He had a pistol in his other hand, an army-issue .45 with the front sight filed down. I managed a look around but couldn’t take in what I was seeing. Chairs and tables were overturned, some of them smashed to splinters. Barstools lay on the tile floor like corpses. The backbar mirror had disappeared, all but a few stray shards still left in the frame. The air was thick with the residue of battle, and my eyes stung from smoke and the fumes of gunpowder and spilled whiskey.
There were bodies scattered around, looking like dolls tossed aside by a thoughtless child. The man and woman who’d been discussing their relationship were together in death, sprawled alongside their overturned table. He was flat on his back with most of his face gone. She lay curled on her side, bent like a fishhook, with the top of her head open and her brains spilling from her shattered skull.
“Come on, man!”
I suppose he was shouting, but his voice didn’t sound very loud to me. I guess the bomb blast had left me partially deaf. Everything was slightly muffled, the way it is in an airport when you’re fresh off a plane and your ears haven’t popped yet.
I heard him and the words registered, but I stayed where I was, rooted to the spot, unable to draw my eyes from them. This is no easier for me than it is for you, he’d told her.
Famous last words . . .
“They’re fucking dead,” Mick said, his tone at once brutal and gentle.
“I knew her,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. “Well, there’s fuck-all you can do for her now, and no time to waste trying.”
I swallowed, trying to clear my ears. It was like getting off a plane in the middle of a war zone, I thought. Smelling the cordite and the death, and stepping over bodies on the way to the baggage claim.
One such body lay in the doorway, a small man with delicate Asian features. He was wearing black pants and a lime green shirt, and at first I took it for one of those Hawaiian shirts with tropical flowers on it. But it was a solid-color shirt and the flowers were three bullet holes and his blood supplied the petals.
Resting in the crook of his arm was the automatic rifle with which he’d sprayed the room.
Mick stopped long enough to snatch up the gun, then gave the dead man a solid boot in the side of the head. “Go straight to hell, you fucker,” he said.
A car stood at the curb, a big old Chevy Caprice, the body badly pitted with rust. Andy Buckley was behind the wheel and Tom Heaney was standing alongside the open door, a gun in his hand, covering our exit.
We dashed across the sidewalk. Mick shoved me into the back seat, piled in after me. Tom got in front next to Andy. The car was moving before the doors were shut.
I could hear sirens. Imperfectly, as I heard everything, but I could hear them. Sirens, coming our way.
“You’re all right, Andy?”
“I’m fine, Mick.”
“Tom?”
“No harm, sir.”
“Good job you were both in the back. What hell they made of Grogan’s, eh? The fuckers.”
We’d headed north on the West Side Drive, then cut over to the Deegan at some point. Andy offered more than once to drop me and Mick wherever we wanted to go, but that wasn’t what Mick wanted. He said he wasn’t sure yet where he’d be staying, and wanted a car.
“Well, this here’s a step down from the Caddy,” Andy said. “But it was just down the block, and a lot quicker than getting yours out of the garage.”
“It’ll do me fine,” Mick said. “And I’ll take good care of it.”
“This piece of shit? You treat it nice, it’ll die of shock.” He slapped the steering wheel. “She runs good, though. And the body damage is a plus, far as I’m concerned. You can park it on the street and know it’s gonna be there when you come back for it.”
We drove through the Bronx, a part of town I know hardly at all. I lived there briefly as a child, upstairs of the little shoe store my father opened—and closed, whereupon we moved to Brooklyn. The building where we lived is gone, the whole block bulldozed for an addition to the Cross-Bronx Expressway, and my recollection of the neighborhood is gone with it.
So I couldn’t really keep track of where we were, and I might have been equally lost in more familiar terrain, my hearing still imperfect and my whole inner self numb and befogged. There wasn’t much conversation, but I missed a portion of what there was, tuning in and out.
Tom said he’d walk from Andy’s house, there was no need to take him to his door, and Andy said it was easy enough to run him home, that it wasn’t far at all. Mick said near or far we’d drop Tom at his home, for God’s sake.
Andy said, “You’re in the same place, Tom? Perry Avenue?” and Tom nodded. We drove there through unfamiliar streets and Tom got out in front of a little box of a house clad in asphalt siding. Mick said he’d be in touch, and Tom nodded and trotted to the door and stuck his key in the lock, and Andy turned the car around.
