14

Mexico City, 1953

When his brother opened the door to his little penthouse, standing just behind him was a tall, bony individual with a dull red moustache, wearing a long apron over a suit and a chef’s toque on his head.

“This is your cook?” Tom asked.

“Ah, Tommy, I can see now why Hogan hired you, blessed as y’are with such keen powers of observation,” Charlie said. “Why, it’s a wonder ya didn’t go straight to the FBI.”

Charlie turned and said something to the tall, bony man in a language Tom didn’t know, and didn’t know of.

“This is Pishta, Tom,” Charlie explained. “He’s Hungarian. Understands a little English, but he can speak only one sentence in it.”

Charlie turned to the cook again.

“Give him yer one line of English, Pishta.”

“Shut up, baby,” Pishta said in a high, heavily accented voice. Charlie burst out laughing, while Pishta smiled broadly, his moustache turning up.

“Shut up, bay-bee!” he repeated, more emphatically than ever.

“Oh, that’s fine, Pishta, just fine! Now, I think we’ll have a scotch before lunch.”

Pishta bowed slightly, still beaming, and went off to fetch their drinks while they settled themselves on the awful green couch.

“Wherever did you find him?”

“Hungarian embassy. There was some sort of falling-out amongst our communist brethren over there—I never did learn exactly what. Maybe he said a kind word about Rajk, when Rákosi was in, or a kind word about Rákosi when Rajk was in. In any case, they were goin’ to ship him back to Budapest for execution, so I gave him asylum at the embassy.”

“Jesus.”

“I know,” Charlie said, nodding in acknowledgment as Pishta handed them their drinks before returning to the kitchen. “What kind of world are we living in, when someone can bother themselves with killing a creature such as Pishta?”

“How did Slim put up with him?” Tom ventured, unsure if he should mention her name at all.

“Oh, she loved Pishta!” Charlie said fondly. “He was a big help with all those garden parties she liked to throw. My God, we had a five-thousand-dollar entertainment allowance for the year; I think she used it up in three months. Just open up the whole house, and invite everyone for the Fourth of July. You ever see the old ambassadorial residence, Tom?”

“No.”

“That’s right, you never got down here. Just one story high, but really a beautiful home, full of old-time elegance. It had a long terrace, and then a garden patio that seemed to go on forever, as lush and green as any field in Bohola. Tall trees all around. Lovely, lovely. Slim herself, when she saw it, said right out loud, ‘How beautiful!’ Just like that: ‘How beautiful!’”

“I believe you, Charlie.”

“I thought she was happy,” he said, draining the rest of the scotch in his glass and jangling the ice plaintively. “Always on the local television, talking about her charities and raising money for this cause or that. First year we were here, she had a society square dance out on the terrace. You’ve never seen anything so beautiful in your life. All those gorgeous Mexican women, whirling their bright skirts about the lawn! God, I loved those parties!”

Crunching a last piece of ice between his teeth, he put his empty glass down on the coffee table before them, the map of Ireland beneath its glass top. A cloud seemed to pass across his face.

“After the first year or so, though, all she cared for were her bullfight luncheons. Every Sunday, once the cow-butcherin’ season commenced in November. She’d have forty, fifty of her aficionados over in the afternoon. Bull breeders and matadors, washed-up picadors an’ banderilleros. ‘Pickled herrings an’ banditos,’ I used to call ’em. I remember she had one famous old matador, kept bowing and kissing the hand of every woman in the place. Well, finally I went over an’ bowed deep an’ kissed his hand. That put an end to that!”

He chuckled, then squinted suspiciously at Tom.

“I heard you got over to Plaza Mexico. Did you meet Chu Chu?”

Tom hesitated, decided not to lie, and nodded his head. “I had that distinction.”

“So you see what I’m havin’ to deal with. For her to associate herself with a man like that—” He cut himself off when he saw Tom’s face, shaking his head and crossing his arms. “God, how she loved it, though. All those afternoons in the dry season. She’d have Pishta cook up big platters of arroz con pollo, and these hot turkey tortas everybody was crazy for then. She put the tables out on the terrace, with one of the little bullfighting puppets she bought in the marketplace on each one. I never saw her so excited. She wasn’t nearly so solicitous of me by then, I can tell you that!”

