THAT NIGHT, WHEN HIS brother died and returned from the dead, Liam was more grateful than ever to have Josh there with him.
They’d first met working for Joe, on his last caper: Liam as the youngest of the Madigan brothers, up-and-coming Irish hoodlums, Josh, freshly arrived from Israel, as a new member of Rebbe Stone’s crew. When Josh was shot, Liam had transported him to safety, and the unspoken attraction between them had bloomed. They’d been a couple ever since.
This day had started early, with a hijacking: a load of digital cameras, Chinese-made cellphones and fancy vacuum cleaners, the kind you strapped to your back. A guy Liam’s middle brother, Sean, drank with had tipped him off to it. He worked in the port of Newark and for a fee would let Sean know when the truck was leaving. The tricky part was how to take it: though more than one gangster had vanished into the surrounding swamplands, there was no way to guarantee that the truck would be heading down an empty road at a conveniently quiet hour. In fact, as it turned out, it was early morning, when the whole area was bustling.
Luckily, Liam had come up with a clever scheme and Josh, with his army training, had been able to implement it quite easily. Brandishing a fake manifest for a missing shipment, they walked onto the shipping company’s yard before the truck ever even left to pick up the container. They found the right vehicle and, while Liam stood lookout, Josh had crept under a wheel well and attached a small explosive device with a tiny radio transmitter.
Next, they got back in their own truck, a tow they had borrowed from their pal Cash, a highly successful car thief from the Chinese section of Flushing, who used a large junkyard called Reliable Scrap as his cover to strip and move stolen cars. They’d painted over the Reliable logo and switched the plates. Then, while the semi they had rigged was inside the port being loaded, they waited, drinking coffee and watching day break over the reed-filled wetlands, looking at the sun glint on the silver towers of chemical plants and burn through the wavering fumes while planes from Newark Liberty Airport passed, leaving jet trails overhead, listening to the songs of whatever strange birds could thrive in this wasteland and still find something to sing about.
“There it is.” Josh pointed.
“I’ve got it,” Liam said. “Let’s give him a little more rope.”
He put the tow truck in gear and slowly rolled out, while Josh got ready with the radio control. They let the truck get about fifty yards ahead on the road that led to the interstate, and then, as it cruised along between fenced-in waste ground, Josh pressed the button and the truck’s front right tire blew. The whole rig shimmied, as the driver fought to steady it. Air brakes huffing, he slowly pulled over. That’s when Liam drove up, honking, and stopped alongside.
“Hey,” he yelled to the driver. “I just saw that blowout. You need some help?”
“Good timing!” the driver called back.
“Let’s pull off over here,” Liam told him, and guided him slowly onto a broken asphalt side road that ran into the high weeds, screened from the traffic.
“Now then,” he said in his bright Irish accent, as he and Josh got out and met the driver as he climbed down from the cab. “Let’s see if we can be of some assistance.”
A few hours later, Liam and Josh drove the truck into a South Williamsburg warehouse owned by Menachem “Rebbe” Stone. It looked like any of the other Hasidic-owned warehouses that stretched along the street: a brick hulk with a fenced-in yard, weeds sprouting in the cracked concrete. A pimply young man in a wide-brimmed black hat, white shirt, and long coat, with a sparse reddish beard, pulled the gate back, and they backed in, parking with the rear of the truck at the loading dock. Another thickset fellow looked down from the roof and nodded at Josh as he climbed from the cab. He too was in black, and heavily black-bearded, as were most of the men here. A few younger men had short, trimmed beards like Josh and were in regular clothes—jeans and polo shirts or button-downs—but still with yarmulkes and tzitzit, the knotted threads, dangling from their undershirts. They opened the truck and quickly began unloading, passing cartons to a forklift that was likewise operated by a skullcap-wearing bearded man in a white shirt and black trousers—his missing jacket the only accommodation made to the oppressive heat inside the dusty warehouse. Josh sat on the truck fender and lit a cigarette and Liam sat beside him and watched: for a lad from Belfast this was exotic indeed. Then a stout, older man with a stringy gray beard that hung like a tie over his shirt passed by, muttering something that Liam couldn’t understand but that included the words “goyim” and “fagalah,” at least one of which he could guess at. He let it pass, figuring it wasn’t his place to intrude, but Josh felt different. As the mutterer passed, Josh reached out and grabbed his beard, hard, yanking him down so that he was bent nearly double and groaning. “What did you say?”
“Nothing, nothing . . .” the mutterer mumbled now, struggling but too scared to raise a hand.
Josh began singeing off strands of his beard with his lit cigarette. The man squealed and squirmed. Liam smelled burnt hair.
“You know what I did in the army don’t you? Do you know how many ways they taught me to hurt you just with this cigarette? Do you?” He yanked harder.
“No . . .” the man shook his head, still straining as the beard pulled at his flesh.
“I’m not sure either. Let’s count and see . . .”
“Yoshua!” a voice with an old-world lilt to it reached them from inside. Josh looked up. It was Rebbe, who had emerged from an inner office. “Stop fooling around and come here.”
Josh let go immediately and the man gasped, stumbling back as if released from a tether, and then scurried off. Josh handed his cigarette to Liam, who took a drag then stomped it out, grinning.
