The City Below (39 page)

The Buick driver leaned out the window. "Sorry about that!" Then his companion appeared out the other side. Each wore a tweed cap above a happy flushed face. "Yeah, we're sorry."

In Virginia, that they were drunk would have increased the air of menace, but here their condition defused it. Civil rights marches at bus terminals and rural courthouses were a lifetime ago, and the gutsy, sandaled art history major who'd thrown herself into them so boldly seemed another person altogether. Joan told herself that these two men who'd so startled her were buffoons like the schoolboys had been.

Terry called across to her, "Let's go, Joan. Back in the car."

At the wheel again, Terry jumped the light and squealed into a turn. "I'll show you the loop," he said, hitting the gas. He wanted her to think the rushing engine and the recklessness were reflections of his mental state, but in fact he was so inwardly composed that he was afraid to show her. "The idea was to dare the cops to chase you."

The car shot up the street, past the blurred rectangles of windows, doors, and slanted storefronts. Joan looked back once, quickly, to be sure the bloated car with the plastic Jesus had not followed.

Just shy of Sullivan Square, before looping back on Bunker Hill Street, Terry forced a grin. "So what do you think so far, of my hometown?"

"What can I say?"

"John Harvard lived here."

"What?"

"Honest to God. Your guy, John Harvard, one of the first Townies."

"Did he loop the loop?" she asked. All at once, Joan laughed heartily. Terry joined her. They threw their heads back into the wind.

This was the street Terry had used a million times, coming and going from the basketball court On his bike, to ease the burden of the hill, he'd hook onto the rear door straps of Edison trucks and haul along behind without the driver seeing him. Now he was a driver with no need of eyes. Unlike other parts of Charlestown, a version of this stretch between the playground and the monument was still duplicated somewhere inside him. Even blind, he could tick off Dick Ballard's house, Tom Foley's, Sean Nudey's, and then Mary Ellen Guineas. She was the first girl he'd ever looked at
AT
a girl, and at her door, at the crest of the hill, instinctively he shifted, the way, as a boy, he'd let go of the truck just there, to coast The momentum brought him into Monument Square again, the completed loop. "And no arrest!" he yelped in triumph, and he honked three times, according to the old rubric.

Terry took the downhill slope out of the square fast, angling right, to the Common again. His eyes went automatically the full length of the block to the large brown clapboard three-decker that dominated the next corner. Kerry Bouquet had a bright new sign, and the display windows were twice as large as when Terry had last been here.

He exhaled a whistle.

"What?"

"That's it." They slowed down. The windows were gaily filled with flowers and foliage, and on the sidewalk potted mums were tiered, bright yellows, the glitter of aluminum foil. On the second and third floors of the house, impressive corner bay windows rode above the street and the Common beyond like twin bridges above the deck of a ship.

Terry pointed to the other windows. "They have air conditioners."

The lace curtains in the bay windows struck Joan, the Irish cliché of them. The house had a surprising dignity, but she could not see it as having anything to do with her husband; that is, with her. As much to deflect the complicated feelings as because it struck her then, she pointed to a school building on the far side of the Common. "What's that?"

"St. Mary's, the parish school." It too was closed, but someone had draped its fence with a long banner made of several bedsheets pinned together.
Rally at City Hall,
it read,
Monday at II. Resist!

"Resist," Joan repeated dully. "As if this were France."

Terry turned back toward the store. The place looked good, a prosperous island of happiness. His heart flew to the bay window on the second floor, what had been his mother's room. He half expected her to appear, staring down at the green sports car, her hand jumping to her mouth when she recognized him. He felt the old sadness, and wanted to turn to Joan and say, If I have anything to give you, it comes from her.

"It looks okay," he said, "doesn't it?"

"Yes, sugar. It looks nice."

