CHAPTER 8

EREV PESACH, SATURDAY, APRIL 18, 1981

 

-1-

 

It was the morning of Erev Pesach, the morning of the first seder, the morning when Jews searched their homes for every crumb of bread, every speck of chametz, and exchanged their everyday dishes for those of Passover; but not on this particular morning because this particular morning fell on the holiest of holy days, the Sabbath, and such secular tasks, all secular tasks, were forbidden on the Sabbath.

Maddie Devlin who knew nothing of the Sabbath bride and thought nothing of desecrating Avram Levy’s Sabbath waited in a small dressing room at the Charles Street Jail while a matron, Gloria Mundy according to her hand-written name tag, searched Maddie’s pocket book and brief-case. Mundy was husky and athletic, built like a wrestler in the heavyweight division. Her hands were out of proportion to her body, the hands of a football player grafted on to the arms of an overweight woman.

“Let’s get this over with, sweets.” Mundy sounded as gleeful as a young boy who delighted in focusing sunlight through a magnifying glass to set fire to the coat of his neighbor’s cat. Her fingers moved deliberately through Maddie’s hair, lifting it to expose the nape of her neck, rubbing her scalp. A stiletto of sensation flashed down the back of Maddie’s legs. Mundy jerked Maddie’s head back, exposing the cartilage of her neck, and pried open her mouth with her thumb and forefinger. Both tasted of onion and the greasy oil of a cheap grinder. Mundy’s finger swabbed the inside of Maddie’s mouth, brushing across the lining of her cheeks and the back of her teeth. Mundy’s calluses rubbed against her cheeks.

With each touch, Maddie’s impacted rage strained against the boundaries that constrained it. She clenched her fists. One punch, she thought. One fucking punch.

“Arms over your head, sweets.”

Mundy slipped off Maddie’s blouse and undid her bra. Football hands moved from her spine, across her rib cage, below her armpits and swallowed up her breasts. Maddie pushed away, but Mundy’s size overpowered her. Maddie crossed her arms over her breasts, but Mundy grabbed her wrists and rotated her arms until Maddie felt they were being ripped from their sockets.

A kick, Maddie thought. A kick in the crotch. More than once Maddie had defended herself with a well-placed kick, often followed by a straight jab to the nose. Her da had insisted she know how to fight back, paid for her to be taught the basics of self-defense. Still, what worked on the street, what worked in an open-ended alley, would not work in a closed room in the Charles Street jail. Yes, she could overcome Mundy; but what would be the follow-up? A criminal charge for assault and battery on a public employee in the performance of her duties. A felony. A classic she said/she said situation. I was patting her down, Mundy would testify, when she attacked me without provocation. Nothing Maddie could say would persuade a judge or jury otherwise. Win the battle; lose the war. Fág an Bealach, Maddie chanted to herself. Fág an Bealach.

With one motion, Mundy stripped Maddie’s skirt, stockings, and underpants and pushed her down until she squatted like a primitive woman about to give birth. Football fingers snaked through her pubic hair.

Hatred, Maddie now realized, was Mundy’s ecstasy, her addiction. To Mundy, Levy was just another fix, me her connection. This must be what first generation Irish endured, Maddie thought, landing in Boston to be greeted by “No Irish” or “Irish Need Not Apply” signs, or what African-Americans feel in parts of Boston today. The cocoon Maddie had been born into, the one she didn’t realize sheltered her, had been shredded, ripped away, exposing her in a way she had never been exposed. The abstract was now concrete. The rifles of her grand da’s firing squad now aimed at her.

“You’re clean, sweets.”

Maddie dressed, then ran to the ladies’ room, the furthest stall. She hung from the door, limp and liquid as a wet rag. There was no toilet seat, no toilet paper. Graffiti covered the walls and ceiling. Reagan ass fucks. Mayor Charlie blows. Warden Spirelet sucks. Phone numbers. Obscenities. Cartoons of penises and balls, tits and pussies. Maddie felt as if she had night sweats, but her mouth was dry, dead bone dry, so dry she feared her lips would crack if she opened her mouth, her tongue would crack if she moved it. She gagged and dry heaved into the toilet. Phlegm, someone else’s, floated on the surface of the water, a piece of scum on a stagnant pond. She poked through her purse for a pocket douche or a napkin, but found only a piece of tissue shredded by her keys. She flattened her palms against the walls of the stall to hold herself up. Dry heaves tore through her.

Hatred had always persecuted somebody else, her namesakes Mary and Ann Devlin in Kilmainham, her grand da in Traitor’s Hell, Jews like the rabbi and Moskovitzky, the immigrants of her grand ma’s generation. Hatred, pure hatred, had always been abstract, experienced vicariously, but now, hatred in its purest form had raped her, deposited its seed in her womb and she knew if she, crazed by the narcotic of vengeance, succumbed to hatred this one time, she, too, would be addicted, always needing another fix, haunting back alleys for her connection, eagerly, happily, paying whatever the price might be. Yet, there was something comfortable about hatred, the way it liberated the mind, amplified the emotions, ordered the chaos of the world into something manageable, understandable. Black and white. White and black. Pluses and minuses. Minuses and pluses. A binary world.

Maddie straightened her clothes and wiped her cheeks with the back of her palm and took several deep breaths as if she were venting nitrogen from her system, and stumbled out of the toilet stall. A new life awaited. Washington. Money. Maybe, marriage. To a man–her fling with a woman over–a man who would father her child, a child who would be christened with a proper Irish name, a name beginning with E in remembrance of Elizabeth.

Gloria Mundy was a messenger not from God, but the devil, an invitation to succumb to hatred, an invitation she would not RSVP because hatred was not the way to her new life. By the time she reached the attorney’s visiting room, she had driven her craving into that deep pit where she had caged Richard Gloucester and Edward Hornstein and the Brits who imprisoned her namesakes and great uncle Clancy and the scum she so resolutely represented. And Michelle Furey? No. Never Furey for Furey had reawakened her capacity to love, to live.

The familiarity of the attorney’s visiting room, its stale, brackish air, the wooden table lined with cigarette burns, the air vent clogged with balls of dust which looked like gray cheese curls, comforted and consoled her the way the execution of a convicted murderer comforted and consoled the family of his victim.

Next week, Washington. She felt like a convict in the last hours of a long prison sentence.

 

-2-

 

“Traif. Must you always desecrate the Sabbath?” Levy asked.

Maddie ignored him.

“Why am I still here? Because you think I’m guilty and deserve to be here?”

“No.” Maddie explained the inevitability of the outcome of the bail hearing, why she waived cross-examination, why she withheld the rabbi from the witness stand, speaking rapidly, letting her persona for the previous eight years as an attorney who aggressively defended her clients no matter how reprehensible take control of her thoughts, her actions.

“When do I meet this Howard Kaplan?”

“Kaplan’s a dead end. He’ll take you to trial. Guaranteed conviction. The jury won’t see beyond your skull-cap. Murder One is life without parole. Murder Two, life with the possibility of parole, but in your case, chance of parole is the same as your becoming a Jesus freak. You’re looking at life, probably in solitary since you wouldn’t survive a week in the general population. If the warden owes Charlie Sullivan a favor, he’ll put you in the general population and let nature takes its course which it will, the first day or two if it takes that long.”

Maddie had intended to bid Levy farewell, to wish him luck with his new attorney, but the encounter with Gloria Mundy had recalibrated her thinking. Abandoning Levy to Howard Kaplan would signal the Gloria Mundy’s of the world they had won. She was not prepared to concede victory to them, not so much for Levy’s sake but for her own. She swallowed some phlegm which she coughed up into a tissue.

“Your only hope is to let me negotiate a plea-bargain, a plea to a lesser included offense, probably manslaughter; maybe negligent homicide if I’m really on my game, in exchange for Bonturo’s agreeing to a prearranged disposition, a term certain, something less than life, something that will let you die a free man, and assignment to a correctional institution rather than a state prison, protocols regarding your personal safety, kosher meals, the right to practice your religion, whatever else I can dream up.”

