World Gone By: A Novel (Joe Coughlin Series) Page 5

  “Not every day. Most days I just saw your mom.” He looked over at his son. “But after a few drinks, you never knew.”

  Tomas chuckled and Joe gave his neck a firm pat.

  “Did people call my mother a nigger?”

  That cold thing entered his father’s eyes—a grayness that could freeze boiling water. “Not around me.”

  “But you knew they thought it.”

  His father’s face became mild again, benign. “Never cared much what strangers thought, kid.”

  “Dad,” Tomas said, “do you care what anyone thinks?”

  “Care what you think,” Joe said. “And your mom.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Yeah, but I like to think she sees us.” His father rolled down his window and lit a cigarette. He held the cigarette in his left hand and dropped his arm along the outside of the door. “I care what your uncle Dion thinks.”

  “Even though he’s not your brother.”

  “In a lotta ways he’s more a brother to me than my real brothers.” His father brought his hand into the car to smoke, draped it back down the door as he exhaled. “I cared about what my father thought, but that would have been news to him. That’s pretty much the end of the list.” He shot his son a sad smile. “I don’t have room in my heart for most people. Got nothing against them, but I got nothing for them, either.”

  “Even the people in the war?”

  “I don’t know those people.” His father stared out the window. “Frankly, I could give a shit whether they live or die.”

  Tomas thought of all the dead in Europe and Russia and the Pacific. Sometimes he dreamed of thousands of them spread bloody and broken in dark fields or stone piazzas, limbs turned in the wrong direction, mouths open and frozen. He wished he could pick up a rifle and fight for them, save just one of them.

  His father, on the other hand, looked at the war like he looked at most things—as an opportunity to make more money.

  “So I shouldn’t let it bother me?” Tomas said after a while.

  “No,” his father said. “Sticks and stones and all that.”

  “Okay. I’ll try.”

  “Good man.”

  His father looked over at him and gave him a confident smile, as if that could fix things, and they finally turned into the lot.

  They passed Rico DiGiacomo as he was exiting the lot. Rico had been Joe’s bodyguard until Joe realized, about six years ago, that he didn’t need a bodyguard anymore, and even if he did, Rico was too smart and talented to be mired in the position. Rico rapped his knuckles on Joe’s hood and shot him the smile he was famous for, the kind of smile that could light a football field at night long enough to call a few final plays. He was flanked by his mother, Olivia, and his brother, Freddy, the old lady like something out of a Karloff movie, a malignant vision dressed all in black who’d floated in off the moors while everyone was sleeping.

  As the DiGiacomos moved on, Tomas asked, “What if there are no spots left?”

  “We’re one car away,” Joe said.

  “But what if his is the last car to get in?”

  “How does it help me to think about that?”

  “I just thought you should consider the possibility.”

  Joe stared at his son. “Are you sure we’re related?”

  “You tell me,” Tomas said and went back to his book.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Absence

  JOE AND TOMAS SAT IN THE BACK OF THE CHURCH, not just because they were later in arriving than most of the parishioners, but because Joe preferred the back of any room he found himself in.

  In addition to Dion (front pew on the left) and Rico DiGiacomo (fifth pew back on the right), Joe picked up a few more of his associates in the room—killers to a man—and wondered what Jesus would feel if He were, in fact, looking down and had access to their thoughts.

  Wait, Jesus would be thinking, you’ve missed the point.

  Up on the altar, Father Ruttle’s sermon was about hell. He hit all the notes about fire and demons with pitchforks, birds plucking at your liver, but then he took it to a place Joe hadn’t been expecting.

  “But what is worse than all those punishments? Genesis tells us that our Lord looked down on Adam and said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone.’ And so the Lord created Eve. Now Eve brought turmoil and betrayal into Paradise, it is true, and condemned us all to suffer the consequences of Original Sin. That is true and the Lord would have known this would happen because He knows all. But yet He created her for Adam? Why? Ask yourselves that—why?”

  Joe glanced around the church, tried to find someone besides Tomas who genuinely appeared to be contemplating the question. Most parishioners looked like they were contemplating grocery lists or the evening meal.

