We Were Kings (19 page)

_________________________

L Street, South Boston

THE WEATHERMAN ON
the radio, Don Kent, had promised rain, at least enough to bring the temps down to the low nineties, but by midafternoon Dante knew there would be no showers, not even a sprinkle. The WBZ meteorologist had been predicting relief for days now, but it never came. He'd be better off setting the odds on the dog races at Wonderland than soothsaying the weather. And with Kent's batting average no better than Eddie Joost's—who had hit a paltry .185 for the 1943 Boston Braves—every New Englander was probably crying for the weatherman's head on a platter.

Kent's voice came from the transistor radio, low and muddied by the static. The bartender limped out from the shadows by the kitchen and turned the radio off. The silence in the place was heavy with a dreadful boredom, and Dante shifted restlessly in his seat because of it. With empty stools beside him, he looked at the window and saw the swath of radiant light cutting across the dark oak bar. The only other patron was a disheveled old man, the sunlight at his back inflaming the wild coils of his white hair. The man's face was blustered and ruddy, and every time Dante made eye contact, the man smiled at him as if he were in possession of the answer to some great riddle.

The pub was called the Castlebar Inn, and it belonged to a turn-of-the-century building that had apartments on the second and third floors that were usually rented out to Irishmen just off the boat and looking for work. It was a place, according to Owen, where not every Irishman would be welcome. Here the Galway caretakers would scope each new arrival's accent right away—if a man was from Dublin or Cork, he didn't stand much of a chance—and if it matched with the last name given, then he would be taken in with some semblance of warmth and brotherhood. The Irishman could get a loan to get him on his feet, a loan to be paid back with significant interest once work came in. Plus there'd be chipped beef and beans and gritty black tea from the closet-size kitchen every morning, just enough to fill the hole and get the blood pumping.

Owen had told Cal that the Castlebar Inn, one of the many bars scattered across the grid of South Boston, would be a good place to check out, and this morning, Dante had taken the train to Broadway and walked the half a mile to meet Cal here. Cal's plan was they'd keep an ear open for any conversations that stirred their curiosity, asking questions when the opportunity arose. Earlier today, there had been nothing but small talk about the weather and chatter about this bloke or that no-good troublemaker or how that piece of shit owed a fin and had given every excuse in the book not to pay it back.

An hour and a half ago, Cal had left the bar and said he had something to do. Dante imagined him in his car traveling the roads, looking at closed doors and quiet storefronts along Dudley Square, cutting through the Polish Triangle, across downtown, to the waterfront and the fish piers, where he'd watch the workers gut and clean their catches for the day. Then he'd head to Savin Hill, where he had once lived with Lynne, and walk along the shore of Malibu Beach where stranded jellyfish lay rotting and stinking in the sand at low tide. After that, he'd get back into his Fleetline and roll through the Avenue all the way to South Boston. That was Cal. Never an idle thinker, and rarely able to sit still.

Dante yawned, and his whole body twitched as the air escaped him. The cigarette slipped from his fingers and scarred the wood black. He picked it up and pressed it down into an ashtray crowded with spent filters and crushed ends.

He had read through the paper twice already. And now he eyed the comics page for the third time—with extra attention to Brenda Starr and how she was wearing one of those fashionable bullet bras that he'd seen models in magazine ads wear under tight wool sweaters, the kind that pushed out their breasts as if they were antiaircraft guns aboard the USS
Iowa
.

Again, he read over Li'l Abner, that little prick Dennis the Menace, and a new strip about a giant dog called Marmaduke. And then he was back at the box scores for yesterday's games, the numbers and names indistinct.

There was nothing left to look at in the papers but the obituaries. The beer was making the small print blur. Dante pressed a stiff finger against the paper and ran it down over the names that sounded Irish.

Cleland. Connelly. Flynn. Hines. Lonergan. Morrison. O'Casey. O'Rourke. Sullivan.

Funny how some of the death notices sounded identical, as if the obituary editor at the
Herald
had used the same copy and simply changed the names of the dearly departed. Six men were to be buried back in Ireland, but the obits didn't say where. Usually the newspapers printed that information—the Irish paid particular attention to what town or region one was from and even more to the location of one's final resting place.

He pressed his finger harder into the page and read some of the obits again. Six of the bodies were being held at two different O'Flaherty's Funeral Homes and would remain there until they were shipped out. That was odd enough, but there was something else wrong, although he couldn't quite pin it down. He closed the paper and folded it.
Flynn
. The name sounded familiar. Why?

