17
Acold night in Boston, and the rain now beating down. It had fallen continuously throughout the day, varying only in its intensity, as though the heavens were determined to sluice the world clean. The lights of the taller buildings, always out of place in Beantown, seemed to brush the clouds above, piercing them and letting the rain pour through the holes. Tonight it was a city of sodden clothing, of suspect shoes that welcomed the damp, of plastered hair that curled and frizzed, and raindrops cold-kissing necks and breasts, of fuzzed neon reflected in puddles like swirls of paint, of slow-moving traffic and impatient pedestrians skipping dangerously past wheels and fenders, ignoring warning beeps and flashing lights. Even the girls heading for the clubs and bars had been forced to swathe their legs and arms for fear of goose bumps, and their frustration was writ large on their faces. Later, the ones who hadn’t found a partner for the night would give up the fight and let the rain ruin their coiffure and smear their mascara, and they’d swear and giggle as they struggled to find a cab, for the cabdrivers would make a killing that night.
But the cold: God, that was the worst of it. It bit and gnawed, its white teeth working on fingertips and toes, noses and ears, like a carrion feeder picking at a corpse in the snow. Winter was one thing: winter, with snow on the ground and clear blue skies. You knew where you stood with winter. But this, this bastard weather, no accommodation could be reached with it. Better not to have come out at all, but that would be to give in to it, to allow it to have its sway over the city, to sacrifice a night out because the elements were conspiring against you, especially when you were young, and nubile, and had money in your pocket. Maybe when you were older, and had less to seek and to prove, the weather might give you pause, but not now. No, such nights were precious, and hard-earned. Let the rain fall; let the cold bite. The warmth and the company will be more welcome for the struggle that it took to find it, and there is little that is more lovely than to watch rain fall in the darkness from the comfort of a chair, a glass in your hand and a voice softly whispering smiling words in your ear.
Seated in their car on East Broadway in Southie, waiting for their moment, Dempsey and Ryan watched the local kids go by. The two men were thankful for the rain, for it kept heads down and obscured the view through the windshield. Both wore headgear: Dempsey a black wool hat, Ryan a Celtics cap, making him look like any one of a dozen mooks gorilla-walking their way along the main drag at this time. They came out of central casting, those guys, with their tats and their oversized T-shirts, with their misplaced sentiment for an island that meant nothing to them in actual terms, a place they could identify on a map only because of its shape. Dempsey and Ryan knew their kind well. They held ancestral grievances passed on by their parents, and their parents’ parents. Their racism was ingrained but inconsistent. They hated blacks but cheered on the Celtics, who had barely a white face among them. They had older brothers who could still recall the busing program of the mid to late seventies, when Garrity and his so-called experts ignored the warnings from both inside and outside South Boston and paired poor white Southie with poor black Roxbury, two sections of Boston’s immigrant community that had suffered more than most because of the consequences of bad urban planning; the intransigence of the all-white Boston School Committee that played upon fears of integration, and effective ghettoization, including the deeply flawed B-BURG experiment which walled the blacks inside the former Jewish neighborhoods of North Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan. Sure, there were racists and bigots in Southie and the Town, because there were racists and bigots everywhere, but busing played into the hands of the worst of them, and even succeeded in uniting the previously warring Irish and Italian communities against a single common foe with a different skin. Hell, Ryan’s old man, who was smarter than most of his neighbors put together and was a member of the Boston branch of the International Socialist Organization, had found himself on the receiving end of threats from the assholes on the Tactical Patrol Force because he’d formed a council to help ensure the safety of black pupils at his son’s high school. Ryan hadn’t thanked him for his liberal views since he was the one who had taken the beatings for his father being a ‘nigger-lover,’ but he respected his old man more now for what he’d done.
The years had changed Ryan, but he kept many of those changes hidden.
Now he sat behind the wheel and wondered at what they were about to do. By Dempsey’s feet lay the shoebox they had taken from the Napier house, but it was no longer filled with money. The device that it contained was crude but effective: little more than a lead-azide detonator and two pounds of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN. The explosive’s lethality had been compounded by the carpet tacks that Dempsey sprinkled liberally through the mix. Ryan had watched, appalled, as Dempsey put it together in the motel room earlier.
‘What are they for?’ he asked
‘They’re for added value.’
‘But they’ll . . .’
He trailed off. His mouth felt too dry. This was wrong. It should be stopped.
