Back Bay (13 page)

“Do you see anything?” asked Pratt.

“No, sir.”

“Then come in out of the rain before you catch cold.”

“I don’t mind if I do.” It was Wilson. He took off his oilskin and climbed into the coach. Once inside, he removed his top hat, shook the water from the brim, and carefully placed the hat on the seat beside him. He looked strong and wiry, though he was about seventy years old.

“I did not invite you to join us,” said Pratt.

Wilson pulled a pint of rum, a salami, and several stale rolls from the pockets of his livery and spread them on the seat. “But I’m inviting you to join me.” He swigged from the bottle and offered it to Pratt. “If we have to sit out here all night in the rain, we might as well be comfortable, eh, Mr. Pratt? When you come right down to it, there’s not much left for two old men but to stay warm and dry and keep a fire cookin’ in their bellies, is there?”

Pratt took a drink and handed the pint back to his footman. “You ask very little of life, Wilson. That’s why you’ve spent most of yours driving my coach.”

Wilson took another swallow of rum, stuffed a piece of salami into his mouth, and bit off a chunk of bread. “If you expect little, life can’t disappoint you.”

Pratt smiled. “I’ve demanded everything and gotten most of it.”

“And ten years from now, the only difference between you and me will be the size of our headstones. So drink up.”

Pratt laughed and drank again. “Wilson, you are a cheerful son of a bitch. You never disappoint me.”

“Not like your friend Dexter Lovell, who’s disappointed you for three nights in a row. From what I remember of Lovell, he’ll continue to disappoint you until we all fall down for want of sleep.”

Young Horace shook the rain off himself and climbed into the coach. Wilson offered the boy rum. Horace looked at his grandfather, who nodded. It was not young Horace’s first liquor, but the rum burned his gullet all the way down. He gagged it back violently, spat it out the window, and in a moment was standing in the rain coughing the fire out of his gut.

“He ain’t quite a man yet,” said Wilson merrily.

“But he’s learning fast,” said Pratt.

“Next time you drink my rum,” Wilson ordered, “don’t be spittin’ it out before it gets to your belly.”

Pratt smiled and waited for the boy to stop coughing. “Any sign of the red lantern, son?”

Horace crawled back into the coach and collapsed in his seat. “No, sir,” he said between breaths. “But the tide is still coming in. It should be slack in about an hour.”

“We’ll wait until it turns,” announced Pratt.

“And hope we don’t catch our deaths in the meantime,” said Wilson.

“I did not ask for your opinion,” answered Pratt.

“You should. You get it anyway.”

Pratt turned to his grandson. “When you grow up, my boy, change servants every five years. Otherwise, they become like old cats—too arrogant for their own good, yet too familiar to throw out in the street.”

Wilson laughed.

The rain began to fall more heavily. Pratt stared out toward the West Boston Bridge. There would be no red lantern tonight.

Dexter Lovell was eighty miles away, just off Provincetown and plowing into Cape Cod Bay under full sail. He could smell rain in the wind, but the onshore breeze was still fresh and he had never felt better.

The
Reckless
was making fine distance. She was a fine ship. From the moment he had taken the tiller in Chesapeake Bay, Lovell knew that two men could sail her to Boston. He hated to scuttle her. And Thomas Jefferson Grew had become a first-class seaman in just a few days. He hated to kill such a fine specimen.

For two weeks, they had been traveling at night, holding close to the shore, and hiding in a bay or inlet from just after sunrise until late in the afternoon. The British Navy was spread along the Atlantic Coast, but not so sparsely that Lovell would risk the tea set more than once.

Just out of Chesapeake Bay, a British frigate had stopped him with a shot across the bow, and he had feared that his adventure
might end quickly. British officers had been instructed to seize any vessel carrying cargo and to fine any with an empty hold, on the assumption that the captain had sold his goods or held funds to purchase cargo in another port. The British boarded the
Reckless
, but they found no cargo. Jack Dawson’s sloop had been modified for smuggling, and Lovell had hidden the tea set in a secret compartment beneath the hold. The British fined Lovell two hundred and fifty dollars, which he paid with the gold coins he had promised Jack Dawson. Then, they warned him to stay in port and sent him and his slave on their way. Lovell did not challenge the Union Jack in daylight again.

