The City Below (32 page)

She had his attention at last, his complete attention.

"Why? Why do you hate me?"

Instead of answering with what she knew he was, a doomed soul if ever there was one, a fraud, a liar, she answered with what he wasn't. "For not being him."

"Who?" His perverse need to make her say it all, out loud, the name, the name he knew best, the first word he'd ever said, the name of what he wasn't, as if news, and not knowledge he carried in his bones.

"Terry."

Squire hit her face with his closed fist She slumped onto the bed, unconscious.

***

Squire waited for Didi to come to. He knew better than to apologize, but when he brought her an ice pack, she accepted it He dressed, and without a word, he left.

An hour later, with Jackie riding shotgun, he was driving across Boston. He said nothing to Didi's brother about what had happened. The night was warm, the car windows were open. At the BU intersections on Comm. Ave., hippie students crossing the street, with their hair and bell bottoms, passed around Doyle's car.

"Faggots," Jackie called toward one knot of jiving kids, but if they heard, they ignored him.

Squire looked across at his friend. "You should let your hair grow, Jackie."

Mullen ran his hand over his close-cropped head. "Missed my chance, boss, because of you."

"How's that?"

"I saw Jerry today. He has me on the list for next week Baldysour forever."

"So you take the test, then what?"

"First, I pass." Mullen cackled. "Then the academy in Hollis for six weeks. Then they give me my boots, gun, and Smokey the Bear, size seven and a fucking half."

"And badge."

"Fucking A."

"You won't be wearing the dugout coat."

Mullen looked down at his jacket, the battered leather sleeves, the football patch, his name in thread, and the number 61 on the sleeve. "I guess it's about time anyways, huh? That's what Didi says. Your wife gives me shit about this coat every time she sees it, which frankly is a pain in the butt"

"She gives everybody shit," Squire said with such deadly coldness that Jackie looked over at him.

After a moment Mullen said, "Didi'll shit
herself
when she finds out I'm going to be a cop."

"Don't tell her yet Don't tell anyone until you get the appointment."

"Why?"

"You've got it, Jackie. The skids are greased. But you haven't been talking, have you?" With that coldness again, Squire glanced over as he stopped the car at a light.

"No."

"I don't want noise about it, Jackie. I want you to just ease into the thing, okay?"

"Whatever you say. You're the boss."

"Sounds like you're starting to get into it."

"I am. I have to admit, I am. I just wish..." As his voice trailed off, Jackie gave himself over to watching the college kids milling in front of one of their high-rise dormitories.

"Your old man?"

"Yeah. He'd never have fucking believed it I can't believe it myself. I'll owe you, Squire, if you get me into the troop. I'll
realty
owe you."

Squire laughed. "I'm counting on it."

"We'll still be partners, though."

"That's the point, Jake."

By chance Mullen had made eye contact with a passing boy dressed in a fringed leather jacket, long blond hair brushing his shoulders, and a wispy beard —a self-styled Kit Carson. Hie boy stared back with eloquent sullenness, and Jackie flipped him the bird. The kid looked quickly away, picking up his pace.

"Plus, I get to crack these faggot, long-haired skulls. Wait'll they try that 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NFL is gonna win' shit with me."

"NLF."

"Whatever."

Squire gunned away from the light, and before long had the engine roaring again.

"Where the hell are we going, anyway?"

"Right up here. We'll get a beer."

"Jesus, Squire, we had to come all this way for a beer? I don't want to drink with these BU homos."

"We're in BC country now. Big difference. I got to check a place out I'm thinking of buying into."

"What bullshit. This is me, remember? You're not doing any buying this week."

"There it is, on the left."

Jackie squinted through the windshield as Squire slowed, preparing to swing across traffic. "What? That auto-parts place? I thought you said a beer."

"The bar next door. The Hofbrâu."

A large red and black sign bearing that word rode precariously above a dramatically, and falsely, peaked roof. Counterfeit beams and a coat of stucco had been slapped on the two-story brick façade of a large building that might once have housed a car dealership.

"
Ein, zwei, zuffa,
" Jackie said. "A beer's a beer." He knew better than to ask what was really up.

