40

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Boston City Hall, Downtown

BOSTON CITY HALL was located on School Street next to the old King’s Chapel graveyard and across from the Parker House, once home to the Saturday Club, the literary elite of Boston, whose members included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, even a visiting Charles Dickens; it now served as the place where politicians from the State House drank after hours, made underhanded deals, and met their mistresses. Cal supposed that at one time or another Foley had met Sheila there.

City Hall had been built in the mid-1800s in the French Second Empire style, with its high mansard roof topped by a dome, tall windows and doors flanked by ornamented columns, all now pristinely coated in snow. In the courtyard Cal and Dante passed the statues of Benjamin Franklin and Josiah Quincy, a marble plaque that recognized the spot as the original location of Boston Latin, the first public school in America, and then pushed though the massive front doors into the heated foyer decorated with historical murals. Clumps of dirty snow melted on the tile and marble, and an old black woman cleaned the floors with a mop as city workers spilled up and down the wide staircase on either side of the entrance.

Cal paused on the stairs as Dante lit a cigarette.

“Any luck last night?” Cal asked.

Dante inhaled on the cigarette, its tip flaring red, and blew out smoke long and slow. “No, nothing. I’ll give it a couple more nights.”

He shook the match out. “You think we’re going to find anything here?”

“Foley and McAllister aren’t tearing down the neighborhood just for the fun of it. The public records will show us what they’re up to.”

The Office of the City Clerk was a large room on the second floor. Its faded wood-paneled walls had seen better days. As had the two large reading tables in the center of the room, their scarred surfaces illuminated by small lamps. Upon the wall a large clock loudly ticked the seconds. A clerk sat behind an opaque ribbed-glass window that he pushed up when Cal rang the bell. He had a narrow face, dull, watery-gray eyes under thick-rimmed eyeglasses smeared with fingerprints, which reflected the lights of the office when he raised his head to look up at them. His eyebrows and hair were slicked down with oil, and the sharp odor of mothballs came from his tweed jacket. Part of the sandwich he’d been chewing bulged in his cheek.

“We’re looking for building proposals or plans for Scollay Square,” Cal said. “Anything you might have that’s come on the books in the last six months or so.”

“A bit more specific would help.”

“The name of the firm is McIntyre, McAllister, and Broome, but I’m not sure how you file such things. How about by… zoning region? There can’t be that much going on in the city, is there?”

“New building proposals and planning would be under the Superintendent of Buildings and the City Planning Commission. Plats that are awaiting review and approval will be there also.”

The clerk took his time chewing and swallowing; he didn’t seem to be enjoying it much.

“I can find those records for you, if you’d like to take a seat over at one of the tables.”

They waited and listened to the sounds from other offices: typewriters clacking, footsteps on the tiled floors beyond the door, a woman’s shrill laughter. Dante finished his cigarette, stamped it out in a tin ashtray still filled with the ash of old cigarettes, and immediately lit another. Cal pulled a damp newspaper from his pocket and began reading the front page, but the words wouldn’t stick, so he moved on to the sports section and then the funnies.

The door opened and the clerk came in carrying an armful of cardboard tubes containing rolled drafting plans. When he dropped them onto the table, they counted ten in all.

“Jesus,” Cal said. “How many developments does McAllister have in the works?”

The clerk sighed as he took the tops off the tubes. “You asked for McIntyre, McAllister, and Broome, and you asked for Scollay Square, so I got you everything from Tremont to Church Street, and from Hanover to Causeway Street in the North End.”

Cal shook out a roll of blue drafting paper and stretched it across the table. Dante held down one side and together they looked at an overhead view of Scollay Square, along Cambridge Street. To the east, past the intersection of State, all the present buildings were gone. In their place were larger divisions and subdivisions: a vast sprawl of concrete plazas and office building skyscrapers. “Shit,” Dante muttered at his side. “This can’t be right.”

Cal’s stomach roiled, a sense of panic swelling in him that he couldn’t explain. He knew that he was merely looking at a plan, that such things couldn’t just happen overnight, that the place he knew couldn’t be gone so neatly and so quickly.

Dante pointed toward the corner of the draft and the names that were printed there: McIntyre, McAllister, and Broome, and below that, Rizzo Construction, and Cal’s unease grew. This was the thing—the connection—between all of them.

“What about the West End?” he asked the clerk.

The clerk stared at him, and when Cal gave him his best smile, he spoke as if he were speaking to a child.

“McIntyre, McAllister, and Broome have proposals for all the city space I just mentioned. That includes the West End. What you see is awaiting review and approval.”

Dante leaned over the draft, the long ash hanging from his cigarette only inches from the paper. “But how can that be? You’re talking about one square mile of city real estate. There are homes and businesses there. None of it’s been sold—it can’t be.”

“That’s what it says,” the clerk said offhandedly, staring at Dante’s cigarette.

The clerk pointed to the largest of the documents. “That’s a plat of consolidation, which consolidates many parcels of urban land into a single parcel. It comes with the required surveys of the previous parcels attached for approval. As it states there, McIntyre, McAllister, and Broome are the registered landowners.”

“They’re going to displace thousands of people.” Cal sensed he was speaking aloud to the almost empty room. “And nobody fucking knows about it.”

The clerk shrugged. “Hey, did you want to look at these or not? I go on my lunch break in five minutes.”

Cal wanted to remind him that he’d just been eating. He glanced at Dante. There was no point in looking at the other plans; they already knew what they contained: more empty spaces filled with grid lines, measurements, numbers, dimensions, and architectural line drawings of buildings that would soon be constructed. Cal shook his head and began to roll up the blueprint stock. His hands were shaking. Dante said, “Thank you. We’re done.”

“You’re welcome,” the clerk said dryly, and took the plan from Cal, rolled it, and then slipped it into its tube. He gathered up the remaining tubes with a burdened sigh.

“The offices are closed from twelve to one fifteen. If you need anything else, you can come back then.” His shoes clattered on the old tile.

Dante whistled and shook his head. “Jesus, Cal, we’re talking millions of dollars at stake here—the whole redevelopment of Scollay and the West End, all dependent on Foley getting it pushed through.”

“Makes the Brink’s job look like peanuts.”

“Yeah. And look how much McAllister has to lose in all this. He doesn’t seem like the kind of man who would take losing anything too well, does he?”

The glass window squealed as it was pried up, and they turned. There was the clerk’s pallid face and his bleary, spectacled eyes staring at them. “The office is closed, gentlemen,” he said, pointing to the large clock ticking on the wall, and brought the window down with a bang.