The City Below

by James Carroll

  "Terry—"

  "I think the man is a sleaze, Joan, because I think he's involved with Squire."

  Joan's shock—not surprise—registered in the jolt of her face and a quite dramatic backward movement. She leaned against the bridge with a false casualness, to steady herself. "What makes you think that?"

  "I guess..." He was suddenly vague, the way he was after too many drinks. "I always have an eye over my shoulder, looking for that bastard."

  Me too, Joan said, but to herself. Because of her, they had arranged their lives so as to see him as little as possible. In fact, Joan had not laid eyes on Nick since their grandfather's funeral five years before. Terry Knew—he must have known—of her repugnance, but he had no idea what sparked it "Look over your shoulder, Terry," Joan said stiffly. "No one's there."

  "But he is there." Terry spoke with such an absence of inflection that it frightened her. She was sorry that he could see the blush that seared her skin from her throat to her forehead. What did he know?

  "When I met Amory this morning, he was wearing one of those shamrock things."

  "What?"

  "You remember, the Kerry Bouquet shamrock, what Squire gave me when he gave you that black orchid years ago."

  Black trillium. She could not believe that flower was being referred to. Confusion and dread filled her, emotions she simply had to flee. Without meaning it to, her tone became mocking. "A boutonniere? You're talking about a boutonniere?"

  "A shamrock boutonniere. My grandfather's invention. Squire's the only other one who's ever made them. They're foolish things that only last a few hours. Even on St. Patrick's Day, they've never made it out of Charlestown. Amory said he bought it at the Ritz, which is ridiculous. Imagine, shit like that at the Ritz."

  "Not even the Ritz is the Ritz anymore. They might sell—"

  "If I'm right," he said coolly, "it means the money Amory is offering us isn't his. Nick would be a go-between. The money would be from the mob."

  He had never mentioned any of this to her; so much unmentioned between them. Their secrets about his brother—hers above all—had grown like tumors inside the body of their love. "Terry, just leave this alone. Why throw open a door into a place you don't want to go?"

  "That's what I'm telling you. The door opened in front of me, on its own, this morning."

  "Then close it." She had. He could. She turned and began to run. Her mind flew to the day two or three years ago when she had bumped into Didi at the new Neiman Marcus at Copley Place. Amid the gleaming brass and marble, Didi came up to her and said, "Mrs. Livingstone, I presume?" Joan was nonplused, and Didi used that against her. "You don't know who I am."

  "Of course I do."

  Each woman shifted her shopping bag to shake hands.

  Joan said, "How are you?"

  "Well. Very well. But you were going to call after Gramps's funeral. You never called. I called you, but you never answered me."

  "Didi, I'm sorry, but I—"

  "You don't have to explain. I know everything."

  Joan's heart sank She stared at Didi, who was still grinning. She wore a beige linen dress and a silk cravat; she looked like a restaurant hostess.

  "Everything?"

  "Why you won't see us. Why you won't let Terry near us."

  "Why?"

  "Because of Squire," Didi said with supreme matter-of-factness. "Because of what he does. You disapprove."

  "I disapprove?"

  "Yes. Of him. Of us."

  Joan backed away from her, blanching with relief. "I disapprove of you?" She began to laugh then, a release from panic, even as she turned and moved away as quickly as she could. "I'm late," she said. "I'm sorry, but I'm late." She'd almost broken into a run, thinking, She doesn't know. Didi doesn't know.

  Now she was running. Terry watched her leave the bridge and turn upriver, toward the business school. His gaze went ahead of her, to the classic stadium and the gabled Victorian boathouse. He saw the scullers in sweatshirts hauling their pencil-thin boat onto the dock, their workout over. The boathouse, the adjacent graceful bridge, the river itself, all glowed crimson in the setting sun, a Thomas Eakins scene so beautiful it hurt Doyle's eyes to look.

  Against the sunlight, framed by the arching brick bridge behind, he found the small, golden figure of his son. Max was still at that bench, resting his bike, but staring back hard, worried now at what had kept his parents. Doyle began running too, toward his son, letting the current of his love flow on ahead.

