4

P. J. Gallagher ran a flower shop on Broadway. Ordinarily a Friday in June was the worst possible time for him. In addition to the regular Sunday displays that had to be readied for the high altar at Gate of Heaven, there were always at least a dozen weddings. If a Southie boy caused the sweat to flow on the palm of a girl’s hand, he married her, just in case. Gallagher was convinced that half the brides who just knew they were pregnant had also just never been penetrated. South Boston was the only place in the world—outside Tipperary—where the miracle of conception occurred in the woman’s mouth.

If Fridays were usually bad, that one was worse.

The flower shop was closed. The hell with the customers for once. P. J. and seven of his boys were huddled in the main room upstairs. P. J.’s wife, Judy, and their four kids were off at her sister’s place in Dorchester. Gallagher did not expect Bennie Maguire to hit him there, but you never knew. Not after what he himself had done. The day after you blow some fucker’s head off from a foot away, you just fucking turn into jelly wondering what the hell you’ve done. But P. J. wasn’t going to let anybody see how he felt. Let the fuckers come. He’d blow them all away. When the shit settled he’d be running everything from Highland Ave. and Bunker Hill to City Point. He watched the traffic on Broadway from the corner of the window. He gave every appearance of confidence and brain, as if this war was what he’d always wanted. In fact, he’d felt continually that day like throwing up.

It wasn’t noon yet when he saw the guy in the suit up the block by Doran’s. Gallagher studied him. What was there about him? He was coming toward the shop. P. J. wore his mind out trying to remember. He watched the guy coming.

“Somebody’s coming,” he said.

The others jumped. They pulled their guns. They were all sick with fear.

“A fellow, dressed up.”

There was a loud knocking on the door downstairs.

No one moved.

The knocking was repeated.

“Hell,” P. J. said, getting up, “probably wants a fucking bouquet.” Nobody he knew dressed like that, cufflinks and all.

He went downstairs. He put his gun in the pocket of his windbreaker, but he did not take his finger off the trigger.

“Yeah?” he yelled through the door.

“I want to see Gallagher, Peter Gallagher, Peter Joseph Gallagher.”

“Who does?”

“Mick Brady.”

“Who the fuck is Mick Brady?”

“Is that you, P. J.?”

The voice plucked at Gallagher’s memory, the wire of it. He had the gun aimed at the door. He opened it.

“I told you.”

“Mick Brady?”

“That’s right.”

“Christ, I remember you.” Recognition crossed P. J.’s face. “Fourth Street, right?”

“Right. St. Eulalia’s.”

“They call it St. Brigid’s now. Monsignor Connor changed the name after his mother.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You been gone quite a while.”

“Yes.”

“Quite a fucking while.”

“Can I come in?”

“What for?”

“Because I’d just as soon not be in the street in front of your place right now. If you don’t mind.”

Gallagher let Brady enter. He did not lower his arm or release the feather hold he had on the trigger.

“And don’t shoot me, P. J., if you don’t mind.”

P. J. let the barrel of the gun fall inside his coat. “What do you want?”

“I came to invite you to a meeting you won’t want to miss.”

Gallagher circled Brady slowly, a loitering crow.

Collins was thinking he and Gallagher should have grown up friends, though he found everything about him distasteful, including the film of oil on his forehead and the blackheads awash in it.

“I’m listening,” Gallagher announced.

“Tomorrow at three at the Cantina Reale on Hanover Street.”

“Fuck! Anselmo?”

“You guessed it.”

“This is none of his shit.”

“That is not how he sees it.”

“You tell him to stay out.”

“You can tell him yourself.”

“Bullshit. Maguire be there?”

“That’s the point.”

“I’ll be goddamned if I will.”

“Possible. What is certain is you’ll be dead if you won’t. What chance would you have against both Maguire and Anselmo?”

Gallagher considered this.

“Why are you setting this up?”

