His gray hair was still a bit on the longish side, but he carried it off. He was, I thought, still handsome in his sixties, in an aging-rock-star sort of way.
“It has occurred to me as I’ve done my reading over the past couple days,” I said, “how little I really knew about Desmond’s career over there on the dark side.”
“I always wondered how much Richie really knew,” Wayne said.
“Spike says Richie has always been able to compartmentalize.”
“Got him good and shot anyway.”
It had begun to rain, the first umbrellas appearing on Arlington Street, people waiting under the awning as Jesse and Ray, the two guys out front, hailed them cabs. I liked this bar anytime. I particularly liked it on rainy nights like this one, with good company right across the table from me and nowhere I needed to be.
“Richie was shot to scare Desmond,” I said. “Hundred percent.”
“Maybe the only thing that would scare the old bastard,” Wayne said.
“First put one in his son, then kill one of his brothers,” I said. “This is starting to feel like the Mobbed-up version of Ten Little Indians. Why I don’t think Peter is the end of it.”
“Fuck, no,” Wayne Cosgrove said.
He gave me a tutorial about what he knew the Irish Mobs were like when Desmond and Felix and their brothers were first coming up. Some of it, the edges of it, I knew from my reading the night before. Wayne knew a lot more. I stopped him at one point and asked why he’d never written a book about any of it. He grinned at me and said, “Because it has always been my fervent hope not to write something that would have me end up like Uncle Peter.”
“Point taken,” I said, and we clinked glasses again.
He sat and took me through the old wars and grudges and all the blood that he said was once on the street as the rain came down harder. He told of the Charlestown Mob, run by the McLaughlin brothers, and about Winter Hill, before Whitey Bulger was in charge, when the bosses were Buddy McLean and Howie Winter and a different McLaughlin than the ones from Charlestown.
“Wait,” I said. “I think I know how the trouble is supposed to have started between Charlestown and Winter Hill. I read about it last night.”
“Look at you,” Wayne said, “still trying to be the smartest girl in class.”
“Almost as smart as you in this subject,” I said.
“Georgie McLaughlin,” he said, “tried to make a move on Bobo Petricone’s girl. Bobo was with Winter Hill. So Bobo and some of the other boys go over and beat the living shit out of Georgie. And his brother Bernie, as you can imagine, didn’t take that so well. You can’t imagine how much of this shit started with beefs about women.”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
“So one thing led to another,” Wayne said, “and poor Bernie ends up dead in the middle of Charlestown Square. And that was the beginning of the end of the Charlestown Mob as anybody knew it at the time. What was left of it was folded into Winter Hill.”
Finally Whitey Bulger was in charge of consolidating Charlestown and the Killeens and the Mullens. And somehow Desmond Burke ended up with a lot of the loansharking that had been run by the Killeen Gang, with Whitey’s blessing, even though no one actually ever could figure out why.
“Every time I think about Whitey I think of Johnny Depp playing him in that movie,” I said.
“Well, the reality of Whitey Bulger was much worse, of course,” Wayne said. “But somehow he steered clear of Desmond. Maybe Desmond did him a solid at some point, and made that stand up until Whitey finally went on the run. No one was ever quite sure why. Maybe he decided he liked killing the Italians and the Chinese more than killing other Irish. Who the fuck knows? But somehow he allowed Desmond to start building his own empire, even though I’m sure your ex’s father would be resistant to the notion that anybody ever allowed him to do shit.”
“Then Whitey goes on the run and Desmond is the last Irishman standing,” I said.
Wayne had his glass nearly to his lips. He stopped now and looked at me.
“Maybe not for long,” he said.
“Manifestly,” I said.
“I think I’ve mentioned before that you sound hardly anything like a private dick,” he said.
“Watch your mouth,” I said.
“Little late for that,” he said, and grinned, and drank.
“You forget I was a fine arts major.”
“Who now has a license to pack a gun.”
“Fine arts majors with guns,” I said. “Sounds like a pitch for a new TV series.”
The bar was beginning to fill up. The rain continued to come down. The people moved faster on Arlington Street, with and without umbrellas. But I felt safe and warm in the bar at the Taj, even as we talked about Mob killings out of the past, and the killing of Peter Burke the day before.
“Maybe the answer is back there somewhere,” I said.
“Maybe there’s someone who worked with one of those Mobs who’s not dead or in prison who still has a score to settle with old Desmond,” Wayne said. “You know the joke about Irish Alzheimer’s, right?”
“I thought it was Italians.”
“Either way,” Wayne said. “You forget everything except the grudges.”
We drank to that. Wayne asked if we should have one more for the road, or old times’ sake, or just for the fuck of it.
I said, “We’d be fools not to.”
Twelve
I was having my weekly session with Dr. Susan Silverman in the office at her home on Linnaean Street in Cambridge.
There had been times in my life when I had seen Dr. Silverman twice a week. Almost always, in the course of our fifty minutes together, the subject would involve Richie.
So it did today.
“At least,” I said, “I feel as if my feelings about him are uncomplicated this time.”
“Are they?” she said.
She was as beautiful as ever, in a way that was both ageless and timeless. And, if you were a woman, more than somewhat annoying. I had always thought it pointless to try guessing her actual age, though I knew it wouldn’t take much crackerjack detecting to find out. I knew she would probably tell me if asked. When I sometimes did imagine myself asking, I could picture her smiling at me and saying, “How old do you think I am?” Or simply asking me why it mattered.
She had hair that was intensely dark, flawless skin, and an intelligence that felt almost kinetic in a room that today was splashed with sunlight. Often I really would leave this office feeling as if I knew myself better. Always, though, I wondered if I would ever have the sense of self that Susan Silverman clearly did.
Today she was wearing a navy suit with pants and a white shirt underneath and makeup and eyeliner that I knew required both time and effort and an almost professional expertise.
“Sunny,” she said now, “I seem to have lost you there for a second. You had suggested that you felt a clarity to your response to Richie being shot.”
“It was partially anger,” I said, “and partially fear about how easily I could have lost him if the shooter had wanted him dead.”
“Lost him in a random and violent and unexpected way,” she said. “Even in a random world.”
“It’s ironic, if you think about it,” I said.
She leaned forward, elbows on her desk, and made a tent with her fingers under her chin, her focus both calm and fierce at the same time.
“In what way?” she said.
“I’ve always known that Richie was raised within the structure of a violent family,” I said. “But as far as I know, the violence of the world of his father and uncles had somehow never reached him.”
These were things that I had been thinking about and discussing with Richie and Spike and others. Just not with Dr. Silverman. It was as if I had come here today looking for some sort of bottom line.