Serpents in the Cold (30 page)

_________________________

City Dump, the Calf Pasture, Dorchester

THEY DROVE THE
DeSoto to the city dump, where they'd left Cal's car parked beyond the mountains of refuse, hidden among the crushed cars from the wrecker's yard stacked eight high. Thick, churning smoke billowed up from the tire plant; the smell of burning rubber swept across the frozen marshland. Here and there, plainly visible in the darkness, feeble white smoke twined sluggishly upward from the roofs of hobo shacks scattered across the point. Tonight it seemed too cold even for the rats, and nothing moved. The crushed chassis shuddered and groaned about them as wind off the water came rushing over the peninsula, and Cal turned his head slightly against the wind, convinced for a moment that he'd heard a fragment of an old dancehall tune come drifting across the bay.

They splashed the remainder of the gasoline on the stolen car, smashed the windows, and doused the interior. Dante lit a matchbook, stood for a moment watching the matches curl, blackened, into a small blaze, and then he pitched it through the shattered windows and onto the front seat, where it at once ignited the gasoline. Blue-tinged flames raced through the interior and then on rapidly flickering tendrils about the roof of the car, across glass and metal. In a moment the upholstery of the seats had caught and the interior became a revolving fireball. The front and rear windows blackened, torqued, and then shattered. Flames shot upward, illuminating the towers of crushed cars.

They stepped back, twenty feet or so, and watched. Even from such a distance the glow of the burning car shone upon their faces. “I was starting to like that car,” Dante said. The adrenaline of the night was all but gone, and a sickly metallic taste remained in his mouth. His limbs ached dully, and he was suddenly extremely tired. Blood had seeped through his bandage, and he felt the wound throb with a sharp, bullying pain. Cal looked pale and washed out, his eyelids opening and closing heavily as they watched the car burn. He lifted the whiskey bottle to his mouth, but it was empty, and he let it drop to the snow.

He trudged to his Fleetline, climbed in, and started the engine—it turned over grudgingly and caught on the third attempt—and fixed Dante in the headlights as he pulled slowly out from between the rows of crushed cars.

Cal rolled down the window, gunned the engine as the idle faltered, and motioned with his head for Dante to get in the car. “I've seen enough fires for one night,” he muttered.

They drove back along the Mile Road from the dump, past the tire factory and treatment station, and the lights of the city blinked into view before them, and it was as if they'd suddenly emerged from some strange, hidden country, a place that existed outside the world they were returning to; and with this came a sensory realization, the overpowering smell of gasoline, sulfur, and ash, burnt hair and charred clothing, of sweat and alcohol. Cal's head slumped forward as he drove, his eyes mere slits as he peered through the glass. His shoulders shook and his hands gripped the wheel so tightly the big, scarred knuckles shone white. It took Dante a moment before he realized that Cal was crying. He said nothing, and Cal's eyes tracked the road before them and they drove on blindly through the dark.

_________________________

Scollay Square, Downtown

CAL WASHED AND
then slept through the afternoon on the office's foldout couch in his underwear, a blanket wrapped about his lower legs, sweating although the room was freezing. When he woke, he looked in on Dante. He was sleeping fitfully but seemed stronger than he had the day before; some color had come back to his face. He boiled water for coffee, breath steaming the cold air, and couldn't help but smell from their overcoats the acrid scent of ash and gasoline. He lowered his nose to his skin and sniffed; even after bathing, he could still smell the gasoline and fire on his skin.

Too agitated and stir-crazy to bide his time sitting in the office any longer, Cal wandered the streets again, his senses alert to every holler or shout or passing car. A reluctant winter dusk came down upon the city and the lights came on. In the distant bell tower of the Old North Church in the North End, a lamp glowed golden-hued, and seemed to guide him. He walked the old West End, passing small tenement houses, working-class shuls, Italian butcher shops and bakeries, grimy storefronts seeming to lean in on the narrow streets, and alleyways entrenched in snow and through which no cars could now pass, and then along the river back into the North End, along Copp's Hill, where Cotton Mather lay in his grave, and down the backside of Hanover Street. He passed Clough House and the Paul Revere House, the Standard Saloon, infamous political club of the old ward bosses.

