Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  Raymond Buckley was thin and, Dillon guessed from the reach of his bony legs under the table, taller than average. He wore a dark gray suit and an out-of-fashion celluloid collar that made the knot of his black tie ride high up on his gaunt neck. From where Dillon sat he could see a two-thirds profile of Buckley. Behind him the gray glass of a narrow window filtered the sunlight in such a way as to highlight something somber in the man. His pinched face, slicked hair and rimless eyeglasses gave him the prim look of a schoolteacher which contrasted sharply with his expansive manner. He had continued to eat his breakfast, cutting morsels of food with arch fastidiousness, but then plunging them into his mouth with sudden gusto. Dillon was seeing the man now in his contradictions, and he sensed how difficult it would be to penetrate to the truth of who he was. Buckley's highly mannered behavior was intended to satisfy the curiosity of onlookers while revealing nothing.

  When the waiter brought Dillon his coffee and toast, served prettily with fresh parsley sprigs, he touched the man's sleeve and pointed across the dining room. "Isn't that Harry Booth, the Union Transit man?"

  "Who, sir? The man in the corner?"

  "Yes."

  "Why, no, that's Mr. Buckley," the waiter said easily, without a trace of the fear with which Hanley and the other yarders spoke the name. Buckley was a big tipper, no doubt. In this realm he sauntered more than swaggered.

  "I took him for Booth because he seems to be interviewing those fellows. What's he hiring for?"

  "Oh, I don't think it's hiring. Mr. Buckley is an iron dealer."

  "An iron dealer? What's that?"

  "Used iron. Scrap iron."

  "You mean a junk dealer?" Dillon didn't even try to keep the surprise from his voice. He smiled blithely, like a harmlessly curious stockman.

  "He's very successful. A place like the stockyards moves a lot of iron. Anyway, most of his breakfast business is about the Democratic Party. He's also the ward committeeman here. He brought the mayor here for lunch last month."

  "Who, Mayor Kelly?"

  "None other." The waiter glanced toward Buckley. Furtively? "The party does a lot of business in this ward. He always has people who need to see him."

  I need to see him, is what Dillon wanted to say, but the waiter moved away.

  Should I be posing as a commission man, a buyer, a valve salesman? What if I was a lawyer for Swift and Company? Or for Lambert, Rowe. Dillon's mind stalled at that thought.

  If I did dare approach him, would it be with the direct set of my questions? Who was Michael Foley to you? What more than nickels and dimes? Why the brutality of how you killed him? What were you avenging? What could such a nobody possibly have done to you?

  Dillon turned back to the Trib, tugging uncomfortably at his tie. He felt the falsehood of his presence here, not only that he was pretending to be a member of this circle, but that he could never close the distance across this room, bridge the gulf of what he did not know. He sat hunched over his paper, moving nothing but his fingers which absently stroked the crisp linen tablecloth, aligned one ornate piece of silverware, pushed at his untouched plate of toast. He lifted his gaze to let it float around the bustling room. The breakfast trade was picking up as more and more of the hotel's guests—the real buyers and sellers, the real lawyers—presented themselves at the maître d's rostrum. The heavy mix of aromas—steak, leghorn eggs, fried potatoes—wafted off the platters on the trays of passing waiters, yet Dillon had no appetite. In truth, he could not imagine eating ever again.

  The futility of his thrust at Buckley struck him. Thrust? A flaccid wave of a hand was more like it. Raymond Buckley could ply his trade, a barely hidden system of loan sharking, influence peddling, protection and extortion, in this most opulent and open setting in Canaryville because, on this narrow but well-tended turf, he was invincible. Buckley had made himself essential not only to the petty hoodlums who ran the local gambling houses and brothels, but to respectable businessmen right up to the packinghouse bosses, and to the neighborhood police and magistrates who were on his payroll, and to the political big shots downtown who used him as the lever of their vise grip on the entire South Side. Dillon could see, as he and everyone else were intended to, the full reach of Buckley's power. What had ever made Dillon think he could take on this man? That he could penetrate the stockyards-wide collusion that protected him? That he could link, before the law, this dapper big shot with the grotesque pulpy mass found head-first in the blood pit?

