The City Below (21 page)

"I wasn't talking to you. Eloise just brought my coffee."

"What a life you have, you bastard."

"Eloise has a sister, Terry. Don't you, El?"

Terry said nothing.

"Charlie?"

"Yes? I'm here."

"God, I'm sorry, Charlie. I'm no help at all, am I?"

"No, none."

"So tell me what the fuck they want."

"No, never mind. It's too complicated. Really, I think I just wanted to touch base..."

"Cold feet? Is that what it is? Cold feet is normal if you're on ice, Terry."

"Maybe that's exactly what it is. Maybe that's all it is."

"Do you have somebody up there you can talk to? What about that priest'"

"Father Collins?"

"Yeah."

"Sure. I can talk to him."

They were silent again. Terry began fingering the graffiti once more, the foul words, the profane.

"Because, if you needed to, you could always talk to my father."

"Your dad?"

"You know how much he likes you. He sees you as my one chance."

"I don't know, Bright."

"Just think about it You're at the Parker House, you said?"

"Yes."

"His office is five minutes away. On Joy Street."

"One doesn't just drop in on the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, Bright."

"
I
would, and so can you. I know that's how he feels. You want me to call him up?"

"No, no. It's helped just talking to you, buddy. I'm glad you're coming up. Where are you staying? With your foils?"

"No." The sound of McKay's voice changed, indicating he'd cupped the phone. "Claudia's. I'll be at Claudia's. You call me, because I can never penetrate that monastic phone system of yours. You still have her number?"

"You
are
a bastard, you know that?" Doyle laughed, hard.
Humanae vitae. Humanae
fucking
vitae.

A few minutes later he was approaching the subway kiosk at Park Street Women in short skirts that showed their thighs, or in jeans that clung to their asses, kept cutting him off. Shoppers with large bags from Filene's and Jordan's entered the small building and disappeared in the smooth downward glide of the escalator. He intended to join them.

But then he stopped. He watched the women for a minute, watched them
as
women, their snappy hairdos, their swinging shoulder bags, their clacking high heels, the curves of their flesh —minis everywhere, and loose breasts leaping against cotton T-shirts. Shit, man.

He looked up at the clock on the white spire of the Park Street Church. The sun glinted off the weathervane. The sky beyond was the blue of someone's eye. The clock showed that he had a couple of hours before the class meeting he had called, the meeting he was expressly forbidden to convene.

Kennedy's question: What am I going to do?

He saw a bank of phone booths and now remembered another time he'd slipped into one —at Georgetown, to call Nick when their mother had died. It was out of the question, calling his brother now. But still, he felt the old longing, how he'd never really grown accustomed to life not so much without her, but without him. Nick. Squire. His brother would not remotely understand. But who would?

Instead of heading down to the subway, he cut into the Common and began angling toward Joy Street. It was an uphill trek, but he took it quickly, hardly breathing, allowing himself the barest sidelong glances at the couples here and there on the grass, holding hands, kissing. Sinking, he had felt He was sinking. Into what? Into sex? Into shame? The feeling was of an old enemy that had him by the ankle and was pulling him down.

The headquarters of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts was half a block up from Beacon Street, in a mansion that was set off from its neighbors by the ecclesiastical flag poking out from the lintel of the second-story bay window. The serenity of the shaded brick façade failed to work its charm on Doyle as he stopped across the street. Beacon Hill was a point around which the city pivoted, but he had rarely crossed into the neighborhood proper. There were no bodies here, no women, only bricks and trim shutters, rooflines, chimneys, and polished brass door knockers. Proud buildings like this lined Monument Square on Bunker Hill, the same bowfronts. But in the Town, otherwise a neighborhood of three-deckers and projects, such buildings always seemed ostentatious, and therefore phony. Here they seemed the height of understatement, completely real.

But what am I going to ask him? What am I going to say? Doyle's questions came quickly. Would crossing this street be disloyal? But Bright's father was a priest He always wore his collar. He believed in the Real Presence and in the Seal of Confession. In lengthy conversations over leisurely Sunday dinners, Doyle had often heard Father McKay, now Bishop McKay, describe his own deep longing for reunion with Rome, his respect for the pope's effort to ride the crest of change, his intuitive preference for what some of his own confreres derided as RC Cola.

