There are what the hippies call the “straight” people: all the young clerks and junior executives from offices in the buildings near the plaza. There are the tourists, aiming their cameras at the picturesque juxtaposition of the old — Trinity Church — and the new — the Hancock building whose skyscraper glass facade reflects the area from every angle. There are the winos — helpless, stumbling carcasses who barely manage to exist from drink to drink, seeking an hour or two of rest in the warmth of the sun. Boston has more young winos than any other city in the whole United States. In their teens and early twenties, teeth knocked out, faces raw, bruised, cut and savaged from drunken brawls over the remnants of a pint of red wine, begging for a dime to go towards another bottle. For the most part they are violent only among themselves.
There are the students. Hundreds of them. A locust swarm covering every inch of the Back Bay area. There are the street people and the hippies, each a sub-culture within a sub-culture.
It’s a great place to hide, right out in the open. You just find the right little group and blend in with them. Each group pretty much has its own territory. Like the street people, for example. The sidewalk along the west side of Boylston Street from Dartmouth to Fairfield is their territory for the most part.
I found the group I was looking for. They were sitting on the grass on the south side of the plaza. I sat down on the fringes of the group. In the center was a young man playing his guitar and singing a folk song of his own composition. He wasn’t very good, but he was sincere.
The late afternoon sunlight was warm. The shadows were lengthening to make another soft New England summer twilight. The objects I’d taken from the two dead men were in my pocket. I took them out to look at them. The first was a silver money clip. The metal was flat. On its surface was a bas-relief design. It took but a glance for me to recognize the now familiar design of the Snake Flag and the ever-present slogan.
The second object looked like a half-dollar at first. It was a round pocketknife. Usually a half-dollar is sliced apart and the coin used to face a half-moon steel blade by soldering it to both sides of the small circular handle. It looks like a coin, but it’s a handy pocketknife. I’d always presumed it was illegal to deface American money, but there are a lot of them around.
There are damned few, however, that carry a Kennedy half-dollar face on one side and a Snake Flag on the other! And once again, circling the rim, were the words that had thrown such fear into John Norfolk when I uttered them: “Don’t Tread on Me!”
What the hell was the significance of that phrase? How did the flag and the phrase tie-in with the organization I was after?
The young man had started on another of his plaintive compositions. He sang in an earnest voice, his face to the sky, his eyes closed, letting the fading sunlight strike his tanned cheeks and long brown hair that fell down to his shoulders.
I started to reach into my shirt pocket for a cigarette and then remembered that they were in my jacket in the tunnel.
Someone, tapped my arm.
“Want one?” The girl was in her early twenties. She held out a pack to me.
“Thanks.”
Crouching beside me, she cupped a match in her palms against the slight breeze.
“You being hassled?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Fuzz?”
“No.”
She inclined her head toward the guitar player. “What do you think of him?”
I shrugged. “He’s doing his thing,” I said. “If it makes him happy, that’s what counts, isn’t it?”
She smiled at me warmly. “Right on!”
I finished the cigarette in silence. I was facing the subway exits on Dartmouth Street, trying to pinpoint which of the loiterers were the men who were after me.
She touched me on the arm again to attract my attention.
“Hey, man,” she said quietly. “You act like you’re real uptight about something.”
“You could say that.”
“You sure it’s not the fuzz? They giving you heat?”
“It’s not the fuzz.”
“Your old lady giving you a hard time?”
“I don’t have an old lady.”
“Oh?” She seemed surprised that I had no girlfriend. A little embarrassed, too.
“Look, I know it’s none of my business, but you — well, there’s...” She didn’t know how to go on.
“Something about me?”
She nodded.
“The way I look?”
She nodded again.
“It’s bugging you?”
“Yeah, it sure is.”
I smiled at her. In a confidential tone I said, “The squares can’t tell the difference. They think I look like, street people.”
She laughed. “Well, I can tell the difference.”
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Julie.”
We looked each other over carefully, openly, frankly. I liked what I saw. Julie was about five feet two inches tall and probably weighed just over 100 pounds. She was slender, with small breasts and a small waist, and she had slender, shapely legs. Her hair was tawny and cut short. She wore a man’s shirt, unbuttoned but tied over the midriff by the shirttails so that there was an expanse of smooth, tight skin between the bottom of the shirt and the top of her patched blue jeans. She had a small, straight nose, a thin-lipped but wide mouth and a delicate chin. Her eyes were freckled. Have you ever seen a girl with freckled eyes? Hers were hazel with brown and gray spots in the iris. The kind of eyes you want to gaze into for hours.
“Well?”
She smiled at me. “The vibes are real good,” she answered. “What do you think?”
I nodded. “They’re very good.”
“You seem like real people,” she said. “You need help?”
“I guess so.”
“Like what?”
“Like you name it.”
“A pad?”
“Yeah.”
Julie got to her feet, a slender reed of a girl, but reeds bend and sway in the wind. They’re flexible and don’t break easily. Julie was like that. She was also very decisive.
“Let’s go,” she said, standing up.
I raised an eyebrow in question.
“I’ve got a pad.”
I got to my feet beside her.
“I’ve also got two roommates,” she said. “But they’re away for the week, so there’s plenty of room.”
“What makes you so sure you can trust me? Don’t you read the papers?”
She flashed a gamin grin at me. “I’m not afraid of you. The vibes are too good, man. What sign are you?”
I didn’t know enough about astrology to know the sign I was born under, so I threw out the first one that came into my mind. “I’m Cancer.”
“We’ll get along. I’m Pisces,” she announced, as if that explained everything.
We set off across the street. At one point Julie must have seen the tenseness in my jawline, because she put her arm around my waist and leaned her head against my shoulder, and that’s how we passed the tall, brawny man who’d been eying me suspiciously for the past twenty minutes.
Chapter Nine
Julie’s apartment was small. It had been partitioned off from one of the great, old, rambling apartments of the early twenties. Bedroom, living room, half-kitchen and bathroom had once been just the living room of the original apartment. The girls had tried to decorate it Burlap sacking had been made into window drapes. A multi-colored, imitation Tiffany lamp shade hung down from the ceiling. One wall was painted chartreuse, another was in mauve. Posters were pinned on the third wall so thickly you could hardly see the wall itself.
While I took a shower to clean the grime off my body, Julie made something for us to eat. Health food. The raw vegetables ground in a blender to a thin, pulpy drink wasn’t too bad. I’ll pass over the rest of the meal. Let’s just say looking at Julie across the small dining table made it easier to get down.