3

“When we pull the string,” Collins Brady was saying to his father, “we would clear ten and a half to eleven million dollars.”

Colman Brady sat with his back to his rolltop desk. Collins sat in a straight-backed oak chair by the refectory table on which papers were stacked and on which a gray leather attaché case stood open at a rakish angle. It was a warm summer afternoon, Thursday, June 10, 1961, but the windows were not opened. Brady had installed central air conditioning in his building the year before. Both men wore suit coats and ties.

“We buy three hundred thousand shares of Percy-Dentler at thirty dollars a share.” Collins referred to the notepad on his knee. “We hold it for two months. By fall the stock will increase in value at least four hundred percent.”

“How?” Colman’s dark look was on his son. He was beginning to think the kid was better at it than he was.

“The key is San Francisco. It’s an American-listed stock. We go through McDonald. We pull Transnational off the board. A month later we get SWG to be noncommittal while word floats that they are about to liquidate, seeming to leave Percy-Dentler on top. The demand then would be instant and strong. We hold. We help the rise along with McDonald and, say, Van Heuval, who start bidding. We still hold. We hold until it’s two hundred a share.”

“When.”

“October, the latest.”

“Have you talked to McDonald?”

“Of course not, but he’ll have to come in.”

“I meant to ask you what he was like these days. He wasn’t always out west, you know. He was a friend of mine.”

“He’s old.”

Colman did not like the bald curtness of his son’s statement. Of course, Jim McDonald was old, near seventy. But Christ, he was only a step or two ahead of Colman.

“He’s my age.”

“No, he’s not, Dad.” The certainty in Collins’s voice was like a perch on which his statement sat.

“He’s the best damn broker in the business. I’m lucky to have him.”

“He’s lucky to have you.” Collins was thinking that the best in the business would not have been suspended from working as a registered representative by the New York Exchange. But that disgrace twenty years before had been a stroke of fortune for Brady, since it led to McDonald’s move to the American in San Francisco, where they needed him now.

“What’s the liability?” Colman asked.

“The obvious one. SEC stock manipulation and fraud. You’re the director.”

Colman was frankly surprised to have such a proposition laid out by his son. They both knew the importance of avoiding outright criminal activity. Their entire enterprise was criminal, but subtly so, designed to attract as little attention as possible from the regulators. Stock manipulation and market fraud; Colman thought about it. The kid seemed to have great hopes pinned on the thing.

“Why not do it through Instrumentation?”

“You’d have to bring in Harper, and since you’re a company officer, you’d still be liable. Frankly, if we go through Monument, we can keep the risk at an acceptable level. We own Sullivan. Even if there were bubbles and he had to move on us, he could hold it down. The deal would be voided. The worst you’d have would be civil.”

Colman brushed his right hand through his abundant white hair. “Sullivan? I didn’t know we had him. Since when?” Colman let his voice display surprise and respect. Peter G. Sullivan was with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Since May seventh. I took him to lunch at Bassin’s, an eighty-thousand-dollar lunch. I have a photograph of him accepting the envelope from me.”

“L’audace,” Colman said, “toujours l’audace!” Collins had already committed an enormous act of bribery. Where had he been hiding his balls all these years? Colman folded his hands at his lips and considered what his son had proposed. “There’s another problem.”

“The Monument shortfall.”

“That’s right. Dividends just went out. I doubt if we have five million.”

“We don’t.” Collins looked at his notepad. “Four and a third.”

“And we’d need?”

“Ten five. It has to be cash. Percy’s giving us a depressed price to get cash.”

“Ten million cash! Don’t be ludicrous!”

“Not in green, not in bills. But immediate credit in his bank. For Christ sake, Dad, that’s what ‘cash’ means now.”

“I thought ‘cash’ meant cash.”

The two men looked at each other. Collins’s smooth face was waxen, immobile, waiting for his father to speak. Colman could sense how much Collins wanted this deal. It was something he’d worked up on his own, and it looked very good. It wasn’t the enormous sums they would make that interested Colman. The innovation of it did. His son was cutting his own path across the field and Colman liked that very much. But still it was out of the question.

