"Two or three special containers a week, Mr. Tucci, with these wall panels rigged to pop off. That would more than double Masio's monthly take at Logan—but over here you have no customs, no narcs."
"How do you know what Masio's take at Logan is?"
"I didn't read it somewhere?"
Tucci stared at Doyle. "You hold out on me, Doyle. You do it all the time."
Squire smiled that smile. "I'm showing you the future, Mr. Tucci. Two million of these containers entered the U.S. last year. Next year, four. The year after that, eight The days of smuggling dope in suitcases in the holds of airplanes are over. There are too many of these things for the government to deal with, and even if they could, the whole point of shipping cargo like this is not to open them. These containers wind up everywhere, so port of entry means nothing anymore. The worst the narcs could do is spot checks, but with these mothers, even that isn't simple. There's no on-site customs here, and in this yard, not even the government can unload one of these containers, which is the first thing they'd have to do to check these walls. So they'd need trucks. They'd need an inspection site. They'd need crews. They could get all of that up now and then, but by the rime they did, I'd know it"
"How?"
Squire went on as if he had not heard Tucci's question. "And it would be a simple matter to keep our special, one-in-a-thousand gift box on board the ship for delivery another day. Even if customs snagged one, whose name would be on it? Not yours."
"And it wouldn't be tulip bulbs."
"You can bet on that."
"An arrangement like this..." Tucci stopped, intensifying his stare. "I'd have to coordinate with people in New York."
"I assume that."
"They would expect me to have total control."
"You'd have that."
"And this would change your participation."
"Not much. I'm still only interested in the Town. I'd be your guy on this dock That's all."
"So what has to happen?"
Squire looked out. The rain was just starting to fall, and with it the patter of drops hitting the metal container began, a surge of resonating noise inside the thing, like the warning clicks of a Geiger counter. Squire said, "Someone has to make the deal with the shipping company in Rotterdam. It should be you. I can introduce you to a guy from my Dutch bulb business."
"What about that other fellow?"
"Who?"
"Moran."
Squire missed a beat as he scrambled inwardly—away from a cliff was the feeling. "Moran?" He shrugged. "Quincy is not in the picture."
"The shipyard there is slated to get a crane like this."
Squire smiled. This fucker was good. "Not this year. Probably not next. If Quincy lands a crane, it'll be—"
"Moran runs the action at the shipyard. Unless I'm mistaken, your Dutch friends had a meeting with Moran in Amsterdam. They flew him over."
"And you say I hold out on you" Squire said. "Lots of people go to Amsterdam, Mr. Tucci."
"Venlo, I should of said." Tucci paused for effect. "He had his meeting in the town of Venlo."
Doyle faced away to watch the rain fall. Jerry Moran, the fucker.
From deep in the container, from well behind Doyle, Tucci's voice resonated gravely, each word weighing more than before. "I'm not going to compete with Moran. Understand? When I go to New York with this, they'll ask me who else is on the square, and I'll have to say no one. Do you hear me?"
"Yes. I'm sure I can—"
"So kill him."
Doyle immediately faced Tucci, knowing how everything depended on the Italian's seeing his eyes at such a moment, their clarity and resolve. "That's not how I operate. I don't even own a gun."
Tucci surprised Doyle by flinging his handbag at him, that effete item of wop fashion. But instead of soft leather, it was the bulk of steel that hit Doyle's chest, and as he caught the bag, he realized what was inside. It was not a wallet but a holster.
"Now you have one. Use it."
Deebo, Squire thought. Here was the difference between Frank Tucci and old Guido. Frank uses one mick to kill another.
"I didn't hear you, Doyle."
"All right, Mr. Tucci. Whatever you say." The two men stared at each other for a long time.
Finally Tucci walked to the edge of the container, to a place next to Squire. They stood shoulder to shoulder, watching the rain collect in puddles. That close to Tucci, Squire's size bulked. But he had the feeling he was the only one of the two who knew how much bigger he was than the Italian.
Tucci was content to stand in silence for some moments before asking, "When?"
