7

“Mr. Anselmo, would you please answer the question?”

“I would like to consult my attorney.”

“You may be excused to do so.”

Anselmo pushed his chair back from the small table. The panel of twenty-four men and women watched him collect several small pieces of notepaper. He arranged them neatly, deliberately lining up their edges. He did not look up.

They were the members of the special federal grand jury which had been convened by the United States Attorney for the purposes of conducting an investigation into the activities of organized crime in New England and, if appropriate, bringing indictments against its members. They had been in session since the first day in May, nearly two weeks. They had listened to Deke Thomas, Assistant U.S. Attorney, interrogate a succession of witnesses. They were familiar by now with the routine. The attorney asked his question. The witness asked to be excused to consult his lawyer, who was forbidden to be present in the hearing room since the proceedings were conducted with elaborate secrecy. Permission for the witness to leave was granted. The witness left the room. The panelists then had to wait in silence. There was nothing to do but read the paper or count the slats on the Venetian blinds which filtered the light on the room’s four six-foot windows. If the blinds were up they could stare at the Customs House Tower, which was directly across Post Office Square from the Federal Building. They could watch the clouds float by. It was, they all felt, a waste of time to be pinned up in a drab room in the lovely month of May listening to these guys say nothing. The witness invariably came back from consulting his lawyer to plead the Fifth Amendment.

Anselmo hated going out into the corridor because he had to wade through the mob of loitering reporters.

“Mr. Anselmo!” one shouted, falling into step with him. “Do you agree with Mr. Balestrione, who said that this grand jury is designed to grab headlines for the Democrats before the elections?”

“No comment.” Anselmo walked slowly, calmly toward the small room beyond the lavatory, where Pio Costanari was waiting for him.

“Do you agree that Robert Kennedy hates Italo-Americans?”

“No comment.”

“You have been called the head of the mob in the North End . . .”

Anselmo opened the door and closed it behind him.

He leaned against the door.

Costanari was seated at a table in the tiny windowless room.

“‘Mob,’” Anselmo said, “What kind of word is ‘mob’? Do they think this is television?”

Costanari shrugged. “It is television. They want a new Valachi.”

Anselmo closed his eyes. Never had he suffered such insults. A lifetime of quiet, private life was being ruined.

“What is the question, Gennaro? Come, we must talk.”

“For what? I’m saying nothing to them.”

“What is the question?”

“Another from inside.”

Anselmo put one of the pieces of notepaper down in front of Costanari, who read it without touching it. The question read, “Do you have personal knowledge of the present whereabouts of Joseph Bonanno?”

Bonanno was a well-known New York crime figure who was in hiding in Montreal. Anselmo’s son Rico had driven him across the Canadian border in Maine several months before.

“How can they connect us with Bonanno? There is nothing!” Anselmo was angry and showing it.

Costanari held his hand up and let his eyes fly around the ceiling. “Do not speak,” he said every way but verbally. “Not here!”

Costanari wrote on the top page of his yellow pad, “That’s it! They have someone inside N.E.” Inside the North End.

This was the fourth consecutive question about matters for which there were no records. They were not asking about any of the North End business fronts Anselmo’s family ran. They were asking about his associations with nationally known crime figures. Anselmo had guarded against such associations and the few he had were models of a discretion which bordered on secrecy. But each of the questions put by Thomas indicated that the government had penetrated that secrecy somehow.

Costanari scratched out what he’d written, then wrote, “C. B.’s juror?”

They knew that one of the jurors had already been bought by Ciro Balestrione. The juror would feed the Providence don information about who had been asked what and what, if anything, he had said. Balestrione had not yet been called to testify, but the government seemed not to be in a hurry. They were fishing. The grand jury would be seated for months.

Anselmo shrugged. He had no idea which of the jurors was Balestrione’s.

“Find him!” Costanari wrote.

Anselmo nodded. He knew that Balestrione’s spy had the purpose of protection as much against himself as against the government. If Anselmo gave testimony that could in any way damage Balestrione, the Providence don would know it immediately and would kill him. Costanari was right. If they could discover the spy, they could use him too. They had to make the traffic run both ways on that street if they could.