Tom could see her face there. Flushed, with that strand of her blond hair falling down over her ear as she turned to smile . . .

“Then we’d all pile into the big cars an’ go over to the Plaza,” Charlie kept on, staring down at the coffee table, as if his drink might rematerialize before him. “We’d have to sit ringside, in the box of those damned Madrazos—more of her bullfighting friends. The matador would come over an’ make a pretty little speech dedicating the next bull to us, while he winked and licked his lips, an’ looked her over like a wolf contemplatin’ a lamb. He’d hand me one of those goddamned Mickey Mouse hats, an’ I’d have to sit there an’ hold it, an’ see that it was filled with coins throughout the ensuing butchery.”

Pishta reentered the room, and laid out two bowls on a small card table set up across the room, waiting there with a dishtowel over one arm for them to be seated. Charlie pulled himself up from the couch, still shaking his head.

“I never understood how she could love it so much,” he said as they took their seats. “I just used to sit there hoping we didn’t get soaked in blood. They shove the first spear in between the bull’s shoulders, right away, and up it blows like an oil geyser . . .”

He could picture that, too, in the pitiless arena he had glimpsed the day before. The first red streak of blood, splattered across the sand in the dry heat of the afternoon. Then a cheer, and more of it, and more of it.

Of course she would want to see all of it, perched up high on her pillow in that ringside seat. Having all she could do to keep from standing up—daughter of a long line of killers, in their march across the continent. The Madrazos, grizzled bull breeders, no doubt grinning at one another and sneaking looks back at her bottom as she rose off the seat. But she would be oblivious, eyes fixed on the kill. Wanting to see everything, just as she always did, and could Charlie really know his wife so very little?

“. . . the rest of it is just the crowd o-layin’, an’ the matadors prancin’ an’ posin’ till finally they get the poor beast worn down to where it’s snortin’ foam an’ blood out through the mouth. Then they would finish it—an’ hand us the ears an’ the tail. God, I wonder sometimes what she’s done with them all!”

The liquid in the bowls before them was a bright orange color, though it smelled familiar.

“Carrot soup,” Charlie told him. “You need a stout heart to cook it.”

“It’s delicious. Spiced like nothing I’ve ever tasted before.”

Charlie said something to Pishta, and he burst into a long spiel of Hungarian.

“He’s overjoyed you like the carrot soup. He wants you to know that it’s got carrots in it, surprisingly enough, and also onion, garlic, parsnips, and silander.”

Pishta’s lips and his moustache turned up again, and he turned and marched back into the kitchen.

“Will she be joining us? Slim?” Tom asked, careful not to betray any emotion at all. Charlie looked grim—but before he could answer, Pishta was back with another excited burst of Hungarian.

“The soup again,” Charlie translated. “He wanted you to be sure to know there’s flour in it, as well. Plus salt and pepper, an’ something the size of a nut. At least I think that’s what he said. Even after all my years with Pishta, his Hungarian sometimes eludes me. Also bouillon cubes. Also water. Don’t forget the water, if yer plannin’ to make this when you get back to Manhattan. When the soup starts to boil, mix in an egg. Then throw the shell out the window. Thank you, Pishta.”

The cook bowed and retreated again, looking more pleased than ever. Charlie tried to keep his face up.

“I invited her, but she says she’s going out of town. She said she’d meet us down in Acapulco. If we want to go down there.”

“I see,” he said slowly. Wondering if he felt disappointed, and if he should.

“We should go, Tommy,” Charlie said, suddenly animated again. “We should get out, see some of the country.”

“I dunno, Charlie. I don’t know how it’d look, the DA’s office funding trips to Acapulco—”

“Ah, the hell with what people say, Tommy!” he exclaimed, the bluff, jovial voice unable to hide the pleading beneath. “You have a dangerous criminal like me, aren’t ya supposed to follow me everywhere? We can stay there for free; some of el presidente’s friends are always very generous about that. Besides, nothing like the open road to free up the mind for reminiscing!”

