The City Below (52 page)

The garden, the tree, the wall of windows—Joan had wanted nothing in the room that would detract from the world it gave them. That was why she'd had it done in white, entirely white. The carpet was white, as was the ornately trimmed mantel over the fireplace on the east wall. The pieces of Design Research furniture in one corner —Formica-topped bureau and writing table, canvas-backed chair—were white, and so was the large, unornamented platform bed against the west wall, with its Parsons table bedstands and architect's lamps. The pillows and linens and puffy down comforter were white. Joan's thought had been to create a vacuum in the room that would draw the color of the garden in. In the winter, black and gray and green, the skeletal oak against the pewter sky, rising from a carefully nurtured grid of boxwoods and sculpted spruce. In the spring, summer, and autumn, a movable feast, beds of rotating crops of annuals and perennials, all colors, but red and yellow especially, from the self-renewing roses which, to her surprise, had brought her husband to his knees in all weather, a gardener, rose grower, flower man at last.

At night, even when they did not draw the blinds across—there was no question of lacking privacy, since no one had a view of their home—the garden outside ceased to exist Then the room became Shakerlike and austere. Except on moonlit nights, the pitch darkness outside clashed with the light inside, transforming the wall of windows into a black mirror in which Terry often watched his wife taking off her clothes. Floodlights on the ceiling splashed ovals on the walls that held nothing—a relief for Joan from the Fogg, where the walls were everything. The only exception in the bedroom was a barely lit, small oil painting over the mantel, a portrait of Joan holding Max when he was a baby. It had been commissioned by her father.

Terry was at the window, using it for a mirror, fussing with his black tie. He said, "Ted asked us to come to Florida for Easter."

Joan, in her slip, was sitting on the bed, putting on her stockings. They were dressing for a gala benefit at the symphony, the kind of thing they did two or three nights a week.

"You saw Ted?"

"At Ruggles today. Bright leaned on him, and he came."

"Do you want to go?"

"Not really. Florida. Ugh."

"It's warm."

"Do you know something, Joan?" Terry paused, then went on casually, as if caring nothing for this. "The economy of Florida makes more off drugs than agriculture, including citrus. Did you know that?"

"No." Joan sat up. His back was to her. She waited for him to find her in the black glass, but he didn't. "Why do you say that?"

"It's interesting. That's all. If there were other kids Max's age..."

"What do you mean?"

"At Palm Beach. I wish Max could somehow..."

"Know who the Kennedys were?"

"I guess so. There." He patted his finished bow tie and turned toward her. "How do I look?"

"Bond. James Bond."

He watched as she hiked her slip to fasten the stocking to her garter. He saw her thighs, the flash of her underpants. Once such a move would have seemed provocative, but he knew, for her, there was no question of display. Her toned, brown arms and legs, her breasts, her perfect ankles—she took her sexiness for granted, but it could still stir him. Often, before dawn, they would turn wordlessly to each other and make love. It had come to say everything about their marriage that, at such moments, they said nothing. There too, as it were, Joan wore her headset Whatever the music of lovemaking was to her, she kept it to herself. For Terry, the moment of climax was always a moment of escape from what he hated in himself, and the truth was that he too experienced it as exquisitely isolating. A mutual solitude. Whenever he would look, her eyes would be closed.

Joan stood and walked briskly to the bathroom, but she stopped in the doorway and looked back at him. "What is it?" she asked. "What's bothering you?"

"Nothing."

"As usual."

"What does that mean?"

"With you, Terry, it's always nothing. Nothing is what bothers you."

"Look, Joan, I tried telling you before, and you wouldn't stop running."

"I'm not running now."

"Amory and my brother, that's what's bothering me. Okay?"

"I've been thinking about it. Can't you just back out of the deal? Let Bright handle it."

"Hammond is the developer. Not Commonwealth Bank.
Me
."

"But if Blight's in charge of financing—"

"Nick. I have to deal with Nick."

"Leave him alone. Stay away from him."

Terry shrugged. "He's my brother, Joan. He sent me a signal with the fucking shamrock."

"He's no good."

