Mortal Friends, page 69
But Jack was a priest, not given to scoring points with idle chatter. One could say anything to a priest.
“Coffee, please, waiter,” Colman said, overgraciously.
They waited in silence for the waiter to return and serve the coffee. Bishop McShane declined a refill.
“What’s the job again?” Colman asked.
“Secretary to the Commission on Bishops and the Government of Dioceses. It’s an appointment that wouldn’t in the normal course of things be announced for months. I hope it would not be inappropriate for you to ask.”
“Leave that to me, son.”
Son?
Had he said son?
Colman could feel the blood rushing to his face. He hoped Jack hadn’t noticed the word. He hoped he wasn’t blushing.
“Colman,” McShane said awkwardly, “you must be discreet in how you broach the subject.”
“I’ll take care of it. You just be open to the Will of God, Bishop, and let the laity arrange it for you.”
After they left Jake Wirth’s they walked to Lincoln Street, where they parted. Brady returned to his office. McShane went west on Lincoln as far as Washington. He thought of hailing a cab to go back to the chancery. He wondered if Cushing had collected himself. He wondered if Cushing was stewed. Then he thought he should go to Prescott Street. His mother, Maeve, would be in bed but awake, watching the soap operas. But he had to be very careful about visiting her. She expected him on Sunday and only on Sunday. If he went other times as well, she’d begin to expect him daily. It was not that he was parsimonious with his time. For her own sake he had to keep a clamp on her demands, which were like jaws. She would eat him. She would eat herself. She would eat like a gull, from pure reflex, even if she were not hungry.
The sky had cleared. It was cold but pleasant. He decided to walk down Washington Street to the South End. He would stop at the cathedral and sit in its permanent twilight and pray for a while.
It took McShane twenty minutes to walk to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. While he waited for the light, he looked up at the grotesque iron structure of the el. The Forest Hills line ran on the track above Washington Street. For fifty years the black filthy thing had hurled its soot against the great marble church, throwing its shadow onto the grand stairs that led up to what should have been an entrance fit for royalty. The elevated train had ruined the cathedral by making its exterior cold, dark, ugly. The pink stone had been black for years. It had ruined the cathedral on the inside by demolishing its silence every four to seven minutes with the noise of the roaring monster uptown and down.
McShane recalled standing as a lad on that very corner with his uncle. He could hear Colman Brady yelling up at the el, “And they did it, the Brahmin bastards!” Colman had arrived in Boston about the time it was being completed. “They took one look at that masterpiece with real Carrara marble,” he would say, “and, by God, they just couldn’t stand it, the jealous Yankee roundheads with their little wooden steeples and sterile altars! So the old circus dogs pulled one of their last tricks before James Michael Curley drove them from the ring.” Colman always claimed they moved the street trestle six blocks over from the Roxbury tracks, where it would have thrown its shadow, dirt, and noise harmlessly down onto the railroad pit, to Washington Street, where it cut through the heart of an Irish neighborhood and desecrated God’s holy temple, O’Connell’s Holy Cross.
McShane squinted up at the church. It was a shrine to the resentment his uncle still wore like an undersheen to his polish, the resentment McShane could surprise like a sneak thief in himself now and then. He shook himself free of it, crossed the street, climbed the cold stairs, and went into the church. The huge bronze door opened easily, still a perfect balance. However sooty and besmirched the door was now, it had begun as a masterwork of craftsmanship.
McShane slipped into one of the rear pews, his eyes blinded for the moment.
His sight found its focus again on the blue flickering of the votive lights that burned at the feet of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the far front of the church. McShane could barely make out the features of the pale ivory statue, but, as always, he was transfixed briefly by the mournful beauty of God’s mother.
His own mother was sixty-eight years old and only mournful. She was diabetic, and her refusal to maintain her diet only made her weaker and more morose. It was one of the mysteries of Jack McShane’s life that his mother should have turned out to be, finally, unhappy. He hated visiting her. He assured himself again that that did not mean he did not love her.
“Hello, dear,” he would say on entering her room. Then he would kiss the air by her cheek. She would offer him her litany of complaints—nothing long-suffering about Maeve McShane—to which he would add his pointless nuances as if in sympathy. Then they would sit in silence for a while, and then Marie would bring their dinners on trays. She would ignore her food while insisting that he eat each morsel of his. He would promise that the cardinal would be over soon. He would stand over her and bless her. He would take the dishes out with him. She was always weeping when he left.
He looked at the Blessed Virgin and prayed for his mother. He prayed on her behalf for the grace of a happy death. If she was still living when the council convened, she would never forgive him for going off to Rome.
“Unless you abandon mother and father and wife and brother and sister for my name’s sake, you cannot be my disciple.”
McShane idled over his prayer, wondering what God’s mother made of his wish for his own mother’s death.
He knew that he was only pressing his thoughts with the word prayer as if it were a stamp, as if he could mail them then to heaven. What else does a man on his knees in a dark place do?
