CHAPTER 14
THE TABLE
POV: RONAN
“It’s gone, boss. All of it.”
“Who.”
“The night man. He was in the office.”
He worked the Northern Avenue warehouse for my grandfather. Sixty-three. A daughter in Worcester, a bad knee, and a transistor radio he refused to replace.
I’m already out of bed. “Conor.”
“Gasoline. Front and back. They wanted it seen.”
Through the wall, she’s asleep. I checked before I picked up. Fifty-four beats a minute. Lamp off tonight.
“I’m coming.”
“Boss, there’s nothing to—”
“I’m coming.”
***
The Northern Avenue warehouse is a black shell with the snow melting off it in steam.
Fire trucks. Blue lights. A detective I own standing by the tape with his hands in his pockets, looking anywhere but at me. The smell of burnt rubber and wet ash.
They have the night man under a sheet on a gurney by the ambulance. I lift the corner. I look. I put it back.
“Liam’s hand,” Theo says quietly beside me. “This is the bill.”
“This is a down payment.”
On the brick wall across the street, where the fire didn’t reach, someone has spray-painted two words in white.
MERRY CHRISTMAS.
I stand in the snow and look at it until the sky starts going gray behind the cranes.
***
At nine, I call the table.
Not at the Seaport. At Draven House. The dining room. Twenty chairs nobody sits in.
They sit in them today.
Theo at my right. My accountant, gray and neat, with a laptop he doesn’t open. The harbormaster, a big man from Charlestown who keeps my berths honest. Hurley, who runs my unions, sixty and red-faced, who got his job from my father and never lets me forget it. Two of my captains from the docks.
And Declan Byrne, standing by the door, because Declan never sits at the table. He runs security for this house. Forty-six, ex-Boston PD, a neck like a fire hydrant and a jaw that never stops working a piece of nicotine gum. Nine years with me.
“Conor burned Northern Avenue,” I say. “The night man is dead. He had a daughter in Worcester. Theo will send her enough that she never works again.”
Nods around the table.
“He painted Merry Christmas on the wall across the street. He thinks this ends on Christmas Eve at berth eleven.”
“Berth eleven’s ours,” the harbormaster says.
“I know.”
“So what do we do?”
“We close Southie.” I look at the captains. “Every shipment Conor moves through my port stops. Today. Every truck that leaves my docks with his product gets pulled over by men I pay. Every bar that buys his whiskey gets a visit. I want him bleeding money by Monday.”
“And the house?” Declan says from the door.
“Double it.”
“Already done. Pulled six from the Quincy yard at four this morning.” He chews. “I’ll need her schedule, boss. The missus. When she goes out, where, who’s with her. So my guys know where to stand.”
“She doesn’t go out.”
“Church, though? Sundays?” He shrugs. “Folks like that like their Mass.”
“She has a chapel.”
“Right.” He nods. “Right. Good.”
Hurley clears his throat.
“With respect, Ronan.”
He says my name the way my father does. Like it’s a size too small for me.
“All this,” Hurley says. “The Kavanagh kid’s hand. A warehouse. A man dead. Over a—” He spreads his hands, grinning around the table for company. “Come on. Over a piece of convent tail you could’ve had for the price of a—”
I’m out of my chair before he finishes.
I take the back of his head in my bandaged hand and bring his face down onto the table.
Once.
The sound is wet and final. The oak is two hundred years old, and it doesn’t care. Hurley’s nose goes flat against it. When I pull him back up by the hair, blood is running out of him in two bright streams, over his lip, onto his tie, onto the table my great-grandfather ate at.
Nobody moves.
“Say her name,” I tell him.
He makes a sound through the blood.
“Her name. You know it. Say it.”
“Mrs.—” He chokes. “Mrs. Draven.”
“Louder.”
“Mrs. Draven.”
I let go. He sags back into his chair, holding his face.
“You don’t run the locals anymore, Hurley. Theo does, until I find a man who knows how to talk about my wife. Get out of my house.”
Two of the captains help him up. He leaves a trail of red across the floor to the hall.
I sit back down. My knuckles have opened again under the gauze. I don’t look at them.
“Anyone else,” I say, “want to tell me what my wife is worth?”
Silence.
Then the front door opens.
