Ralph sat in the back of the squad car feeling totally shocked and detached. He heard sirens whooping as police and fire-trucks sped past them; he heard helicopters clamouring overhead. But it wasn’t long before they were driving past normal streets where normal people were walking and shopping and kids were skateboarding, and suddenly it was an ordinary summer morning in the suburbs of south Boston.
His .44 lay across his lap, no longer warm but smelling strongly of burned powder. John Minatello glanced at it once or twice, but made no attempt to take it away from him. Ralph said nothing, but watched the trees and the buildings and the traffic pass him by, all of it seen through the red gelatinous filter of Sergeant Riordan’s blood.
Matthew Monyatta was talking to a young single mother about her tenancy rights when the door of his office burst open.
‘Hold on just a minute, I’m busy here!’ he called out, raising his hand.
But his unexpected visitor wasn’t deterred. He rapped with his knuckles on the open door, said, ‘Sorry to butt in like this, Matthew ... but –’ and waited with an expectant face for Matthew to ask him what he wanted.
Matthew said, ‘This must be important, right?’
‘It’s important,’ nodded his visitor. ‘In fact, it’s critical.’
‘How long’s this going to take?’ asked Matthew.
His visitor made a face. ‘As long as it takes, I’m afraid.’
Matthew turned around to the young woman with the haunting almond-shaped Ethiopian face and the huge gold earrings and the red satin dress and said, ‘Elizabeth ... I’m sorry about this, but I’m going to ask you to excuse me for just a while. Don’t you worry ... you won’t be put out on the street. I won’t let that happen. You have the right to stay where you are; and you have the right not to be harassed. So don’t you worry. The Lord is with you; the law is with you; and so am I.’
The young woman took hold of his hand and squeezed it. She looked as if she would have been quite prepared to kneel down on the floor and kiss his feet. Then she rose from her chair, and without even looking at Matthew’s visitor, she left the room with a rustle of silken skirts.
The visitor came in and closed the door firmly behind him. He was a broad-shouldered white man with a florid face and wiry blond hair and eggshell eyes that stared just a little too widely, as f he were slightly unhinged. He was built like an old-fashioned wardrobe. He wore a loud check sports coat in mustard and blue and a poached-salmon shirt that was almost the same colour as his face.
‘Haven’t you heard the news?’ he asked Matthew, abruptly.
‘Of course I’ve heard the news,’ Matthew replied, tilting himself back in his chair, so that the springs squeaked. He was a lion-headed black man of fifty-five – handsome now that he was older, because his eyes had sunken a little and his cheekbones were more pronounced and his jaw had taken on a biblical sharpness. His hair was thick and very white. He was wearing a loose oatmeal-coloured djellaba, a hooded North African robe, which not only gave him the appearance of a prophet or a mystic, but which also concealed his considerable bulk. He wore three heavy gold rings on each hand.
The visitor sat down. He had been in this room before, so he was no longer intrigued by the prints that hung on the beige-painted walls: sand dunes and pyramids and strange stylized African faces with slanted eyes. Matthew Monyatta was the founder and president and chief guru of Boston’s Olduvai Black Consciousness Group. He had been a protégé of Malcolm X in the days of the Black Muslims, but after the shooting of his wife and children in 1973 in a bloody struggle between black political factions, he had become far less fanatical, far more interested in racial reconciliation, while at the same time trying to show that black civilization was as ancient and as deeply rooted as white.
Hence the name ‘Olduvai’, from the gorge in Tanzania where some of the earliest fossils of Homo erectus were discovered.
‘There’s a full-scale war going on down there,’ said the visitor.
‘Are you surprised, Mr Deputy Mayor?’ asked Matthew. ‘A white police officer shot and killed the three-month-old son of one of the ghetto’s greatest heroes. Four other black brothers also died, and one black sister. It was a massacre, right on our doorstep. And this was supposedly part of an exercise to catch a drug-running ring run by wealthy white Ivy Leaguers who never even drove down Seaver Street with the windows closed and the air-conditioning turned to “purify”.’
