CHAPTER 13

THURSDAY, APRIL 23, 1981

 

-1-

 

Out of deference to Jacob Moskovitzky’s age, Maddie Devlin visited him at his home to show him the blood grouping test results and to explain her strategy for using them in court. Stalled in traffic on Storrow Drive, she worked through her presentation in her mind, trying to decide what to tell Moskovitzky, what to leave out. She knew Duncan Siward would be cross-examined. Relentlessly. Absent a prosecutorial misstep, what she didn’t want disclosed would come out, namely how the stencil came into Siward’s possession. She could not base her strategy on the chance Bonturo would make a mistake. She needed Moskovitzky’s opinion. She had to tell him everything.

She had gone to Duncan Siward’s lab the previous Monday, the 20th, and had not been welcomed.

“Dr. Siward’s in his lab and he’s not to be disturbed under any circumstances,” his technician, a post-doc who felt more at home in the lab than in an office treating patients, had said. Her voice had been as sour as her lab greens.

“Disturb him. It’s an emergency.”

“What business could Dr. Siward possibly have with you?”

Maddie had smiled. She was beginning to take perverse pleasure in the way people treated her. Being a pariah had its advantages. It liberated her from the constraints of socially acceptable behavior and freed her to be more aggressive, less ladylike, in pursuit of her goals. She had pushed through the swinging doors behind the desk where the technician wrote up her lab results, ignoring the ‘Staff Only’ sign, and forced her way into the hematology lab, evading the technician’s grasp.

“What . . . Maddie!”

“I’ll call security,” the technician said.

“No,” Duncan said. “It’s all right.”

“I tried to stop her.”

“Not to worry. I was about to break for coffee.”

Maddie waited for the technician to leave, then placed the stencil and slide on the lab bench with the care of a paleontologist handling an unclassified fossil. “I need a blood grouping.”

He picked up the stencil by its edges. “Chelsea?”

“The slide is from Bumper Sullivan’s autopsy.”

“How . . . ”

“Privileged information.” What he didn’t know wouldn’t come back to bite her.

He held the slide up to the light. “I’ve never done a blood grouping without live blood. I don’t even know if it’s possible. There’s more involved than blood typing. Categories you’ve never heard. Gm factors, five altogether, and two Kp factors. Thirty-nine factors in a complete test.”

“I want all thirty-nine. How long?”

“No idea.”

“Tomorrow. I’ll bring lunch.”

“I’d prefer you call.”

“See you then.”

“The director may not approve,” Duncan said. “I’ll come to you.”

She missed the teenager who made out with her on her back porch. She felt a twinge of the happiness she once knew, the happiness of a high school girl who thought life was an endless summer; but, only the heat had come true. Except for Michelle Furey who had melted like a candle in a conflagration.

Now, Maddie sounded her horn at the car in front of her which had stopped, afraid to merge into traffic. One opening passed; then a second, a third. Maddie sighed. Siward’s visit to her office with the test results had also been problematic.

She had cleared a seat for him in her cubicle at the offices of Suffolk County Legal Services by taking a mountain of files from her extra chair and stacking them on the floor: Sanchez for breaking and entering, Figone for assault and battery on a police officer, O’Leary for possession of a controlled substance, Goralla for larceny over, Lombard for driving to endanger, and Ferraro for being a common nightwalker. People whose lives intersected hers–some once, others many times–so briefly she couldn’t associate their names with their faces and, without first names, she did not remember which were men, which were women. She made space on her desk for the lunch Duncan had picked up at the Bread Loaf Deli. He placed the napkins and plastic forks on a copy of Warren Bixler’s treatise Defending the Juvenile.

Maddie had reached for her purse.

“My treat,” he had said.

“I insist.” She had stuffed a ten dollar bill in his shirt pocket.

A calendar featuring an advertisement for an insurance agency hung on the partition behind her desk, its blocks black with tiny printing. The third week of June with a single entry, “Levy trial, Suffolk Sup.”, stood out like empty squares in a nearly completed crossword puzzle.

“Quiche isn’t good for you,” Siward said, “cholesterol and all.”

“Better than a hot pastrami sandwich.”