“I’m a lawyer. I set up a lot of things.”

“You work for Anselmo?”

“Let’s just say I work for the peace of the city, P. J. Some concerned citizens would like to help you and Bennie avoid the Hatfield-McCoy bit. Anselmo couldn’t very well send over one of his wop thugs, now, could he?”

“You going to be at this meeting?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t trust that fucker.”

“Anselmo or Maguire?”

“Either one of them.”

“Nobody’s asking you to trust them. Just come.”

“That’s not trust, you dumb shit?”

“And, P. J., no hardware.”

“Fuck you, no hardware.”

“And come alone.”

“That’s not trust? Jesus fucking Christ!”

“Bennie will be there, Gallagher. He’ll be delighted if you don’t show. He’ll have the don’s ear all to himself, and your absence will say all Anselmo needs to hear.”

“Fuck.”

“OK?”

“Fuck you, Brady.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, P. J. Three o’clock. Ciao, bambino, as we say in Dearo.”

Maguire’s house was next to the school on the square around the Bunker Hill obelisk. It was the sort of house Bostonians were accustomed to find on Beacon Hill, a grand Federal bowfront with wrought-iron grillwork on the windows and crafted spiral balusters supporting the brass handrails that framed the seven stairs of the entrance. The brass was brown and caked, however. No one in Charlestown knew what a shine the metal would take. The doorbell did not work. Collins banged on the wood of the door. The beveled glass shook, and a piece of ancient dried putty fell. No one answered. He knocked again and still no sounds came from the house.

Monument Square was a broad expanse of lawn, unfenced. Collins surveyed it, then let his eye drift up the granite shaft, the Washington miniature. As every obelisk once imitated Egypt, now it did Washington. The Bunker Hill Monument was two hundred and twenty feet high. A single window, a monster eye, topped it, Bunker Hill cyclops. Collins Brady saw a flash of white in the window, the sleeve of a shirt pulling back quickly. He waited for it to reappear, but it did not. Someone was up there watching him. It was a good place for that.

Brady crossed the lawn.

“‘A dear bought victory,’” the plaque read. “‘Another such would have ruined us.’—British General Henry Clinton after the Battle of Bunker Hill.”

“Something eh?” the guard said from his little house.

“Yes,” Collins said, “something. How much?”

“Ten cents.”

Brady paid, went into the monument, and started to climb the stairs, two hundred and ninety-four of them.

He had not climbed more than a few dozen when he heard the footsteps from above, rapid and increasingly loud. Someone was running down the stairs. The passageway was very narrow, with barely room for three men to stand abreast, winding upward at such an angle that only the next seven or eight stairs could be seen. Brady retreated four stairs to get away from the meshed bulb from which light poured conically on a small space.

The runner spiraled down on Brady without seeing him. Brady clamped a bearhug on the man and pinned him to the cold rock wall.

It was a boy.

“Let me go!”

Seventeen, no more than eighteen, Tony’s age. He was thin but strong. Brady had to strain to maintain his hold.

“Let me go, goddamn it!”

“Shut up!” Brady pressed the kid hard until he felt him give. “I want to see Bennie Maguire. I’m a friend of his. Where is he?”

“You’re a cop.”

“No, I’m not. Were the cops here?”

“Last night, yesterday, all day.”

“Where’s Bennie?”

“I don’t know.” The kid began to struggle again. “I don’t know. Let go of me.”

Brady released the boy and stepped back. The boy bolted, but Brady grabbed his arm. “Listen. You tell Bennie I’ll wait upstairs, you hear? You tell him Colman Brady’s son Micko is upstairs. OK?”

“Let me go.”

“What are you going to tell him?”

“Brady.”

“That’s right. Colman Brady.”