As they were leaving the car, each slamming his door in the snap-snap synchrony of all their years together, Squire said, "Leave the jacket."

"What do you —?"

"Leave your coat."

"If they don't like my Townie coat, fuck them."

"I don't like it, Jackie. Leave it." Doyle walked across the sidewalk, toward the bar.

Mullen watched from over the roof of the car. Then he shrugged the coat off and tossed it through the car window.

Inside, the place was pandemonium, a huge hall with dozens of long, picnic-style tables jammed with exuberant college kids. Braless waitresses in T-shirts moved among them with trays of beers.

Jackie leaned close to Doyle. "
The Sound of Music
it ain't."

Against one wall, jerky fragments of black-and-white movie images jumped; a film was being projected above the heads of the carousers. If there was a soundtrack, it was lost in the din of talk, laughter, and the ubiquitous rock 'n' roll. One of the characters on the wall, twice life size, was Humphrey Bogart.

After looking the room over, Squire led the way to the bar, which ran the length of the broadest wall. Marijuana smoke wafted by their nostrils, and it struck Squire that even the straight-arrow BC kids were doing dope these days.

They took up a place near the end of the bar, by a doorway that opened onto the corridor where the restrooms were. Squire ordered up beers for both of them. When they came, he handed Jackie his, saying, "Sip it"

"Like always." Mullen grinned as he gave himself a foam mustache.

Squire had not intended to come here. It had seemed, early in the evening, important not to. He smoked his cigarettes and stared obliquely toward a near corner of the room, where a group of tall boys had pushed three of the long tables together. At those tables were the only blacks in the bar, four or five of them, including Bean.

Jackie had followed his gaze. "Jesus, Squire, look who's here, I mean over there, in the corner."

Squire turned back to the bar, refusing to look He blew smoke rings toward a nearby rack of silver-lidded beer steins.

"Look, it's Ginny!"

Their lovely Townie kewpie doll, their homegrown masterpiece of ass, Squire's own cushlamochree. Ginny's blond hair, a close-cropped helmet, shone through the haze. There were other girls at the table with the lanky college Joes, but none like her. She was wearing a black turtleneck sweater. The cuff at her neck made it seem long and slender. She wore black jeans too. The color emphasized her leanness and evoked, simultaneously, the lusty anarchy of beatniks and the self-abnegation of nuns. She'd never dressed like that at Daisy's. And except for black lines around her eyes, she wasn't wearing makeup either. So maybe it wasn't her.

Jackie glanced at Squire, who pretended to care less, but Jackie felt the heat of his intensity.

Jackie looked back at her. In that light she resembled Kim Novak in
Vertigo,
the girl who was her own double. Every time she put her cigarette to her mouth, she tossed her head back slightly, just like Ginny did, displaying the soft white delta of skin at her throat, where Mullen had paid her once to put his tongue. Her black sweater showed less of her breasts than, say, the waitresses' T-shirts, but she seemed all the sexier for being less on display, which had never been a trick of Ginny's that Jackie knew of.

Someone cracked a joke, breaking the table up, and Kim Novak leaned into the knot of kids sitting around her. The way she laughed, she kicked a leg out, showing those green snakeskin cowboy boots.

"It
is
her," Mullen said.

All the kids at the table were laughing and hugging, boys and girls both, including Ginny.

"Jesus H. Christ." Jackie was really irked that Squire was ignoring him. "What the fuck is she doing here? And catch that" He poked Doyle. "Catch that!"

The kid next to her, the particular one she had settled herself against, after the more general hugging.

"Goddamnit, Squire. Look!"

"Cool it, Jackie."

"She's with that coon, that tall spade. Look, Squire, Ginny's got her hand on that jig's thigh."

***

The week that had begun with Tucci's death on Monday ended on Saturday, the morning after the Hofbräu, with Tucci's funeral. Frank was in charge of the arrangements, and, Squire knew, the way the son decided to bury his father would have infuriated the old man.

