hatbands. Loretto's bloody clothes drew stares, and he wanted to get back to his apartment and take a bath. He'd only managed a couple of steps when Dom swooped down on him, linked arms, and pulled him away.
Across the street, in front of the club, Richie Cabo's torpedoes were watching them. The cops had just finished questioning Cabo, and he was moving slowly toward his club while he took in the crowd in the street and on the opposite sidewalk. When he reached his boys, they pointed toward Loretto, and Richie joined them in staring across the avenue.
"V'fancul'!" Dominic said. "What the hell happened?" He hurried up the block, away from Cabo.
"Slow down," Loretto said. "Where we going?"
"Getting the hell out of here." Dom pulled him along the sidewalk.
"Wait, wait. Aspett'!" Across the street, a commotion caught first Loretto's attention and then Dom's. An old woman, frail and dressed in black, stood in a red doorway with a child limp in her arms. She seemed to be speaking, though neither Dom nor Loretto could make out what she was saying. In another moment she was surrounded, the child was taken from her, and the single word morto—dead—made its way through the crowd, traveling outward from the old woman in every direction and seemingly all at once. Frankie Scaletta, the kid whose lemonade stand had been shot up, pushed his way past a pair of coppers and crossed the street hurriedly with his head down.
Loretto caught the kid's arm. "What happened over there, Frankie?"
The kid wiped tears from his face with a furious swipe of his hand. He looked blankly at Loretto before he recognized him and his lips twisted into a sneer. "Your pal Coll killed a bunch of little kids. What do you think happened?"
Dominic slapped the kid across the face, took him by the collar, and pulled him close. "Who do you think you're talking to, you little snot?"
"I ain't said nothin'," Frankie answered, and then he was crying again, the tears glistening on his cheeks.
"Let him go." Loretto found a couple of dollar bills in his wallet and stuffed them in Frankie's pocket. "I didn't have anything to do with this. Neither did Dom."
Frankie took several steps back until he felt he was safely out of reach. "Yeah, well, the Mick's still your friend, isn't he?" He took the bills from his pocket, threw them on the street, and sprinted away.
Dom picked up the bills. "We're attracting attention," he said, and again he linked arms with Loretto and guided him down the street. He was a full head shorter than Loretto and he pulled him along like a tugboat. A block later, crowds were thinning out. "The kid's right, isn't he? This was Irish."
Loretto nodded.
"For Christ's sake," he said, "now he's gone and done it."
Loretto's thoughts were caught up with the stout woman who had grabbed his hand and pushed it over the kid's wound, with the cop who had questioned him, and with the old woman dressed in black with a child in her arms. In his head he heard the word morto flying out in a whisper from the old woman and through the crowd.
"Some birthday present," Dom said.
Loretto looked at Dom in a way that made it clear he didn't know what he meant.
Dom added, "Some birthday present Vince gave you."
"Sure," Loretto said once he remembered it was his birthday. They were nearing the faded red brick tenement building where he'd shared a cold-water flat with Dominic for the past year, since they'd both turned twenty. Loretto had moved out of a single cramped room behind the bakery where he'd started working at sixteen. He'd run away from Mount Loretto every chance he'd got since he'd turned twelve, and at sixteen they'd given up on him. Sister Mary Catherine found him a job at the bakery and he'd worked there a couple of years before Dominic's uncle Gaspar took him on. Dominic had moved out of Gaspar's apartment, where he'd lived since he was an infant. His mother had died of pneumonia soon after he was born. A year later his father had been beaten to death. The way the story went, he'd said something fresh to a girl on a trolley and the next day he'd been found on the street outside his home with his head bashed in.
Mrs. Marcello, at the top of their stoop, held her face in her hands and practically screamed. "Loretto!" She hurried down the steps to meet him. "What happened?" She held him at arm's length and looked him over.
Dominic said, "He got blood all over him tryin' to help one of those kids that got shot."
A middle-aged woman widowed since her twenties, Mrs. Marcello had been standing guard in front of her building from the moment she'd heard the shooting. Her late husband had left her the building when he'd died in the 1918 flu epidemic, along with most of the rest of her family.
"I'm taking a bath," Loretto said, and he gently extricated himself from Mrs. Marcello's grasp.
"Dominic," she said, leading both the boys up the steps and into the dim hallway, "go get the kerosene out of the basement. I got a five-gallon jug at the bottom of the stairs."
"Yeah, but that's yours," Dominic said.
She shushed him. "Take it." Her eyes filled with tears at the sight of
Loretto in his bloody clothes. "Go! Go!" She pushed Loretto up the steps with one hand and Dominic down to the basement with the other.
When Loretto opened the door to his apartment, he found it suffocatingly hot, though neat and in order, thanks mostly to Dom, who had taken to picking up after him and doing most of the cleaning. Now he crossed the sparsely furnished living room and made his way to a bowed triptych of windows that looked out over 107th. He opened the windows to let the heat out. At the scene of the shooting, crowds were still gathered behind police barricades, though the last of the ambulances had departed, leaving only police cars and a swarm of cops and reporters. Loretto'd known Vince Coll since he was seven years old and Vince was nine, when Vince and his older brother, Pete, had been sent to Mount Loretto after their mother died. This, shooting children—this was something Loretto couldn't figure.
Dominic entered the apartment carrying a glass jug of kerosene. He lugged it over to the big silver water heater in the kitchen and knelt to fill the tank.
"What are you doing?" Loretto tossed his jacket onto a chair, sat on the window ledge, and went about taking off his shoes.
Dominic filled the tank and screwed the top back on the jug. "What's it look like I'm doing?"
"Are you crazy?" Loretto peeled off his socks. "Don't light that thing! It's a hundred and ten degrees in here and you want to light the water heater so I can take a hot bath? You and Mrs. Marcello, you're both crazy."
Dom sat on the floor and crossed his legs under him. He squinted as if trying to work out a problem. "I don't know what I was thinking. Must be the shooting's got me rattled."
Loretto took off his pants and undershirt and tossed them on the chair with the rest of his clothes. "Do me a favor." He gestured toward the chair. "Throw my clothes in the trash for me." He went into the bathroom, where he sat on the edge of the tub in his underwear and turned on the water.
Dominic gathered Loretto's clothes from the living room chair, tucked them under his arm, and paused a minute at the window to look down at the crowded sidewalks around Richie Cabo's club. The words Now he's gone and done it rattled around in his head as he watched a small army of cops and reporters mingling with the crowd, trying
