Serpents in the Cold (29 page)

_________________________

Scollay Square, Downtown

THE PAIN FORCED
Dante into a fetal position on the small cot at the back of Pilgrim Security. His shoulder felt as if it were on fire; beneath the bandages it throbbed and pulsed like some manner of animal, something no longer part of him. With clenched teeth, he grabbed Cal's army-issue blanket off the chair next to the cot, shakily wrapped it about him, feeling the coarse wool scratch at his skin like a scouring pad.

The room didn't have much in it. One lamp that occasionally flickered, sometimes going off and leaving him in darkness, or beaming so brightly he'd see spots if he looked at it too long; a radiator constantly pinging with pressure and hissing out steam; and one window to remind him that a world still existed outside. From the other room came voices softly talking, and then the door opened. Cal gave a weak attempt at a smile and stepped inside the room. Behind him came Fierro, wearing a heavy wool coat with the collar turned up and eyeglasses slightly fogged over. In his right hand he gripped a leather satchel, making him appear like a small-town doctor on a house call instead of the city's medical examiner. He labored to catch his breath.

“Claudia,” Dante managed. “I've got to get Claudia.” He tried to rise, but Cal motioned him to be still.

“She's okay. She's at Owen's.”

Dante nodded and lay back. “Thanks.”

“You're an idiot. You should be dead after what you did.”'

“Did I get him?”

“No. Word on the street is that he got you.”

Fierro placed his satchel on the wooden footstool, took off his glasses, and rubbed the lenses with his thumb, wiping away the moisture. He put them back over his wide inquisitive eyes and attempted to appear professional before turning back to the satchel and rifling through it.

“First, Dante, I want you to take some of these pills; they'll help you sleep. Wash them down. And then I've got to check that wound and get the bullet out, that is, if you want to keep living.”

Dante reached out for the pills, his good hand shaking so horribly that Fierro had to hold it steady as he placed them in his palm, and then as he lay back on the cot, he felt Fierro undoing the dirty wrappings about his shoulder.

 

FIERRO CAME BACK
into the office, sat down heavily in the chair opposite Cal's desk.

Cal looked at him. “So he'll be fine?”

Fierro, his neck stiff and tight, eyes appearing owl-like behind his glasses. “He'll live, but he's not fine. That wound is bad. I got the bullet out, cleaned it up best I could, and rewrapped it with clean gauze and bandages. Another day or two, gangrene would have set in. I gave him something that should help him sleep a bit, but he isn't right. Not right at all.”

“Just tell me he's fine. That's all I want to hear.”

“Cal. He's not fine.”

Cal moved behind the desk, sat down in the chair, and reached for the half-empty bottle of whiskey on the glass top.

From his desk drawer he took two shot glasses. He filled them to the rim and slid one across. Fierro tossed it back in one go. He winced briefly, suddenly warmed over.

“Really, Cal, I have no idea what you two are up to, but whatever it is I don't like it. The next time I see you two, I don't want it to be because I'm performing an autopsy on you. Christ's sake, you look almost as bad as him.”

“Don't lecture me. I'm not in the mood.” Cal downed his whiskey, grabbed the bottle, and refilled his glass but not Fierro's.

Fierro glanced down at his empty glass and back up at Cal. “You should stop with all this cops-and-robbers shit. I mean it. Go back to chasing cheating husbands, missing persons, and cats stuck in trees, whatever the fuck you do.”

“You have no idea what's going on.”

“To tell you the truth, I don't want to know.”

Fierro pushed up his glasses, eased forward toward the desk. “That's supposed to be your best friend in there. Do what's right and bring him to a hospital. And you, you should lay off the whiskey for a while.”

Cal shrugged indifferently; it was as if a great weariness were pulling him down. “Fuck you, Fierro,” he said, but without much feeling.

Fierro stood, took his leather satchel and hat off the desk. “I don't know if you've listened to the radio the last couple of days, but there's a real bad storm coming up the coast. Might be the worst one this winter. You'll want to stay put. Keep an eye on Dante, and if his fever gets worse, you'll know what to do, right?”

Fierro waited for Cal to speak, but he didn't.

“I guess that's it. Take care of yourself.”

Cal fought to find words to thank him, to offer him an apology, an excuse, anything, but nothing came to him, and all he could do was pour a third whiskey and keep his eyes downcast, staring at the shot glass filled with its amber liquid and not looking up as Fierro opened the door and left the office. He listened as Fierro's footsteps padded down the hallway and then faded in the stairwell. The curtains were drawn but he could tell it was snowing again, could hear the slow, dull thump of thick, heavy snow against the glass and windowsill. From the back room came the sudden sound of Dante heaving painfully, as if he were vomiting his guts and everything else within him onto the floor.