The view from the monument was unlike any Collins Brady had ever seen of Boston. It was Boston from behind, and because it was unfamiliar—the Manger and North Station and the Garden and the court at Pemberton Square were in the foreground for once, and Beacon Hill seemed stunted and minor in the background—the rents and tears in the tapestry were visible. The shoddy roofs of Scollay Square, the scarred railroad yard, the beaten hotels, the tenements of the West End, and the wharves and warehouses along Commercial Street below Copp’s Hill in the North End—the worn side of the city was showing. Yet, because he had never seen it that way before there was a freshness to it, as if his gaze were enough to repair time’s damage.

Collins never heard him.

“So you’re Colman’s boy.” It was the brogue that told him it was Maguire.

Collins turned slowly to face him, expecting the gun. Maguire had it pointed at Brady’s head.

“Yes, I am. He sent me to you.”

“Why didn’t he come himself?”

“Because I’m a lawyer. If I cross with the police I’ll have reasons. They can’t touch me. Privilege of the court, attorney-client secrecy, all that.”

“And who would your client be, counselor?”

Maguire was tall and very thin. His features were rugged, sharp as a woodcut. His hair was white. Collins guessed he was near sixty. Perhaps he should not have had him climb those stairs, but he seemed strong, unwinded. His accent made him sound just over from Ireland, but Collins knew he’d been in Boston nearly as long as his father. His father’s brogue was softer, more mannered than Maguire’s. His father’s ear had had other tones to learn from.

“Don’t fire,” Collins said, smiling, “till you see the whites of their eyes.”

Maguire did not show whether he got the allusion or not.

“No ‘dear bought victories’ today, alright? Put the gun away, Mr. Maguire. You don’t need it with me.” One of life’s first rules—never address your parents’ peers by the Christian name or by the surname without its title.

Maguire looked at the.38. “I hate the thing anyway.” He slid it into the back pocket of his baggy wool trousers. “So?”

“I’ve come to deliver a message.”

“From Colman?”

“No. From Anselmo.”

Maguire’s smile was as swift and nonchalant as an usher’s tearing a ticket into two pieces. He knew.

“Oh?” he said.

“There’s a meeting tomorrow at three at the Cantina Reale.”

“With Gallagher?”

“Yes.”

“I have to kill him. Anselmo will understand that.”

“I can’t speak for Anselmo. He wants you there.”

“Will Colman be there?”

“No.”

“I want Colman there.”

“That’s impossible. I’ll be there.”

Maguire did not speak.

“Alright?”

Maguire remained silent.

“Mr. Maguire, you don’t want this war.”

“Of course not. I want that animal Gallagher. It’s just between him and me. You tell Anselmo that.”

“You can tell him yourself.”

Nothing.

“Alright?”

Maguire nodded, then turned and disappeared into the narrow winding staircase.

Collins turned to the window and stared out at the city of Boston, still from the wrong angle. A tired old lady whose memories made her almost beautiful.

The next day Collins Brady entered the North End feeling like a member of the public entering a private garden. The streets were crowded with pushcarts and children. Men, retired sentries, stood in their tame clusters on corners. Crones watched from windows, their beefy elbows on stained cushions. Three blocks in on Hanover Street was the Cantina Reale. When Brady went into the restaurant, it was dark and chairs were upended on tables. A man behind a small bar was washing glasses.

He gestured with his head toward a door in the rear.

Brady followed the winding aisle between the tables. The door opened on a staircase, which he ascended.

At the top of the stairs a large man in shirtsleeves sat on a straight-backed chair. The leather straps of his shoulder holster pressed furrows in his flesh. He stood. Brady took his place in front of him and raised his arms. The man ran his hands down the length of Brady’s body, was satisfied, stepped back, and opened the door. Brady entered the room.

Anselmo was behind a desk.

Two men were seated on a tattered vinyl couch to Anselmo’s left, both nattily dressed. A third, Marcello, was standing at Anselmo’s right elbow.

Anselmo nodded at Brady.

“My sons,” he said, gesturing to the seated men, “Leonard and Rico.”