The more she talked, the more she felt like an actress trapped in a bad movie condemned to speak words someone else had written for her. She spoke so fast her mouth raced ahead of her brain. She coughed again, this time a dry cough which came from so deep inside her that her lungs exploded against her ribcage.

“The judge has the last word, but judges usually accept plea-bargains and agreed upon dispositions. It’s the grease that lubricates the justice system.”

“Why would you do that if you know I’m guilty?” Levy asked. “According to Rabbi Luria and Rabbi Schachter, the Talmudic commentaries or Tosafot make it clear that the Torah prohibits a lawyer from defending a client who the lawyer knows is guilty because it is forbidden to help the criminal escape the consequences of his act, forbidden to assist someone to avoid his just punishment, and forbidden to fail to eradicate the evil in our midst.”

Maddie had never seen Levy so animated. His skill at parsing Jewish law would make him a formidable attorney, but she doubted he would be able to persuade many of the Jewish mob lawyers that they were violating Jewish law by defending their clients. She had never considered this in the context of Catholic law. Someday, perhaps, she would; but not today.

“To think or believe something,” Maddie said, “is not the same as knowing it. What if there is doubt, no matter how small? What does your Talmud say then?”

“Tosafot and Rabbenu Asher would say that the defense is permitted as long as the doubt is sincere and the client is not known to the attorney to be guilty in fact.”

“My doubt may be small, miniscule in fact; but it is sincere as is my belief that you are guilty. I believe. I do not know. Is this sufficient for us to continue?”

Levy looked into her eyes, searching them for the answer to her question. This was more, she realized than the children’s game of stare-down. She willed herself not to blink, not to turn away, because she feared doing either would be interpreted to mean her doubt lacked sincerity. After several seconds that seemed to Maddie to be several minutes, Levy smiled, something he had never done before in her presence. He leaned back in his chair. “If my case is so hopeless, why would they agree?”

“They don’t know I’m withdrawing and they’re afraid of me. I’m the David to their Goliath. The Moses to their Pharaoh. Howard Kaplan? Samson after his haircut. No one’s heard of him. No one fears him. He’s God’s gift to the prosecution. Me? I’m God’s gift to you.”

“Hashem hateth haughty eyes, Proverbs 6:16 and 17.”

“As does my church which considers pride to be a mortal sin; but it’s not pride when it’s a fact. They’re trying to scare me off. I just suffered a body search worse than a rape. A real rape is probably next.”

“It is also written in Proverbs that Hashem hateth those who speak with a lying tongue.” Levy paused. “As much as I fear you would betray Anne Frank, I have no choice but to hide in the attic and pray you do not.” He closed his eyes and bowed his head. His lips moved. Rapidly. Adonoy ro-i, lo echsar. Bin-ot desheh yarbitzayni, al may m’nuchot y’nahalayni . . . When he finished, he opened his eyes and looked directly at Maddie, then recited in English, The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want . . .

 

-3-

 

Hours later, Maddie sought relief in the rainbow bubbles of a hot bath. Three empty bottles of Guinness lined the edge of the tub like altar pieces. She opened and drank a fourth, then a fifth. The Guinness felt heavy in her head, heavy behind her eyes, between her ears. Mid-afternoon. Only alcoholics were into their fifth Guinness so early in the day. She had defended her share of alcoholics, always without sympathy. A liar Levy had called her. Someone who would betray Anne Frank. Not the first time a client had called her a liar, not the first time a client had accused her of betraying them, selling them out, always out of anger, frustration, ignorance of how the justice system worked; but never the way Levy had. In his eyes, she was to him what her great-uncle Clancy had been to her grand da. What was she in her own eyes?

The Guinness clouded her mind and carried her back to the year of her fifteenth birthday, 1961, the year of her ma’s death, the year her da dragged her to Dublin for Christmas. The morning they arrived Brian Devlin marched his daughter to Arbour Hill Cemetery, the grave of Seamus, one of Grand da Michael’s brothers, then to Kilmainham, Dublin’s Tower of London, whose prisoners were either executed or forever forgotten until their bones were swept up and given to dogs to gnaw upon.

“Your namesakes,” Brian said, pointing to a page from the 1803 prison register on display in the prison’s entryway as if it were a sacred document or illuminated manuscript reposing in a church nave. “Mary Devlin, prisoner 94; Ann Devlin, prisoner 98. Six Devlins. The youngest a boy of nine. Killed because Ann wouldn’t betray Robert Emmet.”

Maddie gripped her da’s hand as they walked through stone corridors cold and damp. In tiny cells with slits for windows, she imagined a small boy sleeping on a pile of straw in one room, dead with a bloody head wound on the cold stone floor of another, a skeleton in rags in a third. She saw his shadow darken the hole in the moss-covered stone wall into which the executioner slid the crossbeam of the gallows. She heard his voice where the prisoners stood while the firing squad lined up, readied, aimed, fired.

“Da.” Maddie tugged his sleeve until he stopped. “I want to go home.”

“You are home, daughter of mine.”

Outside the gates of Kilmainham, they caught the bus for Hollyfield, a riverside slum infested by gangs and rats and a cemetery known as Traitor’s Hell, where they dumped traitors and sinners excommunicated by the Church. Grave markers, a few whole, most in fragments, were strewn about the bare ground like bones scattered by grave robbers angered by the poverty of the graves they had opened. There were no footpaths, no sidewalks, no roads for hearses to enter or exit, no shrubs or bushes, no sacraments, no last rites. The markers were unadorned except for names, dates. No crosses. No religious symbols. No sign of heaven. Hell abounded.

Maddie followed her da as he zigzagged between the stones. On a slight rise he stopped at a marker, fissured and listing to the side, as grimy as a gathering storm cloud, as smooth as a sunless Irish sky except for its lettering, “M Devlin”. Brian made the sign of the cross. “My da. Your grand da. May God have mercy on his soul.”

“Grand da was a traitor?” Maddie asked.

In a quiet voice both sad and defiant Brian told his daughter what he had told George Harriman so many years before on Guadalcanal. “I could never get Seamus’s side of the family to see beyond Clancy’s lies.” Brian put his arm around his daughter.

Maddie struggled to understand. Three brothers. Michael her grand da. Seamus Trish’s. Seamus killed in a Brit ambush. Michael executed by the IRB as an informer because of Clancy’s lies. Trish’s da blamed her da for Seamus’s death. Trish blamed her. It made no sense, all this blame.

She wished she were back in Boston, attending basketball games with Duncan Siward or jitterbugging at the Friday night dances at the Y or holding hands at the latest Elvis Presley movie, going out for pizza afterwards, making out on her back porch or, when it was cold, in the back hall among winter coats hanging from pegs in the wall, their feet surrounded by boots, stifling their giggles when they heard someone moving about the kitchen. She didn’t want to be in Ireland visiting a jail where Devlins had been imprisoned, tortured, executed, or a cemetery where her grand da lay buried in shame. She didn’t want to be named for sisters who sacrificed themselves for Ireland’s freedom. She didn’t want to be Irish.

Now, many years later, sipping her fifth bottle of Guinness, Maddie once again heard her da’s voice, dead these many years, reciting the Devlin family history, hers and Trish’s, both direct descendants of Robert Emmet. From Robert Emmet to his son, Robert Michael Arthur Devlin, named Devlin rather than Emmet to hide him from the British, to Michael and Arthur being two Devlin cousins, both veterans of the Rising of 1798 and the Rising of 1803 to the Easter Rising of 1916 which begat first her grand da’s betrayal by his brother Clancy and, then, the Republic of Ireland.

All this and more Maddie remembered.

Once again it was November of Maddie’s sophomore year in college. During her freshman year, Duncan Siward, her first great love, her only love, had faded away like a one-hit-recording star. Against her better judgment, she allowed friends to drag her to the Harvard-Yale game and to a party at Eliot House where she met Richard Gloucester, a Harvard junior who asked her for a date. Suffolk Downs, he said, because my tuition’s due.

She didn’t know what to make of this Harvard horse player who majored in English and argued that Richard III was Shakespeare’s greatest play. Once every two or three months her da went to Suffolk Downs with George Harriman, budgeting $25.00 to cover admission, a hot dog and beer, and half a dozen bets, long shots to place, never to win. On a good day he came home with movie money which he gave her with a smile and a kiss. On a bad day, he laughed about the noses that came up short and vowed next time to bet only on Jew horses.

