“A few,” she said.
The overhead light was on, as well as my desk lamp, and the room was quite harsh in the flat light of it. I had the window cracked open behind me, and there was enough traffic on Berkeley and Boylston streets to make a sporadic background noise. But my building was empty except for me, and Erin Macklin, and its silence seemed to overwhelm the occasional traffic.
CHAPTER
19
I kept two water glasses in the office. In case someone were overcome with emotion, I could offer them a glass of water, or if they became hysterical I could throw water in their face. I also kept a bottle of Irish whiskey in the office, and Erin Macklin and I were using the water glasses to sip some of the Irish whiskey while we talked.
“A little kid,” she said, “goes to the store. He has to cross somebody else’s turf. Means he has to sneak. In a car he has to crouch down. The amount of energy they have to expend simply to survive . . .” She paused and looked down into her whiskey. She swirled it slightly in the bottom of the water glass.
“They live in anxiety,” she said. “If they wear the wrong color hat; if their leather jacket is desirable, or their sneakers; if they have a gold chain that someone wants; they are in danger. One out of four young men in the inner city dies violently. These kids are in a war. They have combat fatigue.”
“And they’re mad,” I said.
I had shut the overhead light off, and the room was lit like film noir, with my desk lamp and the ambient light from the streets casting elongated vertical shadows against the top of my office walls and spilling their long black shapes onto my ceiling. I felt like Charlie Chan.
“Yes,” she said. “They are very angry. And the only thing they can do with that anger, pretty much, is to harm each other over trivial matters.”
She took in some of her whiskey. She sat still for a moment and let it work.
“Something has to matter,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly right.”
“Are there turf issues?” I said.
“Sure, but a lot of the extreme violence grows out of small issues between individuals. Who dissed who. Who looked at my girl, who stepped on my sneaker.”
“Something’s got to matter.”
“You get it, don’t you,” she said. “I didn’t expect you would. I figured you’d be different.”
“It has always seemed to me that there’s some sort of inverse ratio between social structure and, what . . . honor codes? Maybe a little highfalutin for the issue at hand, but I can’t think of better.”
“By honor do you mean inner-directed behavior? Because these kids are not inner directed.”
“No, I know they’re not. I guess I mean that nature hates a vacuum. If there are no things which are important, then things are assigned importance arbitrarily and defended at great risk. Because the risk validates the importance.”
Erin Macklin sat back in her chair a little. She was holding her whiskey glass in both hands in her lap. She looked at my face as if she were reading directions.
“You’re not just talking about these kids, are you?” she said.
“Any of them got families?” I said. “Besides the gang?”
“Not always, but sometimes,” she said.
Outside a siren whooped: fire, ambulance, cops. If you live in any city you hear sirens all the time. And you pay no attention. It’s an environmental sound. Like wind and birdsong in the country. Neither of us reacted.
“Often the families are dysfunctional because of dope or booze or pathology. Sometimes they are abusive, the kind you see on television. But sometimes they are Utopian—my kid can do no wrong. My kid is fine. The other ones are bad. It’s the myth by which the parent reassures herself, or occasionally himself, that everything is okay. And of course it isn’t and the pressure on the kid to be the source, so to speak, of ‘okayness’ for the family adds to his stress and drives him to the gang. Sometimes the kid is the family caretaker. He’s the one putting food on the table—usually from dealing drugs—nobody asks him where he got the money. He’s valued for it.” She raised her glass with both hands from her lap and drank some more of the whiskey.
“If you’re dealing,” she said, “you have to be down with the gang where you’re dealing.”
I stood and went around my desk and poured a little more whiskey into her glass. She made no protest. She had settled back into her chair a little; she seemed in a reverie as she talked about what was obviously her life’s work.
“Then there’s the other myth. The bad-seed myth. The family that tells the kid he’s bad from birth. One of my kids got shot in the chest and was dying of it. I was there, and his mother was there. ‘I told him he was no good,’ she said to me. ‘I told him he’d end up with a bullet in him before he was twenty. And I was right.’”
“What a triumph for her,” I said.
The whiskey seemed to have no effect on her, and she drank like one who enjoyed whiskey—not like someone who needed it. She smiled, almost dreamily.
“Had a kid, about fifteen, named Coke. Smart kid, had a lot of imagination, felt a lot of things. He knew the numbers, one in four, and he was sure he was going to be the one. So, because he was certain he’d die young, he set out to impregnate as many girls as he could. Even had a schedule set up, so he could achieve the maximum possible pregnancies before he died.”
“There’ll be one child left to carry on,” I said.
“Unfortunately there are twenty or thirty children left to carry on. All of them with junior high school girls for mothers, and no father.”
“Did he die young?”
“Not yet,” she said. “But he’s not around for those children.”
“They were a stay against confusion,” I said.
“A continuation, a kind of self,” she said, “that would survive him when the world he lived in overwhelmed him.”
“And he never identified with the three out of four that don’t die violently in youth,” I said.