At a red light he said, “Mick, are you sure I can’t run you back to the city? You can keep this car and I’ll get a subway home.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Or you can pick up the Caddy. Or I’ll get the Caddy, whatever you say.”
“Drive yourself home, Andy.”
Andy lived on Bainbridge Avenue, on the other side of the Mosholu Parkway from Tom. He pulled up in front of his house and got out of the car. Mick leaned out the window and motioned him over, and Andy walked around the car and leaned against it with his hand on the roof. “My best to your mother,” Mick said.
“She’ll be sleeping now, Mick.”
“By Jesus, I should hope so.”
“But I’ll tell her when she wakes up. She asks about you all the time.”
“Ah, she’s a good woman,” Mick said. “You’ll be all right now? You’ll have no trouble getting your hands on a car?”
“My cousin Denny’ll let me take his. Or somebody else will. Or I’ll grab one off the street.”
“Be careful, Andy.”
“Always, Mick.”
“They’re hunting us down like rats in a sewer, the bastards. And who are they? Niggers and Chinamen.”
“Looked more like Vietnamese, Mick. Or Thai, could be.”
“They’re all one to me,” he said, “and what am I to them? What’s their quarrel with me? Or poor Burke, for Jesus’ sake, or any of the boys?”
“They just wanted to kill everybody.”
“Everybody. Even the customers. Old men drinking their pints. Decent people from the neighborhood having a last jar before bed. Ah, ‘twas a last jar for some of them, right enough.”
Andy stepped back and Mick got out of the car himself and looked around, then shook himself like a dog shaking off water. He walked around the car and got behind the wheel, and I got out myself and got in front next to him. Andy stood on the sidewalk and watched us drive off.
Neither of us said anything on the way back, and I guess I must have faded out. By the time I checked in again we were back in Manhattan, somewhere down in Chelsea. I could tell because I recognized a Cuban-Chinese restaurant and got a sudden sense memory of their coffee, thick and dark and strong, and remembered the waiter who’d brought it to the table, a slow-moving old fellow who walked as though his feet had been bothering him for years.
Funny what you remember, funny what you don’t.
On Twenty-fourth Street off Sixth Avenue, at the edge of the Flower District, Mick braked to a stop in front of a narrow brick building eight stories tall. There was a steel roll-up door like the kind at E-Z Storage, but narrower, only a little wider than a car, with a pair of windowless doors on either side of it. The door on the right had a column of buzzers at its side, suggesting that it led to the offices or apartments above. The door on the left showed two rows of stenciled lettering, black edged in silver on the red door. MCGINLEY & CALDECOTT, it proclaimed. ARCHITECTURAL SALVAGE.
Mick unlocked and rolled up the metal door, revealing a small street-level garage. Once he’d kicked a couple of cartons out of the way there was just enough room to park a full-size car or a small van. He motioned, and I slid behind the wheel and maneuvered the Chevy into the space.
I got out and joined him on the sidewalk, and he lowered the door and locked it, then unlocked the red door with the lettering on it. We stepped inside and he drew the door shut, leaving us in darkness until he found a light switch. We were at the head of a flight of stairs, and he led me down them to the basement.
We wound up in a huge room, with narrow aisles threaded among dense rows packed with bureaus and tables and chests of drawers and boxes stacked to shoulder height. It was, as promised, an architectural salvage firm, and the full basement constituted the showroom and stockroom all in one.
Ever since the Dutch bought the place, Manhattan’s been a town where they throw buildings up only to knock them down again. Demolition is an industry in itself, construction’s twin, and, if its main goal is an empty lot, I was looking at its by-products. Drawers and boxes spilled over with every sort of hardware you could strip from a structure before you took a wrecking ball to it. There were cartons full of nothing but doorknobs, brass ones and glass ones and nickel-plated ones. There were boxes of escutcheon plates and hinges and locks and things I recognized but didn’t know the names of, and there were other things I couldn’t identify at all.
Carved wooden columns stood here and there, looking for a ceiling to hold up. One section was crammed with ornamental stone and cement work from the outsides of buildings—gargoyles with their tongues protruding, real and imaginary animals, some sharply detailed, others as hard to make out as the inscriptions on old gravestones, weathered by time and acid rain.
A year or two ago Elaine and I spent a weekend in Washington, and in the course of it we dragged ourselves through the Holocaust Museum. It was wrenching, of course—it’s supposed to be—but what hit us the hardest was a room full of shoes. Just shoes, an endless heap of shoes. Neither of us could quite explain the room’s ghastly impact, but I gather our response was not atypical.
