The City Below

by James Carroll

  "Plus, I get to crack these faggot, long-haired skulls. Wait'll they try that 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NFL is gonna win' shit with me."

  "NLF."

  "Whatever."

  Squire gunned away from the light, and before long had the engine roaring again.

  "Where the hell are we going, anyway?"

  "Right up here. We'll get a beer."

  "Jesus, Squire, we had to come all this way for a beer? I don't want to drink with these BU homos."

  "We're in BC country now. Big difference. I got to check a place out I'm thinking of buying into."

  "What bullshit. This is me, remember? You're not doing any buying this week."

  "There it is, on the left."

  Jackie squinted through the windshield as Squire slowed, preparing to swing across traffic. "What? That auto-parts place? I thought you said a beer."

  "The bar next door. The Hofbrâu."

  A large red and black sign bearing that word rode precariously above a dramatically, and falsely, peaked roof. Counterfeit beams and a coat of stucco had been slapped on the two-story brick façade of a large building that might once have housed a car dealership.

  "Ein, zwei, zuffa," Jackie said. "A beer's a beer." He knew better than to ask what was really up.

  As they were leaving the car, each slamming his door in the snap-snap synchrony of all their years together, Squire said, "Leave the jacket."

  "What do you —?"

  "Leave your coat."

  "If they don't like my Townie coat, fuck them."

  "I don't like it, Jackie. Leave it." Doyle walked across the sidewalk, toward the bar.

  Mullen watched from over the roof of the car. Then he shrugged the coat off and tossed it through the car window.

  Inside, the place was pandemonium, a huge hall with dozens of long, picnic-style tables jammed with exuberant college kids. Braless waitresses in T-shirts moved among them with trays of beers.

  Jackie leaned close to Doyle. " The Sound of Music it ain't."

  Against one wall, jerky fragments of black-and-white movie images jumped; a film was being projected above the heads of the carousers. If there was a soundtrack, it was lost in the din of talk, laughter, and the ubiquitous rock 'n' roll. One of the characters on the wall, twice life size, was Humphrey Bogart.

  After looking the room over, Squire led the way to the bar, which ran the length of the broadest wall. Marijuana smoke wafted by their nostrils, and it struck Squire that even the straight-arrow BC kids were doing dope these days.

  They took up a place near the end of the bar, by a doorway that opened onto the corridor where the restrooms were. Squire ordered up beers for both of them. When they came, he handed Jackie his, saying, "Sip it"

  "Like always." Mullen grinned as he gave himself a foam mustache.

  Squire had not intended to come here. It had seemed, early in the evening, important not to. He smoked his cigarettes and stared obliquely toward a near corner of the room, where a group of tall boys had pushed three of the long tables together. At those tables were the only blacks in the bar, four or five of them, including Bean.

  Jackie had followed his gaze. "Jesus, Squire, look who's here, I mean over there, in the corner."

  Squire turned back to the bar, refusing to look He blew smoke rings toward a nearby rack of silver-lidded beer steins.

  "Look, it's Ginny!"

  Their lovely Townie kewpie doll, their homegrown masterpiece of ass, Squire's own cushlamochree. Ginny's blond hair, a close-cropped helmet, shone through the haze. There were other girls at the table with the lanky college Joes, but none like her. She was wearing a black turtleneck sweater. The cuff at her neck made it seem long and slender. She wore black jeans too. The color emphasized her leanness and evoked, simultaneously, the lusty anarchy of beatniks and the self-abnegation of nuns. She'd never dressed like that at Daisy's. And except for black lines around her eyes, she wasn't wearing makeup either. So maybe it wasn't her.

  Jackie glanced at Squire, who pretended to care less, but Jackie felt the heat of his intensity.

  Jackie looked back at her. In that light she resembled Kim Novak in Vertigo, the girl who was her own double. Every time she put her cigarette to her mouth, she tossed her head back slightly, just like Ginny did, displaying the soft white delta of skin at her throat, where Mullen had paid her once to put his tongue. Her black sweater showed less of her breasts than, say, the waitresses' T-shirts, but she seemed all the sexier for being less on display, which had never been a trick of Ginny's that Jackie knew of.

