Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (48 page)

The city of Boston was divided up into electoral districts called wards. By 1876, there were twenty-five wards in the city and, with the migration of the Irish into the suburbs and outer neighborhoods, they began to wield a mighty political club. Each ward had its own boss. These ward bosses were the recognized center of power in their neighborhood. The ward boss was the big man on the streets, the purveyor of favors, loans and empathy. He was the man who would look after his own and their interests; who knew the intricacies of his district’s streets and back lanes. He understood that the needs of the immigrant poor were basic and held to three tenets: food, clothing and shelter. If he could provide these things, he would have the people’s undying loyalty—particularly at election time. Though being ward boss was a means to political power and personal advancement, most Irish ward bosses didn’t abuse their power. It was a way to give their own people, friends, family and neighbors what they needed, to provide a helping hand that spared the Irish the humiliation of begging at the austere Yankee knee. The Irish ward bosses practiced human politics as opposed to the rational politics of the world of corporations and bureaucracy, which often viewed the individual as irrelevant to the larger political machine.

Politics were the one battlefield that the Irish saw they could win on, could gain respect and power in a society that despised them and had consigned them to a permanent underclass. Politics didn’t care if you’d been born in a filthy hovel without the means to put food on the table and clothes on your back; it cared only for ambition and sheer bloody-mindedness. This the Irish understood completely. They also understood the path to such political power was not necessarily paved with roses. If the price to be paid was in the currency of bribes, chicanery, extortion, blackmail and intimidation, well then, at least the process wasn’t boring. The Yankee ethic of fair play and gentlemanly conduct during an election was brushed aside and the Irish took to the political stage with drama and flair. By December of 1884, the City of Boston elected its first Irish born, Catholic mayor. For the Irish community there was no looking back. Political maturity would come in the twentieth century when the name of Kennedy made magic right across the country.

The Irish-Americans, even as they began to climb the ladder of political ascendancy and to gain, if not the riches of fabled America, at least then a certain respectability, didn’t forget what and where they’d come from. Ireland and her interests were never far from their hearts. Clann na Gael was formed in 1858 and became, to some extent, the American wing of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The Clann would fund the 1916 Easter Rising and, through Eamon de Valera, would supply the money to start
The Irish Press
. They would use their influence with politicians and powerbrokers to further the cause of Irish emancipation. The pull of the mother country would eventually lessen but Ireland would not be forgotten.

By the 1960s, Clann na Gael would be a somewhat spent force, having splintered into ineffectuality, but the memory of an immigrant, even two generations removed from degradation and poverty, could still be stirred to a longing for the homeland never seen.

Which was how Casey found himself sitting in the office of Lovett Hagerty, a man who held within his considerable fist the far-flung strings of Boston’s Irish population. Rumor had it that the Irish were on the way out in the corridors of Boston power. No one, it seemed had thought to inform Lovett Hagerty of this fact, however. In his plush, tilted leather chair, with the fumes of a fifty dollar cigar coiling about his head, he seemed blissfully unaware of it.

Lovett Hagerty, some said, was the last of the old time political bosses who had once ruled all of Irish Boston. He still understood that the key to political power was the listening ear and attentive eye. He was the product of an unlikely marriage, one between a mother who came from an old Yankee family and had Brahmin sensibilities oozing from her finely pored skin and a tough, enterprising first generation Irish-American lad. Despite predictions of doom and gloom and being disowned on the maternal side of the family, the marriage had prospered and was now in its fifty-third year. Lovett Hagerty was the oldest son of five children. He’d been named Lovett after his great-grandfather on his mother’s side and though he’d taken his fair share of teasing over the moniker he’d turned it to his advantage during his first run for alderman using the tag-line; ‘Lov-ett or Leave It—Vote for Lovett Hagerty.’ Whether or not it contributed to his remarkable win or not was moot, Lovett understood the nature of the political beast and it understood him. He was that rarest of creatures, a Boston hybrid, combining Irish drama and oratory with good old-fashioned Yankee shrewdness and know-how. He could do a backroom deal securing himself five hundred union dockworker’s votes and then take tea on the hill with Mrs. Cabot-Lodge and not turn a hair in the process. He was America’s child, with all the immigrant’s ambition and the inherent American belief in limitless possibility. He also had an unaccountable and deep-running belief in lost causes, hopeless fights and a fondness for the underdog, which to this point hadn’t hurt his political career though it hadn’t helped it in any discernible way either. Love, as his cronies and fans called him, studied the man in front of him and wondered if that wasn’t all about to change.