“No. The life’s too hard for that kind of optimism.”
“Seventy-five percent is good odds in blackjack,” I said. “But for dying, it would not seem a source of much comfort.”
“Where I work,” she said, “there is no source of much comfort.”
“Except maybe you,” I said.
She smiled a little and sipped a little more whiskey.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so,” she said.
“Well,” I said, “a literate ex-nun.”
“Anything’s possible,” she said.
CHAPTER
20
“Are you going to do anything about them setting the fires?” Jackie said.
Hawk shook his head. We were back in the Double Deuce quadrangle looking at nothing.
“Why not?” Jackie said.
“Trivial,” Hawk said.
“But it’s a challenge, isn’t it?”
“Not if we not challenged,” Hawk said.
We were quiet. Nothing moved in Double Deuce. The sun was steady. There was no wind and the temperature was in the sixties.
Jackie sighed.
“Are you familiar with the word enigmatic?” she said.
“Un huh,” Hawk said. He was looking at the empty courtyard just as if there were something to see.
“How about the word uncommunicative?”
Hawk grinned and didn’t speak.
“Hawk, I’m not just asking to be nosy. I’m a reporter, I’m trying to work.”
He nodded and turned his head to look at her. She was in the front seat beside him.
“What would you like to know?” he said.
“Everything,” she said. “Including answers to questions I don’t know enough to ask.”
&n
bsp; “That’s a lot,” Hawk said.
“Between strangers, yes,” Jackie said. “Among casual acquaintances, even friends, yes. But I am under the impression that we are more than that.”
“Un huh,” Hawk said.
I was in the backseat, sitting crosswise with my legs stretched out as much as you can stretch legs out in the backseat of a Jaguar sedan. I had found a way to sit so that my gun didn’t dig into my back, and I was at peace.
“Is that impression accurate?” Jackie said.
“Yes,” Hawk said.
“Then for Christ sake why don’t you, goddamn it, talk?”
“Jackie,” Hawk said, “you think there’s a plan. You’d have a plan. Probably do. So you ask questions like there was some plan at work. In the kind of work I do, there is no plan. Reason we so good at this work is we know it.”
When he said “we” he moved his head slightly in my direction so she’d know who “we” was.
“So how do you decide?” Jackie said. “Like now, how do you decide that you won’t respond to the trash fires?”
“Same way I decided that you and I be more than friends,” Hawk said. “Seem like the right thing to do.”
“I had something to do with deciding that,” Jackie said.
“Sure,” Hawk said.
“So you have a feeling that it’s best to let the trash fires slide?” Jackie said.
Hawk looked at me.
“Jump in anytime you like,” he said.
“I was just congratulating myself on not being in on this,” I said.
Jackie turned in her seat. Her lipstick was very bright, and she had on a carmine blouse open at the throat. She looked like about twenty-two million dollars. More than friends, I thought. Hawk, you devil.
“You too?” she said. “What’s wrong with you people, don’t you talk?”
“Most people are grateful,” I said.
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “You are just like him, a master of the fucking oblique answer.”
Hawk and I were silent for a moment.
“It’s not willful,” I said. “It’s that very often we don’t know how to explain what we know. We tend to think from the inside out. We tend to feel our way along. And because of the way we live it is more important usually to know what to do than to know how we know it.”
“God—I thought that was the woman’s rap,” Jackie said. “Creatures of feeling. I thought men were supposed to be reasonable.”
“I wouldn’t generalize about men and women,” I said. “But I don’t think Hawk or I are operating on emotional whim. It’s just the way we experience things sometimes needs to get translated sort of promptly into a, ah, course of action. So we have tended to bypass the meditative circuit.”
“Wow,” Hawk said.
I nodded. “I kind of like that myself,” I said. “And going back afterwards and filling in feels like kind of a waste of time.”
“Because the consequences of your actions will prove if you were right,” Jackie said.
“Ya,” I said.
Hawk nodded. He smiled happily.
“Is it intuition?” Jackie said.
“No, it’s the sort of automatic compilation of data without thinking about it, and comparing it with other data previously recorded,” I said. “Most of it sort of volition-less.”
“The thing with these kids,” Hawk said, “they want to see what I do, or Major does, and he seems to be the one calls the plays, because they want to know who we are and what we’re like.”
“Because of you,” Jackie said.
“Un huh. And if they can get us to chase around after them for a misdemeanor like setting trash fires we going to look like fools. What do we do about it? Do we shoot them? For torching trash barrels? Do we slap them around? How do we know who did it?”
“So you let them get away with it?”
“Sure,” Hawk said. “We ignore it. We’re above it.”
“You know those junior high school principals,” I said, “who suspend students for stuff like wearing Bart Simpson T-shirts?”
“Yes,” Jackie said. “They make themselves look like jerks.”
I nodded. Hawk nodded. Jackie smiled. And she nodded.
“I get it,” she said. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”
Hawk and I were both silent for a moment.
