Lawrence Block - A Long Line of Dead Men

"Dueling air conditioners? Unlikely, I'd say. What do you want to do now?"

"I don't know. Go home, I guess."

"Sit around and stare out the window? Make a few phone calls to people who aren't home? Pace the floor?"

"Something like that."

"I've got a better idea," she said. "Walk me home and then go see if Mick wants to make a night of it. Get blitzed on coffee and Perrier. Watch the sun come up. Go to mass, take Holy Reunion."

"Communion."

"Whatever."

"Goyim is goyim, huh?"

"You said it."

In front of the Parc Vendôme she said, "It's definitely raining. You want to come upstairs and get an umbrella?"

"It's not raining that hard."

"Want to see if anybody called? Want to catch the weather report and see what color bow tie your friend Gerry Billings is wearing? Naw, you don't need a weatherman to tell which way the rain is falling."

"No."

"Of course not. You just want to get to Grogan's. Give Mick my love, will you? And enjoy yourself."

"You just missed him," Burke said. "He stepped out not fifteen minutes ago. But he'll be along. He said you might be in."

"He did?"

"And that you should wait for him as he'll not be long. There's fresh coffee made, if you'll have a cup."

He poured coffee for me and I carried it to the table where Mick and I usually wound up sitting, over on the side beneath the mirror advertising Tullamore Dew. Someone had left a copy of the Post on a nearby table, and I opened it to the sports section to see what the columnists had to say. I wasn't much better at tracking their sentences than I'd been at following the movie. After a while I set the paper aside and thought about trying Jim Shorter again. Was it too late to call him? I was considering the point when the door opened and Mick Ballou entered.

He stood just inside the door, his hair pressed flat against his skull by the rain, his clothes sodden. When he caught sight of me his face lit up. "By God," he said, "didn't I say you'd be in tonight? But what a fucking night you picked for it."

"It wasn't much more than a fine mist when I came here."

"I know, for was I not out in it myself? A soft day, the Irish call it. A fucking downpour is what it's turned into." He rubbed his hands together, stamped his feet on the old tile floor. "Let me get out of these wet clothes. Catch a cold this time of the year and the fucker's with you till Christmas."

He went into his office in the back. He sleeps there sometimes on the green leather couch, and keeps several changes of clothing in the oak wardrobe. He has a desk there, too, and a massive old Mosler safe. There's always a lot of cash in the safe, and I can't believe the box would be all that hard to crack. So far no one has ever been fool enough to try.

He emerged from the office after a few minutes with his hair neatly combed and wearing a fresh sport shirt and slacks. He said a few words to one of the darts players, laid a gentle hand on the shoulder of an old man in a cloth cap, and slipped behind the bar to pour himself a drink. He threw down a quick shot to take the chill off, and I could almost feel the warm glow radiating outward from the solar plexus, providing comfort, warming the body and the soul. Then he refilled his glass and brought it to the table along with a fresh cup of coffee for me.

"That's better," he said, dropping into the seat opposite mine. "Terrible thing, being called out on business on a night like this."

"I hope it went well."

"Ah, 'twas nothing serious," he said. "There was this lad who lost a few dollars gambling, and gave a marker for what he owed. Then he decided he'd been cheated, and so he made up his mind that he wasn't going to pay the debt."

"And?"

"And your man who'd taken his marker offered it for sale."

"And you bought it."

"I did," he said. "I thought it a decent investment. Like buying a mortgage, and deeply discounted in the bargain."

"You paid cash for it?"

"I did, and sent Andy Buckley to talk to the lad. And do you know, he still insisted he'd been cheated, and thus owed nothing, no matter who might be holding his marker. He said there was no point in discussing it, that his mind was made up."

"So what did you do?"

"I went to see him."

"And?"

"He changed his mind," Mick said.

"He's going to pay?"

"He's paid. So you might say it was an excellent investment, offering an attractive return. And it's matured early."

He is a large man, my friend Mick, tall and heavy, with a head that would not look out of place among the ancient sculptures on Easter Island. There is a primitive and monolithic quality to him. Years ago, a wit at Morrissey's after-hours described Stonehenge as looking like Mick and his brothers standing in a circle.

It may be fitting, then, that he is just about the last of a vanishing breed, the tough Irish criminals who have been drinking and fighting and raising hell in the West Forties and Fifties since before the Civil War. Various gangs and mobs held sway- the Gophers, the Rhodes Gang, the Parlor Mob, the Gorillas. A lot of their leaders were saloon keepers, too, from Mallet Murphy and Paddy the Priest to Owney Madden. They were as cheerfully vicious as any group New York ever saw, and they might have made a more lasting mark on the place if they hadn't had such an all-consuming thirst. According to Mick, God created whiskey to keep the Irish from taking over the world. It had certainly kept the Hell's Kitchen hoodlums from taking over the city.

A few years ago some newspaper reporters started calling the current crop "the Westies," and by the time the tag caught on there was hardly anybody left to pin it to. The neighborhood bad guys were mostly gone- dead of drink or violence, doing life sentences somewhere upstate, rotting away in the back wards at Manhattan State Hospital. Or they were married and living somewhere in the Jersey suburbs, getting fat and sluggish, running crooked auto-repair shops, rigging the games in church Las Vegas Night fundraisers, or working all week for their fathers-in-law and drinking themselves sodden on the weekends.

Mick, the son of a woman from County Mayo and a father born in France, not far from Marseilles, was a man who drank whiskey like water, a career criminal, a brutal killer who would costume himself for a night of slaughter in the butcher's apron his father had worn, then wear the same apron to mass at St. Bernard's. There was no reason why we should have become friends, and no way to explain our friendship. Nor could I find an explanation for these long nights of ours, when the stories flowed like water or like whiskey. He would drink for both of us, filling his glass time and time again with the twelve-year-old Jameson. I would keep him company with coffee, with Coca-Cola, with soda water.

Maybe, as Jim Faber has suggested, it was a way for me to have the drink without the hangover, to recapture the sweetness of saloon society without risking a seizure or liver damage. Maybe, as Elaine proposed, the two of us had a long karmic history together, and were just renewing the ties that had bonded us in innumerable past lives. Or perhaps, as had sometimes occurred to me, Mick was at once the brother I never had and the road I'd left untaken.

And maybe we're both just men who like a long night in a quiet room, and a good story or two.

"You recall," he said, "when I went to Ireland the year before last."

His lawyer, Mark Rosenstein, had sent him out of the country to avoid a subpoena. "I was going to join you," I reminded him, "but something came up."

"Ah, we'd have set the heather blazing, yourself and I. They're a curious people, the Irish. Did I tell you about Paddy Meehan's pub?"

"I don't believe so."