He prayed for Cardinal Cushing. The man was an alcoholic, but McShane did not judge him. That was for God to do. McShane loved Cushing.
He prayed for Pope John and for the success of the Second Vatican Council. And, humbly, he offered his life to God in its service, invited Him to make of it what He would. McShane pressed his hands against his eyes trying to press out of his mind the enormous new conflict that seethed there just below the surface of his familiar concerns. The papacy for himself? It was ridiculous. Cushing’s chair? How even to imagine that without feeling disloyal? McShane pressed and pressed. He wanted to feel a dose of his customary zeal for the Church, how it needed the council, how it needed his own dedication, fresh and unselfish. McShane felt that he had a special mission. He was young enough to appreciate how the Church needed its aggiornamento, yet as a bishop he was prepared to defend her tradition. Sensibilities like his were exactly what was needed. He assured himself of that. He assured himself that there was nothing wrong in wanting to put himself at the further service of the Church. He prayed that the Will of God in his life and times be successfully accomplished. He was sure, one way or the other, it would be.
Especially with his uncle’s help. Jack McShane was kneeling to his own hopefulness. He would always remember the day of Pope John’s momentous announcement. After this day the Church, unchanged utterly for four hundred years, would never be the same. He knew he would look back on it later in life as the day the earth tilted slightly on its axis, tilted toward him. Was that pride? No, it was the truth. There is nothing shameful in the truth.
In addition to everything else, this was the day on which Colman Brady had called him son.
3
“When we pull the string,” Collins Brady was saying to his father, “we would clear ten and a half to eleven million dollars.”
Colman Brady sat with his back to his rolltop desk. Collins sat in a straight-backed oak chair by the refectory table on which papers were stacked and on which a gray leather attaché case stood open at a rakish angle. It was a warm summer afternoon, Thursday, June 10, 1961, but the windows were not opened. Brady had installed central air conditioning in his building the year before. Both men wore suit coats and ties.
“We buy three hundred thousand shares of Percy-Dentler at thirty dollars a share.” Collins referred to the notepad on his knee. “We hold it for two months. By fall the stock will increase in value at least four hundred percent.”
“How?” Colman’s dark look was on his son. He was beginning to think the kid was better at it than he was.
“The key is San Francisco. It’s an American-listed stock. We go through McDonald. We pull Transnational off the board. A month later we get SWG to be noncommittal while word floats that they are about to liquidate, seeming to leave Percy-Dentler on top. The demand then would be instant and strong. We hold. We help the rise along with McDonald and, say, Van Heuval, who start bidding. We still hold. We hold until it’s two hundred a share.”
“When.”
“October, the latest.”
“Have you talked to McDonald?”
“Of course not, but he’ll have to come in.”
“I meant to ask you what he was like these days. He wasn’t always out west, you know. He was a friend of mine.”
“He’s old.”
Colman did not like the bald curtness of his son’s statement. Of course, Jim McDonald was old, near seventy. But Christ, he was only a step or two ahead of Colman.
“He’s my age.”
“No, he’s not, Dad.” The certainty in Collins’s voice was like a perch on which his statement sat.
“He’s the best damn broker in the business. I’m lucky to have him.”
“He’s lucky to have you.” Collins was thinking that the best in the business would not have been suspended from working as a registered representative by the New York Exchange. But that disgrace twenty years before had been a stroke of fortune for Brady, since it led to McDonald’s move to the American in San Francisco, where they needed him now.
“What’s the liability?” Colman asked.
“The obvious one. SEC stock manipulation and fraud. You’re the director.”
Colman was frankly surprised to have such a proposition laid out by his son. They both knew the importance of avoiding outright criminal activity. Their entire enterprise was criminal, but subtly so, designed to attract as little attention as possible from the regulators. Stock manipulation and market fraud; Colman thought about it. The kid seemed to have great hopes pinned on the thing.
“Why not do it through Instrumentation?”
“You’d have to bring in Harper, and since you’re a company officer, you’d still be liable. Frankly, if we go through Monument, we can keep the risk at an acceptable level. We own Sullivan. Even if there were bubbles and he had to move on us, he could hold it down. The deal would be voided. The worst you’d have would be civil.”
Colman brushed his right hand through his abundant white hair. “Sullivan? I didn’t know we had him. Since when?” Colman let his voice display surprise and respect. Peter G. Sullivan was with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Since May seventh. I took him to lunch at Bassin’s, an eighty-thousand-dollar lunch. I have a photograph of him accepting the envelope from me.”
“L’audace,” Colman said, “toujours l’audace!” Collins had already committed an enormous act of bribery. Where had he been hiding his balls all these years? Colman folded his hands at his lips and considered what his son had proposed. “There’s another problem.”
“The Monument shortfall.”
“That’s right. Dividends just went out. I doubt if we have five million.”
“We don’t.” Collins looked at his notepad. “Four and a third.”
“And we’d need?”
“Ten five. It has to be cash. Percy’s giving us a depressed price to get cash.”
“Ten million cash! Don’t be ludicrous!”