“Both samples may come from the same person.”

“May? Is that the best you can do?”

“I don’t have live blood.”

“Can you testify in court?”

“Would I survive cross-examination?”

“Are the results more probable than not?”

“Don’t know. I’ve never seen it referenced in the literature.”

“It’ll be a first. Write it up.”

“If this were peer reviewed, it would probably be rejected.”

“You doctors are all alike. You’ll say anything to avoid going to court.”

“I’m being honest with you, Maddie. I’m sorry if it doesn’t fit your agenda. Both samples may come from the same person. Or may not. If I had live blood, I could give you a more definitive answer.”

“Guilt and innocence may turn on this.”

“It’s the best I can do.”

She gave him another dollar. “Now that you’ve been paid by the defense, it’s privileged as attorney work product and you have to keep it confidential.”

Because of the way Ugolino had curtailed the police investigation, Maddie knew what would happen if word leaked out. The police pathologist would discover a labeling mistake on the slide. The stencil would now match a bag lady found dead in an abandoned subway station. What Rabbi ben Reuben had said after finding the defaced Torah unrolled on the floor of the sanctuary on the night of the seder now roiled her mind: “When I was done, I thought I had cut myself.”

Now, after several additional openings in the traffic, the car in front of her still hesitated. Maddie leaned on her horn. She was tempted to inch forward and kiss bumpers, anything to get that car to move. An oncoming driver, so unlike the typical Boston driver, slowed and waved for the car to merge ahead of him. About fucking time, Maddie thought. About fucking time.

Jacob Moskovitzky’s home health aide showed her to a room on whose walls hung dozens of photographs, old, soft focus, many sepia-toned from the era of big boxy cameras, hoods that draped the photographer, additional light not always synchronized with the opening and closing of the shutter. The photographs were of people, not places, all posed against a plain backdrop in a studio where conditions could be controlled. Photographs of men and women alone, men and women in couples, couples surrounded by a horde of children, multi-generational groupings, Moskovitzky’s family tree, Maddie assumed. She studied each photograph with children, searching for the one small child who had aged into the attorney who now told her that in his opinion Duncan Siward’s blood grouping test results were inadmissible into evidence at trial.

“I think I can coax Dr. Siward into testifying more probable than not.”

“If the judge did admit it, in this climate no juror would believe it.” Moskovitzky had said the same thing when Maddie told him Levy denied he had made the notations of the chess game in Bumper Sullivan’s spiral notebook.

“You only need one for a mistrial,” Maddie reminded him.

“The Messiah will return before someone open-minded enough to consider Avram innocent is seated on that jury.”

“Which is why I say a plea-bargain . . . ”

“Avram will not plead guilty to a crime he did not commit.”

Maddie detected a hitch in his voice. Chelsea had not persuaded him of Levy’s innocence as it had her. She decided to let it pass. Every difficult case needed to be leavened by the yeast of skepticism.

Moskovitzky struggled to lift himself out of his chair, refusing Maddie’s offer of help. Supporting himself with his cane, he walked over to a photograph of a man and woman and young child, a boy, wearing a dress as young boys often did in that era. A tear drained from his eye. In that tear, Maddie suddenly understood the symmetry between Levy and her grand da Michael, both victims of someone who bore false witness for profit. She wondered what her grand da would have done if the IRB had offered exile and banishment rather than death on the condition he admit being an informer, a traitor. Would he have confessed guilt to a crime he did not commit to save his life? Logic said he should, the same logic she had urged upon Moskovitzky moments ago, the same logic she had urged on the rabbi, the same logic both had rejected and rejected again, the same logic Levy had also rejected.

She had spent her career defending people for whom lying was as ordinary as jaywalking or running a stop sign, people for whom the truth was as disposable as a used condom or a wad of chewed gum. She wanted to believe her grand da was not one of those people. Levy’s courage, made it possible for her to do so. That was Levy’s gift to her. And what was her gift to him? A plea-bargain born of cowardice, rationalized by cowardice. No, her gift to him would be to transform what she knew to be true into admissible evidence so strong, so persuasive, that beyond a reasonable doubt it would convince the most Jew-hating juror, the most ardent member of Bumper’s Brigade, that Levy did not murder Bumper Sullivan.