“Is that what you think we’re doin’, Charlie? Reminiscing—” he said, but then Pishta was back, clearing away their bowls and bringing in a shoulder of pork, covered with peppers and fried tomatoes. It was even better than the soup, hot and marinated until the meat almost fell off the bone, and when he smiled up at Pishta the cook launched into another extended explanation.

“I think we’ll stick with the Reader’s Digest condensed version this time, Pishta,” Charlie said gently. “Suffice it to say, you cook the meat in agua for an hour. Then you add a couple thousand herbs of various descriptions, put it on a slow fire, an’ let that absorb all the grease. Then, when it’s ready, you throw an old shoe out the window.”

“The carnage below your windows must be somethin’ terrible, Charlie.”

“Why d’ya think I live in the middle of the roof? Thanks, Pishta.”

The Hungarian left them, and Tom wanted to try to find a way back to what he had started to say, but Charlie was already talking again.

“Well, it built up goodwill. We always got a big hand from the Mexican people. But some of the Americans down here started to complain. They wanted their quiet embassy evenings back, playin’ canasta around the fire. Slim wouldn’t do that, she couldn’t stomach that, and so they would complain straight to State, and I would have to hear about it. She was never one for politics, that one. Not the way Claire was, y’know, Tom?”

“Sure, Charlie.”

“Oh, but she had a head for the game! I used to rely on her for everything, Tom.”

“I know you did, Charlie.”

“She never thought I should’ve got into politics in the first place. ‘Charlie, God bless you, you’ve got too good a heart, they’ll skin you alive,’ she used to tell me.

“She worried about me every step of the way up. She’d say, ‘I’m glad to see you happy, but I am afraid of it. Are you sure you won’t come to any harm?’ Oh, she knew me better than I knew myself!”

“Maybe she did, Charlie.”

“She had a tongue on her, that one. She was a lady down to her toes, but she had a tongue in her head,” Charlie said, chuckling. “D’ya remember when Truman came to break the ground at Idlewild, back in ’48, when he looked like he was finished? Neddy Moran told me later, she looked at the two of us comin’ up the steps of Gracie Mansion, me an’ the president of the United States, an’ she said to him, ‘Well, here comes Amos ’n Andy’!”

They were both laughing then.

“It was she that should’ve been the politician in the family, Tommy. Wasn’t a day or a night went by I didn’t call her an’ ask her advice on somethin’. It was always right, even at the end when all the fight was drained out of her.”

“She fought hard, Charlie. Right to the end. She stood it all with a rare grace.”

“An’ what did grace ever do for her, Tom?” Charlie snapped with a bitterness that seemed to come out of nowhere. “What’s grace for, what’s courage for? What kind of world is this, where a woman like that can die a long, slow death from something like Parkinson’s, with the cancer thrown in at the end for a chaser?”

He put down his knife and fork and dabbed suddenly at his eyes with his handkerchief. Tom put out a hand to console him, but Charlie’s voice was still bitter.

“Did I ever tell you about the pigeon, Tom? No? It was right near the end. She was up at home, prostrate in bed, an’ I was comin’ out of some big meeting of all the big men, in midtown. At the Yale Club, or the New York Yacht Club, or maybe just the Big Men Club. It was an evening in the early fall, just after a rainstorm. I come out of the meeting none the worse for wear after a couple scotches, thinkin’ all the better of myself after discussin’ the great matters of state, and I look up above and the whole sky is golden. Lighting up the Chrysler Building, an’ the Empire State, an’ all the other high buildings, until it all looked like a gorgeous fairyland we live in.”

“I know it, Charlie. I’ve seen that light myself.”

“And then I looked down, an’ spotted a pigeon dyin’ by the side of a building. It was all tucked into itself, there against the stone wall. Standin’ in somethin’ that had obviously just come out of it, blood or bile, or its own liquid shit. Shiverin’ there, an’ waiting to die, or whatever it thought was going to happen to it. I saw that, and it took away any religion I might’ve had left. I thought, what kind of a God is it, makes the birds of the sky just to huddle and die in their own filth at the end? What kind of a God is it, leaves a woman like that to spend ten years in a wheelchair? Dyin’ bit by bit, while her fine peacock of a husband floats around town, full of liquor from the New York fucking Yacht Club? And all the beauty of His golden sky no compensation for their suffering, no compensation at all. Just a gaudy, sham stage, on which to strut in all His cruelty.”