“What do we do now?” Cal said aloud, and a group of passing pedestrians stared at him.

He passed the Langone Funeral Home on Hanover, where over ten thousand mourners had paid their respects to Sacco and Vanzetti back in '27. And the tenement where ward boss John F. Fitzgerald had been born, worked his way up from ward heeler to city council to state senator to congressman for the Ninth District, and, finally, mayor of Boston. The Ladies' Auxiliary were standing on the steps of the shul on Salem Street, and despite a strake of snow and wind rushing at his face, Cal looked up and tipped his hat as he passed.

A regiment of streetlights came on above his head with a slight buzzing hum. Along the street thick clouds of steam spiraled slowly upward from manhole covers. On Thacher Street he found himself before the restaurant that just the week before he'd waited outside as Foley, McAllister, and Renza's uncle had their meeting. The red and green neon sign glowed in the frozen air, its windows lit brightly from within, and he stepped inside into the heated air thick with the scent of garlic and fresh dough.

Cooks shouted in Italian at one another, flattened and oiled the dough, dressed it with various toppings, pulled pizzas steaming from the ovens. On the wall behind the counter, under grease-spotted frames, numerous pictures of smiling Italian crooners, pop stars from years past, all autographed to the pizzeria.

He ordered a pizza and took a beer to a stool before the window. On the opposite wall more framed pictures crowded the wallpaper, peeling in the steam of the room: local figures, sports heroes, politicians—a picture of Mayor Hynes, Pope Pius XII; Italian boxers staring at the camera lens and frozen in permanent flat-footed rigor, their fists raised against invisible opponents just beyond the photographer.

From a radio came the standards from a decade before, crackling and hissing over the noise from the kitchen, and between songs the deejay, bright and exuberant, describing the year of the song, the various singers and band members, and national events occurring at the time of the record's release. Cal drank the beer slowly, reluctant to head back to the office, and then his pizza came and he ate.

Sam Shaw's “Wish You Were Mine” followed Dinny Cochrane's “A Splendid Thing” from 1942, the year they completed the Alaskan Highway,
How Green Was My Valley
won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and a fire at the Cocoanut Grove supper club on Piedmont Street burned it to the ground, the year Cal shipped out for Europe. He and Lynne had taken a final trip to the Cape the month before, and Dante and Margo had joined them. He hadn't known then that it would be the last time he'd visit the Cape. It was near the end of the summer, and even with the new food rationing program, the local stores were out of vegetables and fruit, even bread and milk were in short supply, and they combined their money and their ration coupons to buy what they could: a small amount of coffee, eggs, and chocolate. From a local fisherman they purchased a crate of beer and a bushel of oysters. It seemed like it was all they ate for three days.

At night they lit a bonfire on Long Nook Beach, and each couple huddled against the wind coming in off the sea, surf booming on the sand, he imagined, like the distant guns in Europe waiting for him, and Dante made up stories about the acts of heroism Cal O'Brien would perform during the war, the medals he'd be wearing on his shirtfront when he came back, stories so absurd that they all laughed. It had been a good time, a happy time, but when he returned, the world had changed, gone slightly off-kilter, and so had he. In the time that he'd been away, Dante had lost himself to his addiction, Margo was slowly killing herself, and he wondered if Dante would ever be the same. But at least now, after Dante's withdrawal, if they could get him cleaned up, off the junk, and healthy again, it would be a start.

One of the cooks was singing in broken English along with Sam Shaw, and Cal smiled as he ate, looked absently at the pictures of Celtics and Bruins teams, the horses at full gallop at Suffolk Downs, and then of greyhounds at Wonderland curling about their track, of a grinning man holding a winning betting ticket aloft, of greyhounds curled up, asleep in their cramped kennels, and another of a gaunt-faced man, eyes bright with humor, walking four greyhounds on a leash, his slick black pompadour seeming to defy gravity.

Cal paused with the pizza in his mouth, began chewing again until he could swallow. He took a swig from his beer, almost draining it, and looked back at the photos again, at their stark black clarity, the sharply defined foreground. He looked about the room and to the signed photos of pop stars and crooners over the counter where a group of old men now sat.

“Hey!” he said aloud to himself. “Hey!”

