Dark Horse

by Rory Flynn

  They walk farther into the house, feeling a coven-y and cult-y vibe that’s setting off Harkness’s alarms.

  Oil lamps and candles burn on the floor. In the distance wanderers huddle around a wood stove jammed in the center the living room and vented out a window via a long aluminum duct.

  “Here’s where that duct thingy came from.” Candace points to the ceiling, where the drywall’s been ripped apart to reveal the house’s raw workings, clumps of wires and dark hollows. “They completely fucked up the house, Eddy.”

  Harkness wonders if Jennet actually encouraged the destruction. “Why’s it so dark in here?”

  “They turned off the electricity and the heat and now they’re burning furniture and branches.”

  Candace and Harkness walk closer to the huddle of people. They’re wearing so many down jackets and overcoats that Harkness can’t even tell if they’re women or men, young or old. They’re just ash-colored figures bumbling around like alt-zombies in the smoke-thick light.

  “All right, Boston Police,” Harkness shouts, holding up his badge. “Who’s in charge here?” His voice echoes through the empty living room. Not much furniture left, just a couple of futons on the floor, stacks of cardboard boxes, and a bunch of beat-up bicycles. Whatever Candace didn’t clear out after her father died found its way into the wanderers’ wood stove.

  “No one’s, like, in charge,” someone mutters. A low wave of laughter rises at the stodgy concept of order.

  A shorter wanderer in thick-lensed round glasses walks up to them. “What’s up, dudes?” he says in a quiet, California-inflected voice.

  “Looks like you guys did a little home renovation,” Harkness says.

  He shrugs. “The place was like totally energy-inefficient. Forty-eight windows, most of ’em facing north. Figured we’d take it off the grid.”

  “Off the grid!” Candace’s hands are on her hips and she’s stalking around kicking at piles of trash. “That’s not up to you, fucktard.”

  Harkness gives her the chill-out look and turns back to the pocket-sized wanderer.

  “That’s a decision the homeowner gets to make.”

  “Actually, that’s not the case.” The wanderer goes over to a stack of books by a shelf marked WANDERER LIBRARY and pulls out a photocopy. “The billeting bylaw allows for, and I quote, ‘any reasonable alternations necessary to allow the comfortable habitation of the premises.’ ”

  Candace makes a strangled noise and kicks over a stack of cans.

  Harkness points to Candace. “Look, the homeowner here generously handed over the keys to her house, the one you’re trashing. And as you can probably tell, she’s not happy with what you’re doing. So keep the so-called alternations to a minimum and don’t burn the place down. That’s really the only fair and civilized way to act, right? No matter what the bylaw says.”

  The wanderer backs off. “Okay, man. We’ll do what we can.”

  Harkness and Candace turn, anxious to get back to May, and walk to the front door, windows on either side covered with burlap.

  Candace reaches up to tug on the fabric. “They just nailed it into the wall,” she says. “Dad would shit.”

  “You always hated this house,” Harkness says. “Don’t forget, you handed over the keys, remember?”

  “So I made a mistake,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean other people get to wreck it. It’s going to cost thousands of dollars to fix.” She wipes her eyes. “Like we have that kind of money.”

  Behind them, someone starts playing a plaintive, minor-key folk song on a ukulele.

  “Let’s get out of here, Eddy,” Candace says.

  “But they’re playing our song.”

  “Not funny.”

  As they step outside into the cold, Harkness takes off his jacket and wraps it around Candace.

  “Regretting that yes vote, aren’t you?”

  “Completely,” she says.

  “Well, you get another shot at it.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a special town meeting in January,” he says. “The American Landowner people rallied enough NIMBY Nagogians to get a new vote.”

  “This time, those smelly woven people are out of here,” Candace says, her breath steaming in the cold.

  “So where are they supposed to go?” Harkness asks.

  Candace shakes her head. “Not my problem.” She holds her hands up in the cold air and shakes them. “They can wander somewhere else.”

  They’re back in the Chevy, May still fast asleep, when one of the wanderers steps gingerly up the walkway. He’s shoeless, bearded, and wearing a flannel shirt and grease-slick overalls that could fit two of him. He looks faux Amish or like he ought to be plucking banjo in an alt-country band.

