20

Mexico, 1953

They came down through the pass into the valley just as the light was fading. Indian women were walking along the side of the road, returning from the markets with goats and pigs at their feet, and iguanas they held aloft on strings as the car drove by. The air smelled of roses, and tortillas, and the wet burros they guided, weighed down with more goods and tents, and giggling children.

They crossed a vast, wooded plateau, fissured by one long ravine after another, as if someone had scraped a giant rake across the land. In between, there were fields full of corn, and red roses, and waxy white tuberoses. Along the ravines, he could see the roots of the high trees wending their way down along the cliff face like desperate fingers, trying to seize a chokehold on the land.

“The barrancas—ravines. They were a natural fortification,” Charlie explained needlessly as they passed over a bridge, prattling happily again. “When the Spanish came, they cut the bridges, and threw everything they had at them—arrows, lances, rocks.”

“But it wasn’t enough?”

“No. It never is.”

Beneficio pushed the boat of a Lincoln up a last hill and into the narrow, serpentine streets of Cuernavaca, as carefully as a captain navigating a new harbor without a pilot. Tom could smell incense now, and just underneath it the rank scent of the garbage floating in the open sewers. But in the windows of the little shops he could make out the names Westinghouse, and Frigidaire, and RCA, and there were signs for Coca-Cola everywhere. They passed a small, pink jewel of a movie house, with a marquee advertising Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas in The Bad and the Beautiful, and something with Cantinflas. Then they turned onto a walled road that opened out into a tawdry cluster of bungalows, arrayed around a dance pavilion and a big, filthy swimming pool.

A lean, athletic man in his sixties, his sharp face turned a deep brown by the sun, was standing out front. When they pulled up, he grinned and broke into a quick little soft-shoe, then stuck out a hand to Tom.

“Welcome to Shangri-La!”

“Welcome to Cuernavaca, the City of Eternal Spring!” Charlie boomed behind Tom, climbing out of the car. He pumped the man’s hand enthusiastically, and the two of them embraced and beamed at each other.

“Tommy, I can’t believe I never introduced you to Henry Fink back in New York. He’s only the greatest vaudeville man who ever lived! Used to run the Club Samoa, with Leo Bernstein. You remember—that great Tiki place on the Street, just across from the Onyx, and Jimmy Ryan’s?”

“I know it.”

“Best supper club in the Latin Quarter!”

“Ah, c’mon,” Fink said, waving him off, though he was clearly delighted. “I been outta New York a long time. Everybody’s forgot about that stuff.”

“Never, Henry, never!”

“Your brother’s too kind to me. Besides, I hear now it’s just another bust-out joint, with the girls givin’ jukesters hand jobs under the tables,” Henry Fink told him, latching onto his arm with a callused hand. He was wearing a white linen shirt and white pants, with a robust growth of white chest hair sticking out through the unbuttoned top of his shirt. “Let’s go sit by the pool an’ have somethin’ refreshing, before I show y’around this dump—”

“Whattaya talk? Did you know this is where the emperor Maximilian and the Mad Carlota used to have their summer place? Right here!” Charlie burbled up just behind them.

“Really? Which bungalow?” Tom asked.

“This whole place, plus all that on the other side of the wall. It used to be the Borda Gardens—their own little private Shangri-la, where they could go to escape the heat in the summer.”

Peering over the wall, Tom could see only a jumbled green ruin of stone and jungle.

“You can almost see ’em there, can’t ya? The emperor and his lady at their trysting place, walking alone along the torchlit paths.” Charlie sighed. “Did ya know Henry here talked the governor into lettin’ him lease half of the gardens, an’ set up this place?”

“It’s what lettin’ a Mexican win at golf will get ya,” Henry Fink said, giving them a broad show-business wink.

“I wonder what letting a Mexican lose at golf’ll get you,” Tom said, but Fink was too busy ushering them into a pair of cushioned rattan chairs around a small table with an umbrella staked through the middle. They were the best set by the pool, but even so the red plastic cushions were cracked and faded, the chairs swaying uneasily under their weight. On others the rattan bottoms had all sagged through, like an old man’s gut, or broken out altogether, the legs pocked with hundreds of visible termite holes.

The pool looked Olympic sized, but it was covered with leaves and rotting fruit from the mango trees that bent over it, and enormous water bugs skittering across the surface like vacationing water-skiers. A very dignified, white-moustachioed man who looked as if he could be left over from Maximilian and Carlota’s time was working at cleaning it, netting the mangoes as deliberately as if he were searching for portents in the water, and tossing them into a rising mound of green and yellow slush on the lawn.

