white and large and driven with panic in the fiery glow and the flashing red lights of the engines. Thick, blazing embers floated down from the sky. More sirens sounded, and another two engines from other parts of the city whined past Cal and joined the two engines already fighting the blaze.

An explosion blew out the windows of the third-floor living room and sent Cal and half a dozen firemen to the blacktop. As he began to rise, crouching low against the heat of the flames, a series of smaller explosions from within the apartment above sounded, and the windows of the kitchen blew outward, frames shattering. He saw a flaming shape—Lynne on fire—racing past the blackened windows, struggling against the flames that engulfed her. With hands clutched to her head and long hair blazing, she burst through the doors to the balcony and, without slowing, launched herself over the railing.

“Lynne!” he screamed. “Lynne!” He rushed forward, but two firemen reached for him. “That's my wife!” he cried out, as he tried to shake them off. “That's my wife.” Burning debris fell about them, small timbers, slates, and shingles skittering alight across the sidewalk and down onto the engines.

“Keep him back, for Christ's sake!” one of the fireman shouted as Cal glared at his ash-streaked face, someone he knew he recognized but could not place, and then more arms were grabbing at him and pushing him back. The hoses writhed and whipped, and men glistening with water turning to ice struggled against them. For a moment Cal fought but finally relented when he saw Lynne's mangled, smoking body on the sidewalk. Steam rose off the blackened, twisted shape of her. The contraction of tendons and ligaments, before they'd been burned away to the bone, had pulled her body into an inhuman contortion—the spine bowed into a severe fetal cocoon, and the neck twisted sideways so that her blackened face held its mouth open in a silent scream. The firemen didn't even bother to cover her. There was no point.

Water flowed through the valves, and men continued to work the pumps to prevent the lines from freezing. Water gushed from the hydrant and valves onto the road, rushed down to the bay, and slowly began to freeze, merging with the black, icy glassiness of the beach. Cars—gleaming pinpricks of headlights—continued on the highway as if a world away, as if nothing had changed.

Cal stumbled backward and stared glassy-eyed at the body before looking away, but the neighborhood around him was unfamiliar and alien. He was cold, his clothes soaked from the hoses, sodden and sticking, freezing to his skin. Ladder 29 and Ladder 26 from Dorchester station houses, and from farther, Engine 49 out of the Hyde Park fire station rumbled by him. A long-bodied black Lincoln idled at the farthest corner of the street, lost in the shadows before the far triple-deckers and beneath the bare branches of the elms. White smoke curled from its dual tailpipes. Condensation fogged its glass. The light of the flames slid in sinuous flickering snakes across its dark metal. Movement stirred within; someone wound down the window and threw a cigarette butt through the gap.

Cal stepped away from the blaze and, gazing more intently at the car, began moving toward it. The alcohol was leaving Cal in a rush, as if someone had just given him a kick of epinephrine. He could see a Kinneally, the big white face leering, staring at the fire from the driver's seat. Cal reached for his gun, extending it before him as he strode, more quickly now, toward the car. The taillights came on as they spotted him. A large goon whom he recognized as one of the Flanagan clan clambered from the back, a gun in his hand. He was laughing. They were all laughing.

“What the fuck you gonna do, O'Brien,” Flanagan called, and then Cal began firing, running as he went. The first bullet struck Flanagan high on his chest and his mouth froze in shock. He reached for the door and managed to fall back into the car. The door remained open and Cal could still see Kinneally staring back at him. Cal fired again and the passenger-side window exploded, and then the car was peeling away from the curb, tires squealing and grasping for traction on the ice, its rear door swinging wide, Flanagan's legs dangling over the seat, his feet dragging on the ground, one black shoe bouncing off into the gutter.

He chased the car down the street, shells snapping from the chamber of his semiautomatic, as onlookers watching the fire fled from their front porches back into their houses. The car reached the intersection and Cal continued firing. The rear window shattered, and he could see Blackie and another man in the front ducking for cover. They careened onto the cross-street without braking as Cal emptied his clip, and as they slid across the road, it gave Cal time to draw his second gun. He pumped five more bullets into the passenger door before the car accelerated up the street toward the Avenue. At the intersection his legs gave out and he finally stopped running. Breath steamed from his mouth, fogged the space before his eyes. His arm remained extended, the gun barrel smoking, the car still in his sights but now too far gone. He reached toward a lamppost for balance and slowly slid down to the ground, sat splay-legged on the curb, staring down the street.

Black ash drifted down, mixed in with the snow coming down upon the houses and bringing forth a vast, muffled silence. It buzzed in his ears along with the other buzz that was the effect of alcohol, and he closed his eyes, but the darkness made him feel queasy. Things were spinning in the dark, and out of this vertigo images were emerging, ash-blackened faces and flashing red lights, orange flames racing up the side of a building, windows exploding, glass bursting in the heat and raining down upon the black sidewalk and flames licking at the same space where just moments before there had been windows. He had to open his eyes again, but when he did, he continued to see Lynne burning and blackened and mutilated and made unrecognizable by fire. He realized he was shaking and sobbing so loudly it racked his body. A bubble of rheum burst from his nose. Gasping, he fought to breathe over the tears, but still he could not stop crying. Finally he stood and walked down the street toward the Avenue, away from the flames and the fire and their home and with still more engines wailing down the street toward the blaze.