Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  Despite himself, Buckley began to back away.

  But Dillon wasn't finished. He thought of it as flogging when he said, his voice at a whisper, "I owe Doc Riley as long as I live. I owe him you."

  "That's it," Buckley's lawyer said. Now when he took Buckley's arm to lead him around Dillon, Buckley did not resist. The lawyer said over his shoulder, "Not a chance, Mister."

  Dillon remembered Father Ferrick's claim to have a contact at Lambert, Rowe, and he realized he could be a lawyer like this man, professionally unintimidated by all that frightens clients, unoffended by all that clients do, regretful at what winning for clients may require. At Lambert, Rowe, Dillon would be a credit to Loyola, and he would be free of the yards, and his name would be John.

  Dillon was still a young man, but as he watched his first enemy moving down the corridor, supported by his high-class lawyer, he felt the impossibility of what he'd set for himself. He felt the impossibility of his own life again.

  "Mr. Dillon?"

  When he turned, he saw Buckley's thug behind him, the man from the street below Riley's room. Dillon tensed; now the blood would flow, but it would be cleaner.

  "You carried it as far as it goes here." The man held up a credentials folder, a badge.

  Sean looked at it, unable to grasp its meaning. "You're the FBI?"

  Light glinted off the small gold shield. Dillon stared at the thing. The blindfolded lady, Justice. But he couldn't make his mind function. When he looked in the man's face, he saw the tiny reflections in his eyes of all that was moving around them. He saw one moving spark in particular. Cass.

  Dillon perceived her approach, as he was perceiving everything suddenly, like someone in a trance, a survivor of a car wreck.

  "I'm Leo Fitzgerald, Miss Ryan." The man held his folder up for her, then put it in his pocket.

  Cass did not react.

  Facing back to Dillon, Fitzgerald spoke with the flat accent of a man from somewhere else. "I want to come right to the point."

  Dillon pressed his arm. "You were watching Riley! You must have—"

  "No, we weren't watching Riley."

  "But I saw—"

  "We were watching you."

  "Me!"

  "We picked you up the night you broke into Buckley's place. We know from Father Ferrick that you have the makings of a good lawyer. And now we know we have this case in common with you. Raymond Buckley has been near the top of our list for a while, but he is very careful to stay off the turf where our rules apply." When Fitzgerald paused, Dillon sensed that he was measuring him one last time. "We could use a patient, thoughtful lawyer who understands how it goes in Chicago."

  Cass interrupted, "He killed my uncle!"

  "We know he did. He has killed a lot of people. But you understand about jurisdiction—"

  "You don't have jurisdiction over murder?"

  "You just saw what happens in these courts." Fitzgerald looked at Dillon again, the one he wanted. "We have to get him into federal court, our court."

  "Why are you telling me this?"

  "Because you're inside, and we're not. We want you to join us." "I'm inside!" Dillon nearly laughed. But then he realized in what simple way it was true. His feeling had put him inside. And so had Cass. He glanced at her, but what he saw was a way, finally, to be the man he had told her he already was. "Will you?" Fitzgerald asked.

  Dillon heard the question as, Will you, for once, finish something? "Yes," he said, facing Fitzgerald, but he was speaking to her.

  Seven

  Poland fell. President Roosevelt immediately declared a so-called "limited national emergency," and limited was how most Chicagoans experienced it. The first shock of Hitler's aggression faded when several months passed in which the Nazi appetite for territory seemed sated. Newspaper wags began calling that period of lull the "phony war." Coughlinites wished Hitler well, and to them the disappointing German inaction was the "Sitzkrieg."

  Unlike the émigré professors in Hyde Park and the Anglophiles in Riverside, back-of-the-yards Chicagoans resumed their habit of paying little attention to that part of Europe east of Wicklow. The parishioners of St. Gabriel's were more anxious that year about how the White Sox would do without Luke Appling than they were about Hitler.

