Remo scouted for a taxicab. He spotted one that was painted a strange robin's-egg blue and maroon and flagged it down.
The cabby asked, "Where to, pal?"
"What do you call the Italian part of town?" Remo asked.
"The North End."
"Take me to the North End."
The cab whisked Remo to the most congested stretch of traffic he had ever had the misfortune to experience. Cars raced in and out of lanes as if at the Daytona 500.
Traffic settled down to a crawl once they entered a long tunnel whose white titles were gray from years of engine exhaust.
"What do you call this thing?" Remo asked after almost being sideswiped by a patrol car.
"'The Sumner Tunnel' seems to be everyone's favorite. Although 'this fucking bottleneck' comes a close second."
"I'll go with option two. What are the odds of us surviving it?" Remo asked, feeling his brain go dead from carbon monoxide fumes.
"Poor."
"I tip better for honest. Your tip just doubled. Consider that an incentive to drive safely."
Eventually the cab emerged into sunlight and fresh air. It whipped out of the traffic flow like a pinball caroming off the side of a pinball machine. The force of it should have thrown Remo into the right-hand door, but he centered his balance, righting himself like a compass needle pointing toward the north pole.
"That felt like three G's," Remo said.
"If you don't grab that turn like a brass ring," the cabby explained, "it's hell backtracking. The artery is much worse. Not that the streets are any prize."
"How is that possible?"
"They were laid out by cows."
"I see what you mean," Remo said once they were cruising down the streets of the North End. It looked like a slice of old Italy, with high brick tenements festooned with wrought-iron fire escapes and wet wash waving on clotheslines between the narrow streets. Despite the cool weather, high windows were open and fat housewives and cigar smoking old men leaned out to watch the parade of humanity below. Outside clocks told time in Roman numerals. Green-white-and-red Italian flags waved proudly.
The side streets were narrow and crooked, and impossible to navigate by car. Double-parking seemed to be the law of the land.
"Any spot in particular?" asked the driver.
Remo noticed a Chinese restaurant on a corner and said, "Right there."
After paying the driver off, Remo pretended to start into the Chinese restaurant, then slipped around the corner.
He walked the narrow streets, trying to orient himself. He couldn't recall the name of the street the building had been on. He knew better than to ask pedestrians, knew better than to attract attention in a close-knit neighborhood such as this one.
Salem Street, off the main drag, Hanover, looked vaguely promising. It was a dark alley of dirty brick bindings that suggested they had been there forever. The soot looked eternal. The streetlamps were an ornate black iron. It was very Old World.
Remo started down it.
Even when he realized he had found the building, Remo kept on going. It was a storefont with its lower windows curtained off; the dingy glass above said "SALEM STREET SOCIAL CLUB."
Across the street a burly man sat on a wooden straightback chair, his shirtsleeves rolled up and a package of Marlboros tucked into the left roll. A lookout.
Remo continued on as if he were a lost tourist and rounded the next corner. Here he might have been negotiating a forgotten section of town. There was a barber shop whose fixtures were so ancient they reminded him of his first haircut, a million years ago in Newark. The nuns of Saint Theresa's orphanage had taken his entire class there one Saturday. Remo could still smell the spicy odor of the hair tonic the barber had used to plaster down his wet hair, as if it were yesterday.
A lifetime ago.
Remo doubled back to Hanover Street and the Chinese restaurant, where he ordered a bowl of fluffy white rice and a glass of water. The rice was tasty, even if it was a domestic Rexoro. The water tasted like it had been hauled out of Boston harbor in a rusty pail.
He ignored the water and nursed the rice, chewing every mouthful to a starchy liquid mass before swallowing, as he waited for darkness to come.
When Remo stepped back out into the street, Hanover Street was ablaze with neon and the narrow sidwalks were choked with every type of person from priests to hookers.
It was still early, so Remo sauntered up and down twisting sidestreets and alleyways that might have been built by a coven of nineteenth-century witches. The ornate streetlamps simulated gaslights and shed a feeble light that suited Remo's nocturnal prowlings perfectly.
After the sun had set, Remo found a high black brick wall one street over from Salem and, looking both ways to be certain there were no lookouts, went up it with spidery silence.
The bricks were irregular enough to make his ascent as easy as climbing a stepladder. Remo quickly gained the roof and crossed the gravel to the opposite end.
Inland, beyond an elevated green artery, the lights of Boston blazed. The North End lay all around him, a shadowy clot of land along the waterfront that had been cut off from the city proper by the artery.
Not far behind him was the spire of Old North Church. To the north, along the coast, the angular spider's web of Old Ironsides wavered in the ocean breezes. The Bunker Hill monument stabbed at the stars.
Remo found himself looking down Salem Street. The social club was diagonally across the street, three buildings south. Below, the lookout still rocked back in his creaking wooden chair.
He showed signs of nodding off, which meant that he was probably just taking the air. There were no lights coming from the storefront itself.
Leaning over, Remo released a droplet of saliva onto the lookout's thick black hair.
The man was more alert than he looked. He reacted instantly, putting his hand up and cursing in Italian when it came away wet.
"Fuckin' pigeons," he snarled as he dragged the chair indoors. A door slammed.
Above, Remo grinned. He worked his way up the street by the roofs. They were so closely packed he didn't have to jump.
When he was directly across from the storefront, he stepped back several paces and sprinted for the parapet's edge.
The street flashed under him like a dark canyon. Remo's Italian loafers made almost no sound as they made contact with the opposite building. He checked his own momentum with a twist of his upper body.
Looking around the roof, Remo discovered a trapdoor. He laid both hands on it and closed his eyes.
The weak electrical current of an ordinary burgler alarm made his sensitive fingertips tingle ever so slightly. Wired. Remo left it alone.
He walked the parapet, looking for the inevitable fire escape. He had not yet seen a building that lacked one. These were firetraps, probably built at the turn of the century-if not before-and never upgraded.
This one clung to the back of the building like exposed iron ribs. Remo's eyes, trained to pick up ambient light and magnify it, detected the faint gleam of moonlight on wires wrapped in shiny black electrical tape. Probably an electric eye or some other alarm system.