Jeff Grew secured a loose shroud and came aft, moving with the confidence of a lifetime sailor. He took a bottle of Jack Dawson’s best rotgut from a chest against the starboard bulwark and sat down to drink. He had been enjoying Dawson’s store since the trip began, and Lovell was amazed at his capacity for spirits.

Grew offered Lovell the bottle. Lovell refused; he did not intend to let drink weaken his resolve. He would not leave himself open for Jeff Grew’s machete.

“How much longer you reckon, Dexter Lovell?”

“We’ll be in Boston tomorrow night.”

Grew sucked on the bottle and studied the white man. He did not trust Dexter Lovell. He didn’t trust anyone who wouldn’t drink with him. Yet, as they drew closer to this place called Boston, Grew realized that his life was in Lovell’s hands. He knew nothing of the city or its people or their opinions about freedmen. Lovell had lived there for many years, and he would have friends waiting for him. If his friends were smugglers, they might be the sort who would split a nigger’s skull when he asked for his fair share of a stolen tea set. The closer they came to Boston, the less Jeff Grew wanted to see its harbor.

“Hey, Dexter, dis be a fine ship, don’t it?”

“Aye.”

“You think you could sail dis ship across the ocean?”

“I could, but not with a one-man crew.”

“What about Jamaica? Could we sail dere?”

“We’re goin’ to Boston,” said Lovell firmly.

“But I have friends in Jamaica, good rich friends.” He spoke with the ingratiating tone that was a remnant of his days as a slave. It crept into his voice whenever he asked a white man for a favor, and he hated himself when he heard it. “Maybe dey pay us plenty for dis tea set. And I got another friend, be a silversmith. He know how to melt down silver into bars. Den we sell it for plenty, and no one ever know we took it from Jemmy Madison’s parlor.” A fawning smile punctuated the speech.

Lovell looked straight ahead, into the clouds that were charging out to meet him. He expected the wind to change any minute. “My connections in Boston will pay us two ’undred times what we can get for a bar of unworked silver in Jamaica,” said Lovell. “So stop schemin’ and do as you’re told.”

Grew drank more rum. He felt the numbness in his gums that told him he was almost drunk. He took another swallow and looked up into the sail, blown full and round like a ripe pear. Grew wanted the money that Lovell was promising, but he didn’t believe he would get it. Better a few hundred dollars for a few pounds of silver than the promise of thousands and a lead ball in the back of the head.

Grew finished the last of Jack Dawson’s rum and slipped the machete from his belt. Dexter Lovell shifted his right hand to one of his pistols and watched the black carefully. Grew took a grindstone from Jack Dawson’s deck box, spat on it, and drew the length of the blade three or four times across its surface. The sound was cold and efficient, and Lovell heard its meaning.

Suddenly, the wind changed and the sail went limp. There was a crash of thunder, and for an instant, the great dunes at Provincetown appeared blue and ghostlike off the port bow.

T
he sun was burning through the haze of another heat-wave morning. Peter Fallon rowed his scull under the Harvard Bridge and into the Charles River Basin. He remembered from the maps that Massachusetts Avenue, which ran across the bridge, cut straight through the area once known as Gravelly Point. He tried to drive the thought from his head. When he rowed, Fallon preferred to move without thinking, but the Dexter Lovell note and the maps had been on his mind since he woke.

Inhale, stroke, exhale, backstroke. He concentrated on the rhythm of rowing, on the regular splash of the oars, the steady movement of the body in the scull. He liked rowing in the humidity. It was better than a sauna for opening the pores and loosening the muscles, and today he rowed much farther than usual.

Skimming along the northern edge of the Back Bay, he passed Beacon Street brownstones with river-view windows, commuter traffic on Storrow Drive, the Prudential and John Hancock towers, and all he could see was a tidal flat stretching two or three miles inland to a neck of land. He swept by the Hatch Memorial Shell, where the Boston Pops performed on summer nights, and he calculated that the Easterly Channel had once flowed into the Charles River just beneath Arthur Fiedler’s podium. He rowed down to the West Boston Bridge, a span of granite arching gracefully over the water, and he saw it as it had looked in 1814—one hundred and eighty piers supporting three quarters of a mile of planking.

