The City Below (64 page)

Now let Terry say he had no need to know. Now let her pretend it had never happened. "I'm of the parochial school," he'd said, and he still remembered it as one of his better lines. What acid the memory of that Sunday afternoon must have been to her all this time. How she'd lowered herself. And then—her voice, "Oh, oh, oh!"—how he had.

Squire went to the long glass cabinet lining one wall of the room. He saw the drawings, but in the dark he couldn't see which was which. He fumbled for his matches, found them, struck one, and held it close to the glass.

The pope's tomb. They had drawings for the pope's tomb at fucking Harvard. He moved the match along. Three drawings, four, and then he saw them, drawings of the slaves, the two slaves. It wasn't
The Dying Slave
he wanted, but the other one,
The Rebellious Slave.
He saw it, the fist clenched, the face uplifted in defiance.

The match burned his finger, and went out.

He took the guard's pistol out of his coat and raised the butt of it to bring it down on the glass, smashing it Buzzers and sirens began to blare at once, but he didn't care. He reached into the cabinet for the print, but its frame was bolted to the base. He smashed its glass and, pushing the shards aside, cut himself. He didn't care.

"The wonder," she'd said, "is that it doesn't speak."

But it did, to him.
I resist,
it said.

He had the paper free, bleeding on it He rolled it as carefully as he could. Message number two.

He carried the print in the hand that wasn't cut and began to run. The noise of the alarms was like needles in his eardrums now, slave torture. In the corridor leading to the side door, the two men were still handcuffed to the radiator.

"Resist!" he yelled as he stormed down on them. "Resist!"

The Wackenhut guard cowered at the sight of the crazyman, charging the door like Geronimo, like fucking Spartacus, but dressed like a priest To Doyle's amazement the Harvard kid, the terrified, pimply graduate student, if that's what he was, rose from his end of the radiator as Doyle approached, and he pointed his hand at him as if recognizing a ghost. Only too late did Squire realize that in his hand was a small gun, an unauthorized weapon the chickenshit had hidden on himself somewhere.

He heard a loud crack For an instant the sounds of the alarms took second place to the gunshot. And in the same instant, an explosion went off in Doyle's chest.

Another crack.

He had his own pistol up, and he could have fired. But he didn't. Goddamnit, he didn't. A fucking Harvard kid. Instead, he thought of Jackie, as he'd looked years before, in his first blue uniform—that scared, but not that fucking dangerous. Like a third bullet in his chest, Squire felt a blow of remorse. Jackie!

He staggered past the cop, bounced off a wall, knew he was hit bad. He crashed through the door, out into the rain, clutching his gun and Michelangelo, blood pumping through the stolen clerical shirt, a dying slave after all.

***

Terry hung up the telephone. He felt a twisting of his bowels, as if his brother had plunged a hand into his body and was choking him from the entrails up.

Joan had leapt out of bed, intending to dress and rush to the Fogg. She was sail in the bathroom. Terry waited for the toilet to flush; when it did, he went in. She was standing before the mirror, more naked, if anything, than ever. He stood behind her. Their eyes met in the glass. "It's your brother," she said.

"I know."

"I took him there once. The Michelangelos seemed—"

"Joan." Terry took her by the shoulders. "I already told you. I know."

"Did he tell you?"

"Not exactly. He tried to use it as a weapon against me."

"It
is
a weapon. I use it against myself."

"Not anymore."

She leaned back against him, fitting her body into the soft curve of his. She had never felt such strength from him before, had never allowed herself to feel so needy of it.

He had his eyes closed, his face next to hers, an expression of inconsolable sadness. "I have to get over there," she said.

"I'm going with you."

Joan left him in the bathroom.

She was at her drawer, having pulled on underpants, and was now fastening her bra, her back to the wall of windows, when it happened—the explosion.

The center pair of French doors, against which the weather had been pushing the branches of the oak, blew in, shattering into a thousand pieces of glass and splintered frames. The black form of a man came crashing through, launched from the tree outside, and landing in a flayed heap on the white carpet.

The wind and rain whipped into the room. Joan heard her own scream as a noise from outside herself. She watched, horrified, first as a stain of blood spread out on the carpet, and then as the hulk began to rouse itself and come at her. A monster of blood, matted hair, and filth.