“I’m sorry, son. There’s simply no way we can swing it.”

“What about a short-term on Monument assets?”

“We’d have to disclose to stockholders. Out of the question.”

“There’s another way.”

“What?”

“Anselmo.”

Colman did not respond. He remained still, fingers a steeple at his lips.

Collins wanted to weather his father’s silence, but could not. “What do you think?”

“Gennaro Anselmo.’ Why do you think of him?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it. He’s our alchemist.”

“Lead into gold,” Colman said absently. He studied his son’s face. Genius, he thought, reveals itself in the eyes. He studied his son’s eyes. “I had the impression you were content to leave him to me.”

“I am. And he is to leave me to you.”

“Yes. He’s a great respecter of sons, but he doesn’t trust former cops.”

“It’s curious what part of my life I have to be ashamed of.”

“Shame is an indulgence, son. The point is this isn’t Anselmo’s kind of deal.”

“How much is in the Swiss account?”

Colman shrugged. “Come on, Dad, this is me! How much?”

“More than enough.”

“Why won’t you tell me?”

Colman stared at the hard image his son threw back at him, a mirror. “I don’t know, Micko, how much is in the account.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It is true, nonetheless. I haven’t seen the figures since April.”

“How much was there then?”

“Seven million, and you want six.”

“Yes.”

“He’d never agree. He believes in cash. That account is his mattress. There has to be five in it at all times.”

“Let me ask him.”

“He won’t see you.”

“He will if you bring me. Look, Dad, once he sees what a sure thing this is he can’t say no. He can double his stash in three months, and there’s no risk.”

“There’s always a risk in the market.”

“No. They want you to think there is.”

Colman registered the awful confidence of his son’s generation. They had begun their lives with the great victory over Hitler. They had bare memories of the Depression, of the Crash, but they had no scars. They believed in the absence of limits. Their money, their plutonium carried the same secret; limitless rapid growth means limitless power.

“Anselmo doesn’t see things the way you do, son. Having five now is more important to him than maybe having twenty in the fall.”

“We’re either in business or we aren’t. This kind of deal is what it’s all about. What the hell does he have us out front for if not for this? Good Christ, Dad! You can’t just buy up nickel and dime shoe stores and then tally the cash register every night. Like it or not, we have to pull this scheme, or one like it, and very soon. If we don’t expand we shrivel. That is what Anselmo is paying us to know. Otherwise we might as well just move into the fucking bank vault with him and whack each other off.”

“He doesn’t live in a bank vault. He lives in a slum.” They could also be very crude, Colman thought, his son’s generation.

“Still?”

“Yes. The money is nothing to him. It never has been. That is why he brought me in.”

“Don’t kid yourself; he loves the secret hold he has on things through you. He loves the fact that unlike all of his flamboyant bullshit brothers of the Unione, his fingers touch something besides dope peddlers, hookers, bookies, and Vegas sharpies. And when I tell him that he can make the stock market dance a minuet to Aaron Copland and pull off one of the coups of the century, he’ll wet his pants to get in.”

“When you tell him?”

“Yes. I want to see him.”

Colman lowered his hand. Maybe what the kid needed was a dose of the wop. “He won’t know who Aaron Copland is.”

“Do you?”

“Rites of Spring.”

“That’s Stravinsky, Daddo.”

“I wasn’t talking about the music, son. I was talking about you.”

Collins grimaced. He should have known.

Colman decided to go with it. As for the fraud, what the hell, it was all fraud. There was something showing in Collins that he had not seen before, and he liked it. If he was disappointed at all, it was that his son had not displayed such nerve a long time before. Colman turned to his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed. He waited. Then he spoke.

“I must see you.”

He waited.

“Very soon, as soon as possible. Yes. That would be good.”

He waited.

“It is not about that. We can discuss that, but I have nothing to . . . Alright.”

He waited.

“One more thing. I am bringing my son. Yes, Gennaro, my son.”

He waited.

“I insist. You must trust me. Alright.”

He returned the phone to its cradle and turned to Collins. “He thought I had something else in mind.”