Her da worked hard for that $25.00, fifteen years at two jobs to save up the down payment for their house, nights the janitor at Holy Name High School, days factory work, operating a punch press to attach rings to loose-leaf binders, eight hour shifts, no paid lunch hour, eight hours surrounded by the steady pounding of a battalion of punch presses, surrounded by air humid with machine oil and heated by motors too hot to touch. Insert the rings. Slide in the binder. Push the button. Snatch back the fingers before the press crushed them, which happened to someone every few months, but never, at least not yet, at a punch press operated by her da. Every night he came home five fingered, smelling of grease that never washed away. He hated the factory, her da, but he was proud he did his work the right way, proud he was reliable, proud he provided for his wife and daughter. Maddie respected his pride and loved him for it and prayed it was genetic and that one day she would be able, like him, to get up every morning and do what she had to do for her children.

Gloucester’s carefree attitude, on the other hand, his blind faith that his next dollar was at the finish line of the next race, both repelled and attracted her. Yet, in spite of Gloucester’s sun-sprite disposition, there was something ominous lurking within his eyes, set deep in their sockets as if they were sinking into his soul, something ominous in their color, a brown so dark it verged on black. His eyebrows merged at the bridge of his nose like a land bridge between two continents that never should have been joined. But, when they kissed, he closed his eyes–she peeked–and imprisoned her fears and worries behind pearly smooth eyelids of love.

Much to Maddie’s surprise, her da liked Gloucester and, after much prodding, accompanied them to the track, betting Gloucester’s touts, small, conservative bets, winning bets, twenty-five dollars becoming seventy-five after subtracting admissions, grandstand instead of track side, a hot dog and premium bottled beer (two) instead of draft (one). Gloucester bet big, both short odds and long (which he wouldn’t allow Brian to bet), always to win. And exotic bets. Not just daily doubles and trifectas and quinellas, but wheels and boxes and bets based on mathematical formulas requiring a slide rule to calculate. Hundreds became thousands and at the end of the day Gloucester banked the profits for graduate school, a PhD in medieval literature. His life plan was to teach Beowulf, Les Chansons de Roland, and The Canterbury Tales in the mornings, play the horses in the afternoon, enjoy evenings at home with wife and children, publish an occasional article or book to maintain his standing in the world of academia. He was the first person Maddie had ever met who had mutated a future based on chance into a future plotted with precision.

Sophomore year cantered into junior year, then senior year, and Maddie grew comfortable with Gloucester, the same comfort she felt walking home after church on Sunday mornings, her arm resting in her da’s. When the track closed for the season, they went to museums, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Gardner, the de Cordova, the Fogg, the Busch-Reisinger. And overnights to New York–separate beds, separate rooms–for the ballet, Gloucester’s great passion, Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Jewels, anything by Balanchine or Robbins, anything by City Ballet, ABT, the Stuttgart, the Royal Danish, the Bolshoi. Modern dance as well. The Ailey. The Joffrey. Martha Graham. Gloucester enthused about the athletic grace of the dancers, comparing it to the beauty of the best thoroughbreds. Not original with me, he confessed. Cribbed it from Homer’s Iliad.

Can a cribbed life be a life well lived? Maddie wondered at the time. For all his reading, his appreciation of art and ballet, his ability to bring light to the Dark Ages, he was in essence a smile, a joke, a wink, a love pat, a shadow who had never known pain. She could not imagine him comforting her after her ma’s death as Duncan Siward had or understanding the dread she felt being named after two sisters who lived out their lives in Kilmainham. He demanded little of her and did not need the emotional commitment Duncan required. He allowed her to encase her feelings in a shell, hide them from herself, bury them in the netherworld. He made life simple. She never had to trust her feelings. Or distrust them. Or act upon them. Or refuse to act. Or voice them. Or swallow them. Or even admit she had them.

After growing up in a family riven by its own internal civil war, a family in which the turmoil of feelings and emotions were handed down generation to generation like hair color, like eye color, the peace of mind she enjoyed with Gloucester, a peace that surpassed all understanding, seduced her before she knew she was being seduced. So, when Gloucester asked her to marry him after hitting a five-figure superfecta, they set a wedding date and she became Mrs. Richard Gloucester; then, nine months after the honeymoon touring Sun Belt race tracks and winning enough to pay cash for a center-entrance colonial in Lexington with Revolutionary-era provenance, the mother of baby Elizabeth.

Once again it was that April afternoon, snow in the air, snow on the ground, a winter which would not relent, Suffolk Downs closed because of the weather. Once again Elizabeth was ten months old. Once again the baby-sitter canceled and Maddie begged Richard to care for Elizabeth so she could go to class, Shakespeare at Harvard Extension School, the day’s topic, fathers and daughters in Shakespeare. Once again he said he’d take Elizabeth with him to Bennie’s, an illegal off track betting parlor where the next race was always minutes away. The call came half way through the lecture on whether Cordelia, Goneril, and Regan were archetypes or unique characters or whether Ophelia or Juliet existed independent of their suicides or whether Shakespeare’s concept of women honored or dishonored his queen, the first Elizabeth. At the hospital, an aide escorted her to the emergency ward where curtains separated Gloucester, under arrest, from the world, where George Harriman waited, his hat drooping between his knees.

“The truth, Uncle George,” Maddie said.

“A patch of ice. The car spun out of control. Elizabeth went through the windshield. Ruptured an artery. Bled to death. Vehicular homicide. Speeding. And he failed the field sobriety tests. He walked away, unhurt.”

Maddie drove to the accident scene and walked the skid marks, black, narrow, and long, very long, thirty-seven steps, heel to toe. In the front yard of a triple-decker, a honeysuckle bush, its branches broken by Elizabeth’s fall, its white winter-defiant petals stained red with Elizabeth’s blood. For all its beauty, its branches had not been thick enough to cushion an airborne infant. Summers would come and go; first frosts would wither the flowers. Each spring, each new season, new flowers, white, sweet smelling, would blossom, ignorant of the day an infant lay in its branches bleeding to death. She breathed deeply, inhaling the sweet fragrance into her memory.

The feelings she had imprisoned broke free and rampaged through her psyche like rioting prisoners, destroying everything, everyone, that had oppressed them. What use was beauty? It never spared a life. And how many had died for beauty?

Brian Devlin eulogized his granddaughter with words from Yeats:

 

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you

can understand.

 

“He writes like he lost a child,” Maddie said after the service.

“Ireland was his only child,” her da replied, “and, yes, he lost her.”

At Gloucester’s trial for vehicular homicide, Ed Hornstein attacked the credentials and competence of the prosecution’s accident reconstruction expert, arguing a two-week course in accident reconstruction at the Massachusetts State Police Academy–with only one day devoted to the physics of moving bodies, the coefficient of friction, torque, and other such subjects–did not qualify anyone to reconstruct an accident from skid marks, the size, depth and location of dents on an automobile, gouge marks in the street and curb, and the other physical evidence found at the accident scene. Without a qualified expert, the science was no better than astrology or mythology, Hornstein argued, and a jury could only speculate how the accident happened and speculation would not sustain a conviction. He also attacked the field sobriety tests administered at the accident scene, demonstrating how sober people had trouble counting back from one hundred or standing on one leg or walking heel to toe in a straight line. He played the sympathy card, remaking Gloucester from a drunk and careless driver to a victim, a father who would live his life blaming himself for his baby daughter’s death. The jury acquitted in less than two hours. Later, Hornstein represented Maddie’s ex-husband in the divorce.

After the entry of the jury’s verdict and Gloucester’s discharge, Maddie ducked into one of the wrought iron spiral staircases that turned up in odd corners of the Suffolk County court-house and spun herself dizzy racing down the steps. At the Park Street MBTA stop, she paused at the top of the staircase. Beneath her, the subway. The third rail. The arch of the entrance, the steps down, lured her. The bench where she once sat mourning the assassination of President Kennedy lured her. The Harvard-Ashmont line then, since 1965 the Red Line, its comings and goings, lured her. How easy it would be. How fast. Peace at last. She descended to the subway platform.