“How much money exactly are we talking about here?” he asked, noting that the man’s face remained impassive, clearly he understood something about backroom dealings himself.

“Several thousand in seed money, enough for a decent first haul of arms and an introduction to the head of what’s left of Clann na Gael over here.”

Love nodded. A nervy demand but he liked that. The man knew he was likely to try to deal him down.

“And you think I can provide such an introduction?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“I think you may be misinformed.”

“I don’t think I am.”

Love sighed, he wasn’t going to be able to wiggle away from this.

“Listen Mr. Riordan, it’s been a long day and I’m hungry, can I interest you in joining me in a bloody steak and a good bottle of whiskey?”

“Now yer talkin’.”

An hour later the two men sat back easy in their chairs, dinner, as bloody as promised, had been consumed and they were halfway down the contents of a bottle of Bushmills whiskey. A contented glow had set itself up at the table and promised to last as long as the whiskey did. They chatted easily about Irish affairs both in Ireland and in America, about the gilded, glory days of Honey Fitzgerald and P.J. Kennedy in Boston politics and then about more personal matters, the son in college who showed no ambition, the daughter who was consorting with an Italian of questionable character and how the Mrs. wanted a new house with a conservatory in it, even though no one played the piano or any other instrument for that matter.

“And yourself, is there a wife at home?” Lovett asked as he lit one of his infamous cigars and handed a fresh one to Casey.

“No, not a wife, at least not yet,” he laid the cigar politely to the side of his plate.

“You’ve the look of a man doomed to find himself at the altar in the near future. I’d bet money on it.”

“Do I? What else might ye be inclined to bet money on, Mr. Hagerty?”

Lovett sighed, the man was incorrigible.

“Do you have a few days? I’ll need at least two to sniff out the situation and see what sort of funds can be funneled through discreet channels. I’ll need to know what’s in this for my colleagues and myself.”

“The freedom of a small nation,” Casey said and swallowed the remainder of his whiskey with one quick movement.

“You’re serious aren’t you?” Lovett drained his own glass and took a long, speculative puff on his cigar. “You busy for the next three days?”

“Nothing to do but await your answer like a moony suitor,” Casey said easily.

“Good, I’d like to show you around the city, give you a feel for the place. Introduce you to some people who could be useful in the future.”

“And how will we explain me?” Casey raised his eyebrows in amusement.

“My long lost seven times removed cousin from the old sod ought to suffice.”

“Here in search of my American roots?”

“Amongst other things Mr. Riordan, amongst other things.”

Casey leaned across the table and Love got a sense of how intimidating the man could be if he so chose. “I think if we’re goin’ to get into the revolutionary bed together ye’d best call me Casey.”

“Casey, I like the cut of your jib,” said Lovett Hagerty and shook hands with the boy from across the water, upon whom he’d just bestowed the most Yankee blessing of all. The irony of it was lost on neither of them.

America was a revelation to Casey, or at least the bit of it controlled and owned by Lovett Hagerty. Love seemed to have the ability to be in ten places at once, to shake hands, kiss babies and listen intently to the woes of a plumber whose wife had just left him for a mechanic and whose business was going under. The man never seemed to tire or grow irritable with the endless demands his various constituents placed upon him.

“People need help and I’m here to give it to them, that’s what got their vote in the first place and that’s what will keep it. As soon as I forget that I’ll be drummed out of office and deservedly so.”

