Live by Night Read online

  “So she’s Albert’s girl.” It deflated Joe to think of her as just another gangster’s moll. He’d already had visions of them racing across the country in a stolen car, unencumbered by a past or a future, chasing a red sky and a setting sun all the way to Mexico.

  “I seen them together three times,” Paolo said.

  “So now it’s three times.”

  Paolo looked down at his fingers for confirmation. “Yeah.”

  “What’s she doing fetching drinks at his poker games then?”

  “What else she going to do?” Dion said. “Retire?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Albert’s married,” Dion said. “Who’s to say how long a party gal lasts on his arm?”

  “She strike you as a party gal?”

  Dion slowly thumbed the cap off a bottle of Canadian gin, his flat eyes on Joe. “She didn’t strike me as anything but a gal bagged up our money. I couldn’t even tell you what color her hair was. I couldn’t—”

  “Dark blond. Almost light brown, but not quite.”

  “She’s Albert’s girl.” Dion poured them all a drink.

  “So she is,” Joe said.

  “Bad enough we just knocked over the man’s joint. Don’t go getting any ideas about taking anything else from him. All right?”

  Joe didn’t say anything.

  “All right?” Dion repeated.

  “All right.” Joe reached for his drink. “Fine.”

  She didn’t come into The Shoelace for the next three nights. Joe was sure of it—he’d been there, open to close, every night.

  Albert came in, wearing one of his signature pinstripe off-white suits. Like he was in Lisbon or something. He wore them with brown fedoras that matched his brown shoes which matched the brown pinstripes. When the snow came, he wore brown suits with off-white pinstripes, an off-white hat, and white-and-brown spats. When February rolled around, he went in for dark brown suits and dark brown shoes with a black hat, but Joe imagined, for the most part, he’d be easy to gun down at night. Shoot him in an alley from twenty yards away with a cheap pistol. You wouldn’t even need a streetlamp to see that white turn red.

  Albert, Albert, Joe thought as Albert glided past his bar stool in The Shoelace on the third night, I could kill you if I knew the first thing about killing.

  Problem was, Albert didn’t go into alleys much, and when he did he had four bodyguards with him. And even if you did get through them and you did kill him—and Joe, no killer, wondered why the fuck he found himself thinking about killing Albert White in the first place—all you’d manage to do would be to derail a business empire for Albert White’s partners, who included the police, the Italians, the Jew mobs in Mattapan, and several legitimate businessmen, including bankers and investors with interests in Cuban and Florida sugarcane. Derailing business like that in a city this small would be like feeding zoo animals with fresh cuts on your hand.

  Albert looked at him once. Looked at him in such a way that Joe thought, He knows, he knows. He knows I robbed him. Knows I want his girl. He knows.

  But Albert said, “Got a light?”

  Joe struck a match off the bar and lit Albert White’s cigarette.

  When Albert blew out the match, he blew smoke into Joe’s face. He said, “Thanks, kid,” and walked away, the man’s flesh as white as his suit, the man’s lips as red as the blood that flowed in and out of his heart.

  The fourth day after the robbery, Joe played a hunch and went back to the furniture warehouse. He almost missed her; apparently the secretaries ended their shift the same time as the laborers, and the secretaries ran small while the forklift operators and stevedores cast wider shadows. The men came out with their longshoremen’s hooks hanging from the shoulders of their dirty jackets, talking loud and swarming the young women, whistling and telling jokes only they laughed at. The women must have been used to it, though, because they managed to move their own circle out of the larger one, and some of the men stayed behind, and others straggled, and a few more broke off to head toward the worst-kept secret on the docks—a houseboat that had been serving alcohol since the first sun to rise on Boston under Prohibition.

  The pack of women stayed tight and moved smoothly up the dock. Joe only saw her because another girl with the same color hair stopped to adjust her heel and Emma’s face took her place in the crowd.