The two stood and shook Brady’s hand with a stiff courtesy. Both were on the wrong edge of youth.

“And Marcello you know.” Marcello, older and more subdued than his brothers in dress, was like his father.

“It’s time,” Marcello said.

“They’ll be here,” Brady said. He looked at his watch. It was two minutes before three.

Standing in the stare of Anselmo and his sons, Brady thought that was what it was to stand in court. They were waiting for the liturgy. There was that peculiar silence floating in the air like the sun’s dust. Brady slowly turned, studying the room. There were no files, no drawers, no shelves. It was not a room from which business was administered. Anselmo’s desk, a table really, was clear.

Behind Anselmo was a door. What was its secret?

“Before our friends come,” Brady said, “is there a bathroom I can use?”

No one moved or spoke.

Finally Leonard stood up and said, “Sure.” He pointed to the door behind Anselmo and took a step toward it. But Anselmo pointed to the door through which Brady’d entered the room and said, “Out there. He’ll show you.”

That was what Brady wanted to know; Anselmo did not want him through the other door.

The man with the shoulder holster took Brady down the corridor to a tiny closet barely large enough to accommodate a man over the toilet. The place was clean.

When Brady returned to the meeting Maguire was there. Relief transformed the Irishman’s face when Collins entered. He guessed that Maguire knew what had happened in that room nearly thirty years before.

“Where is Gallagher?” Marcello asked. It was not clear to whom he was speaking.

“He’ll be here,” Collins said.

Leonard and Rico continued to sit. Anselmo was motionless at his desk. Marcello and Brady stood straight and still while Maguire shifted his weight uneasily from leg to leg. He was too old for this nonsense. A punk like Gallagher he could handle, but Anselmo scared the hell out of him.

There were loud footfalls on the stairs outside. Too loud to be one man.

A voice, presumably the holstered guard, barked a command, but the door muffled it so the men could not make out what he’d said. Another voice, Gallagher’s, responded cockily and too loudly. He was drunk.

Anselmo’s eyes brushed Rico and Leonard, both of whom were up instantly, guns drawn, and at the door. Rico flung the door open and Leonard went through. P. J. Gallagher was standing over the guard brandishing a pistol. The guard’s hands were up. Behind Gallagher were two other men, apparently not armed.

“Well, fuck me,” Gallagher said, staring at the barrel of the gun Leonard pointed at him. “Looks like a fucking standoff.”

Gallagher staggered slightly. He was quite drunk.

Marcello touched Leonard’s shoulder from behind. Leonard stepped aside. Marcello leveled the snout of a Thompson submachine gun at Gallagher’s belly.

“Oops,” Gallagher said. He laughed insanely and insanely cut his laughter short. “Was a fucking standoff.”

Rico crossed to Gallagher and took his gun away from him. Gallagher grinned at Rico, then at his companions. He shrugged grandly. Oh, well.

Marcello looked back at his father, who flicked the tip of his thumb with the tip of his forefinger.

Marcello turned back to Gallagher. “You can leave now.”

“No fuck,” Gallagher said. He grinned back at his friends, weaving. “Fucking-A I can leave now. You tell that truck-fuck Maguire P. J. Gallagher says blow it out his ear!” Gallagher craned past Marcello. “You hear, you fucking asshole?”

Marcello stabbed Gallagher in the belly with the snout of the machine gun.

“Alright, shit, alright.” Gallagher backed off. “And you tell the Top Wop P. J. Gallagher’s fight ain’t with him, OK?” Gallagher backed over the uppermost step and fell drunkenly down the flight. His companions scurried after him.

Marcello listened until they were gone. He gave the guard a look of infinite scorn, returned to the meeting room after Leonard and Rico, and closed the door behind him.

Collins Brady watched Anselmo. He gave no signal. He said nothing, but Gallagher, all understood, was dead.

“There will be no peace,” Anselmo said.