“What?”

“The killing at Revere Beach two days ago. You didn’t read about it? A Gallagher kid killed a Maguire, over a girl, for Christ’s sake.”

“What’s that to Anselmo?”

Colman wondered momentarily if his son really did not know. “Gallagher runs Anselmo’s operation in Southie. Maguire runs it in Charlestown and Somerville. Bennie Maguire declared war on Gallagher this morning.”

Collins did not react.

“Do you know what that means?”

“Certainly. If Anselmo can’t keep his boys in line Balestrione will come up and do it for him. Nobody wants a gang war now.”

“Not with the noise Bobby’s making at Justice. It’s head-in-the-trenches time.”

“But the Irish don’t know it.”

“Stupid harps.”

“Anselmo should relax, Dad. Bobby’s after the Midwest boys, Chicago, Detroit.”

“Suppose you tell that to him.”

“Politely, eh?”

“Very.”

“When’s the meeting?”

“Now. Let’s go.”

Outside Colman hailed a Checker cab and told the driver to take them to Castle Island.

Castle Island was the park on the far tip of the South Boston peninsula. It had not been a true island since Curley’s landfill project on which Brady and Anselmo had first met.

“Forty years ago, nearly,” Colman said.

“It seems to me I can remember when this was an island.”

“Impossible. You were two.”

Collins paid the driver.

On top of a hill was the colonial battery that gave the island its name, a massive stone fort that achieved a medieval aspect with its angled notches and cannon slits, the blinded eyes of war. Boys carrying fishing poles passed Colman and Micko as they stood in the parking lot looking up at the castle. There was a fishing pier at the north base of it. To the south was an expanse of lawn that drew picnickers on weekends. On that Thursday afternoon, typically, there were only the young fishermen, a few solitary strollers, and a pair of hand-holders. Colman led the way along the walk that encircled the fort, past the obelisk honoring David McKay, the builder of clipper ships. On the harbor side of the castle they leaned over the iron railing and watched the surf breaking on the rocks twenty feet below. The harbor islands were like a fleet of ships waiting for their pilots.

“They used to burn the horses there,” Colman said, pointing to a ruined smokestack on the nearest island. “Rendering plant. Render unto horses.”

“And unto glue what glues.”

Colman looked sharply at his son with surprise, not rebuke, in his eyes. It was an impiety once not typical of Collins, like the crude language.

Colman looked at his watch. Four forty.

“Castle Island,” he said. “Because it has a castle on it. Don’t you wish everything was so simple as the name of this place?”

“But it’s not an island. Is that ‘simple’?”

They stared out over the harbor from their similar postures, hunched over the railing, hands clasped.

“There’s a rock out there,” Colman said, “to which they used to tie pirates for the vultures to eat.”

“And for other pirates to see. I remember you telling me about it. Those were the good old days.”

“When they tied pirates to rocks?”

“No, when you told me stories. I loved coming over here with you. I used to come out here by myself a lot. Once or twice from Harvard I came over here.”

“With a girl?”

“Nope.” Why was it hard for his father to imagine him coming out here alone? Because by the time of college he spent as little time as possible alone. That was before Janet, of course. Now he was alone continually, but for such rare moments as this with his father. It was like being a boy again.

Colman looked at his watch. Four forty-seven.

“The next parish over, your Aunt Maeve used to say, is Dingle.”

“It’s Portugal. Ireland is due east of Newfoundland.”

Colman stared at the swells of water as if he saw faces in them. “You’ve a new habit, I see.”

“I do?”

“Contradicting your old man. You used to have respect.”

“That was before you hired me.”

“I pay you to contradict me, do I?”

“Don’t you?”

“You’ve no poet in you, Micko. It disgusts me to think that when you look out at that horizon you see Iberia, not Kerry.”

“I see the horizon.”

“You’re hopeless.”

“No. Just not Irish.”

“Exactly what I mean. How the hell did you end up a son of mine?”

