Hey, it’s not safe for you here no more, all these empty buildings, this construction.’”
“What cops?”
“Cops, I don’t know.”
“Were they in uniform? How do you know they were cops?”
“Because I know! Some was uniform, some wasn’t uniform. They were cops.”
“Did you know them?”
“Only some. The ones we had in the neighborhood.”
“Maybe they were just looking out for you, like they said.”
“Like you were looking out for me when you threw me out on the street? I guess I should be lucky-everybody’s so busy looking out for me, like a princess.”
“The others, the bad guys, did they threaten you?”
“Yeah, they said, ‘You gotta go, you gotta go.’ It was all the same: ‘It’s not safe for you here no more.’”
“Did they do anything to frighten you?”
“Sometimes they called on the phone. ‘If you don’t get out, we’re gonna shoot you, hey, we’re gonna burn down your building.’ One of them told my husband he should watch out, he could fall down the stairs in the building and nobody’d ever find him.”
“In court that day, you called them gangsters. Did you mean real gangsters?”
“I said delinquenti- criminals. I don’t know from gangsters. What, you don’t think a cop can be a bad guy? You should see. How come you’re so concerned all of a sudden?”
“Because somebody got hurt.”
“Somebody who?”
My father, Michael thought but did not say. When he had been a kid, the Daleys received threatening phone calls too, usually at dinnertime, from cons Joe Senior had put away. The calls would come from Walpole or Deer Island. Michael or one of his brothers would answer the phone to a grinding voice, I’m gonna burn down your fuckin’ house, I’m gonna fuck your wife, I’m gonna cut up your kids, I’m gonna shoot you in the fuckin’ head. The calls continued all the years Joe Senior was in various detective bureaus and Homicide. Michael hung up the phone as soon as he heard the first bad words, just as he had been told to do, but he could not un-hear them. How had his father, a gentle man who submitted himself to be pig-piled and horse-ridden and smart-alecked by his sons, mastered these killers? “Don’t you worry, Mike,” his dad used to say. “Big man hiding behind a phone.” But his dad did worry, and Michael worried too. One of these men might escape his cage and come find Michael and mutilate him. Would Michael sacrifice one of his brothers to save himself? It would be best, he understood, if the animal ate Joe and let Ricky and Michael run away. But in a pinch it was clear Michael would have to let himself be devoured to save Ricky, who must be saved. Would he have the courage to surrender to it? What would it feel like when adult hands engaged Michael’s body and cracked it, or a knife unzipped his skin, or a spinning bullet drilled into him? When he was five or six, Michael had been shocked when his dad took him fishing at Jamaica Pond and blithely yanked the hooks from the sunfish they caught, tearing ragged holes in their jaws, cheeks, and eye sockets as the fish arched their bodies in agony. Michael had told him to stop. His dad had tried to appease him, first by saying that the fish could not feel pain because their brains were too small, then that the wounds would heal after they were flipped back into the water. Neither was plausible, and Michael decided not to fish anymore, ever. “What a pussy,” Joe had said, and no one argued the point. After that, Dad had taken Joe and Ricky fishing in Jamaica Pond, and none of them seemed troubled by the suffering of the fishes. So maybe it just did not matter.
“A cop got hurt, Mrs. Cavalcante.”
“ Pssh. A cop gets hurt and everyone comes running.”
“This one was a good guy. Not a delinquenti.”
46
“The fuck is this, Rick?”
“Edith Piaf.”
“Edith Piaf. Fuckin’ Cambridge.”
“She’s French.”
“Well, I know she’s French. That’s not my point.”
“You know Edith Piaf?”
“No, dummy, I can hear. She’s singing French. I’ve been to France, remember? She’d be singin’ German if it wasn’t for me.”
“Good thing you went, then.”
“What kind of place puts Edith Piaf on the fuckin’ jukebox?”
“The customers must like it.”
“Exactly. That’s my point. What kind of people come to a place like this?”
“Me.”
“See, there you go.”
“You said pick a place you wouldn’t see anyone you know. Trust me, no one you know comes here.”
“Why would they?” Joe looked around the place, a scruffy basement bar called the Casablanca-the Casa B, everyone called it-on Brattle Street in Harvard Square. He snorted. What a scene. Couple of boho hippy poets needing a bath and a haircut. Skinny Harvard rich kids needing a wising-up before they went off and became stockbrokers. Dumpy Cambridge broads looking like washerwomen. “Jesus, Rick, I could see Michael hanging around a place like this. I figured you knew better.”
“Sorry to let you down.”
“What are you doing out here anyway? Who would want to live in Cambridge?”
“It’s better not to live where you work.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“I cross that river, I’m in Middlesex County. Different cops, different D.A.’s. Nobody knows me here, no hassles.”
Joe nodded. He scraped his beer bottle with a thumbnail, distracted.
“Relax, Joe. I just told you, you’re out of your jurisdiction.”
“I don’t give a shit. Do whatever you want. What, you think I’m gonna arrest you?” But Joe’s disdain seemed to have exhausted itself on Edith Piaf and the Cambridge hippy scene, and he fell quiet.
Ricky did not know exactly what to make of it. What was Joe up to? What was going on in that massive head of his? Ricky always went a little crazy with Joe. All that firstborn’s confidence and facile conservatism, the dense, bullying, confrontational manner, the reflexive, arrogant, empty-headed, aggressive xenophobia…Joe was Ricky’s negative image. If they had not been brothers, Ricky was sure, they would never have been friends. As it was, they needed Michael as a middleman. Alone, there was a relentless fractious undercurrent to their conversations, as if their thirty-year relationship had been a single ongoing argument. But, in the way of brothers, Ricky could not completely escape admiring Joe, who had, after all, willingly accepted the weight of their patrimony. Fatherhood, husbandhood, cophood-all the things Ricky did not want and doubted he could sustain, Joe took on his shoulders and dead-lifted every day. You had to see Joe the way Kat saw him, Ricky figured: firm, not stubborn; doggishly loyal, not just a company man. Still, Ricky was never sure how to reach Joe.
Chuck Berry came on the jukebox, “Sweet Little Rock ’n’ Roller.”
Joe dipped his head in a stiff, rheumatic way to the beat. Not exactly his style, but getting there.
“Well, come on, Joe,” Ricky said, “you sat through Edith Piaf. Whatever it was you had to say, you might as well get it off your chest.”
“I’m supposed to give you a message.”
“From who?”
“Gargano.”
Ricky felt a freeze. It began between his shoulder blades and washed up the back of his neck. He smothered it as best he could, permitting himself just the slightest rustle of his shoulders, as if he were resettling a jacket that had begun to slip off.
