The City Below (23 page)

"Bobby won't take that from me."

Squire fixed his old friend with a cold stare. "Your job, Jackie, is to make him take it from you. Otherwise, what do you do for me?"

"I keep my fucking mouth shut for you. I don't tell my sister what you do."

Squire reached across and took Mullen's arm in his hand. "Do yourself a big favor. Leave Didi out of this."

Mullen yanked his arm free, wiped his sweaty lip, then opened his door.

"Just tell Bobby old man Tucci is dead. He'll get the picture. Time to take a nap. We want Frank's first move to be in Southie or Somerville, not here. Bobby's smart enough to spark to that. You have to make him think you're smart enough too."

"Fuck you." Mullen got out, slamming the door behind him.

"And Jackie."

"Yeah?" He leaned into the window on his forearms.

"I'm dropping back into the pocket. The flower business. You're going to need something too."

"I'll be all right."

"I'm talking
cover,
asshole. Will you get your hurt feelings off the sidewalk? What, you going to pout now?"

"Look, Squire, you don't have to treat me —"

"We're partners, isn't that it? Through all this shit?"

"Yes." Mullen softened, obviously relieved.

"If you were listening to me with Murtaugh —"

"I was. I heard everything."

"Then you heard me about this." Doyle held up the matchbook.

"The exam."

"It's for you, Jackie. We get a copy of the test, then you take it You ace the fucker, and the next thing you know you're wearing a blue Smokey the Bear."

"Don't shit me, Squire."

"I'm dead serious. With Frank Tucci loose, I'm going to need new kinds of backup. This is something I can't trust with anybody else, Jackie. Just you."

"A fucking cop?"

"Like your old man before he died. But this is
state
cop."

"Chasing speeders on the turnpike?"

"That's not all they do. Think about it."

"I'd never —"

"You got no record. Louise Day Hicks herself will recommend you. Your old man's buddies will. You're a shoe-in. Let the idea roll around in that empty locker of a brain of yours. Besides" —Squire put the car in gear, revved it once —"hell of a pension too. I got to watch out for your old age. After all, you're my Molly's uncle. And pretty soon, my Jack's."

"You're naming him Jack? Really?" Mullen's eyes brightened.

"If it's a boy, Jackie. I want you to be the godfather. So does Didi," he added, which was a lie.

***

Terry was in the seminary a good two years before Squire and Didi had seen each other alone. It was the night of the day of her father's funeral. Terry had used his grandfather's pull with the cardinal to get special permission to attend the service; he showed up in his impressive black suit and tie. As if in memory of his mother, the old ladies oohed and aahed over Terry, though to Squire he looked forlorn, like a Mennonite preacher or an Orthodox Jew —or one of the assistant undertakers. Squire felt sorry for him, and wanted to spring the guy, break him loose, get him out of there. But from what he could see, Terry lapped the attention up, an Irish muckamuck at last.

At the cemetery in West Roxbury on a cold, battleship-gray winter afternoon, Terry led the prayers of committal, chirping away in Latin as if the words meant something, the police honor guard answering the "
Et cum spiritu tuo
" like the altar boys they had all been. Then Squire watched Terry go to Didi and put his arms around her. She leaned against him and so shook with sobbing that Squire, even on the far side of the hill, with the dispersing crowd and the biting wind between them, felt the stab of her grief. Grief for her father, sure. But also grief for the life she would never have with Terry. Nick saw her feelings clear.

When Didi had rejoined her family, and while other people were returning to their cars, Terry came over to Squire.

"Hey, Nick," he said, hunching into his black topcoat. They faced each other on a low hill up from the tidy road. Their breath came in puffs.

"Sad, Terry, huh?"

"You mean Didi?" They both watched her as she put an arm around her mother. Her brother Jackie was on the old woman's other side. Nick and Terry noticed when he hooked his fingers into Didi's on their mother's shoulder. "Makes me think of Ma."

"Me too."

"But not only Ma," Terry said. "Did you ever wonder what it was ...?"

"What?"

"To lose a father."

"We lost a father, Terry. Jesus. Did we ever."

"I mean, to know him first,
then
to lose him."

