Senator

by Richard Bowker

  They love me in Southie just the same. I may be a Republican, but I speak their language.

  Tonight, though, I wished I could be invisible. I had no desire to mingle with the natives. Above all, I had no desire to be seen with Jackie Scanlon.

  When I reached my destination, I parked the car next to a fire hydrant, the only empty space on the street. And then I waited in the growing darkness. He had video cameras, I knew, trained on the street, to give him advance notice of unwelcome visitors. I hoped he wouldn't be long.

  It was a street crowded with three-deckers, most painted an identical chocolate brown with yellow trim. On the second-floor porch of one, an old man in a sleeveless undershirt was smoking a cigarette, the orange glow of its tip moving metronomically to his mouth and away again. A fat woman walked past, pushing a stroller in which a red-headed toddler lolled. She had the ageless look of the obese; I couldn't tell if she was the mother or the grandmother. A man wearing a bowling jacket and a Red Sox cap came out of the first floor of a house across the street and headed toward me. I opened the passenger-side door. He got in.

  "Hiya, Jim."

  "Hello, Jackie."

  "Just start driving, Jim. Gotta make sure we're not bein' followed. I'll tell you when to turn."

  He was gray-haired, with bushy sideburns and enormous eyebrows that met in the middle. He had a square face and a stocky build that was starting to go to fat. His hands were thick and callused. He smelled of cheap after-shave. He looked like the foreman of a construction crew or maybe an off-duty cop.

  He was anything but.

  I started driving.

  * * *

  My conscience is clear.

  Every time I think about Jackie Scanlon, my next thought is: My conscience is clear. That says something altogether different about the state of my conscience, doesn't it?

  And yet, damn it, would my conscience be any better off if I had acted differently?

  All right. I'll tell it to this computer that just sits in front of me like a shrink—silent, except for the humming of its fans. It's so quiet in this room that often the humming is the only noise I hear. If I explain what happened clearly enough to the computer, then I'll understand.

  Right?

  * * *

  I was a better attorney general than I was a defense lawyer. Many people have called me the best attorney general in a generation. For the first time my heart was really in my work. I hired a bunch of bright, energetic young lawyers and let them do their jobs. What I said in my ads was not exaggerated. We protected the consumer against powerful business interests. We uncovered corruption at all levels of state government and put some influential politicians behind bars, including Tom Donato, the president of the state senate and Kevin's bête noire. We never backed down. I was a shoo-in for reelection, and people were urging me to aim higher. The incumbent senator was planning to retire. Who would make a better candidate to succeed him?

  Meanwhile, my brother was struggling to survive.

  It was more than an economic struggle. Oh, sure, he had to keep Danny Boy's afloat; he had to find a way to pay the mortgage and the orthodontist and the liquor wholesalers and the Sears charge. But he also had to find a way to keep his self-respect as the years went by and his life went nowhere.

  It was in those years that the envy started to surface. For a long time my road was just too different from his for him to take much notice of me. But when my name started showing up in the paper all the time, when my face became a fixture on the local news, when people started asking Danny if he was Jim O'Connor's brother, it began to hurt. Then he began to refer to me as the General; then he began making cracks about my politics and my ambition. Did the General send anyone to the electric chair today? Has the General written his inaugural address yet?

  And it was then that he turned into a barroom Irish patriot. A lot of Irish immigrants, legal and otherwise, came into Danny Boy's, and they brought with them their tales of hardship and injustice, their grudges ancient and new, their boozy memories of the auld sod. Like Kevin, Danny needed a cause to believe in. These men gave it to him; they gave him an identity.

  We're Irish, but our father was not the kind to make a big deal of it. We didn't have "Honk If You're Irish" bumper stickers or "May the road rise up to meet you" wall plaques or "Erin Go Bragh" beer mugs. We never went to the parade in Southie on St. Patrick's Day. "I've got better things to do than stand around in the cold and have some drunken mick puke on my shoes," my father would say. He never visited Ireland and seemed uninterested in the problems of the Six Counties. He raised us to think of ourselves as Americans.

