A Cool Breeze on the Underground (2 page)

2

Anyone who grew up in or near Providence, Rhode Island, knew the old bank building. Its gray stones had held in safety the treasure of piggy banks, the birthday presents from fond uncles, the weekly paychecks and stock dividends of the thrifty working-class New Englanders since rum, slaves, and guns had made the town more than just a farm market. Later, the bank housed the profits from the textile mills of southern New England, from the slate quarries of Pawtucket, and from the fishing fleets of Galilee and Jerusalem, at the mouth of Narragansett Bay.

Everyone knew that the bank was solid. It offered no toasters, electric blankets, or water tumblers to lure prospective savers. It had a reputation: trustworthy, solid, and steady, which brought people to its mahogany counters, where the tellers’ windows resembled the gun ports of the old frigates that had brought the city wealth, to deposit their nickels, dimes, and dollars. No deposit was too small or too large.

Something different brought the wealthy customers: privacy. The bank was the Kitteredge family, and the Kitteredge family was the bank. The Kitteredges had been counting, saving, investing, and hiding the money of the rich from the days when British tax collectors sought the Crown’s share of the lucrative molasses trade to the present era of the slick and merciless IRS computers. The Kitteredges were private people, private in the way that can be found only in New England and the Deep South. For the Kitteredges, a new customer was merely a third-generation saver at the bank. Their steady clientele were those who had hoarded their money during the Revolution until they were sure just how things would turn out. Money from the bank fought the Revolution in the form of uniforms, muskets, and powder, although one Kitteredge, Samuel Joshua, displeased his grandfather by donning one of those uniforms and dying at the head of his platoon on the ramparts of Yorktown. Far more sensible in the old man’s eyes were the Kitteredge-financed privateers who raided British shipping on the high Atlantic, thereby serving their country by crippling British sea power, while at the same time bringing home nice profits to the bank.

The Kitteredges were fortunate—some say provident—in producing the right numbers of male and female offspring. Kitteredge followed Kitteredge in direct line as presidents of the bank, with few enough descendants to avoid destructive squabbling and just enough to keep the business in the family.

The nineteenth century was a golden era for the family and its bank, an age when patrician attitudes went hand in hand with the growth of the republic. The Civil War brought a financial boom, and another son, Joshua Samuel, marched off to help destroy the evil institution of slavery that his forefathers had done so much to establish. Young Joshua did not march back; a grave was chipped out on the frozen slopes of Fredericksburg, where a Rhode Island general had ordered him to his death. (“A foolish charge,” Joshua’s father had grumbled at the memorial service, “like someone from Massachusetts might do”—that state having a reputation for fanaticism akin to Rhode Island’s legacy of unprovoked orneriness.)

In the halcyon years between Appomattox and the sinking of the
Lusitania,
the bank thrived. The gaslight gave way to the electric light, furnaces took the place of potbellied stoves, but the old stone building itself never changed. (And never would. “A bank isn’t plastic, glass, and steel,” one Kitteredge had thundered during an infamous 1962 board meeting when a foolish member had proposed a “new look.” “A bank is stone, brass, and hardwood. People bring their money here.”)

The Kitteredge lifestyle was as conservative as the building itself. “Keep the business in the office and out of the newspapers” was the honored family motto. No Newport mansions or debutante balls for the Kitteredges. Their large houses were tucked away in Narragansett or in the woods of Lincoln, and, of course, the old family home on College Hill remained occupied and freshly painted. The Kitteredge youths attended Brown (Yale, too progressive; Harvard, too flashy; Princeton, in New Jersey), berthed their sailboats in a small cove in Wickford, married girls from New Hampshire and Vermont, and drank their whiskey in their dens at night.

July 8, 1913, stands out as a significant date in terms of the lives of Neal Carey and Joe Graham. On that day, one William Kitteredge, in roughly the middle of the standard twenty-to-thirty-year apprenticeship as vice president of something, beat the scion of another family rather too easily in their weekly tennis match at the club. This gentleman, whose family maintained reserves of at least two sets of books at the bank, confessed to Bill that the light of his life, his young daughter, had run away with an Italian. This disturbing revelation provoked sympathy in Bill, who thought something should be done—quietly.

That evening, Bill had a word with Jack Quinn, a janitor at the bank, whose son, Jack Junior, was a promising young prizefighter and youth about town. Could young Jack perhaps lend a hand? Jack was delighted and located the couple, had a few friendly words of counsel with the now-less-than-ardent husband, and delivered the girl to Bill at his house in town. Bill, in turn, had a drink with his friend the judge, and the marriage never happened. Bill returned the daughter, received copious thanks, and thought no more about it until he was summoned into the office promptly at seven o’clock Monday morning.

“Hear you’ve been rescuing damsels in distress from the clutches of recent Mediterranean arrivals,” his father said.

“That’s right.”

“Plan to continue this sort of thing?”

“Might.”

