The City Below (3 page)

Cronin nodded slowly, his gaze fixed upon his grandson, seeing something new in him.

"Lou Triozzi," Squire continued, "who operates out of Revere, where Tucci lives."

"How do you know where Tucci lives? Or are you making that up too?"

Squire shrugged, knowing not to say. Ambiguity could be a hiding place. Even he was surprised by the sureness with which these moves were coming to him, like in the heat of a basketball game.

Yes, Tucci lived in Revere. And yes, Squire had seen him. But there was no question of explaining that to his grandfather. His many trolley rides to the northern terminus had begun innocently enough. Wonderland, Revere Beach, Oceanside Park with its roller coaster and midway, had for decades been popular destinations for Boston's streetcar vacationers. But the gang wars had ended that Revere was a step up from the North End and Eastie, but it was solidly Italian and its new Keep Out was implicit in the headlines. Lately, the MTA trolleys often arrived at the turnaround empty. And hadn't exactly that comprised much of the allure for the gang of Charlestown boys, Squire and half a dozen chums, all sixteen or so, who'd trekked to Revere the summer before? Each had draped a towel around his neck, a vestment signifying the innocent purpose of swimming. But once they'd set out, they'd become a raucous, towel-snapping platoon. They were charged up more by the prospect of trespass than by the pseudo-danger of any roller coaster. When they'd dismounted die trolley, though, they found themselves alone, a set of isolated intruders on the edge of an off-limits enclave. And they'd become instantly subdued.

Their instinctive wariness had been justified at once as a group of lean figures approached from the Wonderland dog track. Five of them, no older than the Townies, they were greasers. But they sauntered forward in their dark clothes like a motorcycle gang, juvenile delinquents, street fighters. Their T-shirts were rolled to show biceps and cigarette packs. They wore slick hair, pointy shoes, pegged pants. Purple thread marked the seams of one lad's black trousers, like an officer's stripe.

"Get the fuck back on that train," one of them yelled from across the circle.

Behind the Italian boys, still in the shade of the dog track's marquee, stood a knot of girls in calf-hugging pants and tight summer shirts. They pointed like spectators and cupped their mouths at each other's ears. Squire understood that they made the boys dangerous.

The streetcar was about to embark on its return trip. The bell clanged urgently. The Charlestown boys knew better than to look at one another as, one by one, with no swagger, they climbed back aboard, as if summoned by nuns.

The last to do so was Squire. At the time he was still known as Nick, and that was the name Jackie Mullen hissed at him, to get him to come.

When the trolley, with its screech of iron wheels, began to roll away, the Irish kids, in an explosion of nerve, began to jeer back at the Italians, hanging out the windows, flipping the bird, crying, "Wop cocksuckers!" The Italians gave chase, but the Irish knew there was no danger they'd catch up to the accelerating streetcar. The driver was a mick too, and he laughed as he said, over his shoulder, "You showed them, I guess, huh?"

Squire had been at the window, jeering like the others, but it had been more an act in his case than in anyone's. His skin burned with that shock of humiliation, and inwardly, on the instant, he resolved to return to Revere and violate its every precinct. And he would do it without the others, who were already slapping each other's backs, snapping towels again, an absurd display, an implicitly phony claim of victory. He would go back alone.

And he had. He'd discovered that as a solitary idler, he could go anywhere in Revere unchallenged. He'd returned numerous times in the summer and fall, and even a few times in winter, indulging a fascination with the decrepit seaside realm. That it was enemy territory had made him a spy. He had browsed unnoticed at comic book racks in candy stores and had sat unobtrusively on rocks while olive-skinned children skipped stones into the lapping surf. He had collected seashells in good weather and tonic bottles from trash bins on the boardwalk when the weather turned. He had cashed the bottles in at the corner grocer's, as if the pennies were what he wanted. Before long he'd begun to nod at people he recognized. In those candy shops and grocery stores, on benches along the boardwalk and on boulders by the water, Squire had listened to the agitated talk, sometimes in Italian but mostly in English, of beatings, gun-downs, and disappearances. He heard the story of a particular fishing boat at a nearby pier that at least once had set out at night to dump a stiff into the sea. He heard of a gas station owner in Everett who kept pickled human ears in a jar by his cash register. Italian kids younger than Squire regaled each other with tales of the war their brothers were winning against the micks down in Beantown.