  But Gramma, our mother's mother, was different. She was born in the old country and never really adjusted to America. She would talk endlessly about the morning mists on the green mountains, the flocks of sheep crossing the narrow roads, the thatched cottage where she grew up, the simple life close to both God and the earth. My father would interpose cynical remarks now and then, but she ignored him. He wouldn't understand, she thought, but his children would.

  I never did. I thought my father always made perfect sense. If Ireland is such a great place, then why can't anyone stand to live there? If the Irish would put as much energy into economic development as they do into complaining and looking for other people to blame, then they'd have a lot less to complain about.

  Well, that's not very charitable—and certainly not something I'd ever say in public. If anyone else said such a thing, I'd feel obliged to boil over with righteous indignation. But that's the way I feel; Republicans aren't romantics.

  Danny is a romantic, however. And the Irishmen he listened to in his bar started him dreaming of intrigue, of heroic deeds, of liberation and redemption.

  At first he didn't do much more than pass the hat for NORAID on St. Patrick's Day; a few dollars for the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army from their brethren, safe and sound in the new country. He also helped the occasional illegal when one of them came his way—a Provo gunman who found things too hot in Northern Ireland, perhaps, and needed a place to stay in Boston for a while before disappearing once again. At any rate he made a few contacts in the IRA, and he found himself on the fringes of a war that had been going on for hundreds of years and will probably continue for that much longer.

  And then Tom Glenn came back into his life.

  He had been a buddy of Danny's in the Navy. I never met the man, so I have no idea what he looks like. But I have a clear image of his personality. He is a lot like Danny, it seems to me: fast-talking, friendly, sincere, not entirely scrupulous, but you are willing to forgive him because he is so sincere about his unscrupulousness.

  A lot like Danny, only a lot smarter.

  Glenn appeared in Danny Boy's one night, and it was a wonderful reunion. The whiskey flowed, and so did the memories of their Navy high jinks. Remember the time we got away with this? And what about the time we pulled that? Ah, those were the days.

  Finally Glenn told Danny why he had come.

  He had weapons. Oh, he didn't exactly have them, but he knew a guy in the Army who had access to them, and this guy needed money bad. The Army was all fucked up, and stealing the weapons was as easy as changing a few numbers in a computer and backing up a truck to a loading dock. But this guy had some scruples; he didn't want to sell the guns to drug dealers or terrorists or the mob. So the guy started thinking: Maybe the IRA would be interested. Now there was a good cause that could use some weapons. But how could he get in touch with the IRA? The guy talked to Glenn, and Glenn thought of Danny.

  Was Danny interested in helping? Glenn wanted to know. There'd be something in it for him if the deal went through.

  Danny was more than interested. This was the chance of a lifetime. He could help the cause he believed in so fervently and help himself as well. The General wasn't the only one in the family who could be a success.

  Danny introduced Glenn to his IRA contacts. They were naturally suspicious. They had been burned too often
by government agents to trust this glib stranger, even though Danny vouched for him.

  They were suspicious but tempted; weapons were hard to come by. They finally agreed to a trial run. They would buy a small shipment of arms from Glenn. If everything seemed okay, they would come back to him for more. And Danny was to serve on the crew that would ship the weapons across the Atlantic to Ireland. Danny was overjoyed at this. He was an old sailor; his experience would be invaluable to the cause. I don't think it occurred to him that the Provos might have wanted him around as a kind of hostage, in case he was thinking of cheating them.

  At any rate, they bought a ship called the Sea-Star and outfitted it as if it were going to be doing some swordfishing off the Grand Banks. They made a down payment to Glenn, with the rest to be paid on delivery. And they waited nervously for Glenn to deliver.

  He did: a couple of vanfuls of weapons, mostly M16's with their serial numbers carefully filed off, along with a few thousand rounds of ammunition. They paid Glenn the rest of his money, loaded the weapons onto the Sea-Star, and several of them took off early in the morning from a pier in South Boston.