Henry Fink called over an equally ancient waiter named Gabriel and ordered them up a round of Negra Modelos, and the man bowed and retreated to the covered rococo bar just off the dance floor. The bar was another fabulous ruin—at least forty feet long, most of it coated in dust, its garish gold brocade lying in tatters. Herculean spider webs filled every open space, even between the countless brands of rum and tequila behind the bartender, and sitting off to one corner, as gaudy and unexpected as a shipwreck in a desert, was a grand piano.

Fink gestured with his head in the direction of the dignified old man spooning at the pool.

“All I’ve got to work with right now is Gabriel an’ Guillermo over there, the fucking Gold Dust twins. But you should come back on the weekend; it’ll be jumpin’.”

“No need to apologize, Henry! This is the best joint in Mexico, far as I’m concerned. You really have to see it on a Saturday, Tom, when they have a band in. All the Big Crowd is here, all the expats, down from Mexico City. Oh, but you should see it!”

He could see it well enough. The same types he’d glimpsed back in the ballroom of the Hotel del Prado. More aging American exiles like his brother, or copies of the ladies from El Ranchito, unable or unwilling to go home. Bored to death, sitting around the pool drinking themselves stupid in their white dinner jackets, the women shrieking with laughter as the bottom slowly gave out of the night, like one of Henry Fink’s rattan chairs. Tom wondering: Did he bring Slim here, too?

He wanted to walk away. He wanted to tell Charlie that he had a headache or a stomachache, or some kind of ache, and excuse himself and go into one of the little bungalows and sleep for about a hundred years. Or maybe go down the hill and get a taxi somewhere, if such a thing existed, and go back up forty-five hundred feet, and down ten thousand, and fly out of Mexico City and back to Ellie.

He was thinking of doing all those things. But instead he made himself take another swallow of his dark Mexican beer, and leaned back in his chair, gazing out into the night, and the massive hodgepodge of churches below them. Some adorned with statues and gold, like something out of the Philippines. Others with red-tipped cupolas and Romanesque domes, looking as ancient and massive as the cathedrals they had blown up in Italy—

“How far back do we go, Henry?” Charlie was almost shouting the few feet over to Henry Fink at his table.

“That Saint Patty’s Day, Charlie. I remember they had you standin’ in the back of a flower car, up at a Hundred Tenth Street an’ Fifth Avenue.”

“Christ, no, Henry, it’s further back than that! I seem to recall it was that Saturday night, down in Bay Ridge. You was with a fella named Pete Reilly.”

“Pete Reilly? Nah, never knew the man. Didn’t he manage prizefighters?”

“That’s right. He had a fighter called himself Jacques de LeHand, said he was the champion of Quebec. In fact his real name was Jack Delahanty, but Pete bought ’im, an’ he made a pretty fair livin’ off Jacques de LeHand until he run into Tiger Ward one night in Hoboken, an’ that was the end a that.”

“D’ya remember what he said after that fight? Ol’ Jacques? He said, ‘Ward was throwin’ so many punches I thought the ref had joined in!’”

The two men hooted with laughter, and Charlie slapped the table.

“I think it was Bill McCormack started callin’ ’im ‘Jacques de No-Left-Hand’,” Charlie said, and roared again.

“William McCormack? You saw the fight with him?” Tom cut in, something pricking at him.

“Sure, sure. He was always gettin’ the boys together, givin’ out tickets to the fights, an’ afterwards there’d be a beefsteak, or some such. All on him!” Charlie churned on without blinking. He turned to his friend. “How about your greatest hit, Henry?” Charlie proposed. “‘The Curse of an Aching Heart’!”

“That old thing? Oh, God, no!” Henry laughed, but Charlie persisted.

“Here, you’ve never seen us together,” he told Tom.

The two of them stood up and harmonized skillfully enough that he realized they must have done it many times before, and he wondered again if Slim had been sitting where he was, night after perfect spring night in Cuernavaca. Just over the wall from the magic trysting place of Maximilian and Carlota—listening to two white-haired men sing a song written before the First World War.

 

 

You’ve shattered each and every dream,

 

 

Fooled me right from the start.

 

 

And though you’re not true,

 

 

May God bless you,

 

 

That’s the curse of an aching heart.

 

 

The light was gone completely now, and the stars were out, which brought a few couples and some ragged-looking individuals filtering into the Shangri-La. Guillermo, he noticed, had put away his net and changed into a red-coated waiter’s costume, napkin over one arm, guiding them to one or another of the least battered tables, while his brother and Henry Fink sang on, oblivious.

When they were finally done there was a smattering of applause from the scattered patrons, and then Henry suggested they go inside the pavilion. There Guillermo pounded the dust off one of the cracked cushions and with a kindly smile under his white brush moustache gestured for them to be seated. They ate some chicken soup that Henry said he had been saving just for Charlie, and then some fried chicken, and tried to figure out again just when it was they had first met.

“No, no, it must’ve been when I was on the force, Henry,” Charlie told him. “Did ya know, Tom, I passed the examination on July 7, 1917? Seven-seventeen-seventeen, now there’s an auspicious date for you!”

“So you’ve said, Charlie.”

“Started at Fordham Law the same year, and they put me a-way out in the Seventy-Deuce, over in Brooklyn. Sunset Park, at Forty-Third Street an’ the Fourth Avenue. Had me on all hours—day, night, midnight. God, but what a place for a rookie cop to start, between Green-Wood Cemetery and the docks!”

“Tough, was it?” Tom asked.

“Tough!” Henry Fink said, and snorted.

“You don’t know how raw it still was out there in those days,” Charlie told them. “It was barely a city. There were still little dirt farms, an’ squatters’ shacks all over the place then. I walked my beat at night, between the water and the dead.”

“Gives me chills,” Fink chimed in.

“Believe me, the dead was the least of my concerns. I don’t know how I woulda made it out of there without the Old Man.”

“That’s where you met McGrath?” Tom asked.

“Sure, an’ thank God. James Brannan, the captain down at the Seventy-Deuce, was a swell-headed little tyrant. We used to say, ‘If Brannan owned the lake in Prospect Park, he wouldn’t give the ducks a swim.’ Oh, he was somethin’!”

Charlie’s reminiscences were voluble enough to attract the attention of some of the patrons, and they sidled over closer to the moldy bar to listen. One man in particular, Tom noticed peering in closely at them—or at least as much as he might in his condition. He was an American, wearing a rumpled seersucker suit, who looked as if he might have been dragged in behind a car. His eyes kept crossing and uncrossing drunkenly, but he was determined to listen to them in the way that only drunks can be determined.

“You’re a great man, Mr. Ambassador!” the drunk said suddenly, leaning precariously toward them on his ratty barstool, flecking them all with the liquor spittle of his tribute.

“Thank you,” Charlie said without looking at the man, his voice suddenly cool and sober. “It was Jack McGrath, the Old Man, what got me through Captain Brannan, and all the rest of it—who helped me survive. McGrath was already a legend out there. They were already tellin’ the story all over the precinct about how he drove all the perverts out of Brooklyn. He’d go around to the station houses on his days off, an’ get the names of all the known child molesters in the neighborhood. Then he’d go to their homes an’ just give ’em a beating, tell ’em they had twenty-four hours to leave the borough. Cleared every single one of ’em outta the borough, by God, like Saint Patrick driving the snakes outta Ireland!”

“You are a great man, and a great American, Mr. Ambassador!” the drunken man interjected again. “Ev’body in Mexico loves you, sir.”

“All right now. We’ve heard about enough of your love,” Charlie said, and Henry Fink rose slowly to his feet, looking questioningly at Charlie.

“Michael Finn is coming, Michael Finn is coming,” he repeated, but Charlie just shook his head.

“The Old Man got me through down there, he really did,” he continued instead. “There were some hard men on the waterfront then. The Kilduffs, who stole whatever they could, even boats if they were small enough. But the worst was the Kid Cheese gang. They used to terrorize the night watchmen, cut their throats an’ throw their bodies in the water, just for the sport of it.

“They wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to a cop. Early on, they got it in for me because I had the effrontery to arrest a couple of ’em while they was cleanin’ out a boxcar on a rail siding. They decided they would teach me a lesson, so they lured me into an apartment hallway with the oldest trick in the book, pretendin’ there was a mugging goin’ on.

“I walked right into it. They’d smashed the hall light bulb, it was pitch-black in there, an’ before I even knew what it was about, they had me down on the floor. It was a narrow space, an’ I was helpless. I woulda taken a terrible beatin’, been stamped an’ kicked an’ punched senseless at the very least, an’ maybe even thrown in the harbor to drown. There was other cops down there by the waterfront, went out on their beat an’ never came back, an’ nobody ever found what happened to them.”