  Someone cracked a joke, breaking the table up, and Kim Novak leaned into the knot of kids sitting around her. The way she laughed, she kicked a leg out, showing those green snakeskin cowboy boots.

  "It is her," Mullen said.

  All the kids at the table were laughing and hugging, boys and girls both, including Ginny.

  "Jesus H. Christ." Jackie was really irked that Squire was ignoring him. "What the fuck is she doing here? And catch that" He poked Doyle. "Catch that!"

  The kid next to her, the particular one she had settled herself against, after the more general hugging.

  "Goddamnit, Squire. Look!"

  "Cool it, Jackie."

  "She's with that coon, that tall spade. Look, Squire, Ginny's got her hand on that jig's thigh."

  ***

  The week that had begun with Tucci's death on Monday ended on Saturday, the morning after the Hofbräu, with Tucci's funeral. Frank was in charge of the arrangements, and, Squire knew, the way the son decided to bury his father would have infuriated the old man.

  Outside the community of Boston Italians, Guido Tucci had not been generally well known. Certainly the feds knew of him, and during the early-sixties gang wars his name had brought a shudder to storekeepers in Charlestown, Southie, Winter Hill, and Fields Corner. But Tucci's photograph had never been in the papers, much less on television. His lifelong discretion had assumed a style that set him apart from crime overlords elsewhere. It was as if the mode of the old Boston Puritans had imposed itself on Italians, the way it had on the Irish. Whatever the reason, Guido Tucci had wielded power from behind curtains. He had made himself into a man no one looked at twice on the street —except those who knew.

  Yet when it came to his funeral that Saturday in late September, the city of Boston had no choice but to notice. Instead of a Revere parish, he was buried out of St. Leonard's, on Hanover Street in the North End, the church Tucci had baptized his children in, but which he had not entered since leaving the neighborhood twenty years before. Frank had let the word out that he expected everyone to attend, and there wasn't room in the church for them all. Automobiles clogged the narrow streets in the city's oldest section.

  Before and after the Requiem Mass, the procession of limos was led by a phalanx of police motorcycles headed up by a squad car in which the commander of Division i was riding, the first open display of the family's ties to the cops.

  Before taking his own family over to the cathedral for Terry's ordination, Squire Doyle slipped across the bridge, went past the Garden and into the North End to watch. He stood on North Washington Street —where kids had waved at Kennedy eight years before —as the motorcade solemnly crept up the ramp onto the expressway, heading toward Saugus and the Italian cemetery. The thought of Kennedy made him realize all the more how different things would be now, under Frank.

  This funeral was Frank's debut, and he was using it to send a message not only to his potential rivals and the city he intended to dominate, but to overlords in other cities. Unlike the old man, he wanted to be noticed. And Squire grasped at once that, for his own purposes, that was good.

  It was some days later before he could arrange a meeting. Tucci had efficiently made his point that he was in no hurry to see his father's favorite mick On impulse, Squire went out to Revere by trolley, as he had in the early days, and it reassured him to arrive so innocuously. Whatever changes Squire had to make in the operation, he intended always to emula
te old Tucci in a nurtured anonymity outside his home turf.

  He crossed from the trolley circle to the beach. The faded amusement park had just closed down for the season. Only when he saw the bleary-eyed workmen boarding up the game stands and rides did he realize October had come. And sure enough, once he hit the boardwalk, the wind had a new sting in it He walked slowly northward, an eye on the bright sea. Whitecaps broke across the tossing blue surface, spewing salt spray. Seagulls carved arcs in the air, and far out, a lone tanker made for the horizon. The sight of that ship in its solitude fixed Doyle for a moment The sea from here was full of a welcome connotation unlike anything he knew from the Mystic piers or the navy yard. It made him think of Guido, who had pressed his arm with unstated affection. He felt an unexpected pang of loss, shocked that the sharp horizon itself could so evoke their intimate meetings on the weathered, splintered boards. Those walks with the old man now loomed, Squire knew, as his main problem with Tucci's son.