“I want him,” Maguire said.

Anselmo shook his head once.

“But hit him quick,” Maguire pleaded. “If his boys blast any of mine, I can’t stop what happens.”

That was the issue and Anselmo knew it. What did authority mean to these fools? How to keep one’s grip on slime? How to keep one’s grip on Boston? If he didn’t, Balestrione would.

“You control your people, Bennie. If you don’t I will.” That was the rule. Anselmo’s rule. Balestrione’s rule.

“Shit, I . . .”

“Control them!”

Maguire stood mute and stooped, looking ashamed. He could control the old guys, but those kids . . . “OK,” he said finally, “I will.”

“Good,” Anselmo said. He smiled.

Collins Brady thought it was one of the nicest smiles he had ever seen. Its warmth and the Italian’s evident affection for the old Irishman struck a more discordant note in Brady than the gunplay had, than the sentence passed on Gallagher had. It occurred to Brady suddenly that he was indifferent to the fate of P. J. Gallagher with whom he should have grown up friends. His indifference did not shock him. He was indifferent to everything but saving his father, which alone was why he’d come to the meeting. He had to see Anselmo’s office and find the place to plant the microphone. He stared at the door behind Anselmo as if he could see through it.

Then he bade the Italians farewell and walked with poor Maguire out of the dear old North End.

That night, in the last hours before dawn, he returned.

Nothing was moving in the North End, not even the early merchants, since it was in fact Sunday morning. The small transistorized microphone-transmitter that Brady carried in his windbreaker pocket was the twin of one developed by the FBI laboratory in Washington for use in the main conference room of the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street. It was a radically new device for eavesdropping, one which the Soviets might anticipate, since they had their equivalents, but which gangsters would never suspect. It was the perfect way to penetrate their secrecy since it had no telltale wires and was not part of a predictable telephone tap.

Collins Brady entertained the thought that his would be the first government-sponsored burglary, but of course he knew it was not. The FBI had been breaking into the embassies and consular offices of foreign countries regularly since the war.

What he did not know was that his importance to Robert Kennedy had as much to do with Kennedy’s conflict with J. Edgar Hoover as with his touted assault on organized crime. Hoover refused to respond to pressures from above. He refused to create a special unit in the bureau to concentrate on organized crime—the General Investigative Division dealt with security checks on pimply-faced applicant clerks as well as with investigations of known hoodlums. Hoover also successfully resisted the establishment of a national anticrime unit outside the FBI. But Kennedy was not going to be thwarted. He intended, despite Hoover, to enlarge the Racketeering Section of the Criminal Division at Justice to coordinate investigations and handle intensified prosecutions. And he intended, under the national security principle, to authorize the extensive use of bugs and wiretaps as intelligence sources if not as the means to collect admissible evidence. But to justify that authorization and to withstand the blast he knew would come from Hoover when he learned of it, he needed a pilot case, a fait accompli, a bug which had turned up irrefutably invaluable information about the Syndicate. Hence Collins Brady’s importance to Robert Kennedy.

Robert Kennedy had an equal importance to Collins Brady. Terrified and reluctant as Collins was, the mission made him an infallible protector of his father. He would plant the microphone and he would monitor its tape. Perfect. He would be the source of everything the government learned about the Anselmo family and the censor of what it would not about the Brady.

Entering the North End at that time of night was like entering a church, silent, familiar, foreign. Brady crossed into Hanover Street on soft feet. He was wearing tennis shoes, twill trousers, a navy windbreaker, a black knit cap, and driving gloves. He felt falsely calm and assured about what he was doing, although he compulsively held his breath for long stretches as he strode by the stores, the locked stands, the coffee bars, butcher stalls, and pizzerias. He passed no one. Not a curtain in a window stirred at his passing. He was less to that street than a breeze. The only sound in his ear was of his manic heart.

At the Cantina Reale he stopped.

