In fact, as I drove down to Fall River in the early morning darkness, I could still remember them clearly, still feel that sharp sense of unfairness that kids never let go of. As for worrying about my vo saying that someone was going to die — well, considering the source, I didn’t really take it too seriously.
On the other hand, almost every light in the third floor apartment of the triple-decker my grandmother owned seemed to be on. She insisted on staying on the third floor despite her age because she said she got extra heat coming up from the people below. And climbing the stairs was good exercise.
I could see her silhouette at the curtains of the front parlor, the only semidarkened room in the apartment, and she appeared to be cradling something that looked ominously familiar in her arms.
So I hustled up the two flights of stairs but was careful to stand off to the side as I rapped on the door.
“Who is it?”
“You know who it is, Vo. I saw you at the window.”
“You alone, Gilbert?”
“Yes, of course I am. So will you please carefully put down Vo’s shotgun and open the door?”
I heard the thunk as the stock of my late grandfather’s old Remington .32 over-and-under hit the floor, then the slow turning of her lock.
“Took you long enough,” she muttered, closing and locking the door behind me.
She was dressed in gray sweats, top and bottom. With her fly-away white hair and dark eyes, the only touch of color on my grandmother was the gold bracelet she always wore. It had cameos and the date of birth for each of her fourteen grandchildren, and we all jangled from her wrist with every move. Kind of like life. I was number eight.
“Sorry, I was slowed down by all that five A.M. traffic.”
“This is no joking matter, Gilbert. No joke at all.”
“Right. You said someone’s going to die, and it’s connected to the statue?”
“Did you see it?” she said, dark eyes blazing. “Did you see what they did to it? To the shrine of the Mother of God?”
“Uh, no, Vo. The statue’s in the back yard. It’s... well, it’s still pretty dark out.”
“They destroyed the boy, Gilbert! They knocked his head off, smashed him all to smithereens.”
“You mean the statue of the boy in your shrine?”
“Yes, of course. The one you dressed up as.”
My grandmother usually knows what buttons to push, but this wasn’t one of those times. I had spent too much of my youth daydreaming about taking a baseball bat to that statue myself.
“It was probably kids that did it, Vo,” I said, trying to hide my concern that she had called me out for what seemed to be simple vandalism. My grandmother wasn’t the kind of person who thought that way.
“No, it wasn’t no kids, Gilbert,” she said, her lips a thin, determined line. “It was that good-for-nothing, Tiago D. Costa.”
Whoa, now that slowed me down. Tiago D. Costa was a name I’d been hearing ever since I was a kid. Always the full name, his middle initial as permanent a placement as George C. Scott’s or James T. Kirk’s. Tiago D. Costa. Although he was only seven years older than I was, graduating from Our Lady of Fatima with my cousin Victor’s class, Tiago D. Costa quickly became a legend for his run-ins with authority. He had the fastest car in the city, the fastest fists. Soon he had the fastest rise to ownership of triple-deckers and small stores in the north end of the city. He was also rumored to have a piece of every illegal transaction that passed through the city, so much so that his name was mentioned three times in a Boston newspaper story about crime in New England.
“Tiago D. Costa broke your statue, Vo?”
“Damned straight, Gilbert. Either him or one of his flunkies.”
“Why would he do that?”
My grandmother had a sudden flash of caution streak across her dark eyes. It was a look I’d seen too many times, even in a small town like Putnam, on people trying to hide some guilt from me.
“Vo?” I said. “Why would Tiago D. Costa break your statue?”
“I don’t know, Gilbert. How would I know why anybody does anything? Especially an animal like him.”
But she knew, I had no doubt about that. I also knew she wasn’t about to tell me.
“You have to go talk to him, Gilbert,” she said, her dark eyes worried, even a little frightened. I’d never seen her frightened, except maybe that night in the hospital when my aunt Lucy had been in an accident and...
“Who is it, Vo?”
“Who’s what? I told you, that animal, Tiago D. Costa,” she said, going over to her stove to get a frying pan.
“No, I mean who are you worried for? Who’s really in trouble with Tiago here?”
She frowned, stared down at the frying pan where she was putting in slices of sweetbread she’d cut from a fat round loaf. I’d guessed right, no doubt about that. My grandmother only worried about two things: the potential closing of Our Lady of Fatima Church and bad things happening to people in the family.
“I need to know, Vo. If I’m gonna speak to him, I need to know.”
She sighed, began toasting the bread in the frying pan as she muttered, “Maybe Victor. He could be in a little trouble.”
“Victor? What’s Victor got to do with Tiago D. attacking the Bath... uh, the shrine to Mary?”
“Talk to Tiago D.,” she said, cracking a couple of eggs into the frying pan to go along with my sweetbread. “Just talk to him, Gilbert, that’s all, that’s all I’m asking you to do.”
Victor. It figures. My cousin had turned his love of technology into a career as a private investigator. I’d heard that he’d recently begun to take ads on local cable, speaking both English and Portuguese and selling himself to the community with the label, “The Portuguese P.I.”
My grandmother shuffled slowly to her refrigerator, suddenly looking very old. She had always looked old to me, but old like some ancient, tough tree planted so firmly in the ground that no wind could knock it over. Now she just looked old.
Five thirty. Okay, if Victor was responsible for my being awakened at four, I could get him up now.
“What’s Victor’s number, Vo?” I said, holding up my cell phone and hoping she wouldn’t know that my phone could store all the numbers I needed. Victor’s had never been one of them.
“Don’t call him, Gilbert. I don’t want him to know I called you. All I want you to do is talk to Tiago D. Costa.”
“Well, if you’re not gonna tell me what you know, I have to ask Victor. I mean, I can’t just go in and face down Tiago without knowing what I’m talking about.”
“You’ll be talking about the destruction of part of my shrine to the Blessed Mother, Gilbert. And don’t you have a badge that will put the shakes even in a crumb like Tiago?”
No point in telling her that that wasn’t the way it worked. Tiago would know my Putnam shield would have no real weight down here. Also no point in telling her that Tiago D. Costa had always been the shadow at the end of the dark street of my mind, half hero, half bogeyman, all intimidating legend of my childhood.
“I don’t suppose you’d know where I could find Tiago?”
Her smile was a small one that flickered off quickly, but I still felt as if she’d just mentally whispered, “Checkmate.”
“He’s usually down at that lousy club of his around the corner by eleven or so,” she said, and to reward me she took a length of chourico that she must have fried earlier out of her refrigerator and began chopping off big slices to toss in the pan with the eggs and sweetbread.
Tiago’s “club” was actually a bar called the Ace, and my grandmother had always hated the place, even before Tiago owned it. She also had always described it as “around the corner.” The front of it was, but its back entrance and rear parking lot were snugged up against my vo’s back yard, just on the other side of her chain-link fence.