"No."

"No what?"

"No, I never wondered about that."

"I did. I mean I
do.
Really, Nick."

Squire shrugged. "Maybe that's the difference, then."

"What, between us?"

Squire studied his brother's face, then burst out laughing. "Of course between us. The difference, Charlie. The difference." Squire opened his hands, indicating Terry's black clothing.

Terry looked down at himself. Then his eyes settled on the ground.

"Anyway," Squire said, "we've had Gramps."

"How's he doing?"

"Slowing down, Terry. You should pay a little more attention."

"You know how little freedom I —"

"Can't you call the guy? Why can't you at least phone him?"

Terry looked up at his brother. "I'm not allowed to, Nick."

"When the hell did
we
become the world, the flesh, and the devil?"

Terry laughed. "But not necessarily in that order." He glanced toward Didi, who was just getting into the limousine. "I hate to say it, but I have to get back."

"Before the clock strikes and your black pants turn into a dress again?"

"Exactly."

"I'll drive you."

"I'm going to hop the MTA, Nick. You should go back to the Mullens'. They'll expect you. They'll need you. Say something nice to Didi, would you? She's shaken up." The limo pulled slowly away.

"She never got over you, did she? I got to tell you, Terry, sometimes I think you finally went into the sem just to get out of the corner she had you in."

"I'll tell you the truth, Nick. She thinks that I love her, but that I love God more. When I see her, I feel like a fucking liar."

"Because you don't."

"Love her? Love God?" Terry smiled sadly. "I don't know what love is, buddy." He suddenly clasped his brother by the shoulder. "Except for you, you piece of shit."

Squire nodded somberly. "Yeah. Me too."

They stared at each other, surprised by the strength of what bound them. Instead of a mother and a father, and despite everything —here was the feeling —they had one another.

At the Mullen house on Monument Square, there had been the traditional funeral aftermath: the crowd of neighbors and friends; Tim Mullen's fellow cops; the feed line at the long table laden with cold cuts, brisket, potato salad, and chips; the booze. Didi had downed several Scotches, then disappeared. Squire went upstairs looking for her. He found her in her room, on her bed, crying. He lay down next to her, like a brother. Say something nice, he thought.

All he could think of was how forbidden her lanky body had been all those years, how it had never entered his mind —so that when she turned her streaked face to him and raised an arm for him to enter, he was completely unprepared for how turned on he was.

Something nice: when he opened his mouth to speak, the word on his tongue was his brother's name, and so, quite simply, he closed his mouth again and kissed her. He knew, when she kissed him back, that she too was thinking, Terry. They made love with all those people downstairs, all those cops, her mother, her father unburied still, beside the mound of dirt covered with the flowers Squire had helped lay out.

They fucked with a wildness unlike anything he had experienced before. Was it the forbidden thrill of incest, a kind of adultery? The taboos must have ignited her too, because she kept pounding under him, churning to the rhythm of her own deep, throaty music long after he was ready to begin regretting what they had done. "Dream," she said finally, and then again: "Dream."

When, later, she turned out to be pregnant, there was no question in his mind, any more than in hers, about what to do. Everybody claimed to be just delighted when they announced their intention to marry immediately. Jackie, of course, and even Terry.

Just before the ceremony, Squire had pressed his brother's arm and whispered, "Say something nice."

"Like you did, you bastard," Terry answered affectionately. The truth was that to him, Nick and Didi's marrying seemed the perfect solution. From the pulpit, where he read Saint Paul, what he said was, "'The greatest of these is love.'"

***

"Hey, sweetie pie," Squire called as he swung through the open door of his grandfather's flower store. Molly had been stacking and unstacking cardboard seedling pots in the corner behind the cash register. She was three now, and her birth had made Squire feel that, yes, he did have the golden touch. He couldn't lose.

When Molly saw her father, she cried out happily. She stalled while getting to her feet, a little momentary arc of triumph, then scampered over to him. Her white shoes slapped the floor. He scooped her up and made her fly; for engine noises, there was her squealing laughter.

"Hi," Didi said, sticking her head out of the back room.

"Should she be out here alone?"