Anselmo took a chrome Zippo lighter from his pocket and struck it. He held the flame out ceremoniously. He did not smoke. He had brought the lighter for this purpose. Costanari ripped the bottom half of the yellow page from the pad and put it into the flame. He pushed his chair back from the table and held the burning paper by its edge until the writing was consumed. Then he dropped the fire into the metal wastebasket. He did the same to Anselmo’s notepaper. They conducted this burning solemnly, rubrically, as if it were the first ritual of omertà.

Anselmo returned to the grand jury room.

The Assistant U.S. Attorney repeated the question. “Do you have personal knowledge of the present whereabouts of Joseph Bonanno?”

Anselmo stared at the jurors. They were seated at small wooden schoolroom desks, which were arranged in four neat rows as if for a class in high-school civics. Thomas paced back and forth across the front of the room, the teacher. The jurors were looking up from their newspapers and copies of Time. One woman was knitting and the click-click of her needles was the only sound.

Anselmo stared at her.

“Mrs. Walsh,” Thomas said politely, “if you please.”

She stopped knitting.

“Answer the question, Mr. Anselmo.”

Anselmo watched another juror, a gray-haired man in a tweed sport coat, lighting his pipe.

Another, a small effeminate-looking man, was rubbing his forefinger up and down the hollow between the bridge of his nose and his cheek.

“Mr. Anselmo?”

A Negro woman dropped her eyes when Anselmo looked at her.

A fat man with long, greasy red hair, wearing a sheeny purple jacket with an embroidered yellow dragon on its left breast, glared at Anselmo impassively. He was Irish. Anselmo recognized the hate.

“Mr. Anselmo, please.”

Anselmo looked at Thomas. “On the advice of my attorney and based on rights accorded to me by the First Amendment, Fifth Amendment, and Seventh Amendment of the United States Constitution, I respectfully decline to answer the question on the ground that to do so may tend to incriminate me.”

Thomas rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.

Mrs. Walsh resumed her knitting. Anselmo had the impression that she clicked her needles more loudly than was necessary.

“You people all have the same script-writer, don’t you?” The Assistant U.S. Attorney bent over his small table and made a note.

One of the jurors stretched his legs forward, sliding his desk backward. It scratched unpleasantly on the floor.

The man in the tweed coat held a new match to his pipe.

“Well,” Thomas said, not looking up from his pad, “I don’t suppose there is much point in going on with this, is there?”

Anselmo ignored him. He was still studying the faces of the jurors. He was waiting for his instinct to tell him which of them was the one.

Mrs. Walsh? It was the only name he knew, a slight indiscretion on Thomas’s part to use it. Their names were secret.

“In that case, Mr. Anselmo, you are dismissed.” Thomas looked up. “For now.”

Anselmo stood and, without looking at them again, left the room. He did not know.

Whom did Balestrione own? Who, of Anselmo’s associates, was providing the government its clues?

As he left the Federal Building with Costanari at his heels, Anselmo turned over in his mind again his most familiar thought. Deke Thomas had been Collins Brady’s assistant on the strike force eight years before. Thomas and Brady had been together with Kefauver. Was that the link? Was that the key? But the younger Brady was privy to nothing that was not at least as incriminating to his father as it was to Anselmo. Neither Brady had knowledge of his relationship to Bonanno. The government knew things that only members of the North End inner circle knew. Since he was scrupulous in using only pay telephones for business calls, it couldn’t be a tap. It had to be one of his own people; that was the weight that bent Anselmo. That was what stirred this unfamiliar rage. He had to know who the Judas was. He had to kill him.

Meanwhile at Prescott Street, Bishop McShane was trying to make his mother understand why he had to leave.

“Ma,” he said, touching her emaciated upper arm through the sheet, “I have to go to Rome.”

“Why? Why do you?” She was going to cry again.

“Because Pope John is dying, Ma.”

“What about your ma? I’m dying.”

“No you’re not. You’re fine. I just spoke to Dr. Schaeffer, and he knows how you are.”

“No, he doesn’t. I’m the only one that knows that.”

“Look at me, Ma.”

“No.”

“I want you to look at me.”

“You want me to die.”

“No, Mother. That hurts me to hear you.”

“You want me to tell you to go ahead so you won’t feel guilty.”

“That’s true.”

“When I die.”

“You’re not dying.”

“You hope.”

“You just said I hoped you were. I have to go, Ma.”

“I abandoned my own mother in the old country. This is God’s punishment. I should never have come. She asked me not to.”

“You had to come. So did Uncle Colman.”

“He didn’t leave until she was dead. You shouldn’t leave, son, until I’m dead.”

“I’m not leaving you, Mother. I’ll just be gone a few days.”

“Until he’s dead.”

“Who?”

“The Pope. The Pope gave me his blessing.”

“I know. He’s praying for you.”

“But you said he’s dying.”

“He is.”

“Well, what good are his prayers?”

“He’s the Pope, Mother.”

“But he’s dying. So there. What’s he dying of?”

“Old age.”

“I’m older than he is.”

“No, you’re not. He’s eighty-four.”

“But I have it too, old age.”

“You’re only sixty-nine.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Fifteen years.”

“Don’t be smart with me, young man.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You should be.”

“I have to go, Ma. My plane’s in forty minutes.”

Silence.

“Ma?”

“Give us a kiss, Ma.”

Rigid silence.

“I’ll give you my blessing. May the blessing of Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, descend upon you and remain with you forever. There.”

Colman was waiting for him downstairs.

“She didn’t take it very well,” McShane said.

His uncle nodded. “I didn’t think she would.”

“How could she? Her son is leaving her deathbed for a stranger’s.”

Colman touched his nephew’s sleeve. “Jack, it’s been her deathbed for a while. Dr. Schaeffer said she could linger indefinitely.”

“Coombs said she could go any day.”

“He said that a month ago.”

“And yesterday.”

“Jack, you’re torturing yourself. Your mother would keep you by her bedside for years if you let her.”

McShane nodded. “It is the Pope, after all. Bishops from all over the world are going for the vigil. I’ll be back next week. It won’t be a problem.”

Colman didn’t say anything.

“That is if His Holiness and Ma time their deaths to suit my schedule.” McShane allowed his contempt for himself to get the better of him. Nothing could devastate him like the feeling he had failed his mother. She knew that about him and she played it like an instrument.

Colman said, “You’ll see Borella?”

“Yes,” McShane said. He did not know or want to know what Colman had sent him, and he refused to think of Pope John’s dying as the beginning of the process that would get him Boston. He did not want to talk about Borella. He said, “I wish you could buy more time for Ma.”

Colman did not reply.

“I have to go. I’ll miss my plane.”

Ruggero Cardinal Borella would not see McShane for three days.

McShane was a nervous wreck. He spent the time pacing his room in the pensione at the Dominican convent on Via Veneto or kneeling with the other prelates in the Sistine Chapel, praying the rosary and reciting the psalms in Latin. He prayed as earnestly as he could for both his mother and the Pope. He tried continually to abandon himself to God’s Will. He asked the Blessed Virgin Mary to intercede for him with her Son.

Periodic bulletins were issued on the pontiff’s condition by the attending physician, Doctor Piero Mazzoni. The Pope’s stomach wall had ruptured and the internal hemorrhaging was proving impossible to stem. They were fearful that peritonitis would set in any moment. Once that happened . . .

Finally Borella sent for him.

McShane was ushered into the cardinal’s office, a stern, ascetic room, which, by its spaciousness, by its view of St. Peter’s, and by the aged simplicity of its oak furnishings, nevertheless achieved a kind of medieval grandeur.

“Your Eminence,” McShane said, kneeling to kiss Borella’s ring.

“My friend.” The cardinal lifted him, but there was an edge in Borella’s voice. “How good of you to come.”