"By this time tomorrow. Jerry Moran is no friend of mine."
"You didn't answer my other question, before."
"What."
"About customs. Jumping this place, if they did. How you'd know ahead of time."
Squire laughed. "Mr. Tucci, they're all micks. Customs, FBI, DEA, the State Police Task Force—they're all my people. Your people are in the olive oil business. Mine are cops. Of course I'll know."
"That's what makes some of my friends nervous about you."
"Good," Squire said quickly, twirling the leather bag, the dead weight of it. "I like folks to be nervous about me." Then he flashed that born-to-bring-flowers smile of his. "Everyone but you."
Tucci's eyes lingered noncommittally on Doyle's bright face. Then he looked out at the rain. He turned his suit collar up. "Christ, I hate to get this suit wet."
Squire knew what he was being ordered to do, but now he did not hesitate. He took his large sweater off and draped it around Tucci's shoulders. Tucci tugged it closer, as if he had expected this, and started to go.
"One more thing, Mr. Tucci." Squire's hands were still on his shoulders, holding him. Tucci stiffened. "None of the coke stays in the Town. That rule holds."
Tucci stepped away and faced him. "You're the boss, Squire."
Doyle held up the leather bag. "Is this loaded?"
"I loaded it myself."
"Thinking you might need it here?"
Tucci stared at him for a moment, then said, "After you use it, ditch it. I'm trusting you to get rid of it."
"Don't worry, Mr. Tucci." Squire smiled. "But maybe I'll keep the bag. I don't have one this nice."
Tucci continued to stare a moment longer, then ducked out into the passing storm, cut quickly across to the turn in the maze of containers and was gone. Squire stayed where he was, listening as the roar of another airplane overwhelmed the drumming rain on the metal box.
***
At the end of that Georgetown party where they'd first met, Joan and Terry had found themselves at the door together. She'd been the one to offer him a lift, which he accepted, as if he did not have his own car parked farther down the same block He found himself in the passenger seat of a churning Austin-Healey, in British racing green, the top down, though it was January. The low-slung headlights split the night. Joan's profile was backlit by the illuminated marble walls of the Kennedy Center. As the car whipped past Watergate, and as he saw her face outlined against the shimmering Lincoln Memorial, for once the sight of that Ionic temple did not make him think of Didi.
After that, Terry had often pictured Joan barreling down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Corcoran, beyond the White House. From the west parapet of the Capitol, where he usually waited, he could spot her half a mile away. When her car disappeared into the fold of trees just below, he would take off full tilt for the other side, to be there when she pulled up. The sports car fit her like an item of apparel, and her face was never more its vibrant self than when framed by the short, desert-colored feathers of her windblown hair. When the car stopped, her hair always fell instantly into place.
When he married Joan Littel, he married the Healey too. He grew accustomed to himself as a man who rode shotgun, although not on that Saturday in Boston. He would drive because this was his town, and his return. By the time they left the house, the noontime showers had passed, and though the streets were still wet a
nd the sky cluttered, there was no question of not folding back the top.
Terry gunned down the length of Memorial Drive, along Cambridge Parkway, and up onto a new sleek bridge that took them from Cambridge into the Town, above the rail yards and the Flat. Terry repeatedly slapped the wooden knob of the gearshift, clutching, revving the engine, going home. The new bridge meant that Charlestown wasn't Charlestown anymore, but that was all right. Terry Doyle wasn't Terry Doyle either.
At the grubby projects, the three-square-block, whites-only housing complex that served as the Town's west wall, Terry slowed the car. His eyes went by chance to a particular window in the nearest building, and he saw the pale face of a child staring out at them. As the child dropped from sight, Terry glanced at Joan. She had seen it too, and he felt her pang for the tyke, whose misery was quickly conveyed by the sagging chain-link fences and yellowed undershirts flapping on a clothesline. Terry said, "You should have seen the tenements those projects replaced. Toilets in the back yard, right behind the prison where Sacco and Vanzetti died."
"Really?" Joan said, but with a flat, noncommittal voice.
