Free Exile on Bridge Street by Eamon Loingsigh Page A

and true enough, it was not there. I was safe.
    In the office, the gang’s chubby, idiot savant accountant Lumpy Gilchrist is slumping over his little desk in the corner, a cast of envelopes scattered about him and a broken pencil in his hand, unaware of my entrance entirely. The Fulton Ferry Landing and Jay Street Terminal dockboss Cinders Connolly, who I shared a cell with, has turned round from his chair across Dinny’s desk and looks at me lamentably. Dinny Meehan too is looking at me, a parting in his mane just left of the center separates two broad clumps of dark brown hair, shorn over the ears tight. Not surprised somehow, his face is almost smiling with agility and reserve like a lion panting or a king of some sunken, nameless and ageless practice that has for so long been ignored that it almost never existed, if not for his sitting atop its throne right here in front of me, the crowned head of lowly laborers in King’s County itself. Eyes alert more than anyone I’ve met, then or now, bright and guarded and knowing and being of a culture older than ours. Older than my own father’s, or his father even. Stones for eyes, a green and pale fuchsite shine, translucent as if they aren’t there at all. But staring at me. Noticing everything. Seeing all. Over his thick shoulders are the industrial, open-shuttered windows and the New York skyline with the two bridges crossing over the East River. He is staring at me from his desk and with the expanse of the city behind him too. I look away. Unable to hold his stare, I look over his shoulder again where he is perched to overlook the docks and bridges. Then look back at him again with his thick jaw revealing within its hard curve over the neck and his piercing stare a purity of law, for which he violently oversees, violently defends. A law that is as rare today as it is ancient and logical and respectful of free men. I know his ways because he had already explained them to me, yet I ignored them. Took them for granted.
    I look away again, then look back up and nod to the tall, tow-haired man on his right, The Swede, whose arms are folded angrily. The Swede he is called, but is not Swedish at all but looks the part of one. He refuses to acknowledge my nodding toward him and instead cynically looks down to me.
    Staring at me as well, Cinders Connolly stands away from the chair he was occupying. Walking from it without being asked and looking at me too, grimly.
    â€œDon’ go,” Dinny directs him while looking at myself, then nods for me to sit.
    I do, gently.
    Dinny tightens his tie although it is already flush on the collar, his hands large and muscular over the tiny knot and thin tie. He looks at me in a slightly pained squint. But just as he is about to speak, he stops. Stares. Watching me. Looking into me.
    He is in the center of the room, Dinny Meehan. The center of all our lives. Surrounded like a mystical deity by men with the ability to do terrible things to others who threaten their leader. Lying about his very existence to outsiders in order to conceal him within the code. Inside our silence. Protecting our secrets from those who want us downed.
    â€œWho’s Dinny Meehan?” is the answer when someone asks about him. “Never heard o’ the man. He live around here?”
    Surrounding him, they do. Bad men, such as Tommy Tuohey guarding the stairwell downstairs, a man with a large build but handy with his fists due to his being bred from day one for gypsy boxing along the country boreens of Ireland. And Vincent Maher who guards the door to the second floor and who has no moral issue in both separating the virginity from a young female with his blood-filled cock as he does removing the life from a male with his snub-nosed, single-action revolver. And The Swede too, always at Dinny’s right side by the window, a man freakishly tall and ugly and horse-faced, furiously paranoid and whose fist is as large as most men’s