Charlie spoke calmly, with a gentle smile on his face, but Tom could imagine well enough what it must have been like: the terrifying feeling of being trapped, unable even to extend his arms. Twisting about helplessly, while blow after blow rained down on him. Pounded with fists and blackjacks and brass knuckles, the breath growing heavier and heavier in his chest. The fear that he was going to die, right there and then—

“But God’s grace, the Old Man was out again lookin’ after his pups. He heard the commotion an’ come runnin’. Didn’t even spend time to whistle up reinforcements, or bang on the manhole covers to spread the word: Policeman in trouble. No, he just ran to the sound of the battle, with nothin’ but his pocket billy in those close quarters. By the time I was back on my feet he had ’em all spread out in the snow outside. Eight members of the Kid Cheese gang, lyin’ there out cold. An’ Jack McGrath lookin’ at me with a rare smile of satisfaction, sayin’, ‘That’ll teach ’em to respect an officer of the law!’”

Just then the drunk in the seersucker staggered off his stool and took a determined step toward them. But his legs got tangled, as the legs of drunks will, and instead he dropped down with a loud exhalation on his backside, stilling what crowd there was and drawing all eyes to their table.

“Anyt’ing happen to you in Mexico, the populace’d be grief-stricken,” he told Charlie from his seat on the floor. “Absolutely grief-stricken. But answer me one thing—just one t’ing. Why’d she leave you? Why’d she walk out on a great man like you?”

Henry Fink was on his feet now, dancing behind where the drunk was sitting, chanting, “Michael Finn is coming, Michael Finn is coming” again. The pavilion went very still, Guillermo and Gabriel looking over, along with the handful of tourists. Tom noticed that his brother’s face had turned the color of ash, but once again he shook his head at Henry—who shrugged, and gave over his dancing. Instead he helped the drunk in the seersucker carefully to his feet and walked him slowly out of the Shangri-La. Somebody put money in the jukebox, and those who remained turned back to their higher interests in alcohol and sloppy, late-night passes.

“Henry is so kind. He is so very kind,” Charlie said softly, turning to his brother.

“So that’s where you met Jack McGrath,” Tom said. “And you were friends ever since?”

“Jack stood by me, and when I got elected DA, I saw to it that he got every promotion he’d been denied over the years,” Charlie told him. “It wasn’t easy, let me tell you—he wouldn’t play ball with the clubhouse boys—”

“Did you have the Old Man pick the detail to guard Reles?” Tom asked him.

“Hmm? Oh, I don’t remember,” Charlie said, sounding preoccupied. “I thought that was Frank Bals. But it could’ve been McGrath. Maybe it was.”

“D’ya know the next morning he had all the guards together in the same room? Before you or anybody else could get up there,” Tom told him. “Gettin’ their stories straight.”

“Did he now?” Charlie chuckled and held out a hand, palm up. “Well, I suppose that was him all along, lookin’ out for his men.”

“Except that you took the fall instead.”

“Ah, Tommy, for chrissakes, don’t you see?” Charlie asked wearily. “I was the one in charge no matter what happened. So we could’ve nailed up a few poor cops for catchin’ some sleep on the job, like every policeman’s done since the Crucifixion itself. It still woulda been me takin’ the blame, once Reles went out that window.”

“But then who did it? Who threw him out?”

His brother started to laugh, a dry, hard chuckle that sounded as rueful as anything he’d said since he’d come to Mexico.

“Well, if we knew that, Tommy, why the fook would we be sittin’ in some bar in Cuernavaca?”

“But Charlie—”

“You know, you really oughtta go back to New York, clear your name, Charlie.” Henry Fink had returned, and slid into a chair at their table with a quiet grace that belied his years. “They could use you up there. Everybody tells me the goddamned City is turning into a sewer!”

“Return, and be dragged from one investigatin’ committee to another? Return to make headlines for every schemin’ pol, every prosecutor who’d like to run for office?” Charlie said, looking meaningfully at Tom. “How could I ever clear my name, when every question is an accusation, even from me own brother—”

“You know that isn’t true, Charlie.”

“—an’ every accusation is a headline that convicts you all over again, in the eyes of the people?” he went on. “Go back? To what? What job could I even get? Not a dime to my name, an’ every hand raised against me—”

Tom realizing that his brother was drunk again. You have to be careful up this high . . . Putting a hand on his back, trying physically to calm him.