  Was that only yesterday? No wonder he had no appetite.

  He stared at Buckley as his first question—What did you do to Foley?—gave way to a new one: What am I going to say to Cass Ryan when she asks me what we can do to you?

  A large man in a suit made of sheeny cloth approached Buckley from another table. Dillon leaned back casually, watching closely. The man's face had a bashed-in look, and Dillon recognized him as a famous boxer. A diamond flashed on the hand he held out. Raymond Buckley rose from his chair, waved his napkin in welcome, delighted to be so acknowledged by a genuine celebrity.

  This move gave Dillon a fresh view of Buckley as he swung around to shake the boxer's hand, and something new struck him. A bandage had been applied to Buckley's right ear, the ear which until now had been hidden from Dillon's view. The white cloth and tape covered the ear like a muff. A swimmer's infection? Such a mundane infirmity so contrasted with the impression Buckley had made on Dillon that it drew his absolute attention. But his curiosity about Buckley's ear faded as quickly as it had been aroused when the ward boss took his chair again and that side of his face once more disappeared.

  Dillon stayed for most of another half hour, watching as the string of cohorts continued unbroken. Buckley's lackey ushered them in and out efficiently.

  When Dillon stood, crushing his napkin onto his plate, he felt a wave of disgust at himself for not having seen an opening in the wall around Buckley. Thus, without having planned to, he touched the waiter's elbow as the waiter collected the check. "That man's iron company," he said.

  The waiter looked at him quizzically.

  "What's it called?"

  "Shamrock," the waiter said. "Shamrock Scrap Iron."

  "Where is it?"

  "Why don't you ask Mr. Buckley?"

  Dillon grinned. "I wouldn't want to trouble him, not yet." And now he winked. "I may have something for him later, though. And I'll tell him you sent me. What's your name?"

  "Malloy. Mick Malloy."

  "Good fellow, Mick." Dillon slapped his shoulder and started off, then stopped. "But where is it?"

  "South Bryant Avenue. Near the carshops. You'll see the sign. 'Shamrock Scrap Iron and Metal Company.' Big green sign."

  Dillon thanked the man, winked again and left the Sirloin Room under the steam of his fresh impulse. By the time he got to South Bryant Avenue he had already imagined what he would find there, a scene similar to the one he'd witnessed in the opulent restaurant. Everything on this sooty street was shoddy, of course, and the supplicants lined up outside the ramshackle office of Buckley's junkyard were not tavern owners or politicians but two-bit debtors whose elbows showed through their sleeves. But they were in a line of Buckley's, just like the others, even if here it took them to a table inside the office at which a mere collector sat. The office windows were clouded over, and as each man entered, the door was firmly shut behind him, so Dillon had no glimpse of the transactions inside. But he didn't need it.

  The waiting men reminded him of stunned cows in the slaughter chute. They were clutching bills or coins, not trusting their pockets with their puny weekly interest payments. Dillon saw the men for the grov-elers, drunks and losers they were, and in the fear in their faces he read the key to Buckley's success. In his unflinching willingness to squeeze even these husks, squeeze them ruthlessly, Buckley's power lay. These men would all know very well what had happened to Mike Foley the day before. They were the exact point, Dillon saw, of what had happened.

  The shadow of Buckley's presence overspr
ead the day, chilling Dillon despite the summer heat as he traveled downtown. He went to the law library intending to study for the torts exam, but in the dark reaches above the cone of light at his table, he kept seeing the images, in turn, of those stooped men, of the corpse in the blood sewer, of Cass Ryan's face looking up at him as if he could help. This was the first time in Dillon's life that he found himself unable to push through a tangle of emotions to the inner calm of his concentration. As the hours passed and the time of the makeup exam approached, he began to feel a mounting sense of panic. Rifling through his notes and books, he could not break his mind free. Eventually he succeeded in putting Mike Foley and Buckley aside, but that only enabled the stronger image of Cass Ryan to take over the entire field of his consciousness. Finally he surrendered to it, forgetting the exam.