He had the keys and a tool in his left pocket. He studied the lock on the door to the restaurant, a simple bolt, as he’d noted. He slid the thin metal edge of the tool inside the crevice between the jamb and the door. He pressed: click! Open. He went in. He stood in the vestibule and leaned his face against the wall and made a cup around it with his gloved hands. In that dark shell the pupils of his eyes dilated rapidly.

On the inner door was a snap lock. He opened it easily.

The restaurant seemed in the dark like a chamber in a mausoleum. The chairs upended on their tables achieved a rigid eerie grief as for some pharaoh or Druid king. Brady stifled a shudder. He moved swiftly through the tables to the door in the rear.

Meanwhile Pio Costanari was waiting for a cab at Logan airport with as much patience as he could muster. He had left Geneva at noon Saturday for Paris, just making his connection to Idlewild. He arrived in New York before midnight, but it had taken an hour to clear Customs. A pilot in the line had told him there was an alert out for a Rumanian defector, but still Costanari worried that they would discover the false wall in his suitcase and find the banknote. They had not, but he missed a flight to Boston, and had to wait an hour and forty minutes and now he was waiting for a cab. He was exhausted and angry, but mainly he was worried. The cashier’s check made out to Monument was for six million dollars. Costanari would not relax until the check was secure in the safe in the office. That was why he would go there before going home.

Brady was at the door behind Anselmo’s desk. It had three complex locks. He had expected that. If it led to what he thought it did, it would have such locks. With as much patience as he could muster he was making his way around the circle of thirty-two manufacturers’ master keys which Deke Thomas had provided with the microphone.

But it took time. Key by key, and each attempt drilled the room with its noise. It seemed like noise to Brady. Finally the lock he had been working opened. It had taken seventeen keys. He had gone to work on the next one. Eleven keys and it had opened. But the third lock was proving impossible. As he approached the thirty-second key he could barely hold on to the ring because his hands were so slick with perspiration. They trembled so that in addition to the noise of the keys into slots, there was the new noise of the keys rattling against each other.

The last key. Brady inserted it with extra care. He turned it gently at first, then firmly. Nothing. He applied more pressure. Nothing. He pressed the key until his fingers hurt so badly he had to stop. Nothing. He could not believe it. He was convinced, irrationally, that the thirty-second key was the right one, and so he tried turning it again. He slid it in and out of its slot and tried again. Nothing.

It had to be one of the other keys. He had missed it. He forced calm down on his hands and on his mind. He slowed his breathing and told himself there was no hurry.

Costanari’s cab pulled up in front of the Cantina Reale. Costanari told the driver to wait.

The eighth key opened the lock and Brady nearly yelled with relief.

He opened the door on an office just spacious enough for two wooden chairs, two desks, and a man-sized floor safe. There were three telephones on each desk. Behind one desk was a door ajar on a cubicle showing its toilet shamelessly. The safe was snug in a corner and abutting a radiator. A radiator. That was what he wanted. Brady took a step toward the radiator. Then he heard the sound.

A key in the lock. It was a sound—a subtle combination of sounds—branded on his mind by then, but this one was coming from the door in the rear of the restaurant downstairs. Brady held his breath. The door opened. There were shoes on the stairs, coming up.

Had he locked the door to the meeting room behind him? Yes.

He would stay in the office.

He swung the door closed and bolted the three locks quickly, hoping the excruciating noise of their actions would be lost on the comer in the sound of his own feet.

He looked around the office.

He crossed to the toilet cubicle and closed himself in it and stopped breathing.

That was when it began to happen.

The space, the utter lack of it, pressed down on him or, more precisely, on his pumping heart. If your heart makes noise when you are hiding you must clamp it in a vise and turn.

He covered his ears and pushed into the corner over the toilet and then vowed never again to move a muscle.

Claustrophobia is mental. It is not real. There is nothing to fear. Those were the slogans he was repeating.

