He whistled. “All these years, all the scrapes you two been in, and you never called on them for backup?”
Angie looked at him through the long bangs that had fallen in her face. “Never even considered it.”
“Why?” He was genuinely confused.
“’Cause you’re all the Mafia we need, handsome.”
He blushed, something only Angie can get him to do, something that’s always worth the effort. His huge face swelled like an overripe grape and for a moment he looked almost harmless. Almost.
“Stop,” he said, “you’re embarrassing me.”
Back at the office, I brewed some coffee to counteract the vodka buzz and Angie played back the messages on our answering machine.
The first was from a recent client, Bobo Gedmenson, owner of Bobo’s Yo-Yo chain of under-twenty-one dance clubs and a few strip joints out in Saugus and Peabody with names like Dripping Vanilla and The Honey Dip. Now that we’d located Bobo’s ex-partner and returned most of the money he’d embezzled from Bobo, Bobo was suddenly questioning our rates and crying poormouth.
“People,” I said, shaking my head.
“Suck,” Angie agreed as Bobo beeped off.
I made a mental reminder to toss the collection job to Bubba, and then the second message played:
“Hallo. Just thought I’d wish you jolly good luck on your new case and all that rubbish. I gather it’s a splendid one. Yes? Well, I’ll be in touch. Cheerio.”
I looked at Angie. “Who the hell was that?”
“I thought you knew. I don’t know anyone British.”
“Me either.” I shrugged. “Wrong number?”
“‘Good luck on your new case’? Sounds like he knew what he was talking about.”
“Accent sound fake to you?”
She nodded. “Like someone who’s watched a lot of Python.”
“Who do we know who does accents?”
“Beats me.”
The next voice was Grace Cole’s. In the background I could hear the assaultive human noise and babble of the emergency room where she worked.
“I actually got ten minutes for a coffee break so I tried to catch you. I’m here till at least early tomorrow morning, but call me at my place tomorrow night. Miss you.”
She beeped off and Angie said, “So, when’s the wedding?”
“Tomorrow. Didn’t you know?”
She smiled. “You’re whipped, Patrick. You do know that, don’t you?”
“According to who?”
“According to me and all your friends.” Her smile
faded a bit. “I’ve never seen you look at a woman the way you look at Grace.”
“And if I am?”
She looked out her window at the avenue. “Then I say more power to you,” she said softly. She tried to get the smile back but it cracked weakly and disappeared. “I wish you both all the best.”
4
By ten that night, Angie and I were sitting in a small coffee shop on Prince Street, learning more than we ever wanted to know about prostates from Fat Freddy Constantine.
Freddy Constantine’s coffee shop on Prince Street was a narrow shop on a narrow street. Prince Street cuts across the North End from Commercial to Moon Street, and like most of the streets in that neighborhood, it’s barely wide enough to squeeze a bicycle through. The temperature had dropped into the mid-fifties by the time we arrived, but up and down Prince Street, men sat in front of shops and restaurants wearing only T-shirts or tank tops under open short-sleeves, leaning back in lawn chairs and smoking cigars or playing cards and laughing suddenly and violently as people do in neighborhoods they’re sure they own.
Freddie’s coffee shop was nothing but a dark room with two small tables out front and four inside on a white-and-black-tile floor. A ceiling fan rotated sluggishly and flipped the pages of a newspaper back and forth on the counter as Dean Martin warbled from somewhere behind a heavy black curtain drawn across the back doorway.
We were met at the front door by two young guys with dark hair and bodies by Bally and matching pink-champagne V-necks and gold chains.
I said, “Is there like a catalog all you guys shop from?”
One of them found this so witty that he patted me down extra hard, the heels of his hands chopping between my rib cage and hips like they expected to meet in the middle.
We’d left our guns in the car, so they took our wallets. We didn’t like it, they didn’t care, and soon they led us to a table across from Don Frederico Constantine himself.
Fat Freddy looked like a walrus without the mustache. He was immense and smoke gray and he wore several layers of dark clothing, so that his square chopping-block head on top of all that darkness looked like something that had erupted from the folds of the collar and spilled toward the shoulders. His almond eyes were warm and liquid, paternal, and he smiled a lot. Smiled at strangers on the street, at reporters as he came down courtroom steps, presumably at his victims before his men kneecapped them.
He said, “Please, sit down.”
Except for Freddy and ourselves, there was only one other person in the coffee shop. He sat about twenty feet back at a table beside a support beam, one hand on the table, legs crossed at the ankles. He wore light khakis and a white shirt and gray scarf under an amber canvas jacket with a leather collar. He didn’t quite look at us, but I couldn’t swear he was looking away either. His name was Pine, no first name that I ever heard, and he was a legend in his circles, the man who’d survived four different bosses, three family wars, and whose enemies had a habit of disappearing so completely people soon forgot they’d ever lived. Sitting at the table, he seemed a perfectly normal, almost bland guy: handsome, possibly, but not in any way that stuck in the memory; he was probably five eleven or six feet with dirty blond hair and green eyes and an average build.
Just being in the same room with him made my skull tingle.
Angie and I sat down and Fat Freddy said, “Prostates.”
“Excuse me?” Angie said.
“Prostates,” Freddy repeated. He poured coffee from a pewter pot into a cup, handed it to Angie. “Not something your gender has to worry about half as much as ours.” He nodded at me as he handed me my cup, then nudged the cream and sugar in our direction. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “I’ve reached the height of my profession, my daughter just got accepted to Harvard, and financially, I want for little.” He shifted in his chair, grimaced enough so that his huge jowls rolled in toward the center of his face and completely obscured his lips for a moment. “But, I swear, I’d trade it all in tomorrow for a healthy prostate.” He sighed. “You?”