The City Below (12 page)

Disappointed, she glanced at Terry. This was his second warning, but he missed it.

When the Doyle brothers, McKay, and Mullen emerged from the low-ceilinged entrance tunnel, the sight of the arena stopped them. After the ill-lit, smelly passageways and ramps leading up from the street, the cavernous space wrenched open their eyes and, for that matter, mouths. Workers stood on ladders and craned over railings to drape the red-white-and-blue and to hang the huge posters. Technicians in the rafters were adjusting lights, and television men were setting up cameras on perches jutting out from the balconies. At the far end of the arena floor, where one of the Celtics' baskets should have been, carpenters hammered away at the speaker's platform. Even though it wasn't finished yet, soundmen were already wiring the microphones. In front, on floor level, a lone man was bent over cartons that struck Squire Doyle, for one, as familiar.

Despite the activity, all four boys noted the vast emptiness of the Garden. They'd been to dozens of games there, but they'd never seen the thousands of seats vacant before, the glistening wood, orange in the lower levels and green in the upper. In the absence of screaming fans, the buzzers and horns, the place seemed, despite the hammers and drills, almost silent.

"Jesus," Squire said. And he knew that the impulse that had prompted his thrust into the tiny opening between Kennedy's new power and the old turf boundaries had been right
Tins
was worth it, and after today Kerry Bouquet would have a toehold here, which he would make into a niche. Squire thought Terry wanted a like toehold, but with Kennedy. Both boys wanted to cross the river into Boston itself, the route the Pilgrims had taken out of Charlestown three hundred years before. "Beautiful," Squire said. The Garden was Boston, pure and simple. That's why Kennedy was coming here. Squire too.

Terry touched his brother's sleeve. "Jeez, Nick, wouldn't you love to play here? Don't your fingers itch for the ball?"

"The fast-break twins."

Their eyes met "Yeah," Terry said. "The good old days."

Nick shook his head once. "We're going to miss you this year, kid." He hit Terry's shoulder. "We're all coming down here to see you play for BC. Enough of this politics, Charlie. Get back on the old parquet"

"I'm going to."

"Oh, really?" McKay said, taking Terry's other arm. He pointed up to the press box, which floated, a fluorescent rectangle, under the ledge of the second balcony. Inside the box were three men who stood looking down like gods.

"That's Mike," McKay said.

Mike Gorman was head of the campaign in New England. He had been one of Kennedy's buddies in the navy, and his present status as one of the candidate's true inner circle made him seem to shimmer. In Terry's weeks as a volunteer, he had dealt with Gorman only in relation to these flowers. Gorman's presence here, now, attending to pre-rally minutiae, reinforced Terry in the feeling of his own importance. And to think he'd fought Squire at first on their bringing flowers into this.

"And that's Larry O'Brien," McKay added.

"Christ," Terry said, "it is!"

"Let's go, fellows," Squire said, "before you wet yourselves."

The four young men moved onto the raw plywood flooring over which the fabled parquet would be laid for basketball.

"Hey, Cous!" Jackie called over to Squire, two-stepping his hand truck between racks of folded chairs.

"Pick!" Squire cut by a stack of risers. The Cous, Ramsey, and Russell—Terry would have joined their skylarking, but just then he was distracted by the figure of the stooped man below the speaker's platform. The man straightened up, unfurling a large bunch of palm branches.

Squire saw him too, and instantly understood what he'd refused to take in before. He looked left and saw figures—eight or ten men in suits—moving down the aisles of the stands from the deep shadows of the rearmost seats. "Shit," he said.

Terry saw the cloud in his brother's face before he saw what caused it. He had heard the sick alarm in that word "shit," but he didn't understand it, any more than he understood that his brother had been trying to pull a tablecloth out from under crystal and china here. And now the crystal and china were going to break.

The thugs had cut them off and were on them so quickly that the three Irish kids, and the one black, had no real choices to make. Squire shoved his hand truck at the one who came at him, a would-be body check But the man sidestepped it and reached for him. Squire ducked and had his belt pulled halfway out of its loops, his only weapon, but another man hit him from behind. Jackie Mullen leapt over chairs and seemed about to get away when he was caught. He landed one solid punch, and he felt the cartilage of the man's nose jolt, which was one small satisfaction as he was then savagely pummeled.