“Not in green, not in bills. But immediate credit in his bank. For Christ sake, Dad, that’s what ‘cash’ means now.”
“I thought ‘cash’ meant cash.”
The two men looked at each other. Collins’s smooth face was waxen, immobile, waiting for his father to speak. Colman could sense how much Collins wanted this deal. It was something he’d worked up on his own, and it looked very good. It wasn’t the enormous sums they would make that interested Colman. The innovation of it did. His son was cutting his own path across the field and Colman liked that very much. But still it was out of the question.
“I’m sorry, son. There’s simply no way we can swing it.”
“What about a short-term on Monument assets?”
“We’d have to disclose to stockholders. Out of the question.”
“There’s another way.”
“What?”
“Anselmo.”
Colman did not respond. He remained still, fingers a steeple at his lips.
Collins wanted to weather his father’s silence, but could not. “What do you think?”
“Gennaro Anselmo.’ Why do you think of him?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it. He’s our alchemist.”
“Lead into gold,” Colman said absently. He studied his son’s face. Genius, he thought, reveals itself in the eyes. He studied his son’s eyes. “I had the impression you were content to leave him to me.”
“I am. And he is to leave me to you.”
“Yes. He’s a great respecter of sons, but he doesn’t trust former cops.”
“It’s curious what part of my life I have to be ashamed of.”
“Shame is an indulgence, son. The point is this isn’t Anselmo’s kind of deal.”
“How much is in the Swiss account?”
Colman shrugged. “Come on, Dad, this is me! How much?”
“More than enough.”
“Why won’t you tell me?”
Colman stared at the hard image his son threw back at him, a mirror. “I don’t know, Micko, how much is in the account.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It is true, nonetheless. I haven’t seen the figures since April.”
“How much was there then?”
“Seven million, and you want six.”
“Yes.”
“He’d never agree. He believes in cash. That account is his mattress. There has to be five in it at all times.”
“Let me ask him.”
“He won’t see you.”
“He will if you bring me. Look, Dad, once he sees what a sure thing this is he can’t say no. He can double his stash in three months, and there’s no risk.”
“There’s always a risk in the market.”
“No. They want you to think there is.”
Colman registered the awful confidence of his son’s generation. They had begun their lives with the great victory over Hitler. They had bare memories of the Depression, of the Crash, but they had no scars. They believed in the absence of limits. Their money, their plutonium carried the same secret; limitless rapid growth means limitless power.
“Anselmo doesn’t see things the way you do, son. Having five now is more important to him than maybe having twenty in the fall.”
“We’re either in business or we aren’t. This kind of deal is what it’s all about. What the hell does he have us out front for if not for this? Good Christ, Dad! You can’t just buy up nickel and dime shoe stores and then tally the cash register every night. Like it or not, we have to pull this scheme, or one like it, and very soon. If we don’t expand we shrivel. That is what Anselmo is paying us to know. Otherwise we might as well just move into the fucking bank vault with him and whack each other off.”
“He doesn’t live in a bank vault. He lives in a slum.” They could also be very crude, Colman thought, his son’s generation.
“Still?”
“Yes. The money is nothing to him. It never has been. That is why he brought me in.”
“Don’t kid yourself; he loves the secret hold he has on things through you. He loves the fact that unlike all of his flamboyant bullshit brothers of the Unione, his fingers touch something besides dope peddlers, hookers, bookies, and Vegas sharpies. And when I tell him that he can make the stock market dance a minuet to Aaron Copland and pull off one of the coups of the century, he’ll wet his pants to get in.”
“When you tell him?”
“Yes. I want to see him.”
Colman lowered his hand. Maybe what the kid needed was a dose of the wop. “He won’t know who Aaron Copland is.”
“Do you?”
“Rites of Spring.”
“That’s Stravinsky, Daddo.”
“I wasn’t talking about the music, son. I was talking about you.”
Collins grimaced. He should have known.
Colman decided to go with it. As for the fraud, what the hell, it was all fraud. There was something showing in Collins that he had not seen before, and he liked it. If he was disappointed at all, it was that his son had not displayed such nerve a long time before. Colman turned to his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed. He waited. Then he spoke.
“I must see you.”
He waited.
“Very soon, as soon as possible. Yes. That would be good.”
He waited.
“It is not about that. We can discuss that, but I have nothing to . . . Alright.”
He waited.
“One more thing. I am bringing my son. Yes, Gennaro, my son.”
He waited.
“I insist. You must trust me. Alright.”
He returned the phone to its cradle and turned to Collins. “He thought I had something else in mind.”
“What?”
“The killing at Revere Beach two days ago. You didn’t read about it? A Gallagher kid killed a Maguire, over a girl, for Christ’s sake.”
“What’s that to Anselmo?”
Colman wondered momentarily if his son really did not know. “Gallagher runs Anselmo’s operation in Southie. Maguire runs it in Charlestown and Somerville. Bennie Maguire declared war on Gallagher this morning.”
