Page 24 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
Three years is a long time to haunt your own halls. Long enough to learn the pitch of every hinge, the particular squeak of the east corridor, the exact time the boiler sighs like a tired priest. Not long enough to forget the look on Aoife’s face in that warehouse. Trust shattering. Mouth opening like she’d been slapped by the truth itself. I’ve watched a hundred men go to their knees for less. It still puts grit in my throat.
The men say I’m softer now. Softer, and meaner. Softer because I don’t laugh as often. Meaner because I don’t warn twice. Boston calls a man like me merciful if he keeps his bodycount respectable and his donations photogenic. The docks still answer when my name is spoken. The unions still take my calls. The judges look away at the correct moments. I have modernized routes, digitized ledgers, rotated crews, exiled a cousin, buried two lieutenants, and added three clean fronts that throw off cash like coal stoves. I have also spent three years asking every door in the world if it has seen a woman with flour on her hands and a voice that can split a man open without raising it.
Sometimes the doors answer. Mostly they lie.
Kieran meets me at the warehouse just after one a.m., breath throwing steam in the cold, cap pulled low. “Container 409. Vietnam shipment cleared. Italians sniffed the south gate around ten. We moved the decoys.”
“Anyone touch our real cargo?”
He hesitates, which is the smart choice. “One kid tried. Dock runner. Seventeen, maybe. Didn’t know who the plates belonged to.”
“And now?”
“Now he knows.” Kieran’s mouth twitches. “Or he will, once the cast comes off.”
I nod and walk the length of the catwalk that overlooks the floor. Below, forklifts weave a ballet that would be beautiful if it weren’t so exhausting. Tarps rustle. Chains clank against steel like small storms. My boots ring on the grating. From here I can see four doors and seven exits, the place where the security camera doesn’t quite cover, the patch of shadow between the loading ramp and the stack of pallets where a man could disappear if he had to. I made that shadow. I keep it.
“Any word on the bank pulls?” I ask.
“Accountant at Eastern filed another suspicious activity report,” Kieran says, hands in pockets. “He’s loyal but nervous. We sent the priest, like you said.”
“Father Gannon still remember how to absolve ambition?”
Kieran grins. “He’s keeping in practice.”
This is how we live—a ledger in one hand, a rosary in the other, our deals laundered through charities and construction sites, sermons and shipping manifests, the old sins rinsed until they shine like civic virtue. The trick is not to be righteous. The trick is to be inevitable.
I go home when the lights in the east start to thin the dark and sit in my father’s chair with a glass of whiskey I don’t drink. The leather holds a crease where his fist used to clamp when he needed to keep from hitting someone. I press my own hand into it like I might learn something by osmosis. The housekeeper sets a tray near my elbow and withdraws without trying to meet my eyes. The men whisper. The staff looks away. A king without a queen looks more like a storm than a man.
Mother appears at breakfast dressed for war—a black sheath, pearls that were purchased with rumor and kept polished with fear, hair a silver crown pinned to kill. She inspects the headlines, turns the pages as if they owe her politeness, and says, without looking up, “You’re seeing Evelyn tonight.”
“Who is Evelyn,” I ask, deadpan. We both know I know.
“The eldest Kavanagh girl. The one who speaks three languages and drinks Burgundy like she was born with a sommelier’s nose.”
“I speak two languages and drink what’s poured.”
Her eyes lift. “You’ll like her.”
“I’ll tolerate her.”
“She knows who you are and pretends she doesn’t,” my mother says, buttering toast with delicate, surgical strokes. “That’s the best one can hope for in our circles. Beautiful, well-mannered, expensive enough to deter amateurs, and not sentimental about kitchens.”
“It’s the last bit you keep testing,” I say.
“I’m not testing anything. I’m building a future out of pieces that won’t choke this family.” She sips her coffee. Looks into it like she might scry the next twenty years if she holds her gaze steady enough. “A woman like Aoife needs clean floors and quiet promises. This house has neither.”
“I know what this house has.” I stand, take the cup from her, empty, and set it down. “And I know what I lost. Your opinion won’t make it easier to live with.”
“Then my opinion will have to make it livable,” she answers. “Dinner. Eight. Wear the emerald tie.”
I wear the tie. I take Evelyn to the sort of room with so much crystal it’s a threat. She talks about Bordeaux, about galleries, about a villa in Cassis where the light hits the sea like someone slashed it with a diamond. She laughs prettily at the correct moments. I ask her a question about her father’s shipping routes, hang a lure I know she can see, and watch her blink with composure before changing the subject to opera. She is perfect. After two hours of perfection, I want to stand in a rainstorm and let it ruin me.
I say goodnight after dinner and leave abruptly.
The next day, Kieran brings me a rumor wrapped in a joke. “You’ll like this one,” he says, dropping into the leather across from my desk. “Woman in a seaside town running a pop-up out of a church basement. Sold out in thirty minutes. Menu said ‘Butter, Salt, Heat, and Spite.’ I’d swear you wrote that one.”
“Salt, hunger, and spite,” I correct before I can stop myself.