  “He made Eve,” Father Ruttle said, “because seeing Adam alone was more than He could bear. Being alone, you see, is the worst of hell’s punishments.” He hit the pulpit with the side of his fist and the congregation woke up. “Hell is the absence of God.” Again the side of his fist found the ornate wood. “It is the absence of light. It is the absence of love.” His neck strained as he looked out on the eight hundred souls arrayed before him. “Do you understand?”

  They weren’t Baptists; they weren’t supposed to answer. But murmurs rolled through the throng.

  “Believe in the Lord,” the priest said.

  “Honor Him, and repent your sins,” he said, “and you shall know Him in heaven.”

  “But repent not?” He looked out at them again. “And you shall be cast from His sight.”

  It was his voice, Joe realized, that had gripped them. Normally it was dry and benign, but the morning’s sermon had altered it, had altered him. He’d spoken with an air of desperation and loss, as if what he’d preached—hell as an infinite and impregnable void—was almost too despairing for the aging priest to contemplate.

  “All rise.”

  Joe and Tomas stood with the rest of the congregation. Joe had never had trouble repenting. In so far as a man with his sins could repent, he had poured tens of thousands of dollars into hospitals, schools, shelters, roads, and plumbing, not just in Boston, where he’d grown up and owned several interests, or in Ybor City, his adopted hometown, but in Cuba, where he lived much of the year in the western tobacco country.

  But for the next few minutes, he did think the old priest might have a point. One of Joe’s deepest secrets was how completely he feared loneliness. He didn’t fear being alone—in fact he liked it—but the solitude he constructed was one that could always be broken with the snap of his fingers. He surrounded his solitude with work, philanthropy, parenting. He controlled it.

  As a child, he’d had no control over it. It was foisted upon him, along with the irony that those who seemed most adamant that he grow up a lonely child slept in the next room.

  He looked down at his son and ran his hand down the back of his head. Tomas gave him a slightly startled, curious look but followed it with a soft smile. Then he turned his head back toward the altar.

  You will have a lot of doubts about me as you grow older, Joe thought as he put his hand on the back of his son’s neck and left it there, but you will never feel unloved, unwanted, or alone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Negotiations

  THE MILLING ABOUT after mass often lasted as long as the mass itself.

  In the fresh morning light outside the church, Mayor Belgrave and his wife paused at the top of the steps, and the crowd swarmed them. Dion acknowledged Joe with a tilt of his head and Joe returned the nod. He and Tomas worked their way through the crowd, turned the corner of the church, and headed for the back. Behind the church was the parochial school with a fenced-in school yard where The Boys met every Sunday to discuss business. There was a second school yard attached to the first, a smaller one for the kids in the early grades, and that’s where the wives and the children gathered.

  As Joe stopped outside the first school yard, Tomas headed for the s
econd to join the other children. A feeling of helplessness, even minor grief, passed through Joe as he watched his son walk away. Life was loss; Joe understood this. But lately he’d felt it more acutely than ever before. His son was eight years away from entering college, and every time he walked away toward anything—anything at all—Joe felt as if he were walking right out of his life.

  Joe had worried that a boy growing up without a mother would become too hard, too tough. Tomas had grown up with nothing but masculine influences around him—even Miss Narcisa with her brusque ways, stern face, and icy revulsion toward sentiment was, as Dion had noted on numerous occasions, more male than most of them. The boy had also grown up in a soldier’s culture, where the men around him wore guns somewhere on their person—he’d have to have been blind not to notice a few of them over the years—and a couple of those men had disappeared. Where they went, Tomas couldn’t know because no one ever mentioned them again. It surprised Joe to watch his son, with no softness in his life, develop into a quiet, gentle boy. If he found a heat-sick lizard on the gallery (and that’s where you usually found them in the summer, already calcifying), he would slide a matchbook under it and carry it down to the garden, release it into the moist earth beneath dark leaves. When he was younger, he’d always befriended the boys who were bullied at home or bullied at school. He wasn’t athletic, or maybe he just wasn’t interested. His grades were only so-so, yet all his teachers agreed he was smart for his age. He liked to paint. And sketch in thick pencil. The paintings were usually cityscapes, the buildings always slanted for some reason, as if all cities were built on crumbling land. The sketches were all of his mother. There was only one photograph of her in the house and half of her face was in shadow, but the sketches he drew over the years picked up an uncanny resemblance for a nine-year-old boy who’d just reached his second birthday when she died.