Or to die trying.

 

-2-

 

Maddie Devlin drove around Roxbury, unable to locate the streets on her map because the street signs had been stolen from most of the intersections. When she asked for directions, people delighted in misleading her, if they responded at all. After an hour, she found Livermore Place and parked across from Blackbird’s. All neighborhoods had local bars, she thought, recalling how her da had frequented O’Driscoll’s several nights a week, always after dinner because her da insisted the family gather around the table at least once a day to share a meal. Small talk grew into large talk as conversation about what had happened in school or at work expanded into discussions of the difficulties of the Irish assimilating in nineteenth century Boston, the current troubles in Northern Ireland, and politics, always politics, Boston’s favorite blood sport.

Named for a poem by Yeats, O’Driscoll’s was her da’s local bar. Trish’s side of the family went to Mangan’s, opposite side of the street one block down. Although her da threw second darts for O’Driscoll’s, the team captain substituted for him when they threw at Mangan’s. Charlie, before he was mayor and still had time, never threw at O’Driscoll’s. Neither team agreed to throw against the other at a neutral site unless those substitutions were made. When Maddie came of age, she occasionally accompanied her da on Thursdays when O’Driscoll’s welcomed women. She drank her first Guinness there and remembered how everyone laughed when she spit up her first mouthful. She knew she would not be welcome now.

But, O’Driscoll’s wasn’t surrounded by vacant lots overflowing with bricks and cinder blocks, sheet rock and lumber, shingles and tar paper, the skeletons of so many buildings. And trash. Garbage. The decomposing bodies of dead household pets. The rats those decomposing bodies attracted. It reminded her of the South Bronx which as a child she had gawked at through the windows of the elevated subway on the way to the Bronx Zoo during the family’s one and only visit to New York. “America’s Dresden,” her da had said. She didn’t know what he meant then; she did now.

Like O’Driscoll’s, Blackbird’s had booths along the walls and tables in the center. A tall black man behind the bar polished glasses. Two customers, sat in a corner booth in the back, one in his late teens, the other in his early or middle twenties. Maddie doubted the alcohol police ran sting operations for underage drinkers in a bar like Blackbird’s. Nor did they have the balls to barge in and demand a bribe. She walked the length of the bar to where the bartender stood. “You Stilts? I’m looking for Mabi.” She handed him her business card which he discarded without a glance.

She placed a ten-dollar bill on the bar. Toying with her, the bartender poached a beer glass from a sink of soapy water, rinsed it, and wiped its inside with the ten spot, then tossed the soggy wad of green back at her. “Ask them boots in the corner.”

Maddie’s heartbeats played tag with each other as she walked over to the booth. Her heart had not fibrillated like this since the one and only time she had appeared before the United States Supreme Court to argue a search and seizure case. The Justices had done nothing to put her at ease, flame-throwing questions at her before she had finished introducing herself, silencing her in mid-sentence when her allotted time was up. She had maintained her composure then, she would maintain it now. “I’m looking for Mabi. I’m with Suffolk County Legal Services, the public defender.”

“He don’t need no defendin’,” one said. His voice crackled like the radio during a summer thunderstorm.

The other sipped coffee, holding the mug with both hands. “Stilts don’t brew it as good as my momma. Her coffee grinder broke down yesterday, but I was able to get it grinding again this morning.”

“I starvin’ for some sweet jelly roll,” the first one said. “I been living on stale dry cornbread all week.”

“Like sucking cardboard,” the other said. He turned to Maddie. “If you looking for Mabi, this the place. He holds calling hours downstairs.”

“I’ll wait here,” Maddie said.

“He don’t take meetings in public.”

“I’s Scorpion,” the first one rasped. “He’s Spider. You Devlin? The Jew’s attorney? I seen you on the tube. You real fly in the flesh.” Maddie intuited the unspoken “for a white cunt.”