  He holds out the untouched turkey platter.

  Candace rolls down her window.

  “We’re vegan,” he says.

  28

  “YOU KNOW THE origins of Albrecht Square, don’t you?”

  “No sir, I don’t.” Harkness does but feigns ignorance to keep Robert Fayerwether IV talking. He’s sitting in a leather armchair in the library of the St. Pancras Club—more exclusive than Cedar, Union, or St. Botolph, but nearly empty on a cold mid-December afternoon.

  “Well!” Fayerwether holds up his long-fingered hand, palm out, to put Harkness on pause as he focuses on his glass of port. His thin lips busily suck up the sweet wine. Then he bends into his latest lecture, his white hair tumbling forward. “We start during the great wave of German immigration, the 1860s. Sigmar Stark leaves his ancestral home of Nuremberg and quickly becomes a rich man buying and selling land in Boston. The crowning achievement of his life is to create a model neighborhood, the Lower South End, completed in 1876 for the centennial.”

  Harkness listens as the lecture marches into the twentieth century. Instead of his uniform, he’s wearing one of his father’s light brown Harris tweed jackets, black wool pants, and a pale blue–striped Brooks Brothers shirt with a dark blue tie. He started with a shiny black one but Candace nixed it, calling it too cop-like. Tweedy and nerdy, thanks to tortoiseshell reading glasses from the drugstore, Harkness looks like he might be the young director of a nonprofit foundation or an unusually buff historian.

  “Does Albrecht Square have anything to do with Albrecht Dürer?” Harkness asks during a lull. He knows that it does—so does anyone who can type and use the Internet.

  Fayerwether wags his finger. “Yes, exactly,” he says. “I do like it when public servants know their city’s history.”

  Harkness says nothing. They’ve already bonded over Harvard and now, history.

  “Stark had a lifelong obsession with Dürer, who came from his hometown. More specifically, he was fascinated by Melencolia I, an engraving from 1514. And he wasn’t the only one—it’s one of the most well-known prints in the world. Hold on a moment, I’m sure there’s a copy of it here somewhere.

  “Wheeler!” Fayerwether calls out, and a broom-thin man wearing a black suit and bow tie sweeps into the room. He pauses before Fayerwether and bends down in supplication. “Yes, sir?”

  Fayerwether points to the upper reaches of the library shelves, and his manservant beetles around the library, climbing wobbly bookshelf ladders to extract dusty volumes.

  Harkness musters up some artspeak he read on Wikipedia. “The engraving is about the overriding order of the universe or something like that, yes?”

  “In a way,” Fayerwether says, smiling as Wheeler pulls out a thick tome, triumphant. “Yes, that’s it.”

  Fayerwether takes the book from its finder without a word of thanks, thumbs through it, and flops it open. “As you can see, there’s a main winged figure of a genius in the foreground, a grounded angel as it were, surrounded by the unused equipment of reason—an empty scale, an hourglass. And it’s saying that you have to use what’s available to you to bring order to the inherent chaos of your mind as well as the world around you. Order in the midst of chaos—it was a messag
e that appealed to Stark as an . . . urban-planning visionary.” He looks across the empty drawing room at the windows facing Commonwealth Avenue when he utters the last words.

  Even from his brief time with Fayerwether, Harkness can tell that he’d like to be called an urban-planning visionary, that when he looks in the mirror in the morning he sees a winged genius.

  Their conversation lags and Harkness stretches out his arm casually to let the sleeve of his Harris tweed jacket ride up and reveal an elegant 1960s Rolex with a simple steel case and black leather band. Harkness saw a similar watch on Fayerwether’s wrist in a Globe photo of last month’s Urban Redevelopment Council meeting. Gus “the Chemist” Donovan, drug dealer turned jeweler, is renting Harkness the Rolex for fifty dollars a day.

  Fayerwether’s owlish eyebrows rise when he spots the watch. It takes only a few shared connections—same college, city, watch—to build trust.