A woman, elderly but erect and able to walk without a cane, appeared on the platform. She wore a veiled hat and white gloves and carried a missal. Her hair, white with age, had hints of its former color, auburn. “To what end?” Her ma’s voice? “Gloucester who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing will measure his mourning as a miser measures his pennies. And your da? Only God may inflict such pain and only God may relieve it.” The woman paused and balanced herself on Maddie’s shoulder to dig a pebble out of her shoe, her touch lighter than a breath of air, then melted into the throng rushing up the stairs out of the Park Street subway station into the open air of Boston Common where she disappeared in the gathering fog.

Before summer’s end, Maddie filed for divorce, waiving alimony because she wanted Gloucester out of her life forever, resuming her maiden name. Father Curry guaranteed perdition. A Devlin born, a Devlin I’ll die, and as a Devlin I’ll face whatever judgment God decrees for me, she replied. In September, she enrolled in law school, not Harvard, which accepted her but would not provide financial aid, but Northeastern where she alternated work semesters with study semesters to pay her own way.

Although she viewed law school as a trade school, except for its pretensions the same as training to become a court stenographer or airline mechanic or truck driver or any other trade or occupation whose schools of higher education advertised on the back of matchbooks, she worked hard to give her da the gift of being proud of his daughter. To dull her own pain, she became addicted to her studies, occluding her mind with cases on property law, securities, corporations, estate planning, criminal law, Constitutional law. She lived on legal precedents to avoid the precedents of her life. The joy her da felt at her achievements at law school–law review, magna cum laude, second in her class–brought her a measure of happiness, a brief respite from her pain.

All this and more Maddie remembered as she hiccoughed little sobs and sank further and further into the bath water, drinking deeply the sweet, black Guinness, hugging herself tightly, trying to squeeze out the bad the way she squeezed out pus from pimples as an adolescent. “You’ll scar your face,” her ma had warned, but she hadn’t.

If it didn’t work for my pimples, she now thought, why would it work for my soul? How bloody Irish of me. How fucking bloody Irish.

 

-4-

 

Shortly after sunset, Rabbi ben Reuben and Jacob Moskovitzky introduced Maddie to the intricate ritual of the seder in the dining room of the rabbi’s home, a short walk from the synagogue where he presided. The ancient story of Israel’s liberation from Egypt was retold in the prescribed order. The seder plate bearing the symbols of Passover, matzohs, the unleavened bread Jews ate on the exodus; roasted shank bone, symbol of the Paschal lamb, the sacrifice offered on the altar of the temple in Jerusalem; roasted egg, the second offering brought to the temple in Jerusalem; moror, bitter herbs which symbolized the bitterness of slavery; haroses, symbol of the mortar used to make bricks for the construction of Egyptian cities; and karpas, symbol of the arrival of spring and the gathering of the spring harvest; was explained. Kiddush was chanted. The four questions were asked by the youngest male present, the rabbi, and answered. The tale of the four sons was told. They drank four cups of wine which, on top of the Guinness, spun Maddie’s head like a speeding merry-go-round. The rabbi opened the door for Elijah. The traditional benediction was offered: The following year grant us to be in Jerusalem.

Initially, Maddie sat politely, listened quietly, but before long she participated in the responsive readings. By the end of the meal, when the rabbi and Moskovitzky searched for the afikomen, a piece of matzoh, the last food eaten by the participants at the seder, which they insisted she hide so that it could be found and redeemed, she had warmed to the ceremony of the evening. They were so animated, momentarily children again, innocent and unburdened.

“Why aren’t you with your grandson and his family?” she asked Moskovitzky.

“He does not believe in seder. Too old-fashioned. Too Jewish.”

“This is nothing like what I expected,” she said.

“Neither are you,” Moskovitzky replied.

“What do you know of this Howard Kaplan?” the rabbi asked.

Outside, in the distance, a muffled sound like the solitary thump of a bass drum echoed, then faded.

“Nothing,” Maddie said. “I’ve never run across him in court. He’s not listed in my Lawyer’s Diary. He has no entry in Martindale-Hubbell. It’s like your grandson snapped his fingers and conjured him up out of thin air. But, I do know this. If this case goes to trial, it will be an absolute disaster. It should be plea-bargained.”

“If Avram pleads guilty,” Moskovitzky said, “every Jew pleads guilty with him and will suffer worse than his punishment.”

“The skull-cap under the chair.” She maintained eye contact, alternating from one to the other. “The jury will believe he lost it struggling with Bumper. True, he wasn’t at the crime scene while Capablanca was open, but he can’t account for his time after it closed, can’t corroborate his alibi. Home studying alone, no juror will believe that. I doubt the jury would be out an hour before it convicted him for first-degree murder. Life without parole. It’s guaranteed. Why risk that when a plea-bargain to a lesser included offense and a sentence short of life is doable?”

“Who will negotiate this plea-bargain?” Moskovitzky asked.

“Me. Before I join your grandson’s firm. They’ll cave because they’re afraid of me. My track record. Kaplan’s unknown. No one’s afraid of him.”

“What do you think?” Moskovitzky asked the rabbi.

Before he could reply, Maddie continued, “You want me off the case, withdraw Levy’s consent and the judge will do it for you. Until then, I’m counsel of record and what I say goes.”

Moskovitzky shook his cane in the air. “If the ancient Jews had your attitude I’d be building pyramids in Egypt and the Irish would still be subjects of Her Majesty, the Queen. Would you have plea-bargained Robert Emmet?”

“What’s with you and Robert Emmet? You know one speck of Irish history and you think you know it all. If it pleases the court, I’m directly descended from Robert Emmet, that Robert Emmet, and yes, I would plea-bargain him to keep him alive so he could fight another day. Martyrdom is overrated.”

“We pray for a golem,” Moskovitzky said, “and what does Hashem send us?”

“Levy’s last, best, and only hope,” Maddie replied.

“Who is abandoning her client for the Golden Calf,” Moskovitzky said.

“I told you I’ll cut the deal before I join your grandson’s firm.”

“Golems do not cut deals,” Moskovitzky said.

“Good defense attorneys do.”

The rabbi stopped massaging his knuckles and folded his hands in his lap. “A golem is created out of clay and brought to life by speaking the unspeakable, the name of the Almighty. In Prague in 1580, Rabbi Yehuda Loew created the Yosel golem to protect Jews from the blood libel accusation. At Passover that year, the local butcher exhumed the body of a Christian boy, drained its blood and cut its throat, and wrapped it in the carcass of a pig. He planned to bury it in the rabbi’s yard in the dead of night, then dig it up the next morning and accuse the rabbi of blood libel, but the Yosel golem caught him in the act. The butcher denied it, but finally confessed. Since then, whenever Jews suffered accusations of blood libel, they sought refuge in the belief the miracle of a golem would save them. It is said the Yosel golem is to this day buried under old prayer books in the attic of Rabbi Loew’s synagogue awaiting the time when he is again needed.”

“If you think Kaplan’s this golem, go with him.” Maddie felt feverish from the heat, the wine, the Guinness, Moskovitzky’s resistance to her logic. If logic would not persuade him, them, retreat was the soundest strategy. The only strategy. Retreat. And, in the morning, open negotiation with Bonturo. A fait accompli would bring them around to her way of thinking. If it didn’t, let them force her recusal, abrogate the plea-bargain, take the case to trial. She mumbled a thank-you for the dinner and an apology for departing so abruptly and slipped out the front door.

Outside, the neighborhood sweltered and the dreams of her new life wilted in the heat like a cheap plastic crucifix in a multi-alarm fire. Washington would be lonely without Michelle Furey. No woman could replace her. No man either. Not even Duncan Siward. But, if she stayed, Boston would devour her. Alive. Something no one, not even Michelle Furey, could protect her against. A hot wind slapped her face. The night sky glowed red and yellow like a sky besieged by a raging forest fire. Plumes of black smoke illuminated by the glow reached one-third of the way to heaven’s peak. Sirens blared. She rushed inside to alert the rabbi and Moskovitzky.

“The shul,” the rabbi said.