  He put his head down on the table, closed his eyes and allowed himself to think of her. His mind came back to one scene in particular. She kept turning in place on that night sidewalk outside Walgreen's, her hair swirling across her perfect cheek, her legs shifting the weight of her perfect body, shifting it toward him. That picture of Cass, like a hypnotist's fixture, calmed him. The storm of what had followed his dashing after her that night— last night—simply went away. No woman's image had ever so soothed him before. He clung to it. Soon he felt strangely at peace. And then he was asleep.

  He woke up seven minutes before four o'clock, just time enough to get to Professor Corrigan's office. The professor wouldn't even look at him. He gestured toward the narrow table in a corner of the small room. The table was cleared of everything except a pencil and the examination booklet. Dillon sat and opened the booklet, marveling at how this scene differed from the classroom trauma the day before. Professor Corrigan pointedly buried himself in the tome on his desk. Dillon picked up the pencil and began to read the first question. Nothing else existed for him but breaches whereby persons acquire a right of action for damages. He took the test with the detached efficiency—the infallibility also—of a veteran sleepwalker.

  As he approached the Ryan house at dusk, his heart sank at the sight of the knot of men in front. They were the spillover from Michael Foley's wake, an informal throng, but the line of Buckley's supplicants was what Dillon thought of. How awkward his fellow yarders were in their collars and suits! They looked better when their elbows showed, he thought. He sensed in their uneasiness something else, however: the accuracy with which they'd registered the warning Mike's death was. This wake would not be raucous.

  Dillon drew closer and saw that the house itself was jammed with people, mostly women. These men would have dutifully passed in pious silence before their friend's casket, then eased out onto the porch and into the warm, twilit street for their smokes and furtively passed bottles. Dillon read their anxiety more accurately now, understanding that they thought they were risking something by coming to Foley's wake at all.

  As Dillon joined the cluster, a man in a green martial tunic and Sam Browne belt leapt at him. It was Hanley, and in tow behind him was another bedecked figure, although he was too stout to fully button his tunic, and the breast belt of his Sam Browne was extended with a piece of rope.

  "This is the doc," Hanley said urgently.

  The doctor, too, eyed Dillon with rampant worry.

  They drew away from the others. "We haven't told anybody," Hanley said.

  "Good, Jack. Told them what?"

  Hanley's eyebrows shot up as he deferred to the doctor.

  The doctor began a rambling report on what he'd found in the autop sy, and as Dillon listened he focused unprofitably on the man's half-drunken state, on his ludicrous Hibernian get-up, on the Celtic cross tattooed absurdly on his wrist.

  Suddenly, as if the doctor were aware of Dillon's perception, he stopped. Then, in clipped language he made the statement that enabled Dillon, in turn, to make the crucial connection.

  It came as an upward surge of recognition, a miracle of obviousness, the ground of a second mystery, but the absolute obliteration of the first. Doc Riley told Sean Dillon that in his examination of Michael Foley's corpse he had found lodged in the cavity of its thorax a half-dollar-sized, teeth-severed piece of what could only have been a human ear.

  Five

  Darkness. South Bryant Avenue in darkness. Sean Dillon walked rapidly along the rough edge of the street. Despite the designation "avenue," there was no question of curbs or sidewalks here, for this was a ragtag trucking district, and the unfriendly buildings were marked more by loading platforms than doorways. Dilapidated lorries and carts were parked at uneven angles, and Dillon had to cut between them, zigzagging, to stay in deep shadow. He was lugging a roll of cloth on his shoulder, like a cowboy's bedroll, and as he went first this way, then that, he had to keep an arm hooked on the roll to steady the thing. It was three o'clock in the morning. The warehouses and factories loomed over the deserted street like walls of a canyon. A faint mist hung in the air, what remained of a midnight rainfall, and Dillon had to hop occasionally to keep his feet dry.

  Two blocks away the grim walls on the left side of the street gave way to stockade fencing, and that clued Dillon. When he'd come here in daylight the broad gate had been wide open, but he had noticed the formidable wooden pickets and the strings of barbed wire topping them. Now the gate was closed, locked. He picked his spot, the midpoint between two barbed-wire stanchions, then stood below it in silence for a moment, to listen.

