When I was little and used to sleep over here some weekends with my sisters, we liked to sneak out of bed late at night and peek out the kitchen window, giggling at the drunks reeling through the parking lot down there.
My vo had caught us doing it once. The next morning at breakfast she had kept hinting to my vô about “that thing we talked about,” and from the way my grandfather kept glancing over at us, we knew she’d ratted us out.
When we came back the next weekend, we found out the “thing” they had talked about was planting a row of arborvitae along this side of their backyard fence. The shrubs were only about two feet high, and it would be a few years before they’d actually block the view of the Ace’s back lot from the third floor window. My poor grandfather, torn between being economical and protecting his netos from the evils of the world, had really done neither.
I walked to that back window now. The line of arborvitae had long outlived my vô; the trees had grown tall while he had faded, and had finally succeeded in keeping the view of the back door and back lot from the prying eyes of his grandson.
Over in the far corner of the yard, just past the end of the line of arborvitae, I could see the shrine. The Blessed Mother still had her hands held open and out, the two girls still prayed to her. But the boy lay shattered, his hands clasped together on the lawn, his head smashed, as my grandmother had said, to smithereens.
To the left and two streets over I could see the cross on the top of Our Lady of Fatima Church, which like so many other churches around here was barely hanging on. Already the diocese had closed a number of churches, consolidating them, sometimes crunching as many as three parishes into one.
It was the topic everyone tried to avoid at family get-togethers because it always upset my grandmother, who had been baptized, confirmed, and married in that church, and, we all knew, planned to be buried out of it as well.
She scooped the sweetbread, eggs, and chourico onto a plate and brought the plate over to the table. Now that I had agreed to talk to Tiago D., she suddenly didn’t look so old any more.
She smiled as she watched me eat. Food was love for her, brought up as she was during the Depression when sometimes there wasn’t much food around. The food was good too, but I think I would have enjoyed it a little more if the shadow of Tiago D. Costa wasn’t hovering over every bite I took.
There was nothing else to do after I ate, and it was still too early to call home. My grandmother caught my second yawn and nagged me into taking a nap in her spare bedroom. I thought I was just humoring her, but I was asleep in that old bed I used to love within five minutes.
The Ace, which had always looked run down when I was a kid, had a new face of sand-colored bricks. Though I’ve seen the inside of a few of the city’s bars, I’d never been in the Ace. I was always sure my grandmother’s eyes were frowning down, right through the quickly growing shield of arborvitae, from her third floor kitchen window.
I could hear a buzzer go off in back as I opened the bar’s front door, could see the video camera in the far left corner checking me out. Lots of caution for a small, neighborhood bar — though maybe not for the headquarters of Tiago D. Costa.
It looked as if the renovations had stopped with the new brick front and the surveillance equipment. The inside, dark and smelling like an early Sunday morning after a very late Saturday night, was deserted. Couldn’t blame people for staying away. The dark wood of the long bar was almost obliterated by nicks and burn spots. The stools, small tables, chairs, looked as if they’d been picked up curbside on trash day. The only thing that looked new and clean was the green felt surface of the pool table.
The door buzzer brought a tall, thin guy through a door to the back. He had the kind of pale complexion that made you wonder if he ever went outside. He must have decided that I wasn’t one of the occasional eleven A.M. drinkers they get because he stood with crossed arms and made no move toward the bar.
“What?” he said, with the kind of look my wife gets when she realizes it’s a telemarketer on the phone.
“I want to talk to Tiago D. Costa.”
“He expecting you?”
“I dunno. Why don’t you ask him?” I said, nodding up at the ceiling-mounted camera.
Hell, Tiago must be back there, and he must have seen me on his monitor.
Confirming my guess, we both heard the troll voice from out back calling, “Send ’im in, for chrissakes!”
The pale guy said, “You can go in,” as if he’d just made up his mind.
Whenever I come back to the city of my childhood, I notice how things have shrunk. The trees I used to climb, my grammar school, that bed in my vo’s spare room. I supposed in the back of my mind I was hoping that Tiago D. Costa had shrunk too. No such luck. He had a few gray hairs at his temple, but looking up from behind a small steel desk he was every bit as broad and carved from stone as I remembered him. His white shortsleeved shirt was tight around his muscled upper arms. His thick hands, folded comfortably on the desktop, looked as if they could still punch out anyone or anything that got in his way, and his dark eyes had kept that dangerous, flat stare that used to make me change direction or cross the street when I was a kid.
“Whattaya want?” he said, his voice as dark and as uninflected as his eyes.
“I’m the grandson of the lady lives in the yard behind this place, the yard with the Bathtub Mary in it.”
“I know who you are,” he said. “I asked you what you wanted.”
I’ve been on the other side of so many interrogations that I knew instinctively I was already at a disadvantage. He had let me know that he had information about me, but not how much or how he intended to use it.
“Somebody destroyed one of her statues,” I said. “She thinks you’re the one had it done.”
What the hell, might as well go with the truth no matter how lame it sounded.
“You’re Victor Medeiros’s cousin,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Victor, the Portagee private eye.”
I waited, thinking maybe he was pushing his early advantage.
“You’re Gilbert Souza, right? You’re a cop in some punk town up near Boston.”
Okay, now he was just showing off.
“About the statue,” I said.
“You might want to talk to your cousin about it.”
“He wasn’t home,” I said, unblinking so he wouldn’t catch the lie.
“Your grandmother, then.”
“She’s the one asked me to speak to you. She was worried that maybe you had it in for Victor for some reason.”
For the first time I thought I caught a glint of something that looked suspiciously like humor in those flat eyes.
“You’re a cop, Gilbert,” he said, tilting his chin to one side. “You know what blackmail is?”
“Blackmail?” I said, though I had heard him clearly, and any rookie on the force would know that I was just trying to buy a little time to figure out what the hell we were talking about here.
He nodded, pulled a thin, leather cigar case from his shirt pocket, removed an even thinner cigar, and lit it up. The gesture reminded me of the tapes I’d seen of old Celtic games, with Red Auerbach lighting up one of his victory cigars before he left the court at the Boston Garden.
“And Victor’s connected... how?”
He blew a narrow stream of smoke toward the already browned ceiling tiles, then fixed me with that stare and said, “Why don’t you go ask the Portagee P.I. about his tape?”