Serpents in the Cold (20 page)

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BY MID-MORNING THE
three limousines were there again, this time farther down the avenue, idling against the curb with white smoke steaming from their exhausts, Donovan standing like a sap by McAllister's car. Cal stared from the office window greasy with condensation, then took his coat and made his way down the back stairway with his car battery. The car had already left him stranded three times in the last week, and since the temperatures had plummeted, he wouldn't leave it to chance.

On the street, Charlie's newsstand was shuttered. After the morning rush he closed up and sat, drinking coffee, at a diner on Brattle until the evening subway commute began. The blue neon cross of the Calvary Rescue Mission shimmered dully through the hard-packed ice that encased it.

As he worked beneath the hood of the Chevy, he lost sensation in his fingers, so that when he cut himself he hardly registered it. He could barely hold on to the wrench. When the battery was mounted and the cables attached, he slammed down the hood and climbed into the car. He sat before the wheel trying to work feeling back into his fingers, pulled out the choke, and then turned the key in the ignition. Wheezing, the engine made half a revolution—he could hear the belts turning—and then it sputtered and stopped. “C'mon, you bitch, fucking start!” he muttered and turned the key again and the engine caught and he gunned it so that it wouldn't stall.

While he waited for the engine to warm and the heat to come on, he wiped at the windows, scraped at the thin film of ice that frosted the interior glass. He stared at the rubble-filled lot surrounded by chain-link fence. Standing by the crane with the wrecking ball that had, days before, leveled another half block of real estate, so that the sun showed through from the West End and the docks where before at this time of day it would have been shadowed and gray, was McAllister, the developer he'd seen at Foley's banquet, and beside him stood Foley, another man Cal didn't recognize, and the union rep. Standing there now, the four looked diminutive, shrunken in their heavy overcoats.

The four men were arguing, but it was the developer, McAllister, who appeared to be shouting the loudest, waving at the surrounding buildings and gesturing toward the West End. At one point Cal thought they might come to blows when the developer, who was no small man, held a finger directly before Foley's face. Foley didn't flinch or budge, but stared at him. The union rep stepped in between them and said something that seemed to calm McAllister, and soon the men parted ways—the rep walking toward his Cadillac and the other three walking across the rubble-strewn lot toward the sidewalk. Donovan held the car door open for McAllister and Foley. After a moment the car pulled out and Cal eased out of his spot and rumbled after them. Riding the brake and the accelerator to keep the car from stalling, he followed them onto Hanover and into the North End.

It still bothered him that Foley had known about Sheila and Bobby Renza, and that Renza had somehow brought the two of them together. There was something wrong there, something that spoke to a deeper connection between the two of them and to her death. For a man who had just been told an ex-lover had been murdered by a notorious killer, and for all his shock and dismay, it now seemed very much business as usual.

The traffic was moving slow and cautious over the slick streets, and he followed behind the car through one traffic light and then another. Donovan glanced in his side mirrors a few times but didn't catch him, and it wouldn't have mattered if he had. There was no reason to be suspicious of him, no reason to think that his driving behind them was anything more than coincidence.

On the narrow streets of the North End other drivers peered through gray, frost-clouded windshields; steam pumped from tailpipes, from sidewalk grates, from the kitchen vents of restaurants and pizzerias. At the intersection of Prince Street and Thacher the car slowed, and Cal held back, watched as it slid long and sleek against the curb before Pizzeria Regina's. Cal pulled into a spot twenty yards back, his bumper knocking over a trash can that a resident of the North End had placed in the shoveled space, and watched as Foley and McAllister entered the restaurant. Donovan stood sentry by the limo. Cal turned off the engine and waited.

The car grew cold and he searched the glove compartment, but he'd finished the last pint bottle yesterday. He turned the car on again to clear the windows and so that the battery wouldn't drain, and listened to the radio for a bit, considered going for a coffee but realized he'd left it too late and might miss them if they came out. Thirty minutes later Foley and McAllister emerged and crossed the street. Cal opened the car door and stepped out into the cold. His muscles had stiffened and his leg throbbed something awful, but he hoped the walk would get the blood circulating through it and that the pain would pass.