_________________________

Cedar Grove Cemetery, Dorchester

THEY HELD A
Mass and funeral service in the Cedar Grove chapel with Lynne's coffin positioned before the altar with flowers and wreaths set upon it. The ground was too frozen to dig, and so the body would rest in the graveyard's charnel house until the ground thawed and she could be buried. Father Nolan, who divided his time between Mission Hill and Saint Brendan's on Gallivan Boulevard, said the Mass and spoke a brief but tender eulogy. He'd asked Cal the night before if he wanted to speak, but Cal declined. Words wouldn't have come to him if he'd tried; all he felt was a dull numbness, as when the nerve endings of one's body have gone into shock and no longer scream with the pain of some terrible wound. He was thankful that the funeral home, Father Nolan, and Owen had done most of the funeral plans. It if it had been up to him, he wouldn't be sitting here now, but Owen had arranged the car service—one black Lincoln for Cal, Owen, and his wife, and another for Lynne's parents—that had picked them up in Southie that morning, and so he'd had no choice. He tried to think about how important it would have been for Lynne, how she would have wanted this, but even that wasn't enough, for nothing seemed to matter anymore, and when he stared at the coffin he saw only the burned and charred remains, a skeleton that could not be his Lynne and yet he knew it was.

In the pews sat mostly Lynne's friends, co-workers from the Carney, others from the old neighborhood whom she hadn't seen in some time or from Savin Hill and to whom she had always been kind. There were also cousins and aunts and uncles of his, the ones who attended every wake and funeral in the city as if it were a special dispensation that their Irish souls demanded of them. Her mother and father were sitting at the front across the aisle from Cal, Owen and his wife, Anne, Claudia, and Dante, pale and disheveled in a tie and black suit, one shoulder raised and crumpled from the thick gauze that wrapped his wound; but they refused to look his way, and when he'd tried to approach them before the Mass, Lynne's mother had shook her head fiercely and begun to sob, and Matty, her husband, jaw-clenched and pale, put up a hand warning him to keep his distance. When he glanced toward the back of the church, he caught sight of Fierro along with half a dozen cops he knew from his days as a detective.

Outside, the air felt cold and hard despite the sun. As if, without the cloud cover that they'd been under the last month, what little heat there had been was now gone. The sky was blue, but the only bird was a seagull shrieking forlornly over the Neponset River and the flats winding out to the bay and the sea. There was the soft peal of a bell, and Cal watched a trolley car bound for Mattapan Square trundle along the tracks that bisected the cemetery. Lynne had often joked that when the time came for them to be buried here, they could still take the trolley into town at midnight and go dancing together at Storyville.

He didn't realize he was crying until he felt Owen's wife hugging him, and then, awkwardly, Claudia did the same thing. Lynne's parents had already climbed into their Lincoln, and he watched as the driver eased the large car between the granite gateposts and out onto Adams Street. And he let them take him to the car, even though it felt as if their combined weight, one on either side of him, were weighing him down.

IN THE DINING
room Owen and his wife had laid out a platter of cold cuts, bread, and cheeses; in the kitchen a large pot of stew simmered over a low flame. Mourners stood in various corners of the room talking quietly. Anne went about turning on the standing lamps while Owen refilled whiskey glasses or passed out bottles of beer.

After he'd shaken hands and listened to condolences, to which he vacantly nodded and said thank you, Cal stood to one side of the bay window in the dining room and looked across the boulevard at Carson Beach. He spooned stew from a bowl and chewed slowly; he couldn't taste a thing, but knew he needed to eat.

There were a few stuttering notes on the upright piano, and then Dante began to play “Carrickfergus.” The piano was out of tune and many of the keys dead, notes that sounded out wooden and dull, but Dante's gnarled fingers did their best, slowly letting the notes hold their pitch. His head was bent to the keys and cocked sideways, and Cal couldn't tell whether this was from the pain of his shoulder wound or if he was listening for the absences and tremors in the range his damaged hands would allow. And there was something about the sound of the ruined piano and its player that lent a melancholy quality to the song.

Cal glanced over from the window. Lynne would have appreciated the song—even with all of its flaws, it was beautiful. More, he thought, she would have been happy that Dante was playing again.

After a moment, Owen placed his beer on the mantel and joined him, singing. Owen was a natural tenor with a fine falsetto and his version of the song brought most people in the room to tears. Together they played “The Galway Shawl” and then “Blackbird” and “She Moved through the Fair,” and the haunting treble of Owen's voice filled the room.

They played together for a while longer, moving from the traditional Irish ballads to World War II standards, and then the sound of them drifted slowly into the swell of talk and lament and the giving of blessings and leave-takings, and it wasn't until Dante stood at his side with a bologna and cheese sandwich and a beer that he knew the whole thing was finally and mercifully over.

