Bosstown--A Novel Read online

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  With love for Adrienne, Sam, and Antonia

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Boston as portrayed in this novel is pretty close to real, but I’ve taken liberties in my descriptions and the changes the city has undergone. The same goes for the events and characters presented in the story. I made all of this up.

  PROLOGUE

  Everybody in the Game Thinks They’re a Shark

  This is how I see my father circa 1990: He sits in a high-backed chair, a deck of Bicycle playing cards nestled in the palm of his left hand, his right hand hovering over the deck like a magician summoning spirits. He is wearing a crisp white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, the sleeves folded into ruler-width rectangles that sit just above the elbows, framing his forearms and the coiled muscles that shift like snakes under his tanned brown skin. He is smiling, my father, exposing yin-yang upper teeth separated horizontally by a scraggly fault line where the bonding was attached but had yet to discolor to match the upper portion. His cheeks are #3 sandpaper, flecked with dull nickel silver only partially covering a lightning-bolt scar under his bottom lip. Smile lines run from the corners of his mouth into estuaries that reach the edges of his eyes, pools of battery acid lit with a galaxy of pinprick lights surrounding the pupils.

  They are liar’s eyes.

  Most of my earliest memories are of poker games, my father caressing a deck of cards, the sound of chips hitting felt, darkened windows or drawn shades and rooms dense with smoke and men who, during breaks in the action, would practice staring into mirrors, trying to erase the light from their own eyes. On nights when my father couldn’t find someone to sit with me and my brother, Zero, he would haul us to these games, where we would pass the time reading whatever books and papers were lying about, or if the game was somewhere with a kitchen or bar, Zero and I would fix the men sandwiches and drinks in exchange for tips. Most often though, we just sat behind—always behind—our father and watched the games unfold, luck give way to skill, friendly banter wind down into pressurized silence or muttered curses.

  It wasn’t unusual for Zero and me to appear in school directly from these marathon games, our pockets bulging with ones and fives, hair styled with palm sweat, clothes wrinkled and pungent with cigar and cigarette smoke. It was also not unusual for me to wake from a deep sleep in the nurse’s office, Zero laid out beside me, his hands squeezing imaginary cards, dreams of royal flushes and quad aces dancing behind sealed lids. The Z Brothers they would call us. The Narcoleptic Twins (though Zero was nearly three years older).

  Whether this midday catatonia brought my father grief from the school’s administration is highly unlikely, since those he played with were often the school officials themselves or men otherwise hardwired to the city’s machinery—politicians and their cronies, ward bosses and their street-corner protégés, cops and robbers, bag men, businessmen, and thieves—who could tell the difference? These were the men who made things happen and problems disappear. Dangerous men who brokered in favors and cautiously guarded secrets that secured their positions and livelihoods, a few of which, remarkably at odds with their public personas, weighed like liens on their conscience. Men who, I was to learn later, had sometimes found the weight of those secrets too great to keep and would look into my father’s black eyes, those liar’s eyes, and find whatever it was they sought. Forgiveness? Understanding?

  In certain Central and South American countries—places where the governments rotate in and out of power seemingly through a revolving door directly connected to hell—there exists a cadre of men and women who hire themselves out as professional hostages, stand-ins for those taken from wealthy families and held for ransom. Though their loved ones have been removed from immediate danger, the families rarely fail to pay the ransom demands in order to preserve the honor of their word and their family’s good name. Whether the hostages are mistreated or tortured, live or die, they could care less. In their world reputation is everything. My father operated under much the same principle, only minus the cold hard cash. His word was bond because, generally, it was all he had. My father was the place secrets went to die, never to see the light of day.

  At least that’s what everybody thought.

  But then along came the Big Dig, Boston’s $20-billion Central Artery Project slicing through the city’s divided neighborhoods—Charlestown, South Boston, Chinatown and East Boston, the South End—tearing up the pavement and exposing the bodies everyone had figured were buried forever. What my father knew, or, rather, what he remembered as Alzheimer’s crept in and rendered his past a grab bag of Etch A Sketch memories, seemed to shift as often as Boston’s topography. The city and its history were turned inside out one heaping shovel load at a time; buildings that had stood mute witness to decades of fitful change were reduced to rubble overnight and carted off by convoys of trucks that shook the ground like mini earthquakes as they barreled toward the harbor docks. Two-way streets were choked into one-way passages, cement barriers eliminating turns. Exits and ramps were blocked or turned around and rerouted into makeshift outlets. Rotaries were halved, draining traffic back to the streets they had just escaped. Sidewalks vanished. Bridges led to nowhere. Streets disappeared completely. And as the earth rumbled, shifted, and coughed up its secrets, from every crack, hole, and crevice, the rats came out to play.

  ONE

  Boylston Street coming out of the Fenway runs for twelve blocks through Boston as straight as a sumo wrestler on the way to a buffet table before intersecting with Tremont, which in turn does a little improvisational dance into the rat maze that constitutes the Financial District—a place the sun never seems to shine below the twentieth floor.

  There are eleven sets of traffic lights from one end of Boylston to where it hits Tremont, seven bus stops, forty-nine fire hydrants, and two mammoth potholes known to swallow small Hondas whole. There are no stop signs.