He followed the men along Prince Street then down an alley past the Baldwin Place Shul to a four-story faded brick office building, and stood to light a cigarette as they climbed the steps to its doors. He watched a mother dragging her children, bundled and stumbling in their excess of clothing, into the Baldwin Talmud Torah and, after a moment, took the steps and entered the lobby, a small space lit by two rows of exposed tungsten bulbs and smelling of old cigarette and cigar smoke.

The pain in his leg was clouding his vision and making it difficult to think. From his inside coat pocket he took his prescription bottle, emptied three bennies into his palm, popped them in his mouth, and, wincing, swallowed them dry.

Above the narrow elevator door on his right, green lights showed the progress of the elevator from floor to floor. He could hear the thing banging away in the shaft as if it might plummet at any moment. On the left of the elevator a staircase covered with peeling linoleum wound upward.

He scanned the building directory, ran his finger beneath the names, and then paused on the third floor under Rizzo Construction, Roberto L. and Son. Cal pursed his lips. How were they connected? After all, it was Foley who'd told him that Renza and Mario Rizzo were the same person.

A radiator hissed uselessly in the corner, and he stamped his feet to keep the blood flowing in his scarred hip and leg. From above he heard voices and then footsteps. The elevator rattled and thumped as it made its descent, and Cal stepped out into the alley again, hobbled back to his car.

HE DROVE BACK
to Scollay disoriented and in a haze of pain that was determined to persist no matter how many bennies he took. What did the Butcher and Sheila's death have to do with Renza, Foley, and McAllister? And if Foley and Renza were connected because of Rizzo Construction, how did McAllister tie in, and if he did, did that mean he knew Sheila as well?

Before he took out the car's battery he picked up a bottle at Court Street Liquors, where the old boy was still complaining that they'd cut off his heat and that they were trying to drive all the poor working people out of the neighborhood. On the street again Cal put the bottle to his lips, but after a mouthful suddenly lost all taste for it and capped it instead. Wind pushed across the lot where Foley and the other men had stood, moaned in the cantilevered braces of the snow-covered crane, sent the chain link jangling, and Cal, freezing and in pain, limped slowly back to Pilgrim Security.

_________________________

Boston City Hall, Downtown

BOSTON CITY HALL
was located on School Street next to the old King's Chapel graveyard and across from the Parker House, once home to the Saturday Club, the literary elite of Boston, whose members included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, even a visiting Charles Dickens; it now served as the place where politicians from the State House drank after hours, made underhanded deals, and met their mistresses. Cal supposed that at one time or another Foley had met Sheila there.

City Hall had been built in the mid-1800s in the French Second Empire style, with its high mansard roof topped by a dome, tall windows and doors flanked by ornamented columns, all now pristinely coated in snow. In the courtyard Cal and Dante passed the statues of Benjamin Franklin and Josiah Quincy, a marble plaque that recognized the spot as the original location of Boston Latin, the first public school in America, and then pushed though the massive front doors into the heated foyer decorated with historical murals. Clumps of dirty snow melted on the tile and marble, and an old black woman cleaned the floors with a mop as city workers spilled up and down the wide staircase on either side of the entrance.

Cal paused on the stairs as Dante lit a cigarette.

“Any luck last night?” Cal asked.

Dante inhaled on the cigarette, its tip flaring red, and blew out smoke long and slow. “No, nothing. I'll give it a couple more nights.”

He shook the match out. “You think we're going to find anything here?”

“Foley and McAllister aren't tearing down the neighborhood just for the fun of it. The public records will show us what they're up to.”

The Office of the City Clerk was a large room on the second floor. Its faded wood-paneled walls had seen better days. As had the two large reading tables in the center of the room, their scarred surfaces illuminated by small lamps. Upon the wall a large clock loudly ticked the seconds. A clerk sat behind an opaque ribbed-glass window that he pushed up when Cal rang the bell. He had a narrow face, dull, watery-gray eyes under thick-rimmed eyeglasses smeared with fingerprints, which reflected the lights of the office when he raised his head to look up at them. His eyebrows and hair were slicked down with oil, and the sharp odor of mothballs came from his tweed jacket. Part of the sandwich he'd been chewing bulged in his cheek.

“We're looking for building proposals or plans for Scollay Square,” Cal said. “Anything you might have that's come on the books in the last six months or so.”

“A bit more specific would help.”

