Live by Night

Naldo stepped aside, Hippo opened the door, and Joe stepped through. There was nothing on the other side but an iron spiral staircase. It rose from the concrete box to a trapdoor that had been left open to the night. Joe pulled the shank out of the back of his pants and placed it in the pocket of his coarse striped shirt. When he reached the top of the staircase, he made a fist of his right hand, then raised the index and middle fingers and thrust the hand out of the hole until the guard in the nearest tower could get a look. The light from the tower swung left, right, and left-right again in a quick zigzag — the all clear. Joe climbed through the opening and out onto the walkway and scanned his surroundings until he made out Maso about fifteen yards down the wall in front of the central watchtower.

He walked to him, feeling the shank bouncing lightly against his hip. The only blind spot to the central watchtower was the space directly below it. As long as Maso stayed where he was, they’d be invisible. When Joe reached him, Maso was smoking one of the bitter French cigarettes he preferred, the yellow ones, and looking west across the blight.

He looked at Joe for a bit and said nothing, just inhaled and exhaled his cigarette smoke with a wet rattle.

And then he said, “I’m sorry about your father.”

Joe stopped fishing for his own cigarette. The night sky dropped over his face like a cloak and the air around him evaporated until the lack of oxygen squeezed his head.

There was no way Maso could know. Even with all his power, all his sources. Danny had told Joe he’d reached out to no less than Superintendent Michael Crowley, who’d come up on foot patrol with their father and whose job their father had been expected to inherit before that night behind the Statler. Thomas Coughlin had been whisked out the back of his house into an unmarked police car and taken into the city morgue by the underground entrance.

I’m sorry about your father.

No, Joe told himself. No. He can’t know. Impossible.

Joe found his cigarette and placed it between his lips. Maso struck a match off the parapet and lit it for him, the old man’s eyes taking on the generous cast they were capable of when it suited.

Joe said, “What’re you sorry about?”

Maso shrugged. “No man should ever be asked to do what’s against his nature, Joseph, even if it’s to help a loved one. What we asked of him, what we asked of you, it wasn’t fair. But what’s fucking fair in this world?”

Joe’s heartbeat slid back out of his ears and throat.

He and Maso leaned their elbows on the parapet and smoked. Lights from the barges along the Mystic scudded through the thick, distant gray like exiled stars. White snakes of foundry smoke pirouetted toward them. The air smelled of trapped heat and a rain that refused to fall.

“I won’t ask anything so hard of you or your father again, Joseph.” Maso gave him a firm nod. “I promise you that.”

Joe locked eyes with him. “Sure you will, Maso.”

“Mr. Pescatore, Joseph.”

Joe said, “My apologies,” and his cigarette fell from his fingers. He bent to the walkway to pick it up.

Instead, he wrapped his arms around Maso’s ankles and pulled up hard.

“Don’t scream.” Joe straightened and the old man’s head entered the space beyond the edge of the parapet. “You scream, I drop you.”

The old man’s breath came fast. His feet kicked against Joe’s ribs.

“I’d stop struggling too, or I won’t be able to hold on.”

It took a few moments, but Maso’s feet stopped moving.

“Do you have any weapons on you? Don’t lie.”

The voice floated back from the edge to him. “Yes.”

“How many?”

“Just one.”

Joe let go of his ankles.

Maso waved his arms like he might, in that moment, learn to fly. He slid forward on his chest, and the dark swallowed his head and torso. He probably would have screamed, but Joe sank his hand into the waistband of Maso’s prison uniform, dug a heel into the wall of the parapet, and leaned back.

Maso made a series of strange huffing sounds, very high-pitched, like a newborn abandoned in a field.

“How many?” Joe repeated.

Nothing but that huffing for a minute and then, “Two.”

“Where are they?”

“Razor at my ankle, nails in my pocket.”

Nails? Joe had to see this. He patted the pockets with his free hand, found on odd lump. He reached in gingerly and came back with what he might have mistaken for a comb at first glance. Four short nails were soldered to a bar that was, in turn, soldered to four misshapen rings.

“This goes over your fist?” Joe said.

“Yes.”

“That’s nasty.”

He placed it on the parapet and then found the straight razor in Maso’s sock, a Wilkinson with a pearl handle. He placed it beside the nail knuckles.

“Getting light-headed yet?”

A muffled “Yes.”

“Expect so.” Joe adjusted his grip on the waistband. “Are we agreed, Maso, that if I open my fingers you’re one dead guinea?”

“Yes.”

“I got a hole in my leg from a fucking potato peeler because of you.”

“I… I… you.”

“What? Speak clearly.”

It came out a hiss. “I saved you.”