Collins shifted his weight on the railing to look at his father. Though the question had been asked lightly, it sliced through Collins. He wanted to show his wound no more than his father had shown his blade, but he could not help but lift a corner on what he was feeling. “I’ve often wondered that myself, Daddo. If I’m a disappointment, it’s as much to myself as to you.”

Colman was stung by his son’s simple statement. A parent, he thought, who wants to be everything to his child hates the child when he is. He felt that he had failed his son miserably. “You’re not a disappointment to me, son.”

“If there’s a difference between us, it’s not your brogue or my flat a. It’s that you live in the world you were born to, however much it keeps changing on you. I don’t. I don’t even live in the world I was trained to.”

“You do alright.” Colman was thinking of the stock deal he had put together.

Collins was thinking that his entire life had become layered with deceit. He was deceiving his father now, even while trying to tell him the truth. There was no point in pressing it. He didn’t say anything.

Colman mistook his son’s silence for mere moroseness. He couldn’t figure the kid. One minute, driven and enthused, the next, done in by self-pity. Colman thought nothing was so smug as self-pity.

He looked at his watch. Four fifty-eight. He pushed himself away from the railing, casting one last look at the harbor. A tanker was sliding in from Boston Light. An Eastern Constellation with a fuselage the shape of a cigar angled down toward the runway at Logan. Colman headed up the grassy slope toward Fort Independence.

Collins followed him.

In 1634 Governor Thomas Dudley persuaded twenty of his fellow Puritans to subscribe five pounds each for the fortification of the island in the middle of Boston Harbor. “We find our defense here,” he said; “now let our history begin.” But it was not until 1776 that the granite fort engaged an enemy. On March 5 of that year Lord Percy, under orders from General Howe, directed a withering fire from the fort against the very people its guns were meant to protect. When the British fled Boston they left the castle ablaze and, on their way out of the harbor, blew up Boston Light as a final gesture of contempt. The fort had five bastions and two dozen casements from which heavy cannon covered Boston.

Colman, and after him Collins, walked through the narrow passageway that cut the east wall in half opposite the huge gate entrance in the west wall. An elm grew in the center of the courtyard and cast its shadow sharply down. Its leafy branches reached to the level of the ramparts fifty feet high. Other smaller trees grew from the soil that covered the bastions on the site of gun emplacements.

Collins saw a discarded condom in the corner of the passageway where it opened on the inner fort. He heard a rat scurrying away and felt a predictable revulsion. He expected to see condoms and hear rats in such places.

Colman took his place under the elm. Collins joined him. They stood stiffly. No one else was in the courtyard. Colman looked at his watch. Five.

He looked toward the low arch of the entrance gate and saw the figures of three men, silhouettes, in the tunnel. They walked with a similar swaying, right to left. One was quite short. All three wore dark business suits.

Colman knew Anselmo and Costanari, but the third man he recognized only because of the eyepatch. Anselmo’s son Marcello had lost his eye, ironically, in a youthful hockey accident.

“Hello, my friend,” Colman said. He stepped into Anselmo’s arms and they embraced not quite perfunctorily.

“This is your son?”

“Yes. Michael Collins Brady.” Colman pushed Anselmo lightly by the elbow toward his son.

Collins had been looking at Marcello, who was as tall as he was and about the same age. He had pronounced lips that were out of proportion with his other features, incongruously so. Such lips were a sign of softness and inexperience which clashed with the gleaming leather eyepatch and with Marcello’s reputation as a rough player.

Collins turned to Gennaro and his impressions came quickly: a short man, losing his hair, sixty, not fat, nothing soft about him. Collins tried to recall the facts about Anselmo’s operation, tried to conjure up the data sheet with its figures and names: Comose Collections—garbage and numbers; Othello wines—bootlegging, smuggling; Roma Foods—the lead arm, Marcello’s. What were the sums involved? What laws habitually violated? What were the points of conflict with Balestrione? What would the Irish gang war mean? Collins was, while staring at Anselmo, trying to think of anything but Anna.