“But to her, Charlie. Was it worthwhile to her?”

Charlie blew his nose and chuckled, despite the tears in his eyes, patting his brother’s hand on his shoulder. “Ah, Tom, you always know what to say. Well, I do think she would’ve been pleased, you know, to see Spellman gave her the big sendoff at Saint Pat’s, with all the smells an’ bells,” he said, softening into his reminiscence, all right. “The cardinal of New York givin’ her eulogy at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. I knew he wanted something for it, of course. A tax break for his damned schools, or another raid on some sacrilegious movie house. She would’ve been the first to tell me that. But even so, it brought tears to the eyes, knowing how pleased she and her whole family would’ve been—pleased I could do that for her.”

“I know she would’ve, Charlie.”

“She was somethin’. They all were. Claire Condon, of the Water Street Condons. What airs that family put on! They lived under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, but they acted like the uncrowned kings of Ireland. Even spelled her name the French way.”

“I remember that, Charlie. She was proud of it, too.”

“She did have class, though, you could see that from the start. Did I ever tell you how we met, up at the Grand Union Hotel, in Saratoga Springs, before the Great War? She was workin’ as a telephone operator at the time, spendin’ her week’s vacation up there with a girlfriend. I was a barman, in my white apron, handin’ out milk punches to the swells, and she come up to the bar to get change for a phone call.

“Right away, she had me so moon-eyed I gave her a Canadian dime by accident. She hung on to it. Years later I saw it in her purse, an’ I asked her, ‘What joker passed that off on you?’ An’ she told me, ‘You did, the first day I met you.’ Did I ever tell ya that?”

“You did, Charlie.”

“But you should’ve seen her in those days, Tommy! You only knew her after she was sick—more’s the pity. Back then she was pretty as a picture. Blue eyes, an’ milk-white skin. Hair black as a raven’s wing. Oh, was she accomplished! You never got to hear her on the piano, Tom, but she had great feeling, great timing, expert finger control—”

“I’ve heard tell, Charlie.”

“All that week, I wooed her in the parlor, or on the big white porch chairs. Sneakin’ out there, because the help wasn’t supposed to mingle with the guests. Wonderful old barn, the Grand Union was. The Victor Herbert Orchestra givin’ a concert out on the piazza, every morning and afternoon!”

“That I’d have liked to see, Charlie,” Tom said gently.

They resettled on the couch while Pishta cleared the plates. Charlie went on speaking in a voice that made Tom wonder if he was about to cry again.

“She was the making of me, Tommy,” he said. “I didn’t even wait until the season was over, just threw over that job at the Grand Union and chased her right back to New York.

“It was after I met her that I knew I had to find a way up. Before that, it’d been just one job after another. Stackin’ groceries up at a James Butler store in the Bronx, workin’ construction over in West Farms. Tendin’ bar down at the Ritz-Carlton, an’ the Plaza. Racketing around the world—”

“I know, Charlie. I remember the letters.”

“The best was when I signed on as a common seaman. Fifteen dollars a month, shovelin’ coal aboard the SS Southern Cross, an’ what I knew about the ocean you could’ve writ on the head of a pin. They worked me half to death on that boat, but it made a man out of me. Sailin’ all the way down to Rio de Janeiro, an’ Buenos Aires, an’ Montevideo, then up the Río de la Plata to Ensenada. I loved that, Tommy, makin’ port in a wondrous new city every other day. I was a good sailor, never seasick for an’ hour, and I worked like a mule in harness down in that boiler room.

“But by the end of the voyage, I was broker than I started. To be sure, the purser had taken a shine to me, he promised to sign me up for their next cruise, an’ I think if he had, I would’ve become a sailor, an’ what would that’ve been like? Sailin’ to a new port every trip, all over the world. I never would’ve met Claire, or Slim. Never would’ve been mayor. Settlin’ down into a whole new place, maybe, with a whole other life—another wife, another family. An’ who would that Charlie O’Kane have been? D’ya ever think about that, Tommy? How circumstance makes us all that we are in the end?”