At the West Boston Bridge, known to most Bostonians as the Longfellow Bridge, he turned back upstream. It was three miles home, and he knew that the last quarter mile, from the Weeks Bridge to the boathouse, would flush everything out of his head. It always did.

Under the Weeks Bridge, he lifted his oars out of the water and took a few deep breaths. He challenged himself to reach the boathouse as quickly as possible. Then his sprint began.

After a hundred yards, his lungs started to burn, demanding more oxygen to fuel the engine. His thighs expanded as blood pumped through them. His arms and shoulders throbbed. His head pounded in the heat, and he increased the pace. The oars became a blur. He had reached the threshold. Another stroke and his brain stopped. His body became a machine, a piston pounding back and forth in the boat. He felt nothing. He was there.

He let go of the oars and collapsed.

It was several minutes before he had the strength to row up to the dock. Then he felt the rush that always followed his sprint. Oxygen filled his lungs, and blood sugar poured through him. With a few powerful strokes he brought the scull to its mooring and leaped onto the dock. He felt euphoric, even in the heat. It was the best part of his day.

A skinny man sat on the bank next to the boathouse and wiped the sweat from his face. When Fallon jogged past, the man pulled himself to his feet and followed. He was impressed by Fallon’s intense conditioning program, and at the moment, worn out by Fallon’s energy.

Henry Dill worked on Bennett Soames’s personal staff. He had been with Pratt Industries for twenty years as a bookkeeper, office manager, and industrial spy. At midnight, he had replaced James Buckley in the Oldsmobile across the street from Fallon’s apartment. At six
A.M
., he had followed Fallon to the river. When Fallon’s scull headed downstream, Dill tried to keep up with it by jogging along the bank in his sportcoat and crepe-soled shoes, but Fallon had disappeared within minutes. Now, he followed Fallon back to the apartment, recorded his activities in the log book, and collapsed in the Oldsmobile for twenty-five minutes, long enough for Fallon to shower, shave, eat a light breakfast, and head for the subway.

Fallon had decided to spend the day researching the story of the tea set. He intended to speak first with Evangeline Carrington. Despite her attitude toward him, she had seemed deeply upset by the secrecy at Searidge. She was also very pretty. When he’d looked up her phone number the night before, he’d found two listings: one of them connected her with a plant store called the Green
Shoppe at the Quincy Market. He couldn’t think of a better place to begin the day.

At the Quincy Market, three buildings stood parallel to one another like granite ships in drydock. Each 555 feet long, the market and two storehouses had been built on a stretch of reclaimed land between Faneuil Hall and the waterfront in 1826. By 1960, the granite had turned black with soot, an elevated highway separated the buildings from the waterfront, and the storehouses were mostly vacant. Durgin Park, a famous old restaurant, was still anchored in the north storehouse. The central building still housed markets for meat, cheese, fish, and other staples. But behind many windows, dust had been accumulating since the Depression.

In the mid-seventies, however, the Quincy Market was refurbished and became the most popular spot in the city. The buildings were sandblasted to their original granite luster. Plywood and broken windows were replaced by plate glass. Interiors were restored, hardwood floors refinished, brick walls and ceiling beams stripped bare. Plazas, trees, and park benches replaced narrow streets and joined the whole complex to Faneuil Hall. The central building—arched windows, Doric columns, and copper dome—regained its Neoclassical beauty. Old businesses were encouraged to stay. Many did not. Restaurants, cafés, and specialty shops moved in. Boston took the Quincy Market merrily into its pocketbook.

Depending on his mood, Fallon thought it was the most successful piece of urban redevelopment he had ever seen, or the biggest tourist trap north of the Florida line. He missed the straightforward honesty of a butcher slicing steaks from a side of beef, and the smell of greasy food permeating the air reminded him of an amusement park. But the Quincy Market had brought people back to the city, it had helped to rejuvenate Boston, and it was always swarming with happy, festive crowds.

Fallon found Evangeline Carrington’s Green Shoppe on the second floor of the North Market. Already he didn’t like it. Any place that spelled “shop” with two
p
’s and an
e
was trying too hard to
be trendy. Give the name of a store an old-fashioned spelling, and it becomes a bouncy little place where the customer can listen to rock music on FM radio and smell cheap incense while he spends his money on something he doesn’t need.