  Danny had told Melissa he was going on a fishing trip with some people who might be interested in investing in his bar. She didn't believe him, but she couldn't stop him, and wasn't sure she wanted to. He seemed happy for once, full of energy and purpose. She was willing to live with lies if the lies would somehow help make their lives better.

  The Sea-Star made the crossing without incident and met up with an IRA vessel about a hundred miles off the west coast of Ireland. Danny and the rest of the crew transferred the weapons on the open sea, and the other ship disappeared into the fog with its deadly cargo. Success.

  The Sea-Star returned to Boston safe and sound. The Boston Provos were ecstatic. Nothing had gone wrong in Ireland, they informed the crew; the weapons had made it. This was apparently the first successful shipment of arms from North America to the IRA. Get hold of Tom Glenn, they told Danny. Let's do it again.

  Danny was happy to oblige. Negotiations were more complicated this time. The Provos wanted as many weapons as they could get their hands on. That increased the risk, Glenn pointed out. It would cost a lot more, and he would need a higher percentage up front. The Provos finally agreed to his demands. He had come through for them once, after all. They would trust him to come through again.

  They made a down payment of four hundred thousand dollars. Not a huge amount in some criminal circles, but for the IRA it represented a lot of hats passed on St. Patrick's Day, a lot of rural banks robbed back in Ireland, a lot of secret contributions from wealthy Irish-Americans seeking to soothe consciences made guilty by success. But the Provos figured it was worth it. If they could buy that many weapons, for the first time they would have an arsenal capable of inflicting real damage on the British forces occupying their land.

  They rounded up the cash and gave the down payment to Danny, who delivered it to Glenn. "I'll get back to you as soon as I can," Danny's old friend said as he walked out of the back room of the bar lugging the suitcase full of cash.

  He got into his car and drove away, and they never saw him again.

  This seems utterly predictable in hindsight, of course. One more fiasco for the IRA, which makes a habit of shooting itself in the foot. One more disappointment for Danny to add to his list. Oh, but this time it was supposed to be different! Danny's cut would have come out of the final payment, and it would have been enough to pay off the note on his bar. At last things would start to improve for him.

  Instead things got considerably worse. As the days passed with no word from Glenn, the Provos began to freak out. This was a catastrophe, and it was Danny's fault—or, worse, it was Danny's idea. After all, Glenn was Danny's friend. What if they had agreed to split the money somewhere down the road, after the furor subsided? The Provos wanted their four hundred thousand dollars back. They wanted it from Danny. He tried to explain to them. He was as devastated by this as they were. He didn't have any money: Look at how he lived; look at his bank statements; look at the nasty letters from his creditors. The Provos weren't interested. This is war, they said. You know what the penalty for treason is. They beat him up—just a little, just enough to show him what his real punishment would be like. They gave him a week to come up with either the weapons or the money.

  So what could Danny do? Ask me for the money? He'd rather have died. Besides, I didn't have it. I was a public servant now; no more six-figure incomes for me. Run away? He wouldn't know where to go. He wouldn't know what to tell his family. Find Glenn? But Glenn could be anywhere. Ask the police for protection? Sure, and explain that he was an international arms smuggler; they'd be very interested in that. Suicide? No, I don't think Danny considered suicide. He's not the type.

  Danny had no options, it seemed.

  Ah, but as Danny pondered his plight and cursed his fate, an angel of mercy was preparing to descend. The angel's name was Jackie Scanlon.

  Back then Jackie was the fourth-or fifth-biggest mobster in New England, with most of the non-Mafia crime in South Boston under his control. If you expected to do any drug selling or book-making or prostitution in Southie, you had to be prepared to deal with Jackie's organization. Jackie had his contacts among the Provos, and it stood to reason that before long he would hear about how they had been double-crossed. And so he paid Danny a visit. "I heard you got a problem," he said. "I'm here to offer a solution."

  The solution was simple. Jackie would pay the Provos their money. In return all he wanted from Danny was a signed statement admitting his gun-smuggling activities on behalf of the IRA.

  Danny is far from stupid. He understood what Jackie was up to. But he also knew that he had no choice. His life was at stake. He agreed. They worked on the statement then and there. Jackie handed the money over to the Provos a couple of days later, and Danny signed the statement. He was safe.