Kenneth Flynn pursed his lips tight and looked away. He had never liked Matthew Monyatta and he knew that he never would. He wasn’t racially prejudiced: one of his closest buddies at college had been black, and was now running for state treasurer. Kenneth just didn’t happen to like ethnicity, period. Irish ethnicity was just as bad as African ethnicity: they both added up to ugly handmade pottery and monotonous songs with a lot of amateurish harmonizing and dopey young people with sandals on their feet and stars in their eyes.
Meanwhile, down on Seaver Street, apartment blocks were burning and markets were being looted, and Hieronymus Bosch had come to town.
‘I talked to the mayor and the mayor asked me to come across to see you,’ said Kenneth.
‘Of course he did,’ said Matthew. ‘He sent you across to see me because you’re good at persuading people to do things they don’t want to do. And he wants me to go down to Seaver Street to tell all the black folks to stop rioting and looting and start acting peaceable because that’s what I’m good at. There are times, though, when I wonder what he’s good at.’
‘Delegating,’ said Kenneth. ‘He’s a great hands-on dele-gator.’
Matthew glanced up, and gave Kenneth a wry smile and a nod of the head. ‘This time, Mr Deputy Mayor, I’m not at all sure that I want to go. This is police business. This is an ambush that never should have happened, not on Seaver Street – even if it had gone right. If I go down there and raise my hands and say people, people, stop your rioting, stop your looting, don’t be angry no more the pigs didn’t mean it, what does that make me? An Uncle Tom? A traitor to my race? Or just an honorary pig?
‘Maybe I don’t see eye to eye with Fly Latomba, but I bleed for Fly Latomba’s shot-dead baby just like everyone else on Seaver Street, and I bleed for all those other lives that were lost this morning; and for those who have suffered; and for Boston, too.’
Kenneth ran his finger around inside his collar, and grimaced. ‘I really don’t need the rhetoric, Matthew. Unless you talk to these people, we’re looking at major bloodshed. This city’s going to burn, Matthew, and you’re the only person who can put out the flames.’
Matthew eased his 265lb bulk out of his armchair, which rock – squikked – rock – squikked two or three times, as if in relief. He came around his desk and stood over Kenneth like Mt Monyatta, blocking out the sunlight from the window. Around his neck there were six or seven strings of African beads and bronze discs and amulets fashioned from goat’s hair and copper wire and glass.
‘ “Can you lift up your voice to the clouds,” ‘ he quoted, ‘ “so that an abundance of water may cover you? Can you send forth lightings that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are?’ Do you know the ordinances of the heavens, or fix their rule over the earth?” ‘
Kenneth slowly raised his eyes until he was looking Matthew straight in the face. ‘ “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear,” ‘ he quoted back. ‘ “But now my eye sees Thee.” ‘
Matthew stared down at him for a very long time. Then he reached across his desk, picked up his portable telephone, and dropped it into the capacious pocket of his robe, along with his wallet and his car keys.
‘You’re a very clever man, Mr Deputy Mayor,’ he said. ‘You’d better direct me down to hell.’
Six
As he climbed out of the car, Michael could see the smoke rising from the Roxbury district, and he stood in the parking lot watching it for a while, and listening to the distant, muted wailing of sirens. Helicopters flackered overhead, circling the Combat Zone in a stilted
aerial dance, and then flackering away again.
The day was humid, with scarcely any breeze, and the air tasted coppery, like pennies. This morning’s forecast had warned of electric storms, with heavy rainfall.
Michael locked the car and walked across to the entrance of Boston Central Hospital, jangling his keys. He had driven up from New Seabury yesterday afternoon, and spent the night on Joe Garboden’s couch. This morning, he had turned up at Plymouth Insurance with a dull headache caused by the high atmospheric pressure, aided and abetted by the bottle of Maker’s Mark that he and Joe had finished off between them, to celebrate his return. He had officially been welcomed back to Plymouth Insurance, and handed the saddle-brown ring-binder marked O’BRIEN.
He had read most of the file over a solitary lunch at Clarke’s Saloon, opposite Faneuil Hall, cheeseburger and ice-cold Mick. He had wanted to bone up on all of the background before he talked face to face with Kevin Murray and Artur Rolbein, the two investigators who had been representing Plymouth’s interests up until now.