Terry stared at her. "After all these years of refusing to have anything to do with him, you finally put it into words."

"Don't make it seem like the issue is my being a snob. I didn't notice you beating any path to Charlestown. Your brother is a bad man, and you know it."

"How do
you
know it?"

Joan just stood there, the curves of her body backlit by the bathroom glare.

"Well?"

"I know it," Joan said, "because of the effect he has on you."

"Which means?"

"Nothing. Never mind."

"No, answer me. Please."

"He makes you weak, Terry." Joan went into the bathroom and closed the door, hardly breathing. What she'd said was true, but only half true. Nick was the reason, also, that when she leaned close to the mirror, the eyes into which she looked were stone cold dead.

***

At the glittering Symphony Hall reception, Joan and Terry moved through the crowd, drawing glances. They were one of Boston's golden couples, a new embodiment of the old Athenian ideal, Art and Commerce hand in hand.

As Terry greeted his friends, the tuxedoed men who looked like less handsome versions of himself, he knew he was doing what, in this town, he was never meant to do. The bankers were there, the pols, the Brahmins, the Harvard rich. And when they saw him, their eyes flicked; each one hoped for a nod.

"Hey, bro," a familiar voice said from behind. Terry turned. Bright, in his tuxedo, leaned across Terry to kiss Joan. "God, you are so lovely," he said, but as he did, he pulled into their circle the tall, thin woman who was with him, a brown-skinned model with a neck like Nefertiti, a face for launching ships, the most beautiful woman in the room. That Bright.

While Joan and his date greeted each other, Bright, aware of the envy in the eyes of the men around them, leaned to Terry and whispered, "Don't you just fucking love this?"

Terry nodded and laughed, but his feelings differed from those of Bright, for whom it seemed to matter not at all that choices they had made meant their women loved them most in settings like this.

Terry wanted to say something like, You, buddy, with yet another bimbo; me with a wife I smite only in black tie. But he shook the feeling off in favor of the other thing, the triumph he and Bright had in common. "Fucking A, brother," he said, and he realized how much he
did
love it He was king of the hill in Boston now. If he felt hands on his ankles once again, hauling him down—that shamrock!—he knew that this time he would kick free no matter whose face he hit.

He looked at his old friend's one eye: Except yours, he thought Then he looked at both of Joan's: No matter what you think of me.

T
HE MOVIE
about Kennedy included scenes of his inauguration, spirals of snow gusting up a deserted Pennsylvania Avenue, the faces of Negro workers sweeping the stands, puffs of steam coming out of their mouths, then the president letting the word go forth. The camera moved in on him, a young man with no hat or overcoat, while behind him sat Eisenhower, bundled up like a nursing home porch-sitter. "The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage"—as the camera cut to flames shooting out of an oil drum, where an old black man was stooped over it for warmth, a transistor radio to his ear.

The movie had been showing out here at the Kennedy Library for five or six years now, but he'd never seen it, and he was not prepared for his reaction. He'd always said he could take Kennedy or leave him, no big deal, but here he was, feeling tears come to his eyes as he watched the pictures flitting by: Kennedy in white tie and tails, with his piece-of-ass, bare-shouldered wife; Kennedy with binoculars, a missile breaking the surface of the ocean; bombers; black kids getting hit by cops; Kennedy on Cape Cod with his little girl, his sailboat; his speeches; Krushchev; the Berlin Wall; Lyndon Johnson and
Air Force One.

Squire was not ready for the freeze-frame shot of the shadow of that airplane, falling on the runway at what the narrator said was Dallas, like a grainy, out-of-focus crucifix, for Christ's sake. Kennedy was dead again, and the screen went blank, and silence thickened in the theater. He realized his cheeks were wet. Squire Doyle was not a mick who'd spent the past twenty years weeping over what was lost with JFK. He'd had no impulse, even, to come over here, the Kennedy Lourdes. It had surprised him when Mullen, saying the feds had agreed to his proposal, said also that this was where they wanted to meet.

He did not like the feeling of being blindsided. As the lights came up, he was glad to be sitting alone, and now that it was over, the slick movie, frankly, made him angry.