Rebbe put his arm around Josh and led him off to a corner. “Luzzem,” he said. “Don’t bother with that meskite. He’s a nobody. A nudnik. Not worth your time.”
“Yes sir,” Josh said.
“Your family back home, they’re okay?”
“Yes, everyone is fine, thank you.”
“And the job, no troubles?”
“No. Smooth.”
“Good work, boychick.” He squeezed his cheek, hard enough to leave an impression, then called to another tough-looking man in a long black beard and black suit. “Shlomo, get a couple cameras and one of those vacuums and put them in my trunk.”
In no time the goods were unpacked and distributed to camera and electronics stores run by Orthodox Jews as well as other dealers further down the pipeline: Black-owned appliance stores in Bed-Stuy, an Italian hardware shop in South Slope, even a discount place along Atlantic run by two Palestinian brothers. This was New York. Meanwhile, Liam and Josh disposed of the truck, leaving it under the BQE, had dinner at a Mexican place, and then circled back to pick up their share of the proceeds. It was a nice score, not at all bad for a day’s work, and Liam knew Sean would be pleased with how things turned out. He’d been complaining about money and had called a couple times to ask about the dough, so Liam was surprised when he finally called to say he had it and Sean didn’t even pick up. But then again, that was Sean. Jack, the eldest, was the grown-up, steady brother. He was married already with a second kid on the way, and the kind of tough guy who had no trouble using a gun but would rather try his fists first. The scar tissue on his knuckles testified how often that was sufficient.
Sean was the wild middle brother. The one who got into scrapes as a kid, dropped out of school, who got drunk and fought now, and who, Liam suspected, might have developed a taste for other substances as well. And Liam? He was the baby, the spoiled one, pretty and clever, who got top grades at school but still preferred the life of crime to the life of the mind, and found, when the time came, that violence, when necessary, caused him no bother at all. They’d been brought over from Ireland by Pat White, a distant relative and then the boss of what was left of the Westies, the Irish mob who once ran Hell’s Kitchen and still ran a share of bookmaking, extortion, robbery, political influence, and murder. But Pat had sold them out, and the Madigan brothers, with an assist from Gio, were in charge now.
“Mind if we swing by me brother’s?” Liam asked Josh now. “I know that eejit too well. Even if he’s dead drunk, he’ll wake up yowling for his money like a babe for a tit.”
“Of course not,” Josh said, squeezing his hand. “It’s a nice night for a drive.”
So they cruised up the West Side to the rent-controlled walk-up that Sean had taken over when the former occupant, a one-time bank robber turned FBI snitch named Harry Harrigan, had been disposed of. Now the Madigans controlled the building, along with most of Pat’s other assets, like the parking lot where they left Josh’s Volvo convertible.
They buzzed. No answer. Was he drinking at a local bar? If so, he would have answered his phone. A neighbor came out, opening the street door, and they climbed the stairs and rang. Still nothing, but he could hear the TV.
“Come on, wake up, you moron!” Liam yelled, banging the door. It swung open. At this both men froze. Liam reached down and pulled the revolver he had in his ankle holster. He glanced at Josh, who nodded, and carefully stepped in. The lights were on. The TV was playing. Sean was alone, spread on the couch. His face was white. His lips were blue. His eyes were staring up at nothing. Drool curled from his slack mouth. And a needle dangled from his arm.
It was Josh who knew what to do. He’d had medic training and it kicked into action. He immediately checked Sean’s pulse and breathing and then got him on the floor where he performed CPR. Liam watched, frozen in horror.
“Liam! You need to focus,” Josh yelled at him, as he pumped Sean’s chest. He tossed him his keys. “There’s a bag in the trunk of my car.”
Snapping out of it, Liam caught the keys and sprinted frantically down to the lot, running right past the attendant to fetch the small first aid kit, and came back, breathing hard. By then Liam had him breathing shallowly, alive, if just barely. He tore the kit open, found the Naloxone, and injected Sean. Instantly, he was back, rejoining the living with a scream that made it seem more like a nightmare than a joy, perhaps similar to the scream he’d uttered at birth.
Later, after they’d made sure Sean was all right, and he’d cried and apologized, and Liam had cried and cursed him out and then forgiven him, and they’d gotten Sean to bed (though not before he remembered to ask for his money), they shut the bedroom door, and Liam put his arms around Josh, his eyes still shined with tears. “You saved his life. I don’t know what to say. I was useless. Thank God for you, Josh.”
Josh smiled back. “You saved mine too, remember? And risked your own for me.”
Liam shook his head. “That’s shite. We were partners on a job and you were just wounded. This is different. He was dead. Dead.”
They gripped each other then, tight, and Liam, as if sharing a secret, whispered to him: “I love you.”
Josh whispered back, “I love you too.”
Before they left, Liam picked up the syringe and broke it with an expression of disgust. He threw it in the trash with the tarnished spoon Sean had used to cook the shot that had nearly killed him. That had killed him, Liam corrected himself, since his brother had died before Josh brought him back. And there on the coffee table beside it was a torn little envelope, coated with a trace of bitter powder, and stamped with the image of an angel, wings up, as though still poised to fly off with your soul.