"There used to be a Flying Horse gas station on the corner."
Vacant lots separated lone storefronts, several of which were bars: Pat's, O'Grady's. Their doors were open, offering glimpses of permanently shadowed interiors. He sensed her registering the sudden stink of stale beer, and he said, "The true Celtic Twilight."
He turned onto Main Street, squealing rubber. Marked by stanchions of the el, the street jogged right a few blocks along, into City Square. A large, pillared bank building anchored one corner; on another were the courthouse and the police station.
Joan pointed at the courthouse and Terry said, "The site of the original settlement of Boston, John Winthrop's—"
"Look, Terry. What's that?"
On the top floor of the courthouse, letters blanked out each of the row of windows, spelling out the word NEVER!
"Well, I never," Joan said.
Terry felt a bolt of anger, but channeled it into his driving, taking the next corner too fast. On Warren Street he continued to accelerate most of the way to St Mary's, where he swung right again. He could have climbed this hill blind.
He turned onto Monument Square, their first view of the great obelisk. "Bunker Hill," he said, slowing. "The hallowed American shrine, 'degraded now,' as the Globe so eloquently put it this morning, 'by misguided and self-appointed defenders of the notorious high school.' Le voilà."
The high school rose ahead, dominating the northwest corner of the square, the same old granite hulk A single glimpse called the place fully to mind, because what his eyes went to were the seven false columns embedded in the façade above the otherwise undistinguished entrance. Eventually those columns—like the stucco-and-beam Tudor façades on Sullivan Square taverns and the marbleized Con-Tact paper on kitchen counters and the wire-propped shamrocks that his grandfather fashioned—symbolized all that he'd wanted to leave behind. No matter that, much later, he had taken the Gothic turrets of Boston College, the reforms of Vatican H, and the high-mindedness of the Kennedys as absolutely authentic.
The bone-white flagpole flew nothing but its ropes. The multiple windows had always been filthy, but the view they offered had nevertheless drawn his constant gaze. He remembered being yanked back from the rooftops of the city by the clang of the period bell. He remembered crowds surging in the corridors, locker doors slamming, the pungent stale air pouring off the bodies of kids who should have been his friends.
FUCK THE TPF, read one sign that the wind had plastered against a fence, POWDER KEG FOREVER! read another. Terry slowed almost to a stop. "Imagine going to war over that sad place."
"What year were you?"
"Nineteen sixty." He pointed to a row of dreary brick houses down the block. "When I was a kid, we thought those places were mansions, but Jesus." What dumps they seemed now, with flaking shutters, sagging bay windows, decked with hand-lettered signs. Never! Resist! Go Townies!
Terry stopped the car without pulling over. His memory supplied a set of tastes and aromas: cabbage, talc, stale tea, egg salad, the smell of Borkham Riff tobacco. Once he'd loved everything about life inside those houses. Now the houses themselves seemed utterly grief stricken.
"Look at those signs," Joan said.
But Telly's eyes were drawn by boys coming out of the variety store where he too had gone, though in his day for Pez and finger-size wax bottles of red, green, or orange sugar water. Three kids, no four, moved onto the sidewalk like heavy machines. They wore caps and sneakers and trousers about to be outgrown and identical school jackets, the white leather sleeves, red bodies, football emblems on their breasts. Linemen. The sports car had drawn their attention.
Terry put the car in gear and turned the corner, past the high school, away from the boys. They took the next turn easily, onto the fourth side of the square, the front of the park "I want to show you something." He pulled over, shut the engine off, opened his door, and, before Joan could react, went around to her door. He held his hand out "Close your eyes."
"What?"
"Close your eyes. I want to surprise you."
"No way."
"Come on, Joan. Really." He took her hand and pulled gently. She swung her legs out and stood. "Close them," he said.
She was wearing a trim tweed jacket over her jeans and sweater. "You're asking me to trust you, is that it"
"Exactly."
She slipped her arm inside his and closed her eyes. She allowed him to lead her across the street and onto the stairs that led up into the park "Watch it here," he said.