As they approached the synagogue, the red and blue lights of police cruisers swept across lichen covered tenement walls. Ululations filled the air with a chorus of laments. They rounded the corner and the synagogue came into view. Moskovitzky pitched forward. Maddie caught him and put her arm around his back and slipped her hand under his arm to hold him up. The rabbi supported himself on her other arm.

“Watch out for the broken glass,” she said

Moskovitzky shuddered. “Kristallnacht.”

The rabbi prayed, nonsense syllables to Maddie, Kaddish, to those who understood Hebrew, then started babbling. “Time was on hot nights like this in Chelsea all the windows would be open and the whirring and clicking of sewing machines, like crickets in the field, was everywhere. Sewing machines. Rented to immigrants doing piecework for the mills. If you complained, a more recent arrival took your place. Work hard. Save. Penny by penny. If the baby didn’t catch the grippe, buy a sewing machine. Control your own destiny. A generation for whom sleep was a luxury stolen in front of sewing machines so its sons and daughters could go to college. That wooden sign?” It hung almost within their reach, its Hebrew letters barely legible. “The mikvah. People once lined the street to get in. Closed. The shops. A man didn’t work a lifetime so his son could become a shop-keeper in Chelsea or his daughter marry one. No, they worked a lifetime so when they died their sons and daughters would drive in from Newton or Brookline or Sharon to post the Closed sign. Another peddler had made his last sale.”

On the curb, Shlomo the bookseller sat among the charred pages of Bibles and prayer books and Sefer Torah and Talmudic commentaries, the writings of Maimonides, the writings of Buber. “Ruined. Everything.” His frail voice sounded like a sickly young boy’s. He receded into the ashes of his store.

They continued their pilgrimage, the weight of Moskovitzky on one side, the rabbi on the other.

“Rabbi!” Yosef, the butcher, cried.

They stepped over pieces of glass painted with fragments of the Hebrew letters for “kosher”. Shards jutted out of the window frame like the teeth of a piranha.

“Did they steal much?” Maddie asked.

“Would they have stolen everything,” Yosef said.

“God of Job!” The rabbi gagged.

A disemboweled carcass of a pig, its side torn open, sprawled on the floor in front of the main display case. Swarms of flies blanketed it. Scores of cats, every stray in Chelsea, fought for position. The fittest clawed at the pig’s carcass and slurped its body fluids. Rats bigger than small cats gorged on the pig’s eyes and ears and tongue, scarring its face and head with gouges made by their sharp, pointed teeth. Swine blood stained the pale yellow poultry a deep red and pork fat desecrated the kosher beef. The floor shone like a sea wall covered with fresh guano.

Maddie doubled over and vomited her seder meal, but the cats and rats continued feeding. Only the flies, buzzing their approval, assayed her puke. Eleazer the grocer gave her a bottle of soda water. “The old country has come to the new,” he said.

“The synagogue.” The rabbi’s voice cracked.

Its exterior was untouched. The cornerstone, granite, proclaiming “1890,” was as resolute as the day it was dedicated. The stained-glass windows, which portrayed scenes from the Holy Scriptures in triptychs of many hues, unbroken, caught the fire’s light and hurled it back like thunderbolts. It made no sense to Maddie that this fragile glass survived the maelstrom on the streets, unless it had been intentionally spared. By whom? The hand of God? Or, the hands of people with the sickest of the sick sense of humor?

With Maddie’s hand in the small of his back, the rabbi seized a railing and pulled himself up the shallow front steps of the synagogue. Moskovitzky followed. The lock had been gouged out of the wooden door. The foyer was the same as when she had first visited the rabbi and Moskovitzky. Prayer books filled the shelves waiting for congregants to gather for the next service. A chest of black yarmulkes guarded the doors to the sanctuary. Prayer shawls were draped over a wooden rod. The rabbi kissed a yarmulke and placed it on his head, as did Moskovitzky, who handed one to Maddie together with a bobby pin for her to fasten it to her hair.

Inside the sanctuary under the back pew, she saw a bracelet. It reminded her of the identification bracelet engraved with her name she received as a First Communion gift. It was silver and shiny, that gift, and had a secret compartment where she kept a four-leaf clover rather than a family photo because she believed a four-leaf clover would bring her the luck of the Irish. She wore the bracelet day and night, everywhere but the shower. As she grew and the links became tighter it made a permanent indentation in the soft skin of her wrist until a link popped open and the bracelet fell from her wrist. Where, she did not know. Like life, one moment it had been there, the next it was gone.

Reaching under the pew, Maddie picked up the bracelet, examined it, then sealed it inside a stamped envelope she kept in her purse, a superstition she inherited from her ma who was always prepared in case she unexpectedly had to mail a letter.

“The Torah!” Rabbi ben Reuben shrieked. It had been unrolled down the aisle and a red swastika stenciled on each page. His body stiffened as if a bolt of lightning entered his body through his eyes and coursed through his nerves, then slackened as if the electricity had exited his nervous system. His arms flailed like high tension wires detached from their grounds.

“Epilepsy?” Maddie asked, but Moskovitzky shook his head.

The rabbi collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath like a man who would not survive without a respirator. He stared straight up, his eyes unseeing, the eyes of a blind man who no longer had memories of ever being sighted. Maddie put her purse under his head and loosened his belt and tie. Moskovitzky replaced his yarmulke. The rabbi’s lips quivered. He mumbled, a stutterer who choked on his words. His eyes widened. His eyelids withdrew inside his head. His face had the expression of a man witnessing something so horrific he could not turn away, something he had seen before but had erased from his memory.

“He needs a doctor,” Maddie said. “Is there a payphone?”

The rabbi grabbed Maddie’s arm. His fingers dug into her flesh. The tighter he gripped, the calmer he became. His face relaxed. The rabbi closed his eyes, then opened them. They focused, his eyes. Not on her. Not on Moskovitzky. Not on the ceiling above them. Not on anything in the sanctuary of the synagogue. In those eyes, Maddie now saw a clarity she had not seen before. Something had excised the cataracts that had blinded the rabbi to his past with a precision beyond the capability of any human hand. The rabbi’s hand fell limply from her arm. With effort, he placed it flat against his chest, over his heart as if he were pledging loyalty to something known only to him. His change in demeanor transfixed Maddie.

“How could they have known?” The rabbi’s voice sounded as if it were coming from somewhere else, another time, another place. He repeated his question, each repetition bringing his voice closer and closer until, at last, it was here and now. “How could they have known?”

Maddie held the rabbi’s hands.

“So long ago. I was just ordained. Just married. A small apartment. Two rooms. A window overlooking Gutenstrasse.”

The rabbi spoke softly and they had to bend over, their ears inches above his mouth.

“She made curtains. Blue and white. With flowers. Not much furniture. A table from my uncle. Two chairs. Didn’t match. Sleeping. Hot. Windows open. Pounding at the door. Does the rabbi live here? More pounding, louder. Schnell. I was scared. Confused. Didn’t know what to do. Gestapo. One had a riding crop. Drunk. Whiskey breath. Black shiny boots. I’m Otto Kempka.

“She came out of the bedroom. Soldiers went in. Tore apart the bedding. Pulled out drawers. Emptied closet. Smashed mirror. Kempka. Whiskey breath. Her wedding gown. She tried to save it. Kempka hit her with his riding crop. Cheek split open. Blood. Raised my hand. He hit me across the face and made her hold the gown. He forced a scissors into my hand. Cut into strips, he ordered. For my daughter, she begged. Kempka laughed. Never to be born, he said. It took forever. A pile of white at her feet. Like firewood at the feet of a person to be burned at the stake.

“The synagogue, Kempka said. Four stayed with her. An hour. Two blocks. An hour. Whiskey breath. The Torah. If you want to see your wife again . . . I unrolled it down the aisle. A bucket. Red liquid. Warm. Too thin to be paint. No paint smell. A brush. Stencil. Swastika. On every page, Kempka ordered. With each stroke I begged Hashem’s forgiveness. An hour, two hours. How long? Don’t know. Kempka drank whiskey. When I was done, I thought I had cut myself. They left me there. I ran home. She was gone. No clothes. No books. No furniture. No pictures. Nothing but strips of wedding gown. I went to the landlord. Out or I’ll call the Gestapo. New tenants in the morning. I searched. Everywhere. Hospitals. Cemeteries. Jails. Morgues. The dump. The streets. The river. Never found. Never found. I was taken to the camps. I searched again. Survived. Came to America. Came to Chelsea. Never found.”