He was aware that they would probably resent his being brought in; Kevin Murray had done what he could, but the police and the coroner had supplied him with only the sketchiest information, and an FAA spokesperson had doggedly replied to all of his enquiries that ‘as of this time, we are not in the business of speculation.’
There was an interesting note in the file from Artur Rolbein. Rolbein had talked to the yacht owner who had paddled ashore in his dinghy after he had seen John O’Brien’s helicopter crashing on Nantasket Beach. He was a New York advertising director called Neal Masky who owned a small summer home at Cohasset.
‘Masky: After the helicopter hit the beach everything was incredibly quiet for quite a long while. I don’t know, three or four minutes at least. I tacked around and it was then that I saw a black or dark blue pick-up parked not too far away from the wreck. I wasn’t sure how it could have gotten there ... I hadn’t seen it drive up since the crash, although maybe I could have missed it because I was busy turning against the wind, and the helicopter was obstructing my view.
‘All the same ... I was so concerned about the people in that helicopter that I kept glancing over toward it to see if there was any sign of life, and I’m sure I would have noticed a truck approaching. I can’t really see how I could have missed it.
‘I can only assume that it was already parked there ... you know, before the helicopter crashed.
‘Rolbein: You said you saw somebody around the wreck. Somebody wearing a black coat.
‘Masky: That’s correct. I couldn’t give you any kind of detailed description, it was a very bulky coat. Well ... I’m not too sure that bulky is the right word. Maybe voluminous.
‘Rolbein: What was this person doing, as far as you could discern?
‘Masky: He or she had some kind of cutting machinery, some kind of cutting gear, the same kind the fire department uses in traffic accidents. I could hear the generator, and I saw him or her lifting up the cutters like a huge kind of metal crab-claw.
‘Rolbein: The Jaws of Life.
‘Masky: Is that what they call them? I don’t really know. They looked like a crab-claw to me.
‘Rolbein: Then you saw this person carrying something out of the wreck? Am I correct?
‘Masky: That’s correct, yes. I couldn’t hazard a guess as to what it was. I shouted but I was still too far away to make myself heard. I started to row harder, but of course when you’re rowing a dinghy you have your back toward your direction of travel, and the next thing I knew, I heard a huge whoomphing noise, and I felt a blast of heat on the back of my neck, and the whole damn helicopter was afire from end to end.
‘Rolbein: And you didn’t see where the pick-up went?
‘Masky: There was only one way it could have gone, back along Sagamore Head and then either north or south on Nantasket Road. North, of course, takes you to Hull and Stoney Beach and no further, unless you can catch the passenger-ferry.
‘Rolbein: But you didn’t see it?
‘Masky: No, sir. I didn’t see it.
Underneath this transcript, Rolbein had Biro’d a question to himself: ‘It’s conceivable that the pick-up could have been parked on Sagamore Head completely by chance and the driver taken advantage of the wreck to loot it. But the pick-up driver was carrying what appears to have been professional metal-cutting gear, Holmatro or similar – a fact which the police briefings to the press have all failed to mention (why?). The driver used this cutting gear to gain access to whatever he or she wanted. So he or she was not only at the right place at the right time, he or she was fully prepared for what must be regarded with a great deal of doubt as an accident. According to our computers, if anybody were to stand at any random point on the Massachusetts shoreline in the hope of having a helicopter crash nearby, the chances of it happening would be 87,234,000:1, and you could be standing there for 239,000 years without any luck. So let’s assume our pick-up driver must have known that the O’Brien helicopter was going to crash there. How? Unless it was crashed there on purpose? By a missile, so far unreported or undetected? By rifle or anti-aircraft fire? (Still wouldn’t make such an accurate crash-landing ... only a few feet short and it would have dropped straight into the sea.) By a suicide pilot? NB: Check the pilot’s personal medical records ... query ME’s report. Maybe he was suffering from a terminal disease but wanted his family to benefit from accident insurance. Remember Pan American Airlines vs. Roddick.’
