Live by Night

Charlestown Penitentiary spilled blood all over itself that summer. Joe first believed the savagery to be innate, the pointless dog-eat-dog viciousness of men killing each other over pride — in your place in line, in your right to continue walking to the yard on the path you’d chosen, in not being jostled or elbowed or having the toe of your shoe scuffed.

It turned out to be more complicated than that.

An inmate in East Wing lost his eyes when someone clapped handfuls of glass into them. In South Wing, guards found a guy stabbed a dozen times below his ribs, entrance wounds that, judging by the odor, had perforated his liver. Inmates two tiers down smelled the guy die. Joe heard of all-night rape parties on the Lawson block, the block so named because three generations of the Lawson family — the grandfather, one of his sons, and three grandsons — had all been jailed there at the same time. The last one, Emil Lawson, had once been the youngest of the Lawson inmates but always the worst of them, and he was never getting out. His sentences added up to 114 years. Good news for Boston, bad news for Charlestown Pen. When he wasn’t leading gang rapes of new fish, Emil Lawson did murder for whoever paid him, though he was rumored to be working exclusively for Maso during the recent troubles.

The war was fought over rum. It was fought on the outside, of course, to some public consternation, but also on the inside, where no one thought to look and wouldn’t have shed a tear if they had. Albert White, an importer of whiskey from the north, had decided to branch out into importing rum from the south before Maso Pescatore was released from prison. Tim Hickey had been the first casualty in the White-Pescatore war. By the end of the summer, though, he was one of a dozen.

On the whiskey end of things, they shot it out in Boston and Portland and along the back roads that branched off the Canadian border. Drivers were run off roads in towns like Massena, New York; Derby, Vermont; and Allagash, Maine. Some were hijacked with just a beating, though one of White’s fastest drivers was forced to his knees in a bed of pine needles and had his jaw blown off at the hinge because he’d talked sass.

As for rum, the battle was waged to keep it out. Trucks were waylaid as far south as the Carolinas and as far north as Rhode Island. After they were coaxed to the shoulder and the drivers were convinced to vacate their cabs, White’s gangs set fire to the trucks. Rum trucks burned like Viking funeral boats, yellowing the underside of the night sky for miles in every direction.

“He’s got a stockpile somewhere,” Maso said on one of their walks. “He’s waiting until he’s bled New England of rum, and then he’ll ride in, the savior, with his own supply.”

“Who’d be stupid enough to supply him?” Joe knew of most of the suppliers in South Florida.

“It’s not stupid,” Maso said. “It’s smart. It’s what I’d do if I had to choose between a slick operator like Albert and an old man who’s been inside since before the czar lost Russia.”

“But you’ve got eyes and ears everywhere.”

The old man nodded. “But they’re not exactly my eyes and they’re not exactly my ears so they’re not connected to my hand. And my hand wields the power.”

That night, one of the guards on Maso’s payroll was off duty in a South End speakeasy when he left with a woman no one had ever seen before. A real looker, though, and definitely a pro. The guard was found three hours later in Franklin Square, sitting on a bench, a canyon cut through his Adam’s apple, deader than Thomas Jefferson.

Maso’s sentence ended in three months, and it was all starting to feel a bit desperate on Albert’s part, and the desperation only made things more dangerous. Just last night, Boyd Holter, Maso’s best forger, had been tossed off the Ames Building downtown. He’d landed on his tailbone, pieces of his spine spitting up into his brainpan like gravel.

Maso’s people responded by blowing up one of Albert’s fronts, a butcher’s shop on Morton Street. The hairdresser and the haberdashery on either side of the butcher also burned to the ground, and several cars along the street lost their windows and paint.

So far, no winner, just a lot of mess.

Along the wall, Joe and Maso stopped to watch an orange moon as big as the sky itself rise over the factory smokestacks and the fields of ash and black poison, and Maso handed Joe a folded piece of paper.

Joe didn’t look at them anymore, just folded them another couple of times and hid them in a slot he’d cut in the sole of his shoe until he saw his father next.

“Open it,” Maso said before Joe could pocket it.

Joe looked at him, the moon making it feel like daylight up here.

Maso nodded.

Joe turned the piece of paper in his hand and thumbed the top edge back. At first, he couldn’t make sense of the two words he saw there:

Brendan Loomis.