“There’s plenty that only want to help you, Charlie,” he said. “Who just can’t stand to see your old friends fob off the blame on you, while they go free.”

Charlie seized hold of his hand over his shoulder, nodding and patting it. “You’re right, Tommy, you’re right, God forgive me. I know you only mean to help. I want to come back, God knows. Maybe later, when it’s all died down more.”

“That’s the spirit, Charlie!” Henry Fink crowed. Guillermo appeared at his elbow, with two blood-red daiquiris on a tray, complete with straws and paper umbrellas, and Fink passed one of them to his brother.

“Hell, maybe I will come back an’ run for office. Governor, or maybe mayor again!” Charlie said, his face brightening as rapidly and as fully as a child’s after a good cry. Beaming happily at them as he sipped from his daiquiri through its straw.

“What I meant, Charlie—”

“Run just so I can get it all out in the open, win or lose!” he said, spreading a hand over the table as if he were laying out his vision. “Sure, I’ll come back. And I’ll make an entrance, all right! You can stage-manage it, Henry—”

“Love to, Charlie!”

He had risen up out of his chair now, drawing the bemused stares of the few remaining patrons at the Shangri-La.

“I think Ebbets Field would be the place to do it. Sure, they’ll boo me. There’ll be a whole storm of boos!” He grinned beatifically down at them—welcoming the boos—then cupped a hand over his heart, as if saying the pledge of allegiance. “But I’ll stare ’em down! Like this. And there’ll be the Brooklyn Symphony there. I’ll have ’em play ‘The Sidewalks of New York’ when I come in. There’ll be boos. But I’ll win ’em over!”

“Speaking of booze—”

The drunken man staggered, and Tom moved quickly to catch him, guiding him back down into his rattan chair. There Charlie blinked, and shook his head, the smile fading from his face—as if he were awaking from a dream.

“Ah, no. Forget it. Wouldn’t be right to Slim. To make her deal with all that.”

The rest of the bar gazed disappointedly down at their drinks again, while Charlie stared off toward the wild, green world beyond the walls, doubly shrouded by the darkness now.

“Y’know, if only we’d had a little trysting place for our own. Someplace to get away to, like what the old Aztec emperors, an’ Maximilian and Carlota had here—”

“It may’ve been their trysting place, but not with each other,” Henry Fink said, laughing.

“What’re ya talkin’ about?”

“Don’tcha know that story? Ol’ Max had a hot little Indian number he kept in town. They still talk about it around here—La Bonita India. And when he was away, the missus was shtupping one of the horse guards. The rumor is she even got knocked up, gave birth to that shmuck general who lost France to the Nazis—”

“No, I didn’t know that. So this is just where he kept his girl on the side,” Charlie said, pondering, sounding disappointed. Tom looked away. “Well, I guess romance is dead. Still, it’s beautiful, don’tcha know—the two of ’em walking in their moonlit garden.”

The last few guests began to leave, and Henry Fink stood up to excuse himself. Charlie seemed to become suddenly conscious of himself again—sitting up straighter in his rickety chair, looking over guiltily at Tom.

“I’m sorry, Tom. But I can’t blame Jack McGrath for lettin’ some good men down easy,” he said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “He saved my life more than once down there in Red Hook. I told you about the docks, Tommy. Nothing is as it seems.

“Those days, after the Great War, men were comin’ back from the fighting, but they couldn’t leave it behind ’em. There were housebreakings all over the precinct, an’ I don’t mean cat burglars, or second-story men. It was gangs of veterans. They’d go right in, an’ somebody got in their way, they’d cut their throat. We worked hard to keep it outta the paper, how many times we found an army bayonet at the scene of the crime.

“That’s how we got Jimmy, y’know. The poor fella, his parents gone from one war, an’ him in the next.”

“I didn’t know that,” Tom said. “I mean, I know the story, but—”

“But not that part of it. I know. It was a house up along Thirty-Ninth Street, by the BMT yards. One of those old wooden double-deckers that used to grow like toadstools in Brooklyn. There was a family on the first floor that was always trouble. One or t’other of us was always in there, tryna stop the man of the house bashin’ his wife’s head against a wall.

