The City Below Read online

  He had been making one of his trademark shamrock boutonnieres, and when the two came in, he redoubled his focus, knotting a wire, yet watching them. One wore a shiny black suit, a lilac shirt, and a tie a deeper shade of purple; the other wore an argyle sweater with red and blue diamonds against a field of cream. The sweater had suede lapels, one of which the man cockily fingered.

  "What'll it be, fellows?" Cronin looked up, letting his glasses slide toward the end of his nose. He held his concoction delicately between thumb and forefinger, four shamrocks and a spray of baby's breath, held together with wire. The shamrock lapel flowers were silly things Ned had put together one St. Patrick's Day, but Townies liked them, and he could always sell whatever he made.

  The pair ignored him to make a show of inspecting the shop. The one in the suit was an unwashed, pimply version of a rock 'n' roll crooner, that ducktail, the lithe jittery body of a car thief. With exaggerated nods at each separate bunch of irises, tulips, and carnations, he took a series of audible whiffs—in contrast to the other, who grimaced as he pushed the foliage aside, giving off the authentic, pungent air of anarchy, a stink of it.

  Cronin tilted back in his chair. He picked up a can of artist's fixative and sprayed the shamrocks. Even when shellacked, they would last only an evening. He put the can and boutonniere aside, to rest his shoulders against the ornate brass cash register. In all these years he had never been robbed. He could feel the baroque relief pattern of the brass cash drawer through his shirt Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, now what?

  "How can I help you, pal?" Cronin addressed himself to the one in the sharkskin suit. But anxiety had pushed its way into his voice. He heard it himself, knew they would, and he wanted to curse.

  But Squire must have heard it too.

  Cronin's grandson, and his chum Jackie Mullen, came out of the back room. They'd been putting together wreaths for a funeral. Each one wore dungarees and a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Squire, one of Cronin's two grandsons, was his after-school helper, a lanky kid with slick red hair combed in a modest but unmistakable pompadour. A bridge of dirt crossed his nose where he'd rubbed it with his hand. Despite the ominous presence of the Italians, he stood easily on the threshold, lighting the room with his habitual grin, a boy born to bring flowers.

  Mullen was harder to read. A shy, cautious boy, he'd hit his stride the previous autumn as a fullback. He was strong and unafraid, but those qualities alarmed Cronin as he saw the sour expression on Jackie's face.

  Cronin saw his grandson move his left hand behind his leg. The lad was still holding the curved blade he'd been using to trim stems.

  Cronin thought back to the K of C gala the year before, when he himself had been raised to the Fourth Degree. As a joke, in the cathedral hall where the beer was flowing after the ceremony, he had brought the flat of his new Eminent Commander's sword down on Nick's shoulder and dubbed him Squire, his second in battle, his armor polisher and weapons carrier. They love a nickname in Charlestown, and "Squire" had stuck. Now the kid was standing there so bravely with that blade, as if about to leap to his old grandpa's defense. Knight's squire indeed.

  "We've come for the dues," the pimply face said.

  Cronin found it possible to smile, as if this were repartee down at the Flower Exchange, but he could not summon the response that would make the situation funny. With a weary grunt he stood, grateful to find that he was taller than the intruders. "Dues? What club?"

  "New merchants' association. You know about it"

  "No, I don't believe I do."

  Squire was smiling in a friendly way, but as concealment. His hand had tightened around the cork handle of his hidden knife. His eye moved from his grandfather to the strangers and back.

  It was Squire to whom Mullen kept looking for a signal. His hands were flexing and unflexing, wanting the ball. When Squire sensed Jackie's eagerness, he hid the knife from him too. The knife took over Squire's mind. What would it be like to slash at the pimples on that one's face?

  "Twenty a week," the Italian said. "Beginning today. And for your money, you get a smooth operation, guaranteed."

  "Thanks. I already have a smooth operation." Cronin turned to Squire and Jackie. With an impatient flip of the fingers of both hands, like the monsignor shooing altar boys, he gestured them toward the back room. But neither Squire nor Jackie moved.

  Without warning, the acne-faced one leapt at Cronin, grabbed his shirt, and smashed his face with a chopping punch. The old man's nose immediately gushed blood, and he crumpled. The Italian's fist was bound in a set of brass knuckles.