Squire had heard the name Guido mentioned repeatedly, and it took him a while to realize that Tucci was being referred to. It was in April, a week after the body of Paulie Mack, a City Square newsstand owner and numbers operator, was tossed out of a car near the donut shop, that Squire had first seen Tucci. A carpenter replacing planks in the Revere Beach boardwalk had pointed him out, a lone figure walking in a hat and long overcoat with his collar up against the springtime wind. Squire had watched the black form grow steadily smaller as he receded to the far end of the boardwalk. When Tucci turned to come back, Squire saw two men who'd been trailing behind step aside for him, and he realized they were bodyguards. That told Squire to keep his distance, and he did. But even so, he watched Tucci for a long time that day, following him finally to the end of a particular street three blocks back from the beach. Another day, picking him up on the boardwalk again, he followed Tucci for enough into the street to see him enter a prim bungalow between two vacant lots. Squire saw the bodyguards get into a black Buick which, then, they did not start.

Yes, he knew where the infamous Tucci lived. He
was
a spy. If he'd uncovered a secret, it was that the great enemy had a small but rounded stomach, walked with a slouch, and seemed lonely. Was merely a man.

Squire held his grandfather's eyes. "Lou Triozzi," he repeated. "Guido Tucci's cousin. We'll talk him up bit by bit We'll accept his protection ..." The young man spoke so coldly that Ned Cronin glanced at Jackie Mullen, but the boy was still too dazed to be marking this phenomenon. "Until we can get protection from one of our own."

G
ROWING UP IN CHARLESTOWN
, they were just the Doyle boys, old Cronin's grandsons, the double pulse of Flo Doyle's heart. Terry and Nick—the sight of one so evoked the other that people in the Town never imagined they would turn out to be so different from each other.

Their father had gone late to the war, and had not come back—Battle of the Bulge, Flo always said. That was why she and her babies had moved back in with her father above the store. Cronin's own wife had died in Ireland giving birth to Flo. No one referred to it, but in the Town, Cronin and his daughter were regarded as if they had replaced each other's spouses. Slightly strange.

But the boys were alike in their bright normality, as American as Irish. Toddlers around the store, they were favorites of the Altar Guild ladies, who praised them for their freckles. As altar boys they always served together, gliding across the polished sanctuary of St. Mary's in cassocks that hid the movement of their legs. But they were headlong players in the neighborhood too, on their bikes and clamp-on skates, shooting hoops at the playground and stealing Pepsi bottles like other kids, pelting cars with snowballs and lying for each other when they were caught Only a year apart in age, they had the air of twins, which served each well when he needed to deny something.

At Charlestown High—by now they were tall, well built, and lithe—they'd become famous outside the parish as a pair of hot-handed forwards who could hit each other with passes without looking. To the Townies in the stands, there was no mystery in the magic the Doyles worked on the court: their being brothers was what gave them their mystical connection. In the heat of a game, even old Cronin had trouble telling them apart.

Not that he didn't have a secret preference. Nick, the younger, was the one who'd been declaring, ever since he could talk, his intention to be a flower man. He hung around the store, drawn by the current of Cronin's particular affection. But that seemed only fair, a compensation for Flo's all too obvious preference for Terry. He was the long-dead father's namesake, and on him, years before, Flo had fixed the stare of her own ambition. Her first-born son was going to be a priest, which was the only large distinction available in the dreams of her kind, and was always the first thing she'd ever said about him. Terry cooperated in her expectation, which set him apart from an early age in everyone's eyes, except in Nick's.

"You, Nick! You!" Ned Cronin had called out that night after the K of C ceremony. The crowd had filed down into the large crypt hall below Holy Cross Cathedral in the South End. Cronin was wearing a satin cape and a plumed hat. Cardinal Cushing had greeted him with the once-over and the crack, "Your haberdasher, Ned, or mine?" Now Ned was near one of the beer kegs, waving at his grandson. "You get over here!"

Nick pressed forward, leaving his brother behind. The other men could tell them apart tonight because Nick was in chinos and a corduroy jacket. Terry wore the black suit his mother had bought him, as if he were already in the seminary.

When Nick presented himself to his grandfather, the circle closed around them. Cronin raised his new sword high over Nick's head. "Kneel ye!"