“We didn’t know it,” Hawk said, “in the first place.”
CHAPTER
21
Jackie and Hawk and I were savoring some chicken fajita subs that Hawk had bought us on Huntington Ave., when Marge Eagen rolled up in a NewsCenter 3 van with her driver, her secretary, a soundwoman, and a cameraman. Two Housing Authority cops parked their car behind the van. A car from the Boston Housing Authority with three civilians in it parked behind the cops.
“Marge always likes to make a site visit,” Jackie said to us. “She’s very thorough.”
“Inconspicuous, too,” I said.
The Housing Authority cops got out and looked around. The civilians got out and grouped near the van. The driver got out and opened the van doors. The secretary got out of the back. The cameraman and the soundwoman got out of the front. And then Marge Eagen stepped out into the sunlight. The civilians stood a little straighter. The cops looked at her. One of them said something under his breath to the other one. They both looked like they wanted to laugh, but knew they shouldn’t. Marge stopped with one foot on the ground and one foot still in the van. A lot of her leg showed. The cameraman took her picture.
“Good leg,” I said to Hawk.
“From here,” Hawk said.
“Her legs are very good,” Jackie said. “And she wants the world to know it. Don’t you ever watch?”
“No,” I said.
Hawk shook his head.
“It’s the trademark opening shot every day. Low shot, her with a hand mike, sitting on a high stool, key lit, legs crossed. Tight skirt.”
The cameraman finished. Marge Eagen finished stepping from the van and strode across toward us. Everyone in Boston knew her. She was a television fixture. Blonde hair, wide mouth, straight nose, and an on-camera persona that resonated with compassion. I had never actually watched her show, but she was legendarily intense and caring and issue-oriented. Jackie got out of the car. Hawk and I didn’t.
“Jackie,” she said. “How bleak.”
Her voice had a soft husky quality that made you think of perfume and silk lingerie. At least it made me think of that, but Susan had once suggested that almost everything did.
“Her voice make you think of perfume and silk lingerie?” I said to Hawk.
He shook his head.
“Money,” he said.
“Everything makes you think of that,” I said.
“Are these the two centurions?” Marge Eagen said. She bent forward and looked in the car at us. She had on a black silk raincoat open over a low-cut ruffled blouse that looked like a man’s tuxedo shirt. While she was bent over looking in at us, I could see that she was also wearing a white bra with lace trim, probably a C cup.
Jackie introduced us.
“Step out,” Marge said, “so we can get a picture of you.”
“No picture,” Hawk said.
“Oh come on, Hawk,” Marge said. “We need it for interior promo. This is going to be the biggest series ever done on local.”
Hawk shook his head. Marge pretended not to see him. With a big smile she opened the car door.
“In fact I suspect it’s going to show up on network. Just the idea circulating has got the network kiddies on the horn already. Don’t be shy,” she said. “Crawl out of there. Let’s get that handsome punim on film.”
Hawk stepped lazily out of the car. He looked
past Marge Eagen to the cameraman.
“If you take a picture of me,” he said, “I will take your camera away and hit you with it.”
He looked steadily at the cameraman, who was a friendly-looking little guy with receding hair, which he concealed by artful combing. He stepped back a full step under the impact of Hawk’s stare and glanced quickly at the two Housing cops.
“Oh, stop the nonsense,” Marge Eagen was saying. “Don’t be—”
Hawk shifted his gaze to her. There was something in his eyes, though his face seemed entirely still. She stopped in midsentence, and while she didn’t step back, she seemed somehow to recede a little. Jackie stepped slightly between them as if she weren’t aware she was doing it.
“We want pictures of Marge really, Harry. That’s the big thing. Against the background of the buildings, looking at them, gazing down an alley. Pointing maybe, while she talks with Mr. Albanese.”
Harry nodded and began looking at the light. Marge Eagen sort of snorted and walked away with him. The soundwoman followed.
“Why couldn’t you let him take a picture, for God’s sake?” Jackie said under her breath.
“Rather not,” Hawk said pleasantly.
“That’s no reason,” Jackie said and turned as the suits from the Housing Authority approached. “Sam Albanese, Jim Doyle,” she said and introduced us. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name,” she said to the third guy.
“John Boc,” he said. “Authority Police Force.” He didn’t offer to shake hands.
“Oh, sure.” Jackie was jollier than the hostess at a sock hop. “You’re the Chief, of course.”
“This isn’t the time,” Albanese said. “But we don’t appreciate a couple of hired thugs trying to do our job for us. It’s vigilante-ism.”
“Actually,” I said, “vigilante-ism would be if the residents banded together to do your job for you. This is more like consulting-ism, I think.”
“We the Arthur D. Little,” Hawk said, “of hired thugdom.”
“Go ahead,” Albanese said, “be funny. I’ve asked our counsel”—he nodded at Mr. Doyle, who was looking at us sternly—“to see if there may not be some violation of statute here.”
Robert B. Parker: The Spencer Novels 1?6 Page 60
