“Hear you’ve been rescuing damsels in distress from the clutches of recent Mediterranean arrivals,” his father said.
“That’s right.”
“Plan to continue this sort of thing?”
“Might.”
“Then you had better get organized.”
Actually, the old man said, it made sense. The world had changed, and could be a more troublesome sort of place than it should. The bank despised a scandal, he said, and more and more of its old customers seemed to be getting in the newspapers these days. “We’re old friends of these families, and moreover, it’s in our interest to keep them safe and happy. Cheaper in the long run to take care of some of these little problems ourselves.”
So Bill got a raise and a budget and orders to put together an agency within the bank to be at the service of old friends whose private problems might not be best ameliorated by the public arm of the law and the grimy hands of the press. The agency never existed on paper, and the door of Room 211 never proclaimed FRIENDS OF THE FAMILY, but that’s what the agency came to be called, and the word passed quickly around the locker rooms and boardrooms of southern New England. The word was that if you needed something done quietly, go visit Bill or drop a word at the bank. That old stone building housed Friends.
Of course, the needs of Friends’ clients changed with the century. Prohibition brought in its wake waves of arrests, which, in turn, brought showers of envelopes cheerfully dropped on enteprising police and judiciary. And a wave of a different sort-the immigrant wave-changed New England forever. But the bank held its ground, and Friends, with both fists and favors, carved out a modus vivendi with other tight-knit ethnic organizations. The Depression winnowed the bank’s customers and forced the bank to burrow deeply into its reserves to survive until Hitler and Tojo filled the shipyard with contracts and workers again, and people remarked over dinner how provident the Kitteredges had been to invest in the arms industry way back in the Thirties.
New England was already on its way to becoming a backwater, however. The textile mills packed up and went south to the cheap labor, and the business talent caught the train to New York City, whose glass and steel monoliths began to buy up more and more New England businesses. Friends’ clients were increasingly finding the worms in the Big Apple, so in 1960, a quiet branch office was opened in Manhattan. Not long after that, Friends hired a foul-mouthed, one-armed, too-clever-by-half private dick named Joe Graham. Not long after that, on one of his early cases, Graham was sitting in a quiet West Side bar when some kid tried to pick his pocket.
3
The 3:40 A.M. train from New York to Providence said AMTRAK on it, but actually it was something Dante had designed for collection agents to spend eternity in-which is about how long the train took to get to Providence.
The seats were as comfortable as a tax audit, featured torn upholstery, and could have served as the focus for a rousing game of Name That Stain. Old newspapers, paper coffee cups, and beer cans festooned the aisles and the seats. The smell of stale everything perfumed what passed for air.
Neal returned from the snack car with a cup of coffee that was already semi-solid, and a Danish older than Hamlet. Graham had brought his own food, sealed in little Tupperware containers. Graham had ridden the train before.
“Why couldn’t we fly?” Neal asked.
“Because I didn’t want to.”
“You’re afraid.”
“I don’t like to fly,” Graham said, munching on a carrot stick.
“Why don’t you like to fly?”
“Because I’m afraid.”
Graham twisted open a thermos and poured hot coffee into his cup. He smiled at Neal and said, “‘Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.’”
Neal huddled up in his sport coat and tried to look out the gunged-up window. They were somewhere in Connecticut, stopped dead in their tracks, as it were, for no discernible reason. Nor did this seem to cause undue concern to the conductor, who was sleeping the sleep of the innocent in the backseat of the car. Neal thought the guy must have the metabolism of a polar bear to sleep in this cold. There was no heat on the train and it was cold for a May morning.
“You want to get drunk?” he asked Graham.
Graham opened the thermos again and held it up to Neal’s nose. “Yes.”
Neal smelled it and gave Graham his best lost-puppy look. Graham sighed and shook his head and pulled an extra plastic cup out of his bag. He removed it from its plastic wrapping and poured Neal a heavy tot.
“Love you, Dad.”
“How could you help it, son?”
The nice thing about Irish coffee, Neal thought, was that it kept your body awake but put your mind to sleep. He sat back and let the warmth spread through him. Eight or ten more of these might make the trip almost bearable. The train lurched forward.
“Wakey, wakey.”
“We there already?”
“Not quite. You have to get cleaned up.”
Graham was leaning over him. Clean-shaven, straight tie, eyes clear, and breath fresh. Neal hated Graham.
“I brought you an extra razor.”
Sure enough, Graham had brought two cordless electric shavers with him; also a lint brush, Visine, and Cepacol. Neal hauled himself and his kit into the rest room and got himself into shape. He felt like shit and was surprised to feel butterflies in his stomach. In almost twelve years of working for Friends, this would be the first time he would meet The Man. And The Man had more or less run his life so far.
“Why,” he asked Graham when he returned to his seat, “is this the first time I meet The Man?”
“No need.”
“And there’s a need now?”
“You look good, son. Straighten your tie.”
Levine waited for them at the platform. Levine was six-three and at thirty-one beginning to thicken around the middle. He had curly black hair, blue eyes, and a face that was just a couple of six-packs this side of fat. His heavily muscled body didn’t begin to hint at his speed. Levine was cat-quick, and that, with his size, made a very ugly package for anybody on the wrong side of his fists. He was a black belt who thought that breaking boards was a waste of time and good wood.
He had come into Friends strictly as muscle, someone to help out a short, one-armed guy when things got out of hand. But Levine had a brain and was very, very hip. Brainy enough and hip enough to know he didn’t want to stay on the street all his life. So he’d put himself through night classes at City and came out with a management degree, and now he headed up the New York office of Friends, passing by his old friend and partner Joe Graham.
“Levine hates you,” Graham told Neal.
“I know.”
This wasn’t exactly news to Neal. He knew Levine hated him and he was tired of it. Really tired of it.
“He figures you got a free ride. Fancy private school. Ivy League. Now graduass school. All paid for. Doesn’t think you’re worth it.”
“He’s probably right.”
“Probably.”
“I don’t want his job, Dad.”
That was the problem, Neal thought. Levine knew that Neal was being groomed. Neal knew it; Graham knew it. The Man was paying for his master’s degree, for the upscale clothing, for the speech teacher who had taken away Neal’s street dialect. But groomed for what? Neal didn’t want to run Friends. He wanted to be an English professor. Honest to God.
“I know. You want to teach poetry to fags.”
Well, not exactly. Eighteenth-century English novels… Fielding, Richardson, Smollett.
“How many times do I have to say it?” Neal asked. He had told Ed. He had told everybody. He had written The Man. Don’t put me through any more college, because I’m not going to stay with you forever. It was all right, they said. “Work for us when you can, part-time, case by case. No strings attached.” Then they jerk you out of classes two weeks before finals. You don’t get to be an English professor by flunking your graduate English seminars. Even getting a B could be death.