“Then you had better get organized.”

Actually, the old man said, it made sense. The world had changed, and could be a more troublesome sort of place than it should. The bank despised a scandal, he said, and more and more of its old customers seemed to be getting in the newspapers these days. “We’re old friends of these families, and moreover, it’s in our interest to keep them safe and happy. Cheaper in the long run to take care of some of these little problems ourselves.”

So Bill got a raise and a budget and orders to put together an agency within the bank to be at the service of old friends whose private problems might not be best ameliorated by the public arm of the law and the grimy hands of the press. The agency never existed on paper, and the door of Room 211 never proclaimed FRIENDS OF THE FAMILY, but that’s what the agency came to be called, and the word passed quickly around the locker rooms and boardrooms of southern New England. The word was that if you needed something done quietly, go visit Bill or drop a word at the bank. That old stone building housed Friends.

Of course, the needs of Friends’ clients changed with the century. Prohibition brought in its wake waves of arrests, which, in turn, brought showers of envelopes cheerfully dropped on enteprising police and judiciary. And a wave of a different sort—the immigrant wave—changed New England forever. But the bank held its ground, and Friends, with both fists and favors, carved out a modus vivendi with other tight-knit ethnic organizations. The Depression winnowed the bank’s customers and forced the bank to burrow deeply into its reserves to survive until Hitler and Tojo filled the shipyard with contracts and workers again, and people remarked over dinner how provident the Kitteredges had been to invest in the arms industry way back in the Thirties.

New England was already on its way to becoming a backwater, however. The textile mills packed up and went south to the cheap labor, and the business talent caught the train to New York City, whose glass and steel monoliths began to buy up more and more New England businesses. Friends’ clients were increasingly finding the worms in the Big Apple, so in 1960, a quiet branch office was opened in Manhattan. Not long after that, Friends hired a foul-mouthed, one-armed, too-clever-by-half private dick named Joe Graham. Not long after that, on one of his early cases, Graham was sitting in a quiet West Side bar when some kid tried to pick his pocket.

3

The 3:40 A.M. train from New York to Providence said AMTRAK on it, but actually it was something Dante had designed for collection agents to spend eternity in—which is about how long the train took to get to Providence.

The seats were as comfortable as a tax audit, featured torn upholstery, and could have served as the focus for a rousing game of Name That Stain. Old newspapers, paper coffee cups, and beer cans festooned the aisles and the seats. The smell of stale everything perfumed what passed for air.

Neal returned from the snack car with a cup of coffee that was already semi-solid, and a Danish older than Hamlet. Graham had brought his own food, sealed in little Tupperware containers. Graham had ridden the train before.

“Why couldn’t we fly?” Neal asked.

“Because I didn’t want to.”

“You’re afraid.”

“I don’t like to fly,” Graham said, munching on a carrot stick.

“Why don’t you like to fly?”

“Because I’m afraid.”

Graham twisted open a thermos and poured hot coffee into his cup. He smiled at Neal and said, “‘Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.’”

Neal huddled up in his sport coat and tried to look out the gunged-up window. They were somewhere in Connecticut, stopped dead in their tracks, as it were, for no discernible reason. Nor did this seem to cause undue concern to the conductor, who was sleeping the sleep of the innocent in the backseat of the car. Neal thought the guy must have the metabolism of a polar bear to sleep in this cold. There was no heat on the train and it was cold for a May morning.

“You want to get drunk?” he asked Graham.

Graham opened the thermos again and held it up to Neal’s nose. “Yes.”

Neal smelled it and gave Graham his best lost-puppy look. Graham sighed and shook his head and pulled an extra plastic cup out of his bag. He removed it from its plastic wrapping and poured Neal a heavy tot.

“Love you, Dad.”

“How could you help it, son?”

The nice thing about Irish coffee, Neal thought, was that it kept your body awake but put your mind to sleep. He sat back and let the warmth spread through him. Eight or ten more of these might make the trip almost bearable. The train lurched forward.

“Wakey, wakey.”

“We there already?”

“Not quite. You have to get cleaned up.”

Graham was leaning over him. Clean-shaven, straight tie, eyes clear, and breath fresh. Neal hated Graham.

“I brought you an extra razor.”

Sure enough, Graham had brought two cordless electric shavers with him; also a lint brush, Visine, and Cepacol. Neal hauled himself and his kit into the rest room and got himself into shape. He felt like shit and was surprised to feel butterflies in his stomach. In almost twelve years of working for Friends, this would be the first time he would meet The Man. And The Man had more or less run his life so far.

“Why,” he asked Graham when he returned to his seat, “is this the first time I meet The Man?”

“No need.”

“And there’s a need now?”

“You look good, son. Straighten your tie.”