  Harkness points to the four-by-four grid of numbers on the print. “Those numbered squares are on the clock tower in Albrecht Square, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, it’s there to remind all passersby of the order of pure reason, no matter what’s happening on the streets,” Fayerwether says. “See the date at the bottom—1514? All the rows and quadrants add up to thirty-four. It’s a mathematical oddity called the magic square. Like sudoku before there was such an abomination.” He reaches out and closes the book firmly. “But enough about history, Officer . . .”

  “Harkness,” he says.

  Fayerwether turns his head and narrows his eyes slightly, as if reading the fine print of Harkness’s life. “Any relation to a rascal named Red Harkness?”

  Harkness nods slowly, prepares to get thrown out of the St. Pancras Club. “He was my father.”

  “You don’t look much like him,” Fayerwether says. “Or act like him.”

  “That’s true.” And for a good reason, Harkness thinks.

  “I remember your father sitting in this very room, decades ago.”

  “Really?” Harkness remembers his father had a drinking hidey-hole he called “the club,” but he had no idea it was the St. Pancras.

  Fayerwether’s eyes turn cloudy as he drifts into the past. “We were writing the Christmas Revels—the whole club participates. A bawdy send-up of the Nativity play. The wise men are bankers with briefcases stuffed with cash. There’s a not-so-Virgin Mary. A martini fountain tinkles away in the corner of the humble stable. I have to say it’s . . . quite a laugh.”

  Harkness smiles, glad that his father charmed Fayerwether instead of ripping him off.

  “Red cast himself as the Dollared Dwarf of Dionysus.” Fayerwether lets out a dry bark. “Did the whole play on his knees dressed in a priest’s cassock, drunk as a . . .” Fayerwether waves his hand to dispel the louche memory and signals the bartender for a refill of port.

  “How well did you know my father?”

  “Oh, you know, we saw each other on club nights, at lunch at Locke-Ober, or at one of the spring galas,” he says. “So, not particularly well but more than a passing acquaintance.” He pauses. “I was very sorry to hear about his . . . complications, and his death, of course. Very sorry.”

  Harkness nods. Complications—WASP code for fraud, IRS regulators, Ponzi scheme, disgrace, suicide.

  Fayerwether rallies. “But we’re not here to talk about the past, are we? Looking back is just a good way to stumble, I always say.”

  “True,” Harkness says.

  “You wanted to know about the Lower South End redevelopment plan.”

  “Right.” Harkness adds, summoning up a useful partial truth, “I’m on the mayor’s task force. Would be great to hear what’s ahead for the neighborhood.”

  Fayerwether holds up his hand to put Harkness on pause again, then signals Wheeler, who rushes into the library, rushes back out, then returns with a thick cylinder of architectural drawings. He drops them in front of Fayerwether like a black Lab delivering a special stick.

  Fayerwether clears newspapers and magazines from a low table and opens the drawings.

  Fayerwether smiles when he looks at the designs. “The beauty of Albrecht Square is its architectural integrity. Monumental puddingstone buildings—retail on the street level and mezzanine, spacious flats above. Brilliant!”

  Harkness nods but says nothing because silence keeps people talking.

  “But the area’s not at all beautiful now, by any stretch of the imagination, is it? Particularly after that horrible flood. It’s become run down and drug-infested. But it was never redeveloped, so we have the freedom to preserve the original streetscape while adding to it.”

  He places an overlay drawing on top of the map, adding four towers. “These are early concepts only, of course. Each tower can house about a hundred luxury apartments.” He traces his finger from one tower to another. “Here’s another wonderful thing about Stark’s initial design—it lets us monitor access from four entry points and create a controlled environment.”

  “Like a gated community?”

  Fayerwether waves his hand again to banish the tawdry words, so California. “What we envision is more elegant than that. A high-tech safety zone. We’re exploring the possibilities with the mayor’s technology fellow.”

  “Neil Burch?”

  Fayerwether brightens at their latest shared connection. “You know Neil?”

  “Yes,” Harkness says. “A real visionary.”

  “Absolutely.” Fayerwether nods. “We’d like to create a technologically advanced oasis right in the heart of the city.”

  “What about the people living there now?”