The rabbi blinked. His eyes slowly focused as he returned from a distant place, a distant time.

“Sie wäre wie alt?” he asked. “Sixty-six? Did her eyes really sing? I don’t have a picture. Is she dead? Ist sie tot? Kann ich sicher sein Ich habe nie Kaddisch gesagt. Ich habe nie wieder geheiratet. Wie könnte ich?

“Faces. I looked at faces. In crowds. On the streets. I didn’t know why. Now, I do. Vielleicht das nächste Gesicht. Einmal in einer Cafeteria. Essen Toast. Langsam. Sehr, sehr langsam. Working girl’s hands. Clean from a lifetime spent in other people’s water. After every bite, wiped her lips with the napkin. München, sagte ich. Pardon? Sie sagte. Aus der Tür. Die Straße entlang. Weg. Weg.”

The rabbi was quiet now. Moskovitzky was crumpled on the floor beside him, his head bowed. Maddie wept. She wept for the rabbi. For the words she did not know, but understood. For the wife whose name he never spoke. For the Torah unrolled on the synagogue floor. For what was happening in Boston. She wept tears of bitterness and in her tears she forged a bond between herself and these two ancient Jews, and she knew, the way one knows a truth to be true precisely because it can-not be proven, that somewhere, beyond all the tears, walked a young Jewish bride, the rabbi’s wife, in the company of young Master Devlin. She now appreciated the lesson of Elizabeth’s death, that each death sires its own unique sadness, and she realized she now wept for the exception which proved the rule, that the sadness caused by the death of Master Devlin and the rabbi’s wife was the same sadness, made bitter by being murdered out of hatred. The rabbi was quiet now, and still she wept.

The rabbi rose from the floor. Page by page, with great care, he rolled up the Torah while Moskovitzky searched for the finials, mantle, and silver breastplate. He found the yad, the silver pointer used by the reader to mark his place. Under the front row of pews, she found the stencil. A swastika like in the rabbi’s story.

“Read a portion,” Moskovitzky said.

The rabbi recited the blessing offered by those called to the Torah: “Borchu es adonoi amvoroh . . .,”

Maddie stared at the black letters glowing through the swastika’s pale red. At the seder table that night, the rabbi had told her Torah was the tree of life to those who clung fast to it and now she saw how it revived him. He picked up the yad. She followed its tip across the page as he touched each word. The rabbi’s voice strengthened word by word and filled the sanctuary. At the end of the passage, the rabbi recited the blessing after the reading of the Torah: “Boruch ato adonoi . . .,”

“It’s from Exodus,” the rabbi said, “the crossing of the Red Sea when Moses parted the waters and the Children of Israel passed safely but the Egyptians drowned.

“There is another version. When Moses led the Children of Israel to the Red Sea, it is said, he cried out to Hashem for help. Hear my prayers, Moses said. Hashem replied: This is not a time for prayer. This is a time for faith. Go forth into the Red Sea or suffer your fate at the hands of the Egyptians. Moses led the Children of Israel into the waters. The water rose to their ankles, their knees, their waists, their chests, their necks. Moses walked onward and the Children of Israel followed. When the water reached their noses, the sea churned and parted and Moses led them to safety.”

Maddie thought of Yeats’s poem, Parnell’s Funeral. Her da cried whenever he read it. Yeats asked, “What is this sacrifice?” and lamented that Parnell’s death was a useless sacrifice because his heart was eaten by his own people. Now, Yeats’s question, What is this sacrifice? confronted her. She could not run from being Mary Ann Devlin any more than Jacob Moskovitzky could run from being Jacob Moskovitzky. For her, for the rabbi, for Moskovitzky, the answer to Yeats’s question, sooner or later, had to be, I am this sacrifice.

Another thought formed in Maddie’s mind, slowly coalescing the way a memory does when the mind unexpectedly encounters a reminder of the past. Levy did not resist a plea-bargain because he was a fatalist bound by God’s will; nor did he resist a plea-bargain because he was a fanatic on a mission. His resistance was a proclamation to her, to the rabbi, to Moskovitzky, of his innocence, a proclamation of his willingness to go to trial than plead guilty to something he did not do. It was an act of courage, his answer to Yeats’s question. He, too, was that sacrifice.

She took Moskovitzky’s hand in one of hers, the rabbi’s in the other, resting her fingertips against his gnarled knuckles. In her mind’s eye, she also held Levy’s hands, convinced now beyond all reasonable doubt that he was innocent in fact.

As they, Maddie, Rabbi ben Reuben, Moskovitzky, exited the synagogue into the oven of a hot April night and passed through the handiwork of hate spread out on both sides of a dying, dead Chelsea street, she vowed to God to follow the bracelet from beneath the pew in the synagogue in Chelsea and to follow the stencil to wherever they may lead. And she vowed to God to become, if necessary, whatever sacrifice was demanded of her to prove Avram Levy innocent. On Elizabeth’s soul, she did vow. And the souls of her namesakes and the souls of her ma and da and grand da and she wished they were all alive to share the moment.

And, they were.

 

-5-

 

Maddie escorted Rabbi ben Reuben and Jacob Moskovitzky through the gauntlet of destruction which once was a Chelsea street of Jewish shops, stepping over fire hoses snaking away from hydrants, stepping around fire engines and police cruisers and ambulances with their back doors open. A cop hustled them behind a police barrier that cordoned off a side street. A scrum of reporters demanding access, television and newspapers, swarmed around them, their way blocked by a wall of police. A reporter with a The New York Times press credential hanging around his neck tried to interview them, but Maddie brushed him aside, brushed all the reporters and cameramen aside. Breaking free of the scrum, she guided the rabbi and Moskovitzky away from the police barrier, down the side street, back to the rabbi’s home.

That night, sleep did not come to Maddie Devlin. Television, radio, records, books, magazines, warm milk, a snifter of brandy, a bottle of Guinness, nothing quieted her mind nor quelled her anxieties. Her future, her escape from the sinkhole of legal aid, her liberation, now lay engulfed in the disemboweled innards of a pig greedily devoured by rats and feral cats on the floor of a kosher butcher; in the flakes of carbonized pages of sacred texts wafting in the fiery wind; in pale red swastikas desecrating the parchment of the Hebrew Bible; in an identification bracelet sealed in an envelope in her purse.

She tried to visualize what lay beyond, but a fog, thick and viperous, occluded her view. She was about to take her first step on a long journey; but she had no guide. Alone at the midpoint of her life, she would have to find her own way. She felt spikes being driven through her hands and feet, a crown of thorns being forced down on her head, wounds being gouged in her side.

The suffocating heat kindled memories Maddie now wished she did not have, memories of clients who had murdered but were acquitted because she had out-thought, out-prepared, out-lawyered the prosecution. How many had murdered again? Too many, but she had wrapped herself in the cliché of the Seventh Amendment; no sin committed, no sin confessed. Not according to Levy’s Talmud test. That test she had failed. She had researched Catholic doctrine. It was more forgiving, teaching it was morally licit for an attorney to defend a client the attorney knows to be guilty as long as the attorney does not misrepresent facts to the court, such as allowing the client to commit perjury or presenting an alibi defense the attorney knew to be false. Being morally licit did not assuage her guilt. Outside her window, heat currents swarmed around the street-light like thugs waiting their turn to rape a young girl.

Maddie threw on some clothes and wandered the neighborhood. Bags of garbage awaiting the morning pickup lined the curbs. She smelled and tasted the heat-intensified stench. Lights from the twenty-four-hour convenience store at the corner beckoned. The bullet editions of the morning papers would be on the newspaper rack. A way to kill time until dawn. Maybe a better future was hidden in her horoscope.