  At the drooping bungalow, Frank's goons searched him. They let him keep the magazine he'd carried in his coat, and he leafed through it while waiting in a sagging wicker chair on the porch. More than an hour passed. One or the other of the knuckle draggers continually held him in an inexpressive stare. It couldn't have been more clear how dearly Tucci wanted him off his list, but Doyle was unfazed. He slowly flipped the pages of his magazine.

  At last he was admitted to the house, to the dark-paneled former dining room that had always served as the office. Frank was in his father's chair, behind the table. He wore a flashy sharkskin suit, a gold collar pin under the tidy knot of his hand-painted tie. Behind him stood another man, unknown to Squire, as Frank himself, never so gaudily dressed, had always stood behind Guido.

  "Hello, Frank." Squire went right at him, hand extended. "I'm sorry about your father."

  Frank shook hands guardedly. "What do you want?"

  "I want to pay my respects."

  "Thank you. Now what else?"

  "I want to offer you something."

  Frank then did what his father never did, not once in eight years: took his eyes off the man he was doing business with to glance back at his lieutenant. Do you believe this punk?

  Doyle reached into his coat for the magazine. He dropped it on the table in front of Frank.

  Sports Illustrated. Muhammad Ali's grinning face and glistening torso, his gloved hands raised above his head in triumph. But the legend read, CHAMPION OR DRAFT DODGER?

  Frank did not look down at it. "What the fuck is this?"

  "Page forty-seven," Doyle said.

  Tucci did not move for a moment, then he sat forward and flipped the magazine open. After backing and forthing, he found the page.

  A large color photograph of a rail-thin Negro dunking a basketball. The headline, NICOLSON LEADS BC INTO THE BIG TIME.

  Tucci read the captions and the story down to the end of the page. Then he looked up. "So what?"

  "Boston College. Irish Harvard. And soon to be Irish UCLA A shoe-in for the NCAA this year."

  "So fucking what?"

  "I can give you their biggest game."

  "How so?"

  Squire nodded at Sports Illustrated."I own Bean Nicolson."

  Frank smiled briefly back at his lieutenant. Yeah, sure.

  Doyle took an envelope from his pocket, withdrew a photograph, and dropped it on the table. The picture showed Bean and Squire, Molly in his arms, the tower of a BC building in the background.

  Frank looked but did not touch it.

  "My brother's one of his coaches," Squire said. My fucking brother, he thought. It wasn't true anymore that Terry was Nicolson's coach. The photo had been taken by a passerby the day Terry went to tell Nicolson he wouldn't be working with him after all. At first Squire had thought Terry had screwed everything up, but then he'd realized that as far as Bean went, it would work better having Terry out of the picture. As for the rest of what Terry had done —Jesus, what an asshole.

  The man behind Frank said, "Knowing the kid isn't owning him."

  Squire removed half a dozen more photos from the envelope and spread them on the table. "These are black-and-white," he said, deadpan.

  Bean Nicolson, those mile-long arms and legs, naked, entwined with the arms and legs of a naked white woman. One photo showed her with her face bent to his genitals, another with his face at hers. "Liquor in front," he said, "poker in back"

  Another photo had Bean on his knees, fucking her from behind. The woman had her face buried in the sheets, her fists coiled around a bed rail. None of the pictures in which she was paired with the black man showed Ginny's face —which had been Squire's promise to her. But there were several of her alone, lewdly sprawled, various ruttish expressions twisting her eyes and mouth and flaunted tongue.

  "Jesus," Tucci said, "it's Rubber Man."

  "Rubbers are against God's law, Frank."

  Tucci grunted.

  "So what's the gig?" the second man asked. "The cunt threatens to say he forced it on her? She doesn't look too unhappy."

  "No need of rape charges. She's underage, but we don't need that either. If we had to press, all we say is he was modeling for pornography, which the girl has been known to do. He's in her portfolio now."

  "What's a little night baseball? Who gives a shit?"

  Doyle looked at him, answering coldly, "BC is a Jesuit school. These pictures would finish him there."

  "So one way or the other, you blackmail the fucker, is that it?"

