Back Bay (61 page)

With his hands wrapped around a cup of hot coffee and his brain thawing slowly out of its stupor, Jack Ferguson realized that he would have frozen to death if another drunk, whose name he did not even know, had not fallen asleep on top of him. Ferguson sipped the coffee and watched the steam swirling into the air, and he saw Bill Rulick’s face. Rulick was to blame. Rulick had robbed him of his job, his reputation, his self-respect. Rulick had tried to kill him.

Jack C. Ferguson resolved that he would not die a derelict in the basement of an abandoned tenement. He might die alone, but not without a fight.

J
ack C. Ferguson had never stopped drinking, but he had been able to taper off and go for up to three days without a drop. This was the third day. He wanted a drink, but he wasn’t going to have one. He had come too close to falter. Too close, but not close enough.

He looked at Fallon and Evangeline, curled up together in a sleeping bag on the other side of the room. He liked them both, and he sensed that they liked him. He hadn’t let anybody get close to him in a long time. Even if he didn’t find the tea set, he thought, he had helped Katherine Pratt Carrington and these two kids.

Bullshit. If he didn’t find the tea set, nothing mattered.

He rolled off his pallet of newspapers and got up. They had spent the night in one of Ferguson’s hideouts, a deserted warehouse near Dover Street. If Rulick sent men after them, Ferguson wanted to be in his own territory, and he didn’t want to endanger the Fallon family any further.

Ferguson looked out the window. A few blocks away, the modern
Herald-American
newspaper building covered most of his old South End neighborhood. Beyond that, the downtown skyline glinted in the June sun. Another scorcher. Ferguson thought about the snowy days when he had sat in Phil Cawley’s room and gazed out at this same view. He remembered that the Customs House Tower, now dwarfed by glass, steel, and red granite, had dominated the city.

Old Phil Cawley and his tale of buried treasure and his quotation from
Paradise Lost
. Damn the quotations, thought Ferguson. Damn the one they didn’t have.

They had spent most of the night piecing together the quotations. At an old desk in the warehouse office, with Ferguson’s kerosene lamp giving light, they had arranged the quotations before them in ascending order, from Book II to Book XII. Occasionally, a rat would scuttle across the floor, and Ferguson, thinking he heard Rulick’s men, would reach for his .45, or a police siren would wail past the warehouse, but sounds served only to punctuate the silence in the mouldering old building.

The first quotation, which Ferguson had gotten from a woman in California, appeared in Book II. It told of a “boiling gulf” over which a bridge stretched from hell to earth. They wondered if Abigail was referring to a bridge. The quotation also mentioned the tracks of Satan, which led them to speculate briefly that the treasure was buried near a bridge over the Boston and Maine tracks.

Evangeline pointed out that it was the only quotation containing a word which might be taken as a homonym for a Back Bay
street. “Boiling,” she suggested, could easily become “Boylston,” Boylston Street, the main commercial thoroughfare in the Back Bay. They agreed.

The next set of lines came from Katherine Carrington. They were part of the prose argument, or introductory synopsis, for Book IV. “Uriel descending on a Sunbeam warns Gabriel, who had in charge the Gate of Paradise, that some evil spirit had escap’d the Deep…” The quotation ended in midsentence. Fallon thought that the rest of the lines in Book IV might refer to the depth at which the tea set was buried, since “Deep” was the last word in the passage. They decided to look at the succeeding quotations with that in mind.

Dr. William Pratt’s quotation, which had hung over his desk at the Massachusetts General Hospital, came next in Book IV. It referred to Adam and Eve, “two of far nobler shape.”

The next set of lines was the quotation Ferguson had shown to Fallon and Evangeline when he had first appeared on Evangeline’s roof. In it, the Archangel Gabriel heard the “tread of nimble feet” as three spirits, including Satan, approached him.

“Like I said the other night, are we supposed to read the unit of measure or the number?”

“Use both of them and put this quotation together with the one before it,” said Fallon. “You get two feet three, which doesn’t help us if she’s talking about the depth at which the tea set is buried.”

They read the next quotation. It was another which Katherine Pratt Carrington had given them at the airport. “So wise he judges it to fly from pain/However, and to ’scape his punishment./So judge thou still, presumptuous, till the wrath,/Which thou incurr’st by flying, meet thy flight/Sev’nfold, and scourge that wisdom back to Hell,/Which taught thee yet no better, that no pain/Can equal anger infinite provk’t.”

