Pete Hamill - Forever

“You’ve seen me around,” Cormac said. “You could have tried a hundred times.”

“Maybe I thought I could use you one day.”

“To humiliate somebody?”

“No. To get you in a jam and see how you wiggle out.”

“That’s the real reason I’m here tonight, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got the wrong man, Hughie.”

He pulled away.

“Where are you going?”

“Away from you.”

Now Cormac could see the rage, the tight mouth, the flickering eyes. And then there was a pistol in Hughie’s hand. Cormac kicked the lantern over the edge of the pier, heard it sizzle as it hit the water, then dropped to the deck as a shot rang out. He rolled toward Mulligan. A second shot ripped through his thigh. But he reached the bigger man and kicked at a kneecap from the ground, then got up and lunged for the pistol hand. The pain was searing his leg.

“Fucker, fucker…”

He grabbed Mulligan’s coat with both hands and butted him in the face with his head, then grabbed the arm, again in both hands, and jerked it backward as if breaking a tree limb. The pistol fell to the dark deck. Still nobody came from the darkness. Mulligan made thin, frantic sounds, full of pain, and went to his knees, searching desperately for the gun. Cormac stood over him, planted his feet, and bent him sideways with a punch. Then he reached around until he found the pistol.

“I’ve got the gun, Hughie.”

He cocked it so that Mulligan could hear.

“Don’t shoot,” Mulligan said.

“Get up.”

“Just don’t shoot me. I want to take care of you.”

“I’ll bet.”

“You can get very rich.”

“Don’t horseshit me, Hughie.”

Mulligan got up, his silhouette hulking and black.

“The one thing I’ll give you, Hughie. You came alone. But I think I know why. This is a private deal. It’s about you and me. You’ve been pissed off for thirty years at me. You’re getting old. You don’t want to die knowing I watched your funeral.” He laughed. “Your boys want nothing to do with killing Tweed. This was one of those great ideas that came to you at two in the morning. You get me to kill Tweed, and then you get me killed, and you have everything you want. You try to take the Ring, and I’m dead and gone.”

He could feel the blood leaking from his thigh down into his boot.

“You got it all wrong, old pal.”

“I don’t think so.”

Cormac hefted the pistol, put it to Mulligan’s chin, cocked it, heard a whimper, then turned and heaved it into the river.

“I’ll see you, tough guy.”

He started to walk away, and then Mulligan rushed him. It was like being hit by a cart. He bent away, let Hughie slide off him, then stood up and punched him in the temple. The big man staggered but did not go down. Cormac hit him again and felt the pulpy nose splay, and heard a whimper from his chest, and then he bent low and hit him with all his strength in the balls.

Mulligan staggered backward as if his immense body had been broken. His hands flailed. He gasped for breath. And then he went off the pier into the swift water.

The tide carried him out toward the watery boneyard that held the Earl of Warren.

The rain fell harder.

He told all of this to Tweed later that night, dressed in bathrobe and slippers while his clothes were being cleaned by Luke in the valet quarters of the Broadway Central. At first Tweed was serious, then amused, and then, as he pried the full tale from Cormac, he grew more and more merry. Finally he fell back laughing.

“It’s as funny as a Saturday night on the Bowery,” he said. “Except that Hughie’s dead,” Cormac said. “That’s not so funny.”

Tweed grew serious.

“I suspect someone will find a suicide note before dawn,” he said.

He looked at his nails, an expression of admiration on his face.

“And we were here together,” Tweed said. “If anyone asks.” A pause. “And nobody will.”

That morning, a housekeeper came to Hughie Mulligan’s suite at the Metropolitan Hotel, where he lived alone. She found a note on his desk. CAN’T STAND LIVING IN THIS TERRIBLE WORLD. HUGH MULLIGAN

Four days later, his body was found floating off Sheep’s Head Bay. It was bloated and partially eaten by fish. His boys threw him a grand funeral, and Tweed sent flowers and a few well-chosen words of respect.

As he walked west, hurrying home on this night in April 1878, he remembered coming to the Five Points when for him it was an undiscovered country. He didn’t move to Mott Street, on the district’s eastern border, in a spirit of contrition, although some of that was alive in his tired bones. He didn’t move there to give himself a sense of proportion over the loss of the countess, and her bath, and the scent of lavender, although that was one of the things he received from the move.

The truth was that when Cormac crossed Broadway that first day, with a cartman behind him carrying his things, his mind felt like sludge. The countess was gone, and something he needed had gone with her: a current, an uncertainty, a set of undecoded codes that had kept his mind alert. When she left, it was as if a switch had been thrown. His body felt young, and looked young, but his brain felt ancient. That was when he remembered the German lesson.

The sludge had entered his brain before, early in the century, when he had been in New York longer than any other inhabitant. It was made up of age, memory, repetition, banality. Then, while trying to learn German in order to read Goethe, he discovered something about himself. When he entered another language, when he tried to absorb its rules, its nouns and verbs, and above all, its rhythms, the sludge in his brain began breaking up. He sought out Germans who could correct his pronunciation, who could explain subtleties of usage, and he could feel a small bright place opening in his brain. It touched everything else. He wrote better in English for the newspaper. He saw more sharply, absorbing details that had been sinking in the sludge. His mind became swifter, his visions more glittering, as if he were three years old again, learning English, or thirteen and learning Irish on the wrong side of the Mountains of Mourne.

He learned then, as Kongo had told him in the cave in Inwood, that in order to live, he must live. And living was a long learning. Learning to paint was a way to break up the sludge. The same was true of the piano. He learned in different ways: by trying to read everything by an author so that he truly entered the writer’s world; by distinguishing between one composer and another so that he could see immense landscapes while hearing a mere eight bars drifting from an open window; or by knowing without thinking the difference between an accent and an umlaut. And it wasn’t all in books or sheets of music. Truly knowing a woman was a way of smashing into the sludge. Knowing a place was another.

And to learn a neighborhood was like learning a language. That was what the Five Points taught him. You needed to recognize the subtle differences in accent, clothing, gesture. You learned to know if a certain blind pig was selling the illusion of menace, for a Saturday night thrill, or was truly a place of danger. Every newcomer had to learn that world in his or her own way. All of it was measured against the past. The Famine Irish measured their present against the horror left behind. From his monastic room on Mott Street, Cormac too looked back at Ireland, and the crossing of the ocean sea, the first years in New York and the years of the Revolution, and thought of them as part of his youth, that strange youth prolonged by a gift from African gods. That youth filled with miracles and magic. But a youth that was, he thought, only sporadically real.