“Does it, Charlie?”

He had heard the stories ever since he’d known his brother—from even before, when he still wrote to the family back in Lismirrane. His father reading the letters around the table along with the papers from Dublin. The neighbors, and all the rest of the family, more interested in hearing Charlie’s tales. Lying in glorious comfort in the outshot, the little bed made for him from the wall cropping that stuck out by the kitchen fire. His brothers and sisters all clustered around, picturing as he did the adventures of his brother as they fell toward sleep.

“But never mind, the purser died of a heart attack, right in the middle of Hanover Square, an’ the boat got sold, an’ that closed off another life. I was able to get work as a coal passer by then at least. Workin’ the night boats up the Hudson, all the way from Christopher Street to the rail bridge in Albany, and back again. That was almost as good as South America; there was never another river like that one in the world! That was where I really learned my trade—cleanin’ my fires in the downstream current to Poughkeepsie, well enough to make steam against the heaviest tide into the City. I used to know the old rhyme of the river by heart—West Point and Middletown, Konnosook and Doodletown, Kakiak and Mamapaw, Stony Point and Haverstraw . . . ”

Tom knew the names almost as well himself, from his brother’s letters. He had dreamed of him there, too. Staring from the deck at the Storm King as it emerged through the morning light . . .

“That night I broke the last of all the many promises I made to our mother, an’ had a glass of beer at Felix Dolan’s Saloon. I suppose that didn’t hurt her soul any worse than me becomin’ an itinerant fireman, instead of a priest! Besides, I was a regular murphy compared to the rest of the crew—those fellas’d be off on a jake at a moment’s notice. The captains liked me. I could always be relied upon to show up for cast-off, and that was another way I could’ve gone, I suppose, tendin’ the boats up an’ down the Hudson for the rest of me days.

“But then the river began to freeze up. It was the coldest winter in twenty years, an’ I had to get work drivin’ a trolley over in Hackensack, an’ then it was back to construction. Hod Carriers Local Number Three. We put up the Woolworth Building, don’tcha know—‘the Cathedral of Commerce!’ Haulin’ a load of bricks up fifty stories, with my nose in the next fella’s arse. I learned some appreciation for the ancient Hebrews on that job, let me tell you!

“The high steel men used to fascinate me up there. Oh, it was a sight to behold—the best theatre in the world, sixty stories above the ground! I used to slip up to where they were workin’ on my lunch break, just to see ’em. They were friendly enough fellas, most of ’em from Ireland, though they didn’t tolerate any nonsense. They showed me how it was, taught me how to walk out on the beams the way they did. Nothin’ below ’em, no safety net, just a foot-wide steel beam an’ eight hundred feet to the ground below.

“God, it scared the life out of me at first! Still does, just to think about it. But they taught me the trick of it—how not to look down, how to judge the wind an’ steady yourself. I would sit out on a beam there, an’ read westerns an’ other adventure stories to them while they ate their lunches. All terrible, dime-novel stuff, but they ate it up. They couldn’t understand why I’d waste my lunchtime reading to ’em, but I told ’em I was tryin’ to lose my accent so I could go into politics.

“It wasn’t true, though—not yet. What I really wanted was that view up there, Tommy. You could see the great bridges over the East River, and the other skyscrapers, and that quaint little building known as City Hall. You could see all the ships in the harbor, an’ the little figures swarming over the docks. You could see the curvature of the earth, Tom, where it moved along the blue line of the sea. And I stood up there, where all the winds of the earth blew right through, and I thought like Archimedes that here was a place to stand on to move the world.”

He was silent then for a moment, picturing again how the world had looked, sixty stories up in the air. Giving voice to his ambition at last, so Tom let him talk. Staring up toward the ceiling of the little beige room as if he were still out on the beams, dazed by the sun and the wind and the curve of the earth.

“I was young still, but growin’ tired of myself,” he said, speaking in a lower, almost chastised voice now. “I was tired of how I lived, in my neat little boardinghouses up in the Bronx. Goin’ downtown to have Dunphy teach me to use the correct knife an’ fork. Goin’ out to make eyes at the ladies along Broadway, or maybe watch the athletics over in Celtic Park on a Sunday afternoon.

