The Last Ledger



The jazz from the speakeasy on Mulberry Street had a way of getting under your skin. It wasn't the music itself — though God knew there was plenty of that — it was the feeling that the music was saying something you wanted to hear but didn't have the courage to acknowledge. Something about the night being young and the bottle being full and the world being exactly as broken as it always had been, which meant it was probably going to stay broken for a while longer, which meant you might as well dance.



Tom O'Neil didn't dance. He stood in the corner of the speakeasy, a glass of rye in his hand, watching the room like a man watching a room full of strangers at a funeral he wasn't supposed to know about. He was forty-one years old and his knees clicked when it rained and he hadn't slept through the night since October 1918, when he was nineteen and standing in a shell crater in the Argonne Forest with eight dead men between his legs and one alive man — Henry Moretti — who was nineteen and bleeding from his stomach and asking Tom in a voice that was somehow not trembling, which made it worse, asking Tom if he could still see the stars.



Tom could still see the stars. They were hidden by smoke and trees and the curved shell of the earth, but he could see them, if he tilted his head just right and looked through the gaps in the smoke like a man looking through the gaps in his fingers. And he had kept looking, every night since, tilting his head, looking through the gaps, searching for something that told him it had been worth it.



He hadn't found it yet. But he was still looking. That was something.



The band struck up a new number — something fast and ragtime and completely inappropriate for the mood Tom was in, which was the point. Jazz was supposed to be inappropriate. It was supposed to take something solemn and make it ridiculous and then take something ridiculous and make it solemn, and you never knew which one you were getting.



"Tank."



Tom turned. Hank was standing behind him, and God help him, Tom felt something move in his chest — not joy exactly, but the ghost of joy, the memory of joy, the thing that used to be joy and had been sitting in the corner of his chest since 1919 waiting for a moment like this to see if it was still alive.



Hank looked good. Too good. He was wearing a white suit that caught the speakeasy light and turned it into something almost gold, and his hair was oiled and combed and his teeth were white and his face was clean-shaven and it was the face of a man who hadn't thought about a razor in three days, which meant someone else was thinking about his face for him.



"Hank," Tom said. "I wondered if you'd show up."



"Doc Salinger sends his regards."



The glass in Tom's hand went very still. The jazz kept playing. Nobody in the room noticed the single note of silence that Tom had inserted between himself and the rest of the world.



"What did he send you to say?"



Hank's smile didn't change, but something behind his eyes shifted, like a clock hand moving from one number to the next without anyone hearing it click. "He says hello. And he says — and I'm quoting him exactly, because I like your reaction — he says that the world is changing, Tank, and the men who understand that will be the ones who make the new one."



"Which men are those?"



"Men who don't waste time on things that can't be changed." Hank's eyes moved to Tom's glass. "You drinking for two again?"



"Sometimes."



"You should stop."



"Sometimes I do."



They looked at each other across three years of silence that weren't really silence — they were a hundred conversations that happened in the space between words, a hundred things that were said without being said, a hundred debts that were counted but never collected.



"Where have you been?" Tom asked.



"Cleveland. New Orleans. A little bit of Chicago. I travel."



"For Doc."



Hank's smile widened by half a degree. It was the kind of smile that could sell you something you didn't need at a price you couldn't afford. "I travel for business."



"What kind of business?"



"Prescription business. Doc has a clinic on Madison Avenue. Very legitimate. Very above board. He treats — how shall I put this? — men of influence. Men who have nervous conditions. Men who need a little help sleeping. Or thinking. Or deciding."



Tom felt the glass move toward his mouth. He didn't remember putting it there. He took a drink. The rye burned the way it always burned — a clean, honest fire that didn't lie about what it was.



"You're selling knockout drops," Tom said.



"I'm selling pharmaceuticals to patients who need them," Hank said. "There's a difference."



"There's a difference between selling morphine to a soldier and selling morphine to a senator?"



Hank's smile didn't waver. "There's a difference between selling to a soldier who asked for it and selling to a senator who doesn't know he's asking for it."



The music swelled. Someone was laughing near the bar. A woman in a red dress danced with a man who wasn't her husband and wasn't her lover and wasn't anyone except a stranger who paid for her drink and knew how to move in time with a piano that sounded like water running downhill.



"You're not the only one who knows about this," Tom said.



"I know," Hank said. "That's the beautiful thing. Nobody knows. Nobody knows, and everyone knows, and the space between those two facts is where all the money is."



Tom set his glass down on a table that had ring stains from a hundred previous glasses, each one belonging to a man who had stood in this exact spot and drunk this exact drink and thought this exact thought — that he was the only one who understood, that he was the exception to the rule, that the world was broken but he was the wrench in the gears, the man who could fix it if he just had the right tool and the right moment.



"You're working for Al Capone now," Tom said.



Hank's eyes flickered. It was quick — a fraction of a second, a single shift of light behind the iris — but Tom had spent three years watching Hank sleep, and he knew the difference between Hank's face when he was honest and Hank's face when he was lying. The lying face was better now. Better than it had been in 1919. But it was still lying.



"Al Capone is a businessman," Hank said. "So am I. We share certain interests."



"Like what?"



"Like the interest that compounds when you don't pay your debts."



Tom felt something cold settle in his stomach, heavier than the rye and colder than the crater in 1918. "What debts?"



"The team's debts. O'Neil and Associates. The insurance collection business. The little enterprise you've been running out of that office on Mercer Street like a man running a church when he's really running a loan shark operation."



The music stopped. For one brief, crystalline moment, the speakeasy was silent — all nine members of Tom's team standing in different corners of the room, each one holding a different drink, each one pretending not to listen, each one listening with every nerve in their body.



"I don't owe anyone anything," Tom said.



"That's what they all say," Hank said. "Doc says it too. Every patient. Every time. 'I don't owe anyone anything.' And then he writes the prescription and the debt gets bigger and the interest compounds and next thing you know, the senator can't make a decision without Doc's little blue pill and the judge can't hold a trial without Doc's little white one and the police commissioner —"



"Stop."



Hank stopped. He picked up his glass and drank, and the drink looked different in his hand than it did in Tom's — it looked like someone else's drink, like something Hank had stolen, like something he'd taken from a man who had needed it more.



"I'm warning you, Tank," Hank said. "Doc's not going to keep doing this. He's built something. He's built something real. And you and your little team are standing in the way of it. Not because you're good. Not because you're right. But because you're in the way."



"Like the crater," Tom said quietly.



Hank closed his eyes. For a moment — just a moment — the white suit and the oiled hair and the confident smile were gone, and he was nineteen again, bleeding in a crater in France, looking up at Tom's face and seeing the stars through the smoke and thinking that if this man died, he would die knowing something was worth dying for.



"Like the crater," Hank said.



The music started again. The woman in the red dress kept dancing. The world kept turning, indifferent and bright and full of people who believed, each in his own way, that they were the ones who understood the truth.



Tom picked up his glass and finished the rye. It tasted the same as it always did — like fire and regret and the memory of a boy who bled in his arms and didn't ask for forgiveness because he didn't think he needed it.



"Coffee sometime?" Hank asked, and it was the same question he'd been asking for three years, in different words, in different places, always at the edge of something that was about to break.



Tom looked at him for a long time. The jazz played. The city breathed. The ledger, wherever it was, whatever it contained, was waiting to be counted.



"Maybe," Tom said.



And they both knew that maybe was the closest thing to the truth that either of them was going to get.

Author Note & Copyright: