night before. And just before she went to sleep, she murmured, half under her breath, “I hope I haven’t fallen in love with you, Frankie Kee.”
A moment later she was asleep.
He lay there for several minutes, regaining his breath. He rolled her gently on her side and looked over at her, admiring her naked body. What a revelation she had turned out to be. Who would have expected such passionate abandon simmered inside that once-mischievous teenager? She was a remarkable sex partner. Totally inexperienced, she was unhampered by modesty and accepted each sexual discovery with a rare mixture of wonderment and joy. So why did he still feel a tinge of conscience? Was it because he had known Vanessa as child? Or because her father was a friend of his? Was it because he still thought of her as thirteen (an embarrassing and uncomfortably erotic consideration)? Or was it just an unfortunate Catholic response—a sense of guilt because it felt so good.
Or perhaps she had opened a window he thought had been shut forever.
There would always be the rumors, of course. One could expect that. But rumors could be ignored, even turned to one’s advantage. The most romantic story about Keegan, the one most often repeated, had him the only son of an Irish countess and a New York bartender who had parlayed his inheritance into a fortune on the stock market, had sold short and got out clean before the crash.
It was a story Keegan liked. It had drama, it had romance, it had a touch of tragedy and a touch of mystery. There was also a semblance of truth to it, so he never disputed it. He never repeated the story as fact, either. Keegan never talked about himself at all, he let others do the talking.
Then there was the other part of the story. That Keegan had made his fortune as a bootlegger while attending Boston College, dealing only with the families of rich college friends.
Another rumor, also not without some merit.
“But what does he do?” the proper Bostonians would be asked, and the answer was usually the same. “He’s . . . rich.”
A perfectly respectable response.
Actually Rose Clarke was a countess and Clancy Keegan was a bartender. When they married, she bought the bar for him and when she died during the influenza epidemic of 1903, Keegan followed close behind, the victim of a broken heart, its shards awash in a sea of Irish whiskey.
Francis, only Jive at the time, was reared by his trustee, his father’s brother Ned, a sly entrepreneur who took his stewardship seriously and managed the bar into a classic East Side watering hole. Ned Keegan reasoned that a bar need only to attract hearty drinkers to be a success and so he concentrated on the heaviest drinkers he .knew, reporters and politicians. He pandered to them, providing extra phones for the reporters and a couple of nicely appointed rooms on the second floor for those times when they either couldn’t make it home—or simply required a little privacy for a couple of hours. There was an unwritten rule that the second floor was a kind of neutral ground for both the politicians and the reporters, as a papal decree had proclaimed it off limits to inquiring minds.
Many a devious political plot was hatched in the scarred oaken booths of the Killarney Rose—to be unhatched just as quickly by eavesdropping journalists, yet the two sects kept coming back. Gossip and news was a commodity oft/u place, to be bartered, sold and traded between drinks, and so The Rose, as it was known to regulars, prospered. And while Ned Keegan tried to keep his young charge out of the place and under the watchful eye of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, his efforts failed. By the time he was fifteen, Francis was bussing tables. At sixteen he had graduated to tending bar.
Like all good bartenders, Francis mastered the art of carrying on one conversation and listening to another at the same time. He never wrote anything down—but he had a long memory. It was at The Rose that he learned his most valuable lessons: never repeat anything he saw or heard; the quickest way to a politician’s heart was through his wallet; bribery was only illegal if one got caught; all sin was relative. It quickly became patently clear to young Francis Keegan that one man ‘s meat was indeed another man‘s poison.
By the time he was twenty, Francis had fought as a doughboy in the trenches in Europe. When he returned in 1918, a hero from the war, Ned offered to buy The Rose from him.
Half a million dollars.
Not bad for a kid with only a couple of Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and two years of bartending to show for his twenty years.
“Now what ‘re ye gonna do?” Ned asked.
“I’m going to get rich, but first I’m going to college,” Keegan answered. “Up in Boston. There a lot of class in Boston and there no such thing as a rich bum.”
He had been there less than a year when he called Jocko Nayles and invited him to lunch at The Rose. It had been two years since he had seen his wartime buddy. Nayles’s clothes were neat but showing wear and he wore the mottled tan of a man who spends long, hard hours working in the sun.
“What ‘ye you been up to?” Keegan asked him.
“Y’know, kid, I’m on the docks.
“You like it?”
“Nobody likes it, it’s a living.”
“I’ve got a better idea, Jocko. I’ve got an idea where we can make a couple of million dollars a year.”
“Yeah, sure. What‘re we gonna do, rent out the White House?”
‘Jocko, I got half a million dollars. We buy a couple of fast boats.
