Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

“How long?” Digger said.

“Day after tomorrow,” Maso said. “We keep our heads down until then. Even that mick son of a bitch doesn’t have the pull to keep roadblocks up that long. We drive down to Miami, catch the train from there.”

“I want a girl,” Digger said.

Maso slapped his son hard in the back of the head. “What part of lying low don’t you understand? A girl? A fucking girl ? Why don’t you ask her to bring some friends, maybe a couple of guns, you dumb fuck.”

Digger rubbed his head. “A man has needs.”

“You see a man around here,” Maso said, “you point him out to me.”

They arrived at the seventh floor and Anthony Servidone met the lift. He handed Maso his room key and Digger his.

“You clear the room?”

Anthony nodded. “They’re clean. Every one. Whole floor.”

Maso had met Anthony in Charlestown, where everyone was loyal to Maso because it was death if you weren’t. Seppe, on the other hand, had come from Alcamo with a letter from Todo Bassina, the local boss, and had distinguished himself more times than Maso could count.

“Seppe,” he said now, “give the room another look.”

“Subito, capo. Subito.” Seppe’s Thompson cleared his raincoat and he walked through the men gathered outside Maso’s suite and let himself inside.

Anthony Servidone stepped in close. “They were seen at the Romero.”

“Who?”

“Coughlin, Bartolo, a bunch of Cubans and Italians on their side.”

“Coughlin, definitely?”

Anthony nodded. “No question.”

Maso closed his eyes for just a moment. “He even get a scratch?”

“Yeah,” Anthony said quickly, excited to deliver some good news. “Big cut on his head and took a slug to his right arm.”

Maso said, “Well, I guess we should wait for him to die of fucking blood poisoning.”

Digger said, “I don’t think we got that kind of time.”

And Maso closed his eyes again.

Digger walked down to his room with a man on either side of him as Seppe came back out of Maso’s suite.

“It’s all clear, boss.”

Maso said, “I want you and Servidone on the door. Everyone else better act like centurions on the Hun border. Capice? ”

“Capice.”

Maso entered the room and removed his raincoat and his hat. He poured himself a drink but from the bottle of anisette they’d sent up. Booze was legal again. Most of it, anyway. And what wasn’t, would be. The country had found sanity again.

A fucking shame, what it was.

“Pour me one, would ya?”

Maso turned, saw Joe sitting on the couch by the window. He had his Savage .32 sitting on his knee with a Maxim silencer screwed onto the muzzle.

Maso wasn’t surprised. Not even a little bit. Just curious about one thing.

“Where were you hiding?” He poured Joe a glass and brought it to him.

“Hiding?” Joe took the glass.

“When Seppe cleared the room?”

Joe used his .32 to point Maso to a chair. “I wasn’t hiding. I was sitting on the bed over there. He walked in and I asked him if he wanted to work for someone who’d be alive tomorrow.”

“That’s all it took?” Maso said.

“It took you wanting to place a fucking dunce like Digger in a position of power. We had a great thing here. A great thing. And you come in and fuck it all up in one day.”

“That’s human nature, isn’t it?”

“Fixing what ain’t broke?” Joe said.

Maso nodded.

“Well, shit,” Joe said, “it doesn’t have to be.”

“No,” Maso said, “but it usually is.”

“You know how many people died today because of you and your fucking greed? You, the ‘simple Wop from Endicott Street’? Well, you ain’t that.”

“Someday, maybe you’ll have a son and then you’ll understand.”

“Will I?” Joe said. “And what will I understand?”

Maso shrugged, as if to put it into words would sully it. “How is my son?”

“By now?” Joe shook his head. “Gone.”

Maso pictured Digger lying facedown on a floor in the next room over, a bullet in the back of his head, the blood pooling on the carpet. He was surprised by how deep and suddenly the grief overtook him. It was so black, so black and hopeless and horrific.

“I’d always wanted you for a son,” he said to Joe and heard his voice break. He looked down at his drink.

“Funny,” Joe said, “I never wanted you for a father.”

The bullet entered Maso’s throat. The last thing he ever saw was a drop of his blood landing in his glass of anisette.

Then it all went back to black.

When Maso fell, he dropped the glass and landed on his knees and his head hit the coffee table. It lay on the right cheek, empty eye staring at the wall to his left. Joe stood and looked at the silencer he’d picked up at the hardware store for three bucks that afternoon. Rumor was Congress was going to raise the price to $200 and then outlaw them entirely.

Pity.

Joe shot Maso through the top of the head just to be sure.

Out in the hall, they’d disarmed the Pescatore guns without a fight as Joe suspected they might. Men didn’t like to fight for a man who thought so little of their lives he’d put an idiot like Digger in charge. Joe exited Maso’s suite and closed the doors behind him and looked at everyone standing around, unsure what would happen next. Dion exited Digger’s room, and they stood in the hallway for a moment, thirteen men and a few machine guns.

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” Joe said. He looked at Anthony Servidone. “You want to die?”

“No, Mr. Coughlin, I do not want to die.”

“Anyone?” Joe looked around the hallway and got a bunch of solemn head shakes. “If you want to go back to Boston, head back with my blessing. You want to stay down here, get some sun, meet some pretty ladies, we got jobs for you. Ain’t too many people offering those these days, so let us know if you’re interested.”

Joe couldn’t think of anything else to say. He shrugged, and he and Dion got on the lift and took it down to the lobby.

Aweek later, in New York, Joe and Dion walked into an office at the back of an actuarial firm in Midtown Manhattan and sat across from Lucky Luciano.

Joe’s theory that the most terrifying men were also the most terrified went right out the window. There was no fear in Luciano. There was very little that resembled emotion, in fact, except a hint of black and endless rage in the furthest depths of his dead sea gaze.

The only thing this man knew about terror was how to infect other people with it.

He was dressed impeccably and would have been a handsome man if his skin didn’t look like veal that had been pounded with a meat tenderizer. His right eye drooped from a failed hit on him back in ’29 and his hands were large and looked like they could squeeze a skull until it popped like a tomato.

“You two hoping to walk back out that door?” he said when they took their seats.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then tell me why I gotta replace my Boston management group.”

They did, and as they talked, Joe kept looking for some indication in those dark eyes that he saw their point or didn’t, but it was like talking to a marble floor—the only thing you got back, if you caught the light right, was your own reflection.

When they finished, Lucky stood and looked out the window at Sixth Avenue. “You’ve made a lot of noise down there. What happened to that Holy Roller who died? Wasn’t her father police chief?”

“They forced him into retirement,” Joe said. “Last I heard he was at some kind of sanitarium. He can’t hurt us.”

“But his daughter did. And you let her. That’s why the word on you is that you’re soft. Not a coward. I didn’t say that. Everyone knows how close you got to take care of that yokel back in ’30 and that ship heist took brass ones. But you didn’t take care of that ’shiner back in ’31 and you let a dame—a fucking dame, Coughlin—block your casino play.”