  ***

  Of all the rooms in the house, theirs was the one devoid of "touches," but pointedly so. The house had been built by Artemas Ward, one of George Washington's generals, and he'd made the second-floor parlor its grandest room. Joan and Terry had made it their bedroom.

  An enormously high ceiling crowned the full wall of windows, which were actually four sets of French doors opening onto a narrow wrought-iron balcony and overlooking the sweep of garden. The property was bordered by a ten-foot-high serpentine brick wall worthy of Monticello, and it gave the garden a perfect frame. The flower beds and shrubs were laid out around, and the ribbons of grass were centered on, a masterpiece oak. The tree had reputedly been planted by Ward, but it was known in this decade as Max's Ladder, because it so lent itself to climbing. Its branches undulated toward each corner of the garden, and reached high above the house toward the unbroken sky. When the wind brought its leaves forward, they brushed the glass of the bedroom windows with a gentle sound of wooing.

  The garden, the tree, the wall of windows—Joan had wanted nothing in the room that would detract from the world it gave them. That was why she'd had it done in white, entirely white. The carpet was white, as was the ornately trimmed mantel over the fireplace on the east wall. The pieces of Design Research furniture in one corner —Formica-topped bureau and writing table, canvas-backed chair—were white, and so was the large, unornamented platform bed against the west wall, with its Parsons table bedstands and architect's lamps. The pillows and linens and puffy down comforter were white. Joan's thought had been to create a vacuum in the room that would draw the color of the garden in. In the winter, black and gray and green, the skeletal oak against the pewter sky, rising from a carefully nurtured grid of boxwoods and sculpted spruce. In the spring, summer, and autumn, a movable feast, beds of rotating crops of annuals and perennials, all colors, but red and yellow especially, from the self-renewing roses which, to her surprise, had brought her husband to his knees in all weather, a gardener, rose grower, flower man at last.

  At night, even when they did not draw the blinds across—there was no question of lacking privacy, since no one had a view of their home—the garden outside ceased to exist Then the room became Shakerlike and austere. Except on moonlit nights, the pitch darkness outside clashed with the light inside, transforming the wall of windows into a black mirror in which Terry often watched his wife taking off her clothes. Floodlights on the ceiling splashed ovals on the walls that held nothing—a relief for Joan from the Fogg, where the walls were everything. The only exception in the bedroom was a barely lit, small oil painting over the mantel, a portrait of Joan holding Max when he was a baby. It had been commissioned by her father.

  Terry was at the window, using it for a mirror, fussing with his black tie. He said, "Ted asked us to come to Florida for Easter."

  Joan, in her slip, was sitting on the bed, putting on her stockings. They were dressing for a gala benefit at the symphony, the kind of thing they did two or three nights a week.

  "You saw Ted?"

  "At Ruggles today. Bright leaned on him, and he came."

  "Do you want to go?"

  "Not really. Florida. Ugh."

  "It's warm."

  "Do you know something, Joan?" Terry paused, then went on casually, as if caring nothing for this. "The economy of Florida makes more off drugs than agriculture, including citrus. Did you know that?"

  "No." Joan sat up. His back was to her. She waited for him to find her in the black glass
, but he didn't. "Why do you say that?"

  "It's interesting. That's all. If there were other kids Max's age..."

  "What do you mean?"

  "At Palm Beach. I wish Max could somehow..."

  "Know who the Kennedys were?"

  "I guess so. There." He patted his finished bow tie and turned toward her. "How do I look?"

  "Bond. James Bond."

  He watched as she hiked her slip to fasten the stocking to her garter. He saw her thighs, the flash of her underpants. Once such a move would have seemed provocative, but he knew, for her, there was no question of display. Her toned, brown arms and legs, her breasts, her perfect ankles—she took her sexiness for granted, but it could still stir him. Often, before dawn, they would turn wordlessly to each other and make love. It had come to say everything about their marriage that, at such moments, they said nothing. There too, as it were, Joan wore her headset Whatever the music of lovemaking was to her, she kept it to herself. For Terry, the moment of climax was always a moment of escape from what he hated in himself, and the truth was that he too experienced it as exquisitely isolating. A mutual solitude. Whenever he would look, her eyes would be closed.

