“The cops were coming, and he was thinking the Fist might try to kill me. They’d went in there and forced him to help them out. I’m telling you, the guy’s a fucking hero going against them like he did.”
Mazzucchelli took a bite of his pasta and shook his head. Joey scratched at the scars on his left hand.
“Sounds like bullshit,” Mazzuchelli said.
“There was a Fist hanging just outside the back door,” Joey said. “And the cops-they picked up Demise there, didn’t they?”
Mazzucchelli took the starched white napkin off his knee and dabbed the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah,” he said with a long, slow, sigh. “Yeah, they did.”
“If I’d have jumped the gun and called in backup, they’d have ambushed us, boss. Demise was just the bait.”
“So how’d this hero priest get the drop on Demise?” Joey grinned.
“Yeah, he told about that too, when he was helping me get my feet. It went like this, see…”
Demise walked out of the detention center in the late afternoon, pissed off. He still had on the fucking Aerosmith t-shirt. The car waited for him at the curb, Phan Lo at the wheel. Demise climbed in and slammed the door.
“What the fuck took you people so long?” he demanded as Phan pulled out into traffic. “I was in there overnight. How hard is it to post a little bail?”
“Gambiones,” Phan said. “They hit back yesterday.”
“No shit?”
“They torched five of our places. We lost twenty, maybe thirty men. Word on the street is they were trying for Danny Mao.”
“Still doesn’t explain why I had to spend a night in the lockup.”
“You weren’t the top priority,” Phan said.
They drove in silence. The day was clearer, but cold. Phan turned toward Chinatown.
“Did you, ah, mention to anyone…” Demise began, but the sentence trailed off.
“They know you got your ass kicked by a deuce priest and a Jokertown whore,” Phan said. “They laughed about it a little and got back to business.”
“Shit.”
“The whole thing was a setup. I saw one of the Gambione guys coming out the back right before the cops showed up. So we got suckered. Let it go, man. No one’s going to remember how they did it. You want to get another shirt?”
“Yeah,” Demise said. “You know, that attitude is just like you. It’s just exactly like all of you. It’s not about who’s going to remember what. It’s about principle. If you let people fuck with you, pretty soon everyone’s going to think they can get away with shit.”
When Phan spoke, his voice was measured and careful. “I don’t think that someone who fucking kills people by looking at them is going to have a lot of trouble with people taking him lightly.”
“You don’t get it. The priest has to die. And I know where he’s going to be on Sunday morning. I’ll kill the little shit in the middle of Mass. ”
“Hardcore,” Phan said, sounding unimpressed.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8. 1987
Dawn threatened in the east, the light from the snowcovered trees making the kitchen window glow. Father Henry put the telephone handset back in its cradle just as Gina emerged from her room wrapped in a thick wool robe two sizes too big for her.
“Coffee smells great,” she said, then “It’s so quiet out here.”
“That’s what we call the country. Haven’t you ever been out of the city?”
“Nah. I was born in Queens.
“You take cream or anything?”
“No. Black and bitter does just fine.”
Father Henry poured the coffee into a couple of Marriage Encounter cups and took them over to the table.
“The Archbishop says he’ll have tickets to Rome ready for us down in Albuquerque by Monday morning.”
“I thought there was a month wait for passports.”
“ Vatican passports,” Father Henry said, blowing on his coffee. “There are certain advantages to being a sovereign nation, after all. And a quarter million dollars is a pretty sizable donation. Exerts a kind of influence.”
“That was my money.”
“It was blood money and only the grace of Christ shall make it clean.”
“And the other quarter million?”
“I’m a man of Christ. It’ll be just fine right where it is. You need any-like maybe for tuition or something?-you just come see your Uncle Henry.”
“Tuition? Give me a break,” she said, laughing. Her face didn’t look so sharp, he thought. “I’ll go down on you for a hundred thousand, though.”
“I was thinking about cooking up some eggs,” he said, ignoring her. “Care for any?”
“Sure,” she said. “Over hard.”
He tried the still-scalding coffee and reached up for a good copper frying pan. Gina stood, her hands deep in the robe’s pockets, went to the window and looked out into the woods. He wondered what it would be like, seeing a pine forest at dawn for the very first time.
Just another little miracle, he figured.
PROMISES by Stephen Leigh
SEPTEMBER, 1995
The squall roared and threw horizontal rain, coming in from the northeast off the North Channel and the Waters of Moyle. The storm had developed unexpectedly an hour ago. The fierce wind rattled the shutters, howled through the cracks in the stone walls and stretched wispy, persistent fingers down the chimney. Rain hissed and beat on the stones, and streams of cold water fell from the ends of the roof’s thatching.
“Shite!” Caitlyn cursed as a gust blew out the match she’d placed to the newspaper under the peat in the hearth. There were only two matches left in the pack, and she’d been trying to get the damned fire going for the last fifteen minutes, since they’d gotten back from Church Bay.
“Máthair?” Moira, Caitlyn’s daughter, shivered in the chair, her knees up to her chest and a woolen blanket wrapped around herself. They’d both been soaked just running the dozen steps from the car to the cottage. The storm had blown down the lines somewhere on the island, which made the electric heaters useless, and the small, three room house had seemed as icy and damp as the sleet outside. Moira’s face was illuminated in the orange-gold light of the oil lamps, her round features emerging from darkness like a Vermeer painting. “I’m awful cold.”
“I know, darling. It’s just that the peat’s gotten soaked, and this damned wind…” Caitlyn struck another match. Her movements were clumsy and stiff, but she managed to light a corner of the paper. The crumpled sheet blackened and curled, the flame leaping blue and yellow as it crackled, but the flame hissed wetly and guttered out once it reached the sod, and Caitlyn cursed again. The shutters banged in a renewed gust, and a rivulet of water trickled down the inside of the chimney.
The noise of the storm lifted to a wild roar: the door to the cottage opened. A man’s form filled the doorway. Moira screamed at the dark apparition, like a banshee in the midst of a tempest, startling enough that Caitlyn wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a keening death-wail. Caitlyn rose-slowly, the only way she could move-to Moira’s side. She patted her daughter’s shoulder with an unbending hand. “Hush,” she told her, though her eyes were on the stranger. “There’s nothing to be frightened about.”
She hoped she was right.
He hadn’t moved. He swayed from side to side, as if it were only an effort of will that kept him standing. With just under two hundred people on the island, Caitlyn knew them all by face and name, and this man was a stranger: tall, with skin the color of dark chocolate. He wore a leather jacket and there were straps and harness about him that looked as if he’d cut something from around him with a knife. He was drenched, the short, wiry black hair beaded with the rain; he steamed, wisps of vapor rising from him. She supposed he might have come over on the Calmac Ferry, maybe one of the rare visitors that came over from Belfast or Dublin to see one of the island’s archeological sites and who had been surprised by the storm. Strange, though, that no one down in Church Bay had mentioned a visitor.