Bishop McKay was like his son in his wiry, thin handsomeness, although he was smaller. He was like Bright in his high-pitched, rolling laugh and in his kindness. Like Bright, he loved to touch your hand when he was telling a story. But he was unlike Bright in his clipped British accent, his utter lack of cynicism, and, more to the point, his wanting so very much —and saying so —for Terry to be ordained. Ordained by Cushing.

As Doyle crossed Joy Street he told himself, No one at St John's will ever know.

He went through the spiked wrought-iron fence and up the stairs. Doyle deflected his anxiety by imagining a history of the place, that it had once been home to a Brahmin abolitionist, his poet daughter, and his son, a hero of the Civil War. But had it also perhaps belonged before that to a wealthy merchant whose stock-in-trade included slaves?

It seemed strange to pull open the heavy brass-studded door without ringing a bell first, waiting for a maid, explaining himself. These were offices now. Doyle mustered an air of casual efficiency, entirely counterfeit, as he went in, aware of the house suddenly as a place in which Irish had lived —and to which even now were admitted —only as servants.

Doyle was exquisitely attuned, in other words, to the chaotic implications of what he was doing, turning for help —despite the man's tide and High-Church preferences —to a Protestant; turning for help —was this the real disloyalty? —to a black man.

T
HE CONVERTED WAREHOUSE
behind the Rancho Diner was a long place-kick off the ramp that led down from the elevated highway, part of the swooping approach to the Mystic River Bridge. The innocuous building was a favorite stopping place for truckers off 95 or Route i or the terminus of 93. They could eat at the Rancho, use its showers in back, leave their rigs in the diner lot. Hitching up their pants, blowing their noses with their fingers, they would walk over to Daisy's, as it was known, although no sign identified the door.

This part of Charlestown was called the Flat, and it was hemmed in by the railyards, the MTA tracks, the double-barreled highway, and the river. It was a rough district with dozens of single-story cement-block structures, each with its loading ramp. They were plumbing suppliers and glass wholesalers, a tidy trade-only lumberyard, a scrap-iron dealer, a welding shop, and numerous unstaffed storage buildings. There was nothing to attract the close attention of outsiders, so the Flat was effectively cut off, not only from the rest of the city, but from the hilly neighborhood that abutted it Patrons could come and go from Daisy's at all hours, and did, and not worry about drawing the notice of anyone inclined to wonder what went on in there. Everybody who had reason to drift through the Flat knew, and, at least now and then, they all went in.

Daisy's was, in the truckers' argot, a joint, a trap, a crib. It was a casino, named not for a voluptuous Irish moll, a figment predictably conjured by roadrunners from out of town, but for the actual flowers that were always on display, sprays and bouquets, cut greens, and especially daisies —all slightly wilted, like Daisy herself would have been if she existed. By the carton and bundle and tubful, blossoms were brought over every few days, the unsold but still piquant stock from the Flower Exchange, near the cathedral. The flowers sat on florist's stands and mesh pillars between banks of slot machines that were arranged in three long aisles. There were flowers against the walls behind the craps, pool, and poker tables. The former warehouse had not been decorated for its new use, so the flowers and the tin artist's lights bouncing indirectly off the whitewashed cement walls gave the place what ambiance it had, cheerful enough and clean. It wasn't Vegas, but neon and cheap plush were not what truckers stopped here for.

The lack of windows meant that the number of players, not the length of shadows, was the accurate indicator of the hour in this realm. Now it was late afternoon, a slow time. Half a dozen men in baseball hats, checkered shirts or green jackets with names stitched on the pockets, and the newly ubiquitous American flag patches on their shoulders were scattered among five times that many slots. The craps and poker tables were vacant, but at one of the two pool tables the room's lone young woman was playing eightball with a man. Periodic bursts of arrhythmic clack-clacking punctured their otherwise rigid silence, indicating a heated contest.