At the corner Terry stopped the car. He looked left, up the hill toward Monument Square again. Every street in this part of Charlestown led to the obelisk On the next corner, just shy of the square, was a proud Victorian mansion with a mansard roof, a carriage house, and a large yard that ran down to the narrow alley, Monument Court, that separated the place from Kerry Bouquet. It was one of the finest houses in the Town, built by a Yankee merchant just before the famine wave of immigration overtook Boston—and the Irish overtook Charlestown—more than a century before. By Terry's time, the mansion had long served as the convent for the two dozen nuns who staffed St. Mary's school. Hie carriage house had become a storage barn for disused pieces of school furniture. Terry had grown up regarding it as a privilege to live half a block from the nuns. His first association with the wealth such a grand and well-maintained house implied had been with the Church.

But now his eyes were drawn to something else entirely, an object hanging from a jury-rigged beam projecting from the peaked eave of the carriage house. The beam was, effectively, a gallows. Dangling from it, twisting gently, was a dark-suited human figure, head in a noose, bent at its broken neck. Its shoes were perhaps a dozen feet above the sidewalk.

The car was not moving, yet Doyle's impulse was to throw an arm across his wife's chest, to protect her in the crash. Crash? What he wanted was to throw his arm over her eyes so she wouldn't see the fucking thing.

He touched the gas to pull through the intersection, to the curb by the flower shop. He pulled on the brake, opened his door, and got out He walked up the incline in the middle of the street, his eyes fast upon the effigy. Hie figure had no face, just a white sack unevenly stuffed. With rags? Drawing nearer, he saw a rough sign pinned to the chest
This Judge Loved Niggers,
he read. And a tag attached to the figure's ankle added,
WAG.
W. Arthur Garrity.

He might have insisted to Joan that nothing could have shocked him more than this, but then Terry saw something else. The suit in which the effigy had been dressed was made of plain black flannel. The trouser cuffs were thick. The middle of three buttons on the coat was missing, and so were both buttons on the right sleeve. It was the suit he'd worn himself,
his
suit, when he'd first entered the seminary.

He went to the large double doors of the carriage house. Buildings like this along Brattle Street in Cambridge had been quainted up, and such doors, if they survived at all, did so as decoration. But these doors were unrenovated, badly in need of paint and new hinges. When Terry kicked them, the doors bounced. The quartet of cloudy glass oblongs rattled in their frames. Chunks of dried putty flew.

Moments later, a small pedestrian door on the side opened. Joan had to crane back to see as a young man in a tattered tweed jacket stepped out onto the sidewalk. He cradled in the angle of his arm what she took at first to be a pipe wrench, but then recognized as some kind of gun.

Terry saw it too, and froze.

The man was tall, gaunt, and icily calm, as if he'd stepped into the street to watch the color change in Joan's face.

A car approached quietly from the square. Joan glanced at the driver, but as he passed he was staring straight ahead. Once beyond them, he sped up, was gone. Terry had yet to move, and Joan, since she could not see his face, was unsure of him. "Terry," she said, despising the weakness in her voice, the fear. He ignored her, and so did the man with the gun.

The weight of the moment shifted as the large double doors swung open, apparently by themselves, revealing a swept garage room with a couch and two old wing chairs on one side and a long library table on the other. In each of two corners stood a flag on its staff, an eagle-tipped spear. One was the red-white-and-blue, the other the Irish green-and-gold. The table held stacks of folders and pamphlets. In the middle of the room was a card table at which four young men had been seated, but now they were standing, still startled, at their chairs. This table was littered with playing cards, poker chips, a pile of dollar bills, and a small forest of beer bottles. The men were dressed in blue jeans, sweatshirts, sneakers, or work boots. Two wore caps. A cigarette stuck to the lips of one.

A fifth man stepped out from behind one of the double doors, and from behind the other, like the star showing himself only once the stage is set, came a policeman.

Joan felt the pressure in her chest break The sight of the blue uniform, the shiny buttons, the badge—what a relief! She almost cried out to him, and in fact involuntarily pointed at the man on the sidewalk with the gun. But they were not looking at her. They were looking at Terry.

"Hey, Charlie," the policeman said. "Long time no see."

Charlie? Had he called Terry Charlie?

"Hello, Jackie."

Even in those two meager words there was something in Terry's voice Joan had never heard before—not defiance, but a kind of hollowness, the sound of a stone which, dropped in a well, finally hits not water but other stones. She was so far outside the scene unfolding before her that she might have been watching a movie.

The policeman was grinning at Terry.

