A week later, at seven o’clock on a Friday morning, the doorbell rang. It was as she knew it would be. She pulled on a robe and walked along the parlor floor. Through the cut-glass inner doors, she could see the two men from the Plymouth. One was tall and blond, the other shorter, balding, smoking a cigarette. They each wore raincoats and bored expressions. She opened the door.
“Good morning,” the blond one said. He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet and showed her a plastic card that bore his picture.
“We’re here to pick up a man named Macias,” the shorter one said, flipping his cigarette into the street.
“Can I help you?” she said, and smiled. “I’m Mrs. Macias.”
IT WAS CLOSE TO midnight on a Friday evening at Rattigan’s Bar and Grill. There were no ball games on the television, old movies only made the clientele feel more ancient, and the jukebox was still broken from the afternoon of Red Butera’s daughter’s wedding. So it was time for Brendan Malachy McCone to take center stage. He motioned for a fresh beer, put his right foot on the brass rail, breathed in deeply, and started to sing.
The song was very Irish, sly and funny, the choruses full of the names of long-forgotten places, and the regulars loved Brendan for his quick, jaunty singing of it. They loved the roguish glitter in his eyes, his energy, his good-natured boasting. He was, after all, a man in his fifties now, and yet here he was, still singing the bold songs of his youth. And on this night, as on so many nights, they joined him in the verses.
Outside, rain had begun to fall, a cold Brooklyn rain, driven by the wind off the harbor, and it made the noises and the singing and the laughter seem even better. Sardines and crackers joined the glasses on the bar while George, the bartender, filled the empties. And Brendan shifted from jauntiness to sorrow.
The mood of the regulars hushed now, as Brendan gave them the song as if it were a hymn. The bar was charged with the feeling they all had for Brendan, knowing that he had been an IRA man long ago, that he had left Ireland a step ahead of the British police, who wanted him for the killing of a British soldier in the Border Campaign. This was their Brendan: the Transit Authority clerk who had once stood in the doorways of Belfast, with the cloth cap pulled tight on his brow, the pistol deep in the pockets of his trench coat, ready to kill or to die for Ireland.
He was singing now about how the strangers came to Ireland, the bloody Brits, and tried to force their ways upon the Irish, his voice was a healthy baritone, a wealth of passion overwhelming a poverty of skill, and it touched all of them, making the younger ones imagine the streets of modern Belfast, where their cousins were still fighting, reminding the older ones of peat fires, black, creamy stout, buttermilk in the morning. The song was about a vanished time, before rock and roll and women’s liberation, before they took Latin out of the Mass, before the blacks and the Puerto Ricans had begun to move in and the children of the Irish had begun to move out. The neighborhood was changing, all right. But Brendan Malachy McCone was still with them, still in the neighborhood.
A little after midnight two strangers came in, dressed in black raincoats. They were wet with rain. They ordered whiskey. Brendan kept singing. Nobody noticed that his voice faltered on the last lines of “Galway Bay,” as he took the applause, glanced at the strangers, and again shifted the mood.
The strangers drank in silence.
At closing time the rain was still pelting down. Brendan stood in the open doorway of the bar with Charlie the Pole and Scotch Eddie, while George the bartender counted the receipts. Everyone else had gone home.
“We’ll have to make a run for it,” Charlie said.
“Dammit,” Scotch Eddie said.
“Yiz might as well run, cause yiz’ll drown anyway,” George said. He was finished counting and looked small and tired.
