Brian McGrory - The Incumbent

To my father, to his memory, for teaching all those lessons with deeds rather than words

Chelsea, Massachusetts February 13, 1979

One hour and counting until dusk, the time of the day Curtis Black liked best. The time when the distant sky left the illusion of light, but the enveloping haze provided the cover of dark. A time when if you knew what you were doing, if you knew how, and you knew why, the visual, visceral uncertainty of the moment served as your most reliable ally. For Curtis Black, it was a time of day to make his mark.

Black shook his Johnnie Walker along the top of the rickety Formica table, the cubes of ice smashing softly against each other and the side of the glass. He did this when he was nervous, and yes, he was nervous now. His eyes drifted vacantly across the diagrams spread out before him, then out the window at the waning afternoon light, then back to the diagrams, then at his watch. He took a small sip of Scotch.

Good help is hard to find. That's what he kept thinking, over and over again, that one thought interfering with his ability to concentrate on the task at hand. Good help is hard to find and harder still to keep.

Kind of ironic, but the better you do, the quicker guys are to move on, to take their experience, the lessons they learned under you, and set out on their own. To succeed you have to keep moving, taking on new people, and every new person represents a new risk, every single time.

But what else are you going to do? Go it alone? Go straight? Black took another sip and bore in on the closest diagram.

The armored truck would come down Prince Street and take a right on Hanover, then drive two blocks through what would be relatively heavy, early rush-hour traffic. There would be a dark blue delivery van idling in the spot where the armored truck usually double-parked, but given the time of day, given the foot traffic, the pickups, the drop-offs, that shouldn't seem unusual. As a matter of fact, the last two Tuesdays, Black had sat in that idling delivery van himself, positioned in that precise spot, to watch how the armored car driver would react, and both times the driver had pulled up in front, parked, and made his pickup from the Shawmut Bank.

It would be a two-man truck. In spite of his nerves, Black chuckled to himself at the thought. All that vulnerability, all that exposure, and just two men to withstand the world. The entire operation, from start to the safety of a successful getaway, should be over in ten minutes, maximum. Unless, of course, someone screwed up.

Which got back to the issue of Black's nerves and this recurring thought that good help is hard to find. He took another sip of whisky and stared out the window at nothing in particular, out onto Broadway in Chelsea, where immigrants locked in a losing battle against despair drove ancient cars down the litter-strewn street. Their plight escaped Black's notice. One small mistake by any one of his five guys, he was thinking, and the whole thing could turn to bedlam in a fraction of a second, and that one fraction of one second could haunt the rest of a lifetime. Maybe even dictate a lifetime. So it comes down to the execution even more than the plans, and the execution was in the hands of five guys he barely knew. He took another pull of whisky and continued gazing out the window, his chin resting hard on the cup of his hand.

By now, Black was oblivious to the diagrams. Rather, he was fretting about one of his men, a guy with the worrisome nickname of Rocky. The bad news was that this Rocky didn't seem to mind the name at all, at least as far as Black could see. The mildly good news was that the name came from Rocky's given name, Rocco. "Call me Rocky," he had said, jovially, that first time they had met for a hamburger and a beer over at the Red Hat. Black had just rolled his eyes. There are no resumes in this business, and no reliable lists of references. So much is done on feel, and suddenly, in the lengthening shadows of that crucial afternoon, Black didn't feel so good about this one.

Rocco Manupelli was a Vietnam veteran, an ex-con, and a former Mafia wiseguy who had done three years in the Walpole State Prison for armed robbery. Black had convinced himself that it might be good to work with a guy who had done time, because a guy who had done time will do absolutely anything not to do more, including getting something right, listening to the plans, not freelancing at the scene. But when they met, Rocky made only a passing reference to his stint in jail, and it wasn't even a negative one. He had made mention of how much exercise he had in prison, all that weight he had lost, as if he had gone to a frigging health spa. It was as if he hadn't minded, as if jail was as good as anything else he might have done, and remembering that fact was now beginning to scare the bejesus out of Curtis Black.

He took a final sip of whisky, draining the glass. He wanted more but wouldn't allow himself any. The goal was to calm his nerves, not dull them. He had to be aware, to be on top of his game, even if everyone knew that the best part of Curtis Black's game was in the planning, not the execution. One of his old cohorts, out on his own now (aren't they all?), used to say that his planning was always so precise, so exhaustively researched, that a trained ape couldn't screw up the scene. Indeed, it was so good that Black never saw fit to carry a gun.

All that would do was add ten years to the jail term on the off chance he was ever caught, and the guys who worked for him, they were carrying anyways.

He focused for a moment on the traffic jerking up Broadway, at the elderly and unemployed walking along the gum-stained sidewalk, so slowly, because they really had no place they needed to go. He shook his glass once more, listening to the reassuring sound of the ice, then slid the tumbler along the tabletop just out of reach and bore in on the top diagram, envisioning the Wells Fargo security guard pushing a dolly carrying a duffel bag filled with cash. Everything goes right, and three men in ski masks jump out of the back of the blue van and surround him. A fourth man appears from across the street, comes up from behind, and disarms the second guard, who is standing beside the truck. Black would be directing the operation from the driver's seat of a getaway car, barking orders into a tiny microphone that the others could hear through their own earpieces. The idea was to keep the operation simple, let the men do their work, say nothing confusing. In a matter of three minutes, the men should be off the street and in the car, no shots, no worries. They'd leave the stolen van behind.

The knock on the door downstairs startled Black, even though he had been waiting for it. He looked at his watch and saw it was 4:25 P.m.

Right on time. He picked up a photograph resting on the windowsill and smiled wi/lly at the three people who were smiling back at him-a woman sitting on a sofa, holding the arms of a toddler who was courageously standing for the first time, and a man, a younger version of himself, kneeling nearby on the living room rug.

He pulled himself up from the metal chair, knocked his fist once against the top of the table, and ambled down the steep, crooked stairs to open the door. One hour to showtime.

one

Present Day Thursday, October 26

It's always odd, meeting someone famous. On television, they never look at you, unless they're giving a speech or staring at the camera in a commercial, and in those cases, they are perfectly made up, every hair in place, rouge spread across their cheeks by artists who make lucrative livings helping people appear better than they actually are.

In newspaper pictures, they are staring down or straight ahead or off at some distant point, dead still, like a corpse. But in person, their eyes move as if some mannequin has sprung eerily to life. They have blemishes, hair is out of place, and your blood races the first few times they use your name.