FINN KICKED OPEN THE door and raged in.
The hut was stark and bare. In the far corner, a single lonely crate stood with a piece of paper nailed to the top.
“Sully,” the note read in large sloppy handwriting, “thanks for the liquid gold. Cross me again, and your Lantern turns to ashes.” It was signed Vinnie the Blade.
“Fuck,” said Finn. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” He dropped the note and his weapon and kicked the wood walls, the fireplace mantle, and the crate with the liquor. He kicked everything in his path, he yelled and cursed, while Isabelle stood nearby in silent disappointment.
Afterward, Finn became a pillar of salt near the window with his back to Isabelle, as he stared out into the night, into nothingness. All hope was gone. He had been so close! He needed just a few months of expenses, both personal and professional, before things turned around, before business picked up in the spring. Clearly a different way was meant for him, but he didn’t want to go that way! He was a banker who lived in a corner townhouse on Louisburg Square in Beacon Hill. That’s who he was. He didn’t want to be the other thing, a destitute man with no name and no work who struggled for his every meal. He had fought so hard all his life not to be that man.
He felt her come up behind him and place her soothing palm between his shoulders. “I’m sorry, Finn,” she said. “It’s okay. It will be okay. We figure out different way. But who is this thief Vinnie?”
“Vincent Moretti,” Finn said. “Sully’s current distiller and distributor from Canada used to be exclusively Vinnie’s. Sully wanted in, and they fought a war over it back in ’26. Moretti is why Sully lost an eye.”
“Lost an eye but won the fight?”
“Yes. Afterward, Sully worked out this convoluted system of transfer to hide his booze from Moretti.”
“How did Vinnie find it?”
“Who knows,” Finn said. “He could’ve paid off the delivery guys or someone at the distillers. A thousand ways this operation can go wrong.” Finn’s shoulders were weighed down by black ruin. “What are we going to do now?” he whispered.
“First thing we do,” she said, “is leave. You don’t know when they come back. We didn’t bring enough munition for proper fight.”
They took the note and the case of whisky. She carried the note and the rifle. He carried the whisky.
After they’d been on the road for a while, still in Vermont, she asked how he knew that something wasn’t right.
“The brush was cleared,” Finn said. “Someone cut a swathe through the woods with an axe, like they didn’t care that they were leaving a trail to the cabin because they knew they were going to leave nothing in it.”
“Sully gonna be mad,” Isabelle said.
“Sully?” said Finn. “I’m not going to get paid.”
“Maybe he has another job for you? We can do another job. This can’t be only liquor cabin he has. Border with Canada long. Maybe other cabins?”
“You’re something else.” Finn smirked. “You want to traipse through two thousand miles of border looking for liquor in the woods?”
“Just offering ideas. Your shoulders too big to be slumped.”
“We’re finished,” Finn said. “If there had been someone waiting for us in that house, we’d be cooked. The two of us couldn’t fight Moretti’s goons even if we were armed to the gills with automatics.”
“If you say so,” said Isabelle, aiming the revolver at the windshield and the night road beyond and pulling a phantom trigger.
“I say so because it is so. Put that down. We have a rifle and a handgun to scare off accidental burglars. We can’t have a cage match against the toughest mobsters in the Northeast.”
“How tough can this Moretti be?” said an unperturbed Isabelle, the gun still aimed at the darkness. “He left note for Sully. Now Sully will find him and bring revenge. Moretti making danger for himself and his men for few bottles of whisky. That’s man who doesn’t respect his life or his business.”
“Yes, and you and I are not going to risk our lives for a few pieces of silver.”
Isabelle looked disappointed as she lowered the weapon, though Finn suspected it was less about the few pieces of silver and more about the firefight that wasn’t to be.
He didn’t ask her about it. Most of the drive back to Boston was brutal. The optimism Finn had felt on the drive north was demolished by the realization that he wasn’t going to earn, find, steal, or borrow the money he needed to barely break even. He still had a bit left from the second November trip; he felt grateful for the prescience that had told him not to pay all his past debts, keeping a few bucks in reserve for the just in case.
Isabelle was speaking to him.
“Finn,” she was saying. “Finn.”
He came out of it, refocused on her.
“Finn, I’m sorry it went so poor. This isn’t what we wanted.”
“No kidding.”
“But I wasn’t joking what I said to you before we went to Schumann when you tried to fire me,” said Isabelle. “You will save much money if your parents sell their house, and Walter and Lucy theirs, and Eleanor and that son of hers theirs, and everybody come live with you.”
“Oh, I definitely thought you were joking,” Finn said. “When you are saying this, are you thinking of how my wife is going to take it?”
“No, Finn,” said Isabelle. “Because what you need to do, you need to do, and you can’t not do it just because Vanessa won’t like it. You need to let your people go, cooks and maids. It’s too many dollars. Sell all houses, everyone live together, like one big family, and see what you see. You may get new job soon. There are banks in Boston, other job chances. But no more Sully. No Vinnie the razor either.”
“Vinnie ‘the Blade,’” said Finn.
“That’s what I say, razorblade.”
“Just bl—never mind.”
New Hampshire passed like this, in sadness and snow.
