“I did not make a mistake in you,” she said.
“No,” I said, “you didn’t.”
The doorbell rang.
Susan said, “I wanted a last supper as roommates.”
She smiled a wide genuine smile.
“But I’ve abandoned, pretense. It’s the Chinese place in Inman Square that delivers.”
I raised my champagne glass. “A votre sante,” I said.
Susan went down and brought up the food in a big white paper sack and put it on top of the refrigerator where Pearl couldn’t reach it.
“Before we dine,” Susan said, “I thought we might wish to screw our brains out.”
“Kind of a salute to freedom,” I said.
“Exactly,” Susan said.
CHAPTER 41
The Fenway is part of what Frederick Law Olmsted called the emerald necklace when he designed it in the nineteenth century-an uninterrupted stretch of green space following the Charles River and branching off along the Muddy River to Jamaica Pond, and continuing, with modest interference from the city, to Franklin Park and the Arboretum. It was a democratic green space and it remained pleasant through demographic shifts which moved the necklace in and out of bad neighborhoods. Along the Park Drive section of the Fenway the neighborhood was what the urban planners probably called transitional. There were apartments full of nurses and graduate students along Park Drive, and across the Fenway there was the proud rear end of the Museum of Fine Arts. Simmons College was on a stretch of Fenway, and Northeastern University was a block away and just up the street was Harvard Medical School.
But the Fenway itself was a kind of Riviera for both black and Hispanic gangs taking occasional leave from their duties in the ghetto. And they didn’t have to go far. The ghetto spread sullenly beyond the Museum and behind the University. The stadium at the southwest end of the Fenway midsection was dense with gang graffiti.
At two minutes to five in the morning, Hawk and I parked up on the grass near the Victory Gardens where Park Drive branches off Boylston Street. We thought it would be wise to walk in from this end and get a look at things as we came. There wasn’t much traffic yet, and as we walked into the Fenway the grass was still wet. A hint of vapor hovered over the Muddy River, and two early ducks floated pleasantly out from under the arched fieldstone bridge.
“We figured out exactly what we’re doing?” I said.
I had on a blue sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, and jeans, and white leather New Balance gym shoes. I wore a Browning 9mm pistol in a brown leather holster tipped a little forward on my right hip, and a pair of drop- dead Ray Ban sunglasses.
“Thinking ‘bout making a citizen’s arrest,” Hawk said.
He was wearing Asics Tiger gels, and a black satin-finish Adidas warm-up suit with red trim. The jacket was half zipped, and the butt of something that appeared to be an antitank gun showed under his left arm.
“I don’t want to kill him if we don’t have to,” I said.
“He’s in the way,” Hawk said. “We don’t get him out the way we got problems at Double Deuce. Plus he buzzes three people and he strolls?”
“If he really buzzed three,” I said.
“He did, ‘less you find me somebody better.”
“I’m working on that,” I said.
“Better hurry,” Hawk said. “Got about thirty-five seconds ‘fore the gate opens.”
Ahead of us was the stadium, poured concrete with bleacher seats rising up at either end. A skin baseball diamond was at the near end. Another diamond wedged in against the stadium administrative tower at the far end. The place must have been built in the thirties. It had, on a small scale, that neo-Roman look like the LA Coliseum. The tower was closed. It had always been closed. I had never seen it open.
As we came into the open end of the stadium from the north, I could see maybe twenty black kids in Raiders caps sitting in a single line, not talking, in the top row of the bleachers on the east side of the stadium, the sun half risen behind them. We kept coming, and as we did, Major appeared from behind the tower, walking slowly toward us.
Hawk laughed softly.
“Major been watching those Western movies,” Hawk said.
Major was all in black. Shirts, jeans, hightopped sneakers, Raiders cap. As he came toward us I could see the sun glint on the surface of a handgun stuck in his belt.
“Piece in his belt,” I said. “In front.”
“Un huh.”
We were in front of the assembled Hobart Raiders now. We stopped. Major, fifteen yards from us, stopped where we stopped. One point for us: you needed to be pretty good to count on shooting well at forty-five feet with a handgun. Hawk and I were pretty good. Odds were that Major wasn’t. Odds were on the other hand that if all the kids in the stands opened up, some of them might hit us. Odds were, though, that not all of them had weapons.
“Life’s uncertain,” I said to Hawk.