“I saw you on the tube,” the clerk said as she handed him a five-dollar bill to pay for two twenty-five-cent newspapers. He wore a leather sweat band on each wrist, laced with rawhide rather than buckled. The veins in his arms wiggled like blue earthworms burrowing beneath his skin. There were no needle marks. Maybe he injected between his toes. Many of her clients did. On his forehead above his right eye, a tattoo of a skull laughed when he raised his eyebrow. As he talked, its jaws opened and closed. None of the gang members she had defended over the years sported a tattoo like that. Maybe there was a new gang in town; or, maybe, it was a souvenir of too much hash, too much booze, too much cunt, while on R&R in Saigon. She had never seen this clerk before; but, then, with the rapid turnover on the graveyard shift, she rarely saw the same person twice. His hand lingered over the button that opened the cash drawer. She asked for her change.

“I hear you fuck Jews. Niggers. Spics. Gooks. How ’bout me? War hero, I am.”

She picked up three packages of hot dogs, $1.49 each, from the cooler. “I get off on these, pencil prick. Buy yourself a blow job with the change.” His obscenities chased her down the street. He stood on the sidewalk outside the store. Its fluorescent lights made him look like a child’s toy which glowed in the dark. From down the block, she shouted, “Your better half dripped down your mother’s leg,”

He faked a move toward her. “At least I had a mother.”

In her apartment, Maddie nibbled on the hot dogs, raw and uncooked, kosher, which she hadn’t noticed when she grabbed them. The problem messages hidden in horoscopes was that, like beauty, their meaning was in the eye of the beholder. She might as well believe in the Oracle of Delphi.

She telephoned George Harriman. “Meet me at Behan’s. It’s about the Chelsea business.”

“Christ, Maddie, do you know what time it is?”

“Time is of the essence, Uncle George.”

Behan’s was Southie’s last all-night railroad diner and it didn’t serve decaf. A “Sanka is for sissies” needlepoint made by one of the waitresses hung above the coffee urns. Sanka, as everyone in Southie knew, was packaged in orange, a color as welcome in Behan’s as Maddie Devlin herself.

Maddie was on her third cup of coffee and the caffeine was beginning to infuriate her system as she waited for Harriman. People who traded day for night crowded the diner: cops and firefighters unwinding from the four to midnight shift; truck drivers on their way from delivering the bullet edition of the newspapers; donut makers relaxing before firing up the grease vats to prepare for the morning rush; janitors and cleaning ladies who moved into Boston’s office towers after the secretaries, business executives, bankers, lawyers finished for the day; interns and residents recuperating from a seventy-two hour shift in the emergency rooms of the city hospitals. They all flocked to Behan’s because Behan’s specialized in truckburgers–shitburgers in impolite company–a hamburger grilled in butter with a slab of American cheese, topped by a fried egg, sunny side up, and thick slices of fresh onions pan fried in the butter and hamburger juices. Banished to the back booth by the door to the restrooms, Maddie sat alone with her coffee.

“Two truckburgers rare and a large milk,” Harriman called to the counterman as he made his way the length of the diner to where Maddie waited. A “whole milk is holy” needlepoint by the same waitress decorated the milk dispenser. Harriman traded greetings, a handshake or slap on the back, a whisper, at every stool along the counter, every booth along the wall of windows.

“So, my rose upon the rood of time,” he said when he reached her. “What witchery are you up to at this ungodly hour?”

“I found this in the Chelsea synagogue.” She dropped the envelope with the identification bracelet in the middle of the table. “And the swastika stencil.”

With a pencil, Harriman picked up the identification bracelet and held it to the light, then returned it to the envelope, sealing it. “Trojan horse,” he said.

“Who’s Badger?” Maddie asked. The name Badger Thomas was engraved beside the Trojan horse.

“Silvy Thomas’s brother. She’s Mabi’s woman.” The waitress brought the truckburgers and milk, sneering at Maddie as she set the order on the table.

Maddie ignored her. “This is why Ugolino wanted a change of venue. He figured out the connection.”

Harriman filled his mouth with truckburger. He ripped a napkin from the dispenser and wiped his chin. “I thought it was Levy’s absence from Capablanca.”

Maddie continued, “The bracelet links Chelsea to the Trojans. I’m betting the stencil links the Trojans to Bumper’s murder. I’m betting it’s his blood on the stencil.”

“Interesting theories.”

“Worth investigating.”

“By the police.”

“I don’t trust Ugolino,” Maddie said, “especially after he handed off the case to Angelo the Sweeper.”

“Why would Ugolino protect Mabi and the Trojans? A black, a Jew, one scalp’s as good as the other for him.”

“Not when the black is fat on drug money and the Jew indigent.”

“Speculation.”

“Often the first step toward the truth.”

Harriman chewed his truckburger. His facial expression, earnest as if he were trying to solve a puzzle, told Maddie his mind was not on his food. His eyes snapped back into focus, fixing on her as if she were a fugitive, armed and dangerous

“If this is evidence,” he said, “you can’t withhold it. You could be disbarred. I could be fired and lose my pension. Your da would be the first to agree with me.”

“If I’m right, and my gut tells me I am, you’ll be a hero and Ugolino will be doing time for obstructing justice. As for my da, I think he’d back me on this one.”

Maddie wanted to believe her da would. She had last seen him more than nine years before on a Friday afternoon in September, a month after she sat for the bar exam, two months before the announcement of the results. Years of smoking cigarettes and inhaling the oily fumes of the punch press room had killed him. The afternoon of his wake, a few private moments before the arrival of the mourners, she leaned forward and kissed him on his forehead, leaving as their last tangible link a smudge caused by her lipstick. She examined her da’s face, searching the hollows of his cheeks and the shadow of his beard for clues as to the whereabouts of his soul. He looked so serene, so much the gentleman in his burial suit. He had finally escaped to the rural corner of his beloved Ireland, reunited in heaven with all who loved him and with all whom he loved.

She had felt so abandoned that day nine years ago, standing alone beside her da’s open casket, greeting mourners, accepting their platitudes with the kindness with which they were offered. Being the only child of only children had never bothered her before. She never thought about it. Yet, now, her side of the Devlin family would go extinct like the dinosaurs with herself eternally shamed by the lies of a false informer. More than her da lay dead in the casket. She felt weightless, without substance, buffeted like a milkweed in a strong wind. The long line of mourners crowding the foyer of the funeral home and filling the parlor did not dispel her loneliness. Soon, these people would leave, go back to their own lives, their own problems, reducing their connection to her to a polite hello, how are you, on Sunday morning after Mass.

Her mind drifted as she greeted the callers, reserving enough concentration to address each by name, to thank them for their condolences. She had spent too much of her life burying people, her ma, her daughter, her da. Who was left to bury her? Love wasn’t worth the sorrow it brought. Father Curry told her to remember the happy times, but how could she be truly happy knowing life was so ephemeral. Maybe the nuns had it right. In high school she believed only women afraid of happiness hid inside the nun’s habit. Maybe it wasn’t fear, but wisdom to realize the only true happiness was eternal happiness which only came from falling in love with God’s only begotten Son; but, the nuns didn’t seem so happy either. She could tell by the way they walked, slowly as if life had already passed them by.

That day at her da’s wake she had asked for a glass of water and Moynihan led her into a private parlor reserved for immediate family. The mourners waiting their turn grumbled at the interruption. By the window of the parlor another couple sat, their heads bowed in prayer. Maddie was grateful for their presence. She closed her eyes and rested her head on her hands, trying to merge into the silence. Clothes rustled, people rising, as quietly as possible, tiptoeing so they wouldn’t disturb her. She raised her head out of politeness to acknowledge them.

“Duncan!”

“I’m sorry about your dad.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “My wife, Natalie.”

“I feel like I knew your father, the way Duncan talked about him,” Natalie said. She had a soft, kind voice, the perfect voice to soothe a young child with a scraped knee or elbow.

“I heard about Elizabeth,” Duncan said. “I was in California. I bought a card, but I couldn’t bring myself to mail it. I was going to call, but . . . I guess I figured you didn’t want to hear from me.”

“I didn’t want to hear from anyone,” Maddie said. “When are you due?” she asked Natalie.

“Five weeks.”

“Do you have a name?”