“She was a sweet woman, too. Not one to put a tongue on a man until it drove him mad,” he reflected, staring out at the black nullity of the pool. “Hair the color of Jimmy’s—that’s where he got it, that sort of ginger shade. A little thing, always cheerful. Not like the mister, a big brute of a man. Quiet as a parson most a the time, workin’ the docks with his crew. But he’d get into the growler on a Saturday night, and then the whiskey, an’ everything would change.

“He’d blacken her eye for her, put out a tooth. Broke her nose so many times, until it was tilted over permanently, like some cheap pug’s. That sweet woman! He’d hit her until the neighbors couldn’t stand it anymore, an’ they were not a squeamish lot, believe me. We’d have to go in an’ restrain the duid raibead, the raging man. We’d get ’im settled, with the tap of a nightstick if need be, an’ somebody would send for the priest to talk to him, while she sobbed in the next room. But the priest never told ’im anything but to mind his temper, and he never told her anything but to stay with her husband, an’ so there you were.”

“So there you were. And Jimmy?”

Charlie kept staring out at the pool, putting his big, red drink up on the table like Guillermo discarding a waterlogged mango.

“He come out to me of a Saturday evenin’ in the summer. It was a hot night, but not the hottest. That’s the worst, as the Old Man warned me it would be. When it gets too hot, the way it can, nobody has the energy to do anything. The City becomes almost peaceful, as peaceful as it ever is, because everybody’s too exhausted to move. But when it’s just hot enough to prick an’ itch at ya, an’ keep ya from sleep . . . when it turns the beer you drink sour in yer stomach—that’s when it’s bad. We’d have half the women in the neighborhood walkin’ around claimin’ they run into doors.

“This evenin’ Jimmy come out to see me, so I knew it was somethin’ very wrong. He was about seven then, as fair a little boy as you’d want to look at. When we had to come into his place, he’d just stay down the hall, peekin’ out at what was happenin’ with those big brown eyes of his wide as two moon pies, but never sayin’ a thing.

“This night he come out into the street, an’ he asked me would I please come, his mother was in trouble. That’s just how he put it, too: ‘Me ma is in trouble.’ We tried to go into family fights at least two at a time, that’s how dangerous they were, but I knew from the look on his face, there was no time for me to find a partner. He wasn’t even wearin’ shoes, just dressed in his pajamas, an’ so I followed him right back into that house.”

The whole scene already a hell. He could tell from the moment he walked through the open front door, half off its hinges. (Where she tried to flee, before being hauled back in?) What bare sticks of furniture there were tumbled over and broken, the lacework she’d done to make the house as much of a home as it could be thrown on the floor.

“She was in a corner of the kitchen, a mass of blood. The long hair covered her face—praise God, it spared her son that, at least. But she wasn’t movin’ an’ she wasn’t breathin’. The brute standin’ over her in his undershirt an’ suspenders and his army-issue pants. The blood coating his hands, but still standin’ over her, his fists cocked. Like it was a prizefight, an’ he was just darin’ her to get up again.”

When he came into the narrow, broken kitchen the raging man turned on him at once. Moving across the room in two quick strides, without bothering to say a word. He hadn’t had time to say anything himself, or even get his nightstick up. Just able to push Jimmy back behind him, down the hall, before the husband was upon him.

He got his stick up in time to block the first blow, but the raging man only shoved it back into him. Sending him stumbling back down the hall, falling over. It was madness, his strength a force like nothing else Charlie had ever felt in his life, not even from the gang who ambushed him by the docks. His eyes, in the moment he’d seen them up close, like two pools of tar, black and impenetrable, inured to all reason and care.

He tried to get to his feet, watching as the man grabbed up a bayonet from the kitchen table, the blade as bloodstained as his hands, and came back at him. Scrambling for the pistol in his belt holster then, knowing as surely as he knew anything that if he did not get it out, he was going to die . . .

“I shot him right in the chest, dead center, when he come down that hallway after me. It just slowed him down. He didn’t even drop the bayonet. So I shot him again, right over the heart this time, an’ he dropped close enough for me to smell his breath, an’ damn if I didn’t shoot him again in the head, just to make sure the son of a bitch was finally dead.

“An’ the worst of it was, I turned around an’ there was Jimmy standin’ there, with those big eyes of his. He’d seen the whole thing; I killed the boy’s father right in front of him. But you know, he never said a word.