“Fucking Irish,” Dante said under his breath, and he raised his pint glass and drank down half his beer.

The old man had heard him, and he raised his own beer glass in salute and grinned in that deranged way, the halo of dirty light around his head appearing to scintillate even more.

With his pint now polished off, the man moved painfully from his stool and out through the front door he went.

The door closed and then rattled as it opened again.

A construction worker came in and sat two stools down from Dante. The man's skin was sunburned, and he wore the look of the overworked and underpaid. The stink of oil was heavy on his clothes, and the dirt-encrusted knuckles on his left hand were bleeding. He didn't seem to care. He lit a cigarette and sucked on it loudly, the gray smoke funneling out of his nostrils like the exhaust from an old coal-powered train.

The worker had a whiskey and two beers in the time it took Dante to reread the front page of the
Herald
. When he left, it was just Dante at the bar again. He contemplated leaving as well—Cal could wander around the city all he fucking wanted. He drank down his beer and waited for the bartender, a cockeyed man who hunched over as if years of hard labor had contorted his spine and permanently twisted his gait.

“Another one?” he asked.

“No,” Dante said. “I'll pay out.”

“Buck fifty then.”

Dante reached for his wallet.

The stool next to him scraped the floorboards.

“So what's happening in the world?” Cal asked, and pointed to the newspaper.

“Not much. That anti-Commie board is trying to take away little kids' horror comics. They say they're too violent and will turn them into juvenile thugs. Then there's the Red hunt in Hollywood, the heat wave, the Sox taking another loss by six, and an article about the Cuban narcotics trade.”

“That's it?”

“And Brenda Starr's tits just keep getting bigger.”

“Jesus, you must be bored out of your fucking mind.”

“You could say that. Anything on your end?”

“No, it's quiet out there. Too quiet.”

When the clock by the cash register flipped to four o'clock, a new bartender came on shift. Dante got his attention and asked for two Jamesons. They came in glasses still warm from the sink, and a faint soapy taste lingered after he sucked the shot down.

“You ain't going to drink it?” Dante nodded to Cal's untouched whiskey.

“Maybe in a bit,” Cal said. “You hungry?”

“Not really. Soon, though.” Dante got up from the stool and went to the men's room in the back.

“A lot of Irish wakes next week,” Dante said matter-of-factly when he returned.

“Yeah?”

“Six of them.”

“What are you talking about?”

Dante pointed his thumb at the newspaper. “In the obituaries, there are half a dozen funerals, one after the other. And all of them are getting shipped back home to Ireland.”

Cal lit a cigarette and paused. “Doesn't sound that odd to me.”

“But these are all at O'Flaherty's, in Dorchester and Southie. There must be more Irish-owned funeral homes in this city, no? Here, take a look.”

Dante slid the newspaper across the bar. Ash from his cigarette crumbled off and dusted the pages. He leaned in and lowered his voice. “Maybe this is something we should look into.”

“I'd say it's just coincidence.”

“It can't be coincidence.” Dante slurred the last word. The beers he'd drunk earlier in the afternoon were getting to him. He had fed Maria this morning but forgotten to feed himself. He warned himself to slow it down. “Flynn? Connelly? Those names sound familiar?”

“Wait a minute.” Cal's eyes flitted over the page. “People would notice something like this.”

“Perhaps people just check out the names in the obituaries. Maybe they don't waste their time reading each one.”

“You're wrong. Most Irish do. My father would get the paper and read them before anything else, even the headlines. And I know my fair share of people who do the same thing.”

Cal's hand crept along the bar toward the shot glass of whiskey, which glistened in the afternoon sunlight like some kind of caramel-colored gemstone. Cal lifted it and held it still, perhaps questioning if it was worth it, especially at this time of day, but he swallowed the shot and winced, and Dante knew that Cal had instantly felt its effect winding through his system. He wiped at his mouth with his knuckles and then smiled.

“When I was young, my father dragged me to every funeral from Mission Hill to West Roxbury. Wherever it was, all those funeral homes looked the same to me. The same white paint on the outside, and inside the same crimson carpets lining each and every room. And the same smell too. All those flowers surrounding the dead but not doing shit to cover up the fact that they were rotting away. Jesus, even when I was a kid, the dead all looked the same to me.”

