Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

“And you do what you have to.” His father nodded, his green eyes brighter than usual. “And I’ll never judge you for it. But I won’t commit homicide.”

“Even for me?”

“Especially for you.”

“Then I’ll die in here, Dad.”

“That’s possible, yes.”

Joe looked down at the table, the wood blurring, everything blurring. “Soon.”

“And if that happens”—his father’s voice was a whisper—“I’ll die soon after of a broken heart. But I won’t murder for you, son. Kill for you? Yes. But murder? Never.”

Joe looked up. He was ashamed how wet his voice sounded when he said, “Please.”

His father shook his head. Softly. Slowly.

Well, then. There was nothing left to say.

Joe went to stand.

His father said, “Wait.”

“What?”

His father looked at the guard standing by the door behind Joe. “That screw, is he in Maso’s pocket?”

“Yeah. Why?”

His father removed his watch from his vest. He removed the chain from the watch.

“No, Dad. No.”

Thomas dropped the chain back into his pocket and slid the watch across the table.

Joe tried to keep the tears in his eyes from falling. “I can’t.”

“You can. You will.” His father stared through the screen at him like something on fire, all the exhaustion swept from his face, all the hopelessness too. “It’s worth a fortune, that piece of metal. But that’s all it is—a piece of metal. You buy your life with it. You hear me? You give it to that dago devil and buy your life.”

Joe closed his hand over the watch and it was still warm from his father’s pocket, ticking against his palm like a heart.

He told Maso in the mess hall. He hadn’t intended to; he hadn’t guessed it would come up. He thought he’d have time. During meals, Joe sat with members of the Pescatore crew, but not with the ones at the first table who sat with Maso himself. Joe sat at the next one over with guys like Rico Gastemeyer, who ran the daily number, and Larry Kahn, who made toilet gin in the basement of the guards’ quarters. He came back from his meeting with his father and took a seat across from Rico and Ernie Rowland, a counterfeiter from Saugus, but they were pushed down the bench by Hippo Fasini, one of the soldiers closest to Maso, and Joe was left looking across the table at Maso himself, flanked on one side by Naldo Aliente and on the other by Hippo Fasini.

“So when will it happen?” Maso asked.

“Sir?”

Maso looked frustrated, as he always did when asked to repeat himself. “Joseph.”

Joe felt his chest and throat clench around his answer. “He won’t do it.”

Naldo Aliente chuckled softly and shook his head.

Maso said, “He refused?”

Joe nodded.

Maso looked at Naldo, then at Hippo Fasini. No one said anything for some time. Joe looked down at his food, aware that it was growing cold, aware he should eat it because if you skipped a meal in here, you’d grow weak very fast.

“Joseph, look at me.”

Joe looked across the table. The face staring back at him seemed amused and curious, like a wolf who’d come upon a nest of newborn chicks where he’d least expected.

“Why weren’t you more convincing with your father?”

Joe said, “Mr. Pescatore, I tried.”

Maso looked back and forth between his men. “He tried.”

When Naldo Aliente smiled he exposed a row of teeth that looked like bats hanging in a cave. “Not hard enough.”

“Look,” Joe said, “he gave me something.”

“He…?” Maso put a hand behind his ear.

“Gave me something to give to you.” Joe handed the watch across the table.

Maso took note of the gold cover. He opened it and considered the timepiece itself and then the inside of the dust cover where Patek Philippe had been engraved in the most graceful script. His eyebrows rose in approval.

“It’s the 1902, eighteen karat,” he said to Naldo. He turned to Joe. “Only two thousand ever made. It’s worth more than my house. How’s a copper come to own it?”

“Broke up a bank robbery in ’08,” Joe said, repeating a story his Uncle Eddie had told a hundred times, though his father never discussed it. “It was in Codman Square. He killed one of the robbers before the guy could kill the bank manager.”

“And the bank manager gave him this watch?”

Joe shook his head. “Bank president did. The manager was his son.”

“So now he gives it to me to save his own son?”

Joe nodded.

“I got three sons, myself. You know that?”

Joe said, “I heard that, yeah.”

“So I know something about fathers and how they love their sons.”

Maso sat back and looked at the watch for a bit. Eventually he sighed and pocketed the watch. He reached across the table and patted Joe’s hand three times. “You get back in touch with your old man. Tell him thanks for the gift.” Maso stood from the table. “And then tell him to do what I fucking told him to do.”

Maso’s men all stood together and they left the mess hall.

When he returned to his cell after work detail in the chain shop, Joe was hot, filthy, and three men he’d never seen before waited inside for him. The bunk beds were still gone but the mattresses had been returned to the floor. The men sat on the mattresses. His mattress lay beyond them, against the wall under the high window, farthest from the bars. Two of the fellas he’d never seen before, he was sure of it, but the third looked familiar. He was about thirty, short, but with a very long face, and a chin as pointy as his nose and the tips of his ears. Joe ratcheted through all the names and faces he’d learned in this prison and realized he was looking across at Basil Chigis, one of Emil Lawson’s crew, a lifer like his boss, no possibility of parole. Alleged to have eaten the fingers of a boy he’d killed in a Chelsea basement.

Joe looked at each of the men long enough to show he wasn’t frightened, though he was, and they stared back at him, blinking occasionally but never speaking. So he didn’t speak either.

At some point, the men seemed to tire of the staring and played cards. The currency was bones. Small bones, the bones of quail or young chickens or minor birds of prey. The men carried the bones in small canvas sacks. Boiled white, they clacked when they were gathered up in a winning pot. When the light dimmed, the men continued playing, never speaking except to say, “Raise,” or “See ya,” or “Fold.” Every now and then one of them would glance at Joe but never for very long, and then he’d go back to playing cards.