"The slave," he said, offering the crumpled print, as if in homage. But in his other hand was the gun, and he was raising that toward her too.

"Nick!"

Squire turned slowly and saw his brother at the threshold of the bathroom, beyond the bed. Perhaps it was Terry's nakedness, or simply the resolution in him; perhaps it was that Nick was too far gone already, but he seemed not to recognize him.

"Nick!" Terry said again, moving now, closing the distance, watching the gun as it came up. Once, Terry would have experienced the prospect of death at his brother's hands fatalistically, the inevitable end of their perverse story. But not now. And not ever again. He walked directly to his brother, preempting him. Before Squire could react, Terry had the gun firmly in hand.

Squire collapsed against him; his weight took Terry down. But Terry controlled their fall. He took Nick across his lap on the floor. Squire gave him the print "Michelangelo," he said.

"You're in bad shape, Nick."

"Be my priest, Charlie."

"I can't do that."

"I killed Jackie. I committed adultery."

"I'm no priest, Nick. You're the one in a collar."

Squire laughed. "And you're the one with no clothes on. We switched places, Charlie." And then he looked up at Joan. "You did it to me, didn't you? You're really something."

Joan was too horrified to speak.

"You
did
kill me, like you said."

And then Squire slumped. The breath left him.

Terry looked up. Joan, clutching her unsnapped bra, her arms across her breasts, had not moved.

And to
bis
paralyzing horror then, Terry saw the door open slowly, and there was Max in his hot-air-balloon pajamas. "Joan," Terry said, "go to Max."

Joan did, covering herself. As she took the boy, leading him back through the door, Max continued staring at his father, at his two fathers. Terry thought, And all we'd ever wanted was one.

The door closed. And Terry was alone with his brother, to whom he leaned then. He kissed his forehead. Already it was cold. "Oh, Nick," he said.

The ruined print lay on the floor beside Terry. Moments passed before he realized what a disaster, in addition to everything else, this would be for Joan. And, of course, wasn't that Nick's point in singling out her office? He lay his brother aside, picked up the print, and tried to flatten it. Torn and blood-stained, the drawing of a naked, bound, defiant man meant nothing to Terry.

He went back to the bathroom for his robe. He crossed to the table, thinking at first only to call the police. But then he saw the cigar box. And he realized at once the power it gave him: Joyce on tape, Farrell on tape, dealing with Nick Doyle, this murderer, this thief.

Farrell could cover this. Terry looked at the print again. Farrell could cover Joan. He opened the cigar box, fingered the tapes, a last gift, despite himself, from Squire. Terry picked up the phone and asked the operator for the FBI.

***

Funerals. The Irish believe, if not in death, in funerals; and a good thing it was that week, when there were not two, but three.

First, a full-dress inspector's funeral for a policeman slain in the line of duty. The newspapers had been full of the story of Lieutenant John Mullen's brutal execution. Frank Tucci, the mob overlord whom Mullen was investigating, had been charged with the murder and was being held without bail. The public was outraged, and the Middlesex County DA had called for a restoration of the death penalty in Massachusetts.

On a glorious, crisp April morning, seven hundred and fifty policemen, some from as far away as New Jersey and New York, all wearing white gloves and black armbands on the various shades of blue, filed into Holy Cross Cathedral near the elevated tracks of the Orange Line. The policemen joined a grief-stricken throng of Townies, including a special contingent of Mrs. Mullen's sodality ladies from St Mary's. Mayor Flynn and Governor Dukakis were there, and the Requiem was celebrated by the new archbishop, Bernard Law, whose many distinctions included his having gone to Harvard College.

Joan Littel did not attend that funeral. To be with Didi, Terry went, but he moved through the motions of the Mass, the kneeling and standing, the blessing himself and the going to Communion, the dropping of dirt on the casket at the cemetery, feeling nothing.

Squire's funeral was at St. Mary's, in the Town. But this one was impressive too, attended by the men from the Flower Exchange, the K of C, truckers, dock workers, corner boys, merchants, union men, and liquor dealers—many of whom were also wiseguys, hustlers, straws, shills, and fronts. Every Irish neighborhood in greater Boston was represented. Who of those mourners had not been stunned, some even to disbelief, at the news of his sudden heart attack? And who had not seen it as a grief reaction to the death of his old friend and brother-in-law?