  A leisurely drive down Boylston just taking in the sights—the granite mistake of the Prudential Center, Boston Public Library, Copley Square, Trinity Church and its Gothic reflection in the slate blue glass of the John Hancock Tower, a corner of the Public Garden blooming behind the cast-iron fence—would take about seven minutes, providing you didn’t catch every red light along the way.

  I know these and other meaningless facts about Boylston Street because it’s a road I’ve traveled often, way more times than I care to remember, and in just about every condition imaginable, Boylston and just about every other strip of pavement masquerading as a street in this historic landfill. I get paid to travel them, you see. I deliver things. Pick things up. I’m a bicycle messenger. Hell on wheels. A pedestrian’s worst nightmare.

  On a social scale, that makes me right about even with the gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Maybe even the stuff stuck to the bottom of the gum. But I like it. There are even times I like it because of it. Sometimes I think it’s a lot easier being the gum than the shoe. The life might be shorter, but it’s full of flavor while it lasts.

  To make up for my occasional bouts with a lack of professional self-esteem, I like to think of myself as Boston’s lowest paid professional athlete. Though admittedly, I’d be hard-pressed to qualify, considering I’ve yet to submit to drug testing, be sued for paternity, or get stopped on the street for an autograph or handshake. And that’s despite the fact my outfits are tighter than Tom Brady’s game-day uniform and sometimes twice as flashy. I often contemplate hiring an agent. Just about every one of my ex-girlfriends—and there are plenty of those—thinks maybe I should get a real job.

  But at this point such drastic measures are out of the question. I get enough of the ball-and-chain nine-to-five during my forays inside the endless cubicle cities and office cells. It’s as close to real as I want to get. I decided a long time ago I needed a longer leash.

  So I ride the streets. And the sidewalks. And the occasional lobby if it comes to that—caffeine fueled, adrenaline hyped, my stripped-down silver Fat Chance oiled and tuned to the bone. Almost out of habit it seems. No road too rough, no curb too high, no hangover too debilitating; on most days I never give much thought to what I’m doing or the streets flashing beneath my wheels.

  Only this morning is different. This morning I have the time to think about where I am, which happens to be Boylston Street, long, wide, and one-way only. Because this morning in early June, sunny and bright, the birds singing like they’ve been paid in advance, Boylston Street is as backed up as John Goodman’s arteries. Backed up solid. Plugged. Bumper to bumper and heading nowhere fast.

  And I seem to be the cause of it. Because this morning I’m lying in the middle of Boylston at the intersection of Arlington, bleeding like I never knew I could. Like a river. Like a pro. Lo
ts and lots of blood coming out from somewhere on my head, my face, my hip, and my leg, blood coming out red, warm, and sticky like someone turned on the faucet and left it running.

  And all of a sudden, I’m not having such a swell day.

  TWO

  I blame it on the coffee. It was weak and old, the color of soaking rust, the filter a less than clean dish towel that had been lying around looking for a purposeful existence.

  I gave it one.

  I lined it inside my weary Melitta, poured in the suspect grounds, added water, and hoped for the best. I was the MacGyver of coffee. I searched the fridge for half-and-half but came up empty and emptier. A poke through cabinets and shelves turned up mass quantities of organic poverty: brown rice, tea bags, peanut butter, and ramen noodles, but no cream or anything remotely like it. This was real life. In real life there’s no such thing as improvising cream.

  So I drank it brown. It packed a wallop like Tinker Bell with twelve-ounce gloves and tasted just about how it looked, maybe a little too much like what the dish towel had wiped up a month earlier. I was halfway through a second cup when my Motorola started barking static on the strap of the bag hanging by the front door of the industrial South End loft I share with two roommates.

  I ignored it and one-eyed the kitchen’s apocalyptic mess: the sink piled high with plates and mismatched glasses, food and cigarette butts hardening onto their surfaces like glazed ceramic as the faucet plip-plopped cold water torture, drilling a hole through my pounding head. I knew better at that point than to try and fix it.

  The faucet, I mean.

  Our hot- and cold-water knobs are a distant memory, replaced by a pair of mismatched wrenches, which stick out at forty-five-degree angles and bleed toxic rust-orange streaks into the sink; to turn the water on, you have to tighten the grips on the wrenches and rotate them counterclockwise without skinning your knuckles on the wall. Hot water is hit or miss. The water heater, roughly three feet to the left of the sink and visible under the stairs, wears a sweater of pink insulation and an enormous black brassiere. We named her Joan. She’s haughty and fickle and doles out hot water like UN rations, though a swift kick sometimes prods her into action. But for the most part, we wash in digit-numbing cold water, which might explain why our household tends to catch colds at the same time.

  I cleared some room at the table, toppling empty Heineken bottles stripped naked, their labels having joined a hundred other brands in the alcoholic collage that wallpapers half the kitchen and speaks volumes about our overindulgences and lack of brand loyalty. Beer is good, our décor says. You bring it, we’ll drink it.