“It is the most unhappy time for the Church and for the world. All America mourns.”

“Ah, His Holiness is not dead, yet, my son. We must not mourn the living.”

“But he is near death.”

“Yes.” Borella took his place behind his desk. He was nodding sadly. “The Lord is very close. Please sit.”

McShane sat in the carved abbot’s chair opposite. He wished they were walking in the garden behind the Papal Apartments.

“He is a saint, this one,” Borella said solemnly. He might have said that saints are better prayed to than respected.

“Yes, he is.”

“This morning he gathered his family at his bedside. He said in the Bergamasque dialect, ‘Remember Mama? Remember Papa? I am going to see them. Let us pray for them.’”

“How very moving.”

“He is a man of his people. He loves his family dearly.”

McShane refused again to feel his guilt. Such choices as he had made were the work of Providence.

“And how is your family?” Borella asked, falsely smiling. He lit a cigarette.

“My mother is unwell, Cardinal. Quite seriously unwell.”

“I am sorry to hear that. You should be with her.”

“I came to pray for His Holiness.”

“It is His Holiness who should pray for us.”

“Of course. I have also looked forward to seeing you.”

Borella nodded, but said nothing.

McShane took a deep breath. He had decided to press Borella. If Cushing, whom he loved more than ever, was going to be replaced anyway, then he was going to do what he could to see it was with himself. Besides, wasn’t Cushing committing a slow form of suicide with his drinking? It was not love or loyalty to pretend otherwise. “In fact, Eminence, I wanted to convey to you the impression that my fellow clergy share in Boston that the situation with Cardinal Cushing is growing worse.” McShane paused. “It should be . . .”—he waited for Borella to look up from his cigarette—“. . . resolved quickly.”

“Situation? I am not certain I know what you refer to.”

McShane was stunned. Did Borella require a more explicit explanation? Obviously not.

“You said when we talked . . .”

“At the council?”

“Yes. That when Pope John died . . .”

“But Pope John, dear Bishop, is not dead.” There was a viciousness to Borella’s smile that caused a shudder to climb up McShane’s spine.

“I know that, Eminence, but . . . the next Pope must . . .”

“Bishop, it is not appropriate to discuss the duties and burdens awaiting the next Pope. John is Pope.”

“But you said . . .”

“I said nothing.”

McShane stared, disbelieving, at Borella, who had accepted, he was certain, thousands of dollars from Colman Brady. Did he think that money was meant to purchase rice for pagan babies?

Borella was growing impatient. There was nothing subtle about this McShane. He dripped with ambition. He was utterly lacking in discretion. He had no patience. What an offense against the Church it was for him to bare his hunger in this way. Roncalli was not yet dead!

“It is unseemly for you to be here,” Borella began.

McShane interrupted, his voice cracked by panic. He saw that he had made a dreadful mistake. “I’m sorry, Cardinal, Your Eminence. I meant no harm.”

Borella silenced him by abruptly raising his hand; do not interrupt me!

It was clear to Borella now that McShane would not do. It was too bad. More of his uncle’s money would have been useful, but, after this recent hundred thousand dollars, he had gleaned enough. McShane was all too American. He had no sense of the decorum of things. The Pope was dying, after all. This was not the time. “You should be with your mother.”

“Yes,” McShane said, defeat and shame in his voice. He sensed how vast and awful was the disaster that had just occurred. He was totally destroyed. He had betrayed Cushing. He had abandoned his mother. He had profaned Pope John’s dying. He was a hugely sinful man to himself. He stood. He wanted to get away from Borella. He wanted to go home to his mother. But he had to find some way to redeem, if only partially, his dashed hopes. He needed one last rope to grab. Where was it? His mind whirred. What to say to recoup his dignity, to make Borella think well of him again? McShane knew instinctively that now only under the guise of small talk could he make a new point. While going the infinite distance from Borella’s desk to the office door he had to think of what could reverse this disaster. Something under the outward ease of family gossip; it was the terrain on which polite moves came so easily to both of them. Something to do with Kennedy would be best of all. The Italians loved Kennedy.