Spider unlocked a door along the back wall. Scorpion grabbed her wrist, dragging her through it before she had a chance to resist. The lock clicked. They descended, one behind her, one in front. The stairwell was warm, like a furnace room, and narrow, built at a time when people were shorter and thinner. Her right arm brushed one wall, her left shoulder the other. Their footsteps echoed, the three of them sounding like six.

In her mind, Maddie ran through the various judo techniques she had learned in the women’s self-defense class her da had insisted she take. They were always taught and practiced on flat surfaces, floors with mats. Never on stairs. Nagi-Wazi or throwing techniques, Te-Waza or hand techniques, Ashi-Waza or foot techniques, with any of these the three of them were likely to tumble into a pile-up at the bottom of the stairs. If there were Tachi-Waza or standing techniques that could be used on stairs, she had not learned them. Her da was right when he scolded her for not enrolling in the advanced class.

A landing at the bottom of the stairs, too small, too cramped, to extend her arms or legs. It would be like trying judo moves in an over-crowded elevator. Another door opened with the squeal of metal rubbing against metal. Behind her, a door closed with the slam of wood against wood. Again, metal screeched on metal and a light revealed a small room, sparsely furnished, but crowded by a double bed against the wall opposite the door covered with a ratty olive-green blanket, a chest of drawers, and a rocking chair. Scuff marks wore a path in the linoleum from the door to the bed.

“This the place where Stilts blows the blues when his old lady’s locked him out,” Spider said.

Before she could attack, Spider kicked her legs out from under her and slammed her on to the bed. His knee nose-dived to her chest between her breasts, pinning her to the mattress. Panting, she struggled to suck air into her lungs. When her breathing returned to normal, she scissor-kicked, then swung her legs, first to the right, then to the left, but lacked the leverage needed to free herself. She went limp to give herself time to regain her strength and think through the situation. Let them think they’ve won was one of the lessons she learned in her self-defense class. They’ll relax, get careless, give you an opening. Unlike judo moves, this strategy could not be practiced in the gym.

“Sing the lady some verses,” Scorpion said. A lifetime of cigarettes had turned Scorpion’s larynx into a chip of hickory charcoal. He ran a few scales up and down a harmonica, then blew the plaintive wail familiar to whites who went to college when Maddie did and prided themselves on being able to identify the bluesmen who influenced the Rolling Stones.

 

Spider started singing:

 

I got a sweet woman;

She lives right back the jail.

She’s got a sign on her window,

Good cabbage for sale.

 

“That the ‘Low Down Blues’,” Scorpion said. “Jelly Roll Morton. Bessie Smith she’s my favorite.”

 

Again, Spider sang:

 

He boiled my first cabbage,

And he made it awful hot.

When he put in the bacon

It overflowed the pot.

 

“‘Empty Bed Blues,’” Spider said, “but we got no call singing them now.”

The heating pipes lining the ceiling clanged. The air, heated and dried by those pipes, smelled musty from the evaporated sweat of a multitude of people baked into the mattress, the blanket, the chair’s upholstery.

Moving like a flash of summer lightening, Spider wadded his handkerchief into a ball and stuffed it in Maddie’s mouth, gagging her with a piece of rope before she could spit it out. She tried to counter with an obi tori gaeshi or belt grab reversal, but her fingers slipped before she could close them around his belt. She reached out to attempt a kata guruma or shoulder wheel, but he twisted her arm and pinned her in a full-nelson before she could complete the move.

Spider whistled while Scorpion stripped her blouse off. As he fumbled with the hook of her bra, his long fingernails scratched the small of her back. With his belt, he bound her wrists behind her. Maddie had studied Ma-Sutemi-Waza or back sacrifice techniques and Yoko-Sutemi-Waza or side sacrifice techniques in her self-defense class, but none with her hands bound behind her at the wrists. Still pinned to the mattress, she lacked the leverage to use her legs for Kansetsu-Waza or joint locking techniques.

Judo had never failed Maddie. Never. Not even the time she was attacked by the brothers and cousin of a prostitute sentenced to hard time for murdering her john. Her best efforts could not negate the DNA evidence found on the prostitute and the victim. They weren’t seeking revenge, these men, because they loved and cared for their sister and cousin; but, rather, because they had lost their meal ticket. Years later, whether released after serving her sentence or due to the leniency of the parole board, she’d be so old, so haggard, she wouldn’t turn enough tricks to pay for a light snack for one of them, much less three. Judo had not failed her then even though she was out-numbered three-to-one.

