Adrian McKinty - Dead I Well May Be

I finished my food, which was so loaded with MSG I was starting to see visions.

I said a pleasant cheerio and went outside and fixed my shades and my hat. Freddie was chin-wagging with some Costa Rican guy, and he introduced us and then he disturbed the hell out of me by asking if I was still seeing that big-chested, redheaded girl, which could only be Bridget, and here I was thinking that I was Mr. Secret Agent Man with her, but if the goddamned postie knew then half the fucking city knew.

I told him no, I’d never been seeing her and that he was mistaken.

I went down to the 125th IRT stop. I thought about calling Mrs. Shovel (her name was Rebecca); she wanted me to call, she would be waiting. But no. In New York, at least, Bridget was my girl. She was mine. It was all her. Darkey would fuck up. He’d hit her or get drunk; she’d come to me, we’d fly away together, over the ocean. Safe. Aye, oh aye…

The train came, and I took it to the Bronx.

It troubled me that now I was mixed up in a killing. We were implicated in the death of Dermot and surely this would amount to something. Surely the cops would be on my trail, pounding doors, relentless. That’s how it was on TV. But, in fact, Dermot’s death barely even registered. It made no difference whatsoever. A drop in the bucket. No one stuffed him with straw, so it didn’t even make the evening news.

I was still concerned, though, for if you look at the newspapers of the early nineties, they’re absolutely full of stuff about organized crime in New York. There were over three hundred FBI agents working on breaking the Mob’s power in New York City, and to your average reader it seemed that every bloody cannoli shop was bugged or videotaped and every second dough tosser in your local pizzeria was a bloody federal agent. You saw rat after rat and trial upon trial on TV, U.S. Attorney and later Mayor Giuliani grinning in the Sunday papers and boasting about how he was sticking it to the Families. It wasn’t him alone, by any means. I mean, there were the cops, the FBI, treasury men, state police, tax guys, even the fucking Royal Canadian Mounted Police. So you’d think with all this that it would be impossible around then to run an operation like Mr. Duffy’s or like Darkey’s, but it wasn’t.

It wasn’t at all.

For as exciting as the Mob story was in New York in the early nineties, the grander narrative wasn’t their decline, their collapse, their self-immolation. No, the big story was the drug-addled slaughter taking place nightly in Harlem and the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy. The big story was who was moving into the vacuum created by the decline and fall of the Mafia.

And the truth was that above 110th Street the rules were different. No one seemed to care about what happened up there; certainly, in all the time that I was in Harlem and Washington Heights, I never came across a single agent, a single narc, a single goon.

Not that it would have made much difference even if the Feds had ventured north of 110th, because Darkey was very smart. Very goddamned smart. Darkey concerned himself only with recent Irish immigrants, the poor wee illegal weans fleeing 30 percent unemployment and a civil war and of whom there were tens of thousands in Riverdale, Washington Heights, and the odd wee pocket in the Bronx. Those boys and girls weren’t going near the cops, never mind the United States government. It wasn’t Boston and it wasn’t San Francisco, but look at the INS figures for Irish immigrants to the United States in the late ’80s and multiply that by about a dozen and you’ll have some idea of the scale of what I’m talking about.

Of course, the Micks weren’t just going uptown. Woodside was a big draw in Queens, and there was Hell’s Kitchen and the Upper East Side around Second and Third. But that was someone else’s space. Not Darkey’s, but probably still under Mr. Duffy. The point of all this is, I suppose, that despite the FBI and despite Mayor Dinkins and despite the cops, Mr. Duffy and Darkey weren’t having any bother at all. I shouldn’t have worried about the peelers looking for me. Jesus, I was nothing. I was protected, and Darkey had them confused and bent. I was safe as houses. Sunshine would look out for us all, and our Darkey was charmed and on to a sweet thing. He had no legal concerns; potential enemies were destroying themselves; the Micks kept coming. He had his girl, his crew, his skinny guardian angel, and but for that flabby and slightly pockmarked face of his you could say he was sitting pretty. So, as I sat there later that night in the public bar of the Four Provinces getting hot and drinking vile Harp Lager and feeling a wee bit sorry for myself and a wee bit anxious about the morning’s events, I had to admit to myself that I really shouldn’t be that concerned. We were fine. And I told myself that things were going to be ok and go on that way for the old foreseeable. Darkey was raking it in and it would trickle down to us and we’d get fatter and richer and maybe we’d retire in a year or two and get to a university or have a bar ourselves somewhere.

And sure enough, events might just have gone that way but for a process already in motion that three of our little crew knew about, but crucially not me and not Scotchy.

But again, that’s the future and this is now, and at the minute I was getting a bit eggy about the death of some wee shite called Dermot and getting all existential about organized crime and the racial nature of policing policy in NYC.

You look troubled, Andy said.

Do I?

Yes.

Oh.

What were you thinking about?

I was thinking that we’re bloody lucky we’re uptown, otherwise the peelers would be down our fucking necks.

Yeah.

You ever see that film Across 110th Street? I asked him.

No.

No, me neither, but I bet it makes some pretty good points about organized crime and the racial nature of policing policy in New York. Peels don’t care what goes on up here, fucking don’t care, I said.

Andy cocked his head.

What’s the matter with you today? he asked. Do you want to be fucking caught?

No.

Well, Jesus.

All right, forget it, excuse me for thinking, Andy. Big mistake around here. Forgot who I was talking to, I said.

Andy looked hurt.

Joking mate, joking. Sorry. Tell me, big fella, how ya feeling? I asked him.

Andy started telling me how he was feeling, and I sat there. Keeping it in, nodding my head, making him think I was interested in the bollocks he was spieling me. Sighing, scratching my arse, Andy jabbering, me drinking, listening, and neither of us had a clue that Scotchy was going to come down the stairs in ten minutes and blow all of my concerns about the cops, the city, and every other aspect of my present life not just out of the water but out of the universe in which water can even exist as a molecule of bonded hydrogen and oxygen.

Yeah, it’s coming. And I should have been up there at that fucking meeting to register my protest and see Darkey in the face, but I wasn’t because I’d gotten there late.

The meeting was still going on, but Andy was down here now because all the smoke had been making him a bit sick. He was telling me about the stuff I’d missed, and apparently it had been exciting.

Fireworks, Andy said, and went on to explain that Darkey (a bit unreasonably, I thought) considered the whole Dermot thing a complete cock-up because Dermot was dead and the peels were involved. Darkey had exploded at Sunshine and given him a really big seeing-to. He must have been really furious or else this was the standard Andy exaggeration. I looked at old And. He was big and blond and dopey-looking. He wasn’t a complete idiot, but he wasn’t going to be invited to the Institute for Advanced Studies anytime soon. He was really sweet, though, and he didn’t deserve that beating the other day. Scotchy needed a beating, Fergal did, but Andy didn’t.