  In Washington during the same period, however, there was a profound if untouted urgency, as FDR maneuvered the fickle government into a state of readiness. And Washington, beginning after his taking the bar and completing his training, was where Sean Dillon was. He had joined the Bureau to be part of the move against the wily Chicago pols like Buckley. Especially Buckley. But the FBI war against the new breed political hoodlums was the real Sitzkrieg, as events in Europe forced the Bureau, too, to reorder priorities.

  The FBI training facility in rural Virginia was a sprawling complex of buildings, athletic fields and firing ranges deep inside the huge Quantico Marine Corps post. The sky boomed with the sound of ordnance as leatherneck gun crews drilled in the surrounding hills, while Bureau recruits put in hour after hour shooting at human-shaped targets and practicing live-ammo assaults against mock-up gangster hideouts. They were taught how to interrogate and how to interview, and they learned the latest in techniques of eavesdropping and surveillance. Dillon had never been much with his fists, but now he became adept at throwing opponents and pinning them. He qualified early on the pistol range, and in the classroom displayed the acute intelligence that had always marked him as a student. One hastily organized course emphasized the activities of the German-American Bund, and another laid out basic principles of cryptanalysis.

  The training lasted two months. By the time Dillon's class was presented with its agent's credentials and personal weapons, the men's morale was high. They felt ready, even, for war. And by then, war seemed imminent. That's why most of the new agents were assigned to Bureau headquarters or to the beefed-up D.C. field office, and at first Dillon was one of the few who did not see it as a privilege to remain in the nation's capital during a time of national emergency.

  It was in Sean's absence, and with a sharp sense of disappointment—almost betrayal—that Cass began going to see Father Ferrick at Loyola. Because Sean's letters described his duties only vaguely, they did little to help her share the powerful patriotic urge with which, finally, he threw himself into his work. Soon it wasn't only the war that was a distant abstraction to Cass; Sean himself was. But there was nothing abstract in the offense she felt as the months passed; as the missing Doc Riley never turned up; as rough grass grew over the oblong plot of her uncle's grave; as snow covered it. And as Raymond Buckley still went unchallenged.

  She looked less and less well to Father Ferrick. Her reports of sleeplessness and of night-long bouts of weeping filled him with inept worry. He was a teacher, even a lawyer, more than a priest, and her plight chastened him. His attachment to her grew, though; and that was what she needed—a father, an uncle. Often, instead of going home after work, Cass would go directly to the Jesuit residence at Loyola, not far from the Switchboards Building. She would curl up in the stiff chair by the parlor window while Father Ferrick sat in silence, watching the evening light softly fading until the shadows were as dark as the dresses she habitually wore. She would periodically start, as if recalling his presence, and then she would apologize for saying so little. But the priest considered their speechlessness his failure, not hers. They were enacting an all too familiar Irish melodrama, for he was, to himself if not to her, just another in the ever growing line of flawed men who'd let a good woman down.

  They had put Sean in that line, but too soon. In fact, his assignment at headquarters had been to the newly established office responsible for coordinating Bureau policy with war-readiness measures taken by other federal bodies, particularly Congress. All that year, unbeknownst to Cass or Father Ferrick—and, for that matter, to his superiors—Dillon was stalking Raymond Buckley through the thickets of the burgeoning Washington bureaucracy. The decisions arrived at, the directives issued and the laws passe
d, when taken together—and, owing to Roosevelt's discretion, few did take them together—represented the most massive expansion ever of federal jurisdiction over the lives of ordinary Americans.

  Over the life, therefore—and here was the core of Dillon's insight—of his own Buckley.

  Dillon had quickly recognized his advantage over gumshoe agents in Chicago. Even as a low-level neophyte, he was one of the first to see the implications for law enforcement of the new national situation, and that was never more true than the day after Hitler moved on Denmark, Norway and France. On that day, emergency legislation was introduced in Congress to call up the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. Through that summer, Congress debated the conscription bill and took testimony from many experts, including J. Edgar Hoover.