She searched her catalog of wazas, desperate to find one that might work, but her mind had gone blank as if her subconscious had accidentally hit the delete key, erasing all she had learned in her self-defense class. Out of breath, Maddie attempted to roll over to cover herself, but Scorpion grabbed her shoulder and flipped her on her back. The stink of his sweat gagged her. She blamed herself, not because of the single-mindedness that brought her to Blackbird’s; but because she failed to translate their language into her language. For years she had defended street blacks, listened to their talk without trying to understand what they said, assumed they were saying nothing worth hearing. Now her ignorance, her racism, as quiet and concealed as it was, condemned her.

Spider rolled two blunts, lit them with a wooden kitchen match, and handed one to Scorpion. Maddie hated dope heads, especially the rapists she defended who claimed they were too high to know what they were doing. When Spider turned to face her, his crotch bulged. She struggled to pull her hands apart.

Scorpion took a penny from his pocket and flipped it. “Call it, man.” His voice grated like a dull hand saw scraping against a piece of green hardwood.

“Heads.”

The coin hung in the air, then landed in Scorpion’s palm. He slapped it on the back of his other hand and showed it to Spider. Maddie studied their faces for a clue as to heads or tails. When Scorpion asked Spider to roll him another, she knew.

She wished she could dull her nerve endings until her whole body felt like it was shot through with Novocain, but there was nothing to distort her senses except fear and fear was an ineffective anesthetic. Her arms ached from the weight of her body. The acrid smoke irritated her eyes and nose.

Scorpion unbuckled her slacks. His knuckles scraped her abdomen as he unzipped her pants. He curled his fingers around the elastic band of her underpants and lifted her off the bed. “Never seen pussy that color before.”

“’Member when Edwina dyed her hair that color?” Spider asked. “She dyed her pussy to match.”

“Ugly cunt that woman had.”

Spider laughed. “Fucking ugly.”

“But not too ugly to fuck.”

Scorpion rolled Maddie onto her stomach and spread her legs. A spring sticking out of the mattress scratched her. He took off his pants. The zipper sounded like one of Boston’s trolleys scraping the side of the tunnel. She thought she heard another sound, footsteps on the stairs or someone walking around in the bar upstairs. The heating pipes clanged. Scorpion grabbed the inside of her thighs and forced her legs apart until she felt she was being split open like a lobster claw by a man ravenous with hunger. Did she hear the sound again? She no longer trusted her senses. Too many sensations assaulted her, the feel of hands on her thighs, the smell of sweat, the sight of stains on the mattress, the smell of the dope, the taste of the handkerchief in her mouth, and a sound her mind might have created, or if it were real, the sound of a rat scurrying through the cellar, knocking something over.

The mattress shook. Scorpion knelt between her legs. He yanked her ass upwards by her hip bones. Spider slipped a pillow under her stomach.

“Get it on, man,” Spider said. “I expected home for supper.”

“Tell her you already ate.”

“Shit to pay if I don’t feed her right.”

The noise again. Closer. More distinct. Am I hallucinating? Maddie wondered. Is this how women react while being raped? She wanted to scream, but the handkerchief gagged her. Panic triggered new urges, strange urges, urges she had never had before, the urge to take a knife and castrate Spider and Scorpion and dump their balls into a toilet and flush them into the sewers to be eaten by rats. If she had a gun, she’d blow their heads off without hesitation. Her impacted rage ran wild. The benefits of years of therapy, of cognitive restructuring, of practicing impulse control, vanished as if she had never been to Dr. Przystas. For her mind to survive, provided her body did, she would have to begin again at the beginning, a new twelve session protocol, group and individual. This angered her as much as the horror of being raped by Spider and Scorpion.

This new urge, this urge to hurt, to maim, to kill, overwhelmed her. This sudden blood lust to kill lifted her mind out of her body to places she had not anticipated.