  "No." Squire smiled. "Anyone could do that. You could. What I do is rescue him from blackmail, save his ass. I swear not to tell my brother, or the other coaches. I adopt the kid."

  "That's right," Tucci said, "I forgot. You're a sweetheart."

  Squire shrugged. "I get him helping me out at the Boys' Club in Charlestown. The Jesuits love that. I start giving him pocket money. Then I make it bonuses, a friendly incentive, for scoring high. Ten bucks, say, for every point over twenty. He starts taking my money for doing what he wants to do anyway, winning. The season goes well. BC gets the tournament bid. By the time of the NCAA, what with the pictures in the background and a history of taking money from me, he has no choice when I tell him it's Burma Shave time. Time to score under twenty."

  "You'd do that to the guy?"

  "Nobody's wise if he comes along. Nobody but him."

  Tucci said nothing for a long time. Then, with sudden animation, he exclaimed, "Sweetheart? Shit, you're more of a prick than I thought."

  Squire blanked him. "We wait for the heavy game, national television, BC the favorite, high on the Vegas boards. I own the nigger, and I hand him over to you. You set up Jimmy the Greek if you want. After that, all over the country, your selected friends all know who runs Boston. Everything in Boston."

  Frank and his lieutenant exchanged another look, not smirking now. The man behind Frank nodded once, and Squire knew he was home again.

  ***

  A few weeks after Cardinal Cushing ordained his new deacons, Jacqueline Kennedy married a divorced man. The Vatican issued a statement branding her a "public sinner." Cushing replied with a statement of his own: "Leave the poor woman alone!"

  Despite his reputation as a liberal, Cushing hated dissent. He would never have done to Rome what his seminarians did to him. But unlike birth control, Jackie's fate was no moral abstraction to him. If the old archbishop had ever loved a woman, he loved her. In the weeks before her marriage to Aristotle Onassis, Jackie had sought him out repeatedly. She knew the rules as well as he did, but, perhaps thinking of his own sister Dolly, who'd married a Jew, Cushing simply could not reassert them. Finally he had told her the very thing he was at that moment chastising his seminarians for: she should follow her conscience. And he promised her that, should anyone deny her Holy Communion, all she had to do was come to him.

  When the message came down from the gargoyles in Vatican City that, as the woman's Ordinary, he was solemnly required to condemn the marriage, Cushing thought of the oath he'd m
ade to the dead president. The hell I will! He shut up those wop monsignors by immediately calling a press conference and announcing his retirement —a full two years early.

  And when Terry Doyle read of it, he thought back to Cushing's stunning gesture at the ordination ceremony. That event had been, in turn, the most numbing and the most charged experience of his life. His memory had quickly fogged over, but there were certain things he would never forget.

  The arrival of his family at the cathedral, for example. It was a few minutes before the ceremony's scheduled start He had mounted the pulpit for one last look at the Scripture he was to read, the third chapter of Paul's first letter to Timothy: "In the same way, deacons must be respectable men whose word can be trusted. They must be conscientious believers in the mystery of faith. They are to be examined first, and only admitted to serve as deacons if there is nothing against them."

  In front of Terry, people were entering the vast church and filing into the pews. It was a child's crying that drew Terry's attention to the arches of the entranceway. Though he'd had no experience of it in such a setting, he knew Molly's wail. He saw them coming in, Molly in Didi's arms, Didi wearing sunglasses, Nick, and Gramps. Terry wished at once that they would take their places far in the rear, but he watched as the knot of his loved ones moved up the nave, driven by his grandfather's K of C need to sit in front.

  The figure of his grandfather pierced Terry's heart, the old man bent, walking with a hesitant shuffle, clinging to Nick's arm. Nick himself seemed more erect than ever, a handsome, tall Irishman in his prime, with his brown tweed suit, his dark hair long, brushing his collar. It struck Terry how grown-up and prosperous looking his brother was. The swagger of a Townie punk was gone, replaced by an impressive and appealing air of personal authority, what the old man was leaning on.

  Gramps did not recognize the man in the pulpit as his Terry, vested in an alb, amice, and cincture, the white garments priests and deacons wear under their chasubles and dalmatics.