Live by Night

Thomas looked down the ladder at the man standing on the sidewalk thirty feet below. He wore a light blue seersucker, white shirt, and a red bow tie, no hat.

“How can I help?” Thomas said.

“I’m looking for the L Street Bathhouse.”

From up here, Thomas could see the bathhouse, and not just the roof — the whole of its brick edifice. He could see the small lagoon beyond it, and beyond the lagoon, the Atlantic, stretching all the way to the land of his birth.

“End of the street.” Thomas pointed, gave the man a nod, and turned back to his paintbrush.

The man said, “Right down the end of the street, huh? Right down there?”

Thomas turned back and nodded, his eyes on the man now.

“Sometimes, I can’t get out of my own way,” the man said. “Ever happen to you? You know what you should do, but you just can’t get out of your own way?”

The man was blond and bland, handsome in a forgettable way. Neither tall nor short, fat nor thin.

“They won’t kill him,” he said pleasantly.

Thomas said, “Excuse me?” and dropped the brush into the paint can.

The man put his hand on the ladder.

From there, it wouldn’t take much.

The man squinted up at Thomas and then looked down the street. “They’ll make him wish they did, though. Make him wish that every day of his life.”

“You understand my rank with the Boston Police Department,” Thomas said.

“He’ll think about suicide,” the man said. “Of course he will. But they’ll keep him alive by promising to kill you if he does. And every day? They’ll think of a new thing to try on him.”

A black Model T pulled off the curb and idled in the middle of the street. The man left the sidewalk, climbed in, and they drove away, taking the first left they found.

Thomas climbed down, surprised to see the shakes in his forearms even after he entered his house. He was getting old, very old. He shouldn’t be up on ladders. He shouldn’t be standing on principle.

The way of the old was to allow the new to push you aside with as much grace as you could muster.

He called Kenny Donlan, the captain of the Third District in Mattapan. For five years, Kenny had been Thomas’s lieutenant at the Sixth in South Boston. Like many of the department command staff, he owed his success to Thomas.

“And on your day off no less,” Kenny said when his secretary patched Thomas through.

“Ah, there’s no days off for the likes of us, boy.”

“That’s the truth of it,” Kenny said. “How can I help you, Thomas?”

“One-four-one-seven Blue Hill Avenue,” Thomas said. “It’s a warehouse, supposedly for gaming parlor equipment.”

“But that’s not what’s in there,” Kenny said.

“No.”

“How hard do you want it hit?”

“Down to the last bottle,” Thomas said, and something inside him cried out as it died. “Down to the last drop.”

Chapter eight In the Gloaming

That summer at Charlestown Penitentiary the Commonwealth of Massachusetts prepared to execute two famous anarchists. Global protests didn’t deter the state from its mission, nor did a flurry of last-minute appeals, stays, and further appeals. In the weeks after Sacco and Vanzetti were taken to Charlestown from Dedham and housed in the Death House to await the electric chair, Joe’s sleep was interrupted by throngs of outraged citizens gathered on the other side of the dark granite walls. Sometimes they remained there through the night, singing songs and shouting through megaphones and chanting their slogans. Several nights Joe assumed they brought torches to add a medieval flavor to the proceedings because he’d wake to the smell of burning pitch.

Other than a few nights of fitful sleep, however, the fate of the two doomed men had no effect on the lives of Joe or anyone he knew except for Maso Pescatore, who’d been forced to sacrifice his nightly strolls atop the prison walls until the world stopped watching.

On that famous night in late August, the excess voltage used on the hapless Italians sapped the rest of the electricity in the prison, and the lights on the tiers flickered and dimmed or snapped off entirely. The dead anarchists were taken to Forest Hills and cremated. The protestors dwindled and then went away.

Maso returned to the nightly routine he’d been following for ten years — walking the tops of the walls along the thick, curled wire and the dark watchtowers that overlooked the yard within and the blasted landscape of factories and slums without.

He often took Joe with him. To his surprise, Joe had become some kind of symbol to Maso — whether as the trophy scalp of the high-ranking police officer now under his thumb or as a potential member of his organization or as a puppy, Joe didn’t know, and he didn’t ask. Why ask when his presence on the wall beside Maso at night clearly stated one thing above all others — he was protected.

“Do you think they were guilty?” Joe asked one night.

Maso shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is the message.”

“What message? They executed two fellas who might have been innocent.”

“That was the message,” Maso said. “And every anarchist in the world heard it.”