Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

Thomas climbed down, surprised to see the shakes in his forearms even after he entered his house. He was getting old, very old. He shouldn’t be up on ladders. He shouldn’t be standing on principle.

The way of the old was to allow the new to push you aside with as much grace as you could muster.

He called Kenny Donlan, the captain of the Third District in Mattapan. For five years, Kenny had been Thomas’s lieutenant at the Sixth in South Boston. Like many of the department command staff, he owed his success to Thomas.

“And on your day off no less,” Kenny said when his secretary patched Thomas through.

“Ah, there’s no days off for the likes of us, boy.”

“That’s the truth of it,” Kenny said. “How can I help you, Thomas?”

“One-four-one-seven Blue Hill Avenue,” Thomas said. “It’s a warehouse, supposedly for gaming parlor equipment.”

“But that’s not what’s in there,” Kenny said.

“No.”

“How hard do you want it hit?”

“Down to the last bottle,” Thomas said, and something inside him cried out as it died. “Down to the last drop.”

That summer at Charlestown Penitentiary the Commonwealth of Massachusetts prepared to execute two famous anarchists. Global protests didn’t deter the state from its mission, nor did a flurry of last-minute appeals, stays, and further appeals. In the weeks after Sacco and Vanzetti were taken to Charlestown from Dedham and housed in the Death House to await the electric chair, Joe’s sleep was interrupted by throngs of outraged citizens gathered on the other side of the dark granite walls. Sometimes they remained there through the night, singing songs and shouting through megaphones and chanting their slogans. Several nights Joe assumed they brought torches to add a medieval flavor to the proceedings because he’d wake to the smell of burning pitch.

Other than a few nights of fitful sleep, however, the fate of the two doomed men had no effect on the lives of Joe or anyone he knew except for Maso Pescatore, who’d been forced to sacrifice his nightly strolls atop the prison walls until the world stopped watching.

On that famous night in late August, the excess voltage used on the hapless Italians sapped the rest of the electricity in the prison, and the lights on the tiers flickered and dimmed or snapped off entirely. The dead anarchists were taken to Forest Hills and cremated. The protestors dwindled and then went away.

Maso returned to the nightly routine he’d been following for ten years—walking the tops of the walls along the thick, curled wire and the dark watchtowers that overlooked the yard within and the blasted landscape of factories and slums without.

He often took Joe with him. To his surprise, Joe had become some kind of symbol to Maso—whether as the trophy scalp of the high-ranking police officer now under his thumb or as a potential member of his organization or as a puppy, Joe didn’t know, and he didn’t ask. Why ask when his presence on the wall beside Maso at night clearly stated one thing above all others—he was protected.

“Do you think they were guilty?” Joe asked one night.

Maso shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is the message.”

“What message? They executed two fellas who might have been innocent.”

“That was the message,” Maso said. “And every anarchist in the world heard it.”

Charlestown Penitentiary spilled blood all over itself that summer. Joe first believed the savagery to be innate, the pointless dog-eat-dog viciousness of men killing each other over pride—in your place in line, in your right to continue walking to the yard on the path you’d chosen, in not being jostled or elbowed or having the toe of your shoe scuffed.

It turned out to be more complicated than that.

An inmate in East Wing lost his eyes when someone clapped handfuls of glass into them. In South Wing, guards found a guy stabbed a dozen times below his ribs, entrance wounds that, judging by the odor, had perforated his liver. Inmates two tiers down smelled the guy die. Joe heard of all-night rape parties on the Lawson block, the block so named because three generations of the Lawson family—the grandfather, one of his sons, and three grandsons—had all been jailed there at the same time. The last one, Emil Lawson, had once been the youngest of the Lawson inmates but always the worst of them, and he was never getting out. His sentences added up to 114 years. Good news for Boston, bad news for Charlestown Pen. When he wasn’t leading gang rapes of new fish, Emil Lawson did murder for whoever paid him, though he was rumored to be working exclusively for Maso during the recent troubles.

The war was fought over rum. It was fought on the outside, of course, to some public consternation, but also on the inside, where no one thought to look and wouldn’t have shed a tear if they had. Albert White, an importer of whiskey from the north, had decided to branch out into importing rum from the south before Maso Pescatore was released from prison. Tim Hickey had been the first casualty in the White-Pescatore war. By the end of the summer, though, he was one of a dozen.

On the whiskey end of things, they shot it out in Boston and Portland and along the back roads that branched off the Canadian border. Drivers were run off roads in towns like Massena, New York; Derby, Vermont; and Allagash, Maine. Some were hijacked with just a beating, though one of White’s fastest drivers was forced to his knees in a bed of pine needles and had his jaw blown off at the hinge because he’d talked sass.

As for rum, the battle was waged to keep it out. Trucks were waylaid as far south as the Carolinas and as far north as Rhode Island. After they were coaxed to the shoulder and the drivers were convinced to vacate their cabs, White’s gangs set fire to the trucks. Rum trucks burned like Viking funeral boats, yellowing the underside of the night sky for miles in every direction.

“He’s got a stockpile somewhere,” Maso said on one of their walks. “He’s waiting until he’s bled New England of rum, and then he’ll ride in, the savior, with his own supply.”

“Who’d be stupid enough to supply him?” Joe knew of most of the suppliers in South Florida.

“It’s not stupid,” Maso said. “It’s smart. It’s what I’d do if I had to choose between a slick operator like Albert and an old man who’s been inside since before the czar lost Russia.”

“But you’ve got eyes and ears everywhere.”

The old man nodded. “But they’re not exactly my eyes and they’re not exactly my ears so they’re not connected to my hand. And my hand wields the power.”

That night, one of the guards on Maso’s payroll was off duty in a South End speakeasy when he left with a woman no one had ever seen before. A real looker, though, and definitely a pro. The guard was found three hours later in Franklin Square, sitting on a bench, a canyon cut through his Adam’s apple, deader than Thomas Jefferson.

Maso’s sentence ended in three months, and it was all starting to feel a bit desperate on Albert’s part, and the desperation only made things more dangerous. Just last night, Boyd Holter, Maso’s best forger, had been tossed off the Ames Building downtown. He’d landed on his tailbone, pieces of his spine spitting up into his brainpan like gravel.

Maso’s people responded by blowing up one of Albert’s fronts, a butcher’s shop on Morton Street. The hairdresser and the haberdashery on either side of the butcher also burned to the ground, and several cars along the street lost their windows and paint.

So far, no winner, just a lot of mess.

Along the wall, Joe and Maso stopped to watch an orange moon as big as the sky itself rise over the factory smokestacks and the fields of ash and black poison, and Maso handed Joe a folded piece of paper.