The City Below Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1960

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  1968

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  1975

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  1984

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Copyright © 1994 by Morrissey Street Ltd.

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,

  New York, New York 10003.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carroll, James, date.

  The city below / James Carroll.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-395-82522-8

  I. Title.

  PS3553.A764C58 1994 93-40837

  813'.54—dc20 CIP

  Printed in the United States of America

  QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  Book design by Melodie Wertelet

  The author is grateful for permission to quote lines from "Brother of My

  Heart," from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 1980

  by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

  All rights reserved.

  for

  Paul Lannan

  and for

  Larry Kessler

  Brother of my heart,

  don't you know there's only one

  walking into the light, only one,

  before this light

  flashes out, before this bravest knight

  crashes his black bones into the earth?

  —GALWAY KINNELL

  1960

  1

  ON A BRISK SPRING MORNING in the year that John F. Kennedy began his run for president, a pair of burly micks in overalls and tweed caps sat on the bench in front of the monument on Bunker Hill in Charlestown. One was in his fifties, and looked it. He seemed relieved to be idling. The other was younger and seemed agitated, his eyes scanning the scene like a radar dish. The older man gazed serenely, straight ahead, blank-eyed. The grass sloped away from them toward the street, which was lined with stout brick houses, stately Federal bowfronts, the kind Bostonians associated with Beacon Hill, not Bunker. There was a puritan-pleasing simplicity to the unadorned pillars and lintels of the entrances, but it had been years since the people using them had understood what a shine those brass door knockers would take.

  In the distance sat the egg-sucking, indifferent city, with the spire of the Custom House, the white steeple of Paul Revere's church, the peaked roof of the Boston Sand and Gravel tower. Otherwise the skyline was flat. Nothing had been built in the city below since before the Depression. In Boston the Depression wasn't over yet.

  Deebo McCarthy—Brian—was the Charlestown waterfront boss. His young sidekick was Dick Burke, his hack. Along the piers and in the warehouse districts, not only of the Town, as it was called, but of the Irish territory out the long peninsula of South Boston, McCarthy's rule was absolute. The Irish neighborhoods were his complete domain. He had begun as a roustabout, and he was still at ease in work clothes. He always had a wet cigar in his mouth. Burke tried to carry himself like Deebo, that air of fuck you. But he couldn't pull it off. He was worried.

  For his part, McCarthy had always been unable to look out at the rest of the city without a sharp sense of what was not his. He had succeeded in walling himself off from that feeling now. This morning he would settle for the turf divisions as they were. The pristine steeple there, so close he could almost hit it with spit, marked the Italian North End. Italians dominated East Boston, on another side of him, and the Everett and Chelsea banks of the Mystic River on yet another. Downtown, Italians ran the great commercial storage wharves, the former icehouses, along Atlantic Avenue up to Fort Point Channel, which marked the boundary with Southie. The Teamsters were controlled by Italians out of New York, and only a month ago McCarthy's own Longshoremen's Union had voted with the hod carriers and the luggers from Logan Airport in Eastie, electing its first wop slate. The balance of their version of the earth had shifted then. The dago takeover of the forever Irish union was the signal, Deebo knew, that things were changing. This morning was his turn at bat, and if he took his eye off it, the greased-up ball would hit him. The era of sharing the waterfront loot in Boston would be over. He had to crowd the plate, stare back at the fuckers, make them think he didn't give a shit.

  When he'd gotten the call from Tucci, he'd been suspicious. Guido Tucci was more than McCarthy's counterpart. He controlled the Italian waterfront organization as Deebo did the Irish, but his sway had extended to the citywide rackets—gambling, loansharking, black markets—since the thirties. For most of those years, he and McCarthy had respected each other's turf, mostly because the Irish had settled for the lucrative but limited acreage around their own neighborhoods. But now? When Tucci had proposed this meeting, McCarthy had suggested this site in his own territory, cut off from the Italian districts by the harbor and by the Charles and Mystic rivers. He'd thought Tucci would never agree.

  Yet here the fucker was, pulling up in a car he was driving himself, no bodyguard even. The car was dark and large. It rolled to a stop at the foot of the broad granite steps that led up from the street. Neither Burke nor McCarthy moved as Tucci got out of the car and came up the stairs toward them. A small man, he was dressed like a mortician. McCarthy had known him since '38, and he recognized the slow, deliberate walk, the slightly bent posture, the right hand forward with each step, as if he were using a cane. Tucci had cultivated the personal style of a gentleman from the old country. He was born in Worcester at the beginning of the century, but he'd been raised in a strict Sicilian household, and he still spoke English with a heavy accent He conducted himself as if slick American ways were foreign to him.

  "Hello, Brian," Tucci said quietly, approaching.

  McCarthy nodded but said nothing.

  "I had hoped we could talk alone." Tucci turned his gaze on Burke, who felt the chill of it.

  Burke said, "Nothing doing. I'm Mr. McCarthy's assistant"

  Tucci wearily raised his arms, making them like wings. At that invitation, Burke stood and patted him down.