"How can I watch it if my eyes are closed?" She laughed and leaned into him.
"There are maybe twenty stairs going up. Twenty-five. Careful here, it curves. And a railing is on your right now, if you want."
She squeezed against him. "Who needs a railing? But you better get me there. Three minutes of trusting and I start to feel dizzy."
"I've noticed."
"What is this, Outward Bound?"
"Just a bit further ... across here ... just a little further."
"Terry, really ... this is ..."
"We're almost there." He had taken her to the base of the stone monument, and now he turned her so that she stood with her back to it, at the bench to which he had always gone. "Now," he said. "Now open."
She did, and her mind reeled at what she saw. Muscular clouds of the passing rain marched across the sky, but her eyes went right to the spine of the strange city, Oz, at her feet "Oh, it's close!"
"Ain't it beautiful?"
"But it's ... it's ..." She hesitated, then saw what made the view strange. "It's reversed!" The familiar Custom House and State Street Bank were in the foreground, a switch with the gleaming Hancock tower. "The skyline is backwards from here."
"Maybe it's backwards from Cambridge," he said, but he was moved by her readiness to lose her breath to a view he loved. "This is where I used to come as a kid. Boston seemed so close from here. Everything seemed possible."
"Everything was possible, sugar." She leaned against him once more.
"I love this city."
"But you moved away. You love it as something you can't have."
Terry laughed. "Which is why I love it. I only love what I can't have."
"But you have me."
"The exception that proves the rule?"
"And since that's what I am, I give this to you." She tossed her free arm at the skyline. "I let you have it, finally."
"'All of this I lay before you.'"
"What?"
"The Devil, to Jesus, when he took him up the mountain and showed him the world. A temptation."
"Well, when you get to be Jesus, you can start worrying about it. Meanwhile, the city's yours."
His gaze went back to the side wall of the high school, NEVER! he read. The Irish Nazis. For a moment that wall seemed to be falling toward him, but that was an effect of the clouds soaring by behind.
"If I want it."
"Yes, if you want it."
Joan set off down the steps toward the car. He lit a cigarette, cupping the match against the harbor breeze, inhaling deeply but tasting nothing. Then he followed.
What he saw, over the lip of the hill, stopped him. The four boys from the variety store were in, and on, the Healey, one in each seat, the others lounging on the fenders. Joan had stopped dead where she had registered the sight, and now she turned toward Terry. He skipped down the stairs. "Wait here," he said, passing her.
But she didn't. She followed closely behind, as far as the curb. As he crossed the street toward the car, she cried after him, "Call the police!"
What, the TPF?
He put his weed between his lips, grinning at the boys as if glad to see them. Do this like a coach, he told himself. "What say, guys? Pretty nice wheels, huh?"
"Brit piece of shit," the boy in the driver's seat said, and he sent a wad of spit shooting past Terry's feet. A trail of saliva fell across the side of the car. The others laughed.
"Brit? Don't you know what this is? Austin-Healey, see there?" When the punks turned to look at the medallion on the steering wheel, Doyle sensed his power. They are children, he told himself. "Healey is as Irish as we are. Healey owns the company. The Irish are very proud of this car. That's why most of the models you see are green."
The two on the fenders exchanged a wary glance, but the boy at the wheel, with a malevolent eye, said, "We was going to go for a ride." Earlier Terry had made them for linemen, but this kid had the confidence of a ball carrier. There was something familiar about the way his close-cropped head rode on his shoulders, like a pumpkin on a board.
"I'd love to let you go for a ride, but I'm not insured for it."
"You're insured for theft, aren't you?" The boy on the rear fender grinned at the others.
Terry held out his cigarette pack. "Have a smoke, fellows. Let it go at that."
"Give us the key, mister. This car don't belong in Charlestown. We'll take it out for you."
"You going to loop it?"
"You know about looping?"
"Yeah, I know about it." Terry leaned toward the driver and read the name on his jacket "'Boss.' What are you boss of? The Town bullshit factory?"
The City Below Page 29