  Joan stood and walked briskly to the bathroom, but she stopped in the doorway and looked back at him. "What is it?" she asked. "What's bothering you?"

  "Nothing."

  "As usual."

  "What does that mean?"

  "With you, Terry, it's always nothing. Nothing is what bothers you."

  "Look, Joan, I tried telling you before, and you wouldn't stop running."

  "I'm not running now."

  "Amory and my brother, that's what's bothering me. Okay?"

  "I've been thinking about it. Can't you just back out of the deal? Let Bright handle it."

  "Hammond is the developer. Not Commonwealth Bank. Me."

  "But if Blight's in charge of financing—"

  "Nick. I have to deal with Nick."

  "Leave him alone. Stay away from him."

  Terry shrugged. "He's my brother, Joan. He sent me a signal with the fucking shamrock."

  "He's no good."

  Terry stared at her. "After all these years of refusing to have anything to do with him, you finally put it into words."

  "Don't make it seem like the issue is my being a snob. I didn't notice you beating any path to Charlestown. Your brother is a bad man, and you know it."

  "How do you know it?"

  Joan just stood there, the curves of her body backlit by the bathroom glare.

  "Well?"

  "I know it," Joan said, "because of the effect he has on you."

  "Which means?"

  "Nothing. Never mind."

  "No, answer me. Please."

  "He makes you weak, Terry." Joan went into the bathroom and closed the door, hardly breathing. What she'd said was true, but only half true. Nick was the reason, also, that when she leaned close to the mirror, the eyes into which she looked were stone cold dead.

  ***

  At the glittering Symphony Hall reception, Joan and Terry moved through the crowd, drawing glances. They were one of Boston's golden couples, a new embodiment of the old Athenian ideal, Art and Commerce hand in hand.

  As Terry greeted his friends, the tuxedoed men who looked like less handsome versions of himself, he knew he was doing what, in this town, he was never meant to do. The bankers were there, the pols, the Brahmins, the Harvard rich. And when they saw him, their eyes flicked; each one hoped for a nod.

  "Hey, bro," a familiar voice said from behind. Terry turned. Bright, in his tuxedo, leaned across Terry to kiss Joan. "God, you are so lovely," he said, but as he did, he pulled into their circle the tall, thin woman who was with him, a brown-skinned model with a neck like Nefertiti, a face for launching ships, the most beautiful woman in the room. That Bright.

  While Joan and his date greeted each other, Bright, aware of the envy in the eyes of the men around them, leaned to Terry and whispered, "Don't you just fucking love this?"

  Terry nodded and laughed, but his feelings differed from those of Bright, for whom it seemed to matter not at all that choices they had made meant their women loved them most in settings like this.

  Terry wanted to say something like, You, buddy, with yet another bimbo; me with a wife I smite only in black tie. But he shook the feeling off in favor of the other thing, the triumph he and Bright had in common. "Fucking A, brother," he said, and he realized how much he did love it He was king of the hill in Boston now. If he felt hands on his ankles once again, hauling him down—that shamrock!—he knew that this time he would kick free no matter whose face he hit.

  He looked at his old friend's one eye: Except yours, he thought Then he looked at both of Joan's: No matter what you think of me.

  17

  THE MOVIE about Kennedy included scenes of his inauguration, spirals of snow gusting up a deserted Pennsylvania Avenue, the faces of Negro workers sweeping the stands, puffs of steam coming out of their mouths, then the president letting the word go forth. The camera moved in on him, a young man with no hat or overcoat, while behind him sat Eisenhower, bundled up like a nursing home porch-sitter. "The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage"—as the camera cut to flames shooting out of an oil drum, where an old black man was stooped over it for warmth, a transistor radio to his ear.