I can’t say the plastic milk crates overflowing with doorknobs elicited a similar emotional reaction. My gut didn’t churn at the thought of what had happened to all the doors to which those knobs had once been fitted, or the long-vanished rooms behind those doors. But somehow the endless array of hardware, sifted and sorted with Teutonic thoroughness, did call to mind that room full of shoes.
“Where buildings go to die,” Mick said.
“Just what I was thinking.”
“It’s a good old business. Who could guess what you can strip off an old building before you knock her down? You pull the plumbing, of course, and the boiler, and sell all that for scrap, but there are people who find a use for all the old hardware and ornamentation. If you were restoring an old brownstone, say, you’d want all the details authentic. You’d come here and go home with replacement crystals for the chandelier, or a better chandelier entirely. And door hinges, and a marble mantel for the fireplace. It’s all here, whatever you might want and much you wouldn’t.”
“So I see.”
“And did you know there are those that collect bits of ornamentation? Caldecott has one customer with a passion for gargoyles. There was one he bought too heavy to carry, and your man delivered it and saw his collection. Two small rooms in Christopher Street was all he had, and there’s shelves all round stuffed with dozens of fucking gargoyles of all sizes, all of them making horrible faces, and one uglier than the next. From the description it must have been as cluttered as this place, but that’s how it is when you’re a collector. You must be forever getting more of whatever it is you fancy.”
“Do you own this place, Mick?”
“I’ve an interest in it. You might say I’m a silent partner.” He picked up a tarnished brass hinge, turned it in his hand, put it back where he’d found it. “’Tis a good business for a man. You sell for cash, and you’ve no purchase records because you don’t purchase your stock, you salvage it. So you’ve cash coming in and cash going out, and that’s a useful sort of business in this day and age.”
“I imagine it is.”
“And I’m a useful partner for the lads. I’ve connections in the construction and demolition trade, labor and management both, and that’s a help in securing salvage rights to a building. Oh, it works out well for all concerned.”
“And I don’t suppose your name’s on the paperwork.”
“You know my thoughts on the subject. What you don’t own can’t be taken from you. I’ve a set of keys, and the use of the office when I want it, and a place to park a car where it can’t be seen. They keep their van there, they use that bay for loading and unloading, but Brian McGinley takes the van home at the day’s end. And that reminds me.”
He dug the cell phone out of his pocket, then changed his mind and put it back. We walked the length of one aisle to an office in the back, where he sat at the gray metal desk and looked up a number and made a call. The phone had a rotary dial, and might have been salvage itself.
He said, “Mr. McGinley, please. . . . I know it is, and I’d not call at this hour but out of necessity. . . . I’m afraid you’ll have to wake him. Just tell him it’s the big fellow.”
He covered the mouthpiece and rolled his eyes. “Ah, Brian,” he said. “Good man. Do you know, I think you and Caldecott are closed for the week. No one’s to come in until you hear from me. . . . That’s the idea. And my apologies to your wife from the lateness of the hour. Why don’t you make it up to her and take her to Puerto Rico for a few days? . . . Well, Cancún then, if she likes it better. . . . And you’ll phone Caldecott? And anyone else that ought to be told? Good man.”
He hung up. “’The big fellow,’” he said. “It’s presumption, hanging that tag on myself. That’s what they called Collins.”
“And De Valera didn’t like it.”
“A sanctimonious bastard, wasn’t he? Tell me something. Where the hell’s Cancún?”
“The Yucatán Peninsula.”
“That’s Mexico, isn’t it? Mrs. McGinley like is there, likes it better than phone calls in the middle of the night. ‘I can’t wake him, he’s sleeping.’ Well, if he wasn’t sleeping, you wouldn’t need to wake him, you silly cow.” He sighed, leaned back in the oak desk chair. “How the hell do you know Dev didn’t like it? You never went to the movie.”
“Elaine rented it,” I said, “and we watched it on the VCR. Jesus Christ.”
“What?”
“That was last night we saw it. It doesn’t seem possible. It feels more like a week.”
“It’s a fully day you had, isn’t it?”
“So much death,” I said.