“I wanted a home, I wanted a vocation. I just didn’t know what it was yet. So when the big building was finished, I let my feet take me again. I went up to Saratoga for the summer, and that’s how I met Claire Condon, of the Water Street Condons, an’ suddenly I had it all—that home, that life, that way forward.

“None of it happened right away. But the Condon Colony of Dreamers wasn’t about to countenance a hod carrier, or a barman, no matter if he was a spoilt priest from the Irish College at Salamanca! I put in three years of night school up at City College, studyin’ English, an’ civics, an’ American history, and shorthand an’ typing. Then I got my citizenship, an’ joined the force, an’ started on my law degree at the same time, until finally they ran out of objections to us gettin’ married.

“I’d put aside a little money by then, enough to take her on a honeymoon. We sailed out on the Southern Cross, the very same ship I shoveled coal on, an’ don’t think I wasn’t proud of that, as we cruised down to Rio de Janeiro, and up the broad River Plate. It was the same as I remembered it, the wild jungles, an’ the beautiful cities, and it was still a place of wonder. But I had no thought of what it would be like to stay there anymore, or to sail from port to port. I had a purpose now, and a wife by my side, and even a passel of in-laws bound to me, however grudgingly, and I thought then that at last I did belong.

“But you know, I often wonder if she got all she hoped for from me, Tom. Besides that grand funeral, I mean—”

“I’m sure that she did, Charlie. Why wouldn’t she?”

“She had a great head for the politics, Tom, but I don’t know that she liked the game.”

He paused while Pishta brought them coffee. It was dark and thick, and spiked with something that tasted like chocolate to Tom, as astonishingly strange and delicious as everything else he’d been served.

“I think she thought it was below her, a rough, vulgar sort of profession. And indeed it was, Tom, indeed it was,” he said sadly. “I think she would have liked me to be in somethin’ more refined. But you know, she never complained. Not even after we got the final diagnosis.

“God, but that’s a strange feeling! I hope you never have to endure it, Tommy. Sittin’ in a doctor’s office, feeling more or less like you always do, an’ having a man tell you how an’ when you will die. What use is the brain, will you tell me, then, Tommy? What is consciousness but a curse? That pigeon at least, it may’ve suspected it was in trouble. But nobody sat it down in a clean, sterile office, an’ told it that it was doomed to a long, cruel death. Goddamnit, Tom! It’s as if we’re God’s special whipping boys—if there were a God.

“We come out of the doctor’s office at Bellevue, and I was about all done in by the news. But Claire, she looked up at me with her eyes shining, an’ she said, ‘Thank God, Tom, we didn’t have children!’ That was her explanation as to why God had been so cruel as to deprive us of a child of our own, and give us young Jimmy instead. To her, this was good news, a chance to make sense of life, and forgive God.”

He stood up and began to pace agitatedly around the little living room.

“Can you imagine that, Tom? A woman as smart, and talented, and loving as that, relieved to get the news that she’s going to die a long, horrible death because it explains the Almighty to her! And isn’t that the ultimate cruelty of havin’ a mind at all, Tom? Of bein’ condemned to think. To excuse even the sight of a bird shuddering to death in a golden light—just so we can forgive that God we made in our own image, and so want to love. The stories that we tell ourselves to get through to the end—”

“God bless, Charlie, but take it easy now,” Tom said, alarmed to see the state his brother was suddenly in. Pishta stuck his head in, too, but retreated immediately to the kitchen, his face solemn.

“I didn’t know her well, but I knew her long enough to know she loved life, and she loved you, an’ she stuck it out right to the end,” Tom said quickly, almost babbling in his eagerness to calm his brother.

Tom’s memory of her still mostly as a shadow, in those back bedrooms of the attached house in Bay Ridge, and then at Gracie Mansion. Already confined to the chair. Always dressed up nicely, in prim hats and well-cut dresses. But her hair was lank and oily under the hats by then, and there were piles of white flecks on the shoulders of her new outfits, no matter how repeatedly Neddy Moran flicked them away. Her face a rigid mask, the drool running out one side of her mouth, no matter how alert Neddy was with the handkerchief. By the end, though he tried not to think it, she reminded him of some sort of ancient oracle, wheeled out in her chair with that mask of a face, speaking in a soft monotone they all had to lean in to hear.