  In the distance were faint night-city sounds, but here on this street, and over the fence, inside the junkyard, nothing disturbed the night's tranquility.

  The wooden pickets were seven feet high, and the two strands of barbed wire added another foot above that. Dillon shrugged the cloth from his shoulder, a section of heavy canvas tarpaulin. He bent to refold the tarp into a thickness of four layers, a yard square, and in one swift, leaping movement hurled it up to the top of the fence. It fell across the wires like a horse blanket, and in clambering up the rough fence, hooking his leg over the barb-smothering tarp, he felt like the star of an Old West movie.

  In seconds he was over the fence and down.

  Once more he froze, listening. He was ready for a watchman, but who would steal this junk? The forms of the iron wreckage cluttering the yard—rods, engine blocks, automobile fenders, radiators—poked eerily through the mist. Nothing moved.

  The one-story building into which the line of coin-clutching supplicants had filed two mornings before was dark too. From his vantage now, it looked like a gas station shack. He made for it.

  Halfway there he heard a cough.

  He dropped behind the rusted hulk of a tractor motor.

  Someone coughed again.

  Not coughed. Only after the fact did Dillon recognize the sound of snoring.

  Again he heard a loud, satisfied snore, then the lip-smacking grunt of a happy sleeper.

  Dillon could still get away. He could retrace his steps to the fence and get up and over. Even if the sleeper woke up, he would never catch him. The smart thing would be to take off, now.

  But instead he came out of his hiding place and crept forward. Near the building, to the left of the door, was the form of a man prone on a low cot. Not a cot, but the upholstered backseat of a car, propped now in the open air between a pair of crates. Dillon ignored the voice in his head that warned him not to approach.

  The man was sound asleep on his stomach, his face turned aside, his arm hanging from the seat, his hand still clutching an empty bottle of hooch. Not asleep, but passed out. A pool of spittle had soaked the fabric by his mouth, and even now strings of drool blew in and out with each breath.

  Dillon bent over, ready to hit the man if he woke, but then saw the flash of metal on the man's collar, a small silver pin, the letters "C.P.D." At the sight of the uniform Dillon straightened. The man's hat was on the ground near his feet. Dillon picked it up, eyed the badge, then dropped it. "Christ," he muttered. The cop had a ring of keys on his belt, and a flashlight. Dillon took them both, thinking,
Someone must want me to succeed at this.

  At the door, even in the dark, it was a simple matter to find the key that opened the lock, and without thinking more about it than that, he went inside. Once in the shabby dark room Dillon realized he had no idea what to do next. The plan in his mind hadn't even taken him this far, and the fact that the passed-out cop's key ring had solved his largest problem only emphasized the absurdity of his having come here so unprepared. The outrageous violation of his act hit him, not violation of the law or of Buckley's code, but of his own history. When had he ever behaved so impulsively? To have come here equipped only with a piece of tarp seemed suddenly childish, a caper from the Keystone Kops. He could not have justified himself to anyone at that moment. What was his purpose here? What did he hope to find? His uncertainty now, after having so easily slipped past the watchman, sparked an unprecedented bolt of fear, as if the threshold he had just crossed had in fact brought him into a trap. Buckley's office a trap?

  He shook the thought off. The true threat—what could ensnare him—was the rampant set of his own feelings, utterly uncharacteristic, what had brought him here like this.

  Now what? To move into the room and against it? Or slip back out and be gone? He crossed to the oversized, littered desk; the movement itself was his choice, and it made everything obvious. He removed the top desk drawer and placed it on the floor, below the level of the window, so that he could use the flashlight without being seen. After examining the desk drawers, he would move to the cabinets that lined one wall. He had time, he told himself. The cop was dead asleep. There were no other hitches. Someone did want him to succeed at this. He was here to learn whatever secrets the room would give up to him. It does not matter, he told himself, if I don't know ahead of time what they will be.

  As he removed the second desk drawer, he froze again on instinct, to listen.