“James if it’s a boy; Colleen for a girl.”

Maddie wanted to keep her talking. The peacefulness of her voice, the soft, smooth flow of her words. “Are you here for a visit?”

“We’re moving to Boston,” Duncan said. “I have a grant to do blood research. Somehow I ended up in hematology.”

“I pegged you as a pediatrician,” Maddie said.

“Hon.” Natalie leaned against the back of a couch.

“She tires easily in the heat,” Duncan said.

Maddie offered her hand, first to Natalie, then to Duncan, keeping her arm stiff so he couldn’t lean in and kiss her. “Thanks for coming. Good luck with the baby.”

Maddie lingered in the parlor to give them a chance to leave. Something about Natalie’s voice told Maddie they could become great friends, not acquaintances who made believe they were friends by playing bridge; but Maddie knew they never would. It wouldn’t be fair to Duncan. Nor to herself.

College had divorced her and Duncan; Boston College for her, Notre Dame for him. Maddie had also been accepted at Notre Dame, but she needed a scholarship and Boston College offered her one. Three days before Duncan left for Notre Dame, he came over to fix her bike. When he had finished, she invited him in for lemonade. They cuddled on the living room couch while he finished his drink, then she kissed him, enjoying the taste of lemonade in his mouth. When he closed his eyes, she pulled up her top and pressed his hand against her breast. The feeling of his hand on her breast gave her the same sense of being connected, being anchored, as when they held hands and she wondered if this was the difference between sex and love. As they kissed, she saw herself, sixty years in the future, flabby and wrinkled, and she wondered if Duncan would be there for her.

Soon, they were naked, lying on the floor, and she could feel the summer breeze blowing against her skin. She guided him into her, the pain not as bad as the anticipation, and as he moved, she became wetter. She moved with him, answering each thrust with a thrust of her own until, like a flash of heat lightening in summer, he filled her with himself, then deflated, too limp to continue, and slipped out of her, his penis lying wet and shrunken against her thigh.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

She guided his hand to her, but he jerked it away as if her wetness repelled him. He stood up, saying it was getting late. She reached for him; but he had started dressing, slipping into his underwear, then his shorts and jersey. “Hold me. Please.”

He left quickly and she lay there on the damp towel in the middle of her living room floor listening to the click of the reflector in the spokes of the front wheel of his bike as he pedaled away. She felt as if she had been widowed before being married.

Duncan neither phoned nor wrote from Notre Dame until President Kennedy’s assassination when he called and tried to comfort her. She also tried to comfort him, but all they could do was cry and, for the first time when it really mattered, she realized Duncan would never comfort her again.

As that weekend unfolded, the weekend of Dallas and Oswald and Ruby and a new president being sworn in on an airplane flying toward Washington, Maddie sat in front of the television, feeling the grief of Carolyn and John John, adding it to her own; and when John John saluted his fallen father, she gathered her own personal grief around her like a winter coat, tied it around her throat like a scarf, and rode the Green Line into Park Street, walking down the stairs to Park Street Under where the Harvard Square-Ashmont line stopped, a true subway with a live third rail. She sat on a bench beneath a no-smoking sign pushing at cigarette butts with the toes of her shoes, buttoned up against the November cold, which came from within. Two, three, four trains, some for Harvard Square, some for Ashmont, arrived, stopped, departed. With each, she thought about jumping on the tracks, electrocuting herself, being crushed.

The day passed and the trains continued arriving, stopping, departing, mostly empty because everyone was home watching history on television. Soon, though it really wasn’t soon, a police officer told her the station would be closing for the night, the last train would be arriving in a few minutes. She caught the last train home where, still wrapped tightly in her coat and scarf, she climbed into bed, too numb to dream, too tired to sleep.

Sunrise, she tossed and turned, exhausted. Downstairs, over the soft sound of the television, she heard her da and Uncle George talking quietly about how worried they were at her reaction to Jack Kennedy’s assassination, how it seemed so much more extreme than her reaction to her ma’s death, and whether Father Curry should be asked to counsel her. Listening to their voices, Maddie realized her da, for all his silences, for all his solitude, for the way he dragged her hither and thither in Dublin, loved her in the special way fathers love daughters. She stripped off her winter coat and unwound the scarf from around her neck. She smelled from sleeping in her clothes and she wanted to shower for her da, then hug him and cry on his shoulder and tell him that she loved him and that she would be all right and to thank him for being her da. The shower felt good and, for the first time since Kilmainham, since Traitor’s Hell, she felt clean.

As those memories retreated back into storage and memories of her da’s wake replaced them, she remembered that Harriman had joined her in the sitting room on that day nine years earlier.

“You holding up okay?”

“I saw Duncan Siward. He’s married. His wife is pregnant.”

“People are waiting.”

She offered her hand so he could help her stand. “Have you chosen a reading?”

“I was leaning toward The Second Coming, but I wonder if it’s too political. Would you prefer something else?”

“One of the early poems,” she said. “Maybe The Song of Wandering Aengus. ‘ . . . the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun . . .’” She drew a deep breath. “The Christmas after ma died, we went to Ireland, Kilmainham, Traitor’s Hell, Glasnevin. He made me promise . . . ”

“He’s finally free, Maddie.” Harriman had placed his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t take his place in the cell.”

Now, nine years later, April of 1981, she had become her father’s proxy in the prison of the past, a pariah to everyone for whom St. Patrick’s Day was a holy day of obligation. Sitting across from Harriman in the back booth of Behan’s, she said, “I want you to arrest Badger Thomas.”

“Charges?” Yellow yoke dried on Harriman’s chin.

“The bracelet is more than enough probable cause for an arrest. I should know.”

“Not if the police don’t know about it. Not if it’s not logged into the evidence room.” He bit into his second truckburger. “What’s your theory?”

“It puts him at the scene the way the skull-cap put Levy at the scene and you arrested him.”

Harriman lowered his half-eaten truckburger.

“Keep the bracelet, but . . . ”

“Chain of custody, Maddie,” he interrupted. “How will I establish chain of custody?”

“I’m taking the stencil to Duncan Siward at Mass. General,” Maddie continued, “so he can run blood grouping tests.”

“You’re playing a dangerous game, Maddie. A call from Ugolino and the DA will charge you with withholding evidence, tampering with evidence, interfering with a police investigation, God knows what else.”

“What police investigation? Angelo the Sweeper’s dog and pony show spoon fed to the press? Ugolino himself told me he had his man as soon as Charlie found the skull-cap. No. I turn this in and Procaccino will make it disappear faster than the booze at a cop’s retirement party.”

“I’ll have your back.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. The DA will charge you as my co-conspirator. I don’t want you to sacrifice your pension over something that’s my responsibility.”

Maddie twitched as the caffeine roiled her nervous system. She had scooped up the bracelet and sealed it in the envelope without showing it to the rabbi or Moskovitzky. She doubted they had seen her do it. The argument was so obvious: a plant, a frame, the same argument she planned to use to explain Levy’s skull-cap. She cursed the stupidity of her haste.

“Brand me a traitor, but I’m an honest traitor. Ugolino may lie to prove Levy guilty, but I won’t lie to prove him innocent.”

“I’ll need to take your statement tonight because I’m leaving for Dublin after early Mass.”

“Why now? I need you here.”

“Ugolino. Some conference on international extradition procedures. I think he suspects something and wants me out of the way. I’ll be a phone call and a five-hour flight away.” Harriman covered her hands with his. “You’ll have to sign off on it under the pains and penalties of perjury.”

“Is my credibility that low?”

“Standard operating procedure.”

“Not in any witness statements I’ve been given.”

“Yes, your credibility’s that low.”

“With you, too?” When Harriman did not reply, she asked, “Who’ll make the arrest?”

“If there’s an arrest,” he spoke slowly to emphasize the iffy nature of the situation, “the gang unit. It’s their play whether I’m here or not. There’s hell to pay if anyone trespasses into their jurisdiction.”

“Will they?”

“I’ll call in an IOU.”

“They know what they’re doing?”

“Ever overturn one of their collars?”

“Thank you, Uncle George.”

For the first time since she could remember, Maddie didn’t notice the heat.