The new bartender was at the taps filling a glass. The Pickwick tap sputtered with foam and made a strangled, hissing noise.

“But one place that stood out was O'Flaherty's. I remember my dad would sometimes take me to these even when there wasn't a funeral going on.”

Cal paused. “Flynn. Cleland. Those are names of the victims. Jesus. They're all getting shipped back together, aren't they?”

_________________________

South Boston

NOT EVEN IN
America for a full twenty-four hours, Bobby Myles sat in a small, square boardinghouse room with the weary desperation of a prisoner stuck inside his cell. Across from him there was a sink, discolored with rust, and its tap constantly dripped no matter how hard he tightened the ivory handle. Yellowed by decades of cigarette smoke, a length of wallpaper was curling away from the corner of the wall, the glue once binding it now pasty and smelling of mildew. On the bedside table there was a lamp that didn't work and a vase that held dead flowers, the water at the bottom tea-colored and speckled white with mold. And worst of all, the cot mattress was festering with fleas, so much so that last night he'd slept on the floor with his jacket folded into a pillow. That he'd managed to get even a couple of hours of sleep amazed him.

Scratching at the bites on his arm, Bobby decided he couldn't stand the place much longer—the rotten smell from the wallpaper, the stink of his own bitter sweat, and the savage heat that came through the window as though it were the grate of a blazing furnace. He decided to check the car that they were to use for the job. It should be ready by now. And then perhaps a stroll through the neighborhood, if one could call it that, and then, later, try to find something to eat and drink.

Perhaps he should have gone with Fitzgerald and the others into town. After five days of travel—four on the ocean and one in the air—he deserved at least some reprieve, some solid ground to stand on. But while they were enthusiastic about their first couple of days in Boston, he felt on edge. He had felt this way ever since he got on the plane and left the Dublin terminal, and then for the four days in the closet-size rooms three levels below deck on the
Queen Elizabeth,
the sea constantly lapping at the great hull as they dragged closer to America. The edgy feeling only got worse when the plane departed from New York and made its way north to Boston.

When they had stepped out onto the sweltering tarmac at Logan Airport, he had felt as if he couldn't breathe. And later, when the four of them stood under the harsh fluorescent lights awaiting their luggage, the anxious feeling increased. Somebody should have been there to meet them, or at least to point them in the right direction.

Once they got their suitcases from the cart, Egan, Kinsella, and Fitzgerald had gone off to exchange some of their shillings and pounds for American dollars. Bobby already had two nickels in his pocket and he went off to find a pay phone and make a call. On his third try, a man picked up and told him to get the others and go to the drop-off area; somebody was on the way. Egan had purchased several packs of American cigarettes, and the four of them waited outside, watched the big Yank cars pulling in and out of the great asphalt parking lot, smoked, and said little to one another besides how big of a bitch the heat was here.

Two hours later, a man named O'Flaherty, a morose fellow who said he was born and raised in Tullamore, met them and drove them around the city—the Common, the waterfront and the piers, a place called Beacon Hill, down a long strip of desperate-looking road called Dorchester Avenue, and, last, to where they'd be staying, a boardinghouse in South Boston.

The mood during the car ride had been pensive, as though they were all strangers sharing a cab. The sites they'd passed were less grandiose than they had imagined, and O'Flaherty as a tour guide was far from captivating. He seemed unable, perhaps unwilling, to put a proper sentence together.

“We'll be in touch with you before anything happens,” he had said to Myles as he stood by the car, and then he'd handed him a ring with two keys on it and a piece of paper with two addresses. The first was where he'd find the car they'd use, just a few blocks down from L Street, parked in a driveway of a triple-decker home, and the second was the home of Owen Mackey, 180 William Day Boulevard. There was a laminated photo of the man clipped to the note. It appeared to be cut from a group photo; a ghostly, disembodied arm was wrapped around Mackey's shoulder. There was a boyish roundness to his face, and his bright eager eyes shone as if he was gripped in the swell of a celebration. Perhaps it was taken at a wedding, or some ball or banquet. Despite his innocent face, the man could have done terrible, awful things. And even though Bobby tried to convince himself that that was the truth, he knew that something was off. Why had they sent them all the way here to do this job?

To get out of his head, Myles sat up from the wooden chair, dropped to the floor, and did push-ups until his vision began to blur and his shoulders burned at the joints. He stretched and went to the beaten-up dresser, put on a shirt and his watch—four o'clock—grabbed the two keys, his wallet, the note and the photo, and slipped them all into his pocket. He combed through his hair with his fingers and left the room.

