Live by Night

Tell me about Mom.

What do you want to know?

Who was she?

A frightened girl. A very frightened girl, Joseph.

What was she afraid of?

Out there.

What’s out there?

Everything she didn’t understand.

Did she love me?

In her own way.

That’s not love.

For her it was. Don’t look at it as if she left you.

How am I supposed to look at it?

That she hung on because of you. Otherwise, she would have left us all years ago.

I don’t miss her.

Funny. I do.

Joe looked into the dark. I miss you.

You’ll see me soon enough.

Once Joe had streamlined the prison’s distillery and smuggling operations as well as its protection rackets, he had plenty of time to read. He read just about everything in the prison library, which was no small feat, thanks to Lancelot Hudson III.

Lancelot Hudson III had been the only rich man anyone could ever remember who’d been sentenced to hard time in Charlestown Pen’. But Lancelot’s crime had been so outrageous and so public — he’d thrown his unfaithful wife, Catherine, from the roof of their four-story Beacon Street town house into the Independence Day Parade of 1919 as it flowed down Beacon Hill — that even the Brahmins had put down their bone china long enough to decide that if there was ever a time to feed one of their own to the natives, this was it. Lancelot Hudson III served seven years at Charlestown for involuntary manslaughter. If it wasn’t exactly hard labor, it was hard time, mitigated only by the books he’d had shipped into the prison, a deal dependent on his leaving them behind when he left. Joe read at least a hundred books of the Hudson collection. You knew they were his because, in the top right corner of the title page, he’d written in tiny, cramped penmanship, “Originally the Property of Lancelot Hudson III. Fuck you.” Joe read Dumas and Dickens and Twain. He read Malthus, Adam Smith, Marx and Engels, Machiavelli, The Federalist Papers, and Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms. When he’d burned through the Hudson collection, he read whatever else was on hand — dime novels and Westerns mostly — as well as every magazine and newspaper they allowed in. He became something of an expert at figuring out what words or whole sentences they’d censored.

Browsing an issue of the Boston Traveler, he came across a story about a fire at the East Coast Bus Line Terminal on St. James. A frayed electrical cord had sent sparks into the terminal Christmas tree. In short order, the building caught fire. The breath in Joe’s body went small and trapped as he studied the photographs of the damage. The locker where he’d stashed his life’s savings, including the $62,000 from the Pittsfield job, was in the corner of one shot. It lay on its side under a ceiling beam, the metal as black as soil.

Joe couldn’t decide which felt worse — the sensation that he’d never breathe again or the feeling that he was about to vomit fire through his windpipe.

The article claimed the building was a total loss. Nothing salvaged. Joe doubted that. Someday, when he had the time, he was going to track down which employee of the East Coast Bus Line had retired young and was rumored to be living abroad and in style.

Until then, he was going to need a job.

Maso offered it to him late that winter, the same day he told Joe his appeal was proceeding apace.

“You’ll be out of here soon,” Maso told him through the mesh.

“All due respect,” Joe said, “how soon?”

“By the summer.”

Joe smiled. “Really?”

Maso nodded. “Judges don’t come cheap, though. You’re going to have to work that off.”

“Why don’t we call us even for me not killing you?”

Maso narrowed his eyes, a natty figure now in his cashmere topcoat and a wool suit complete with a white carnation in his lapel that matched his silk hatband. “Sounds like a deal. Our friend, Mr. White, is making a lot of noise in Tampa, by the way.”

“Tampa?”

Maso nodded. “He still held on to a few places here. I can’t get them all because New York owns a piece and they’ve made it clear I don’t fuck with them right now. He runs the rum up on our routes and there’s nothing I can do about that, either. But because he’s infringing on my turf down there, the boys in New York gave us permission to push him out.”

“What level of permission?” Joe said.

“Short of killing him.”

“Okay. So what’re you going to do?”

“Not what I’m going to do. It’s what you’re going to do, Joe. I want you to take over down there.”

“But Lou Ormino runs Tampa.”

“He’s gonna decide he doesn’t want the headache anymore.”

“When’s he going to decide that?”