That was how Didi chose to speak of it She moved through the rituals of both funerals with great dignity, thinking more than once of Mrs. Kennedy—not Jackie but Ethel, who could understand what it was to lose a beloved brother and a husband too. Like Ethel, Didi had her brood of children to worry over now, but also, like Ethel, she had her faith. And she had her late husband's brother. Terry held her arm at St Mary's too.

And once more, he felt nothing.

Ethel Kennedy was on everyone's mind that week, because two days after the deaths of Jackie Mullen and Nick Doyle, her son David died of an overdose of drugs in a motel near the family's villa in Palm Beach. The clan's Easter reunion, to which Ted had invited Doyle and McKay, had become another communal act of mythic grief. On Friday, April 27, the family gathered for
its
Requiem at the Catholic church in McLean, Virginia. For the interment, they flew to Boston.

The newspaper that reported on David Kennedy's funeral also reported, in another story, that the ever-diligent FBI had recovered, in a Dumpster not far from the Fogg Museum, the priceless Michelangelo print, damaged but intact. The Bureau had no leads as to the identity of the thief.

And the newspaper noted, in a discreet item on the back page, that when the Kennedys arrived in Boston, they were joined by a number of family friends and political figures, and also former Kennedy staffers Neville McKay and Terence Doyle, and Doyle's wife, Joan. The unannounced service took place at two o'clock at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline. Lasting less than twenty minutes, it was no one's idea of an Irish funeral.

The family plot dominated a rise known as Cushing Knoll, at the end of a tidy asphalt lane. Forsythia and mountain laurel were in bloom. Daffodils, late crocuses, and early tiger lilies had sprouted in bunches, dotting the rolling green terrain like Easter eggs. The scent of honeysuckle was in the air. A stand of arborvitae formed the backdrop of a large, upright granite block on which etched letters spelled
KENNEDY.
David's casket was centered before the stone, the family huddled on one side—the sisters, Bobby's other kids, John and Caroline with their mother, the new young in-laws, seeming lost—all in sunglasses. Looking at Jackie Onassis, Terry heard the gruff longshoreman's voice of Cushing: Leave the poor woman alone.

On the other side of the casket, mourners were more loosely clustered. Terry, Joan, and Bright stood close beside the coffin, near a pair of small tablets flush with the clipped lawn. The stones read,
JOSEPH P. KENNEDY SR.,
1969 and
BABY GIRL,
1962. Terry had forgotten that Ted and his Joan had lost a child, but it was the thought of the old man that struck him most.

He nudged McKay. "Himself," Terry said. And he thought even the old crustacean would see the connection of then to now. The mob, rumrunning, and big Irish money were still the holy trinity, only cocaine and heroin had replaced bootleg whiskey. If Joe were alive, he'd have made the deal with Amory work, but through
his
bank instead of Squire's. And if so, he'd have had the pleasure now of seeing the capsule of his own space shot return to Earth in the fatal speedballing of his grandson.

For a shocking instant, as if inside Bright's head, Terry heard Bobby's voice asking, "with Aeschylus," as he always said, "Who is the victim? Who the slayer? Speak!"

Joan took Terry's arm firmly in her hand.

The archbishop, sprinkling water on the mahogany casket, said, "May the angels rush to greet you in paradise ..."

And though the prayer went on, Terry said amen to that piece of it, thinking of the eager Harvard kid David had been, rushing to greet life. Then he thought of the twelve-year-old alone in the L.A. hotel room, watching his father's murder on TV. "Is everybody all right?" dying Bobby had asked. David wasn't all right, but no one knew it then.

And what of his own Max, after what
he'd
seen? Max was what had changed him, finally, for in Terry a son's ache had become a father's.

Terry glanced across at Ted, bent, old looking, too heavy. Yet strength was flowing out of him, into Ethel. From old habit, she clung to him. He was the father now.

An emotion hit Terry at last, what he'd felt none of at Jackie Mullen's funeral, or at Nick's. A wall fell on him, not glass but stone,
that
stone:
KENNEDY
. He tasted a bitter draft of this one family's longing. Here was what they'd become in the end, to him and to the nation, the very opposite of what the dead brothers had sworn they were: a forever fading symbol of what we see, want, strive for—and will never be. And he knew from the weight of his pity that he was not one of them.