16
Joseph Anthony Toomey, or Joey Tuna as he was known to his customers at the Dorchester Central Fish Market, a name that implied Dorchester was coming down with fish markets as if they were going out of fashion, sat in his office calculating the day’s takings and planning his orders for the week to come. Around him, the market was quiet. The day’s work was done by seven p.m., and in reality there was little cause for Joey to be there after hours, but he enjoyed the silence of the old building, broken only by the low hum of the refrigerators and the dripping of water. Each part of the day had its own rhythm, its own cadence, and after so many years of working the market Joey’s own body was now attuned to the cycles of his business. It was why he knew that he would never be able to retire: He was connected to this place as surely as if an umbilical cord joined him to it. Without it, he would fade away and die. He loved the market, loved the feel of it, the sound of it, the smell of it. He carried it with him in his heart, his thoughts, and on his clothes and his skin. His wife, his beloved Eileen, liked to joke that there were creatures living in the sea who smelled less strongly of salt and fish than her Joey. And what of it if he did? It was where we had all come from to begin with, and we could still taste it in our sweat. The sea had given life to Joey, and continued to support him. He tried never to be far from it, and had always lived within earshot of the sound of breaking waves.
Still, he was always on site with the first of the workers, the processing crew that came in at six a.m. to commence the cutting of the fish, mostly haddock, tuna and swordfish. Throughout the day Joey’s was generally an unobtrusive presence, for he trusted his employees to do whatever was necessary to ensure the smooth running of the operation; after all, most of them had been with him for many years, and by now he was convinced that even the gentlest involvement by their employer was largely an inconvenience to them. They each had their own areas of responsibility, they worked well together, and when Joey stuck his nose in he only managed to confuse everyone. It was better if he simply ensured that they had fish to sell every morning, a safe in which to put the money every evening, and enough cash left at the end of the week to pay everybody’s wages.
So he would make a cursory check at 7:45 a.m. before walking the floor with a mug of tea in his hand, shooting the breeze with his customers, checking that they were happy, enquiring after the well-being of their businesses and the health of their families, offering help where it might be needed, and carefully recording each acceptance of such favors in his mental ledger of debtors and creditors, for not every debt could be counted in dollars and cents. Joey knew the name of every significant man and woman who crossed the threshold of the Dorchester Central Fish Market, and the names of many of the less significant ones as well. He could judge minute changes in the state of a restaurant’s finances by the pattern of its orders, and he was careful to monitor any signs of fragility, both to guarantee that, in the worst event of a closure, his bills would not be among those left unpaid, and because troubles for some represented good fortune for others. Loans could be advanced, agreements signed, portions of businesses acquired for next to nothing, and once Joey or his associates had a seat at the table they would feed and feed and feed. To those who were vulnerable, or who knew no better, Joey Tuna’s offers of a helping hand were potentially cancerous in their malignity.
After the delivery trucks went out to the restaurants, Joey would often disappear for a few hours to take care of matters unrelated to the purchase and sale of seafood, then come back in the late afternoon to balance the books, count the cash, and deal with any minor problems that might have arisen during the day. Recently, these were increasingly related to extensions of credit, and bills that were past due but were different in nature from those that might lead to Joey and his kind taking an interest in the business. They were, for now, temporary setbacks being endured by those who had been on Joey’s books for decades, men who were wise to Joey’s ways but knew him also as a fair trader, a man who kept his word and didn’t gouge honest men. True, there was a side to Joey that should be avoided, but he was by no means unique in this, and some of his customers were at least as hard as he was. Joey didn’t cheat. He didn’t mix frozen lobster meat in with the fresh. He didn’t soak his scallops overnight, knowing that they would absorb their own weight in water, transforming one pound into two; and you could do the same with haddock too, although they didn’t absorb as much. If he was forced to freeze fish, he froze only the oilier kinds – tuna, sword, salmon – but he would tell the buyer that it had been frozen, and therefore wouldn’t taste as good, even as he priced it lighter. With Joey Tuna, you knew what you were getting.
