“Eddie, Eddie,” Dunellen chided. “I’ll pay you for the week.”
Eddie had meant to leave after one drink. Now, having been challenged by Lonergan, he thought it prudent to outstay him. That meant drinking alongside Dunellen, who was three times Eddie’s girth and had a wooden leg. Eddie eyed the door, willing Maggie, Dunellen’s harridan of a wife, to roust him out of the bar as if Dunellen were a loader blowing his pay, not president of the union local on his way to becoming an alderman. But Maggie didn’t show, and eventually, Eddie found himself bawling out the words to “The Black Velvet Band” along with Dunellen and a few others, all of them wiping tears. At long last, Lonergan took his leave.
“You don’t like him,” Dunellen said when he’d gone—the very opening he would have given Lonergan had Eddie left first.
“He’s all right.”
“You think he’s square?”
“I think his game is clean.”
“You’ve a good nose for that,” Dunellen said. “You should’ve been a copper.”
Eddie shrugged, turning his cigarette between two fingers.
“You think like one.”
“I’d have had to be crooked. And what kind of copper is that?”
From within the craggy topography of his head, Dunellen gave Eddie a sharp look. “Ain’t crookedness in the eye of the beholder?”
“I suppose.”
“They can’t lay off cops, even in a Depression.”
“There’s something to that.”
Dunellen seemed to fade out. His inattention led some men to take him lightly or act too freely in his presence—a mistake. He was like one of those poisonous fish Eddie had heard of that took on the look of a rock to fool its prey. Eddie was on the verge of rising to go when Dunellen turned to him, tamping Eddie with a wet, beseeching gaze. “Tancredo,” he moaned. “Wop bastard likes the fights.”
Stoking Dunellen’s obsession with the wops would cost Eddie thirty minutes, at least. “How are your boys?” he asked, hoping to distract him.
At the mention of his boxers, Dunellen’s face loosened like a cold roast warming over a flame. “Beautiful,” he murmured, and to Eddie’s alarm, he waved for another round. “Just beautiful. They’re quick, they’re smart, they listen. You should see them move, Ed.”
Dunellen was childless, an oddity in this milieu, where the average man had between four and ten offspring. Opinion was divided on whether Maggie’s shrewishness was the cause or the result of their unproductive union. One thing was certain: had Dunellen coddled sons as he did his middle lightweights (there were always two), he would have been openly derided. At their fights, he cringed and convulsed like an old maid watching her lapdog face off against a Doberman. The green sunshade he wore to the ring failed to conceal the freshets of tears that coursed from his small, cruel eyes.
“Tancredo’s got his hands on them,” he said in a trembling voice. “My boys. He’ll fix it so they haven’t a chance.”
Even drunk, Eddie had no trouble deciphering Dunny’s predicament: Tancredo, whoever the hell he was, was demanding a piece of Dunellen’s lightweights in exchange for letting them fight—or possibly win—in certain rings the Syndicate controlled. The arrangement was identical to the one Dunellen imposed upon all manner of businesses around his piers: if you failed to pay, unemployment was the best you could hope for.
“They’ve my balls in a vise, Ed. The wops. Can’t sleep for thinking of it.”
It was Dunellen’s cherished belief that the Wop Syndicate, as he liked to call it, had a design ulterior to its evident goals of profit and self-preservation: to exterminate Irishmen. This theory hinged on certain events he revisited like stations of the cross: the dissolution of Tammany by Mayor LaGuardia, the Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago (seven Irishmen killed), and the more recent murders of Legs Diamond, Vincent Coll, and others. Never mind that those killed had all been killers. Never mind that the Syndicate was not all wops, or that Dunellen’s personal enemies were, to a man, fellow micks: rival pier bosses, rogue hiring bosses, union holdouts—any one of whom might vanish, courtesy of Dunellen’s loogans, until the spring thaw sent their bloated bodies wafting to the surface of the Hudson River like parade floats. For Dunellen, the threat of the Wop Syndicate was biblical, cosmic. And while normally this fixation posed no greater danger to Eddie than boring him silly, he’d spent today in the company of a Syndicate boss.
“You’re thinking something,” Dunellen said, peering at Eddie invasively. “Cough it up.”
From within the abstracted, half-drunken heap that was John Dunellen, there prickled a supernatural awareness, as if his perceptions were routed through his radio and magnified. Here was the Dunellen most men failed to see until it was too late—the one who could read your thoughts. You lied to him at your peril.
“You’re right, Dunny,” Eddie said. “I would’ve liked to be a cop.”
Dunellen eyed him a moment longer. Then, detecting the truth of the statement, he relaxed. “What would you do,” he breathed, “about Tancredo?”
“I’d give him what he wants.”
Dunellen reared back into a thunderhead of protest. “Why the fuck should I?”
“Sometimes fighting’s no good,” Eddie said. “Sometimes the best you can do is buy time, wait for an opening.”
Occasionally, as now, the ocean rescue that had forged the bond between them and still radiated, allegorically, through all of their discourse, broke the surface and moved into the light. Dunellen and Sheehan were the older boys; Bart the brain, Dunny the mouth. When Eddie saw them thrashing, unable to get back to shore, he ran into the water and swam to them. He put an arm around each boy’s neck and shouted into their terrified faces, “Stop fighting. Float and let the tide pull us out.”
They were too tired not to obey. They floated, and when they’d caught their breath, Eddie led them swimming along the shore a half mile out. They were all water rats, having dived from city piers to escape the summer heat practically since they could walk. A mile down the beach, Eddie saw an opening in the breakers and herded Bart and Dunny back in.
“How do I buy time with an interfering wop?” Dunellen smoldered.
“Give him enough to keep him quiet,” Eddie said. “Keep him satisfied. Then look for a way out.”
He was aware of talking to himself as much as Dunellen—of talking about Dunellen. His old friend had moved very close, and Eddie was enveloped in a sour smell of the pickled onions he liked to suck. A corkscrew of nausea gyred through him.
“Some good advice, Ed,” Dunellen said gruffly.
“Glad to help.”