“For Desmond, you mean,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
The old man said, “I am frankly confused by this, as I am sure you are, Miss Randall. Desmond is an old man, the way I am. I had just assumed that all old fights that needed to be fought had already been fought.”
“But you both have business interests that are still quite active,” I said.
“Ones that we have mostly managed to keep separate, Desmond and me,” he said.
“In the interest of mutual profit,” I said.
“And respect,” he said. He smiled. “It always comes down to that in our world, does it not? Respect. Or lack of respect. Or earning respect. Or avenging the lack of respect.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Sometimes I think we are all still children,” he said.
“Would you tell me if you knew who has been doing the shooting?” I said.
“For mutual profit?” he said.
“I am told that Desmond is getting more into guns,” I said, “and that such an action might have angered you.”
“Angered me in what way?”
“Perhaps he beat you out of making a similar action.”
The old man waved a hand.
“Maybe there was a time when Desmond Burke beat me to things,” he said. “But not for a very long time.”
“He says you have hated him for a very long time,” I said. “Why is that?”
“We were both full of piss and vinegar once,” he said. There was a small smile. “When we could still piss.”
Spike made a brief snorting sound.
Antonioni nodded at the bartender, who came for his cup, went back over to the espresso machine behind the bar, refilled it, brought it back. Antonioni sipped and nodded. The bartender looked relieved, as if maybe that meant his family could live. Spike wasn’t looking at the other men now. He was looking at Antonioni, fascinated.
“If I thought the risk was worth the reward with guns,” Antonioni said, “that Iron Pipeline about which people speak would be running through me, and fuck Desmond Burke. But it does not.”
“Okay, let’s assume it’s not about guns,” I said. “Who out of Desmond’s past would shoot his son and kill his brother?”
“At last an easy question,” Albert Antonioni said. “Anybody Desmond ever fucked over.”
I started to say something, but he held up an old, veiny hand.
“We’re done here now,” he said.
“Evidently,” I said.
“You have obviously taken it upon yourself to find out who is doing this to Desmond and his family, and why.”
“I have,” I said.
Antonioni stood and nodded.
“Tough cookie,” he said.
“All due respect, sir?” Spike said. “You have no fucking idea.”
“One last thing, Miss Randall,” the old man said. “It is my experience that the Irish in Boston only forget grudges when they are dead.”
“Is that a suggestion?” I said.
“More of an observation,” he said. “The answers you seek are likely there, not here.”
He gave me a long look, with dark eyes suddenly full of light.
“By the way?” he said. “Brock Patton might have gotten elected, as much of a stunad as he is. As you have probably noticed, just about anybody can in this country.”
He and his men left the room first. They had all been his. Spike and I remained at the table until we were certain they were gone from the Old Canteen. When we were outside and walking back underneath the arch, Spike said, “Did Albert’s boys scare you as much as they did me?”
“Not as much as Albert does,” I said.
“Fuckin’ ay,” Spike said.
Eighteen
Richie’s mother had died in her thirties, from uterine cancer. Desmond had never remarried. If there had been women after his wife died, Richie knew nothing of it. Or it was just more of Desmond Burke’s secret life.
Felix had never married, despite what Richie said had always been an extremely active romantic life for his uncle until he just stopped giving a shit about women. According to Richie, the only meaningful and enduring relationship of Felix Burke’s adult life had been his marriage to the family business. Felix now lived in a condominium at the marina in Charlestown, Charlestown being the second-oldest neighborhood in Boston, and more Irish than St. Patrick’s Day. But it had become gentrified over time. The city had not only expanded the residential life of the marina, it had developed the Navy Yard as well.
As much as Charlestown always had been, and always would be, associated with the Bunker Hill Monument, there were so many lovely parts of it, located as it was on the banks of Boston Harbor and the Mystic River. So it was both a historic Boston address and a fashionable one these days, particularly if your address was on the water. I remember how surprised Richie had been when he’d learned Felix was moving out of the home he had lived in for forty years to a newer and much trendier one.
“Next he’s going to get an electric-powered car,” Richie said.
That morning Felix had met Desmond, as always, for seven-o’clock Mass at St. Frances de Sales Church on Bunker Hill Street, before they would have breakfast at the Grasshopper Café, on the same street. Desmond and Felix each had two bodyguards with them, as they had since Richie was shot.
And sometime after the black Lincoln with Felix and his men inside had left for church, someone had walked up to Felix Burke’s condominium on the water side and blown out the ground-floor windows with a shotgun. No one saw who did it. There was the thought that he might even have come by small boat. All the neighbors heard the blast, muted slightly by the loud wind and rain that was blowing off the water at the time.
When those with the same view as Felix’s looked out their own windows to see what had caused the commotion, all they saw was the water.
Richie was the one who called me, saying over the phone, “You would’ve found out. And I wouldn’t have been able to keep you away.”
I told him I would meet him there, which I did forty-five minutes later. There were two police cruisers at the end of Felix’s block. Another, lights flashing, was directly in front of the condominium. There were onlookers in the street, even in the rain, the crowd of them roped off by cops. Richie was waiting for me near the entrance to his uncle’s place. By then the cops knew he was Felix Burke’s nephew, and let us both pass. Richie didn’t even take me inside, just walked me around to the back.
Desmond and Felix were both there, both wearing tan, half-raincoats and the same kind of scally caps I imagined them wearing on the boat that brought them to America in the first place.
Frank Belson was with them. No one had died, but Felix was a Burke and his brother had already been shot dead this week, after Richie had been shot in the back. What had happened here was a part of all that, clearly. But the randomness of it all, I thought, continued. Richie had been wounded. Peter had been murdered. Now it was only a residence that had been hit. Felix’s residence.
Belson, as he often did and without greeting or salutation, made it sound as if we were halfway into a conversation when I went walking over to him.
“Shotguns are good,” he said, “even though you have to get close to do any good damage with them. Usually no rifling or markings that can be traced or give you anything consistent enough for a match. Maybe my guys will find something we can trace back to a manufacturer. But it won’t do shit.”
“Another warning shot,” I said.
“More than one, from the looks of the place,” Belson said.
He took a small cigar out of the corner of his mouth, both he and it oblivious to the rain. Or perhaps impervious.