‘Don’t be a fool. You wouldn’t know until they came knocking on your door with a federal arrest warrant. Then you’d know, and it’d be too late to do anything about it. There are men in this town who have no intention of dying in prison, and I’m one of them. Don’t be thinking that you’re safe either. He’ll rat you out along with the rest of us. That’s how they work, those bastards. They want everything, every name that you can vomit up, every man and woman who ever did you a favor in your life. It’s all or nothing with them, all or nothing.’
‘Tommy’s not trying to cut a deal. I’m telling you that.’
‘Ah, you’re telling, you’re telling.’ Joey waved at him in dismissal. ‘You listen to me – the only telling you need to do is tell Tommy that he has to come in. We’ll arrange a sit-down. We’ll work things out. If he’s sound, like you say he’s sound, then he has nothing to worry about.’
Joey put a meaty paw on Dempsey’s wrist, holding it so tight that the tips of Dempsey’s fingers began to tingle. There were beads of spittle on Joey’s lips, and Dempsey could smell the lingering stench of fish that always hung around the man.
‘Do you understand me, Martin?’ said Joey, the stink of him all over Dempsey now, his skin burning as though he were allergic to this foul man. ‘You tell him to come in, or maybe you give me a call and let me know where we might be able to find him. That’s all you have to do. You’ll be looked after, and so will he. I promise you that. It will all be done the right way.’
They both knew what was being spoken of here. It was an act of betrayal, after which there would only be two choices left: Walk off to exile, or pretend that a life in Boston might still be possible, taking whatever work they put your way until they eventually decided to put a bullet in you, because you couldn’t trust a man who’d sell out his boss.
Dempsey pulled his hand away. He looked at his watch. Oweny’s representative was now fifteen minutes late. The arrangement was that Joey would come in first, and his presence during the meet would ensure that all exchanges remained civil, except Oweny’s man hadn’t shown yet. Outside, Ryan had finished his coffee and was dancing anxiously from foot to foot.
‘Oweny’s boy should be here,’ said Dempsey, but Joey had stood up and was now buttoning his coat.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Dempsey. ‘The sit-down hasn’t happened yet.’
‘Yes, it has,’ said Joey, and Dempsey felt the air leave his body as surely as if he’d been punched in the stomach. Oweny’s boy wasn’t coming. He had never been coming. Instead, Joey spoke for Oweny. Joey spoke for them all, every one of them, every man who wasn’t Tommy Morris and wasn’t linked to Tommy Morris, every man who wanted Tommy silenced with a bullet through the back of the head, the smell of the lime that would be used on his body burning his eyes, and a hammer close by to knock his teeth out when it was done. Sentence had been passed. All that remained was its execution.
‘The girl?’ said Dempsey. ‘Tell me the truth. He wants to know. You said Oweny didn’t have her. But do you have her? Is she leverage in this?’
But Joey was already somewhere else in his mind. His body just hadn’t arrived there yet.
‘You tell him to come in, Martin. Don’t make us go looking for him. I like you. I like the boy outside. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to either of you. So talk to Tommy. Make him see sense. You’re a smart man. You’ll find the right words. Take care, now.’
He left the coffee shop, patting Ryan on the back as he went. Ryan watched him go, then turned to stare at Dempsey, his mouth agape, one hand raised in a ‘WTF?’ gesture, the other still holding on to the gun in his pocket.
Good lad, thought Dempsey. Keep a hold on that gun. He was thankful now that he had arranged the aborted meet for here and not for somewhere in Dorchester or Charlestown, as Joey had first suggested. If he’d agreed to that, he’d be on a warehouse floor by now and someone would be hammering nails into his hands and his feet to make him talk.
He walked to the door, the newspaper held awkwardly over the gun. There was a woman coming in and he slipped by her, jostling her as he went. She said something, but he didn’t hear her. He was concentrating on the world outside, on the plaza that suddenly seemed more empty than before, on the faces that suddenly seemed more knowing, more threatening. In the time since he had stepped into the coffee shop, his realm of existence had become a desolate, merciless place.
He told Ryan to get moving, and together they floated out into this hostile universe.
15
Aimee was forced to cancel our morning meeting owing to an incident of domestic violence that left a fifty- year-old man with a broken arm, a fractured skull, and a collection of busted ribs. His assailant was his forty-three- year-old wife, who weighed barely ninety pounds fully clothed and soaking wet, and was so soft-spoken that only bats could hear her. Apparently her husband had been beating on her for the first nineteen years of their marriage, and so she had decided to mark the start of their twentieth year together by encouraging him to turn over a new leaf through the judicious application of a lump hammer while he was sleeping off a drunk. A women’s refuge for which Aimee provided pro bono services called her in to speak to the woman, so Aimee had postponed our discussion until the afternoon.
There was only a scattering of worshippers at the eight a.m. Mass at St. Maximillian Kolbe in Scarborough when I arrived. I slipped into a pew at the back, and kept my head down throughout. I didn’t go to church so much anymore; I went when I needed consolation, or just a space in which to breathe for a time. I found a peace there, the peace that comes from distancing oneself from the mundane, if only for a little while, and embracing the possibility of a peace beyond this world. I could never tell when the urge to seek out that space would strike me, but it came to me that morning after Aimee postponed our meeting, and I did not fight it.
Louis had once asked me if I believed in God after all that I had seen and all I had gone through, most particularly the loss of Susan and Jennifer. I gave him three answers, which was probably at least two more than he had been expecting. I told him that I found it easier to believe in God than not to believe, for if I believed in nothing then the deaths of Susan and Jennifer were pointless and without reason, and I preferred to hope that their loss was part of a pattern I did not yet understand. I told him that the God in whom I believed sometimes looked away. He was a distractible God, a God overwhelmed by our demands, and we were so very, very small, and there were so very, very many of us. I told him that I understood how that could be the case. My God was like a parent always trying to watch out for His children, but you couldn’t always be there for your children, no matter how hard you tried. I had not been there for Jennifer when she most needed me, and I refused to blame my God for that.
And I told him that I believed in God because I had seen His opposite. I had seen all that He was not, and been touched by it, and so I could no more deny the possibility of an ultimate goodness to set against such depravity than I could deny that daylight followed darkness, and night the day.
All this I told him, and he was silent afterward.
When Mass was over, I drove out to the Palace Diner in Biddeford and ate breakfast. Some might have felt that it was a ways to go for breakfast, but those people hadn’t eaten in the Palace. I lingered over coffee, and read the newspaper, and just as I was relaxed and ready to face the day my phone beeped to indicate that I had a new message. I read it, saved it, and felt my good humor vanish.
I returned home and began working my way through Randall Haight’s list of names, using distinguishing information to trace their movements over the years in case any had been employed in a capacity that might have brought them into contact with prisons, and cross-referencing names and addresses against prison records in an effort to establish if anyone in Pastor’s Bay had either served time in North Dakota, Vermont, or New Hampshire, or had close relatives who had served time in those states. I drew a blank on them all, but it was only the first stage in what might prove to be a long, drawn-out process of picking apart the weave of dozens of potentially interconnected lives.
I drove to South Freeport shortly after one, and parked in the lot beside Aimee’s building. There were no ravens in the trees today. They were elsewhere, and that was fine with me. In the past, I had seen great black ravens squatting on the walls of the old prison at Thomaston, and they had seemed at once both monstrous birds and more, entities that mutated as I watched them, emissaries from a world more tainted than this one. That image had never left me, and now when I saw such birds I wondered at their true nature, and their true purpose.