“And what did I do? Did I devote myself to her in her dyin’ days? No, I went right on with my political career, sheer vanity that it was, and for all the joy it would bring me!”

“You had to work, Charlie—”

“Yes, I had to work!” he said viciously. “But I could’ve stayed on the bench in Brooklyn, helpin’ the people with their problems. I didn’t have to be the crusading DA. I didn’t have to be the mayor. And for chrissakes, Tommy, I sure as hell didn’t have to go off to war!”

“We all did that, Charlie.”

“No, no. Are ye that dense, you don’t see what I’m talkin’ about? You don’t see the difference. That was another part of my political ambitions, such as they were,” Charlie said furiously, still pacing the floor. “God knows, it was all of a piece—and I knew it then, too, in some part of me head. I didn’t go to stop the damned Germans, or the Japanese, halfway around the goddamned world. I did it for me! Me, Tom, me! Vanity, all vanity! Standin’ in his office with the Great Man while I got a medal pinned on my chest. Listenin’ to him tell me how I should run for governor or senator! And all with her dyin’ back home.”

He sat back on the couch and seemed to sink into a reverie. Sipping at the last of his coffee, staring straight ahead.

“Thank God for Neddy Moran. That’s all I have to say. I know you don’t want to hear it, Tommy, but it’s the truth! Thank God for Neddy, he was the one stayed home an’ took care of her, while I went gallivantin’ out across the USA, and over to Italy. He was the one who always looked after her—well, he and poor Jimmy. But after Jimmy was gone, it was always him. Never complained, never asked for a thing.”

“He betrayed you, Charlie.”

“No, Tommy, no. It wasn’t like that. If anything, I betrayed him, the poor man. Stickin’ him with a job like that.”

“He got his pound of flesh,” Tom said grimly. “He got what he wanted out of you, and through his actions he blackened your name in return.”

“I won’t speak ill of the man, Tommy. He was there for her. He was there for her when I wasn’t, and that’s all that matters.”

“Damnit, Charlie, don’t ya see?” he said, his frustration brimming over despite himself. “Men like Moran have used you. They’ve taken your good name an’ flung it in the gutter.”

“No, no, I’m not God, I won’t judge the man!” Charlie said, turning away from him and walking across the room to stand under the framed picture of himself as the bold mayor of New York, face floating serenely over the vast tangle of trains, and planes, and skyscrapers. “He was good to Claire all those years. He took such care of her when I was in the army—”

“God bless, Charlie, he could’ve joined the Sisters of Mercy. But when he was at the fire department he was liftin’ two thousand dollars a week, I don’t care why he did it—”

“If he did what he’s accused of doin’, then he’s wrong, and I feel sorry for the man,” Charlie said, holding up a hand. “He knew I wanted him to be clean. I’d heard rumors about him before. Your boss, Mr. Hogan, warned me off him. I remember he told me Neddy Moran’s a man who trades in favors. But that’s like sayin’ the man who follows the circus parade sweeps up a little shite from time to time. That’s what politics is, Tommy.”

“You should’ve listened, Charlie,” he said, standing now and half pleading, his hands held out toward his brother.

“You have to understand, Tom, Neddy’s a narrow, untutored man. He rubs people the wrong way, but I’da been lost without him. He’d been with me ever since he was my stenographer on the magistrate’s court, an’ then he was my clerk at the DA’s office. Besides, the job I ended up givin’ him wasn’t so important—”

“Deputy fire commissioner?”

“I had to do it, Tom, so he could educate his children. You should’ve seen him when I told him—the tears were streamin’ down his face—”

“Goddamnit, Charlie, it wasn’t the first time! He’d already betrayed you! Pullin’ those wanted cards on Anastasia. Makin’ those union files disappear—”

Charlie sighed and sat down in a chair. Running a hand over his forehead as if he were back under the blazing television lights.

“Well, now, there was that,” he said in a small voice. “There was that.”