I know the sound of that cane on the marble before I see him. I’ve known it my whole life.
***
My father doesn’t knock. He never has. In his head it’s still his house, though he signed it over to me the day after we buried my mother and moved to Palm Beach with a woman half his age.
Conrad Draven is seventy-one. White hair swept back. A tan that doesn’t belong in Boston in December. A camel overcoat and a cane with a silver head shaped like a hound. My eyes, older and paler, like something left out in the sun.
He stops in the doorway of the dining room and looks at the table. At the blood. At Hurley’s trail across the floor.
“Well,” he says. “You’ve been busy.”
Everyone at the table stands. They can’t help it. He trained them.
I stay sitting.
“You’re supposed to be in Florida.”
“I was.” He comes in, the cane clicking. He doesn’t sit. He stands at the far end of the table, the head, where he sat for forty years. “Then Conor Kavanagh called me at home at six this morning to tell me my son shot his boy’s hand off at the Copley over a girl from Dorchester.”
“Through.”
“What?”
“I shot it through. It’s still attached.”
My father looks at me down the length of twenty chairs.
“Get out,” he says to the table, without looking at them.
They look at me.
I nod.
They go. Theo last. Declan closes the door behind them, his jaw still working the gum.
***
It’s the two of us.
“You spoke to Conor,” I say.
“Somebody in this family has to speak to Conor.” He leans the cane against the table. “Thirty years, Ronan. Thirty years of peace with Southie. I built that. I sat in that pub and drank their piss beer and I made it work, and you’ve burned it down in a week.”
“He burned it down. Northern Avenue. A man’s dead.”
“Because you shot his son!”
“Because his son put his hand on my wife.”
“Your wife.” He laughs. It isn’t a pleasant sound. “You married a nun in a hurry in a church your mother liked, and you think that makes her your wife. It makes her a problem.”
I don’t answer.
“Give her back,” he says.
The room goes still.
“Conor’s reasonable. I’ve talked to him. You give him the Holloway girl, he forgets the hand, you pay for the warehouse, and we have peace by Christmas.” He spreads his hands. “One girl. One week. It’s arithmetic.”
“No.”
“Ronan—”
“No.”
He looks at me a long moment. Then something in his face changes. Softens. It’s worse than the anger.
“Your mother,” he says, “made you soft. I watched it happen. Her little chapel. Her rosary. Letting you sit at that piano when you should’ve been at the docks with me.
” He shakes his head. “A woman is a weakness. A good one is worse. I see it in you, son. I saw it at the funeral. You were looking up at that choir loft like—”
He stops.
His eyes go past me. To the doorway behind me. To the hall.
“Well,” my father says softly. “So this is the nun.”
I turn.
She’s standing in the doorway.
Gray dress. Cardigan. Hair down. The bruise on her throat has gone green and yellow at the edges, and she hasn’t covered it. One hand on the doorframe, the other at her side, her ring on her finger. She’s looking at my father.
I should send her upstairs. I open my mouth to do it.
“Postulant,” she says. “Former.”
My father raises his eyebrows.
“And it’s Mrs. Draven,” she adds.
He smiles. The famous smile. The one that bought half the city council.
“She has spine,” he says to me. “That’s worse.”
“Go upstairs, Magdalene,” I say.
She doesn’t move.
She looks at me instead. A long look. At the gauze on my hands, red again. At the blood on the table. At the chair where Hurley sat.
She stays in the doorway.
I let her.
My father sees it. I watch him see it. I watch him understand that I’m not going to make her leave, and I watch him file it somewhere behind those pale eyes.
He picks up his cane.
“Last chance, Ronan,” he says. “Give Conor what he’s owed.”
“She isn’t owed. She’s mine.”
“Then she’s the price of your war.”
“Then I’ll pay it in their blood.”
He looks at me a moment longer. Then he nods, once, the way he used to nod when I lost a hand of cards to him on purpose and he knew it.
He walks to the door. He stops beside her. He’s a head taller, and he looks down at her, and she looks right back up.
“Pretty,” he says. “Your voice was prettier. At the funeral.”
He goes out. The cane taps down the hall. The front door opens and shuts.
The dining room is very quiet.
Blood on the oak. Twenty empty chairs.
My wife, in the doorway.
She heard every word.
She doesn’t look away.