The pace of his life was hectic and yet as smoothly organized as a well-oiled machine and through it all Love’s black-haired, blue-eyed Irish charm stayed firmly buttoned in place. There were deals, calls and last minute saves all done with lightning-quick reflexes and maneuvering worthy of a snake charmer. And at night, there was the family to be attended to, the pert blonde mistress installed in a pretty little apartment in a smart section of the city, and the deals done over cards in backrooms into the wee hours of the morning and still he’d be at his desk by eight o’clock the next day.

On the morning of Casey’s third day, Love broke from his morning meeting early and told his secretary to take messages; he’d be back the next day.

“Come on, there’s something I want to show you,” he said to Casey, taking the stairs down from his office at a jaunting pace that belied the scant two hours of sleep he’d managed to fit in the night before.

His car took them to Beacon Hill, once bastion and sanctuary of Boston’s merchant princes. Beacon Street, Oliver Wendell Holmes had once said, ‘was the sunny street of the sifted few.’ It still seemed so with its gently curving streets, the great spreading hardwood trees shading its pavements, the terraced lawns and elaborately arched entrances. It was a neighborhood of wealth and privilege, of gold-edged lives lived out in oak-paneled libraries and brilliantly lit ballrooms.

“It’s something ain’t it?” Lovett said, gesturing for his driver to stop. “They say old John Fitzgerald used to sell papers up here as a boy and dream of the life that went on inside those pretty walls. I used to walk up here myself as a boy, I’d wait until twilight when all the families would be in having their evening meal and the light would spill out across the lawns and I could watch them unobserved. Let’s walk, shall we?”

They left the car and strolled along the wide avenue lined with overarching elms, dark and heavy with mist on this winter morning.

“See this house up here?” he pointed to a mansion set upon a knoll, its side turned to the street, so that it would not have to observe the comings and goings of the street. Snow covered the grounds thickly but Casey knew in the summer there would be long swathes of velvety lawn, sweeps of flowers and the buzzing of bees fat on such prolific nectar. The house itself was elegant, pillared in the Greco-Roman fashion, colored a soft umber, its mullioned windows reflecting back the snow as it softly dropped from the twisted trunks and branches of oaks, elms and maples.

“It’s a beautiful house,” Casey said, feeling some response was required.

“Isn’t it though? Takes a lot of people to keep a place like that running. Footmen, valets, cooks, housemaids, parlormaids, ladies maids, governess’. Of course, that was in the glory days when ladies took tea each day and presented one another with calling cards, and the rooms were lit with the soft glow of gas lamps, and the governess’ wore starched and ruffled white and young ladies went to dancing school and were presented at cotillions. My Daddy used to deliver groceries to the back door here and I used to come up here in the dark and stare through the windows, the poor little mucker in the snow.”

“Whose house is this?”

“My grandfather’s of course,” Lovett Hagerty said with a smile that contained a rueful sadness. “I worked up the courage to go to the door once, took every ounce of daring I had. They wouldn’t let me in to see the old man, said I’d no right to come to the front door but he came out to see what all the kerfuffle was about and I announced myself as though I’d every right to be there. Said, ‘I’m Lovett Joseph Hagerty and you are my grandfather’. I couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds soaking wet and stood five feet three inches in a thick-soled pair of shoes but I was determined to make him acknowledge me. He looked at me with those icy blue eyes of his and said, ‘Aren’t you the little ruffian who stares in my windows, I ought to call the police on you.’ And I said ‘I am your grandson,’ again, not quite understanding what was going on. And he looks me up and down and there was no emotion in his face, other than maybe contempt and he says ‘I have no grandson and even if I did he wouldn’t be a filthy little Paddy half-breed like you.’ Then he had me lifted by the collar and thrown out of the house, through the back door mind you, not the front. He couldn’t even give me the dignity of that. The butler was instructed to offer me a hundred dollars if I’d promise to stay away. It was somehow the worst thing about the whole ordeal, that he’d offer me money, knowing that I’d never seen that much in my whole life. It was like the devil tempting me.”