The recession was bad for everyone, and Joey sympathized, but if he let his sympathies get in the way of common sense he’d be on the United Way list, he and the men and women who worked for him. It was all a question of balance. Joey had his competitors, just like anyone else, and they’d be happy to take disgruntled customers off his hands. In this city, the jungle drums beat all the time; an hour after someone mentioned that he was unhappy about the price per pound, you could be damn sure there would be a phone call, and the offer of a better rate. Joey himself wasn’t above hustling, so why should anyone else be? He didn’t like losing customers, though, and three times since the summer he’d been forced to offer gentle discouragement to a couple of restaurateurs who’d been tempted to take their business elsewhere, the threat made more palatable by some temporary sweeteners.
Hard times for honest men, and some dishonest ones too.
That evening, only the desk light burned in Joey’s office. The pot of tea on the electric ring had brewed to a rich yellow-brown, and tasted as strong as sucking on the leaves themselves, but Joey didn’t care. A mug of it sat at his right hand, and it was warming his bones. Joey didn’t touch alcohol. He wasn’t a prude about it, and he didn’t mind others doing it, but he’d seen the damage it had inflicted on friends and family, and had decided that it wasn’t for him. He had learned from the mistakes of the Winter Hill Gang, whose members he had watched succumb to some of the very vices they had encouraged in others. He also understood his own nature: He suspected that he had an addictive personality, and was afraid that if he started boozing, or gambling, or whoring he might never stop. So he drank tea, and ignored the horses, and remained faithful to his wife, and anyone who judged him by appearances only, and heard him joke about his fear of addiction, might wonder whether such a man, so self-aware, so mindful of his flaws, really had any reason to be concerned that, once he began to engage in a certain act, he might doubt his inability to pull back from it.
But such an individual would not have seen Joey’s fists at work, because Joey Tuna liked to work with his hands. Once Joey started pounding on someone he didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, because his world would go black and there would be only the rhythm of flesh on flesh, over and over, methodical yet unreasoning, expelling the life from the body punch by punch. And when at last the light began to pierce the murk – a red beam, like a shepherd’s warning dawn – and he saw the work that his hands had wrought, his body aching, the muscles in his stomach and back on the verge of tearing, the meat that was left behind gave him no more pause for thought than a gutted fish or a headless shrimp.
That was why Joey Tuna now left the beatings to others, although he tried to ensure that they were doled out only when absolutely necessary. Punishments of a more final kind were also strictly controlled; more than ever before, probably, now that Whitey had gone to ground. The necessity for them was less frequent, of course, and such acts less advisable even as a last resort. Oh, there were still young hotheads who thought nothing of waving a piece in someone’s face, who liked the feel of a gun in their waistband; the big men on the block who wanted to ‘make their bones,’ as the greasers would say, by putting one behind some poor bastard’s ear. But most young men like that didn’t live to be old, and a lot of those who survived would grow old with their permanent, limited view interrupted by the vertical lines of prison bars. Joey himself had done time when he was a young hothead and didn’t know any better, but the years inside had cooled him down some, and when he came out he was a different man. He was that rare breed: a man who learned from his mistakes, and didn’t repeat them. Rarer still, he was a criminal who thought that way. He had that in common with Tommy Morris, his protégé, along with the fact that they were both full Irish, a heritage that had marked them as outsiders for so long. In the Boston criminal circles through which they had moved, mongrels were the norm.
Usually Joey enjoyed these moments in the silence of his office. He took pleasure in making the accounts balance, in knowing that his business was running efficiently and profitably. He craved order. He always had, even as a boy. He was neat, and he never lost anything. Everything in its place, and a place for everything. Tonight, though, he was distracted. This Tommy Morris thing was giving him a hernia, but he should have expected that Tommy wouldn’t just lie down and die.
He still struggled to pinpoint exactly when Tommy had begun to lose control of his operations, and why, but once the rot set in there were too many who were prepared to exploit his weakness, and Joey had tacitly, and then actively, encouraged them to do so. There was no room for sentimentality in business, but Joey wished that his relationship with Tommy hadn’t come to such an end. He had a soft spot for Tommy, always had, but Joey had backed his horse now, and the race was running. Oweny Farrell would win it in the end, for it had been rigged from the off, but Tommy needed to be removed quickly at the risk of leaving the track littered with dead riders. They might even have had Tommy by now if it wasn’t for Martin Dempsey. He was a cool one, make no mistake. Joey would almost be sorry to see him dead too.
