He pulled out a fold of money and asked Lyle, 'How much do we owe for that last round?' Confidingly to me: 'I can bill this off to the Record.'
I put my hand gently on Havlicek's arm and pushed it down. 'On me,' I said.
'No, no, no,' he said, determined, holding the money up high now. The few people around were looking. Lyle appeared frozen behind the bar.
'Really, Steve. I've got it. Besides, they don't take cash in here.
Everything's on charge. I just sign it all away.'
'You just sign your name, and that's it?' A pause while he calculated just what that meant, which, for him, was free food and drink. 'God, I love this place.'
Lyle looked relieved. I tugged Havlicek toward an empty dining table nearby, away from more potential trouble. Don't get me wrong. I'm not rich, and I'm not a snob. The University Club is my one true indulgence. Years ago, it was my refuge, a place to steal away for a few hours from the grind of work and the occasional frustrations of my courtship with Katherine. We were both enormous advocates of the need for our own time, private time, and I usually spent mine here, down in the gym working up a sweat, taking a long steam bath, then stealing up to this very grille room for a hamburger, a beer, and a wedge of cheesecake. Now, with Katherine gone, the club had become something of a second home for me, an anchor when I was constantly on the road, a place where I looked forward to coming and where Lyle would always greet me with a warm squeeze of my shoulder.
'Look,' I said, after we sat down. 'I've got some things we should go over.'
'Yeah?' he said. He was looking at me square in the eyes, waiting, and I continued on slowly.
'I think someone just took a shot at me,' I said. I saw the look of confusion on his face, and added quickly, 'Let me start from the beginning. I've got an anonymous caller ringing me up. He made the first call right after I arrived in the hospital. He called me once on what must have been late Thursday afternoon, then again on Friday morning. Then someone-the source or more likely someone else-followed me to a restaurant in Georgetown last night and gave the waitress a note telling me to meet him at the Newseum over in Rosslyn tonight at five- thirty.'
'What the fuck,' Havlicek said. An eloquent one. 'What happened tonight?'
I told him the details. When I was through, Havlicek said, 'Jesus Christ. Some fricking story. You never saw the guy?'
'Not even a glimpse.'
'You think it was the same source who's been calling you? You think this is all just some sort of setup?'
A pair of typically good inquiries. I shrugged.
Havlicek said, 'What's he sound like?'
'He's older, and very eloquent. He's polite, but forceful. He sounds like he really wants to make a point. Sounds like he knows what he's talking about, but he hasn't really said anything of value yet.'
Havlicek asked, 'And was that the same voice that called out to you at the Newseum?'
'That's the thing,' I replied. 'I don't think it was. The voice there sounded much younger, much livelier, less formal.'
'Probably two different people,' Havlicek said, reaffirming what I believed in the back of my mind. 'One person wants to help you get information. The other person wants to make sure you never get it.
The good guy, assuming there is one, how did he leave it with you?'
I said, 'Says he'll help me more as soon as he's convinced I'm serious.'
'Well, the answer is to keep getting some hits on this story and slam them into the paper. Meanwhile, I'll renew my sources out there and work them over. And you should turn Idaho into a nice quick hit.
Would be nice to have a turnaround on that, get it in the paper, generate some news and maintain this guy's interest in you.'
Notice that although my life was on the line, calling authorities was never an option-not for Havlicek, not for me. There was a story at stake, and a peripheral investigation would hamper our chances at getting it.
A waiter came over with some menus. 'I saw you on CNN, Mr. Flynn,' he said to me. 'You looked terrific.' Mental note: add an extra tip on the sign slip.
Havlicek said, 'Something's been bothering me.' He looked at me hard and continued. 'Why were you playing golf with Hutchins in the first place? Martin said you were working on some pardon story, but I didn't quite get it.'
'Presidential pardons,' I said. 'Every year, the president pardons any given number of convicts. It's part of his executive powers, like vetoing a piece of legislation. At first, I was working a generic story, kind of the anatomy of a presidential pardon. Most of the pardons have easy explanations, like a convict in a questionable murder conviction becomes a model inmate after forty years and is freed to spend his dying days with his family, something like that. I came across one in Massachusetts, a guy by the name of Paul Stemple, involved in an armored car heist back in the late 1970's, that lacked an easy answer. So I asked Royal Dalton about it. He called me back with a vague explanation about the inmate having served twenty years already, but never explained properly the genesis of the pardon. Then, out of nowhere, he says the president would like to know if I might be available for a game of golf.'
Havlicek cut in and said, 'So you asked Hutchins about it?'
'Well, I planned to, yes. But before I could, we got carried away in another conversation, and then, suddenly, we get shot.'
'Let me ask you something far-fetched,' Havlicek said. 'You don't think there's any way that Hutchins or his people might have staged this assassination attempt as some sort of preelection ploy, do you?'
I stared down into my beer and nodded my head slowly. 'I'll admit, I've thought about that,' I said. 'But damn, come on. How dangerous is that?'
'Yeah, too stupid. Too stupid.'
He added, 'So somebody wants to help you. Somebody else wants to kill you, maybe because that first somebody wants to help you. You have to watch your back.'
I nodded, and we both turned our attention to the menu. We ordered some smoked salmon, some calamari, a couple of hamburgers. At ten o'clock, Havlicek looked at his watch and announced he had to head back to his hotel and call his wife.
Watch your back. I started to walk outside, into the night, and then thought better of it. The dog was with Kristen, so I ambled up to the front desk, got myself a guest key, and slept in one of the overnight rooms upstairs.
Boston, Massachusetts February 13, 1979
Finally, Curtis Black decided it was time to break the heavy silence.
For ten minutes, as he drove the intentionally nondescript blue cargo van out of Chelsea, then up and over the Tobin Bridge into Boston, no one had uttered a solitary word, not Black himself, not his three men sitting on the floor in the back. All of the men wore gloves, all of them were dressed in gray, all of them were packing a 9-mm semiautomatic weapon that Black hoped against hope they would never have to use. The fourth man would be meeting them on Hanover Street in the getaway car-a 1978 Lincoln Continental, stolen the week before and stashed since in a private garage. The fifth man would be meeting them on the Boston Fish Pier in a second getaway car, a Mercury station wagon with tinted windows.
Not that Black minded the silence. Better to be silent than jumpy, falsely jovial. Silence meant economy, and at the scene of a crime, there's nothing better than to be economical. The more words you speak, the more actions you take, the more opportunity there is for error and the more clues you leave behind. Better to cut into the fabric of everyday life with a scalpel rather than blow it up with a bomb, the goal being to grab whatever it is you want or need, then vanish in as straight a line as you came, leaving as little of life interrupted as possible. No need, in short, for undue drama.
Still, this silence felt almost morbid, Black thought. They had gone over their plan one final time, sitting around the little kitchen table of his Chelsea apartment. They had run through a checklist of actions, then made sure everyone was carrying his ski mask, his gloves, his gun.
Each man's pockets were otherwise empty. Everyone knew his role.
'In an hour, we're a hell of a lot richer than we are right now,' Black called out from the driver's seat. The