  Joe left the spot where he’d been standing, near the loading dock of the Gillette Company, and fell into step about fifty yards behind the group. He told himself she was Albert White’s girl. Told himself he was out of his mind and he needed to stop this now. Not only should he not be following Albert White’s girl along the waterfront of South Boston, he shouldn’t even be in the state until he learned for sure whether or not anyone could finger him for the poker game robbery. Tim Hickey was down south on a rum deal and couldn’t fill in the blanks about how they’d ended up knocking over the wrong card game, and the Bartolo brothers were keeping their heads down and noses clean until they heard what was what, but here was Joe, supposedly the smart one, sniffing around Emma Gould like a starving dog following the scent of a cook fire.

  Walk away, walk away, walk away.

  Joe knew the voice was right. The voice was reason. And if not reason, then his guardian angel.

  Problem was, he wasn’t interested in guardian angels today. He was interested in her.

  The group of women walked off the waterfront and dispersed at Broadway Station. Most walked to a bench on the streetcar side, but Emma descended into the subway. Joe gave her a head start, then followed her through the turnstiles and down another set of steps and onto a northbound train. It was crowded on the train and hot but he never took his eyes off her, which was a good thing because she left the train one stop later, at South Station.

  South Station was a transfer station where three subway lines, two el lines, a streetcar line, two bus lines, and the commuter rail all converged. Stepping out of the car and onto the platform turned him into a billiards ball on the break—he was bounced, pinned, and bounced again. He lost sight of her. He was not a tall man like his brothers, one of whom was tall and the other abnormally so. But thank God he wasn’t short, just medium. He stepped up on his toes and tried to press through the throng that way. It made the going slower, but he got a flash of her butterscotch hair bobbing by the transfer tunnel to the Atlantic Avenue Elevated.

  He reached the platform just as the cars arrived. She stood two doors ahead of him in the same car when the train left the station and the city opened up in front of them, its blues and browns and brick red deepening in the onset of dusk. Windows in the office buildings had turned yellow. Streetlamps came on, block by block. The harbor bled out from the edges of the skyline. Emma leaned against a window and Joe watched it all unfurl behind her. She stared out blankly at the crowded car, her eyes alighting on nothing but wary just the same. They were so pale, her eyes, paler even than her skin. The pale of very cold gin. Her jaw and nose were both slightly pointed and dusted with freckles. Nothing about her invited approach. She seemed locked behind her own cold and beautiful face.

  And what will the gentleman be having with his robbery this morning?

  Just try not to leave marks.

  That’s usually what liars say.

  When they passed through Batterymarch Station and rattled over the North End, Joe looked down at the ghetto, teeming with Italians—Italian people, Italian dialects, Italian customs and food—and he couldn’t help but think of his oldest brother, Danny, the Irish cop who’d loved the Italian ghetto so much he’d lived and worked there. Danny was a big man, taller than just about anyone Joe had ever met. He’d been a hell of a boxer, a hell of a cop, and he knew little of fear. An organizer and vice president of the policemen’s union, he’d met the fate of every cop who’d chosen to go out on strike in September 1919—he’d lost his job without hope of reinstateme
nt and been blackballed from all law enforcement positions on the Eastern Seaboard. It broke him. Or so the story went. He’d ended up in a Negro section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, that had burned to the ground in a riot five years ago. Since then, Joe’s family had heard only rumors about his whereabouts and those of his wife, Nora—Austin, Baltimore, Philadelphia.

  Growing up, Joe had adored his brother. Then he’d come to hate him. Now, he mostly didn’t think about him. When he did, he had to admit, he missed his laugh.

  Down the other end of the car, Emma Gould said “Excuse me, excuse me” as she worked her way toward the doors. Joe looked out the window and saw that they were approaching City Square in Charlestown.

  Charlestown. No wonder she hadn’t gotten rattled with a gun pointed at her. In Charlestown, they brought .38s to the dinner table, used the barrels to stir their coffee.