“How do you think Sully is going to react when he finds out someone stole a hundred and fifty grand of his liquor?” Finn said, somewhat rhetorically.
“Not someone,” said Isabelle. “Dumb mobber Moretti. There’s going to be war. Stay away from North End until things calm down.”
“I’ll have to find another place to drink.”
“We can make our own.”
He laughed.
“I’m not funny,” she said.
“Oh, most definitely not funny, Isabelle,” said Finn, but for some reason felt better, a little lighter.
“I teach you,” she said. “It’s not hard. I can make it very delicious.”
“In my house? Tell me, will this brewing and distilling be before or after I have all my relatives move in? I assume there will be some distilling?”
“If you want delicious moonshine, then of course much de-stilling. But fine, you want to make fun instead of make liquor, go head. But you can’t make money from funny, Finn. Especially not you.”
“Perhaps we can open not just a brewery but a speakeasy in my kitchen?”
“Certainly can’t open comedy show in your kitchen,” she returned.
“Do I want to keep my house or don’t I?”
“You make so much money with my moonshine, you keep your house and get more houses.”
“Do I want to keep my family?” For a second that sounded like a rhetorical question, and he regretted it as soon as the words left his throat. “I do, and I don’t want to go to prison.”
He wanted to add that he was a banker, not a bootlegger. But now that he had confessed to Isabelle the secret of the McBride brothers, lies became the truth, doubt became certainty, nightmare a reality. The hopelessness he felt at his doubt over who he was, coupled with the loss of his self-made self, was doubly unmooring him. What was better, to be a fake Finn Evans, the once well-respected businessman, born and raised in Beacon Hill, pretend son of a judge and a teacher, or a true Moses-basket baby McBride, born in the North End to the kind of woman who abandoned her children? And not all her children, obviously.
Just Finn.
“It can’t continue,” Isabelle was saying. “People can’t be out of work and not drink too. It can only be one or other. Both together is, how you say . . .”
“Unsustainable.”
“Right, unassailable.”
“That’s not what I—” He waved it off. “I don’t know if I can face Walter,” Finn said. “How am I going to talk to him about this?”
“Is there any way you can keep bank open?”
He shook his head.
“Then I don’t know how thirteen thousand dollars would help you keep it open,” Isabelle said. “I’m not saying it’s not big money. But it’s limited money. It goes away. To keep bank open, you need continuing money.”
“That’s really the crux of it, isn’t it, Isa?” said Finn, and coughed quickly, as if he’d misspoken. It was the first time he’d called her anything but Isabelle.
She smiled and went on almost as if she hadn’t noticed. “Can you borrow more money?” She clicked her tongue. “I’m not advising it. My mother said if you can’t afford it, you shouldn’t have it.”
“What could you possibly need in Ispas?” he said.
“What you mean? A new saddle. Some beads. Cici and I wear them on our wrists and necks, many beads, they look pretty. And dresses. Sometimes nice to dress up. We bought ice skates and sleds. I bought toys for my . . .” She broke off. “You know, everybody likes nice things, even simple farm girls. These boots I wear, for example,” Isabelle said. “I save for two years to buy them. I never borrow money. I save and save, because they so expensive, they cost like half horse. But they last me look how long.”
“Half a horse or half a house?”
“Half horse. House so cheap in Ukraine. Made of mud. But horse expensive.”
He was quiet. “So many things have happened to you and to me in such a short time, haven’t they?”
“Feels like someone else’s life,” she said, blinking away memory. “I know you feel terrible, Finn. Vanessa is going to not react good. But if you realize you have no choice, if you know this is what you must do, it’s easier to talk to people about hard things. Because you have no option.”
When they stopped somewhere in Massachusetts to have a smoke and some food, she asked what he planned to do with their one case of whisky.
“Give it back to Sully, of course,” Finn said. “It’s his liquor.”
She shrugged. “There is his, and there is his,” she said. “Is he going to pay you for this trip, your time, Schumann’s truck?”
“Well, no . . .”
“Exactly,” said Isabelle. “He should pay something. He man of business.”
“Man of crime business.”
“Even men of crime business have honor. He not Communist. You show him note from Razorblade. Whisky can be your payment for your trouble. Then you can have drink or two right at home.”
“Keep the entire case?”
“One bottle to Schumann. Rest to us.”
“I don’t know about that, Izzzabelle . . .”
“Finn, you gonna be out of work soon,” she said. “Remember I tell you, country can take your job or your liquor. Not both.”
Finn laughed. And then, because he couldn’t help it, he opened his arms and hugged her. They were outside a roadside cafe in the hard dust and cold. He was in his big coat and she was in some borrowed lumberjacky cape, and the embrace was awkward and bear-like—two large paws wrapped around a slender girl inside layered winter garb. “Thank you,” he whispered, pressing his cheek to her covered head. Her hands patted his sides, clutched his coat.
“You just happy I say you hide eleven bottles of liquor in your house.”
“Am I that transparent?”
“Well, don’t thank me yet,” she said into his chest, her head pressed against him, not moving away. “You got crap of stuff left to do before you can raise glass of Sully’s delicious whisky.” She squeezed him. “Like retailing your wife with stories of your life of crime.”
“I can’t wait to retail her about that,” said Finn.