Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

Joe looked at the address scrawled there: 1417 Blue Hill Ave. That was it—no name, no telephone number, just an address.

“Hand it to your father. Just this once. It’s all I’ll ask of you.”

“What if I don’t?” Joe asked.

Maso seemed genuinely confused by the question. He tilted his head to one side and looked at Joe and a small and curious smile found his lips. The smile widened and turned into a soft laugh. He shook his head several times. He gave Joe a two-finger salute and walked back to the wall where his men stood waiting.

In the visiting room, Thomas watched his son limp across the floor and take his seat.

“What happened?”

“Guy stabbed me in the leg.”

“Why?”

Joe shook his head. He slid his palm across the table, and Thomas saw the piece of paper under it. He closed his hand over his son’s for a moment, relishing the contact and trying to remember why he’d refrained from initiating it for over a decade. He took the piece of paper and placed it in his pocket. He looked at his son, at his dark-ringed eyes and sullied spirit, and he saw the whole of it suddenly.

“I’m to do someone’s bidding,” he said.

Joe looked up from the table and met his eyes.

“Whose bidding, Joseph?”

“Maso Pescatore’s.”

Thomas sat back and asked himself just how much he loved his son.

Joe read the question in his eyes. “Don’t try to tell me you’re clean, Dad.”

“I do civilized business with civilized people. You’re asking me to get under the thumb of a bunch of dagos one generation removed from a cave.”

“It’s not under their thumb.”

“No? What’s on the piece of paper?”

“An address.”

“Just an address?”

“Yeah. I don’t know any more than that.”

His father nodded several times, his breath exiting through his nostrils. “Because you’re a child. Some wop gives you an address to give your father, a member of police command, and you don’t grasp that the only thing that address could be is the location of a rival’s illicit supply.”

“Of what?”

“Most likely a warehouse filled to the bursting with liquor.” His father stared up at the ceiling and ran a hand over his trim white hair.

“He said just this once.”

His father gave him a malevolent smile. “And you believed him.”

He left the prison.

He walked down the path toward his car, surrounded by the smell of chemicals. Smoke rose from the factory stacks. It was dark gray in most places but it turned the sky brown and the earth black. Trains chugged along the outskirts; for some odd reason, they reminded Thomas of wolves circling a medical tent.

He had sent at least a thousand men here over the course of his career. Many of them had died behind the granite walls. If they arrived with any illusions about human decency, they lost those straightaway. There were too many prisoners and too few guards for the prison to run as anything but what it was—a dumping ground, and then a proving ground, for animals. If you went in a man, you left a beast. If you went in an animal, you honed your skills.

He feared his son was too soft. For all his transgressions over the years, his lawlessness, his inability to obey Thomas or the rules or much of anything, Joseph was the most open of his sons. You could see his heart through the heaviest winter coat.

Thomas reached a call box at the end of the path. His key was attached to his watch chain and he used it now to open the box. He looked at the address in his hand: 1417 Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan. Jew Country. Which meant the warehouse was probably owned by Jacob Rosen, a known supplier of Albert White.

White was back in the city now. He’d never spent a night in jail, probably because he’d hired Jack D’Jarvis to handle his defense.

Thomas looked back at the prison his son called home. A tragedy but not surprising. His son had chosen the path that had led him here over years of Thomas’s strenuous objection and disapproval. If Thomas used this call box, he was wedded to the Pescatore mob for life, to a race of people who had brought to the shores of this country anarchism and its bombers, assassins, and the Black Hand and now, organized in something rumored to be called omertà organiza, they had overtaken by force the entire business of illegal liquor.

And he was supposed to give them more?

Work for them?

Kiss their rings?

He closed the call box door, returned his watch to his pocket, and walked to his car.

For two days, he considered the piece of paper. For two days, he prayed to the God he feared didn’t exist. Prayed for guidance. Prayed for his son behind those granite walls.

Saturday was his day off, and Thomas was up on a ladder, repainting the black trim of the windowsills of the K Street row house, when the man called up for directions. It was a hot and humid afternoon, a few purple clouds undulating in his direction. He looked through a window on the third floor into what had once been Aiden’s room. It had stood empty for three years before his wife, Ellen, had taken it over as a sewing room. She had passed in her sleep two years ago, so now it sat empty except for a pedal-charged sewing machine and a wooden rack from which hung the items that had been awaiting mending two years ago. Thomas dipped his brush into the can. It would always be Aiden’s room.

“I’m a bit turned around.”

Thomas looked down the ladder at the man standing on the sidewalk thirty feet below. He wore a light blue seersucker, white shirt, and a red bow tie, no hat.

“How can I help?” Thomas said.

“I’m looking for the L Street Bathhouse.”

From up here, Thomas could see the bathhouse, and not just the roof—the whole of its brick edifice. He could see the small lagoon beyond it, and beyond the lagoon, the Atlantic, stretching all the way to the land of his birth.

“End of the street.” Thomas pointed, gave the man a nod, and turned back to his paintbrush.

The man said, “Right down the end of the street, huh? Right down there?”

Thomas turned back and nodded, his eyes on the man now.

“Sometimes, I can’t get out of my own way,” the man said. “Ever happen to you? You know what you should do, but you just can’t get out of your own way?”

The man was blond and bland, handsome in a forgettable way. Neither tall nor short, fat nor thin.

“They won’t kill him,” he said pleasantly.

Thomas said, “Excuse me?” and dropped the brush into the paint can.