He squinted and stared at the row of three pictures of Wonderland: the greyhounds racing, the greyhounds asleep, and the man with the black pompadour holding the dogs' leash. They were all done in the same style as the ones they'd found in Sheila's box.

The amber glow of the streetlights pushed through the three windows at his back, like the flames of a dimming furnace, lighting the long, narrow room. He looked at the picture on the wall, and then stood to look at the autographed picture of the crooner above the register. “It's fucking him,” he whispered. “Bobby Renza, Mario fucking Rizzo.”

“Hey,” he said to one of the men working the ovens, face shimmering with sweat from the heat. “You know this guy?” He pointed to the photograph of the crooner on the wall.

“Of course,” he said. “Everyone know that guy.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “but what about this guy,” and he gestured to the photos on the back wall so that the man had to come out from behind the ovens to look. He shook his head. “I no know this guy, I no know who he is.”

Some locals seated at stools at the counter turned his way. “You know this guy?” he asked. “This guy in the picture with the dogs, you know this guy?” But either because they spoke only Italian or because they distrusted him, they refused to answer and only shook their heads.

He turned to a stocky man who sat at a small booth studying a betting slip, the thumb-end of a cigar clenched between his teeth, its thick smoke swirling above his head.

“This guy,” he said, “in this picture, it's Mario Rizzo, right?” The man had arms that seemed carved of granite, each tightly layered with cords of muscle and coiling black hair, and each crossed over the other and leaning atop his generous stomach. He gave off the appearance of some golem, a morose statue perched still on the toilet, contemplating nothing but the well-earned stones he was about to purge from his bowels.

Cal ground his teeth in frustration. He might as well have been talking to a man taking a shit, and was about to turn away when the man nodded once slowly, and then looked back down at the betting slip on the table before him.

Relief came over him. He shoved pizza into his mouth, chewed at it voraciously, and washed it down with the cold beer. He looked again at the pictures on the wall before him. He stared at the photo of Mario Rizzo on one knee, stroking the back of a dog. Another of a greyhound at full sprint and leaning into the bend of the track, looking as if it were levitating, lean muscles bulging from thin bone, and he imagined Sheila there, just to the right of the camera lens, leaning on the railing, watching the dogs racing past, and in a moment she would be captured within that frame herself, smiling beautifully forever.

“I know where to find you, Mario Rizzo,” he said. “I know where to fucking well find you.”

_________________________

Wonderland Dog Track, Revere

HE WATCHED THE
two men appear on the horizon, two black figures against the snow-packed field and the sky above, colored like wet stone, its clouds breaking and rolling in slow liquid movements. One was tall and lean, bowed slightly, the other a little shorter, compact, and moving with a stiff determination even as he seemed to be limping. A tingling sense of déjà vu came over him, some future memory that seeped in from the spaces between dream and premonition, and he lowered his head wearily and sighed. It was time.

One of the dogs nuzzled against his leg. She sat beside him, and he dropped to one knee and pulled her to his chest. He felt her shivering, the sharpness of her ribs beneath her thinning coat. Her one good eye glistened wetly from the frigid air.

“Maxine, my old lady, I know it's too damn cold. Go join the others and get those muscles worked up before the big storm.” He stroked her head and then said, “Go on now.”

The old greyhound gave him a worried look, as if she knew that the two figures approaching were carrying some bad news, but she obeyed his command and ambled off as well as her arthritic legs would allow, joining the other two dogs, Norman and Sierra, who moved through the snow quicker than she could, their heads bobbing as they rushed each other in play.

He stood and wiped the snow sticking to his knee. The two men were getting closer. It seemed they knew he wouldn't make a run for it.

Norman and Sierra noticed the men approaching, and they hustled back and paced around him, craning their necks up as they circled, occasionally barking while their panting spurts of breath steamed the cold air. He wondered if they could feel what he was feeling: the fear and yet acceptance that everything would soon be at an end. The sound of the world felt contained, as if nature were holding its breath. He reached out to Sierra, and she nudged his hand before mewling a sad strange song. “It's okay, sweetheart,” he soothed.