A recidivist once told her only the first killing was hard. All the others were fun. His words echoed through her mind like a refrain. She willed her mind away from thinking about the pillow under her stomach or the hands on her buttocks or the mattress spring grinding into her skin or the sweaty smell clinging to her like a wet film. All the others were fun.

Instead, she visualized cutting off their manhood, Spider’s and Scorpion’s. She visualized the blood flowing down their legs, a scalpel peeling the skin off their faces. She heard their screams. She reveled in the writhing of their death dances, the grinding gears of their death rattles. Yet, she felt neither guilt, nor remorse. No one would condemn her act of vengeance.

If she killed tonight, she knew she would kill again tomorrow. All blacks, young and old, male and female, would, for her, now be Spider or Scorpion. Now she understood how the blood lust of hatred began. From her deepest fears floated a thought, a solitary frightening thought, the thought that, yes, all the others would be fun. She doubted she would be the same person again. She would not want to be.

A new sound. Familiar. A spring, rusty, being stretched. Metal against metal. Louder. More persistent. How much time since the footsteps. Two seconds? Five? Ten? Time had stopped. Metal against metal again. Over her shoulder. A man as large as he was black. His body filled the door frame. His head extended to the lintel.

“She ready for riding,” Spider said. “You want firsts?”

“Cut her loose.”

“Fucking A I will.”

“Do it.”

Spider unknotted the belt, untied the gag, pulled the handkerchief from her mouth. Maddie wiggled her jaw back and forth and wrapped herself in the blanket. She itched as the coarse cloth scratched her. The inside of her mouth felt stuffed with cotton. Mabi rummaged through her purse and tossed her car keys to Spider. “Move her ride to the Government Center garage.”

“Ain’t no Cadillac,” Scorpion said.

“All you riding today.”

“Shit, man,” Spider said. “Pussy for one, pussy for all.”

“She’s Badger’s ticket.”

“No reason we can’t punch it first,” Spider said.

“Give damaged goods, get damaged goods. Now move your asses.”

“Little fucking never damaged nobody.”

Mabi stood before her. An ebony statue. She hated racist metaphors, but once again she was a prisoner of language. She didn’t know any other way to phrase her thoughts. He was blacker than any black she had ever seen. Coal on ice. She felt so illiterate. A drop of saliva, the first, moistened her mouth. Her tongue felt lumpy against her teeth. The blanket irritated her skin. She wanted to scratch–her sides, her thighs, her back, her breasts; but she refused to open the blanket, refused to expose herself. Her calves were falling asleep under the weight of her body, but stretching her legs would uncover her vaginal area. She craved a damp cloth to wipe between her breasts, along her thighs, her crotch. She yearned to stand, to extend her arms and legs so no part of her skin touched any other. She drew her cocoon closer. Mabi victimized her with his silence as she had hundreds of witnesses during her legal career. “Why’d you stop them?” she asked at last.

She felt like a trial attorney facing a surprise witness. Strategies scrolled through her mind. She searched for one that would allow her to regain control. She had to out-think him, she realized. She was too drained, physically, emotionally, to try and out-muscle him. She saw no percentage in being trade bait. Ugolino might refuse the trade; Mabi might double-cross him. She understood, now, how her da survived Guadalcanal, how her namesakes endured Kilmainham, how her grand da had the courage to stand before the firing squad. If the Trojans were going to gangbang her to death, fuck ’em. If she had any control, it derived from knowing Mabi or some other Trojan had killed Bumper and used his blood to desecrate the Torah. How else would Bumper’s blood get from his body to the stencil to the swastikas? What other Trojan? It was Mabi who played chess with Bumper that night. Coincidence? Unlikely. Circumstantial? Probably, but circumstantial evidence was a weak foundation to build a defense on. If she could convince Mabi that she shared this knowledge with others, that her disappearance would finger him, maybe he’d free her. Bullshit, she thought; but what choice did she have? None but to go for the jugular. And, if it were hers, well, bleeding to death was an honorable way to die as long as the wound was not self-inflicted.

“Why’d you kill Bumper Sullivan?”