Bright McKay and Terry fought back briefly, but a knot of four or five men beat them down. Terry's teeth sliced much of the way through his own tongue. He gagged on blood. Bright lost consciousness when the toe of a stout black shoe connected with his head. "Nigger! Nigger!" The man repeated each time he drew his foot back and then swung it forward. He kicked McKay's head again and again in a fury. "Nigger! Nigger!"

Long after Bright stopped hearing the word, Terry, crumpled beside him, would hear nothing else.

Squire had covered his head with his arms, an apparently defensive posture, but he uncoiled twice, a pair of well-aimed, vicious kicks, one of which visibly snapped his assailant's jawbone. That man would have killed Squire, but his comrades dragged him off.

The television technicians, carpenters, bull gang, and bunting hangers all stopped what they were doing to watch. Only the man unpacking flowers at the platform continued his work.

The dark-suited, silent men—silent except for that "Nigger! Nigger!"—continued hitting the boys in clear view on the spot, approximately, where the boxing ring would stand on Friday night. No spectator moved to help at first, although one woman on a ladder with streamers draping her shoulders let out a scream when the blade of a machete appeared above their heads. From the distance, it looked like a pirate's cutlass. The machete came slicing down not on the boys' heads but on the cartons of flowers. A dozen swings was all it took. The brilliant red of chopped petals sprayed into the air like blood.

A few dozen more swings of the blade—with a terrified but unharmed Didi pushed up against one panel of the truck outside—was all it would take, moments later, to shred the entire lot of long-stem carnations. So much for hailing the matador.

But in the Garden now, a man's voice pierced the silence. "Hey, stop that, you! Stop! Leave them boys alone!"

One thug released his grip on Squire, straightened up, and peered into the vacant stands. Perhaps twenty rows back stood a lone Negro in a green shirt and green pants. "You stop that, you hear? I'll call the police." The Negro held a push broom, the handle pointing like the barrel of a gun.

The thug crashed through chairs and jumped a railing to go after him. Light sparked off the man's fist as he raised it, the polished bar of brass knuckles. The janitor tried to run, but the man caught him. Two punches broke his teeth. He fell in a heap.

"Jesus," Jackie said later, "the only one who tried to help was this old spade." And still later that would come to seem a kind of proof, as if the janitor had responded only to McKay, that spades stick together.

Terry was still conscious when the men in suits left, but in his memory of the event long afterward, it would seem he wasn't, because he could never quite get the time right—not the year it happened, not the city, and not even who was attacked and with what He was sure now that his ribs had been cracked right into his heart. He was sure he was dying, but dying was less to him already than a deep feeling of shame. Bloody and smashed, he was finally naked—here was the feeling—before God. And God was averting his eyes.

He found it possible to look over at Bright. Bright was dead. His face was a mass of blood. One eyeball was hanging outside its socket on his cheek, hanging by a pulsing blood vessel.

"This is a great country ..." It didn't sound like Squire, because the words were pushing through a thick-lipped, broken mouth. And then Terry realized that his brother was speaking even at that moment in a broad, stock imitation of John Kennedy. "But I think it can be better. I think we can get this country moving—"

"Shut up!" Terry screamed. The pain in his tongue! Spittle fell back onto his face, and he told himself to get up, but he couldn't move. "Shut the fuck up!"

"Fuck yourself," Squire said.

"Fuck
you!
" Terry knew nothing of what had happened, except that Nick had caused it. Nick had betrayed him. Bright was dead, and Nick had killed him.

Terry lay there for a long time. His head was positioned so that whenever he opened his eyes, they went right to the figure inside the press box. Terry wanted to yell up, "Tell Senator Kennedy that I'm sorry!"

Mike Gorman was staring down at them, like a householder waiting for the garbage men to come and sweep the dogshit away.

Here was where Terry's memory became confused. Sometimes, over the years, instead of the indifferent Gorman high above that carnage, he saw an image of Lee Harvey Oswald looking down on Dealey Plaza. Italians hired Oswald to kill the president—that was the absurd notion he would never be able, quite, to disbelieve. The melee at the Garden seemed an a priori proof. Italians killed Kennedy. Gian-cana, Marcello, Patriarca, or Tucci—it didn't matter which one or why. Push across boundaries, was the lesson, and the boundaries push back.