But still he was not breathing, which was foolish, he knew, because finally when he gasped for air he would explode with noise and they would catch him and slice him from his bones before killing him, and his father would never understand why.

He made an effort to breathe and that made things worse because the dust on the nodules of his nostrils took him elsewhere. It took him to France where he was running down from the château and across the grass as swiftly as he could after Janet. He remembered cutting through a thicket of brambles and coming upon a cave into which he dreaded going. But he loved her. She was leading him there. She would make it safe for him. But, going in, he could not find her. Collins remembered the taste of limestone—was that the dust?—and remembered crawling on his belly and the awful feeling that the cave was going to collapse. He was having that exact feeling again. He pressed his hands against his ears harder, trying to squeeze the panic out of his head, trying to make the memory go away. But it would not. He remembered the light, how when the cave opened he hurled himself toward it, but there had been nothing and he had nearly fallen from the sheer cliff. He recalled turning to find Janet naked and alluring, waiting for him. He had gone to her and made love with her, but that image eluded him. What he saw, even as he kept his eyes shut against it, was an image of himself flailing her, kicking her, pulling the flesh from her bones. He was tearing at her eyes and clawing her and pounding her. He saw blood splashing from his hands. He was killing her and he could hear himself screaming, “Ma! Ma! You’re smothering me! You’re smothering me! Get off, Ma! Get off me, Ma!” And pushing her and clawing at her and not breathing because there was no air, only smoke, and not breathing because his mother was lying on top of him and his face was lost in her belly, and not breathing because he was choking with his weeping and his father was squeezing him in his terrible embrace and saying, “It doesn’t matter, Micko, because I love you.” All Collins Brady knew was that he was locked in too small a place with no air and it took everything in him not to cry out because he was dying of it.

He opened his eyes.

He was hunched over the toilet bowl.

He covered his face with his hands, which were wet, and he feared in the dark that it was blood, his mother’s, his father’s, his wife’s. But it was tears and perspiration, his.

Ma? Had he cried Ma? What Ma? Was he crazy? Had he killed Janet? Was his father smothering him? What had happened?

There was the noise of a key turning in the lock. And then a second. A third.

He listened.

There were no other sounds.

Still he listened.

There was nothing.

After a long time he opened the cubicle door. The office was empty.

He crossed to the door and began to open its locks.

But he had not hung the microphone. The hell with it! He wanted out. He had to get out.

But he forced himself back. He took the device from his pocket, turned the switch as he’d been instructed, then lowered it on its wire a foot and a half below the level of the radiator. Only when it was securely in place, hidden, did he turn, cross back to the door and leave.

On the street, going west toward Boston, he knew that he had just lost his mind. He had just killed Janet, calling her “Ma.” He had lost his mind and would never find it again. Why shouldn’t he, when the sun finally came up, have been walking along the esplanade of the Charles weeping?

An MDC police cruiser on its regular patrol along the river drew up behind him. The lone officer might have passed the man by—there was nothing illegal about walking the esplanade at dawn—but there were several peculiarities about him. Peculiarities are what police look for. First, he did not move off the center of the path so the cruiser could pass. He seemed oblivious that an auto was trailing at his heels. Second, there was a purposelessness to his walking, a vagueness that reminded the officer of the way inmates walked around the yard at the State Hospital in Westboro. Not walking; ambulating. Third, the man was sobbing.

The policeman stopped the cruiser, put it in neutral, and got out.

“What’s the matter, fellow?”

Brady kept walking.

The policeman touched his elbow. There was something so sad about the guy that the policeman was moved. He wanted to be kind.

“Can I take you home, fellow?”

Brady stopped and faced him. “Take me, please, to the bishop’s house.”

Jesus Christ, the officer thought, it’s a priest!

“You mean the cardinal?”

“Bishop McShane. Jack McShane.”

Yes. He had to be a priest. Who else would call the bishop by his first name?