His hand surrounded the base of her throat. His fingers encircled her neck. He squeezed and she realized he could break her neck as easily as a child could snap a twig. She had lost at Russian roulette. She now faced the same choice Ann Devlin had faced in Kilmainham when she suffered years of torture without betraying Robert Emmet. It was her turn to answer Yeats’s question–“What is this sacrifice?”–and the answer would have to be the same in the basement of Blackbird’s as it was on a dead street in Chelsea or in the street in front of the Dublin post office in 1916 or when her grand da faced the IRB firing squad. No wonder skulls on old grave stones always laughed.

 

-3-

 

As the white hot sun melded into early evening red, Silvy, Cealy, Mabi, and Dr. John Obeah waited in the Thomas’s kitchen for Beaujolais Wine to deliver Badger. Obeah’s presence quieted the bickering between Mabi and Silvy. Every few minutes as if set off by some internal alarm, Cealy shook her hands at the ceiling and begged the good Lord to hurry home her Badger.

“You giving us fits, Cealy Thomas,” Silvy said.

“The Lord don’t listen to them who don’t talk.”

Twilight deepened to the moment between day and night when there were no shadows. At last, Beaujolais arrived with Badger. Dr. Obeah administered a thorough physical, poking Badger’s abdomen, chest, and the fleshy parts of the neck with his fingers, listening to his heart and lungs, examining his teeth, eyes, ears and throat, inspecting his groin and scrotum, taking his pulse, blood pressure, and temperature and checking his skin for bruises, welts, or other abrasions.

“How you feeling, son?”

“I ain’t your son.”

“Answer the man,” Mabi said.

“Like when I popped my first cherry.”

“You ain’t popped no cherries,” Mabi said.

“He’s prime,” Dr. Obeah said.

Mabi telephoned Stilts at Blackbird’s. “Tell Spider to scare shit into Devlin’s pants, but no hurts. Not even a bruise.” He turned to Silvy. “I kept my promise, so let’s go where we won’t be intruding on this mother and child reunion.”

“Only ’cause Hannah gave me words for you and I promised to deliver them.”

“That all I’m worth, second-hand words?”

“You wish.”

At his place, Mabi tried to put his arms around her.

“My love’s not coming down for you no more.”

“Fuck why?”

“For the way you making Badger your legacy. I’m taking him down home.” She paused. “And for what you done to Mayor Charlie’s kid.”

“I done nothing to that kid.”

She returned his gaze, even up and twice as hard. “Hannah knows. She’s not deaf, dumb, and blind, your momma.”

“What she know?”

“And them Falashas from the African Meeting House. You know what they be?”

“Some African tribe.”

“Some Jew African tribe. Shit! You as Jewish as that fucking Levy.”

“You lying lying or lying true?”

“Lying true.”

“Jim Ed?”

“Never knowed.” Silvy paused. “What goes ’round comes ’round.”

 

-4-

 

Maddie did not sleep that night. After her release from Blackbird’s, she took a bus to a neighborhood where she could hail a cab that would take her to the Government Center parking garage. When the garage elevator opened at the seventh floor, Spider jumped in and pushed the emergency stop button. Without saying a word, he crouched over her, pinning her shoulders with his knees. Like a drunken barber, he sheared her hair. She refused to scream, resolved not to give him the satisfaction. She lay as still as she could while he pulled her hair away from her scalp and chopped it off at the roots. More than once he drew blood.

At home, with an envelope of hair mixed with dirt and debris from the elevator floor, she felt like an escaped prisoner of war. Mabi had not confessed, at least not verbally, but she felt confident she had solved Bumper Sullivan’s murder. If she died before sharing her information, Mabi would fly free and Levy would be convicted. Reaching for a tissue, she knocked Elizabeth’s hospital photograph off the night table. “Baby Girl Gloucester.” Her eyes were closed, her skull misshapen, her skin wrinkled. Indentations from the forceps distorted the sides of her head. It had taken a month for the indentations to fill in. Maddie righted the photo.