The men pushed closer to watch. They had their beer and their cigars, after choking through the interminable convocation upstairs, in the cathedral proper. Their ties were loosened now, and their shirts were open at their throats.

"Bow ye!"

Nick bowed his head.

And though this was a game, the encircling men felt a common shudder of delight as they recognized Nick's posture, with his robed grandfather towering over him. "I dub ye Squire! Squire to the Knight!"

Nick raised his head to look his looming grandfather in the eye. When he said in a firm, loud voice, "I, Squire, pledge ye, Knight, my fealty and devotion," the men let up an approving cheer.

Squire got to his feet The men were slapping his back, but the boy ignored them and leaned toward his grandfather and whispered, "What about Terry, Gramps?"

Cronin blinked. What about him?

"Do one for Terry, Gramps."

Only then did Cronin realize what a hole he would blast in their brotherhood if he did not call Terry forward too. These boys made their moves together, and it was like Nick to have said so. Nick and Terry were a pair.

Cronin stretched to his full height to look for the kid. With his plumed hat, Cronin was taller than anybody there. He spotted Terry back by the sandwich table. "And behold," he bellowed, "the Knight spies his Chaplain!"

The men stopped and listened again. Terry stepped aside.

"The Royal Chaplain!" Cronin added.

Terry stood where he was, a stricken look on his face. His grandfather sensed how he'd have preferred to be ignored, but Cronin had no way to know why being singled out like this—
as
this—was Terry's nightmare.

"Chaplin!" one of the men cried raucously."
Charlie
Chaplin!"

The Charlestown gang laughed. Another nickname, a beaut Some people would call Terry Doyle Charlie long after the originating joke had been forgotten by everyone but him.

***

Terry was sitting on a bench at the foot of the obelisk on Bunker Hill. He often came here, just to look out at the spine of the city—the Custom House and the harbor at one end, the Hancock Building with its hypodermic-needle spire at the other. In between, he pictured the men and women who lived and worked in those buildings, who stood at the wheels of sailboats in the harbor, who spread cloth napkins on their laps to eat breakfast in the restaurants, who drank cocktails in the hotel bars. He pictured students at their desks at all the great colleges, the blue books in which they wrote their exams.

It was a magnificent spring afternoon, with an army of clouds in retreat across die sky. The light was so clear that the lines of the mortar in distant brick buildings flashed, the air sparked off the angles of new leaves. A pale green haze draped each tree. As he sat staring out of Charlestown, an unusual peripheral sense had made Terry feel aware both of the view and of what was behind him a few dozen yards away, over the lip of the hill, down the grassy slope—the high school, where he'd learned that the feelings he had, sitting here, were disloyal.

The school had let out hours ago. He was supposed to be home for dinner already, but he'd become transfixed by the view of downtown, the clouds streaming overhead from west to east, which had maybe hypnotized him. He was suspended in a mood of uncertainty and longing. The sight of the distant buildings soothed him, but the images they evoked—men in topcoats hailing cabs, women getting out of those cabs, leading with one spiked heel, one perfect leg—filled him with anxiety. The few tall buildings were modest compared to the skyscrapers in other cities, he knew, but to him they were the pickets of a world of sophistication and accomplishment, a world of which he was meant to know nothing.

He took out a cigarette and lit it He knew that the impression most outsiders had of Charlestown came from the fearsome, low-rent end that abutted the Mystic River Bridge from which commuters looked down. They saw the rough industrial district dominated by the Boston Sand and Gravel tower on one side and by dilapidated wharves lining the crotch of the harbor on the other. Outsiders could see the Bunker Hill monument, but they knew nothing of Monument Square or the streets leading into it where fine Victorian houses stood, proudly kept not by die wealthy who had built them, but by the large, intact families of Irish firefighters and cops. They knew nothing of Main Street where storekeepers greeted every shopper by name, or of the tranquil Common where he lived, or the elm trees, the wide sidewalks, the tidy squares of grass, the hedges and flower beds, the neighbors minding each other's children, burying each other's dead. They knew nothing of the churches—his own St Mary's, but also St. Catherine's and St. Francis de Sales—where the people, all the people, met each other regularly in one common acknowledgment not only of needing grace but of having it.