He opened his eyes.
The street scene in his windshield was essentially unchanged. But no pedestrians were nearby. The hookers had drifted around the corner up LaGrange, toward Good Time Charlie’s, out of view.
There was a car parked beside Joe’s. He was aware of it before he actually turned to see it, a long black- hooded car.
A voice: “Hey, cop.”
Joe looked to his right across the passenger seat to see Vinnie Gargano double-parked beside him, so close, the car doors nearly touching, just a few inches between the windowsills. At the same time Gargano seemed far away, in a separate space, tanked inside his own car. Gun.
N Gargano hesitated, perplexed, as if he did not understand what his eyes had just told him: big Joe Daley’s expression had not changed, but a neat dark circle had winked open on his forehead. It appeared so suddenly and- the bullet’s flight being unobservable-inexplicably that for a moment it seemed like a magic trick. The hole seemed to have come from inside him. Daley’s body slumped back, and the hole filled with blood which ran out thick and gleaming as poured paint. Gargano recovered himself, remembered he had work to do-his jobs had become increasingly sloppy and frenzied, the trigger-hysteria getting the better of him-and he emptied his clip into Daley’s body and sped off.
Long day. Michael leaned back, eyes shut, one toe poised on the ledge of an open drawer. The chair reclined with little metallic ticks, his weight transferred from his buttocks to the wings of his back, verte-brae popped into line with agreeable thumps, and when he had found the right balance he removed his foot from the desk and lay there like John Glenn in the Friendship 7, aimed upward into space, and he decided it was the first moment of the day that he had actually enjoyed. This chair might just have been the one good thing about working for the A.G. Maybe he would take it with him when he left. Or maybe he would never leave; he could just hang on here in a dingy state office, a lifer, the type that knew the precise date when his pension would vest.
Outside, something changed.
There was a modulation in the white noise of the city. A shrill siren whined, and another. A car drag-raced, making a perilous clatter in a city of close streets. Michael went to the window. Night had fallen. He saw nothing, of course, nothing but the yellow-brick rear of the State House, the ranks of office windows. But he knew by the change in pitch that something was wrong, some disaster, maybe close by, reflected off the maze-walls of the city. The air thrummed with it.
Heavy steps in the hall, the jingling of keys and equipment, and Conroy was in the doorway, grim and massive. “Bad news, Michael. We got to go. It’s Joe.”
“What?”
“Come on, we got to go. It’s bad.”
“What happened?”
“It’s-Look, there’s no other way to say it. I’m sorry-Joe’s dead.”
“What!”
“He got shot. That’s all they know. I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“Come on, Michael, right now, we got to go.”
And this was how suddenly it happened. This was how Joe died, for Michael, with those two electric words: He’s dead.
Then Michael was following Conroy down the hallways. Blood rushed in his ears. Objects seemed to swim- office doors with pebbled-glass windows; a janitor with a mop bucket on wheels; smudgy photos of stern, bushy- bearded politicians from the last century.
Out into the street, where Conroy had an unmarked cruiser waiting. For some reason Michael went to get in the back seat, as if the black Ford was a taxi, and Conroy had to tell him to sit in front. “Come on, Mike, you gotta keep your shit together, Mike. Your mother needs you here.” Michael did as he was told, he sat in the front seat, and even now he detested Brendan Conroy-the worldly paternal tone with its hint that Michael would play novice to Conroy’s mentor; the repetition of his name, Mike, Mike, Mike, as if he had learned the habit in a Dale Carnegie course. Call me Michael, you prick. But he was too bewildered to maintain his contempt.
Conroy rushed the car down the back slope of Beacon Hill and shot across Bowdoin Square.
Michael thought: He should have turned right, to make his way west to Boston City Hospital. Joe must have been taken to Mass. General instead. Maybe when a cop got shot even the remorseless Yankees there would find it in their hearts to let an Irishman in the back door. But again, Michael’s cynicism evaporated almost immediately. He could not hold a thought in his head. His mind continually emptied itself.
The siren made its clarinet wail, and a blue flasher strobed on the dashboard.
“They found him on Washington Street,” Conroy was half-shouting, “right in his car, right there on the street. Can you believe that? I mean, can you believe the balls on these guys? The unmitigated balls on these guys.” He clenched the steering wheel at nine and three o’clock, arms stiff.
Once they crossed Cambridge Street, the view through the windshield went black, like looking out over water at night. Then the buildings beside them disappeared and they sailed off the map, off the street grid, into the empty space of the old West End site. The road faltered. Conroy killed the siren and the blinking blue lights. They bounced over the rocky surface.
“Jesus, Brendan, what the hell, where are you going?”
“Hospital.”
“ This way?”
“Yeah, sorry, I know. Shortcut. Cambridge Street’s a mess. Just let me drive. We’ll be there in a minute. You alright, Michael?”
The answer was no, he was not alright, he was very definitely not alright. A late night at the office had exploded into a catastrophe, and the strangeness, the shock of it, left him feeling unmoored, as if that reclining chair in his office really had been the Friendship 7 and Michael had been rocketed into outer space. He covered his mouth with his left hand and repeated, Joe is dead, Joe is dead, to convince himself of it. How recently had he taken a similar ride, in Joe’s car, to bring similar news to Ricky after Amy was murdered? Six months before. Then, the mantra had been: Amy’s dead, Amy’s dead…What the brain cannot fathom, it simply rejects as untrue.
In front of them stretched a vast empty field, the fifty acres of the old West End razed to the dirt. The light of the moon and the surrounding city illuminated the ground with pale fluorescence. A rubble field of rocks and sandy soil and construction scrap, no trees, no roads. Before them the desolate irradiated landscape sloped gently away to sea level, a quarter mile away, where it ran out into the darkness. Looking over it you could imagine some conquering army had swept across and consumed it. The only things they had left behind were the enormous mounds of building materials heaped up like cairns, bristling with two-by-fours, the remains of demolished buildings. On the far side of the wasteland, lights burned in clusters at Mass. General and, farther away, at the construction site of JFK Park, Farley Sonnenshein’s dream city of the future. The New Boston.
The car yawed and hopped over the rocks. Stones clattered in the wheel wells and chinked against the bottom of the car. Here and there, Conroy had to slow to a crawl to avoid bottoming out on the debris.
Michael tried to gauge his location, but the streets had been completely effaced. So he surrendered to disorientation and simply gawked at what was close: the haystacks of two-by-fours that rose to four and five times the height of the car; the scraps strewn on the ground, concrete, metal, brick; the odd personal item, a mangled baby carriage, a shoe. And stones-stones everywhere, the same rocky untillable soil the ancient pilgrims had found here. He thought-as everyone thought and everyone commented, because the memory was so near, the comparison so irresistible-that it all looked exactly like the old newspaper photos of bombed-out cities in Europe. And this thought, too, led back to Joe. Joe who had marched across Europe all the way to Berlin, only to die here. Joe was dead.
“Who did it? Are there witnesses?”
“Yeah. But don’t you worry about that, Michael. We’ll get the guy. You worry about your family.”
“I should have done something, shouldn’t I? I don’t know; you know? I should’ve helped him.”
“Can’t think like that, boyo, can’t do that to yourself.”
“I should’ve-”
“Nothing anyone could do. Joe got himself into it. It’s nobody else’s fault. It’s over now anyway.”
Conroy picked his way over the rubble. In some places where the roads had been, the ground still bore their