  Mullen charged forward, but the second thug hit him from the side. The blow landed on his cheekbone with a dull thunk, another brass sucker punch. Mullen went down, coldcocked.

  Squire used the hatred he felt as fuel for an act of deep memorization. One face, then the other—the bastard who'd decked his grandfather. He dropped the trimmer's knife into the potted plant behind him. Without a glance at Jackie or Cronin, he walked to the cash register. He rang up No Sale; the drawer popped open. "Twenty, you said?" And he held out two tens.

  The one with the acne released Cronin, who fumbled for his handkerchief. The punk crossed to Squire and snatched the bills. "We'll be back once a week, get it?"

  "Yes, sir. You bet."

  The punk stuffed the bills in his trousers pocket and turned to a bucket of carnations. He snapped off a flower and put it in his lapel buttonhole, a trophy. "How much for the rose?"

  "No charge," Squire said.

  Jackie looked up at his friend with shame and disappointment. The guy who'd hit him still stood over Mullen, fist cocked. The other was turning to lead the way out when Squire, still at the register, said, "Does this mean we don't have to pay the other guys?"

  The two looked at Squire.

  "I mean, you take care of them for us now, right?"

  The Italians exchanged a glance. The suit said, "What other guys?"

  "Mr. Triozzi," Squire answered. "He said not to tell his name, but it's okay for you to know, right? What's your name?"

  "Triozzi?"

  "He said he was somebody's cousin. Weirdo, or something."

  "Guido?"

  "Yeah, that's it. Guido. Guido Tucci. That's what he said. He's Guido Tucci's cousin."

  Again the two looked at each other, but now the one in the sweater flashed with anger, and his partner muttered defensively in Italian. In three broad strides, he crossed back to the cash register and slapped the twenty dollars down, then turned and left the store. His comrade followed, whining, "Goddamnit, Mano, I told you—" Then they were gone.

  Mano. Squire repeated the name to himself.

  Ned Cronin took one last swipe with his handkerchief. He brushed the remains of the shamrock boutonniere from his shirt, then joined his grandson in helping Mullen to his feet.

  "Triozzi?" Cronin asked. "Who the hell is Triozzi?"

  When Squire did not answer, Cronin realized what his grandson had done. He looked nervously toward the door, then back at his daughter's kid. "You made that up? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you made that up?" A grin slowly overspread Cronin's face. With amazement and disbelief, he repeated, "You made that up?"

  Still Squire did not answer.

  Cronin grasped his grandson's forearm. "You had me fooled too. I thought there must of been some guy come in here while I—"

  Squire was looking at his grandfather with rare solemnity.

  "How did you know what name to mention?"

  "Triozzi." Squire shrugged. "It's the wop name that popped into my head."

  "They wouldn't of believed you if you'd just said Tucci, if you hadn't played so dumb. 'Weirdo'! You said 'Weirdo'!" Cronin laughed.

  "I'm sorry the guy hit you, Gramps. I'm sorry I just stood there."

  Cronin pressed Squire's arm. Of course, the kid hadn't just stood there, which was the point now. "Hell, I'm okay." He turned to Mullen. "You're the one who took the crack, Jackie."

  "The wop bastard." Mullen's cheek
bone was aflame, the hollow under his eye already mousing up. His fingers jittered at his face.

  Cronin wanted to shake the stunned Mullen: Didn't you see what Squire just did here?

  Squire picked up the bills from the register. "Here's your twenty back, Gramps."

  "That's yours, kid." Cronin laughed again and pushed his grandson's hand away. "That's protection money, and you're my protection now. Wait'll the boys at the Exchange hear what you did."

  "No, Gramps." Squire spoke with grave authority. "You shouldn't talk it up. Not at the Exchange and not here in the Town. We should let it sit for a while. We should find out who else these guys have hit Them we talk to. We tell them about Triozzi. We treat Triozzi like he's real. One by one, we sign up the other stores on Main and on the square."

  "And the fellas at the Exchange—"

  "No, Gramps. Just Charlestown. We keep this thing in the Town. Marin, O'Brien, Jocko—the ones we trust. But we all treat Triozzi like he's real. Get it?"