“The name of the firm is McIntyre, McAllister, and Broome, but I'm not sure how you file such things. How about by… zoning region? There can't be that much going on in the city, is there?”

“New building proposals and planning would be under the Superintendent of Buildings and the City Planning Commission. Plats that are awaiting review and approval will be there also.”

The clerk took his time chewing and swallowing; he didn't seem to be enjoying it much.

“I can find those records for you, if you'd like to take a seat over at one of the tables.”

They waited and listened to the sounds from other offices: typewriters clacking, footsteps on the tiled floors beyond the door, a woman's shrill laughter. Dante finished his cigarette, stamped it out in a tin ashtray still filled with the ash of old cigarettes, and immediately lit another. Cal pulled a damp newspaper from his pocket and began reading the front page, but the words wouldn't stick, so he moved on to the sports section and then the funnies.

The door opened and the clerk came in carrying an armful of cardboard tubes containing rolled drafting plans. When he dropped them onto the table, they counted ten in all.

“Jesus,” Cal said. “How many developments does McAllister have in the works?”

The clerk sighed as he took the tops off the tubes. “You asked for McIntyre, McAllister, and Broome, and you asked for Scollay Square, so I got you everything from Tremont to Church Street, and from Hanover to Causeway Street in the North End.”

Cal shook out a roll of blue drafting paper and stretched it across the table. Dante held down one side and together they looked at an overhead view of Scollay Square, along Cambridge Street. To the east, past the intersection of State, all the present buildings were gone. In their place were larger divisions and subdivisions: a vast sprawl of concrete plazas and office building skyscrapers. “Shit,” Dante muttered at his side. “This can't be right.”

Cal's stomach roiled, a sense of panic swelling in him that he couldn't explain. He knew that he was merely looking at a plan, that such things couldn't just happen overnight, that the place he knew couldn't be gone so neatly and so quickly.

Dante pointed toward the corner of the draft and the names that were printed there: McIntyre, McAllister, and Broome, and below that, Rizzo Construction, and Cal's unease grew. This was the thing—the connection—between all of them.

“What about the West End?” he asked the clerk.

The clerk stared at him, and when Cal gave him his best smile, he spoke as if he were speaking to a child.

“McIntyre, McAllister, and Broome have proposals for all the city space I just mentioned. That includes the West End. What you see is awaiting review and approval.”

Dante leaned over the draft, the long ash hanging from his cigarette only inches from the paper. “But how can that be? You're talking about one square mile of city real estate. There are homes and businesses there. None of it's been sold—it can't be.”

“That's what it says,” the clerk said offhandedly, staring at Dante's cigarette.

The clerk pointed to the largest of the documents. “That's a plat of consolidation, which consolidates many parcels of urban land into a single parcel. It comes with the required surveys of the previous parcels attached for approval. As it states there, McIntyre, McAllister, and Broome are the registered landowners.”

“They're going to displace thousands of people.” Cal sensed he was speaking aloud to the almost empty room. “And nobody fucking knows about it.”

The clerk shrugged. “Hey, did you want to look at these or not? I go on my lunch break in five minutes.”

Cal wanted to remind him that he'd just been eating. He glanced at Dante. There was no point in looking at the other plans; they already knew what they contained: more empty spaces filled with grid lines, measurements, numbers, dimensions, and architectural line drawings of buildings that would soon be constructed. Cal shook his head and began to roll up the blueprint stock. His hands were shaking. Dante said, “Thank you. We're done.”

“You're welcome,” the clerk said dryly, and took the plan from Cal, rolled it, and then slipped it into its tube. He gathered up the remaining tubes with a burdened sigh.

“The offices are closed from twelve to one fifteen. If you need anything else, you can come back then.” His shoes clattered on the old tile.

Dante whistled and shook his head. “Jesus, Cal, we're talking millions of dollars at stake here—the whole redevelopment of Scollay and the West End, all dependent on Foley getting it pushed through.”

“Makes the Brink's job look like peanuts.”

“Yeah. And look how much McAllister has to lose in all this. He doesn't seem like the kind of man who would take losing anything too well, does he?”

The glass window squealed as it was pried up, and they turned. There was the clerk's pallid face and his bleary, spectacled eyes staring at them. “The office is closed, gentlemen,” he said, pointing to the large clock ticking on the wall, and brought the window down with a bang.