“Sure thing, fellow.” He would not embarrass him by calling him “Father.” “That’s up at St. John’s, eh? At the chancery?”

Brady nodded.

“Sure thing.” He was glad, really glad to help, after all the good things priests had done for him. Priests were human too, right?

When Bishop McShane saw the police cruiser from his window he answered the door himself. He wanted to give the officer ten dollars, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

He gave his cousin an ounce of brandy in a tumbler.

“What happened, Micko?”

Collins looked up at Jack from the large easy chair, a dazed, frightened expression on his face. There were dried tracks of tears on his cheeks. His cousin was standing over him with a strong hand on his shoulder.

Collins loved the feel of that hand. “Oh, Jack. Oh, Jack.” Then he began to cry again.

The bishop sat on the arm of the chair and put his arms around his cousin. His cousin, hell! His brother. “It’s alright, Micko. It’s alright,” he repeated.

Through his sobbing, Collins was saying, “I’m so evil, so evil, so evil.”

McShane rubbed the flesh below Collins’s shoulder blades. “I’m with you, Micko, no matter what.”

Then Brady stopped saying anything, and soon he stopped crying.

For a long time he sat hunched in the hollow of McShane’s strong embrace.

McShane had never seen his cousin vulnerable before, and here he was shattered. He’d come, thank God, to the right place.

When after nearly an hour Collins seemed to have a hold on himself, the bishop said, “Do you want to talk about it, Micko?”

“I guess, Jack, I’d like some coffee.”

“Sure.” He crossed to his hot plate. “Instant OK?” He put a kettle on the burner and took a seat opposite Brady.

“I don’t know how to tell you, Jack.”

Brady could feel his mind closing its shutters on its secrets. He owed a serious and truthful explanation to his cousin, but he would say nothing that pointed to his father or that demeaned himself.

“I’m involved, Jack . . .”

The bishop thought he was about to say, “With another woman.”

“. . . with the Mafia.”

“The Mafia!”

“Yes. Have you ever heard of Gennaro Anselmo?”

“No.”

“He’s the don of the North End. Tonight . . . It was awful . . . I had to sit silently while he ordered a man killed in my presence. I felt a part of it, there was nothing I could do.”

“I don’t understand, Micko.”

“Jack, I’m a special undercover agent for Bobby Kennedy.”

The whistle on the kettle exploded.

McShane got up and prepared two cups of instant.

Collins was in complete control of himself now. “I had something of a trauma this morning because I’d broken into Anselmo’s office to plant a bug and was nearly caught. I had to hide in a closet and, well, I guess my old . . .”

“Claustrophobia.”

“Yes.”

“You couldn’t even hide under the bed when we were kids.”

“I know. I was in there for a long time.” Years.

“That must have been terrible for you.”

“It was, as you saw. And, frankly, my mission, in which I believe and which Kennedy is counting on as a major breakthrough against crime, still makes me feel dirty, filthy, sneaky. And then this thing with the order to in effect murder a man, well, I feel awful about it.”

“There’s nothing you can do about that, is there?”

“No.”

“Then you’re not morally responsible, Micko. Your conscience should be clear.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. I assure you.”

“I think, Jack, I feel . . .”—Brady paused, knowing this was the truth—“. . . evil.”

“Would you like absolution?”

Brady studied his cousin. That was not what he was talking about at all.

But, well, maybe it was.

“Yes, I think I would.”

The bishop laid his coffee aside, crossed to his bureau, from which he took a thin purple stole. He donned it and stood over Brady with his hands on his head. “Absolvo te,” he intoned, and deliberately made his way through the Latin phrases, thinking meanwhile that he really did, after all these years, love this man intensely.

When the bishop finished, Collins took his hand and kissed the green stone of its ring. He looked up and said, “What I’ve told you, Jack, it’s very secret.”

“Of course, Micko,” the bishop said. “The seal of confession. And who would I tell anyway?”