“The two we buried at the farm, and that was what, four nights ago? Then Peter Rooney, but you only know of him from my telling you. And then your friend, the Buddhist. I drank to his memory, and the next minute they were making a charnel house of Grogan’s, killing people left and right. Burke was killed, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I looked for him and found him on the floorboards behind the bar, covered with glass from the mirror and with a terrible hole in his chest. Dead at his post, like a captain going down with the ship. I’d say that’s the end of that bar. Next time you see it some Korean’ll have it, selling fruits and vegetables around the clock.”
He fell silent, and after a long moment I said, “I knew her, Mick.”
“I thought you did.”
“You know who I meant?”
“Of course I do. Herself as was sitting nearby, that you didn’t want to be hearing their conversation. I had a feeling right then.”
“Did you?”
“I did. Do you know, moving to the next table probably saved our lives. It put us off to the side and gave us that extra fraction of time to hit the floor before the bullets reached us.” He cocked his head, looked at something on the wall. “Unless it’s all worked out in advance,” he said, “and you die when your time comes and not before.”
“I wonder.”
“Ah, that’s man’s lot, isn’t it? To wonder.” He opened desk drawers until he found the one with the bottle of Jameson in it. He cracked the seal and drank from the bottle. He said, “Was she the one, then?”
“The one?”
“Your bit on the side.”
“I guess that’s as good a phrase as any. We stopped seeing each other awhile ago.”
“Did you love her?”
“No.”
“Ah.”
“I cared for her, though.”
“That’s rare enough,” he said, and took another drink. “I never loved anyone. Aside from my mother and my brothers, but that’s a different matter, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Of women, I loved none and cared for few.”
“I love Elaine,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone else.”
“You were married before.”
“A long time ago.”
“Did you love her?”
“There was a time when I thought I did.”
“Ah. What was this one’s name?”
“Lisa.”
“She was a fine-looking woman.”
My mind filled with a picture of her as I saw her last, her skull shattered. I blinked it away and saw her in her apartment, wearing jeans and a sweater, standing in front of a window with a view of the setting sun. That was better.
“Yes,” I said. “She was.”
“It was sudden, you know. I doubt she ever knew what hit her.”
“But she’s gone.”
“That she is,” he said.
He had the old leather satchel on top of the desk and was poking around in it. “Cash from the safe,” he said. “Some papers. All the guns I could grab up. The police can get a court order and torch the safe, or they’ll do it without a court order. What they can’t use as evidence against me they’ll shove in their pockets. So I didn’t want to leave them too much.”
“No.”
“And anything they left would be useless to me, as I couldn’t go back for it. They’ll have it sealed off, once they’ve finished with their photographs and measurements, all the scientific things they do. You’d know more about that than I.”
“The crime scene routine’s changed since my day,” I said. “It seems to me they shoot a lot of videotape these days. And they keep getting more scientific.”
“Though what’s the need for science in this? One man sprays a room with. bullets and another hurls a bomb. I wonder have they finished carrying out the dead yet. I wonder how many dead there were, and others dying.”
“We’ll hear it on the news.”
“Too many, whatever the number. A whole row drinking their pints at the bar, and a stream of bullets to knock them off their stools. Not Eamonn Dougherty, though. Never a scratch on him. Did I not once tell you he’d outlive us all?”
“I believe you did.”
“The murderous wee bastard. I wonder how old he is. Jesus, he was in Tom Barry’s flying column. He has to be ninety, and he could be ninety-five. A long life to live when you’ve all that blood on your hands. Or do you suppose the blood washes off after so many years?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wonder,” he said, and looked down at his own hands. “You saw the gunman. Vietnamese, Andy thought. Or Thai, or God knows what else. Did you get a look at the one that threw the bomb?”
“No.”
“He got away, and I scarcely saw him myself. There was his big face, looming over the other’s shoulder, and then he threw the bomb and after that I never saw him again. It seems to me he was a very pale washed-out sort of white.”
“And partnered with an Asian.”
“It’s the entire United fucking Nations arrayed against me,” he said. “It’s no more than luck they weren’t trying to kill me.”
“You mean all that was just to get your attention?”
“Oh, they came to do murder, and it was murder they did. But I’d say the man who sent them never expected to find me there, or yourself either. He sent those two to destroy the place and kill as many people as they could.” He hefted the weapon he’d taken from the dead Asian. “If I hadn’t shot the fucker,” he said, “he’d have gone on firing until he killed everyone in the room.”
And if he hadn’t been quick as a cat, knocking me down even as he drew the gun . . .
“A big moon face pale as death. Does that sound like anyone you know?”