  Hoover was drawing on recommendations that Dillon himself had had a hand in shaping, and he succeeded in influencing the legislation in ways that matched the Bureau's own broad agenda. Now, for example, instead of waiting for bail jumpers or prison escapees to cross state lines, Hoover's agents could come into any unlawful-flight case on the wonderfully simple grounds that fugitives, by definition, fail to notify their draft boards of changes of address. The draft law would authorize the FBI to stop any male on any street and demand to see his registration card. Every American man between seventeen and forty-five was about to come under the personal authority of J. Edgar Hoover, and of those, Hoover had his special attention fixed on the big-city political hoods who had so successfully eluded him.

  Sparked to the idea by Dillon's office, Hoover argued that the bill's proposed penalties were too lenient. An unprecedented national conscription, he said, would work only if it was backed up with merciless sanctions. Anyone convicted of draft dodging or of abetting it should face up to, not two, as proposed, but ten years in federal prison. The minimum should be five. "This is the survival," he said, "of our beloved nation."

  The U.S. Congress, in its Selective Service and Training Act of September 16, 1940, set the general penalty for failure to comply at up to five years—not ten, but not two either. Hoover groused, but in fact the new law was his dream come true.

  Sean Dillon, for his part, wanted a stockyard cutter's knife with which to make his long-postponed thrust, but this law would have to do. Unlike his colleagues, he did not have an eye fixed on an entire class of criminals, but on one man alone.

  "Ecce Agnus Dei," Father Ferrick said, turning to face the scattered congregation and holding the host above the ciborium like a small torch. It was the early morning Mass at the Jesuit chapel at Loyola, a weekday in November. The chapel glowed eerily with its candles and votive lights. As the old dean recited the triple plea for mercy, the people on their knees, heads thrown toward him, thumped their breasts. "Domine non sum dignus," they repeated. His vestments swirled as he descended, and the communicants rose like a stirred undersea animal, a single creature now instead of urban hermits, curling to the bright rail like a tide. The click of their shoes on the linoleum was one of the eternal sounds of the church, like the swish of the confessional curtain, sounds which instead of breaking the peculiar silence of the religion, floated within it.

  Father Ferrick dispensed the wafers rapidly, moving along the row. Their beady, moist tongues were what he saw, not their faces, the old ladies in their hats, the shopkeepers on the way to work, the odd Loyola student, the nuns who smelled of soap. But Father Ferrick always noticed Cass. Unlike most of the communicants, she kept her eyes open when she received, a violation of the piety, but a welcome one to him. Her face, framed by the slanting thin visor of her hat, offered a tiny, warm greeting which slipped between the stones of the impersonal.

  The dean would remember that particular morning because of who else came to the rail: one of the last to do so, a scoured man in a dark suit, elbows just so at his waist, a stranger to the priest there, on his knees, with his tongue waiting. Sean.

  Does she know you're here? Even as Father Ferrick put the host on Dillon's tongue, he glanced toward the pew in which Cass always knelt, saw her bowed head. As Sean blessed himself, and stood and turned away, never having raised his eyes, the priest watched to see if she would notice. Sean moved down the side aisle to a place in the distant rear—the hard men always took pews near the door—but she never brought her face out of her hands.

  Father Ferrick's hesitation threw off the student serving as altar boy, who nearly bumped the priest when he didn't glide back across the sanctuary. Sean is back! He stood there watching the two of them, separated and unaware, aching that they should find each other. Sean is back, Cass! He wanted to cry out to her.

  Sean's eyes flashed in the dim light when, instead of burying them in the postcommunion depths, he looked across at Cass, knowing exactly where in the dark church she was. He's back for you!

  He waited for her on the steps of the chapel, and when she came out, eyes on her feet, belting her coat against the chill, he was afraid that she would pass without seeing him. He stepped into her path.

  "Sean!" She was as surprised as he was to hear the weight of harshness with which her voice had automatically loaded his name.

