The irony of the fact that I was walking through the doors of what had once upon a time been the New Irving was probably not lost on me, although I didn’t stop to think about it. Monk’s old place, the scene of much honest mayhem in the good old days, and here I was, big as life, for this day only, the great man himself, reincarnated. And if it was Easter Sunday to boot, well, that was simply poetic justice.
Bohan wasn’t much to look at, but then assassins are usually not a patch on the great men they dispatch. It went without saying that everybody in the joint knew who I was except for Bohan himself, which was to be expected, because a federal in my experience was about the dumbest form of life there was, except for a Republican.
“Whaddya know, whaddya say?” says I, sitting down at the stool next to him.
“What’s it to you?” He was at least three drinks ahead of me, and already belligerent.
“A beer,” I said to the barkeep. “Madden’s No. 1.”
“Swill,” said Bohan.
“Name your poison,” says I, taking a draught. Even though I didn’t drink anymore, it was mighty good. “What’s yours, friend?”
“What’s it to you?” he snarled.
I picked up the bottle and looked at the label. There was my name, big as life, emblazoned across the bottle’s belly, right in front of an artist’s rendering of the Phoenix Brewery its own good self, all red brick and smokestacks, old Tenth Avenue come to life.
“You know what the papers said about Monk when he came back from France, Jerry?” He gave me a rheumy look. “ ‘Monk Eastman Wins New Soul.’ ”
I cracked the empty bottle over his head as hard as I could, which was saying something. That was the signal for the bartender to drop onto the floor and forget he’d ever seen my face, and for what few patrons who were in this fine establishment of a Sunday to start to scatter, and for Jerry it was the signal to reach up and grab his bleeding scalp, which meant that, defenseless, he was a sucker for receiving the broken half of the bottle right in his face. It caught him across the bridge of the nose, which meant that both shards gouged into his eyes, blinding him on the spot.
A more pathetic sight than a blind man, his eyes streaming with blood, Oedipus calling for his mommy, there isn’t, but in my heart there was no mercy at all, just the vision of Monk lying there, whether bloodied in the Bronx barn or on the pavement outside the Wigwam it didn’t matter, my Monk, my father.
Bohan had fallen off his stool and was kneeling on the floor, mumblin’ and mutterin’ to beat the band.
“You know what this is, don’t you, boy?” I said to him as calmly as I could, removing one of my pistols from my waistband.
I never saw such blood. “Oh God Jesus Mary and Joseph and all the saints please sir have mercy…”
I conked him but good with the butt of a .45, which drove him down face first into the floor. “Answer my question.”
I’ll give Jerry Bohan this. He managed to push his torso up, elevating his puss to my knee-level, all the while whining for mercy and asking questions of eternity it was not my place to answer.
Normally it is against my rules to beat a man when he is down, but in the matter, I decided to make an exception. I swung the automatic, catching him on the jaw, which knocked out a few of his teeth, not that he was going to need them where he was going.
“Answer me.”
It always makes it easier on me when a man who knows he’s about to die gives up and makes it easier on himself. Luigi had fought me, Willie had never seen it coming and Fats had had it coming. Jerry raised his head one last time, praying through blubbery red-flecked lips, and I might have felt sorry for him, except that I didn’t.
“Tell me,” he pleaded, because I guess in the end we all want to know why we’re getting it, why here, why now, why.
“Redemption.” I shot him once through each bloody eye and left him there on the floor, the New Irving floor that had absorbed so much blood it was almost human. Now Jerry’s blood was mingling with Monk’s and the score was even.
I tossed a couple of bills on the bar as I departed. “Drinks on the house,” I said. “Make ’em doubles.”