  He followed her to a two-story house at the end of Union Street. Just before she reached the house, she took a right down a pathway that ran along the side, and by the time Joe got to the alley behind the house, she was gone. He looked up and down the alley—nothing but similar two-story houses, most of them saltbox shacks with rotting window frames and tar patches in the roof. She could’ve gone into any of them, but she’d chosen the last walkway on the block. He assumed hers was the blue-gray one he was facing with steel doors over a wooden bulkhead.

  Just past the house was a wooden gate. It was locked, so he grabbed the top of it, hoisted himself up, and took a look at another alley, narrower than the one he was in. Aside from a few trash cans, it was empty. He let himself back down and searched his pocket for one of the hairpins he rarely left home without.

  Half a minute later he stood on the other side of the gate and waited.

  It didn’t take long. This time of day—quitting time—it never did. Two pairs of footsteps came up the alley, two men talking about the latest plane that had gone down trying to cross the Atlantic, no sign of the pilot, an Englishman, or the wreckage. One second it was in the air, the next it was gone for good. One of the men knocked on the bulkhead, and after a few seconds, Joe heard him say, “Blacksmith.”

  One of the bulkhead doors was pulled back with a whine and then a few moments later, it was dropped back in place and locked.

  Joe waited five minutes, clocking it, and then he exited the second alley and knocked on the bulkhead.

  A muffled voice said, “What?”

  “Blacksmith.”

  There was a ratcheting sound as someone threw the bolt back and Joe lifted the bulkhead door. He climbed into the small stairwell and let himself down it, lowering the bulkhead door as he went. At the bottom of the stairwell, he faced a second door. It opened as he was reaching for it. An old baldy guy with a cauliflower nose and blown blood vessels splayed across his cheekbones waved him inside, a grim scowl on his face.

  It was an unfinished basement with a wood bar in the center of the dirt floor. The tables were wooden barrels, the chairs made of the cheapest pine.

  At the bar, Joe sat down at the end closest to the door, where a woman with fat that hung off her arms like pregnant bellies served him a bucket of warm beer that tasted a little of soap and a little of sawdust, but not a lot like beer or a lot like alcohol. He looked for Emma Gould in the basement gloom, saw only dockworkers, a couple of sailors, and a few working girls. A piano sat against the brick wall under the stairs, unused, a few keys broken. This was not the kind of speak that went in for entertainment much beyond the bar fight that would open up between the sailors and the dockworkers once they realized they were short two working girls.

  She came out the door behind the bar, tying a kerchief off behind her head. She’d traded her blouse and skirt for an off-white fisherman’s sweater and brown tweed trousers. She walked the bar, emptying ashtrays and wiping spills, and the woman who’d served Joe his drink removed her apron and went back through the door behind the bar.

  When she reached Joe, her eyes flicked on his near-empty bucket. “You want another?”

  “Sure.”

  She glanced at his face and didn’t seem fond of the result. “Who told you about the place?”

  “Dinny Cooper.”

  “Don’t know him,” she said.

  That makes two of us, Joe thought, wondering where the fuck he’d come up with such a stupid name. Dinny? Why didn’t he call the guy “Lunch”?

  “He’s from Everett.”

  She wiped the bar in front of him, still not moving to get his drink. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. We worked the Chelsea side of the Mystic last week. Dredge work?”

  She shook her head.

  “Anyway, Dinny pointed across the river, told me about this place. Said you served good beer.”

  “Now I know you’re lying.”

  “Because someone said you serve good beer?”

  She stared at him the way she had in the payroll office, like she could see the intestines curled inside him, the pink of his lungs, the thoughts that journeyed among the folds of his brain.

  “The beer’s not that bad,” he said and raised his bucket. “I had some once in this place this one time? I swear to you it—”

  “Butter doesn’t melt on your tongue, does it?” she said.

  “Miss?”

  “Does it?”

  He decided to try resigned indignation. “I’m not lying, miss. But I can go. I can certainly go.” He stood. “What do I owe you for the first one?”

  “Two dimes.”