The woman was a striking, out-of-the-bottle blond, her hair short, framing her face like a pouting French movie star's, and if she was as cheap looking as she was pretty, it seemed somehow deliberate. She moved around the table from shot to shot with quick authority, as if completely aware, and in charge, of the impression she was making. She wore tight hip-huggers and a halter that left much of her back bare, not quite up to the job of containing her breasts when she bent over to shoot. Her blue jeans flared at the ankle over a pair of green snakeskin cowboy boots. Her opponent stood back, chalking his sock, frankly enjoying her run for the way it let him watch her. He was a large, well-muscled man, a cigarette permanently at his lip, sending a ribbon of smoke into his squinting left eye. Though it was warm in die room and though, in his mid-twenties, he seemed too old for it, he wore a leather-sleeved high school jacket.
Charlestown,
it read across the back He was Jackie Mullen.

One end of the game room was taken up by a bar, a long counter but without stools.
Liquor in front
, a bumper sticker posted above the bottle shelf read,
poker in back.
Behind the bar was a large campaign poster, a hazy photograph of a fat-jowled matron in a frilly hat.
Louise Day Hicks far Mayor,
it said.
You Know Where She Stands.

At the bar two men nursed drinks, one a beer, the other a Coke. The first was wearing the dark blue, shiny-assed trousers of a Boston cop. As a gesture of his customarily minimal but sufficient discretion, his tan poplin jacket was zipped to his throat so that his collar insignia did not show. He wasn't a large man, but his thick neck, strong jaw, big ears, and hair cropped like a Marine's gave him an intimidating air. His jacket also hid the sergeant's stripes on his shirt sleeves. He was Sonny Murtaugh, a lownie —one of several from the City Square precinct house, including a lieutenant, who were the owners of Daisy's, which was why the place was never tipped over.

He spoke in bursts, with punching gestures, but he kept his voice low. "I don't give a shit what that wop bastard said. We keep loansharking and enforcement out of here. This is where the suckers
play.
Everyone can spot Tucci's juice collectors. No fucking way. We keep the system as is or we shut it down." He poked his companion, Squire Doyle, too hard for friendliness, but Doyle did not move for a moment, or react.

Finally he laughed. "You shut this place down, Sonny, and Frank just opens a truckers' joint himself."

"In the Town? Let him try."

"The highway goes north and south, sport It brushes Somerville and Chelsea. It cuts right through Revere and Everett. All his territory."

Murtaugh shook his head. "We get rigs going south, and in from the west because of die junction. Those are the guys with change. Who goes north? Lobstermen and Christmas tree carriers, frogs and fishermen. Our guys run to Providence, Hartford, and New York. They're the players. Fuck that dago kid."

"That dago kid was at his old man's elbow for twenty years. He's older than you are."

"I can't have those guys in here, Squire. Shit, we're cops. We can't —"

"It's a show of power, Sonny. That's all it is. Transition time. Consolidation. Frank would love for you to challenge him. Now that the old man is dead, he has to move right away to prove he has a pair of big
cojones.
That's all this is. He's showing us and, more to the point, he's showing his own people. I don't take the new rules personally, and neither should you. It doesn't matter how the juice gets collected, and if he ups the ante on you, you can pay it. And don't give me that 'We're cops' bullshit."

"I don't want those greaseball cunts coming in here, acting like this is their fucking operation."

Squire smiled. "But it is, Sonny. You're a franchise holder, and don't forget it He's the parent corporation. That's the point Frank is making, same thing I'd be doing, a little tickle to remind you. This
is
theirs."

"We pay them to leave it alone. I pay you to keep the sharks and kneecappers out of here."

"From now on, you pay me for the flowers, period."

"I still say fuck him." Murtaugh drained his glass and slammed it on the bar.

Squire pushed his hardly touched Coke a few inches away. "And if the Teamsters put out the word on Daisy's?"

Murtaugh fell silent, taking the point in. Then, abruptly, he went around the bar to the beer tap, drew himself another glass, sucked half of it down, then wiped his mouth with his cupped hand. He looked up at Doyle. "You're awfully fucking philosophical about this, if you ask me. You organized the Irish rackets for these bastards. Now the zips want to run the streets without you."

"It was time, Sonny. Fucking courier service, that's all I've been."