But Tommy Morris. What to do about Tommy Morris?
And, as if he had summoned him from the darkness, Tommy answered.
‘How are you, Joey?’
Joey looked up from his papers. There was a storage room to his left. He kept his records in there, along with reams of computer paper, and fresh stationery, and anything else that he didn’t want tainted by damp or the smell of the floor below. The door was always open, because his employees knew better than to be in there without his permission, and it was only the door to the office itself that he locked. Now Tommy Morris emerged from the storage room, what little hair he had left cut short, his face unshaved, his paunch lapping at his belt like a pale tongue, peeping out from beneath the fabric of his golf shirt, hairy and somehow obscene. He was wearing a pair of blue overalls from the fish market, open to his crotch. He must have been in there for the best part of an hour, waiting patiently until the market was quiet, until just the two of them were left.
‘Tommy,’ said Joey. ‘You scared the life out of me. What are you doing hanging around in closets. You turning queer on me, Tommy? You a Mary?’
He smiled at his own joke, and Tommy smiled back. He seemed to have more wrinkles than before, and the beard that was coming in was entirely gray. Failure will do that to a man, thought Joey: failure, and the knowledge of the imminence of his own mortality.
Except Tommy wasn’t alone in feeling the Reaper’s breath. In his right hand he held a pistol. The suppressor made it appear both sleeker and uglier than it already was. Not that he’d need it, not really. There was nobody to hear the gun, and the glass and walls were thick. But it was like Tommy to take care of the little details and fail to take account of the bigger picture. It was why he was broke, and running, and why he had only Ryan and Dempsey left at his side.
‘You know me better than that, Joey. I always had an eye for the girls.’
That was true. Tommy was never without a couple of women on the go at the same time. Joey had had the devil of a time finding the girls in his current stable in the hope that he might catch Tommy with his pants around his ankles.
‘You should have settled down like me,’ said Joey. ‘If you do it right, it removes the need for all that kind of nonsense, or most of it. Why don’t you pull up a chair and take the weight off your soles?’
Tommy stayed where he was. The gun hadn’t moved. It was still pointed at Joey, who was unarmed. There was no gun in his desk drawer. He had no call to have one. He was Joey Tuna, the go-between. When he had to be, he was Joey Tombs, the dispenser of justice, but it was justice that had been agreed upon beforehand, settled upon by wise heads. It was always the right thing to do.
‘This place hasn’t changed,’ said Tommy. ‘I think those may even be the same papers on your desk.’
‘There’s no cause to change what has always worked, Tommy. I make money. Until the downturn, we were even growing a little every year. We do things right here. We dot the i’s and cross the t’s. We’re so clean, the IRS is sure that we’re dirty. It was like that when I took over the business from my uncle, and God willing it will stay like that when I’m gone.’
He didn’t flinch as he spoke those words. He wasn’t going to give Tommy the satisfaction. Anyway, it wasn’t over yet. He might still talk the younger man around.
‘You remember when I gave you your first job here?’ he said.
‘I remember,’ said Tommy. ‘Cleaning up guts and scales and slime. I hated the smell of it. I could never get it off my hands.’
‘Clean work always smells dirty,’ said Joey. ‘Honest work.’
‘Sometimes dirty work smells dirty too. It smells of blood and shit. It smells like this place. I think you’ve been here so long that you’ve become confused. You can’t tell the difference anymore.’
Joey looked affronted. ‘You know, you were always a lazy bastard. You didn’t like hard work.’
‘I had no problem with hard work, Joey. My old man worked the piers, and my mother cleaned office floors. They taught me the value of honest labor. It was you who dangled the soft option in front of me, the promise of easier money.’
‘So you’re blaming me for what you’ve become? There’s a coward talking, if ever I heard one.’
‘No, I’m not blaming you. It wouldn’t have mattered who suggested it to me first, I’d still have turned. I was a kid. Stealing from trucks, breaking into warehouses – that was all second nature to me. Still, you opened the door. You showed me the way. I was always going to fall, but you were the one who gave me the push.’