  She held out her hand and he placed the coins in them and she placed them in the pocket of her man’s trousers. “You won’t do it.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Leave. You want me to be so impressed that you said you’d leave that I’ll decide you’re a Clear-Talk Charlie and ask you to stay.”

  “Nope.” He shrugged into his coat. “I’m really going.”

  She leaned into the bar. “Come here.”

  He cocked his head.

  She crooked a finger at him. “Come here.”

  He moved a couple of stools out of the way and leaned into the bar.

  “You see those fellas in the corner, sitting by the table made out of the apple barrel?”

  He didn’t need to turn his head. He’d seen them the moment he walked in—three of them. Dockworkers by the look of them, ship masts for shoulders, rocks for hands, eyes you didn’t want to catch.

  “I see ’em.”

  “They’re my cousins. You see a family resemblance, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  She shrugged. “You know what they do for work?”

  Their lips were close enough that if they’d opened their mouths and unfurled their tongues, the tips would have met.

  “I have no idea.”

  “They find guys like you who lie about guys named Dinny and they beat them to death.” She inched her elbows forward and their faces grew even closer. “Then they throw them in the river.”

  Joe’s scalp and the backs of his ears itched. “Quite the occupation.”

  “Beats robbing poker games, though, doesn’t it?”

  For a moment Joe forgot how to move his face.

  “Say something clever,” Emma Gould said. “Maybe about that sock you put in my mouth. I want to hear something slick and clever.”

  Joe said nothing.

  “And while you’re thinking of things,” Emma Gould said, “think of this—they’re watching us right now. If I tug this earlobe? You won’t make the stairs.”

  He looked at the earlobe she’d indicated with a flick of her pale eyes. The right one. It looked like a chickpea, but softer. He wondered what it would taste like first thing in the morning.

  Joe glanced down at the bar. “And if I pull this trigger?”

  She followed his gaze, saw the pistol he’d placed between them.
/>   “You won’t reach your earlobe,” he said.

  Her eyes left the pistol and rose up his forearm in such a way he could feel the hairs parting. She sculled across the center of his chest and then up his throat and over his chin. When she found his eyes, hers were fuller and sharper, lit with something that had entered the world centuries before civilized things.

  “I get off at midnight,” she said.

  Chapter Two

  The Lack in Her

  Joe lived on the top floor of a boardinghouse in the West End, just a short walk from the riot of Scollay Square. The boardinghouse was owned and operated by the Tim Hickey Mob, which had long had a presence in the city but had flourished in the six years since the Eighteenth Amendment took effect.

  The first floor was usually occupied by Paddys right off the boat with woolen brogues and bodies of gristle. One of Joe’s jobs was to meet them at the docks and lead them to Hickey-owned soup kitchens, give them brown bread and white chowder and gray potatoes. He brought them back to the boardinghouse where they were packed three to a room on firm, clean mattresses while their clothes were laundered in the basement by the older whores. After a week or so, once they’d gotten some strength back and freed their hair of nits and their mouths of poisoned teeth, they’d sign voter registration cards and pledge bottomless support to Hickey candidates in next year’s elections. Then they were set loose with the names and addresses of other immigrants from the same villages or counties back home who might be counted on to find them jobs straightaway.

  On the second floor of the boardinghouse, accessible only by a separate entrance, was the casino. The third was the whore floor. Joe lived on the fourth, in a room at the end of the hall. There was a nice bathroom on the floor that he shared with whichever high rollers were in town at the moment and Penny Palumbo, the star whore of Tim Hickey’s stable. Penny was twenty-five but looked seventeen and her hair was the color bottled honey got when the sun moved through it. A man had jumped off a roof over Penny Palumbo; another had stepped off a boat; a third, instead of killing himself, killed another guy. Joe liked her well enough; she was nice and wonderful to look at. But if her face looked seventeen, he’d bet her brain looked ten. It was solely occupied, as far as Joe could tell, by three songs and some vague wishes about becoming a dressmaker.