Michael had thumbed through the rest of the binder but Rolbein’s meanderings were by far the most provocative thoughts in the whole file. He had called Rolbein and left a message on his answerphone, requesting a meeting within the next few days. Meanwhile, he was visiting Boston Central Hospital to meet Dr Raymond Moorpath, who had carried out the medical examination on the victims of the O’Brien helicopter crash at the specific request of Boston’s police commissioner, Homer T. Hudson.
Boston Central had once been a shabby, run-down metropolitan hospital, with junkies nodding in the corridors and blood in the toilets and alcoholics screaming on every floor. It had closed in 1981 for lack of funding, but six years later it had been taken over by a powerful consortium of financiers, property developers and wealthy doctors. Its redbrick Gothic grandeur had been restored. Every room was a luxury room. For those who could afford it, or who had adequately protected themselves with TAHPS or Bay State or Blue Cross, Boston Central offered state-of-the-art treatment for heart and vascular disease, diabetic complications, cancer, AIDS and transplantation. At Boston Central, you could have photopheresis to fight off your autoimmune disease, or neutron capture therapy to frizzle your brain tumour, or radio frequency catheter ablation to quell your irregular heartbeats.
Boston Central was the gilded temple of modern medicine, and Dr Raymond Moorpath was one of the most exalted of its priests.
Michael had to wait in the downstairs lobby for nearly fifteen minutes, pacing the shining mosaic floor and peering at the oil-paintings of eminent Boston doctors, and then sitting on a huge tan-coloured leather couch and flicking through leaflets for liposuction that offered ‘body contouring for a more desirable you ... we eliminate “saddle-bag” thighs, “protuberant” abdomen, “love handles”, redundant chins and enlarged male breasts.’
Her eyes glowing violet in the light from her desk lamp, the brunette receptionist with the dinky little mock-nurses’ cap suddenly leaned forward and said, ‘Mr Rearden? Dr Moorpath will see you now. Eighth floor, room 8202.’
The hospital was deeply carpeted in eau-de-Nil and smelled of hotels rather than hospitals. The walls were hung with hesitant, messy abstracts, which looked as if they had been painted by neurotics and purchased by Philistines. Michael passed a white-haired man in a wheelchair who stared at him wildly and demanded, ‘Are you Lloyd Bridges?’
He found Dr Moorpath playing golf in a huge, high-ceilinged corner office. The view through the windows was hazy and blurred, but only a few miles away Michael could see the ter
rible orange glittering of fire, and brown smoke rising thickly and lazily into the air, and helicopters hovering like dragonflies. None of this seemed to perturb Dr Moorpath, even if he had noticed it. Michael had the feeling that he would derive a certain amount of malicious enjoyment out it. Anything that the poor and underprivileged did to inflict yet more misery upon themselves was only further evidence of their stupidity, that was Dr Moorpath’s opinion. ‘Nobody has ever considered that they might actually enjoy being underprivileged. It gives them a sense of importance.’
The office was furnished in a style that was supposed to capture the grandeur and solidity of an English country house, with oak-panelled walls and a massive stone fireplace, and a leather-topped desk that was almost big enough to house one of the poor and underprivileged families that Dr Moorpath was always complaining about. On the opposite wall was a vast oil-painting of the Quorn Hunt, in England, a blaze of hunting-pink jackets and shining top hats and polished boots.
Dr Moorpath himself was gigantic, the kind of man who could overcrowd an elevator on his own. He had a big, jowly face and bushy black eyebrows, and his shiny raven-black hair was combed severely back from his forehead. The black of his hair was so intense that it must have been dyed: a crude and obvious vanity that was quite at odds with his complex personality, and which Michael had never been able to understand. Dr Moorpath was swathed in a very expensive maroon shawl-collared cardigan, and he was wearing baggy tan corduroys and Jesus sandals with dark green socks.
Dr Moorpath had graduated from Harvard Med with honours in pathology, and for two decades he had been one of the most dedicated medical examiners in the state. He had written the definitive book on forensic entomology, pinpointing the time and date of death by the development of flesh-flies within the body, The Life-Cycle of Sarcophaga Carnara in the Establishment of Time of Extinction — more usually referred to by medical students as Moorpath’s Flies.
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