“How you holding up?” Dante asked.

Cal nodded. “I'm okay.”

He flexed his bandaged hand then looked back to the window. Dante watched him staring blankly beyond the glass. He finished his sandwich and sipped his beer.

“What do you want us to do?”

“Do? Do about what?”

In the living room someone turned on the radio and a surge of static filled the room, followed by the loud, jubilant sounds of a swing number, and they quickly turned it off. Dante followed Cal's eyes; the street looked gray and deserted. Not even a car moved. It was as if the world had been stilled and was waiting to move forward again.

Voices from the living room came to them, louder now thanks to the whiskey and the beer, everyone more comfortable with their grief and letting go the decorum of mourning. Dante touched Cal's arm lightly and Cal looked at him. “What do you want us to do?” he said again.

Cal rolled his shoulders and it hurt; he realized that his body had been rigid for the last half hour, and that he'd been standing in the same spot without moving. He still felt the tightness and pain in his muscles, the ache of nerve and tendon after the surge of adrenaline from three nights before. He exhaled slowly, trying to let the tension go. Felt the holsters beneath his jacket. Since the fire he'd kept them close and hadn't left the house without them. It was time to let them go, too. All of it needed to end, and there was only one way.

“I want to burn the fucker down,” he said softly. “All of it. I want to light him up.”

“Good,” Dante said. “That's good.”

_________________________

Blue Hill Avenue, Mattapan

FROM THE FRONT
seat of the battered DeSoto Dante had jacked in Jamaica Plain, they watched the lights beyond the plate glass windows of McGuire's Package Store on Blue Hill Avenue and the clerk bent, slope-shouldered at the cash register, closing out, taking the cash, adding up the receipts, and then walking through the narrow building, extinguishing the lights one by one. They watched as a beer truck made a late-night delivery, the driver carting kegs and crates of booze on a two-wheeler dolly through the side entrance. After the truck was gone, they watched as the clerk wiped the snow from his car and then as he drove out of the lot, turning left onto Blue Hill Avenue toward Franklin Park and the city.

Cal hunched low in his seat, knees against the dashboard, thumbing bullets into the clip of his automatic. Dante sucked his cigarette slowly, let a thin stream of smoke escape from between his lips and drift out the partly open window. A truck bearing the placard
RUBENSTEIN'S KOSHER MEATS
growled down the deserted avenue, big band music drifting from its cab. With the heel of his hand, Cal pushed the clip into the chamber.

On the darkened street Dante opened the trunk of the car. Six five-gallon metal gas cans stood upright, side by side, a seventh lay turned on its side. With his good arm he reached into a nook beside the upright cans and pulled out a pint bottle. “For your miseries,” he said, lifting the bottle in mock toast, and they both took swigs from it.

Cal looked up and down the street to see if anybody was watching. The wooden triple-deckers and brick-and-clapboard houses, the poorly shoveled sidewalks, mounds of plowed snow and parked cars squeezed between them; the whole neighborhood encased in a bone-white moonlight that made it all appear frozen, as silent and still as a photograph in a rarely opened photo album. He ran his fingers through his hair, hacked, and spat phlegm into the snow. He heaved out one of the five-gallon canisters and then slammed the trunk shut. “All right, then,” he said, and in the moonlight Dante could see Cal's face, rigid and hard as stone.

In the back lot a line of low pine trees silhouetted the mottled sky, charcoal clouds covering the moon. The back door of the building was encrusted with ice. A drift of frozen snow covered the bottom steps in a sweeping arch. Cal kicked at the door once. Three more times and the door snapped open, the dead bolt tearing through the weathered wood.

First thing that hit them was the smell. Dante moved about the center of the room with the flame from his butane lighter leading the way. After several minutes he found a lone string hanging from the ceiling. He pulled down on it and a bare bulb illuminated a room with concrete floors and walls constructed of cheap plywood. A couple of worktables stood against the wall off to their right, boxes of bootleg liquor stacked beneath them.

A cot covered in bedsheets and blankets rested in the far-left corner of the room. Above it, photos of women with powdered faces exposing their pointed breasts were tacked on the wall, and besides them, a gas station calendar two years old, pinned open to October 1949.

“Jesus Christ,” Dante said as he pulled back the sheets, revealing a large blackish-brown stain in the area where a head would have rested.

Cal moved to the boxes under the table. They were full of water-damaged papers and files, now dry to the touch. He poured gasoline on them first, and then, taking small steps sideways, his arms moving in a careful pendulum motion, poured gasoline in splashing arcs on the walls.

