The City Below (47 page)

This was Jack's building, the federal government's building, the FBI's—not some ambivalent mayor's building, not Boston's.

The mob had followed Kennedy, pushing against the hastily formed line of cops who were standing them off now outside the doors. The guards had the doors locked.

"Fucking Kennedy!" Even through the glass their curses carried. "Fuck Garrity, the Kennedy judge! Fuck the
Globe
!"

Terry slowly turned away from the faces in the glass, unable to stand the sight of people he was sure he knew. To his surprise, he realized that he had been craning his head back across his shoulder, and that he had his arms around the senator, and so did Joe Perry. They had pressed Kennedy against the marble wall, shielding him. Kennedy was limp. His face was completely pale, except for an ugly blotch of red on his left cheek where someone or something had hit him. His suit coat was ripped at the shoulder seam. But his eyes were clear and cold, absolutely focused. "Where's Neville?" he asked.

"Neville?"

"McKay."

Bright! Terry looked back toward the door just in time to see the surge of energy cresting through the crowd, the hundreds of people who had mobbed the entrance. Those in front were being forced against the glass, at the mercy of those behind, who were pushing, pushing, until...

The huge plate-glass window beside the doorway proper shattered in an explosion. Shards of glass flew everywhere, and the noise was deafening, like a mortar shell. Was this Vietnam? The first row of people stormed through, and Terry thought, Now we die. Now the last Kennedy dies.

Then, suddenly, it was over.

The mob was stopped by what it had done. The people froze, all staring in horror at Kennedy.

Here and there, those bloodied by shards were crying, and some woman was shrieking "Help! Help!" But compared to the previous noise, the glass-strewn foyer, even open as it was now to the outside, was quiet. Doyle had no memory of having moved from his place with Kennedy by the wall, but now he was standing, as if alone, in the center of the space from which others had scattered. He stared at the stunned faces in front of him, the faces of mothers, fathers, and teenagers, faces like those he'd held the paten for at the Communion rail of St Mary's, and like those he'd seen turned to the sun on the benches of Bunker Hill. Faces like those he'd waved at and kissed all his pointless life.

The crowd on the plaza had fallen back, away from the building. Those inside, near him, twenty or thirty people, the ones who'd been pushed from behind and whose momentum had carried them into this other realm, had not moved. They had not meant to do this.

Is everybody all right?

"Go home," Terry said.

They did not move.

Terry looked back for the senator and saw Mike Hazzard, holding a pistol now, as he pushed Senator Kennedy through the door of one of the elevators.

For an instant Terry's eyes and Kennedy's locked together, and Terry saw clearly the pure terror in the man, and its meaning. The source of Kennedy's strength as a champion had turned against him. First Joe Malloy, then Squire, and now Irish children, Kennedy's children. They all felt free to say it: Fuck Ted! Why had it taken this long for Doyle to see it, that Kennedy was finished? Even now, Kennedy was being hauled back down into the muck of his own origins by people who'd never escaped it, never wanted to.

For Terry Doyle the moment was an exact replay of his having looked at Cushing years before and realized, Not for me. Only now, at last, it was Kennedy; the dream of being Kennedy was not enough. They may have you, Ted—the monster hands, hauling down—but they haven't got me!

The door of the elevator said closed, taking the senator away. Physically safe, but finished. Kennedy was not Kennedy anymore.

Terry turned toward the mob, his old neighbors, assassins after all. "Go home!" he ordered loudly. He began shoving against those nearest him, a pair of Charlestown Marshals. "Go home!" He jolted the boys, pushing them back with the stainless steel of his oldest feeling, pushing back against everything that wanted to hold him down, to keep him from fulfilling the ambition that had become the core of his very self. "Go home!"

The people scrambled away, stumbling out through the jagged opening in the wall where glass had been. Terry Doyle ordered them out—and they went He would never be one of them again.

At last he thought of Bright. Bright, where are you?

He went outside. Cops were using their sacks to push people back toward City Hall. They swung at anyone within range. One cop brought his club down on the head of a Townie. Terry heard the dull
thunk
of the hickory, and without thinking he grabbed the cop's arm. "Jesus Christ, you'll kill him!"

