a little hand signal to follow me. Then I thought about Havlicek, about the way his grip loosened on my hand Sunday morning in the unforgiving aftermath of the explosion, about his wife's voice on the other end of the line when I told her that her husband was dead.
So I nodded at Gus, and he, for no apparent reason, nodded back at me, and we disappeared over the other side of the hill, meandering among the ancient oak trees and tombstones.
The two of us stood on the end of the Boston Fish Pier in a remote loading area beside the ancient brick auction house as the pale November sun seemed ready to surrender to the chill of another New England winter. On one side of us, the magnificent city skyline rose toward the heavens, the steel-and-glass buildings splashed with light.
On the other side, the harbor sparkled and rippled in the autumn breeze. Planes from Logan Airport thundered overhead as they ascended to destinations unknown.
Gus looked at me and spoke for the first time since the graveyard.
'Are you familiar with Paul Stemple?' he asked.
'I saw him yesterday morning,' I said. 'He's dead. Murdered.' Here he was, a man who held secrets that could probably shake our democracy to its core, and his passing was marked only by a newsbrief in the Washington Post under the headline 'Capitol Hill Transient Slain.'
Gus grimaced and shook his head slowly. 'I had a feeling,' he said.
Much as I love Gus, standing there watching him, I couldn't contain my anger, even with the prospect of an imminent explanation. 'As I've said, Havlicek is dead. I couldn't have been warned about this? You couldn't have helped us out-some real goddamned help-instead of this pseudo-intellectual gamesmanship?'
We had driven from Roslindale to the waterfront in collective silence, the only sound in Gus's car being the all-news AM radio station broadcasting blurbs from a speech President Hutchins had delivered that morning in Cleveland, Ohio, on the eve of the election. The reporter said that after a final blitz from Detroit to New York City, Hutchins would be back at the White House tonight. Democratic nominee Stanny Nichols, the reporter said, was spending election eve scouring the crucial electoral state of California for last-minute support.
When we had arrived at this barren concrete loading zone, Gus simply got out of the car and stood in the brisk outdoors air. I, of course, followed him.
To my pending question, he stayed silent, either thinking about what I had asked or ignoring me. I only became angrier. What, he hadn't prepared for this moment? After all this, he didn't know what he was going to say?
I glared at Gus in a way I never thought I could or would and said,
'What the hell is going on here? What the hell is going on?'
Gus leaned back against the hood of his car, a navy Oldsmobile bought with cash, no doubt-money saved from decades of hard work alternating between the evening and overnight shifts in the pressroom. He looked extraordinarily uncomfortable in his shirt, tie, and jacket, and it struck me that I hadn't seen Gus dressed this way since Katherine's funeral. Then it occurred to me to put that thought out of my mind right now. I had to concentrate on the issues at hand.
Lingering silence. Endless silence.
I said, 'Gus, you brought me here to tell me something. What is it?'
'This isn't easy,' he said. He fell quiet again, and I regarded him more closely-the long forehead on such a short man, the fatherly eyes, which at the moment held the anguished embarrassment of a child, the leathery skin baked from too much sun over too many summers, the way he stood with one leg always bent at the knee because the other leg was two inches shorter.
He broke my train of meaningless thought and said, 'I know Curtis Black.'
This time I stayed quiet, waiting, expecting.
He said, 'I know Curtis Black. The guys in that armored car robbery, they fled Hanover Street in one getaway car with the money, drove along the waterfront, and came to this very spot. I met them here in a second car, and we all drove from here down to a storefront in Providence, where we split up the cash. My take was somewhat smaller than the rest because I wasn't at the scene.'
I looked at him in shock. Gus, my Gus, a common criminal, part of a gang of killer armored car robbers. A man died that day, a young husband, a father, if I remembered right from the newspaper clips, shot in the neck during a heist on Hanover Street. And Gus was a part of it-not the direct cause, if he could be believed, but an accessory nonetheless.
Gus stood there watching me. My mind became a blur. So many questions to ask, so little ability to ask them. I was, in the parlance of the pop psychology that so many of my journalistic colleagues indulge in, conflicted. On the one hand, I didn't want to believe what he was saying. I didn't want him to be involved in anything like this. On the other hand, if he was, he would be forthcoming with the explanations I needed to this seemingly inexplicable, impenetrable mess.
'I don't get it. If you were involved, why weren't you arrested like the others? Why didn't you go to prison? How did you end up at the Record?'
Gus was still leaning against the car, almost sitting on the hood, his arms crossed. I was standing facing him.
'Black didn't give me up,' Gus said. 'When he turned government's witness, he denied there was a second getaway driver. Two of the other guys, probably hoping to get leniency, kept insisting to the feds there was another driver, but they didn't even know my name. It came down to Paul Stemple. He fired a shot that day, but meant to aim high-a warning shot. The guy next to him, name of Manupelli, fired a shot too. Stemple was always racked by guilt over the possibility that he killed the guard, that the whole thing was his fault. So he refused to give me up because he knew I didn't have anything to do with the death.
The U.s. attorney himself asked Paul if there was a second getaway driver, and Paul told him no.'
I shot a glance toward my bodyguards standing by their rental car about forty yards down the pier, though perhaps shot is the wrong word to use at this point. I don't know. I didn't feel like I knew much of anything anymore, even as I was learning new things by the second. I returned my gaze to Gus.
Gus said, 'So I went to your old man. We knew each other growing up.
I told him I was desperate, that I was in a lot of trouble, that I needed his help. I mean, I didn't get involved in this robbery just for kicks. I'd like to tell you I needed the money to pay for something for the kids or medical bills or something. Something. But I needed it because I got in some gambling trouble, and if I didn't come up with some cash, I was going to be in some serious health trouble, maybe even dead.'
Standing here on the Boston Fish Pier at high noon on election eve, I mused that you know people, but you don't really know them. You know them now, so you think you've known them always, as if everyone follows the same cookie-cutter path in life from young adulthood on to marriage, parenthood, or whatever. In fact, what you see or even imagine is little more than an outline, a silhouette, and perhaps a deceiving one at that. What you don't see is the text and the texture, the private drama that makes up a human life.
I was both stunned and spellbound. I didn't say anything-one, because I couldn't, and two, because I didn't want Gus to stop. Never interrupt the steady flow of crucial information to hear yourself speak.
Gus took the silent bait. 'Black didn't give me up, and I owed him for that. But Black didn't give me up for a simple reason. Had he given me up, I would have made a pretty damned good government witness. I couldn't have been involved in the shooting. I didn't mastermind the thing. I was just a grunt driving a car, trying to make some dough to keep my legs from getting busted. Had I been a federal witness, Black would have gone to jail.'
He paused only long enough to look me hard in the eye and catch his own breath. This whole thing seemed to be like penance for Gus. I suspect he regarded me as some sort of keeper of the truth, being in the newspaper business and all, and here he was letting the truth be known for the first time, so many years after the fact.
'So I owe something to your father. He was a shift supervisor at the Record, and he got me a job when I needed it most. And I owe something to Mr. Stemple, and here I am taking care of two debts by trying to help you.' A pause, accompanied by a watchful gaze over my face, then,
'Does this make sense?'
'It does, yeah, if I knew what it is you were trying to help me with.