He nurtured a juxtaposition of opposing convictions about Anna’s death. On the one hand, it was an accident which resulted from his father’s overzealous and misguided effort to protect him. His father had been gullible and naïve about what was involved in preventing the marriage, and he regretted Anna’s death as much as Collins himself did. On the other hand, Anna’s death was the result of brutal behavior by gangsters who were murderously indifferent to the value of human life. Anselmo had had her kidnapped and, as Collins saw it, was only vaguely disturbed that she had died. Collins had transferred all the hate and rage he might otherwise have felt for his father to this callous man who was standing in front of him. But he would not feel it. Collins would show Anselmo nothing.

“Good to meet you after all these years,” he said.

“Yes,” Anselmo said. “You’ve been with your father a long time now.”

“Nearly seven years.”

Colman put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “He gets the works when I retire.”

“As it should be,” Anselmo said.

“But he’ll never retire,” Collins said. “That’s the catch.”

“Also as it should be.” Anselmo touched Colman. “We must beware the ambition of our sons, eh?”

“Indeed,” Colman said, but Anselmo’s statement put him in mind of his nephew’s ambition, not his son’s.

Costanari’s impatience was palpable. “There are two points to this meeting, the don’s and yours. First, the don’s.”

By virtue of Costanari’s rudeness Anselmo could be polite. “You know Gallagher,” he said to Colman.

“I knew his father, P. J. He was with Jerry MacCurtain. You remember Jerry MacCurtain?”

“You know Gallagher,” Anselmo repeated.

“No. Maybe I met him when he was a kid. I don’t think so.”

“I know him,” Collins said. “They lived on Seventh, right?”

Colman nodded.

“We were altar boys together. P. J., Junior. I know him.”

Anselmo had entirely ignored Collins and continued to do so. “You know Maguire, the oldest one.”

“Yes,” Colman said, “I know Bennie. I don’t know his brother.”

“No matter.”

“Why?”

“He is dead. Gallagher walked up behind him on the street at City Square and put his gun to his ear and blew his head off.”

“Christ,” Colman said, “Bennie’ll murder him.”

“He will not,” Anselmo said.

“You don’t know Bennie. If they killed his brother, they’ll make Chicago look sweet. You’ve got a problem.”

It seemed to Marcello his father did not need an Irishman telling him he had a problem with Irishmen.

“I want to see them,” Anselmo said.

Colman said nothing.

“I want you to arrange it.”

“They’re your boys, Gennaro. I’m out of touch with that stuff. I haven’t seen Bennie in years.”

“My friend, I am asking you to help me keep the peace of Boston. Your Irish brothers understand only one word from me. I would prefer not to speak it.”

“I have no influence with them.”

“They are your people.”

How to explain to Anselmo that micks are not wops.

Collins shocked Colman by saying, “You have more influence than you imagine. I think Mr. Anselmo’s right.”

Colman looked sharply at Collins. The kid and his contradictions. Colman, Anselmo had said, control your son.

Colman led Collins away from the tree to the point where the passageway intersected with the courtyard. Colman stood with his back toward the others so that his son had to circle around him.

“What in hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Anselmo’s right, Dad.”

“It’s his problem, not ours. I stay out of the street. I have always stayed out of the street.”

“But if these punks start bumping each other off you know what follows—press, TV, editorials, outraged citizenry, pressure to investigate, starting with Anselmo, ending with us. We have to help him cool it.”

“He thinks I’m some kind of harp chieftain. Gallagher and Maguire would laugh me off the block.”

“I’ll do it.”

“What?”

“Let me do it.”

“You’re kidding. You don’t know your ass from your elbow out there.”

“I know Gallagher.”

“Altar boys, Jesus Christ!”

“And you can get me to Bennie.”

“Collins, listen to me. We have no public link to Anselmo. We do not want any now; can’t you understand that?”

“Our secret is not worth a damn if a major gang war opens up. The one reason the arrangement has worked is because Boston has been peaceful. If Gallagher and Maguire start knocking heads, then Anselmo moves in on both of them. If he doesn’t, Balestrione moves in on him. If he doesn’t, the national syndicate moves against him. One’s house in order—the first rule.”

“For want of a nail, the shoe.”