He walked down the hollow-sounding stairs and passed through a hallway that led to a bar called the Castlebar Inn. It was filling up with men arriving after a day of work, most of them with that wild look in their eyes as they started in on their evening drunk. A group of them cawed at one another with the brash accents of Bostonians. His stomach growled but he fought against the feeling. He'd seen what the food looked like here—it would probably look the same going out as it had coming in.

Outside, he surveyed the street and watched as the sun flared a septic light against the multifamily houses across the road. There was much disrepair to these homes, and the shoddy attempts by lax landlords to fix the damage on the cheap made the places look even worse. Patchwork molding, mismatched paints, bubbling tarpaper on porch roofs, shingles hanging at crooked angles, and gutters held in place by rope and twine.

On the second-floor porch of one home, a horribly stained carpet hung over a railing, and Bobby watched as a pink, rotund woman whacked at it with an iron rod and clouds of dust billowed in the thick, still air. A small girl wearing no shirt and a drooping cloth diaper held the screen door open and cried out hungrily.

He didn't trust the area. Perhaps it was the narrow, nameless streets and the sharp, blind corners. And how the alleyways ran deep between the clapboard houses like secret passageways. And how the sidewalks and street corners were too thin, and how they appeared to be manned by hoodlums and juveniles looking for trouble.

Bobby asked a teenage boy where the ocean was, and without looking at him, the kid pointed ahead.

Two blocks down, Bobby was amazed to find how close the Atlantic actually was. In the apartment, it had felt like it was miles and miles away. He made it to a walkway lined with giant blocks of granite spackled white with bird droppings, and on the other side, a narrow curve of beach was nearly swallowed up by the incoming tide. Farther off, through the haze, were the humps of several islands that hugged close to the Boston coastline. For a moment, he wondered if anybody lived out there or if the islands were desolate, abandoned.

A seagull swooped down from its perch on a telephone pole and cried out with both aggression and hunger. Its target was a much smaller gull pecking at bits of trash down by the gutter. Facing off against each other, the birds flared their wings and shrieked. Bobby closed his eyes and saw the gulls of Wicklow, wide-breasted with a seafaring pureness to them, not polluted and squalid like the ones before him.

He fought against the homesick feeling percolating in his gut. He lit an American cigarette and dragged in the smoke, sighed it out, and walked away from the sea.

When he got to the car, he was perspiring heavily. O'Flaherty had told him the house where it was parked was close by the inn, but it took him almost a half an hour to find it. It was a brown triple-decker with a crooked front porch littered with broken furniture and crates of miscellaneous junk. The driveway was barely wide enough to fit one car. The Packard sedan sat far back beside the yard, which, in the heat, smelled of dog shit. Laundry hung from a clothesline, still looking unwashed and filthy. A dog leash coiled along the dirt next to the back steps, the collar split in two.

“Lovely,” he said to himself.

He walked around to the trunk. The key scraped inside the lock, and he pushed in hard and maneuvered it until he felt it click open. Inside was a stained canvas tarpaulin smelling of oil. The sensation of somebody watching made him turn back to the yard. Startled by the hanging laundry—the white undershirt of a large man, a pair of gabardine slacks—he inched back, turned around, and looked down the driveway. Nobody was there. He looked up to the windows of the houses pressing over him and saw only closed curtains and torn and patched screens.

At the trunk, he lifted the canvas and saw the guns. They were all there. Four pistols, a sawed-off shotgun, and several boxes of cartridges. There were also two maps, one for the city and the other for the state of Massachusetts. He took the maps, closed the trunk, and made sure the doors were locked.

It was time for a drink and then back to the room to go over the maps.

After walking for some time, he ended up where he'd started—in front of his boardinghouse and the Castlebar Inn. The loud talk of men came through the windows with the intensity of a crowd awaiting a prize fight, yet somewhere within its din, he found comfort.

Through the smoke and banter of the workingmen, he walked the hallway, but once at the stairwell, he had an immense urge to go back—Egan, Fitzgerald, and Kinsella, they were out having fun, why shouldn't he? But he grabbed hold of the railing, feeling the immensity of this new, strange city press down on him, and took out the maps from his back pocket and pulled himself up the hollow stairs to his room on the second floor.