With their hands stuffed inside their coat pockets, the two men were close enough now so that he could see their faces. They didn't look like killers, nor did they look like police. The taller one seemed somewhat familiar, unshaven and gaunt and looking as if he'd been through the wash one too many times. It seemed as if he were barely on his feet and might fall any minute. The shorter guy was clean-shaven; his square face shone, reddened by the wind. As they came closer, he could see the shorter man's eyes, bright and blue in bloodshot whites.

The shorter guy said, “Bobby Renza.”

“I don't go by that name anymore.” His voice cracked as he spoke, as if something were catching painfully in his throat. The dogs moved toward the strangers. Steam fell from their open mouths, tongues hanging as they panted, brown mottled with pink.

He shrugged, scratched at his beard, cigarette smoldering between nicotine-stained fingers.

“We need to talk,” the shorter man said.

“What about? I don't know nothing and I got nothing to say.”

“Maybe. It's about Sheila Anderson.”

“Are you here to kill me?”

The shorter one paused at that.

“We just want to talk.”

Renza knelt by Norman, rubbed his hackles, as Sierra came and licked at his other hand. He looked at the two men, who eyed him flatly, the stone-faced blue-eyed one and the thin, sick one giving off such a buzz he could feel it. So many things he could do right now and perhaps make a getaway, but he felt so damn tired. He nodded toward a little wooden shack attached to a narrow extension where they kept the kennels. The shack's stovepipe chimney funneled a gray smoke into the even grayer sky.

“All right then,” he said.

THE ROOM WAS
dimly lit but for the flickering light that came from the woodstove in a corner on which a blackened coffeepot sat, and from a small window above a cot piled with discolored sheets and wool army blankets. It smelled of warm dog hair, tobacco, old animal feed, stale sweat, and of bedsheets that hadn't been changed in some time. The dogs followed them into the room, and Renza closed the door behind them. The older-looking dog pulled herself up onto the bunk but continued to stare at them.

Renza left them while he put the other two dogs in their cages, and from the kennel there came the sound of scratching and a chorus of excited barking. When he returned, he put two splintered logs into the fire, poked at the embers beneath them until flames shot up and licked, crackling, at the wood. “Sierra and Norman get a little wary around new people, but don't worry about Maxine here, she's a harmless old lady.” The dog looked toward him, nervously stole glances at the two strangers.

“All the other greyhounds are down in Florida for the winter. These here with me didn't make it. They're way past their prime, not one race left in the tank.” He walked to an industrial wooden trestle turned on its side to make a table, picked up a bottle of rum and a dirty glass.

“If you're not here to finish me, you might as well pull up a chair, help me finish off this bottle.”

Bobby Renza was not what Dante had expected. His marquee good looks had long since faded. Bloodshot eyes burned from deep-set shadowed sockets. He had an unruly black beard. The pompadour was gone. Now his hair was long and swept over his ears, a black stocking cap tight on his head. He wore a tattered red and black flannel jacket, frayed at the collar and cuffs. The place around him was just as disheveled. Magazines and a stack of old newspapers and empty cans of beans and empty bottles of Coca-Cola strewn about, and above, exposed ceiling beams that seemed to bend, ready to snap and cave in from all the snow packed onto the flat tar roof.

Renza stared at Dante. “Now I know who you are. Sheila kept a picture of you and her sister on the dresser. She used to talk about you sometimes.”

Dante stepped closer to the fire, seeking some warmth to thaw the numbness in his bandaged shoulder. “We know all about pictures. We found some nice ones you took of her, the kind of smut they pass around at stag parties. Was she proud enough to put those on the dresser?”

“Those were just for the two of us,” he said and closed his eyes for a moment. “Most of them anyway.”

Cal pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “And the rest for Foley?”

“A few.”

“You're a real piece of shit.”

A sad smile crept over Renza's mouth. He coughed weakly and then cleared his throat as he sat down at the table. “I loved that girl like you wouldn't believe.” He filled up the small glass with rum, took his lips to it, and drained it.

There was a moment of silence in the room, interrupted by wood popping in the fire. And as if the rum had already made him drunk, Renza continued. “You know, it was that faraway look in her eyes. First time I met her, back when I was singing still, I noticed it and immediately thought she was trouble. Not the kind like in the movies where she sticks a knife in your back when you're not looking. No, it was never that way. Just like something damaged, something that you know you can't fix but you damn well try your hardest anyway.”