  The movie had been showing out here at the Kennedy Library for five or six years now, but he'd never seen it, and he was not prepared for his reaction. He'd always said he could take Kennedy or leave him, no big deal, but here he was, feeling tears come to his eyes as he watched the pictures flitting by: Kennedy in white tie and tails, with his piece-of-ass, bare-shouldered wife; Kennedy with binoculars, a missile breaking the surface of the ocean; bombers; black kids getting hit by cops; Kennedy on Cape Cod with his little girl, his sailboat; his speeches; Krushchev; the Berlin Wall; Lyndon Johnson and Air Force One.

  Squire was not ready for the freeze-frame shot of the shadow of that airplane, falling on the runway at what the narrator said was Dallas, like a grainy, out-of-focus crucifix, for Christ's sake. Kennedy was dead again, and the screen went blank, and silence thickened in the theater. He realized his cheeks were wet. Squire Doyle was not a mick who'd spent the past twenty years weeping over what was lost with JFK. He'd had no impulse, even, to come over here, the Kennedy Lourdes. It had surprised him when Mullen, saying the feds had agreed to his proposal, said also that this was where they wanted to meet.

  He did not like the feeling of being blindsided. As the lights came up, he was glad to be sitting alone, and now that it was over, the slick movie, frankly, made him angry.

  The tourist ladies were digging for their Kleenex packs. The men were blinking, adjusting their nylon-mesh baseball caps, hitching their beldess pants, feigning coughs. There were perhaps two hundred people in the theater. They got to their feet, a subdued group, shuffling sideways to the ends of their rows, into the aisles and filing out Squire remained where he was, in a seat in the middle of the fifth row, watching the others leave, feeling not at all superior. Americans, he thought We're all lost sheep.

  This was August 1983, eight months before Bright and Terry's Southwest Corridor Improvement Project kickoff. Also to the point, this was six months after a Washington meeting in an office on that same Pennsylvania Avenue at which the head of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, the chief of criminal investigations for the IRS, and the associate director of the FBI for drug enforcement agreed on a new strategy. Highly publicized street sweeps in cities across the country, in which tens of thousands of drug dealers were arrested, were having a more disruptive effect on the police and the courts than on the drug trade. The national net of secret electronic surveillance of Mafia meeting places was snagging well-known, ruthless, but only low- and mid-level gangsters. The real leaders of La Cosa Nostra had learned to insulate themselves even from their own operation
s. The FBI's extensive bugging and eavesdropping simply were not getting them. Like the massive border interdiction efforts of the 1970s, the switch in the early eighties to prosecutions based on RICO statutes was turning out not to be enough.

  But to the savvy longarms, an alternative strategy suggested itself, a bold reversal in which drugs were not targeted so much as the money drugs produced. Since the explosion of demand for product began a decade earlier, the drug trade had been generating many times more profits than criminal enterprise ever had before, annual amounts in the billions of dollars. That success was giving the otherwise immune heads of the crime organizations their biggest problem, and it gave law enforcement an unprecedented opportunity. The overlords kept their distance from street trade, but not from money. The whole point was money, and that was the key.

  Drug producers in Colombia and other countries, who controlled their governments and dominated their national economies, could impudently accumulate and spend vast quantities of tainted cash, but not so the distributors in the United States, with its regulated financial system. Vast drug profits were useless to Americans until they could somehow be made to appear legitimate. The days were past when a series of duffel-bag cash deposits into phony accounts at neighborhood banks would do, partly because a 1982 revision of the Bank Secrecy Act had tightened bank reporting obligations, and partly because the $10,000 deposit figure that triggered a bank's Currency Transaction Report fell so far short of the amounts the top drug traffickers now had to legitimize. Large city couriers—in the argot, "smurfs"—who brought such bundled cash to teller windows at numerous banks found themselves at it all the time, yet still failed to keep up with the cash flowing in. A new laundering system was needed. When Squire Doyle had positioned himself to provide it, he let Frank Tucci know, offering once again a service Tucci needed and could not otherwise obtain. Doyle knew that Tucci had never trusted him, but this time the prize would seem worth it And hadn't Doyle proved himself in all these years? All these years since Causeway Street? All these years, yes, since Kennedy? Kennedys don't get mad; he thought of Bobby and, to himself, he laughed. We get even. Frank Tucci was not the only one whom Squire Doyle had notified.