Роберт Паркер - All Our Yesterdays

“You mean Mellen? For Crissake, you just got married.”

“It’s not Mellen.”

The vice detective kissed the nine ball into a side pocket and set himself up for the ten ball in the corner. He laughed, and took a pull from an unlabeled brown beer bottle.

“Conn, Goddammit, if I’m gonna get shot because of you I want to know why.”

Knocko pointed a thick forefinger at Conn’s chest.

“Is there anything in there? Is there anything scares you, or makes you happy, or does anything?”

Conn took a deep swallow of whiskey. He felt it move inside him, spreading through him the way it did. He listened to the click of the balls on the pool table.

“No, there isn’t,” Conn said softly.

There was a sound in Conn’s voice that Knocko had never heard. Suddenly, Knocko didn’t know what to say. The two men sat silently. The vice detective finished his solitary pool game. He put his cue stick away, drank the rest of his beer, racked the balls, and left. The bartender was at the other end of the bar reading a newspaper. Conn and Knocko were alone.

“I was in love,” Conn said. “She turned me in to the English.”

“During the troubles.”

Conn nodded. He was looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

“And that’s it? That’s why you don’t care about anything? I mean, I ain’t trying to tell you it was nothing, but, Conn, people get over things.”

“I’m over it,” Conn said. “I stopped caring about it a long time ago. But it was so hard to stop caring about her that I had to stop caring about everything. You understand that?”

Knocko shrugged. “So what’s that got to do with wanting to shoot the Chinamen?”

Conn stared into his whiskey glass, turning it slowly in his hands.

“I won’t let anybody threaten me,” he said. “One of the rules. You got no feelings, rules get to be important. You know?”

“You ever have any fun?” Knocko said.

“Sure I have fan. I fuck, I drink, I like a good meal.”

“Nothing else?”

“That’s about it.”

“How about Mellen?” Knocko said.

Conn shrugged.

“You knock her up?” Knocko said.

Conn nodded.

“Christ,” Knocko said. “I coulda sent her someplace. You didn’t have to fucking marry her.”

Conn shrugged again.

“I know,” he said.

“So why did you?”

“Why not?” Conn said.

Knocko was silent. Conn was silent, staring at his drink.

“That woman,” Knocko said finally. He didn’t look at Conn. He looked instead at the mirror. “The one in Ireland... That woman killed you, Conn.”

“I know.”

Conn raised his head slowly. Two tears ran silently down his face. They both saw the tears in the bar mirror.

“Oh, shit,” Knocko said.

“Knocko said Conn wasn’t really on the take,” I said. “Knocko was, and proud of it; but he says Conn didn’t really care about taking money or not taking money. When Knocko worked up some graft, Conn would take some, the way you might share some popcorn if it was offered. But he never seemed interested.

“Marrying Mellen didn’t change him any.”

“No,” Grace said. “I imagine not.”

“Mellen became somebody he serviced as necessary, and other women was where he put his money. I guess he didn’t solicit graft, that was Knocko’s deal, but stylish womanizing was expensive. This was during the Depression, remember, and a guy with a little money could buy a lot of things. He could take them to the air-conditioned movie theater. He could take them to eat at Locke-Ober’s. He could give some stumblebum a dollar for an apple. He could afford a room in a good hotel for seductions. There were about five million people unemployed the year my father was conceived, but Conn Sheridan was not one of them. He had steady work.

“My father was born, a little, ah, premature on the seventeenth of September, 1932. Conn took Mellen to the hospital about four o’clock in the morning and then sat and read stories in Black Mask magazine, which he probably found pretty funny, being an actual cop. Nothing happened, so he left and went down on Canal Street to an all-night movie and watched Paul Muni in Scarface which he probably found pretty funny too and came out and had some eggs and bacon in a diner under the elevated and went back to the hospital where Mellen was lying in bed crying and feeding his son, Augustus Sheridan, my father, who at the time weighed just under seven pounds, as befits a kid slightly premature... I like to think Conn felt something, that he saw his son and felt something for the first time since Hadley turned him in... But I don’t know if he did or not. Gus says he thinks Conn tried. But... what I know is that Mellen could never really see Gus the way new mothers are supposed to see new babies. He was an emblem of her sin. And from the day of his birth he never looked at her face and saw joy.”

Conn lay quietly on his back on his side of the bed, his hands behind his head.

“We haven’t done it, since before Gus was born,” Conn said.

Mellen was in the bed beside him. It was a big bed. There was space between them.

“I know.”

“Kid’s three years old,” Conn said.

“I’m sorry,” Mellen said.

The ornamental tops of the bedposts always reminded Conn of asparagus tips. The posts themselves were shaped like fluted baseball bats. Conn used to think what fine bludgeons they would make, if you sawed them off.

“Sure you are,” Conn said. “So’s my pecker.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” Mellen said.

“Or think like that,” Conn said without anger. “Or be like that.”

Mellen lay quite stiffly on her side of the bed, her face turned away from Conn. Her rosary beads lay in a neat gather on her bedside table.

“What we did before we were married was sinful,” she said. Her voice was flat.

“A couple of Our Fathers should take care of it,” Conn said, “a nice act of contrition.”

“Please,” Mellen said, “don’t mock the Church.”

“Hard not to,” Conn said. “All the pantywaist priests looking to diddle the altar boys.”

Mellen turned onto her side, away from Conn, and put her hands over her ears.

“May God forgive you,” she said. Her voice seemed frozen.

“He might,” Conn said quietly. “You won’t. You’ll never forgive me. Hell, you’ll never forgive yourself.”

“Our marriage is founded on mortal sin, Conn. Our son is the product of mortal sin.”

“And you won’t forgive him either, will you?”

With her back to him and her knees drawn up, Mellen was gracelessly angular under the covers. She clutched the bedspread about her shoulders, as if she were cold, though the June night outside their bedroom was very mild.

“What you can’t stand,” Conn said thoughtfully, as if he were talking to himself, “is that you liked it.”

She made no sound.

“That’s the dirty little secret,” Conn said musingly, “and I found it out. You like to fuck, saints-preserve-us. And I’m the guy knows it. And I’m the guy proved it to you. You’re married to me because you like to fuck.”

Mellen stayed rigidly on her side with her back to him, the spread held tightly around her.

“And Gus, the poor little bastard, reminds you every day that he’s here because you like to fuck.”

Mellen began to pray to herself in a soft flat voice.

“ Hail Mary, fall of grace ...”

“You can never fuck again, but it won’t go away,” Conn said.

“ The Lord is with thee ...”

“The feeling will always be there.”