  He then came to see me and explained what had happened. He was drunk; he was frightened; he was contrite. He begged my forgiveness. He said he'd understand if I didn't help him out. He didn't mind going to prison; he probably deserved to go to prison. But Melissa. The kids. Dad. It would be so hard on everyone. If I could see my way clear...

  I threw him out of the house. He was lucky I didn't kill him.

  The next day I got a call from Scanlon. It was brief and polite. Would I like to meet him on a matter of some urgency? We agreed on a place and time. And that was how Jackie Scanlon came into my life.

  Neither of us wanted to be seen with the other, and Scanlon was terrified of being bugged—with good reason. So we set up a meeting in the parking lot of the South Shore Plaza in Braintree early on a Sunday morning. He pulled up next to me in the deserted lot and motioned for me to get into his car. It was a Ford Crown Victoria, the kind all the police departments use for their cruisers. I got in. He offered his hand; I ignored it.

  His appearance did not impress. But I knew scum like him. A lot of street smarts can be hidden behind a construction worker's face.

  "I wonder if you'd mind if I searched you, sir," he said.

  "I'm clean," I replied. I didn't like the way he called me sir.

  "You can't be too careful in my business," Scanlon said. He waited. I shrugged and raised my arms. He patted me down, feeling for a transmitter. "Thank you, sir," he said when he was satisfied. I wondered if I should search him, but I figured the transmitter could be anywhere in the car if he wanted to record the conversation. So I didn't bother. Scanlon leaned back in his seat. "I guess you know what this is all about."

  "Not really. The feds are the people you have to be concerned with."

  "Sure, but they gotta let you know about things. They gotta have everyone cooperating, make sure you're not stepping on each other's toes. I hear they're planning a big offensive against me. Well, I'd like to find out something about it, naturally. In case it hurts my business."

  "Naturally. You think you can blackmail me with a piece of paper my brother is
supposed to have signed."

  "Well, no, I agree that's pretty flimsy. I like to be more thorough than that." He opened a beat-up briefcase. "Maybe you'd like to take a look at these pictures. And I got this tape, too. I can play it for you if you want."

  They were photographs of the guns being loaded onto the Sea-Star. Danny's face was recognizable in the gray light. Scanlon slid the tape into the cassette deck. A babble of voices discussing payment, the weapons, weather conditions for the voyage. Danny had as much to say as anyone; he loved being an expert. He sounded like an old hand at arms smuggling.

  "See, they made the mistake of leaving from Southie," Scanlon explained when he stopped the tape. "Nothing goes on in Southie without me knowing about it."

  I handed the photographs back to him. "Voters are smarter than you give them credit for," I said. "They won't necessarily hold a candidate accountable for the sins of his brother. Nobody has a perfect family. Danny's willing to go to prison for this. So why shouldn't he?"

  "I dunno," Scanlon said. "I only know, if it was my brother, I'd help him out. Don't you love your brother?"

  "Politics is a business. Would you help him out if it hurt your business?"

  "Sure I would. Only a jerk wouldn't help his brother."

  "I could have you arrested for attempted bribery," I pointed out. "I bet the feds would agree not to prosecute Danny if he testified against you."

  "And maybe at the trial I testify that you were the one doin' the bribing. You told me to fork over the four hundred grand to your brother in return for you goin' easy on my operations. I refuse to do it, and you turn me in to the feds."

  "No one would believe that."

  Scanlon shook his head. "You really do have a lotta faith in the voters. I don't know what they'll believe, but I figure it'll all end up sounding awful messy, and maybe the Republicans won't be quite so eager to make you their candidate for senator."

  We sat in silence for a while as I tried to think it through. And then Scanlon said, "Listen, I gotta get back home or I'll be late for mass. I'll give you a few days to make up your mind. I'll be in touch." Scanlon held out his hand once again; again I ignored it. I got out of the car, and he drove off. He'd be home in time for the ten-thirty at Gate of Heaven, I figured. I got back into my car and sat in the parking lot for a long time before returning home.