  Joe asked him about it once. “How do you know what she looks like off one picture? Do you remember her?”

  “No,” the boy said. There was no loss in his voice. It was as if Joe had asked him about anything else from that time period—Do you remember your crib? Your teddy bear? That dog we had in Cuba that ran into the path of a tobacco truck? No.

  “So how is it you draw her face so well?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  Tomas nodded. “You compared things to her a lot. You’d say, ‘Your mother’s hair was that color but thicker,” or ‘Your mother had those beauty marks, but they were along her collarbone.’”

  Joe said, “I did, huh?”

  Another nod. “I don’t think you realize how much you used to talk about her.”

  “Used to?”

  His son looked at him. “You don’t anymore. Not much anyway.”

  Joe knew the reason why, even if his son didn’t, and he sent a silently apology to Graciela. Yes, honey, you—even you—fade.

  DION SHOOED HIS BODYGUARDS off to the side and he and Joe exchanged handshakes, then stood in the long shadows of the church and waited for the brothers DiGiacomo.

  Dion and Joe had been friends since they were kids running the streets of South Boston. They’d been outlaws, then criminals, then gangsters together. Dion had once worked for Joe. Now Joe worked for Dion. Kind of. The specifics could get cloudy. Joe was no longer a boss and Dion was. But Joe was an active member of the Commission. A boss had more power than any single member of the Commission, but the Commission had more power than any one boss. It complicated things at times.

  Rico and Freddy didn’t keep them waiting, though Rico and his matinee-idol looks and charm pressed a lot of flesh on his way over. Freddy, on the other hand, looked as sullen and confused as ever. He was the older of the two, but his younger brother had received all the proceeds from the genetic jackpot. Rico got the looks, the charm, and the intelligence. Freddy just got the itch for thinking the world owed him something. Everyone admitted Freddy was a good earner—though, not surprisingly, not nearly as good as his brother—but given his taste for needless violence and some question regarding his sexual appetites, it was common knowledge that if Rico weren’t his brother, he’d still be a foot soldier.

  They all shook hands, Rico adding a slug to Joe’s shoulder and a pinch of Dion’s jowl before they got down to it.

  The first order of business was what they should do for Shel Gold’s family now that Shel had caught some kind of muscle disease that confined him to a wheelchair. Shel was a Jew and so not part of the Family, but they’d made a lot of money with him over the years and he was funny as all hell. At first, when he’d begun falling for no discernible reasons and one of his eyelids had started to droop, they thought he was just having everyone on. But now he was in the wheelchair and he couldn’t speak too well and he twitched a lot. He was only forty-five, had three kids with the wife, Esther, and another three scattered around the darker parts of town. They decided to slip Esther five hundred bucks and a fruit basket.

  The next item for consideration was whether to ask the Commission to open the books for Paul Battalia, who’d turned things around with the sanitation locals and had doubled the book he’d inherited from Salvy LaPretto in six months, which confirmed most people’s opinion that Salvy, six months dead after three strokes in one week, had been the laziest gangster since Ralph Capone.

  Rico DiGiacomo wondered if Paul was too young to be made. Six years ago, Joe had encouraged Rico—back then, just a kid, maybe nineteen, Jesus—to think bigger. Now Rico owned several bookmaking joints, two whorehouses, and a phosphate transport company. Plus, most lucratively, he owned a piece of just about every man who worked the docks. And, much like Joe, he’d seemed to have managed it without making many enemies. A miracle in their business far more impressive than turning water into wine or parting a parched sea at low tide. When Dion pointed out that Paul was a year older than Rico himself had been when he’d been welcomed into the Outfit, they both looked to Joe. Joe, an Irishman, could never be a made guy, but as a member of the Commission, he best knew what Battalia’s chances would be.

