World Gone By: A Novel by Dennis Lehane Read Free Book Online Page B

“Not around me.”
    “But you knew they thought it.”
    His father’s face became mild again, benign. “Never cared much what strangers thought, kid.”
    “Dad,” Tomas said, “do you care what anyone thinks?”
    “Care what you think,” Joe said. “And your mom.”
    “She’s dead.”
    “Yeah, but I like to think she sees us.” His father rolled down his window and lit a cigarette. He held the cigarette in his left handand dropped his arm along the outside of the door. “I care what your uncle Dion thinks.”
    “Even though he’s not your brother.”
    “In a lotta ways he’s more a brother to me than my real brothers.” His father brought his hand into the car to smoke, draped it back down the door as he exhaled. “I cared about what my father thought, but that would have been news to him. That’s pretty much the end of the list.” He shot his son a sad smile. “I don’t have room in my heart for most people. Got nothing against them, but I got nothing for them, either.”
    “Even the people in the war?”
    “I don’t know those people.” His father stared out the window. “Frankly, I could give a shit whether they live or die.”
    Tomas thought of all the dead in Europe and Russia and the Pacific. Sometimes he dreamed of thousands of them spread bloody and broken in dark fields or stone piazzas, limbs turned in the wrong direction, mouths open and frozen. He wished he could pick up a rifle and fight for them, save just one of them.
    His father, on the other hand, looked at the war like he looked at most things—as an opportunity to make more money.
    “So I shouldn’t let it bother me?” Tomas said after a while.
    “No,” his father said. “Sticks and stones and all that.”
    “Okay. I’ll try.”
    “Good man.”
    His father looked over at him and gave him a confident smile, as if that could fix things, and they finally turned into the lot.
    They passed Rico DiGiacomo as he was exiting the lot. Rico had been Joe’s bodyguard until Joe realized, about six years ago, that he didn’t need a bodyguard anymore, and even if he did, Rico was too smart and talented to be mired in the position. Rico rapped his knuckles on Joe’s hood and shot him the smile he was famousfor, the kind of smile that could light a football field at night long enough to call a few final plays. He was flanked by his mother, Olivia, and his brother, Freddy, the old lady like something out of a Karloff movie, a malignant vision dressed all in black who’d floated in off the moors while everyone was sleeping.
    As the DiGiacomos moved on, Tomas asked, “What if there are no spots left?”
    “We’re one car away,” Joe said.
    “But what if his is the last car to get in?”
    “How does it help me to think about that?”
    “I just thought you should consider the possibility.”
    Joe stared at his son. “Are you sure we’re related?”
    “You tell me,” Tomas said and went back to his book.

C HAPTER F OUR
Absence
    JOE AND TOMAS SAT IN THE BACK OF THE CHURCH, not just because they were later in arriving than most of the parishioners, but because Joe preferred the back of any room he found himself in.
    In addition to Dion (front pew on the left) and Rico DiGiacomo (fifth pew back on the right), Joe picked up a few more of his associates in the room—killers to a man—and wondered what Jesus would feel if He were, in fact, looking down and had access to their thoughts.
    Wait , Jesus would be thinking, you’ve missed the point.
    Up on the altar, Father Ruttle’s sermon was about hell. He hit all the notes about fire and demons with pitchforks, birds plucking at your liver, but then he took it to a place Joe hadn’t been expecting.
    “But what is worse than all those punishments? Genesis tells us that our Lord looked down on Adam and said, ‘It is not goodthat man should be alone.’ And so the Lord created Eve. Now Eve brought turmoil and betrayal into Paradise, it is true, and condemned us all to suffer