‘They’ll what? Hurt people? Scar them? What do you think the point of this is, Francis?’
Ryan found some saliva. ‘To take out Oweny Farrell.’
‘No, it’s to take out Oweny Farrell and everyone around him. It’s to leave nobody from his inner circle standing. It’s to send a message that Tommy Morris isn’t down and he isn’t out, and his meal tickets aren’t up for grabs.’
‘They won’t let it slide. They can’t.’
‘They will if he gives them no other choice. They sat back and waited to see what Oweny would do, and how Tommy would respond. This is Tommy’s response. This is his way back.’
Ryan turned away. His fingers shook. He lit a cigarette to calm himself.
‘This is not right, Martin. This is not what we are. There’ll be people in there who have nothing to do with it.’
He tried to visualize the damage that a hail of tacks would do in an enclosed space, and felt vomit well up in his throat. Had Tommy told Dempsey to do this, or had Dempsey come up with the idea himself? Dempsey was the one to whom Tommy relayed his orders, unless, as with Helen Napier, Dempsey was otherwise occupied. Ryan had to take it on trust that what he heard from Dempsey was the true substance of their conversations. If Tommy had really endorsed this course of action, then all was lost and there was no longer any rightness to his cause.
‘Look,’ said Dempsey, ‘it’s this or Tommy rolls over and dies.’
Seconds ticked by.
‘That might be for the best,’ said Ryan. He said it so slowly, and so softly, that Dempsey had to lean forward to be sure he was hearing him right. Ryan’s face was still turned away from him. The cigarette was in his left hand, but his right hand was no longer visible. From the angle of his arm, it was somewhere close to his belt. Dempsey grew still. On the table beside him was his gun. Casually, he rested his hand inches from it.
‘I thought we’d had this conversation already, Francis,’ he said. He was surprised at how relaxed he sounded. His fingertips brushed the grips.
Ryan’s shoulders trembled. Dempsey thought that he might be on the verge of tears. There was a tremor in his voice when he spoke again.
‘I mean, look at us. We’re making a bomb. We’re going to slaughter and maim. I’m not like you, Martin. Maybe I’m not as tough as you. I’ve delivered beatings with the best of them, but I’ve never killed. I don’t want to kill anyone, not even Oweny Farrell.’
‘How did you think this was going to end?’
‘I don’t know: with a sit-down, maybe, with everybody compromising. I thought Joey Tuna would see us right. I thought—’
‘You thought what: that you were dealing with reasonable men?’ There was no mockery to Dempsey’s tone. He merely sounded tired, and there was a horror in his voice at what he had allowed himself to become.
‘No,’ said Ryan. ‘Just men. Just ordinary men.’
‘They were never ordinary, Francis. Ordinary men lead ordinary lives, but not them. They all had blood on their hands and on their souls. We’re tainted by it too, just by being around them.’
‘Have you killed, Martin?’
Now he turned to look at the older man. Ryan had heard stories: Dempsey worked alone, and the people he took care of didn’t surface again. Wherever they were, they were buried deep. Now Ryan wanted to hear confirmation from Dempsey’s own mouth.
‘Yes,’ said Dempsey. His eyes were empty.
‘For Tommy?’
‘And before Tommy.’
‘Who did you kill, Martin? Who did you kill before?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
But it did. It mattered to Ryan. Dempsey was born in Belmont, but he’d come to them from abroad. The whispers were that he’d been a bomb-maker, that he’d planted devices in Northern Ireland for the Provisionals, and in Madrid for the ETA Basques. Now he couldn’t return to Europe because, even with some form of peace established in both conflicts, there were those with long memories and scores to settle. Tommy had given him a home and a role to play, and Dempsey’s reputation had gone before him when there were problems that needed to be handled.
Before Ryan could question him further, Dempsey spoke again.
‘You say you’ve never killed, Francis. You say that you can’t. But before all this is over you may be put in a position where you have to pull the trigger on someone to save yourself. Have you thought about that?’
‘Yes,’ said Ryan. ‘I’ve thought about it. I even dream about it.’
‘And in the dreams, do you pull the trigger?’
Dempsey waited for the answer, the only light coming from the lamp on the table, its glow catching the sharp, glittering spikes of the tacks.
‘Yes,’ said Ryan at last. ‘I pull the trigger.’
‘Then maybe you can kill after all. Who do you kill in your dreams?’
‘Faceless men. I don’t know who they are.’
‘But you kill them anyway?’
‘Yes.’