Hank said to me softly, his voice raspy again, “I’m one of those cops that Jankle flipped. It’s a shame I’ve lived with ever since.”
Standing just a few feet from a man I would consider one of my closest friends, I said, “What did you mean, that he gave you no choice?”
“I thought I had Harkins cold in the Gardner theft. Jankle came to me and said if I pursued it, that I should be very worried about the health of my wife and my son.”
He paused here, looking down through the dark. “So I didn’t say anything. Next thing you know, I get a promotion. The whole thing kind of goes away. My wife and boy are fine. I put it in the back of my mind, but not really. You’re never entirely done with it. I’m supposed to enforce the law, not break it.”
And I’m supposed to write stories, not cause them, pursue the truth, not obscure it. But that’s what had happened on the complicated road to reason.
“You just saved my life. If you can forget about it, so can I,” I said.
He smiled and replied, “Let’s both give it a try.”
I nodded at Jankle’s form sprawled out across a collection of broken branches and puffy weeds. “He alive?” I asked.
Sweeney crouched down and put his finger under Jankle’s nose. “Yep.”
We walked across the clearing, into the shallow woods, to where Toby Harkins lay. But in what I thought was the space, there was only tamped down weeds. I ran and grabbed the lamp and flashed it around, but saw nothing.
“He’s gone,” Hank said.
“Brace yourself,” I said quietly. Then I hollered, “We need some help back here.”
Flashlights shone through the woods. Men yelled back. I called out, “Toby Harkins has escaped. Look for Harkins.”
I turned to Hank and asked, “Where are we, anyway?”
“At the truth,” he said, nodding knowingly, draping his arm over my shoulder.
Indeed, we were. It took a long time getting there, but it was a damned nice place to be.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Friday, October 3
I t was one of those remarkable autumn days when summer takes a curtain call amid the brightly colored leaves and the chilly nights, as if the entire season has stepped back out of the dugout and waved to the crowd in the way that Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski never did or would.
We were sitting at an outdoor café along Boston’s Newbury Street, Vinny and me—or is that Vinny and I? I never know these things. Anyway, it was the two of us. He had a fresh fruit plate in front of him covered with yogurt, along with a low-fat bran muffin, no butter, as well as a can of V-8 that he had brought in himself.
“You allowed to do that?” I asked. “I mean, isn’t there someone, somewhere, who cracks down on bringing your own vegetable juice into restaurants?”
“Fuck you.”
He had lost five pounds in five days, he said, meaning at this rate, next year this time, he wouldn’t actually exist. Not a bad thought, considering the argument he was waging with me.
He was sitting there extolling the virtues of placing his name first in the title of the crisis management consulting firm that we were about to open. He was telling me that the name Mongillo had become synonymous among the ruling elite and the rank and file of Boston with hard work, with extraordinary contacts, with easy access all along the corridors of power. I was making a stroking motion with my right hand, when he interrupted and said, “I mean it, Jack. You’ve got to start thinking like a businessman now, about making money, and you know and I know that we’ll make more money if my name goes first.”
I didn’t particularly care; I just didn’t want to be seen as a pushover in our first-ever business meeting. “All right,” I said. “You get your name first if I get to pick our slogan.”
“What do you have?” He asked this skeptically with a mouth full of cantaloupe.
“Your downfall is our windfall.”
He speared a large hunk of pineapple with his fork and ate it without expression.
“This is serious shit,” he said, after chewing for a moment. “This ain’t the goddamned newsroom anymore, where we get paid whether we put in a good day’s worth of work or not, and in your case, usually not. Come on, Fair Hair, get with the program.”
It was tough to take him seriously as the next Jack Welch or Lou Gerstner, sitting there in a flannel button-down with a dab of purple-colored yogurt on his upper lip.
He said, “I’ve already gotten calls from the head of the phone company wanting to hire us at ten large a month. Remember they got into that brouhaha for shutting off service to a battered-women’s shelter because the place was a month late paying their bill—and it ended up, the phone company had lost the check?