Evangeline read the context. “It’s Gabriel talking to Satan again.”

“A Calvinist world view for sure,” said Fallon. “Run away from punishment now, and you’ll get it sevenfold in the ass when the Lord catches up with you.”

“Okay,” said Ferguson. “We’ve now got a ‘sev’nfold,’ a ‘two,’ a ‘three,’ and we think we’re talking about feet and depth. Do we put
the ‘two’ together with the ‘sev’nfold’ and come up with fourteen feet?”

“Not if we’re talking about depth,” said Fallon. “The average depth of the landfill is twenty and a half feet, and we know the tea set was buried in the mud under the landfill.”

“What about ‘feet,’ ‘three,’ and ‘sev’nfold’? Twenty-one feet?”

Fallon shook his head. “That would leave the tea set in six inches of mud. Even if water did cover it for most of that time, I don’t think the tea set could lie there for fifty years and not be found. If Abigail is telling us how deep the thing is buried, I think she wants us to read ‘sev’nfold’ simply as the number seven. That gives us ‘two’ and ‘seven’ sandwiched around the word ‘feet.’ Twenty-seven feet.”

“What about the number ‘three’ in the ‘nimble feet’ passage?”

“If the tea set is buried thirty-seven feet down, I don’t think anyone is going to find it. The tea set sank into the mud and was covered over by a layer of dirt and gravel. I say that the tea set is buried from twenty-three to twenty-seven feet down.”

Another quotation, from Book VII, was more general in its reference. “But they, or under ground, or circuit wide/With Serpent error wand’ring, found their way,/And on the washy Ooze deep Channels wore;/Easy, ere God had bid the ground be dry…”

Katherine wrote that this had been her quotation, coming to her through her granduncle, Henry Pratt. The reference was obvious—a channel in the ooze before God filled the land. The Easterly Channel.

Fallon, Evangeline, and Ferguson kept working until five in the morning. Anticipation and frustration struggled within them as they deciphered. It was not difficult to draw a single clue from each quotation; Abigail had been careful to make the individual meanings clear. But they were not always certain if they were arranging the clues in the correct order. At times, she seemed to follow a sequence—in Book IV and later, when she gave directional clues—but quotations like the “boiling gulf” appeared to have been chosen without reference to the other lines.

They agreed that the lines on the tombstones of Horace Pratt and Abigail were not clues, but exhortations to succeeding generations. They did not consider them.

They pushed the other clues around until they found a logical sequence for the words and phrases. They thought that the tea set was now within their grasp. They stepped back, like artisans admiring their handiwork, and read, “In the channel beneath the fill; Boylston; twenty-three to twenty-seven feet deep; ten paces east on southwest corner.”

Fallon cursed softly.

“Southwest corner of what?” asked Evangeline.

The vital clue was missing. Fallon sank into a sitting position on the floor. He realized that he was too exhausted to be disappointed.

Ferguson looked out the window. The sky was already light. “I rode the rails for three weeks back in seventy-six. I found an old woman named Mary Korbel in a seedy Hollywood apartment, I knew just lookin’ at her that she didn’t have much time. Cancer. She showed me this sampler that the quotation was embroidered onto, the one about boiling abysses. I tried to buy it off her, but she wouldn’t sell. She said her daughter was a godless prostitute, and someday the message on the sampler might lead her to salvation. All along, I’ve been figuring that this was the clue the Pratts didn’t have, and once I had the Pratt clues, I’d find the tea set.”

“Maybe they don’t have it,” offered Evangeline. She didn’t care how they found it now, as long as they found it. “Maybe they have another one. They might be willing to make a deal.”

“No deals,” Ferguson growled.

“No deals,” agreed Peter. “There’s another quotation out there. Either that or we’ve deciphered these things all wrong. Let’s get some sleep and try again in the morning.”

Standing now in the bright sunlight, Ferguson began to wonder if he would ever see the Golden Eagle. He had searched for years, and he was not much closer than he’d been that day Phil Cawley told him the story. He could hear Phil Cawley’s rasping voice. He could almost taste Phil Cawley’s alky split. He took some money from Evangeline’s purse, stepped past the tin-can alarms, and went down the fire escape.