At her make-up table, she looked herself in the eye, a stare-down with her soul to see who blinked first. When neither did, line by line she filled one page after another in a legal pad with a detailed statement of the information she had gathered and the inferences she drew from it. She explained the link between Bumper Sullivan’s murder and the desecration of the synagogue and why she concluded Mabi and the Trojans had committed both crimes. She recounted seeing al-Saffah’s name in Ugolino’s guest register and his testifying at the bail hearing, facts that in her mind established he was part of the plot. She described what had happened in the basement of Blackbird’s, recreating what Mabi had said almost verbatim. She included a paragraph on Spider’s assault in the parking garage elevator. She explained why she did not take this information to Ugolino, his attempt to bribe her with a Superior Court judgeship. She listed the physical evidence–the slide with the blood, the blood-stained stencil, Duncan Siward’s report, Badger’s identification bracelet, a remnant of olive blanket from Blackbird’s, the plastic bag with her hair and debris from the elevator floor, the photocopy of the last page of Bumper’s spiral notebook–and where she hid it all. The more she wrote, the calmer she felt, calm enough to end her statement with Yeats’s epitaph:

 

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by!

 

Come morning, she would mail copies to Rabbi ben Reuben, Moskovitzky, Duncan Siward, Uncle George, and Trish Sullivan. She thought about adding a note to Trish’s copy, but what would she say? That jail no longer ran in the Devlin blood? But it did. More than ever. Their past may have been rewritten, revised, corrected, but it was still the death row within which they were imprisoned.

In the bathroom, Maddie moistened her head with a hot towel and shaved her scalp, not a fashion statement but an act of defiance, a battle scar she would wear proudly, exposed to the world rather than hidden beneath a scarf or wig. And if people mistook her for a cancer victim undergoing radiation or chemotherapy, let them; in a sense a cancer had lived within her since birth and now, at long last, she was vanquishing her disease.

Too charged up to sleep, she poured herself a Guinness, emptying the bottle straight down the center of the glass. Her father scolded her the first time she poured Guinness that way, but she liked to watch the brown foam rise to the rim, then recede as the black liquid rose in its place. The clock on the wall chimed the half-hour, 3:30 a.m.

She telephoned Michelle Furey. “I need a will.”

“At this hour?”

“Can you come here? I don’t want to go out.”

“You all right?”

“I will be when I have a will.”

“What about witnesses? I need two witnesses.”

“Please.”

While Maddie waited, she dumped the contents of her purse on the kitchen table and rifled through the mess, looking for the scrap of paper with the name of Uncle George’s Dublin hotel. It was among the food coupons in her supermarket envelope.

When Harriman came on the line, Maddie said, “Mabi killed Bumper.” The echo of her voice and the slight time lag in his response unnerved her.

“You sound in an awful way.”

She read him her statement.

“Prepare a second original in your own handwriting. Sign each page and hide it with the evidence so I can find it.”

Minutes later the front door buzzer sounded and Maddie let Michelle Furey into the building. “Christ, Maddie.” Furey recoiled. “What happened to you?”

Maddie led her to the kitchen table, offered her a Guinness, which Furey refused. “I need a will.”

“Come to my office in the morning. We’ll do it right. Witnesses. All the formalities.”

“I need it now.” Maddie patted the side of her head to straighten strands of hair that were no longer there. “Morning may be too late.”

“Chemotherapy? Is that why you shaved your head?”

“Read this.” Maddie gave Furey her statement.

“My folks have a cabin up country. Middle of nowhere. We can hide out there.”

“I’m done hiding out. Never again.”

Furey gazed at Maddie with the resignation, the understanding, of someone visiting a beloved relative on her death-bed. The sadness in Furey’s eyes comforted Maddie, told her that Furey cared.

“We could do a holographic will,” Furey said. “It’s better than nothing. It has to be in your handwriting. I’ll dictate the language.”

Maddie wrote as Furey spoke, then signed each page as well as the signature line on the last page attesting that she intended this holographic will to be her “last will and testament signed freely and voluntarily for the purposes set forth therein and with full knowledge and understanding of its contents.” Peace veiled Maddie in an inner calm. “Kiss me,” she said.

“I love you,” Maddie said after they made love. “Now, skedaddle.”

“I want to stay.”

“No. If it’s to be my fate, it’s my fate alone.”