The tourist ladies were digging for their Kleenex packs. The men were blinking, adjusting their nylon-mesh baseball caps, hitching their beldess pants, feigning coughs. There were perhaps two hundred people in the theater. They got to their feet, a subdued group, shuffling sideways to the ends of their rows, into the aisles and filing out Squire remained where he was, in a seat in the middle of the fifth row, watching the others leave, feeling not at all superior. Americans, he thought We're all lost sheep.

This was August 1983, eight months before Bright and Terry's Southwest Corridor Improvement Project kickoff. Also to the point, this was six months
after
a Washington meeting in an office on that same Pennsylvania Avenue at which the head of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, the chief of criminal investigations for the IRS, and the associate director of the FBI for drug enforcement agreed on a new strategy. Highly publicized street sweeps in cities across the country, in which tens of thousands of drug dealers were arrested, were having a more disruptive effect on the police and the courts than on the drug trade. The national net of secret electronic surveillance of Mafia meeting places was snagging well-known, ruthless, but only low- and mid-level gangsters. The real leaders of La Cosa Nostra had learned to insulate themselves even from their own operations. The FBI's extensive bugging and eavesdropping simply were not getting them. Like the massive border interdiction efforts of the 1970s, the switch in the early eighties to prosecutions based on RICO statutes was turning out not to be enough.

But to the savvy longarms, an alternative strategy suggested itself, a bold reversal in which drugs were not targeted so much as the money drugs produced. Since the explosion of demand for product began a decade earlier, the drug trade had been generating many times more profits than criminal enterprise ever had before, annual amounts in the billions of dollars. That success was giving the otherwise immune heads of the crime organizations their biggest problem, and it gave law enforcement an unprecedented opportunity. The overlords kept their distance from street trade, but not from money. The whole point was money, and that was the key.

Drug producers in Colombia and other countries, who controlled their governments and dominated their national economies, could impudently accumulate and spend vast quantities of tainted cash, but not so the distributors in the United States, with its regulated financial system. Vast drug profits were useless to Americans until they could somehow be made to appear legitimate. The days were past when a series of duffel-bag cash deposits into phony accounts at neighborhood banks would do, partly because a 1982 revision of the Bank Secrecy Act had tightened bank reporting obligations, and partly because the $10,000 deposit figure that triggered a bank's Currency Transaction Report fell so far short of the amounts the top drug traffickers now had to legitimize. Large city couriers—in the argot, "smurfs"—who brought such bundled cash to teller windows at numerous banks found themselves at it all the time, yet still failed to keep up with the cash flowing in. A new laundering system was needed. When Squire Doyle had positioned himself to provide it, he let Frank Tucci know, offering once again a service Tucci needed and could not otherwise obtain. Doyle knew that Tucci had never trusted him, but this time the prize would seem worth it And hadn't Doyle proved himself in all these years? All these years since Causeway Street? All these years, yes, since Kennedy? Kennedys don't get mad; he thought of Bobby and, to himself, he laughed. We get even. Frank Tucci was not the only one whom Squire Doyle had notified.

Despite his earlier reservations, Doyle realized, as the last of the tourists drifted from the theater, that the library was a good place for the meeting. No wops. No fucking wops anywhere at this St Jack by the Sea. He heard locks being snapped on the rear doors, from outside. When he looked around, there were three other men sitting in seats widely separated from one another in the otherwise empty auditorium. All were staring at him. Three familiar faces, three Irishmen, with two of whom, over the years, he'd done lesser pieces of business, just enough to keep afloat: Colin Joyce, the head of the New England Organized Crime Strike Force, and Joseph Farrell, the assistant special agent in charge of the Boston FBI office. Farrell's legs were stretched out on the seat in front of him.

"Well, well, Mr. Doyle," Farrell said. "We hear you're in the banking business now. You've bought yourself a bank."

Squire stared back at him. "A little one. I'm a small businessman."

"The Sullivan Square Savings Bank in Charlestown."

"Where I've kept receipts from my flower stores for years. It was a bargain. The bank was going under."