  Tucci let an amused sparkle show in his eye as he looked at the much brawnier McCarthy. "I am honored that you regard me still as capable ..." He let his voice trail off. Tucci's skin was dark and smooth, but at his eyes and mouth it was wrinkled. His body had begun folding onto itself.

  McCarthy stood up and nudged Burke. "Let it go, Dick. Jesus."

  Burke was satisfied by then anyway, so he stepped back.

  "Could we walk?" Tucci asked quietly. "Could you show me ... your estate?" He grinned.

  "Sure I could."

  "Boss, we—"

  "Never mind, Dick. What would you like to see, Mr. Tucci?"

  Tucci shrugged, but he let his eye drift up the line of the towering obelisk.

  "Two hundred and ninety-four fucking stairs, Guido. I don't think either of us is young enough for that."

  "It is beautiful, nevertheless, from here."

  McCarthy shrugged. "Yankee idea of a monument, if you ask me. Like a cross without the corpse. Like their wooden churches. Now that"—he pointed to the gun-toting statue of Colonel William Prescott, a literal rendition—"tells you something."

  "What?"

>   "Fucking battle. Whites of the eyes. That shit."

  "The British won this battle, I believe," Tucci said.

  "No, we did."

  "We?"

  "Americans."

  "If you choose to think so."

  McCarthy looked across at Burke, the surprise of a new idea sharp on his face. "We won that, right?"

  But Burke had not heard what they were saying. He shrugged.

  "No, I'm sure we won," McCarthy said with forced expansiveness. "Yankees put this thing here. They don't raise monuments to defeats. Only the Irish do that" McCarthy laughed. "I'll show you something. Come on." With abrupt enthusiasm, he led the way around the monument. Tucci followed.

  Burke called after him, "Boss, should I—?"

  "Forget it, Dick. Meet me at the clubhouse."

  On the west side of the monument McCarthy stepped onto the grass at a point where it sloped sharply down. He gestured toward a huge granite building across the street, four stories high, a façade ornamented with seven false columns, an American flag wafting gently above the entrance, below the words CHARLESTOWN HIGH SCHOOL.

  "See that?" McCarthy pointed.

  Tucci smiled. "I see it, yes."

  "That's where Jack Kennedy announced for Congress in 'forty-six. Right there, in the auditorium. I was there. This is Kennedy's first district." McCarthy turned toward Tucci, his face transformed by a rowdy expression that said, Match that, you fuck.

  But Tucci's face remained impassive.

  "What's with you, Guido? At least he's a Catholic, right? Don't you want a Catholic president?"

  Still Tucci did not react.

  "I don't get it. Don't you people give a shit?"

  "You people?"

  "You know what I mean."

  Tucci turned and sent his eyes up once more, tracing the lines of the massive granite shaft.

  "So what did you want to talk about?"

  "Can we walk?" Tucci asked. "I prefer to walk."

  McCarthy's impatience flared. He made a show of looking around. There were no watchers. No one could hear them. What was this?

  But he thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his overalls. "All right. I'll show you where the flicking British landed. One if by land, two if by sea. They came by sea."

  "Not that day." Tucci pointed to a plaque mounted on a stub in the grass. Both read in silence: NW corner of redoubt thrown up on the night of the seventh of June, 1775.

  "Paul Revere," Tucci said, "was in April."

  "How do you know that?"

  With the slightest turn of his head, Tucci glanced in the direction of Revere's church, the white steeple a mile—but a world—away.

  McCarthy laughed, a sudden recognition of their absurdity, a mick and a wop scoring on each other about the mythic exploits of the old Americans whose descendants disdained them both. "Come on," he said, setting off at a clip.

  He led the way north, toward the Mystic River, which formed one side of the tight peninsula. If McCarthy walked with a sprightly energy, perhaps it was because he liked leading Tucci even deeper into the heart of his own turf. They took the two steep downhill blocks to Bunker Hill Street, where, to the right, the Town housing projects began. Curley's projects, just one of the great things the late mayor had done for the Town. A baby's cry wafted into the air above the tidy brick enclave. Young mothers could be seen sitting on benches surrounded by carriages. McCarthy's nose supplied the smell of ammonia and soiled diapers.

  To the left, across the flattened land, a broad, ill-tended ball field ran toward the narrow inlet beyond which, along the riverfront proper, stood the wharves and warehouses of the Charlestown docks. Two huge cargo ships were at their piers, cranes towering over the holds of the ships, pallets dangling. McCarthy eyed it all proudly.

  When it had become evident that the stooped, slow Tucci was not going to keep up, the Irish waterfront boss eased his pace with a show of resentment, but also with a sly smugness at his old enemy's physical decline.

  That was why it came as a surprise when, on the far edge of the ball field, Tucci, while still walking, said simply, "We will have a new arrangement, beginning now."

  McCarthy stopped, staring after him as Tucci kept walking toward the channel. The inlet was a narrow gut lined with walls made of granite monoliths. Its bank was an apron of pavement six feet across. When Tucci reached it, he turned to face McCarthy.

  "What do you mean, 'new arrangement'?"

  Tucci did not answer.