  Fayerwether tilts his head slightly. “Familiar with the West End, Officer Harkness?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Then you probably know that one of my predecessors at the Urban Redevelopment Council tore it down in 1958 to build the dreadful City Hall Plaza.”

  “Not a popular move.”

  “Not at the time. And I’ll be the first to admit, City Hall is among the ten worst buildings in modern architecture. But here’s the thing.” Fayerwether leans forward. “The city tore down forty-seven acres of blighted row houses—including the notorious Scollay Square, the Times Square of Boston. It displaced almost three thousand families but brought Dirty Old Boston into the modern world. And now?”

  Harkness waits for Fayerwether to answer his own question.

  “Now no one cares.” Fayerwether shrugs. “Life continues. People forget. The city moves ahead in waves, and another one’s coming, mark my words. The underlying terrain stays the same but the surface changes. We can’t will a neighborhood to survive like a sickly pet. The last time I walked through the Lower South End, what I saw was a neighborhood of tawdry bars, minimarkets, SRO hotels, and cheap Chinese restaurants.”

  “I was there a few weeks ago,” Harkness says.

  “And what did you see?”

  Harkness pauses, works up the right lie. He locks his face in a mask of imperious wisdom. “I saw a neighborhood asking for change.”

  “Well, it’s most definitely going to get it.” Fayerwether rolls up his drawings. “In spades.”

  “Thanks so much for showing me your work.”

  “Glad to share it.” Fayerwether signals the bartender. “Another port for me. And one for my young friend here.”

  Harkness feels his departmental cell phone vibrate for the second time in a minute. “Excuse me, sir, I have to check this.”

  “I’m afraid cell phones aren’t allowed in the club,” Fayerwether says, then looks around the empty library. “But since your father was a member, I suppose we can make an exception.”

  Harkness reads the text on the screen. “There’s news about some Harvard students.”

  “Oh?” Fayerwether smiles, awaits the good word—they’re starting the next Facebook, creating affordable laptops for the developing world, curing Alzheimer’s. “What news, then?”

  “Two undergraduates dead in a dorm room,” Harkness says.r />
  “How awful! What on earth happened?”

  Harkness stares into Fayerwether’s pale blue eyes. “Looks like they overdosed on heroin.”

  29

  “MEET THE DEAD KIDS.” Esther hands Harkness her departmental iPad, decorated with crime scene tape. The first photo shows a young woman with dyed black hair lying on top of a green comforter, eyes wide open, pupils blown, skin mottled and bluish, cheeks sunken. The dead girl wears a white sweatshirt that reads IT’S HOLIDAY TIME, MOTHERFUCKERS spelled out in festive garlands of holly.

  “Therese Caldwell, nineteen, Harvard sophomore, from Manhattan, father’s a big Wall Street guy,” Esther says. “This is her dorm room. No priors. No trouble with the college.” She nods toward the hallway, where a cluster of campus cops wait their turn at the crime scene. “And from what I can tell, no previous IV drug use. Looks like a newbie to me. Full blood workups are on their way.” Esther may be an oddball but she’s solid gold at a crime scene.

  Harkness takes a look around the Finster House dorm room with its leaded-glass bay windows facing the snowy banks of the Charles, separate living room, and en suite bathroom. Plush digs, he thinks. Except the room is teeming with BPD cops, and the girl who used to live here in collegiate comfort is stone-cold dead.

  “Anything else?”

  Esther nods toward the bathroom. “We found some prescription drugs in there—high-test Wellbutrin, half-full bottle of Valium, Zoloft. Nothing too weird.”

  Esther swipes her finger on the iPad screen. “Other dead kid’s Jason Kittredge, twenty, Harvard junior from Portland, Maine. Lived off campus in Central Square in a dumpy hipster house but he’s been staying here a lot this fall, the other students on the floor say. Again, no priors, no trouble on campus. This kid’s not so fancy—dad runs a nightclub up there. Rock ’n’ roll place. Not exactly squeaky clean.”

  On the screen, Harkness sees a pretty boy with longish brown hair parted down the middle. Jason’s dark eyes are wide open, his full lips pale.