“And I got another call from a former congressman who will remain momentarily nameless who would like to be governor. He wants us to address the potential publicity around an incident involving him, a prostitute, a Bijon Frise, and a park ranger. That’s another seven-and-a-half large a month.”
I said, “I got a call from my old friend Harry Putnam asking me if I’ve gone nuts.”
I gave in on the naming rights, then ordered dessert—a gingerbread sundae—just to drive him crazy.
When it arrived, I said, “I hate when they drench the damned thing in this delicious hot fudge sauce, so the ice cream melts too fast.” He looked like he was ready to punch me harder than Toby Harkins’s people ever did.
So I changed the subject.
“How close are we on a lease?”
He explained that he had negotiated a deal for space on the twenty-ninth floor of a downtown high-rise that would give us each identically sized offices with views across the harbor to Logan Airport. We would have a shared secretary, additional space for cubicles for any new hires, and with the lease came membership to a top-floor dining club.
“All we have to do is sign on the dotted line and show up at work,” he said.
We both sat in a long state of silence, watching the passersby, seeing nothing at all. I thought of myself reporting to a high-rise office building every day, wearing a suit and tie, maybe carrying a briefcase, sitting with my feet up on a minimalist glass-top desk, phone cradled to my ear, gazing out at the boats bobbing in the water. And what would I be saying on the phone? Hire my company? Run our side of the story? Would I be telling reporters, people just like me, that they have their facts all wrong, even when I know, when they know, they don’t?
Hello, adulthood.
I asked, “You going to miss the newsroom?”
Mongillo almost seemed startled by my voice, or maybe it was the question. I don’t know. He picked up a red grape with his fingers and popped it into his mouth. “Like what? One deadline sneaking up after another? The cell phone ringing twenty-four hours every damned day? The constant pressure to produce? The what-have-you-done-for-me-lately attitude that Martin gives off?”
I replied, “Yeah, that.”
He looked down and said, “I don’t know, will you?”
I thought for a moment. Actually, what I was doing was scraping the remnants of chocolate sauce from the plate and spooning it into my mouth, but I can do two things at once—what is it that they call it downtown, multitasking? Oh yeah.
“Yeah, I will.”
I thought of the adrenaline rush of nailing a story cold, the omnipotent feeling of badgering some politician who you know had done something wrong, the fascinating paths toward elusive truths. Maybe I was just tired. Maybe I was romanticizing things. But I suddenly had an empty feeling in a place that should have been filled with anticipation.
Now’s as good a time as any to point out that I had hammered the Toby Harkins/Tom Jankle story home. Ends up, that bunker was in Boston Harbor, on Great Brewster Island, almost nine miles offshore. On a clear day, I could probably see it from the balcony of my condominium, not that I ever looked. I slipped out of the woods with Hank that night, as the FBI agents, wink-wink, searched the cliffsides for Harkins. I bet they were search
ing real hard. At the bottom of one rocky cliff, I asked Hank if we were swimming for safety. “You can,” he replied. “But I’m going to ride in my boat.” And with that, we climbed into the rented outboard he had come in on.
Buzzing along the black skin of the harbor, the chill sea mist flying in our faces, the glittering skyline beckoning from the shore, I felt not just reinvigorated, but enlivened. I had survived, and I decided there and then, so would Hank.
It was 3:00 A.M. when I hit the newsroom, so I didn’t write that night. Martin was, of course, waiting by my desk, pacing, still furious that we’d blown deadline on the story that we’d initially planned, even though I had called him from a pay phone on the way down to give him the reason why. When I elaborated in greater detail in his office, I thought he might climb on my lap and try to neck. We decided I shouldn’t leave the newsroom for fear that some cop or agent somewhere might try to arrest me for leaving the scene of a crime, or worse, so I stretched out on a couch in the conference room and grabbed a few hours’ rest.