Didi ignored his question, the criticism not so thinly veiled. She had on the blue smock she wore in the store, but it would no longer button closed, her belly was so big, oddly disproportionate to the rest of her body. During this pregnancy, her shape had become even more ostrich-like than the first time. The larger her stomach became, the narrower her shoulders seemed, the smaller her head. Her long neck, once, with her hair, her most alluring feature, now seemed gawkish. It helped not at all that she habitually wore, both in the store and in the kitchen upstairs, bright yellow rubber gloves.

Now she held a trimming knife and two long birds of paradise. Despite the barb in his question and his lack of greeting for
her,
Didi's broad-mouthed face was alight with pleasure. It never failed to make her happy, watching his way with Molly. He was as good a father as he was a grandson.

But her happiness gave way to the other thing. "Your grandfather wants to see you right away. He's upstairs." Didi lifted her hand to her ear to push back an unruly strand of her rich red hair. The blade of the knife blanked her eyes for an instant, giving her the odd look of a
Star Trek
character.

"What's up?" he asked, putting Molly back on the floor, playfully swatting her hugely padded derriere as she waddled back to her corner and her seedling pots.

"Something has Gramps upset. I don't know what."

"What could —?"

"His Eminence called here. I answered the phone. There was his raspy, barking voice, just like on the radio rosary. He asked for 'my old Ned.' I thought it was somebody pulling a joke. You maybe, or Jackie. I almost said something rude. But it was the cardinal all right. I never knew him to call here, did you?"

"In the old days, he did. Cushing always came by here when he was in the neighborhood. What did he want now?"

Didi shrugged. "I didn't dare ask." She let her right hand rest on the shelf of her belly, the two flower stems dramatically erect. Every move she made lately struck Squire as strange. The woman's uneasiness inside her own body was palpable. "I think he'd been drinking," she added.

"He probably wants some money. He's always hitting people up. Or he wants flowers for some monsignor's funeral. Gratis, natch."

"I don't think so."

"What do you mean?"

"When Gramps took the phone, he listened for a minute, then he said, real shocked like, 'Terry did that? Our Terry?' Then he said, 'Why, that disloyal bastard!'"

"Gramps said that to the cardinal?"

"Yes."

"What the hell did Terry do?"

"I don't know. Gramps said, 'We'll see about that.' He listened some more, then he said, 'Absolutely, Your Eminence. I guarantee it.'"

"What?"

"Then he hung up and went right up the stairs. I went to see what was wrong, and he snapped that it didn't involve me. It was 'a family matter.'" Didi's eyes were at the mercy of an old hurt. "As if I'm still not a member of this family."

"Don't start in on that."

"About an hour ago, Gramps called down. He told me to send you up as soon as you got back."

"Shit," Squire said.

Then Molly, behind him, repeated the word. "Shit, Daddy, shit"

Didi's face darkened. "Out of the mouths of babes."

Squire threw a hand toward the ridiculous flowers sprouting from the vase of her yellow glove on the perch of her stomach. "Do something with those birds, Didi. You look like the Mount of Olives with a TV antenna on top of it, for Christ's sake."

Squire turned his back on her so abruptly that Didi's eyes automatically went to Molly, checking if she'd seen. But Molly, truly her mother's daughter, was only smiling.

When Didi and Squire had married, they'd replaced the tenants in the third-floor flat Ned had the second floor to himself. It was more cluttered than ever, because he had kept his late daughter's figurines and gewgaws, as if the place were a shrine to her. There were doilies on the backs of the plush furniture and on the tables, copies of Fulton Sheen books and
Catholic Digest.
A dried palm branch arched across the wall behind the crucifix, brushing a cheap oil painting of Flo done from a photograph. The windows were blanketed with double thicknesses of real lace. Squire could never enter those rooms without a burst of wonder that he and his brother had ever lived in them.

The lights were out, and though it wasn't nearly dark yet outside, the living room was deeply shadowed, except for the flickering blue of the television set Cronin was sitting in the rocker in front of it, his back to Squire, some game show unrolling before him. The parakeet, whose cage sat on top of the forever untouched upright piano, whistled at Squire, alarm.