As McShane stepped back from his chair he said, “By the way, I discovered since our talk at the Council that my cousin Michael Brady went with the Kennedy government, after all.” What harm was there in saying that?

“Oh?” Borella had come out from behind his desk and was taking McShane by the elbow to the door. “Your uncle must miss him at the company.” Borella was barely interested. He wanted McShane out of his presence.

But McShane couldn’t leave him with the impression that Micko’d left Monument, since that wasn’t the precise case. “Well, he’s still with my uncle. He does that also.” What a feeble statement. “He does some confidential work with Kennedy. I mean for Kennedy.”

Borella stopped. They were at the door.

Suddenly Borella seemed less impatient. He took out his silver case and withdrew a cigarette. “Confidential?” he said. He seemed impressed.

McShane relaxed a bit. “Yes. He works directly with Robert Kennedy.”

“The Attorney General. How very important his work must be.”

“Yes, although I know almost nothing about it. It’s very secret.”

“Having to do with crime.”

“Yes. Against the underworld. Against mobsters. He and Kennedy meet all the time.”

“A secret agent?” Borella smiled. “Like your hero, James . . . ?”

“Bond.” McShane laughed. “Yes, like that. James Bond. Only Collins works against the Sicilians instead of the Russians.”

“Sicilians,” Borella said, smiling broadly. “I am Sicilian.”

“Oh.” McShane blushed. “I didn’t mean Sicilians. I meant . . .” McShane thought he would die. He wanted to end this and get out.

“The Mafia.”

“Yes.”

“A terrible thing, the Mafia.” Borella dragged on his cigarette, shaking his head. “They have been bad for our people for years. It is good that men like your cousin work against them. You should be very proud.”

McShane relaxed some. “Yes.”

“So your cousin works against them in Washington.”

“No, in Boston.”

“Oh? Is there Mafia in Boston?” Borella dragged on his cigarette. “I did not know that.”

McShane panicked. Had he revealed something he shouldn’t have? Had he broken the seal of that confession Collins had made? He tried to back off what he’d said. “But you’re right. I think mainly he works in Washington. I don’t know of any underworld in Boston either.”

But Borella seemed suddenly uninterested. He opened the door. “You have a fine family, John. That is another reason why the Church is privileged to have your service.”

“It is my privilege, Eminence.”

“We are all privileged, aren’t we?”

McShane felt that perhaps his mistakes had not been so drastic, after all. Borella seemed to regard him affectionately still. But the question nagged; had he violated Micko’s confidence? Of course he had. The seal of confession is absolute. “Eminence.” McShane lowered his voice so that the secretary in the outer office would not hear. “What I’ve told you, of course, about my cousin is sub secreto.”

“Am I not a priest, John?”

“Thank you, Eminence. May I have your blessing?”

McShane knelt.

Ruggero Cardinal Borella blessed him, then said, “Pray, dear Bishop, for His Holiness.”

“Yes, Cardinal, of course. Always.”

Borella closed the door on McShane, then crossed to the large window that cut the north wall of his office in half. He looked out at the dome of St. Peter’s and lit a second cigarette from the stub of the first. Gennaro, he thought. Gennaro.

McShane stopped in the Basilica to pray.

He felt better. Perhaps his cause was not lost after all.

He knelt before Michelangelo’s Pietà and let his eyes bathe in the suffering of God’s Mother.

He asked her to forgive him.

He had violated the seal of silence for the first time in his priestly life, but not gravely. He had shared the secret, but only minimally and only with another priest, and not casually, not without reason. God’s Mother would understand.

He asked her to grant Pope John the grace of a happy death.

He asked her to sustain his own mother in her time of trial. What evil could befall her under the benign glance of Mary?

McShane hurried back to his room to pack and catch the next plane home. It seemed to him that things were not nearly as bad as, for a moment, he had feared.

But that was before he arrived at the pensione and found the telegram from Maureen. “Mother died,” it said. That was all.