The cop raised his stick again, but now above Terry's head. Terry fell back, and the stick, swooping down with full force, just missed him. Another bursting red Irish face, all the madness of what was happening had collected in the policeman, who swung again, insane.

Terry pushed away. Instead of going with the crowd, he moved toward the low wall that separated the municipal plaza from the tree-lined apron that ran alongside the Kennedy Building toward Congress Street. The wall was low enough to offer government workers, when the world was not ending, a place to eat their lunches. Terry hopped onto it and turned to scan the crowd from there. Where are you?

Worry for Bright choked him. But then he remembered that the night before, when he'd called to tell her, so proudly, that Kennedy had agreed to come, Joan had said she would be here too. Jesus Christ, Joan! What if these animals—these Irish—hurt her?

***

Squire Doyle had watched everything from the place he'd taken across Tremont Street, in the shadow of the great arch of the curving brick Crescent Building. Government Center terrain was a long, gentle slope taking the city from its hill down to the sea. Squire had a sweeping vantage of the entire scene, from the new Druid temple of City Hall to the glass-and-concrete upended shoebox of the JFK.

The Crescent Building had cut off access between the courthouse at Pemberton Square and the government offices; the broad, through-the-building archway was the architect's solution, centered on an open-air escalator that carried pedestrians down the last notch of Beacon Hill into the brick expanse of the plaza. Ordinarily tourists, secretaries, stenographers, court workers, and jurors used the thoroughfare, but the moving stairs had been mostly vacant since the demonstration started.

What few passersby had gone through would have had no reason to notice Squire Doyle. He was dressed in the dark, loose-fitting but well-made trousers, shirt, and sweater that set him apart only slightly, and his position between the escalator and the side door of a Shawmut Bank branch was discreet With him was Jackie Mullen, but not in uniform. Mullen was dressed like a Townie dock worker, in sweatshirt, overalls, and ankle-high work boots. His jaunty tweed cap completed the image. He resembled dozens or hundreds of the demonstrators, which served his purpose. He was one of a number of state cops in plain clothes, but he violated his own costume with the handset of the police radio he was holding to his ear.

Because they had seen the frantic ebb and flow of the crowd, but also because, with the radio, Mullen had monitored the panicked police alarms, they had been aware of the threat to Kennedy. The commotion at the entrance to the JFK Building had been calmed, but word of what had happened had passed through the mob. Even from across Tremont Street Mullen and Doyle could hear the triumphant shouts: "We got Kennedy!" Kids had put on football helmets and were brandishing pipes. "Fuck the judge! Fuck Kennedy! Don't fuck with Southie!"

Mullen touched Squire's sleeve. "He's all right They took him through the basement, out the service entrance on Congress Street. He's on his way to Logan." Mullen lowered the radio.

"Whose idea was the football helmets?"

"Those aren't our guys. They're from Southie."

"White and red? Shit, Jackie. I thought you had them under control."

"Hey, Squire, if Kennedy shows his puss here, it serves him right. What a stupid-ass thing to do."

"I thought the point was, we
want
Kennedy. Isn't that it, Jackie? We have a grievance, and we want it heard. We want to win these guys over. Or was all this a way to come downtown to say Fuck you."

Mullen shrugged. "The folks are pissed off. I don't blame them. Kennedy was just going to wag his finger in their faces, as you know better than me."

"Because of Terry?"

"The greatest finger-wagger of them all," Mullen said.

"I encouraged Terry to get Kennedy here if he could. I'm amazed he was able to do it. I didn't think Ted Kennedy had the balls." Squire faced his friend. "And I didn't think Townies, including our punks, were looking to kill the bastard."

"Shit, Squire, don't blame this—"

"Forget it. Like you said, he's gone. Christ." Doyle turned back toward die throng, which was suddenly dispersing, as if the rank meaning of what had nearly happened had spontaneously dawned on thirty-five hundred people. Rowdies continued to hurl epithets and fists into the air, but the chalk-faced men and women around them moved in a subdued mass out into the surrounding sidewalks and streets.

At the edge of his vision, off to his left, Squire saw a dark form glide by like a mote. He turned his head fully to look and saw Joan, the upper half of her.