  Something told McCarthy to stay where he was, but the image of the frail, vulnerable old man drew him. The fuck. "What do you mean?" he repeated, approaching.

  "Your people will be working with mine now."

  "What, in Charlestown?"

  "And in South Boston. Things have changed, Brian."

  "The fuck they have."

  "The union is mine. The airport is mine. The big ships don't come in like before. The old division doesn't work. I want you to help me make a new one. The waterfront must be one operation, controlled by one organization."

  "Yours."

  "Yes."

  "No fucking way, Tucci. Things have worked in Boston because we've kept apart My people will never lug for you."

  Tucci shrugged. "It will be you lugging for me."

  "It don't play that way with us."

  "Why do you say your people would not accept this when it is you? Are you afraid to say it is you who refuses me?"

  "No. I ain't afraid to say that. I've spent thirty years building what I have. You think I just hand it over, you got shit for brains." McCarthy turned as he spoke, covering the act of reaching inside his coat. "What sparks this, Guido? The fucking union vote? The union vote don't mean a damn."

  "Except as a sign of the times, Brian. You know what's happened in Providence and New York."

  "Boston's different, always has been. Separate turf, that's the rule here. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be."

  "Until now. On the water, on the harbor—action goes through one organization. One juice collection from the ships, one loader's fence, one distribution."

  "Yours."

  "I said that"

  "You said it, yeah."

  "Then you understand."

  "The question is, do I agree?"

  "Yes."

  "You've got some fucking nerve. Do you know that?"

  "Brian, Brian. I've come here myself, against advice, to give you a chance. Between the two of us we could make the adjustment smooth. We are old men. The young ones have not seen what we have seen, how bad it goes when—"

  "Forget it, Guido."

  "You would be my capo."

  "Your flunky. Your hack."

  Tucci shook his head mournfully. "Do not do this."

  "This?" McCarthy began pulling his gun. "This?" A primitive urge carried McCarthy forward, as if to push the bastard backwards into the oily water. "This?" He showed the gun.

  McCarthy had made his move so swiftly that he was on Tucci before seeing the flash of the knife—it came from Tucci's sleeve, one of those arms he had so willingly held up for Burke. The blade was visible only for an instant, until it disappeared in its ample new sheath, McCarthy's own stomach. Jesus.

  McCarthy's last sensations were the unforgiving crunch of the cement against his face and the roar of a motor in his ears. He had life enough to realize that Tucci would make his escape now in some dago's souped-up speedboat, swirling into and out of the channel, out to the harbor, across to Eastie or the North End. Two if by sea, the fucks.

  ***

  In quick order, in the days following, even before Easter, McCarthy's chieftains in Southie, Savin Hill, and Fields Corner, in Union Square and Winter Hill in Somerville, were eliminated, all but one in public executions calculated to make a point. The takeover, to succeed, had to be swift and brutal. If the Italians, for their part, misjudged the Irish, it was in assuming they would need a hope of victory before putting up a fight. The old-country Irish impulse was to make
their defiance at least as brutal as it was futile, and that spring and summer they did.

  Guido Tucci's nephew was run down on North Washington Street, coming out of Polcari's. Afterward the mick driver stopped, got out of his car, went back, and, in front of the young man's mother, Tucci's sister, cut off his ear and threw it at the woman's feet.

  With no overt warning, killings became rampant in the areas where Irish and Italian neighborhoods overlapped: Dorchester, Somerville, Chelsea, and Everett. The two Irish peninsulas, Southie and Charlestown, because of their geographical isolation, were the most concerned but the least affected. The murders spilled over into downtown, into Scollay Square, and even, three times, the Common. At first every lurid slaying—a corpse thrown from a sedan at Farragut's statue, a restaurant owner shot through the eye amid the bright morning crowds of Haymarket, a fish handler drowned in a holding tank on Rowes Wharf—hit the front pages, often with photographs. But eventually the press, the police, and the citizenry itself became inured. The violence continued into the fall.

  Old Boston was confirmed in its most cherished views of both peoples, the Irish and the Italians. The closed systems of Boston's caste society and the city's economic stratification were at last justified by the primitive blood lust of those who'd been kept out. Their viciousness shocked even those whose disdain had been absolute. Corpses showed up in the cold-storage vaults of the waterfront, a naked flogged body was found hanging from a light fixture in the workers' bathroom at the Park Street station. See how the Catholics kill one another. To the denizens of Back Bay and Beacon Hill, the gang war was proof that the long-held attitudes for which they'd been so ridiculed were perfectly true. The City on the Hill had fallen to men of no virtue, and was ruined.

  ***

  One day in May of 1960, a year after Guido Tucci had murdered Deebo McCarthy, a pair of dark-eyed, slick-haired punks came into the Kerry Bouquet, a flower store across the street from the Charlestown Common, on the lower slope of Bunker Hill.

  Ned Cronin, in the corner by the ivy trellis, sized them up without lifting his head. He was a large, white-headed Irishman with a reddish nose, the same age as the century. He had the build of a scrapper, but, as the flower king of the Town, he spent most of his time with women, the parish biddies and nuns who kept him in business. So the arrival of the toughs drew his absolute attention.