  Cronin nodded slowly, his gaze fixed upon his grandson, seeing something new in him.

  "Lou Triozzi," Squire continued, "who operates out of Revere, where Tucci lives."

  "How do you know where Tucci lives? Or are you making that up too?"

  Squire shrugged, knowing not to say. Ambiguity could be a hiding place. Even he was surprised by the sureness with which these moves were coming to him, like in the heat of a basketball game.

  Yes, Tucci lived in Revere. And yes, Squire had seen him. But there was no question of explaining that to his grandfather. His many trolley rides to the northern terminus had begun innocently enough. Wonderland, Revere Beach, Oceanside Park with its roller coaster and midway, had for decades been popular destinations for Boston's streetcar vacationers. But the gang wars had ended that Revere was a step up from the North End and Eastie, but it was solidly Italian and its new Keep Out was implicit in the headlines. Lately, the MTA trolleys often arrived at the turnaround empty. And hadn't exactly that comprised much of the allure for the gang of Charlestown boys, Squire and half a dozen chums, all sixteen or so, who'd trekked to Revere the summer before? Each had draped a towel around his neck, a vestment signifying the innocent purpose of swimming. But once they'd set out, they'd become a raucous, towel-snapping platoon. They were charged up more by the prospect of trespass than by the pseudo-danger of any roller coaster. When they'd dismounted die trolley, though, they found themselves alone, a set of isolated intruders on the edge of an off-limits enclave. And they'd become instantly subdued.

  Their instinctive wariness had been justified at once as a group of lean figures approached from the Wonderland dog track. Five of them, no older than the Townies, they were greasers. But they sauntered forward in their dark clothes like a motorcycle gang, juvenile delinquents, street fighters. Their T-shirts were rolled to show biceps and cigarette packs. They wore slick hair, pointy shoes, pegged pants. Purple thread marked the seams of one lad's black trousers, like an officer's stripe.

  "Get the fuck back on that train," one of them yelled from across the circle.

  Behind the Italian boys, still in the shade of the dog track's marquee, stood a knot of girls in calf-hugging pants and tight summer shirts. They pointed like spectators and cupped their mouths at each other's ears. Squire understood that they made the boys dangerous.

  The streetcar was about to embark on its return trip. The bell clanged urgently. The Charlestown boys knew better than to look at one another as, one by one, with no swagger, they climbed back aboard, as if summoned by nuns.

  The last to do so was Squire. At the time he was still known as Nick, and that was the name Jackie Mullen hissed at him, to get him to come.

  When the trolley, with its screech of iron wheels, began to roll away, the Irish kids, in an explosion of nerve, began to jeer back at the Italians, hanging out the windows, flipping the bird, crying, "Wop cocksuckers!" The Italians gave chase, but the Irish knew there was no danger they'd catch up to the accelerating streetcar. The driver was a mick too, and he laughed as he said, over his shoulder, "You showed them, I guess, huh?"

  Squire had been at the window, jeering like the others, but it had been more an act in his case than in anyone's. His skin burned with that shock of humiliation, and inwardly, on the instant, he resolved to return to Revere and violate its every precinct. And he would do it without the others, who were already slapping each other's backs, snapping towels again, an absurd display, an implicitly phony claim of victory. He would go back alone.

  And he had. He'd discovered that as a solitary idler, he could go anywhere in Revere unchallenged. He'd returned numerous times in the summer and fall, and even a few times in winter, indulging a fascination with the decrepit seaside realm. That it was enemy territory had made him a spy. He had browsed unnoticed at comic book racks in candy stores and had sat unobtrusively on rocks while olive-skinned children skipped stones into the lapping surf. He had collected seashells in good weather and tonic bottles from trash bins on the boardwalk when the weather turned. He had cashed the bottles in at the corner grocer's, as if the pennies were what he wanted. Before long he'd begun to nod at people he recognized. In those candy shops and grocery stores, on benches along the boardwalk and on boulders by the water, Squire had listened to the agitated talk, sometimes in Italian but mostly in English, of beatings, gun-downs, and disappearances. He heard the story of a particular fishing boat at a nearby pier that at least once had set out at night to dump a stiff into the sea. He heard of a gas station owner in Everett who kept pickled human ears in a jar by his cash register. Italian kids younger than Squire regaled each other with tales of the war their brothers were winning against the micks down in Beantown.

