Live by Night Page 0,47

hanging in a cave. "Not hard enough."

"Look," Joe said, "he gave me something."

"He . . . ?" Maso put a hand behind his ear.

"Gave me something to give to you." Joe handed the watch across the table.

Maso took note of the gold cover. He opened it and considered the timepiece itself and then the inside of the dust cover where Patek Philippe had been engraved in the most graceful script. His eyebrows rose in approval.

"It's the 1902, eighteen karat," he said to Naldo. He turned to Joe. "Only two thousand ever made. It's worth more than my house. How's a copper come to own it?"

"Broke up a bank robbery in '08," Joe said, repeating a story his Uncle Eddie had told a hundred times, though his father never discussed it. "It was in Codman Square. He killed one of the robbers before the guy could kill the bank manager."

"And the bank manager gave him this watch?"

Joe shook his head. "Bank president did. The manager was his son."

"So now he gives it to me to save his own son?"

Joe nodded.

"I got three sons, myself. You know that?"

Joe said, "I heard that, yeah."

"So I know something about fathers and how they love their sons."

Maso sat back and looked at the watch for a bit. Eventually he sighed and pocketed the watch. He reached across the table and patted Joe's hand three times. "You get back in touch with your old man. Tell him thanks for the gift." Maso stood from the table. "And then tell him to do what I fucking told him to do."

Maso's men all stood together and they left the mess hall.

When he returned to his cell after work detail in the chain shop, Joe was hot, filthy, and three men he'd never seen before waited inside for him. The bunk beds were still gone but the mattresses had been returned to the floor. The men sat on the mattresses. His mattress lay beyond them, against the wall under the high window, farthest from the bars. Two of the fellas he'd never seen before, he was sure of it, but the third looked familiar. He was about thirty, short, but with a very long face, and a chin as pointy as his nose and the tips of his ears. Joe ratcheted through all the names and faces he'd learned in this prison and realized he was looking across at Basil Chigis, one of Emil Lawson's crew, a lifer like his boss, no possibility of parole. Alleged to have eaten the fingers of a boy he'd killed in a Chelsea basement.

Joe looked at each of the men long enough to show he wasn't frightened, though he was, and they stared back at him, blinking occasionally but never speaking. So he didn't speak either.

At some point, the men seemed to tire of the staring and played cards. The currency was bones. Small bones, the bones of quail or young chickens or minor birds of prey. The men carried the bones in small canvas sacks. Boiled white, they clacked when they were gathered up in a winning pot. When the light dimmed, the men continued playing, never speaking except to say, "Raise," or "See ya," or "Fold." Every now and then one of them would glance at Joe but never for very long, and then he'd go back to playing cards.

When full dark descended, the lights along the tiers were shut off. The three men tried to finish their hand but then Basil Chigis's voice floated out of the black - "Fuck this" - and cards scraped as they gathered them off the floor and the bones clicked as they returned them to their sacks.

They sat in the dark, breathing.

Time wasn't something Joe knew how to measure that night. He could have sat in the dark thirty minutes or two hours. He had no idea. The men sat in a half circle across from him, and he could smell their breath and their body odor. The one to his right smelled particularly bad, like dried sweat so old it had turned to vinegar.

As his eyes adjusted, he could see them, and the deep black became a gloaming. They sat with their arms across their knees, their legs crossed at the ankles. Their eyes were fixed on him.

In one of the factories behind him, a whistle blew.

Even if he'd had a shank, he doubted he could have stabbed all three of them. Given that he'd never stabbed anyone in his life, he might