“I walked out on the porch of that double-decker, and a lot of the neighbors were already there, wantin’ to know what happened. Most of them were already keenin’ like idiots, an’ goin’ on about what a good man the deceased was, an’ how could I a shot him—the same lot that heard him bangin’ his wife’s skull off the woodwork every Saturday night! But little Jimmy, he just took me hand, an’ led me over to the porch bench, an’ there we sat, him lookin’ up at me as if to see if I was all right.

“It was then that the Old Man arrived, thank Christ, with a troop of the lads. He told all the righteous citizens to disperse immediately if they didn’t want to get their heads broke an’ turned in for public riotin’. They moved away right quick. Then he knelt down an’ asked me if I was all right, an’ he asked Jimmy how he was, while the rest a the boys went in to take care of the scene. And I couldn’t get a word out. It was the first an’ last time I ever shot a man, even if it was in self-defense, and I couldn’t say a thing. But Jimmy just turned to McGrath an’ told him, ‘He saved my life.’”

Charlie stabbed idly at the slushy ice and the few pieces of fruit remaining in the daiquiri. The bar at the Shangri-La empty now, save for the two of them.

“You know the rest of it,” Charlie said in a flat, even voice, still looking away. “She was dead, just as I knew, the poor woman. They said in the papers he’d been buried alive for ten minutes over there when a shell hit his trench. They said he was always a well-tempered man before he went over, but I didn’t care about any of that. He was dead, and I was glad he was dead.

“To me he never seemed human. He seemed like the wrath of God itself, Tommy, d’ya know what I’m sayin’? He seemed like some force of destruction greater than any man, an’ I knew I’d come within one slip on the trigger, one uncleaned barrel from bein’ gutted myself, right there on the floor. He was all the chaos an’ bloodlust he’d brought back from the war, all that we released into this world, and have kept spewin’ out ever since. I knew then I had to get out, I couldn’t face it anymore. I knew I had to get through Fordham an’ pass the bar as soon as I could because this was not the work I was cut out for: openin’ up every can a worms there was in the borough of Brooklyn, New York.”

“I know, Charlie.”

“But the Old Man was. That was just what he was built for, makin’ order out of chaos, like the hand of God Itself. He took control of the whole situation. He made sure to get the bodies out without me or Jimmy havin’ to look at ’em again, and he threatened the gabbling neighbors within an inch of their lives if they dared to come into court an’ make up lies, and he got me back to Claire’s arms that night. The inquest cleared me without any trouble, an’ it wasn’t long after that he saw to it that I was transferred to work as a driver for the borough inspector, an’ then to work plainclothes out at Coney Island, trackin’ the touts an’ the policy runners, an’ the palm readers, and all the other raffish merchants of illusion.

“But one day before I left the Seventy-Deuce, he brought in Jimmy to see me, and he told me, ‘Take him and raise him as your own.’ I told him I couldn’t do that, there was the Book of Rules, an’ City regulations, an’ they’d need to search for next of kin. An’ he told me, ‘There is no next a kin, not in this world, an’ screw the Book of Rules. He’s already been forgotten, far as this city is concerned, so take him home an’ give him a good life, an’ ease the pain for the both a you.’

“An’ so I did. And so Claire took him in just like the fine mother I always knew she could be, and he was everything you’d want in a son. Never gave us any trouble, an’ he grew up to be a big, fine lad, a fighter when he had to be, gentle as a lamb the rest of the time. They put him in the Airborne, an’ he made it through D-Day even with his glider crashin’, and havin’ to walk back ten miles through the Jerry lines—only to get shot in the hedgerows, three weeks later. A good, quick death, they said, never knew what hit him. And they told me, an’ then I had to go tell you.”

Tom remembering the rest of that night in the ruined Italian villa. How after he threw up, the archbishop had become surprisingly solicitous, even tender, running his chubby hands over his face as he held his head. Blessing him, and Jimmy. Saying a prayer for him right there by the great Renaissance mantelpiece of the vanished Sforza. The MPs and the butler, and the cooks dropping down to their knees, to hear Archbishop Francis Spellman give his thanks for the fallen warrior of the Faith, and he had made it seem like it almost meant something . . .

“But what I always remember—how I’ll always see Jimmy—is that day in Sunset Park. The dear boy. Walkin’ off with me hand in hand, a little packet of his things an’ his clothes clutched to his chest. Headin’ with me to the subway, an’ the ride back to his new home, and his new life in Bay Ridge. And short as it was, and cut off as it was, that was the greatest blessing of my life, Tommy. That was the best of it, and it was the Old Man who set it up, just as he always put everything to rights.”