  Squire had heard the name Guido mentioned repeatedly, and it took him a while to realize that Tucci was being referred to. It was in April, a week after the body of Paulie Mack, a City Square newsstand owner and numbers operator, was tossed out of a car near the donut shop, that Squire had first seen Tucci. A carpenter replacing planks in the Revere Beach boardwalk had pointed him out, a lone figure walking in a hat and long overcoat with his collar up against the springtime wind. Squire had watched the black form grow steadily smaller as he receded to the far end of the boardwalk. When Tucci turned to come back, Squire saw two men who'd been trailing behind step aside for him, and he realized they were bodyguards. That told Squire to keep his distance, and he did. But even so, he watched Tucci for a long time that day, following him finally to the end of a particular street three blocks back from the beach. Another day, picking him up on the boardwalk again, he followed Tucci for enough into the street to see him enter a prim bungalow between two vacant lots. Squire saw the bodyguards get into a black Buick which, then, they did not start.

  Yes, he knew where the infamous Tucci lived. He was a spy. If he'd uncovered a secret, it was that the great enemy had a small but rounded stomach, walked with a slouch, and seemed lonely. Was merely a man.

  Squire held his grandfather's eyes. "Lou Triozzi," he repeated. "Guido Tucci's cousin. We'll talk him up bit by bit We'll accept his protection ..." The young man spoke so coldly that Ned Cronin glanced at Jackie Mullen, but the boy was still too dazed to be marking this phenomenon. "Until we can get protection from one of our own."

  2

  GROWING UP IN CHARLESTOWN, they were just the Doyle boys, old Cronin's grandsons, the double pulse of Flo Doyle's heart. Terry and Nick—the sight of one so evoked the other that people in the Town never imagined they would turn out to be so different from each other.

  Their father had gone late to the war, and had not come back—Battle of the Bulge, Flo always said. That was why she and her babies had moved back in with her father above the store. Cronin's own wife had died in Ireland giving birth to Flo. No one referred to it, but in the Town, Cronin and his daughter were regarded as if they had replaced each other's spouses. Slightly strange.

  But the boys were alike in their bright normality, as American as Irish. Toddlers around the store, t
hey were favorites of the Altar Guild ladies, who praised them for their freckles. As altar boys they always served together, gliding across the polished sanctuary of St. Mary's in cassocks that hid the movement of their legs. But they were headlong players in the neighborhood too, on their bikes and clamp-on skates, shooting hoops at the playground and stealing Pepsi bottles like other kids, pelting cars with snowballs and lying for each other when they were caught Only a year apart in age, they had the air of twins, which served each well when he needed to deny something.

  At Charlestown High—by now they were tall, well built, and lithe—they'd become famous outside the parish as a pair of hot-handed forwards who could hit each other with passes without looking. To the Townies in the stands, there was no mystery in the magic the Doyles worked on the court: their being brothers was what gave them their mystical connection. In the heat of a game, even old Cronin had trouble telling them apart.

  Not that he didn't have a secret preference. Nick, the younger, was the one who'd been declaring, ever since he could talk, his intention to be a flower man. He hung around the store, drawn by the current of Cronin's particular affection. But that seemed only fair, a compensation for Flo's all too obvious preference for Terry. He was the long-dead father's namesake, and on him, years before, Flo had fixed the stare of her own ambition. Her first-born son was going to be a priest, which was the only large distinction available in the dreams of her kind, and was always the first thing she'd ever said about him. Terry cooperated in her expectation, which set him apart from an early age in everyone's eyes, except in Nick's.

  "You, Nick! You!" Ned Cronin had called out that night after the K of C ceremony. The crowd had filed down into the large crypt hall below Holy Cross Cathedral in the South End. Cronin was wearing a satin cape and a plumed hat. Cardinal Cushing had greeted him with the once-over and the crack, "Your haberdasher, Ned, or mine?" Now Ned was near one of the beer kegs, waving at his grandson. "You get over here!"