Levine waited for them at the platform. Levine was six-three and at thirty-one beginning to thicken around the middle. He had curly black hair, blue eyes, and a face that was just a couple of six-packs this side of fat. His heavily muscled body didn’t begin to hint at his speed. Levine was cat-quick, and that, with his size, made a very ugly package for anybody on the wrong side of his fists. He was a black belt who thought that breaking boards was a waste of time and good wood.

He had come into Friends strictly as muscle, someone to help out a short, one-armed guy when things got out of hand. But Levine had a brain and was very, very hip. Brainy enough and hip enough to know he didn’t want to stay on the street all his life. So he’d put himself through night classes at City and came out with a management degree, and now he headed up the New York office of Friends, passing by his old friend and partner Joe Graham.

“Levine hates you,” Graham told Neal.

“I know.”

This wasn’t exactly news to Neal. He knew Levine hated him and he was tired of it. Really tired of it.

“He figures you got a free ride. Fancy private school. Ivy League. Now graduass school. All paid for. Doesn’t think you’re worth it.”

“He’s probably right.”

“Probably.”

“I don’t want his job, Dad.”

That was the problem, Neal thought. Levine knew that Neal was being groomed. Neal knew it; Graham knew it. The Man was paying for his master’s degree, for the upscale clothing, for the speech teacher who had taken away Neal’s street dialect. But groomed for what? Neal didn’t want to run Friends. He wanted to be an English professor. Honest to God.

“I know. You want to teach poetry to fags.”

Well, not exactly. Eighteenth-century English novels … Fielding, Richardson, Smollett.

“How many times do I have to say it?” Neal asked. He had told Ed. He had told everybody. He had written The Man. Don’t put me through any more college, because I’m not going to stay with you forever. It was all right, they said. “Work for us when you can, part-time, case by case. No strings attached.” Then they jerk you out of classes two weeks before finals. You don’t get to be an English professor by flunking your graduate English seminars. Even getting a B could be death.

“Maybe if you hadn’t pronged his wife,” Graham said.

The train was pulling into the grimy Providence suburbs.

“She wasn’t his wife then,” Neal said. He’d been over this ground so many times. “Christ, I introduced them.”

“Maybe Ed just figures you got everything he should have had. First.” Neal shrugged. Maybe that was true. But he hadn’t asked for any of it.

Providence is the kind of city where all the men still wear hats. The soul of the city was stuck back in the good old Forties, when you kept a lid on things and rooted against the Japs, the Germans, and the Yankees, not necessarily in that order. A hat was a symbol of respectability, a nod to the order of things, to a city run by Irish politicians, Sicilian gangs, and French priests, all of whom came together for Knights of Columbus breakfasts and Providence College basketball games and otherwise stayed in their respective realms.

Union Station was a perfect representative of the city. Sad, drab, dirty, and hopeless, it was the right place to enter Providence. You didn’t get your hopes up.

Levine greeted them as they got off the train. “Laurel and Hardy,” he said. “Hello, Ed,” said Graham.

Levine ignored Neal. He said to Graham, “Anybody follow you?” Graham and Neal exchanged an amused glance. “I think we’re clean, Ed.” “You better be.”

“Well, there was that guy with dark glasses, a fake mustache, and a trench coat. You don’t suppose …” Ed didn’t laugh. “C’mon.”

He led them downstairs into the old terminal, where a few old winos held some ragged newspapers down on the old wooden benches. A couple of them were watching the dust filtered through the dirty, yellow windows.

As they walked past a stand of metal lockers, Ed grabbed Neal by the neck and pushed him none too gently against a locker. He lifted Neal until only his toes touched the floor. Graham started to move in but was stopped by a straight-arm and an ice-cold look.

Neal tried to slide out of the hold, but Ed’s big arms held him tight. He managed to get his own arms inside Ed’s and grab him by the collar. It was merely a symbolic hold.

“Now listen to me, you little bastard,” Ed whispered. “This job is important. Got it? Important. You’re going to do just what you’re told, just the way you’re told to do it. None of your smart mouth or your smart ideas.

“You are the last person in the world I’d pick for this job, but The Man wants you, so it’s you. So you don’t fuck around and you don’t fuck up. Because if you do, I’m going to bust you up. I’m going to hurt you real bad. Got it?”

“Jesus, Ed,” said Graham.

“Got it?”

“You’re going to do this to me sometime, Ed, and I’m …”

Ed tightened his grip and laughed. “You’re going to do what, Neal? Huh? What are you going to do?”

Neal could barely breathe. He needed air—even Providence air. Levine could break him into little bits without breaking a sweat. The book said to hit Ed in the nose with the heel of his palm. The book wasn’t going to get killed.

So Neal did the best thing he could under the circumstances. He kept his mouth shut. After a few long seconds, Ed let him go and walked away. Graham rolled his eyes at Neal and hurried after Ed.

Neal slouched against the lockers and caught his breath. Then he shouted after Levine, “So, Ed! How’s the little woman?”

He watched as Graham nudged Levine through the door. Neal was getting tired of this shit—very tired.