When the can was empty, he walked back to the center of the room and lit the cigarette in his mouth, inhaled slowly, seeming to savor it. He flicked the cigarette and it landed under the table, and the vacuum sucking noise of conflagration was followed by a rolling, bellowing hiss as everything caught fire. He walked over to the bulb and pulled down on the string so the only light was from the flames that carried up the walls in a brilliant blue, orange, and white wave.

Outside, it took a third attempt with the solenoid clicking before the engine roared and then settled into a steady grumble. Cal hit a switch, and headlights rose up from the sides of the hood. Two beams of light fluttered, washed trembling light across the snowbank before them. The engine grated and made a straining noise as he put the car in gear and slowly moved out onto the empty street.

He kept the whiskey bottle between his legs as he drove, took a small pull before taking a much larger one, then passed it to Dante. He flexed his hands, rolled his shoulders, pressed back into the car seat, and watched the snow falling slow and thick before the wavering beam of the headlights.

THEY FINISHED THE
bottle of whiskey outside the second building, a small warehouse on the Milton–Hyde Park line. It was as if it was all meant to be. The door to the small warehouse wasn't even locked, and inside a large pile of dried splitting firewood sat in the corner, as though the Fates bore matchstick fingers and had placed it there just for them. But farther in amid boxes of cigarettes, imported canned goods, clothes, kitchen appliances, was a row of male and female department store mannequins standing there as if guarding the stolen goods. Grinning, Cal began moving about the room like the boxer of old, jabbing the air before the mannequins' faces. He shuffled down the row and then paused at a dummy with a pencil-thin mustache. “Ahh, you fuck!” Cal shouted. “Thought you'd sneak by me, didn't you, you dirty bastard!” and he struck it a left uppercut and then a right and the dummy toppled to the floor. Dante shook his head, helped drag one of the wooden men into the center of the large room, poured gasoline over its bald head just like dousing a wick, and then, branching out trails of gasoline in all directions, made sure the inferno would catch to every corner.

LEARY'S SAT AGAINST
the tracks behind a steel-wire fence crested with tight coils of barbed wire: a one-story building that looked as if it had once been a canteen for the local mill workers. It was well past one o'clock, and all the lights were out. Cal and Dante moved around the perimeter of the building until they found a cellar window. “It's Saturday night, they got better places to be,” Dante said as he kicked the glass in, tapped at the sharp fragments with the tip of his boot until it was clear enough for them to climb through. They made it up the staircase, listened at the door, and when only silence came to their ears, they moved quickly inside. Dante found a light switch, which illuminated the small barroom.

Dante moved behind the bar, swiped a bottle, broke its seal, and drank from it. Cal poured gasoline along the oak bar and the stools whose cushions were tattered and torn, wide strips of electrical tape keeping them from falling apart. When he lit the cigarette and flicked it over the bar, Dante stood farther away, unzipped, and let loose a streaming arc of piss onto the jukebox by the entrance, watching the fire reflect off and dance on Cal's profile. “Now we can celebrate!” he shouted.

BLACK JACK'S HAD
its back to the Fort Point Channel, beside an arch-covered alleyway that veered crookedly out onto Old Colony Way. Plaster crumbling in places revealed the horsehair between the framing joists. Empty beer glasses and overflowing ashtrays lay on the windowsills from the night before. Dante glanced at the shattered glass, the places that showed bullet holes and blood, and the floor near the door where a pool of blood had soaked into the wood, turning it black, and then he and Cal went to work, dousing the tables and booths and bar.

As Cal and Dante set the fire, there was a sudden swell in the channel as a barge passed slowly in the night; waves pushed up against the stone embankment, and the building seemed to shift, a wavering tremor beneath Dante's and Cal's feet as if they were at sea, and as if the place were built on pylons instead of stone, and then they rushed out to the car, which they'd left idling.

They crossed the channel and drove into the city. The windows of the lone tavern on the far side of the South Street Bridge blazed with light like a distant flame, and then something inside ignited, perhaps the gas mains from the stove or the heater, or more secret things stored in the bar's cellars, for an explosion sounded across the water, and they could feel the vibration of it through the chassis of the car, and a pillar of bright flame shot through the bar's roof, sending shingles and splintered joist beams and black tar paper hurtling into a sky lightening with more snow.

They moved through the dark, deserted city, blankets of white snow in drifts between buildings starkly white, and the firelight caught like candle flames in black, empty windows. Dante tugged at a cigarette while Cal wove the car lazily through the darkness, fishtailing back and forth on the deserted streets of downtown. The lights of Jimmy's Lighthouse blazed in blue and amber. Atop the John Hancock building the weather beacon flashed red. And the snow fell thick and soft before their headlights, swirling before the windshield and the wipers, and then swept back along the car's sides and into the blackness.