bartender, would remember him later), he called room 404 again on the house phone and again got no answer. He drained his highball and in a tipsy voice he told the bartender an old joke-about the giraffe who walks into a bar and announces, “The highballs are on me”-before leaving. The bartender’s face puckered: Didn’t this jackass know Kennedy was dead?
Elevator to the fourth floor.
At room 404 he gave a brushy knock, then took a key from his pocket and let himself in.
He checked the room. Empty.
Back to the door. Gloves on. A glance up and down the hallway. He took a paper clip from his pocket, broke an inch of wire from it, slid the wire into the keyhole to plug it, then closed the door.
Checked the dresser. Checked the closets. He worked quickly but without noise and without leaving a mess. Found what he was looking for duct-taped to the inside of the toilet tank (clever prick): a yellow silk jewelry bag.
Ricky emptied the bag onto the bed. Loose diamonds. Some small jewelry pieces. Packets of hundred-dollar bills, banded. He separated out some of the jewelry, the gold plate, the pieces too bulky to conceal. That left a glassy heap. There might have been a half million dollars mounded up there. A cool little cone of diamonds.
The corners of Ricky’s mouth tried to curl up into the tiniest unprofessional smirk, which he smothered.
2
Michael Daley
A bulge rippled across his view. It was, he thought, like looking at the bottom of a stream as a little wave passes over: a transparent swell traveled from right to left across his field of vision. It bloated the damask curtains, the walls, the men’s faces, the bald head of a man at a lectern-and at that point Michael closed his eyes.
He knew what the hallucination signaled. The pain was coming. Soon. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes.
His right hand tingled, and a drink slipped out of his fingers and dropped away. The glass remained upright as it fell, as if it were falling straight down a tube. He gazed down into the top of the glass, at the undisturbed ice cubes and soda water and lime wedge, until the floor punched the bottom of the glass and the drink erupted onto the carpet and splattered his shoes.
The spill made no noise, but a little gasp went up from the crowd around Michael. From the lectern, the speaker quipped, “Yes, it’s shocking, I know,” and everyone laughed. Someone chucked Michael on the shoulder, and he mustered a smile for them, though he was not the sort who liked to be looked at, much less laughed at. He picked up the empty glass and made a feeble gesture with it, like a toast, to ward them off, to direct all those eyes back to Farley Sonnenshein and his speech.
Sonnenshein resumed, the usual developer-speak, although he made his pitch with unusual flair. “Gentlemen, let’s not forget where this city was only a few short years ago. Decaying, rotting, shrinking-dying. Young people leaving in droves. Businesses closing. Blight was spreading like cancer in an old man. And the only hope for this man-this ravaged, dying old man-was surgery. Radical surgery.”
Another wave rolled through Sonnenshein. The developer seemed to ripple like a flag in a light breeze. Michael looked down, pretending to concentrate on the speech. He thought he could hold this pose for a moment before the hallucinations got worse and he would have to leave the room.
This was the aura that preceded a migraine. The word aura was a clinical term, but it captured the experience perfectly. The migraine aura swept in like fog; by the time you’d detected it, you were already enveloped, isolated. This particular hallucination-those rolling undulations in his visual field-was new to Michael. He had sometimes seen shivery radiations around the edges of things, like heat rising off hot asphalt, before a migraine set in. But this was new. He wanted to remember it clearly so he could describe it to his doctor.
And he wanted to get out.
Sonnenshein’s voice: “The West End-a crowded ghetto, all fifty-some-odd acres of it-gone! Swept away! Soon it will be replaced with a streamlined complex of shops and apartments. We’ve broken ground on our new Central Artery, an elevated high-speed expressway that will whisk cars right through downtown, relieve our crowded streets, and speed local commerce. Even Scollay Square-”
A mock plea went up, in thick Bostonese, “Not Skully Squay-uh!”
“Yes, gentlemen, even Scollay Square! Goodbye, burlesque houses! Goodbye, tattoo parlors! Arrivederci, Scollay Square, you will not be missed. Not when this city has a new, modern Government Center in your place.”
“You call that progress?” someone shouted, and there was a gust of laughter.
Sonnenshein waited for the room to fall quiet. “I call it the New Boston,” he answered, as if this new city were a gift he was granting them. “That’s the Boston your children will know. And the old Boston, my friends, our Boston, will seem as vanished and quaint to them as Pompeii.”
Michael looked up. A test. For a moment he saw the scene clearly: Sonnenshein with his hand still poised on the white cloth; the roomful of men watching him, eager, excited at the nearness of Sonnenshein, the Man to See. The picture held for a moment, then it billowed once, and again, and again. Michael closed his eyes only to be dazzled by phosphenes, flashbursts of light that he sensed rather than saw, as if he’d been staring into the sun. He began to make his way toward the door, through the crowd, his eyes open only a crack.
Somewhere behind Michael was Sonnenshein’s voice: “President Kennedy told that wonderful story about the great French marshal, Lyautey. One day Marshal Lyautey asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow-growing and would not bloom for a hundred years. The marshal replied, ‘In that case, there is no time to lose. Plant it this afternoon.’ Gentlemen, we too have trees to plant. Let’s plant them this afternoon. That is how we will honor Jack Kennedy’s memory. With a living memorial in his old hometown. I give you the next piece of the New Boston: JFK Park.”
Michael dared to look back as Sonnenshein slipped the cloth off an architect’s model, a Corbusian apartment complex, four soaring towers set in a swell of green. The model was white, immaculate, futuristic, fantastic. There was an audible contented mmm. Applause. Mayor Collins, in his wheelchair, peered between the little clay buildings at eye level, beaming. The Cardinal craned his neck.
“To the future!” someone toasted.
“The future!” came the answer, and a cheer went up.
A blind spot, a white hole, now occupied the center of Michael’s field of vision. He tried to blink it away. The hole faded, scintillated at the edges, and through it he saw Sonnenshein scanning the room, gauging the reaction to his model.
Michael’s boss, an assistant A.G. named Wamsley, materialized at Michael’s side. Jug-eared, grinning his familiar toothy grin. “What’s wrong, Daley, you don’t like the future?”
“Not the immediate future, no.” Michael struggled to hold himself still, to present himself as a healthy man.
“You alright, Michael?”
“No. I have a headache.”
He stumbled out onto School Street. A doorman in his smart Parker House uniform offered a cab, and somehow Michael fell into the back seat. He was holding his head now, pressing two fingers at each temple. Still no pain, but it was coming.
“Beacon and Clarendon,” he told the cabbie.
“You want to take a cab six blocks?”
“Yes.”
“You could walk it quicka.”
“Just do it.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. These people.”
Michael lay down on the back seat. It smelled of vinyl and sweat and gasoline and cold. The aura would end, all the kaleidoscopic visions and the exalted, privileged intoxication that accompanied them-all the phenomena that so fascinated the doctors, the scotomata and spectra of a classical migraine aura- they would fade, soon, and in their place would be the first little swell of pain, a bony hump inside the forehead, pressing, always on the right side. You
