Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

What they rarely did was talk. At least not about anything outside the borders of their seemingly bottomless addiction to each other.

Behind Emma’s pale eyes and pale skin lay something coiled and caged. And not caged in a way that it wanted to come out. Caged in a way that demanded nothing come in. The cage opened when she took him inside her and for as long as they could sustain their lovemaking. In those moments, her eyes were open and searching and he could see her soul back there and the red light of her heart and whatever dreams she may have clung to as a child, temporarily untethered and freed of their cellar and its dark walls and padlocked door.

Once he’d pulled out of her, though, and her breathing slowed to normal, he would watch those things recede like the tide.

Didn’t matter, though. He was starting to suspect he was in love with her. In those rare moments when the cage opened and he was invited in, he found a person desperate to trust, desperate to love, hell, desperate to live. She just needed to see he was worthy of risking that trust, that love, that life.

And he would be.

He turned twenty years old that winter and he knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He wanted to become the one man Emma Gould put all her faith in.

As the winter wore on, they risked appearing in public together a few times. Only on the nights when she had it on good authority that Albert White and his key men were out of town and only at establishments that were owned by Tim Hickey or his partners.

One of Tim’s partners was Phil Cregger, who owned the Venetian Garden restaurant on the first floor of the Bromfield Hotel. Joe and Emma went there on a frigid night that smelled of snow even though the sky was clear. They’d just checked their coats and hats when a group exited the private room behind the kitchen and Joe knew them for what they were by their cigar smoke and the practiced bonhomie in their voices before he ever saw their faces—pols.

Aldermen and selectmen and city councillors and fire captains and police captains and prosecutors—the shiny, smiling, grubby battery that kept the city’s lights on, barely. Kept the trains running and the traffic signals working, barely. Kept the populace ever aware that those services and a thousand more, big and small, could end—would end—were it not for their constant vigilance.

He saw his father at the same moment his father noticed him. It was, as it usually was if they hadn’t seen each other in a while, unsettling if for no other reason than how completely they mirrored each other. Joe’s father was sixty. He’d sired Joe late after producing two sons at a more respectably youthful age. But whereas Connor and Danny carried the genetic strains of both parents in their faces and bodies and certainly their height (which came from the Fennessey side of the family, where the men grew tall), Joe had come out the spitting image of his old man. Same height, same build, same hard jawline, same nose and sharp cheekbones and eyes sunk back in their sockets just a little farther than normal, which made it all the harder for people to read what he was thinking. The only difference between Joe and his father was one of color. Joe’s eyes were blue whereas his father’s were green; Joe’s hair was the color of wheat, his father’s the color of flax. Otherwise, Joe’s father looked at him and saw his own youth mocking him. Joe looked at his father and saw liver spots and loose flesh, Death standing at the end of his bed at 3 A.M., tapping an impatient foot.

After a few farewell handshakes and backslaps, his father broke from the crowd as the men lined up for their coats. He stood before his son. He thrust out his hand. “How are you?”

Joe shook his hand. “Not bad, sir. You?”

“Tip-top. I was promoted last month.”

“Deputy superintendent of the BPD,” Joe said. “I heard.”

“And you? Where are you working these days?”

You’d have to have known Thomas Coughlin a long time to spot the effects of alcohol on him. It was never to be found in his speech, which remained smooth and firm and of consistent volume even after half a bottle of good Irish. It wasn’t to be found in any glassiness of the eyes. But if you knew where to look for it, you could find something predatory and mischievous in the glow of his handsome face, something that sized you up, found your weaknesses, and debated whether to dine on them.

“Dad,” Joe said, “this is Emma Gould.”

Thomas Coughlin took her hand and kissed the knuckles. “A pleasure, Miss Gould.” He tilted his head to the maître d’. “The corner table, Gerard, please.” He smiled at Joe and Emma. “Do you mind if I join you? I’m famished.”

They got through the salads pleasantly enough.

Thomas told stories of Joe’s childhood, the point of which was invariably what a scamp Joe had been, how irrepressible and full of beans. In his father’s retelling, they were whimsical stories fit for the Hal Roach shorts at a Saturday matinee. His father left out how the stories had usually ended—with a slap or the strap.

Emma smiled and chuckled at all the right places, but Joe could see she was pretending. They were all pretending. Joe and Thomas pretended to be bound by the love between a father and son and Emma pretended not to notice that they weren’t.

After the story about six-year-old Joe in his father’s garden—a story told so many times over the years Joe could predict to a breath his father’s pauses—Thomas asked Emma where her family hailed from.

“Charlestown,” she said, and Joe worried he heard a hint of defiance in her voice.

“No, I mean before they came here. You’re clearly Irish. Do you know where your ancestors were born?”

The waiter cleared the salad plates as Emma said, “My mother’s father was from Kerry and my father’s mother was from Cork.”

“I’m from just outside Cork,” Thomas said with uncommon delight.

Emma sipped her water but didn’t say anything, a part of her missing suddenly. Joe had seen this before—she had a way of disconnecting from a situation if it wasn’t to her liking. Her body remained, like something left behind in the chair during her escape, but the essence of her, whatever made Emma Emma, was gone.

“What was her maiden name, your grandmother?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You don’t know?”

Emma shrugged. “She’s dead.”

“But it’s your heritage.” Thomas was flummoxed.

Emma gave that another shrug. She lit a cigarette. Thomas showed no reaction but Joe knew he was aghast. Flappers appalled him on countless levels—women smoking, flashing thigh, lowering necklines, appearing drunk in public without shame or fear of civic scorn.