She was riding the escalator from Pemberton Square down to the Tremont Street sidewalk. He could have lobbed a basketball at her, she was that close. Her long neck was hidden by her black turtleneck, and he knew why at once: the mark of a poppy blossom that he had left on her throat.

She was staring straight ahead at the unraveling demonstration. She would have no idea that the rambling punks, now in clusters of three and four, were nothing compared to the just-passed danger of the mob. Watching her smooth descent, Squire saw a flash of the scene from the day before, her colorful underpants bunched at the base of that statue, what he had found himself staring at when, at last, he'd opened his eyes.

She might as well have been asleep, so unaware was she that he was looking at her. He regretted not telling her how she'd made him feel. Would she have been complimented, he wondered, to know how confused she'd left him when, afterward and so abruptly, she'd made him go? Usually he was the one who wanted out, and her urgency had impressed him almost as much as the shock of his feelings for her.

He took one step toward her, and as if she had registered the consequent movement of air, she turned toward him, a backward glance, as the escalator continued carrying her down and away.

"Hey, isn't that—?" Mullen checked his question when he saw Squire's face, connecting it to hers, the look between them. Squire seemed timid, that was the first clue. And the woman—surely it was Terry's wife from the other day—seemed made of stone.

Even before Joan reached ground level, she was moving, with her eyes fixed on Squire. Mullen began instinctively to back away, aware as he watched her leave the stairs and come forward that she did not see him. By the time she reached Squire, Mullen was safely on the fringe of the crowd, still watching.

Joan stopped a few feet short of Squire, whose face showed nothing.

"Do you feel better, Nick?"

"Feel better?"

"Now that you've fucked your brother. Wasn't that the point of fucking me?"

Squire smiled. "Gee, it sure felt like you, just you."

"It will never happen again. Do you understand that?"

"I wouldn't want it either, sweetheart. Not that it wasn't great."

"You got what you wanted, as usual."

"Are you afraid I'll tell? Is that it?"

"No. That would ruin it for you. I see that. But if you ever did tell Terry, it would destroy him—not because of me doing it, but because of you. You may not know this, but he loves you. He loves you, you bastard."

Squire said nothing.

"Get out of his life. Stay away from us. Do you hear me?"

Sail Squire only stared at her mutely.

She stepped closer. "I'll tell you something else. If you ever did tell him, I'd—"

He seemed as hard as she, as close to an extreme. But he mistook for reluctance the pause during which she allowed weight to accumulate on her statement Without meaning to, he yielded something when he indicated curiosity by raising an eyebrow. You'd what, sweetheart?

"—kill you," she said.

***

Only moments had passed with Terry standing on the ledge of the masonry wall near the JFK Building. Now he saw Joan pushing through the crowd. She had seen him first, and when his eyes fell on her she waved, but there was doom in the gesture, not joy. He thought that was because of the scene she'd found herself in. He hopped down from the wall but remained by it, waiting for her.

She ran across the last stretch of the brick pavement. With none of the composure he'd thought of as her absolute possession, she threw herself on him. He took her weight without budging.

She held him as she rarely had before, and he misunderstood entirely. "They didn't get him," he said. "He got away."

"Who?"

"The senator. They would have killed him, but they didn't. He's safe. He's gone. It's Bright I just can't find."

"What?"

"Bright disappeared. I don't know what happened to him." Even as he spoke, with his mouth and nose at her hair, his hands tight on her slim hips, Terry began scanning the plaza again. Most of the crowd, heading off toward the Common or thronging the subway stop, had their backs to him. Even so, it was such a simple matter seeing them all as white.

"Christ," Terry said then, "look who's here."

As Squire passed the tag ends of the crowd, coming through them, the men and women gave way for him ever so slightly, and Terry recognized his brother's power. And at that moment it was only a relief to do so. Mullen came up behind, but it was only his brother whom Terry saw.

"Nick, Nick—I can't find Bright."

Squire had once searched for ways to get his brother to need him. He'd imagined Terry capsizing out in the harbor channel and waving desperately from the upturned hull of a dinghy. He'd imagined him getting stuck in the narrow storm pipe below the navy yard, pulling him out by his heels. He'd even imagined him asking for a job after he left the seminary. But the wish to help his brother had died with the expectation that he ever would. Besides, he was now thinking of Joan.