Terry said, "You joined the state cops. I heard that."

"You heard right."

Terry gestured at the others. "So what are you doing here with these—"

"These are my deputies, Charlie. Right, fellas?" Mullen laughed. "The Charlestown Marshals, to be precise."

Joan couldn't take her eyes off him, his size, his cocky fluidity, the brightness in his face that she recognized as slight drunkenness.

"You're a disgrace, Jackie," Terry said.

Mullen laughed again. "To who? You? I got news for you, Charlie. We're winning. We're protecting our neighborhood. Right, fellas?"

"Jackie, Jesus Christ, what are you talking about? With a lynching? You're a cop."

"I don't appear in public. The boys—"

"'Our neighborhood'? You said 'our neighborhood'? Our neighborhood stood for something decent. Not cops meeting behind closed doors with thugs."

The man with the gun, a sawed-off shotgun, stepped forward. "Who the fuck do you—?"

"Back off, Brownie," Mullen said sharply.

Terry pointed at the man, as Joan had done, and said to Mullen, "You're a cop and you let a weapon like that in sight of the monument? You're protecting the neighborhood? Is that what the Marshals are, punks with shotguns?"

Joan rose in her seat. She wanted to warn Terry, to dampen his fierceness. His authority had cut through the alcohol buzz of the clubhouse, seizing their attention, but the men looked dangerous.

Terry stepped toward Mullen, a fist raised. "Tell him to put the gun away, Jackie."

Mullen jerked his thumb at the man, who glowered as he turned and reentered the side door, closing it. The stairs there led up to a loft.

"Do the nuns let you use this place?"

A question that made no sense to Joan.

But Mullen laughed hard. "Goddamn, Charlie, you
have
been gone, haven't you? The convent's sold. This isn't the Sisters' anymore. This place is Squire's, Charlie. This
and
the convent building. Squire lives on the corner now." Mullen pointed toward the old mansion. Then he let his arm sweep to the boys behind him. "Say hello to Squire's brother, fellas. Except he doesn't even know where Squire lives."

"Doesn't know shit from a shingle," one of the others said with unconvincing toughness.

Terry made a show of looking them over. "These are kids, Jackie. You could have made a difference to them. You still could. Somebody's going to get killed over here before this thing is over."

"That's probably true, Charlie." Mullen leaned in on Terry. "You still work for Kennedy?"

"Yes."

Mullen poked Terry's chest "Then you tell the senator that
You
tell the
Globe
and your fucking federal judge. You be our messenger. 'Somebody's going to get killed.' Fucking A, Charlie. Fucking A."

"Yeah," one of the men said, "the next nigger that comes into the Town."

"Even if it's a second grader?"

"A spade's a spade, Charlie. We didn't start this, did we, fellas?" Mullen turned for his echo of "Fuck no"s, but now his friends weren't looking at him. The eyes of the card players had gone to a point in the street beyond.

Terry sensed it before Jackie did, but Terry was slow to turn. He was the last to see Nick The first had been Joan. She had glimpsed him in the rear-view mirror as he'd come out of the flower shop and loped up the slight incline to a point behind the car that seemed prearranged, so centered in the mirror was he. Though they'd never met, she knew him at once, the hairline and the chin, the large eyebrows, the loose, athlete's posture, the walk with a hand sunk into his pocket, purposeful but unhurried. With his other hand he held a wrapped plant, a lavender cone in the cradle of his arm. From the way he carried himself, he might almost have been her husband.

"Hello, Terry." The calm in Terry's brother's voice made Joan realize how shrill the exchanges up till now had been.

He looked toward her. Their eyes did not come close to meeting in the small circle of the mirror. He had no idea she'd been studying him. "And this must be Joan."

He disappeared from the mirror, then came up beside the car. She looked up at him.

He smiled warmly. "Do you know who I am?"

"You're Nick."

"I finally get to meet you." He half bowed, and she had no idea how to respond.

Squire gestured at the others, spoke from where he stood, and quickly the large doors of the carriage house were closed, with Mullen and the Marshals shut up once more inside. Terry and Squire faced each other from opposite sides of the sports car, Joan small between them.