It was eight o’clock. Philip Pratt sat in his study and watched two tree sparrows chase each other in the elm outside his window. He
had been up for an hour, since Soames had called to tell him of his aunt’s disappearance. They had already decided that a report to the police would be unwise. Pratt heard the elevator door open down the hall. He was expecting Soames and James Buckley, who had been dispatched onto Fallon’s trail the day before and had disappeared for the night. Pratt swiveled around to face the door.

Isabelle walked into the room. She was wearing Philip’s terrycloth bathrobe and a gold necklace. She was carrying a tray of coffee, juice, and croissants. She had spent the night in the Back Bay mansion, and there was only one bed for the maid to make up in the morning. “You’ll feel better if you have a little breakfast, Philip.”

“I’ll feel better when I know what’s going to happen.”

“Soon enough.”

He watched her pour the coffee. She seemed serene, unworried. He asked her if she was concerned about her mother.

“Not really. I know where she’s gone.”

“Where?”

“Hawaii.” She sat back on her heels, exposing her muscular thighs. “It’s always been one of her fantasies. I’ll bet she’s on a plane right now.”

“Hawaii.” He said the word dreamily, then said, “I’m still worried about her.”

“We both know that Evangeline got her out with the help of the Fallons, and she’s fully competent. She wasn’t for a day or so after Christopher died. None of us were. But she knew that we were keeping her there because it served our convenience.”

“And her safety.”

“She didn’t accept that, and I’m not sure I do, either. But in any event, I’m quite certain that she hates us both.”

He looked again at the sparrows chattering at each other. “Would she hate us more if she knew about last night?”

“She’d give me the same motherly advice she dispensed thirty years ago, when we first started going for long walks on the beach; don’t.”

“Are we wrong?”

“I suppose.” She did not want to think about morality. She simply wanted to enjoy him. “But I’m too old to have children. We’re
both alone. And I was brought up in such a rarefied atmosphere that I’ve never found a man outside the Pratt family worth my time, and that includes my late husband.”

Isabelle Carrington Howe was not beautiful in the way that Melissa Pike was beautiful. Her hair was turning gray, her nose was rather prominent, and when she was unhappy, her look was stern and severe, instead of pouty and little-girl sexy, like Melissa’s. But Isabelle comforted Philip. No one had comforted him in years.

“I have the feeling,” he said, “that rather soon I am going to be unemployed.”

“You mustn’t think that way.”

“I’m beginning to enjoy the prospect. I’m thinking of loading up the
Gay Head IV
and just sailing away. I’ve always wanted to do it. Now that I owe a personal apology to your mother, I think I’ll aim for Hawaii.”

“In the
Gay Head?
”

“The original
Gay Head
wasn’t much larger, and Horace Taylor Pratt built an empire on its keel.” He paused for a moment and looked at Isabelle. “If I should turn the empire over to someone else, I’ll be free to go where I please and with whom I please. Would you be interested in sailing to Hawaii with me?”

She knew he was serious. She liked the idea, but it frightened her. She didn’t know what to say. The sound of the elevator distracted them.

Soames and Buckley entered the study. Buckley looked like a schoolboy come to see the principal.

“Good morning, Bennett,” said Pratt.

“He was never able to pick up the Fallons, either in South Boston or the South End, so he called his girlfriend and spent the night with her.” Soames spoke as though Buckley were not in the room.

“I hope he realizes that while he was screwing, he might have been providing us with valuable information,” said Pratt.

“Give a guy a break,” protested Buckley. “I been so damn busy followin’ that Fallon around I ain’t been on the rack in three weeks.”

Pratt smiled. He was in no position to criticize. “One break is
extended. Two weeks ago, you followed Peter Fallon to a wake. It is very important that you tell us everything that you remember about it.”

“Can I have a cup of coffee?”

Isabelle poured, and James Buckley took a small notebook from his pocket. It contained names, addresses, and extra notes on Peter Fallon’s activities.

Evangeline felt something crawling on her leg. She kicked violently, knocking Peter awake.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“A cockroach!” She jumped up from the sleeping bag, and the cockroach streaked off into a corner. She would have stepped on it, but she wasn’t wearing shoes. She had slept in T-shirt, panties and socks.