Outside the community of Boston Italians, Guido Tucci had not been generally well known. Certainly the feds knew of him, and during the early-sixties gang wars his name had brought a shudder to storekeepers in Charlestown, Southie, Winter Hill, and Fields Corner. But Tucci's photograph had never been in the papers, much less on television. His lifelong discretion had assumed a style that set him apart from crime overlords elsewhere. It was as if the mode of the old Boston Puritans had imposed itself on Italians, the way it had on the Irish. Whatever the reason, Guido Tucci had wielded power from behind curtains. He had made himself into a man no one looked at twice on the street —except those who knew.

Yet when it came to his funeral that Saturday in late September, the city of Boston had no choice but to notice. Instead of a Revere parish, he was buried out of St. Leonard's, on Hanover Street in the North End, the church Tucci had baptized his children in, but which he had not entered since leaving the neighborhood twenty years before. Frank had let the word out that he expected everyone to attend, and there wasn't room in the church for them all. Automobiles clogged the narrow streets in the city's oldest section.

Before and after the Requiem Mass, the procession of limos was led by a phalanx of police motorcycles headed up by a squad car in which the commander of Division i was riding, the first open display of the family's ties to the cops.

Before taking his own family over to the cathedral for Terry's ordination, Squire Doyle slipped across the bridge, went past the Garden and into the North End to watch. He stood on North Washington Street —where kids had waved at Kennedy eight years before —as the motorcade solemnly crept up the ramp onto the expressway, heading toward Saugus and the Italian cemetery. The thought of Kennedy made him realize all the more how different things would be now, under Frank.

This funeral was Frank's debut, and he was using it to send a message not only to his potential rivals and the city he intended to dominate, but to overlords in other cities. Unlike the old man, he wanted to be noticed. And Squire grasped at once that, for his own purposes, that was good.

It was some days later before he could arrange a meeting. Tucci had efficiently made his point that he was in no hurry to see his father's favorite mick On impulse, Squire went out to Revere by trolley, as he had in the early days, and it reassured him to arrive so innocuously. Whatever changes Squire had to make in the operation, he intended always to emulate old Tucci in a nurtured anonymity outside his home turf.

He crossed from the trolley circle to the beach. The faded amusement park had just closed down for the season. Only when he saw the bleary-eyed workmen boarding up the game stands and rides did he realize October had come. And sure enough, once he hit the boardwalk, the wind had a new sting in it He walked slowly northward, an eye on the bright sea. Whitecaps broke across the tossing blue surface, spewing salt spray. Seagulls carved arcs in the air, and far out, a lone tanker made for the horizon. The sight of that ship in its solitude fixed Doyle for a moment The sea from here was full of a welcome connotation unlike anything he knew from the Mystic piers or the navy yard. It made him think of Guido, who had pressed his arm with unstated affection. He felt an unexpected pang of loss, shocked that the sharp horizon itself could so evoke their intimate meetings on the weathered, splintered boards. Those walks with the old man now loomed, Squire knew, as his main problem with Tucci's son.

At the drooping bungalow, Frank's goons searched him. They let him keep the magazine he'd carried in his coat, and he leafed through it while waiting in a sagging wicker chair on the porch. More than an hour passed. One or the other of the knuckle draggers continually held him in an inexpressive stare. It couldn't have been more clear how dearly Tucci wanted him off his list, but Doyle was unfazed. He slowly flipped the pages of his magazine.

At last he was admitted to the house, to the dark-paneled former dining room that had always served as the office. Frank was in his father's chair, behind the table. He wore a flashy sharkskin suit, a gold collar pin under the tidy knot of his hand-painted tie. Behind him stood another man, unknown to Squire, as Frank himself, never so gaudily dressed, had always stood behind Guido.

"Hello, Frank." Squire went right at him, hand extended. "I'm sorry about your father."

Frank shook hands guardedly. "What do you want?"

"I want to pay my respects."

"Thank you. Now what else?"

"I want to offer you something."

Frank then did what his father never did, not once in eight years: took his eyes off the man he was doing business with to glance back at his lieutenant. Do you believe this punk?

Doyle reached into his coat for the magazine. He dropped it on the table in front of Frank.

Sports Illustrated.
Muhammad Ali's grinning face and glistening torso, his gloved hands raised above his head in triumph. But the legend read,
CHAMPION OR DRAFT DODGER?