  “I’m not saying exceptions can’t be made,” Joe said, “but the book is pretty much closed for the duration of the thing in Europe. Question is whether Paul is that exception.” He looked at Dion. “Is he?”

  “He can ride the bench another year,” Dion said.

  Over in the other school yard, Mrs. DiGiacomo swatted at a kid who ran too close to her. Freddy, the more dutiful of the sons, kept his eyes on her. Or, Joe wondered not for the first time, was that all his eyes fell on over there? Sometimes Freddy found reason to retrieve his mother before she exited on her own, and he would always come out of there with sweat on his upper lip, a sodden, distracted look in his eyes.

  This morning, though, he looked away from his mother and the school yard full of kids quickly enough, and held the morning paper to his chest. “Anybody want to talk about it?”

  Taking up the lower-right-hand corner of the front page was an article on the bust at the cook house in Brown Town.

  “How much this cost us?” Dion asked, looking at Joe and Rico.

  “In the right now?” Joe said. “About two hundred thousand.”

  “What?”

  Joe nodded. “That was two months’ supply that got wiped out in there.”

  Rico chimed in. “But that’s not including what happens when our competitors fill the void and build some customer loyalty. It also doesn’t include the loss of personnel—one of Montooth’s is dead, one of ours, plus nine in jail. Half the guys in jail ran book, the other half ran policy. We gotta cover their routes, we gotta find replacements, bump guys up, find guys to replace those guys. It’s a mess.”

  Dion said what no one wanted to. “How’d they know?”

  Rico threw his hands softly in the air. Joe let out a long breath.

  Freddy stated the obvious. “We got a fucking rat in our crew. Or the niggers got one in theirs. I’m betting the niggers.”

  “Why?” Joe said.

  Fredd
y couldn’t follow. “ ’Cause they’re niggers, Joe.”

  “You don’t think they know they’d be the first people we’d blame if we lost nearly a quarter million dollars’ worth of product? Montooth Dix is a smart guy. A fucking legend. And he’s gonna rat us out? For what?”

  “Who knows?” Freddy said. “He took a pinch we don’t know about. They caught one of his wives without a green card. Who knows what it takes to turn a nigger into a rat?”

  Joe looked at Dion, who was holding out his hands, as if to say Freddy had a point.

  “The only two people outside of us who knew where the cook house was going to be,” Dion said, “was Montooth Dix and Wally Grimes.”

  “And Wally Grimes,” Rico said, “is no longer with us.”

  “Which is convenient,” Joe said, looking over at Freddy, “if someone, say, wanted to push Montooth Dix out of the policy and narcotics businesses in Brown Town.”

  “You saying someone framed Montooth Dix for being a rat?” Freddy said, a curious smile on his face.

  “No,” Joe said. “I’m just noting that if Montooth is the rat, that works out real well for anyone who covets the coin he’s making down there.”

  “I’m here to make money. Why the good Lord”—Freddy blessed himself quickly—“put us on this earth.” He shrugged. “I don’t apologize for it. Montooth Dix is earning so much, he’s a threat to all of us.”

  “Or just you?” Joe asked. “I hear your crew’s been tuning up some of the coloreds down there, Freddy.”

  “We get pushed, Joe, we’re gonna push back.”

  “And you don’t think they feel the same way?”

  “But, Joe,” Freddy said reasonably, “they’re niggers.”

  Besides being vain, arrogant, and secretly convinced that he’d never met a man as smart as himself, Joe Coughlin had also killed, stolen, maimed, and assaulted his way through his thirty-seven years on the planet. So he rarely felt like he held the moral high ground over anyone. But he could live a hundred lives and never understand the bigots in his midst. Seemed every race had been the niggers of someplace at some point in their history. And as soon as the black niggers got respectable, the next scapegoat race would be duly designated, maybe by the very niggers who’d just escaped into respectability.