  "Cass," he said, but softly. He twirled his snap-brim awkwardly between his hands. He never used to wear a hat.

  "You're in Chicago?"

  "I just arrived. Literally. I took the Nighthawk. My train came in an hour ago. I came here hoping to see you."

  "How did you know to do that? I never used to come to daily Mass down here."

  "Father Ferrick told me."

  "You talk to him?"

  "In letters. He mentioned you."

  Cass turned half away, afraid for a moment of what Dillon knew, of what the priest had told him.

  "Your letters were nice," she said.

  He knew, if she didn't, how little of what he'd wanted to express had made it into those thin envelopes. "There's been a lot I've wanted to tell you, but I couldn't."

  "Why?"

  He looked away and said nothing. The air between them might have been the same blank paper he'd been unable to fill.

  He fell into step beside her as they began to walk up the crowded street toward La Salle and her office building. Now when Dillon spoke, it was with a certain impersonalness. "I came to you first, Cass, because I wanted to tell you what is going to happen with our friend."

  His words only made her want to go faster. What she regretted most about the way time had so undercut them was that, apparently, he thought her sole passion was the hatred she had for Buckley.

  "Would you stop a minute?" When she did, he added, "You're always walking away from me."

  "That's not true. For more than a year I've hardly taken a step, but how would you know?" She didn't care a damn suddenly if he saw how hurt she was. "You've been busy in Washington."

  "Right. And now I'm in Chicago, without knowing for how long. And the first thing I do is check my suitcase in a locker at the train station and come to you. What I have been doing in Washington is setting a trap for Raymond Buckley, and I thought you had a right to know about it before we laid it out in front of him."

  "I do want to know."

  "Then let's find a place where we can talk."

  "I can't now. I have to get to my job."

  "But I have to talk to you before I report in. The first order they'll give me is to talk to nobody. I've already said too much."

  Cass laughed harshly. "I know Raymond Buckley better than they do. How could they say something is secret about him from me? How could you?"

  "I didn't, Cass. That's why I'm here."

  "Then meet me after," she said coldly.

  "What time?"

  "Five o'clock. You're really going to get him?" With a rush of feeling she touched his arm. But the feeling was hatred.

  "Did you think I wouldn't?"

  She had to look away. Of course, that was what she thought.

  "I'm here for the homestretch and the finish, Cass. I've had my binoculars on Buckley the whole year. And now..." He shrug
ged. "Leo arranged my TDY."

  "Your what?"

  "Temporary duty. I won't be here for long." How to explain that he wasn't in charge of himself anymore, of a schedule of time that reflected his own priorities. Buckley, for one. This woman, for another.

  Her hand closed on his arm, pressing it hard, and her eyes sparkled as she said, "I have something of my own to tell you, a secret. That's another reason to wait until later."

  "Where should we meet? I can't come to the Switchboards."

  "But you'll be downtown?"

  "Yes."

  "Then Oak Street Beach."

  Dillon remembered that afternoon—was it really more than a year ago? At the lakeside, the scene of their youthful bottle collecting, their hearts had opened to each other for a moment.

  "At that pavilion," she added, "where the polka bands play."

  "Polkas?" Dillon laughed with a pleasure he hadn't felt in years. He saw himself cavorting on the margins of those summer concert crowds, one of a gang of Irish kids pretending to know the dance, jerking around the slatted floor, mocking the thick-legged Polacks, but also themselves.

  "We won't be dancing," Cass said.

  She should be here by now, he thought. He lit a cigarette, but even in cupping his match, he kept an eye scanning across the sweep of Lake Shore Drive to the buildings beyond. He stood alone in the shadow of the weathered pavilion. From the shabby look of the place, he guessed it was years since bands had really played there. He had not anticipated the lakefront's autumnal desolation.

  He had no way of knowing that Cass Ryan's impulse to meet there had come automatically because of the countless hours in the last year she had walked those boards, that sand, alone.