"Fuck you, Nick" As if Nick were the one staring down from the heights. As if
he
had kicked Blight's eyeball out As if
he
had shot the president and ruined everything more or less forever.

T
HANKSGIVING CAME
and the Irish praised God for Kennedy. A few days later, Squire made his way by streetcar up to Revere. It was a cold, wet day. Outside the streetcar window, the muddy flats of backwater wedands stretched toward the Saugus hills. Shy of Revere, the rain started to fall. The half frozen raindrops hit the window like pieces of rice.

Squire was still wearing a small bandage on his ear, and his left eye was still shadowed by a small dark crescent But mostly he'd recovered, like the others, except for McKay, who was blind in his left eye now, and always would be. Squire saw things more clearly than before, and that was why, unknown to anyone, he was going to Revere.

He wore an orange canvas rain slicker—what longshoremen wore—and a tweed cap pulled down on his face. He looked like nobody. Even in the Town he would no longer wear clothes, like his dugout jacket, that said so blatantly who he was. He kept his hands inside his coat pockets, his right closed tighdy around a roll of quarters, his left clutching a brown envelope. The clacking of the steel wheels, the side-to-side jostling of the streetcar, and the monotonous sight of the dull tidal landscape combined to soothe him, putting him almost to sleep at one point, asleep everywhere except in that hollow place in his chest where part of him was always awake now.

At the end of the line he got off, walking into the rain as if unaware of it. On the boardwalk, going north, he had to lean into the wind. At the pavilion, his marker, he stopped and faced the rolling sea to watch the storm.

A few minutes later he was on Tucci's street He left the sidewalk for the middle of the asphalt so the men in the dark Buick would see him coming. As he approached, the car doors opened. The two men got out, exactly as he knew they would. He took his hands from his pockets and held them away from his sides as he walked. They waited.

A dozen feet from the Buick, he stopped. "My name is Nicholas Doyle," he announced. "Mr. Tucci has business with me in Charlestown."

The two men exchanged a glance now that they had seen what a lad he was. Squire had no memory of the thugs' faces from the Garden. For some reason, he did not feel afraid. He indicated his pocket "I brought something."

One of the guards nodded.

Squire took out the envelope. As he handed it to the first, the second grabbed his free arm, twisting it back, wrenching his wrist well up against his shoulder blades. Despite himself, Squire let out a yelp of pain. The other roughly frisked him, finding the roll of quarters.

The envelope and the quarters. The guard weighed one in each hand. The envelope was sealed, and he knew better than to open it. The heft was familiar, and was what made it impossible to dispose of this kid without first checking inside. He nodded to his partner, turned, and went up the tidy flagstone walk. Tucci's house was a three-story bungalow with faded yellow stucco walls, brown trim and shutters. A veranda protruded off the first floor, and behind its screens forlorn summer furniture lay stored against the wall. The guard mounted the stairs, pushed a doorbell button, and waited. When the door opened, he went inside.

Squire and the second guard stood outside for a few minutes, staring at the house. But nothing happened. The sleet fell harder than ever. The guard opened the Buick's passenger door for Squire, then circled the car to get in on the driver's side. Suddenly Squire felt cold. Only now, in shelter, did he find himself shuddering.

Half an hour passed in silent detachment It was not true, of course, that Squire had no stake in what was about to happen, but acting that way made it feel true. Where had he learned this, that the value of seeming not to care was in the structure it imposed on the secret anarchy of his caring too fucking much.

The first guard came out at last and got him. He brought Squire into the house and then left.

Guido Tucci was sitting behind a long table in a dark-paneled room just inside and to the right of the door. The table held stacks of ledger books. File cabinets lined one wall, but instead of seeing the room as an office, Squire saw it as the dining room it had been before.

Beside Tucci, to the rear, stood a middle-aged man, overweight and bald, nobody's guard. He had his lips prissily together, but there was a malevolence in his eyes that made Squire not meet them.