“A cop said the moon’s full tonight.”
“Then maybe that was himself. The man in the moon, come down to pay his respects. What about the two who waylaid you the other night?”
I described them as well as I could and he just shook his head. They could be anybody, he said. Anybody at all.
“And it was a black man did the shooting at the Chinese restaurant. It makes a man long for the old days, when the only people I had to worry about were the Eyetalians. And they may have been bad bastards but you could reason with them. Now it’s the Rainbow Coalition, with all the races of man uniting against me. What’s next, do you suppose? Cats and dogs?”
“Are you safe here, Mick?”
“Safe enough, for as long as I’ll be here. I didn’t want to go to any of my apartments. There’s people who know about them. Only a few people, and they’re people I trust, but how do I know who’s to be trusted? Andy Buckley’s almost a son to me, but who’s to say what he’ll do if some bastard puts a gun to his head?”
“That’s why you wouldn’t let him drop us off.”
“No, I wanted a car handy, and a less noticeable car than the Cadillac. But he’s no need to know where I am. He can’t reveal what’s been kept from him.”
“Couldn’t you go to the farm?”
He shook his head. “There’s altogether too many know of the farm. And it’s too far away from everything.” He took a drink. “If I wanted to be away from it all,” he said, “I could stay with the brothers.”
That puzzled me for a moment. Then I said, “Oh. The monastery?”
“The Thessalonians, of course. What were you thinking?”
“You said the brothers, and we were talking about the shooter being black and the Rainbow Coalition, and . . .”
“Ah, that’s rich,” he said. “No, it’s the brothers on Staten Island, not the brothers on Lenox Avenue.” He looked at his hands again. “I’m a terrible Catholic,” he said. “Ages since my last confession, and a soul well blackened with sins. But I could go there, to the brothers, and they’d take me in and ask me no questions. Whoever he is, he’d never think to hunt me there. He’d not be sending his black and brown shooters, or his pale white bomb throwers, either.”
“Maybe that’s not a bad idea, Mick.”
“It’s no idea at all,” he said, “because I can’t do it.”
“Why not? Suppose you just walk away from it all.”
He shook his head. “There’s nothing to walk away from. I don’t know who he is or what he wants, the man who’s set all this in motion, but it can’t be anything I have. Am I a crime boss with a great territory? I’m nothing of the sort. I own a few pieces of property, I have some business interests, but that’s not what he wants. Don’t you see? It’s personal with him. He wants to destroy me.” He uncapped the bottle, took a drink. “And all I can do,” he said, “is try to get him first.”
“Before he gets you.”
“Is there another way? You’re the policeman.”
“Years ago.”
“But you can still think like one. Give me a policeman’s advice. Shall I go swear out a complaint? Against person or persons unknown?”
“No.”
“Or ask for police protection? They couldn’t protect me if they wanted to, and whyever should they want to? Haven’t I lived my whole life on the other side of the law? And now it’s kill or be killed, and how can I be hoisting a white flag and asking them to change the rules?”
A door at the left rear corner of the basement opened onto a flight of steps leading up to the air shaft. Mick unbolted the door and asked me again if I didn’t want to catch a few hours’ sleep before I went home. I could have the couch, he said. He was drinking, he’d just sit in the chair and sip whiskey until he dozed off.
I told him I didn’t want Elaine to wake up before I got home. She’d turn on the news and hear what had happened at Grogan’s.
“’Twill be everyone’s lead story,” he said. “I’d put on the radio to learn the number of dead, but I’ll know soon enough.” He gripped my shoulder. “Go on home. And keep your eyes open, will you?”
“I will.”
“And pack your bags and take herself off to Ireland or Italy or wherever she wants to go. Just so you get the hell away from here. Will you do that?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“That’s what I want to hear from you, that you’re at the airport waiting for your flight to board.”
“How will I call you? What’s the phone number here?”
“Wait a minute,” he said, and scribbled on a piece of paper, straightened up and handed it to me. “The cellular phone. I never give out the number because I don’t want a fucking telephone ringing in my pocket. I just bought the creature because you can never find a pay phone that works, or if you do you’ve no quarters for it. I don’t know how much time I’ll spend here, and I don’t want to answer the store phone anyway, with people calling to inquire about doorknobs and strap hinges. Call me from the airport, eh? Will you do that?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just gave me a pat on the back and a shove out the door. I headed up the dark stairs and heard the door close, heard the lock turn.