Joe said, “There’s nothing wrong with them.”
“I promise,” the old man said, “if they send me to fight you, I’ll limit myself to grasping your ankles and holding on tight.”
Joe chuckled. “Just the ankles, uh?”
“Maybe the nose, if I sense an advantage.”
Joe looked over at him. He must have been here so long he’d seen every hope die and experienced every degradation, and now they left him alone because he’d survived all they’d thrown at him. Or because he was just a bag of wrinkles, unappealing for purposes of trade. Harmless.
“Well, to protect my nose…” Joe took a long drag off the cigarette. He’d forgotten how good one could taste if you didn’t know where your next one was coming from. “A few months ago, I broke six ribs and fractured or sprained the rest.”
“A few months ago. That leaves you only a couple months to go.”
“No. Really?”
The old man nodded. “Broken ribs are like broken hearts—at least six months before they heal.”
Is that how long it takes? Joe thought.
“If only meals lasted as long.” The old man rubbed his small paunch. “What do they call you?”
“Joe.”
“Never Joseph?”
“Just my father.”
The man nodded and exhaled a stream of smoke with slow relish. “This is such a hopeless place. Even in your limited time here, I’m sure you’ve come to the same conclusion.”
Joe nodded.
“It eats men. It doesn’t even spit them back out.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Oh,” the old man said, “I stopped counting years ago.” He looked up at the greasy blue sky and spit a piece of tobacco off his tongue. “There’s nothing about this place I don’t know. If you need help comprehending it, just ask.”
Joe doubted the old fella was as tuned to the pulse of the place as he imagined himself to be, but he saw no harm in saying, “I will. Thank you. I appreciate your offer.”
They reached the end of the yard. As they turned to walk back the way they’d come, the old man placed his arm around Joe’s shoulders.
The whole yard watched.
The old man flicked his cigarette into the dust and held out his hand. Joe shook it.
“My name is Tommaso Pescatore, but everyone calls me Maso. Consider yourself under my care.”
Joe knew the name. Maso Pescatore ran the North End and most of the gambling and women on the North Shore. From behind these walls, he controlled a lot of the liquor coming up from Florida. Tim Hickey had done a lot of work with him over the years and usually mentioned that extreme caution was the only sensible course of action when dealing with the man.
“I didn’t ask to be under your care, Maso.”
“How many things in life—good and bad—come to us whether we ask for them or not?” Maso removed his arm from Joe’s shoulders and placed a hand over his eyebrows to block the sun. Where Joe had just seen innocence in his eyes, he now saw cunning. “Call me Mr. Pescatore from now on, Joseph. And give this to your father next time you see him.” Maso slipped a piece of paper into Joe’s hand.
Joe looked at the address scrawled there: 1417 Blue Hill Ave. That was it—no name, no telephone number, just an address.
“Hand it to your father. Just this once. It’s all I’ll ask of you.”
“What if I don’t?” Joe asked.
Maso seemed genuinely confused by the question. He tilted his head to one side and looked at Joe and a small and curious smile found his lips. The smile widened and turned into a soft laugh. He shook his head several times. He gave Joe a two-finger salute and walked back to the wall where his men stood waiting.
In the visiting room, Thomas watched his son limp across the floor and take his seat.
“What happened?”
“Guy stabbed me in the leg.”
“Why?”
Joe shook his head. He slid his palm across the table, and Thomas saw the piece of paper under it. He closed his hand over his son’s for a moment, relishing the contact and trying to remember why he’d refrained from initiating it for over a decade. He took the piece of paper and placed it in his pocket. He looked at his son, at his dark-ringed eyes and sullied spirit, and he saw the whole of it suddenly.
“I’m to do someone’s bidding,” he said.
Joe looked up from the table and met his eyes.
“Whose bidding, Joseph?”
“Maso Pescatore’s.”
Thomas sat back and asked himself just how much he loved his son.
Joe read the question in his eyes. “Don’t try to tell me you’re clean, Dad.”
“I do civilized business with civilized people. You’re asking me to get under the thumb of a bunch of dagos one generation removed from a cave.”
“It’s not under their thumb.”
“No? What’s on the piece of paper?”
“An address.”
“Just an address?”
“Yeah. I don’t know any more than that.”
His father nodded several times, his breath exiting through his nostrils. “Because you’re a child. Some wop gives you an address to give your father, a member of police command, and you don’t grasp that the only thing that address could be is the location of a rival’s illicit supply.”
“Of what?”
“Most likely a warehouse filled to the bursting with liquor.” His father stared up at the ceiling and ran a hand over his trim white hair.
“He said just this once.”
His father gave him a malevolent smile. “And you believed him.”
He left the prison.
He walked down the path toward his car, surrounded by the smell of chemicals. Smoke rose from the factory stacks. It was dark gray in most places but it turned the sky brown and the earth black. Trains chugged along the outskirts; for some odd reason, they reminded Thomas of wolves circling a medical tent.
He had sent at least a thousand men here over the course of his career. Many of them had died behind the granite walls. If they arrived with any illusions about human decency, they lost those straightaway. There were too many prisoners and too few guards for the prison to run as anything but what it was—a dumping ground, and then a proving ground, for animals. If you went in a man, you left a beast. If you went in an animal, you honed your skills.
He feared his son was too soft. For all his transgressions over the years, his lawlessness, his inability to obey Thomas or the rules or much of anything, Joseph was the most open of his sons. You could see his heart through the heaviest winter coat.
Thomas reached a call box at the end of the path. His key was attached to his watch chain and he used it now to open the box. He looked at the address in his hand: 1417 Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan. Jew Country. Which meant the warehouse was probably owned by Jacob Rosen, a known supplier of Albert White.
White was back in the city now. He’d never spent a night in jail, probably because he’d hired Jack D’Jarvis to handle his defense.
Thomas looked back at the prison his son called home. A tragedy but not surprising. His son had chosen the path that had led him here over years of Thomas’s strenuous objection and disapproval. If Thomas used this call box, he was wedded to the Pescatore mob for life, to a race of people who had brought to the shores of this country anarchism and its bombers, assassins, and the Black Hand and now, organized in something rumored to be called omertà organiza, they had overtaken by force the entire business of illegal liquor.
And he was supposed to give them more?
Work for them?
Kiss their rings?
He closed the call box door, returned his watch to his pocket, and walked to his car.