“That damage attracted you,” Dante said.

“Yeah. And not just me.”

“She left you for Foley, didn't she?” Cal asked.

“You've got it wrong, all wrong. She was always my girl. Even he knew that.”

“Then come clean.” Dante sat down in the chair opposite him, took off his hat, and placed it on the table.

They watched him pour three fingers' worth of rum, then drink it down.

“Day in, day out, stuck here hiding like some sick fucking dog. Somebody knows they can use you and they hand you a lot of money, you take it and feel this is it, the big payday. I thought I'd get what I finally deserved, take care of Sheila the right way by giving her everything she ever wanted.”

He paused as he filled his glass again. “Well over a million in bills and bonds. They wouldn't notice the difference, right? A few thousand here and there out of a haul like that? Peanuts, right? But we all thought that way, you know, taking from the top and then some more.”

“The Brink's job,” Cal said.

“Yeah.”

“And Sheila knew too much about it. She knew what you were up to, but that's not what got her in trouble. It was your uncle, the contractor, right? He forced you to give her up to Foley. She was there to grease the deal. Foley had his fun, and now your scumbag uncle is in charge of tearing down and rebuilding Scollay, and it's on her fucking grave.”

Renza took three tugs off the bottle, pulled it roughly back from his chapped lips. “I loved that Sheila like nobody else ever did. And she did everything to protect me, kept her mouth shut…”

“What about the Emporium, room eight-oh-oh-one?”

“What about it? That's Foley's penthouse suite, where he and her used to meet. After I introduced the two of 'em, she went regularly by herself, whenever he called, the fucking shit.”

“Where's the money, Bobby?” Dante asked.

“They killed her…you think it'll make any difference if they get their money now?”

“I don't think she died for the money, Bobby, but it might be the only thing that can save you.”

Dante pushed his chair in closer, the sound of wood scraping wood. “Who killed her?”

Bobby shook his head. “Honest to God, I don't know.” He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand.

“You knew she was pregnant?” Cal asked.

“Of course I did.”

Dante's head was beginning to throb. “So you know what happened to the baby?”

Renza shook his head and took another hit off the bottle. “Dead and buried in a landfill for all I know. I have no fucking idea.” He slammed the bottle against the table, made a fist, and clenched his teeth.

“I don't know shit. She could have been fucking half this city for all I know. A bunch of politicians at the State House, trading favors for favors, or at the jazz clubs she always went to, going down on some niggers just so they'd play her favorite song. And that makes me the sucker, don't it?”

“You're the one that sold her out, Bobby, pimped her like she was a whore.”

But Bobby no longer seemed to be listening. His bottle was almost empty. His head swayed and then drooped and stayed that way; his fingers lightly touched the bottle before him.

Dante clenched his jaws. “Hey,” he said, and kicked at Bobby's feet. “Hey!” He wanted to hit him, but he knew that Bobby probably wouldn't feel a thing; he was too far gone.

“Fucking wet-brain,” Cal said. They both knew he wouldn't last much longer even if he did decide to run. The old greyhound on the cot eyed them sadly and groaned. Dante stood and made for the door, and Cal followed him.

Outside the cold air felt good on Cal's neck and face, sharp in his nostrils, stinging his eyes so they watered. The snow-packed field was covered in shadow, and in the dusk-lit distance they could see the shell of the Wonderland racetrack, with its gleaming frozen track and empty stands, looking like something skeletal, just bones and the vast emptiness that seemed to hold it all together. It appeared as though it was much farther away, and that the walk back to the parking lot would take them nothing short of an eternity.

They began walking, and then paused when they heard the slight stirrings of a song. It was Renza's voice coming to them, bending against and falling into the wind that whirled throughout the grandstands and onto the open field before them. It was a familiar ballad, strange and haunting, from which all the ravages and drunken slurring had lifted, and Renza's voice was as golden in timbre and cadence as it had ever been on the radio all those years before.

Dante shivered and pulled his coat more firmly about him. The dead still sing, he thought as he and Cal trudged back through the field, the sky above darkening with night and neither of them saying a word to the other but instead merely listening to the last ghostly echoes of Renza's song fading throughout the old iron balustrades and tin roofing and then, almost at its end, broken by a dog's howl.