The story itself was a thing of beauty. It led with the revelation that Toby Harkins, the nation’s most-wanted fugitive, was a long-time FBI informant, essentially receiving federal protection even as he committed murder and ran what we like to call in newspaper-speak, “a far-reaching criminal enterprise.” I quickly got into FBI Special Agent Tom Jankle’s murder of Hilary Kane, his confession and such. I recounted the gunpoint conversation between Jankle and Harkins amid the old military bunkers on Great Brewster Island, where yours truly was the bull’s-eye that was inexplicably never hit. I pointedly included Jankle’s line that he had tipped Harkins off to the impending indictment that led to the flight from justice. And I detailed Dan Harkins’s involvement, his awareness of his son’s whereabouts and his attempts to convince Toby to turn himself in. My bet was and is, it doesn’t matter that he was trying to do good. The mayor will be thrown out with the dirty bathwater.
Of Hank Sweeney, I left him out—mostly. He stood over my shoulder as I wrote, giving me a legion of key details about the extent to which the FBI went to protect its prized informant for all those years. Hank agreed to be named in print, probably as some sort of penance for long-ago mistakes. But no need. I quoted him as an unnamed retired law enforcement official intimate with the details of the case. Let a judge or a congressional committee try to get it out of me.
Speaking of which, Jankle was charged by Boston police for Hilary Kane’s murder the following morning after a court-authorized search of his house turned up a gun that had gone missing from an FBI evidence locker two years before—and had recently been discharged. Ballistics experts matched it to the Kane crime scene.
And I’ve been invited to appear before the House Government Affairs Committee, which is investigating the FBI’s role in all this. I politely declined, and they politely presented me with a subpoena. That’s supposed to happen next week.
What else? Baker, I miss him every hour of every day, the only living thing in my life that got all the jokes and didn’t mind hearing them again and again. Elizabeth? She left town without ever saying good-bye, not that I blame her. She wanted something that was no longer mine to give, or maybe it was just too soon. To her credit, she hung around long after any logical person would have left and gave me more than just about anyone had given me before.
Peter Martin, on the other hand, watched me write that day from a safe distance, like a zookeeper might regard a particularly ornery lion feasting on the corpse of some ravaged prey, maybe a zebra. After I sent the stories in, after he carefully edited and reedited every word, he came out into the newsroom and offered to have my baby. I think he might have been serious. Sometime, over a beer, I’m going to explain to him about birds and bees and the physiological limitations of the mortal man.
And then there’s Vinny, sitting here with me finishing the rest of his fruit plate.
“I will, too,” he said, his big brown eyes as sad as I’ve ever seen them, except for that time at Amrhein’s over in South Boston that he watched a waitress accidentally drop his prime rib special—the last cut left of the night—on the floor.
We looked at each other, quiet. The world, literally, was passing us by, well-dressed locals with places to be and people to see, all striding purposefully along the sun-dappled sidewalk.
“You want to forget the whole damned thing?” I asked.
He nodded, his face breaking out into a broad grin. “Yeah, I do,” he said.
And with that, I felt like the weight of the adult world was instantly lifted from my broad shoulders, like my life was again instilled with a sense of natural purpose. There were politicians to chase and truths to uncover and stories to write, all to be published in the beautifully packaged pages of The Boston Record, the finest newspaper I have ever known.
Vinny reached over and, for a second, I thought he was going to lick my dessert plate. Instead, he wrapped his massive arms around my shoulders and hugged me. I smelled pepperoni. I felt perspiration. It was all like a wonderful dream.
He reached into his computer case and pulled out a sheaf of papers, which he promptly, ceremoniously, ripped in half in front of me.
“The lease?” I asked.
“Take-out menus,” he answered. “I’ll stay a reporter, but I’m not going to let it kill me.”