“Alarum sounds. Exit Richard to be slain.” Collins paused. “It’s not such a big thing to ask Gallagher and Maguire to sit down.” He paused again. “Alright?”

“Alright.”

They returned to the tree.

“I’ve decided,” Colman said, “to have my son arrange it.”

“I want you,” Anselmo said.

“No.”

Anselmo studied Colman’s face. That jaw was set.

Anselmo nodded, barely.

“The meeting,” Costanari announced, “will be Saturday at three o’clock at the Cantina Reale.”

The Cantina Reale. Could Colman Brady be doing this again?

“I will arrange it,” Collins said. “That brings us to point two.”

Costanari gave Collins a sharp look. He was the one to announce the points.

Brady ignored him. “We have an extraordinary opportunity to establish the economic power of Monument on an international level. The details are too complicated to go into.”

“Go into them,” Costanari said, but Collins was addressing himself to Anselmo.

“There are only two dozen companies in the country that could make the deal I’m proposing, and they don’t know about it. It boils down to buying out the largest copper company in Latin America, waiting long enough to make it seem that its holdings are going to be multiplied by the purchase of other companies, letting the stock soar, and selling at four hundred percent.”

“A public corporation?” Costanari asked.

“Yes.”

Costanari shook his head at Anselmo.

“The SEC will approve everything we do. We’ll be operating in a legal gray area. The regulations governing multinational transactions are a thicket of contradictions and vagueness. In any case, we have the SEC tied up.”

“What do you want from me?” Anselmo asked. “I don’t concern myself with these things.”

“Six million in cash to add to the four we have.”

Neither Costanari nor Marcello spoke. This was Anselmo’s.

“Why should I trust you with that much money?”

“For the same reason you’ve trusted us with any,” Collins said. “Because you don’t want to underuse your capital. You hired my father to pull in chits for you, and he does. He hired me because I know things he doesn’t know. The law, for example, and how to work it in your favor. And I know that at a certain point in business, money has its own momentum, and one had better either be prepared to run with it or get out of business altogether. Frankly, Mr. Anselmo, your alternative to this deal is a savings account at First National.”

Anselmo said slowly, “You want me to risk the money to make money.”

“No. That is not it at all, and you know it. I want you to take the opportunity you have to score one of the major coups in the history of the stock market.”

“Which would attract attention.”

“Not to you. Not to us if we don’t want it to. It’s paper talking to paper. We control the transaction and its aftermath absolutely. Obviously Monument could be a big-league operation after this. I assumed that was what you wanted.”

Anselmo looked at Colman. Colman understood that he was being asked for his endorsement. “I’d go with it, Gennaro. The kid has done his homework. And I think he’s right. We either go with the boom or we start shutting down.”

“Eventually, you’re talking about an international company,” Anselmo said, showing his interest.

“A collection of companies,” Collins said. “A conglomerate, controlled by no one government and subject to the regulation of no one commission. There is a huge crack in the wall and we can be one of the first through it. We need the six million.”

Anselmo turned slightly toward Costanari, who nodded.

Collins understood immediately that Costanari kept the books. He would be the Swiss shuttle. His were the hands that touched things.

“When?” Anselmo asked.

“Tomorrow.”

Costanari shook his head. “Six million dollars. It is not in my desk. It means a journey.”

“My father can go,” Collins said.

“No,” Costanari said blankly.

Anselmo and Colman stared at each other. There was a second account in Switzerland. Colman was not privy to everything.

Collins, aware of the magnet lock between the two, understood the revelation he’d forced and was embarrassed for his father. All these years—a second account. But Colman was not embarrassed. He understood Anselmo. He’d have had a second account himself. Anselmo probably had a third, of which Costanari was ignorant.

“I must be here for the meeting with the Irish,” Costanari said.

“If we’re going to make the deal,” Collins said, “we have to do it at the latest Monday morning.”

Anselmo was still staring at Colman. “Is it good?”

“Yes,” Colman said.

“You will go,” Anselmo said to Costanari.

“But I will . . .”

“I have decided.”

Costanari sagged with disappointment.

Collins was thinking the man’s office would be vacant all weekend.