  That goes double for wine—preferably red—with each bottle on the table bearing some mark of a pornographic alteration, crude figurines hand-carved into the amber glass with the sharp edge of a key.

  My roommate Nicolette, a legit six feet, hard and lean from working as a welder and set designer, gets fairly creative when she drinks red wine, which is to say, often. When Nicolette isn’t working steadily, she’s prone to violent mood swings that come crashing through the loft in waves of activity masking despair.

  Luckily, that activity often comes in the form of hastily thrown dinner parties, as was the case last night. Nicolette can be a handful, but the girl can cook, and on the cheap, too, which is no small thing in our little collective. Our other roommate, David, actually has something approaching a real job, in the sense that he gets up the same time most mornings, goes somewhere, and gets paid every two weeks (I’ve seen the checks). What exactly he does to earn those shekels is beyond me, except I know it’s highly technical and based on the fact he’s relentlessly cheerful, his life goal of achieving world domination through the production and dissemination of earsplitting techno beats must be progressing smoothly. David is short, hairy, and bespectacled; dresses like a ninja down to his polished eight-lace Doc Martens; and is one of the smartest, nicest, and funniest people I have ever known.

  Last night, Nicolette threw together black beans with boiled dandelion greens she’d uprooted from the fenced-in alley that separates our block-long former factory building from the hardscrabble ball field behind us. The greens could be considered organic, I suppose, only the neighborhood drug addicts tend to urinate on them—the methadone clinic at Boston City is a zombie stroll away, and the Pine Street Inn, Boston’s largest homeless shelter, is within sight of our front windows, our very own gloom with a view.

  To the greens Nicolette added some unidentified spices, chopped peppers, and tomatoes; wept bitter tears of an undetermined nature into a mountain of diced onions; and wrapped everything in pan-warmed tortillas sealed with a layer of burnt cheese.

  The guests provided the booze, which in our household always amounts to fair trade. The playlist went a little something like this: Otis and Aretha, because we always start with some soul; Depeche Mode, Rage Against the Machine, Wu-Tang Clan, and Nirvana to take us through and home. At some point Nicolette dragged one of David’s goth-leaning friends into her bedroom and forced him to do unspeakable things while the rest of us listened and played Guess the Position. His black leather Misfits jacket was still draped over one of the chairs, his pockets turned inside out and empty. I don’t remember going to bed, but I know I went alone because that’s how I woke up, nursing a ringing headache, the cat staring at me with scorn.

  When my Motorola came to life again, my name surrounded by anatomic-themed curses, I unclipped it from my bag and pressed the side button.

  “Argh,” I said into it.

  “Let me guess.” It was Martha, my dispatcher, as always gnawing on something loudly. Martha’s thin as a rail and has a mouth like the electrified third, and as far as I can tell, chewing is the only exercise she ever gets. “Red wine, rock and roll, and a whole lot of stick-it-to-the-man, fight-the-power bullshit.”

  “Argh,” I said.

  “I thought so.” Chew. “You got a pickup at Black Hole Vinyl. ASAP.”

  “Martha.” I rubbed my temples uselessly with one hand. “It’s not even eight o’clock yet. Can you please not speak to me in acronyms?”

  “Okey-dokey.” Chew. “Black Hole Vinyl. Get your ass in gear. How’s that?”

  “Better. Isn’t Black Hole Gus’s account?”

  “Your point?”

  “You can’t reach him?”

  “Nope. Please tell me your slut of a roommate didn’t snatch him up again.”

  “Snatch?” I said. “As in pussy?”

  “Nooo.” Chew. “Snatch, as in you’re a pig. Is Gus there or not?”

  “Not. Nicolette tapped someone else last night.”

  “Poor thing,” Martha drawled, but I wasn’t sure whether she meant Nicolette or Misfit. “You know where they’re at?”

  “Central Square, right?”

  “Not anymore. Thirty-eight Newbury Street, sixth floor.”

  “Wow, movin’ on up,” I said, starting in on the theme song to The Jeffersons. “To the apart-ment in the sky-I-I…”

  Martha chewed through my rendition, unimpressed. “You want it?” she said when I’d finished.

  “I want it,” I replied.

  “You awake yet?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Just checking,” she said, swallowed, and faded to static.

  I let the drain choke on what was left in my cup.

  THREE

  Thirty-eight Newbury Street is a seven-story red brick building that extends itself like a bookend to the corner of Berkeley Street. It’s a high-rent building in a high-rent district, Brooks Brothers and Cartier providing a foundation of solid capital for the floors that rise above it.

  One door over, in the darkened window of Alan Bilzerian, a pair of mannequins lurked in a thicket of bamboo poles, dressed in peasant straw hats and thousand-dollar silk Vietcong pajamas. I was admiring the antique Raleigh nestled between them when a man in a polyester tracksuit with five-pound weights strapped to his ankles stopped midstride and looked along with me.

  “Look at this shit,” he grunted, the “look” sounding like “Luke,” a heavy Eastern European accent smudging the words. He had long sideburns and bristly black hair, a white towel wrapped around the back of his neck and stuffed into the front of his zipped-up jacket. “History is window dressing.” He motioned to me with his chin. “You like?”