That’s when I saw him. At first, I just saw a flash of light gold. But then my eyes came to focus on the fuzziest, most perfect little creature that I’d seen since, well, since I’d sent Baker off to that dog park in the sky the week before. He was maybe ten weeks old, all brown eyes and blonde fur, a blocky little golden retriever puppy who sauntered up to the wrought-iron gate that separated the restaurant patio from the world around it. It’s as if he had been scouting me out for days.
I jumped out of my chair and scooped him up in my arms, a miniature golden bear who pressed the top of his head against the bottom of my chin.
“He’s gorgeous, isn’t he?”
And with that, my reverie was broken. I looked out onto the sidewalk to see the equally beautiful personage of Maggie Kane, her skirt as short and casual as that mop of blonde hair. I hadn’t seen her in a week, hadn’t seen her since I went back to my apartment that Monday night after writing the stories. She waited there for me to tell her what happened, and I did, the two of us sitting on my couch, her wearing one of my blue oxford cloth shirts, her legs tucked under her body, both her hands wrapped around a cup of hot tea. After I recounted the prior night’s events, we talked more about the son she barely had and the daughter I never did, about life and about loss and the way the former gracelessly, inevitably, leads to the latter. Come midnight, she asked if she could spend the night again, and she did, in my bed, while I remained out on the couch, always polite, maybe too much so.
In the morning, she kissed me on the cheek as she was leaving. I wasn’t sure what to say to someone who had shared what we had shared over the past week, who had lost something similar to what I had lost. So I said nothing more than good-bye.
I stared into the puppy’s eyes. “He’s incredible,” I said. Then dawn broke over Marblehead; the thought occurred that the dog was a gift for me.
But was I ready? Was it too fast? Was it respectful enough of what I had with Baker?
I looked at her and she at me. “I was tired of looking backward,” she said, a huge smile filling every perfect inch of her face.
She put her hand on the bridge of the puppy’s square nose and added, “And he’s here to help me look ahead, to move on.”
I nodded, a little jealous and a little relieved.
She said, “Come walk with us.”
I put the puppy down, turned to Vinny, and said, “Meet you back at the newsroom. Can you pick up the check?”
He looked somewhere between panicked and perturbed, but nodded.
I climbed over the metal gate and stood for a second on the sidewalk gazing silently at this beautiful creature—the woman now, not the dog. And we began walking,
the three of us, away from the past, through the moment, and toward a future that we didn’t yet know.
My mind scanned back over the day, over the past couple of weeks, over a lifetime in which so much good seemed to end so bad. At the first intersection, I brushed the back of my fingers against the side of her face—something I had wanted to do for what felt like forever. She took my hand in hers and didn’t let go.
Acknowledgments
I’m fortunate, blessed even, to have spent my adult life coming and going from a newsroom, especially in cities as vibrant as Boston and Washington, and more especially for a newspaper as thoughtful and compelling as The Boston Globe. To that end, I owe many good people my thanks on this project, whether they realize it or not. I’ve learned and borrowed significantly from the exhaustive work that the Globe’s Steve Kurkjian invested into the Gardner Museum theft, and have been aided by his wise counsel. Likewise, the late Elizabeth Neuffer, who died too young, too tragically, in Iraq, wrote one of the most enduring and extensive stories on the theft, which helped me immensely. And I was also was enlightened by the fascinating stories written by Tom Mashberg for the Boston Herald.
I’d also like to thank a former federal investigator and a current one, both of whom prefer the cloak of anonymity, but were generous with their time and insights. Thanks as well to Pam Bendock, a trusted veterinarian and good friend, who guided me through some touchy aspects of the text. And much gratitude to friend and former colleague Mitch Zuckoff for his keen eye.
I could never properly thank the wonderful people of International Creative Management for starting me on this novel writing venture and then propelling me along the way. Specifically, Richard Abate has been invaluable—in his ability to make deals, provide sage counsel, and offer constant encouragement. There is no better agent. Thanks as well to his ever efficient and always calm assistant, Kate Lee, for overseeing all the details and being immeasurably kind.
Dead Line Page 37