House Revenge Read online

  “Huh,” Mahoney said.

  But Mahoney actually liked this problem. He didn’t really think he could stop the developer from renovating the area where Elinore lived, but he could take her side on the issue. He’d give a speech about the need for affordable urban housing and how developers can’t be allowed to do what this guy was doing: cutting off the heat and power and using scare tactics to force her out. Yeah, he’d hold a press conference with Elinore at his side; she was articulate and photogenic in a feisty, little-old-lady kind of way and would look great standing next to him. He’d rant about income inequality and show how he was on the side of all the poor folks like Elinore Dobbs.

  Then he’d go see the developer and get the guy to knock off the bullshit, at least for a while, so Mahoney would look like he’d made a difference. He’d tell him to blame what was happening on his employees, like these McNulty goons, and say that they’d been overzealous and doing things he didn’t approve of. Then he’d tell him to make Elinore a deal she couldn’t refuse; hell, a place on Cape Cod would probably be cheaper than what Elinore was costing him by delaying his construction project. Yep, Mahoney would champion the little people and would look good doing so, and when Elinore was eventually forced to move . . . Well, he could show that he’d done his best—and find some way to blame the Republicans.

  “What’s the name of this developer?” Mahoney asked.

  “Sean Callahan,” Elinore said.

  Mahoney almost smiled. This was perfect. He knew Callahan well. He also knew a little about Callahan’s development in Boston. It was huge, and Elinore Dobbs’s building was just a small part of it.

  But he didn’t smile, and he didn’t tell Elinore he knew Callahan. Instead he said, “Callahan. Yeah, I’ve heard about him,” making it sound as if Callahan was evil incarnate.

  He called Maggie and told her to send in one of the kids. He was hoping she’d send in the good-looking coed again. Instead she sent in one of the boys—a tall, gangly dork who was probably a genius as Maggie only hired geniuses, and he was probably rich as she only hired kids whose parents were likely to contribute to Mahoney.

  “What’s your name again?” Mahoney asked the boy. He’d never known the kid’s name.

  “Mason Stanhope,” the kid said.

  What a yuppie fuckin’ name! But Mahoney knew Stanhope’s father; he was a lawyer who’d made his money filing class action lawsuits against airline companies and had a house as big as a medieval castle on Martha’s Vineyard—another place where only rich people can afford to live.

  “Mason, this is Elinore Dobbs. I want you to sit down with her and write down all the stuff she’s going to tell you. Elinore, you give Mason the facts. Dates, specific people you’ve contacted, details about the things these McNulty creeps have done. And Mason, you tell one of the guys you work with—like maybe that young lady who brought me the copy of my Knights of Columbus speech—that I want to understand the law on evicting folks from their apartments. You’ll understand after Elinore explains to you what’s going on. And I want you to move fast on this, Mason. Elinore and I are going to hold a press conference tomorrow, so you move chop-chop. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Mason said.

  “You’re really going to help me?” Elinore said, sounding incredulous.

  “You’re damn right I am,” her champion said.

  3

  Mahoney asked Maggie to send in the next citizen, but he also told her to call Sean Callahan. “Tell Sean I want to see him this evening, have a drink over at the Copley about six or seven.”

  The next citizen was an old woman who was wearing her Sunday go-to-Mass clothes, including a feathered blue bonnet and white gloves. She brought a plate of chocolate chip cookies she’d baked herself, and they were good. She surprised Mahoney when she said she wanted to talk about how Comcast had a monopoly on Internet service in Boston and kept jacking up their rates and forcing people to bundle services to get a decent price. She said the Internet ought to be a public utility like sewer and water, and that poor people—because of that demon Comcast—had to go to a library to get online to look for a job or apply for one. She wanted to know why Mahoney didn’t give that wimp who ran the FCC a kick in the pants, a guy who, according to her, was basically on Comcast’s payroll.

  Mahoney pointed out that the FCC had just blocked a merger between Comcast and Time Warner to prevent Comcast from dominating the market but the old lady said that didn’t do a damn thing for cities like Boston where Comcast already had a monopoly. Mahoney knew she was right but he was thinking he’d just as soon not piss off Comcast, who contributed to him—and maybe to everyone else in Congress. He was trying to come up with a way to blame this one on the Republicans, too, but at that moment, Maggie stuck her head into his office and said, “Sorry to interrupt, Congressman, but Mr. Callahan said tonight isn’t convenient for him and asked if he could meet with you some other time.”

  “Not convenient for him?” Mahoney said. “Why, that arrogant little . . .”

  He’d been about to say “prick,” but stopped himself as the old lady was still in the room. If Mahoney needed to meet with the president of the United States, and if the president was in town, he’d make time for Mahoney. Yet here was this punk, Callahan, who thought that because he was now worth a few hundred million, he could blow Mahoney off.

  “You call him back and tell him that if he doesn’t meet with me tonight, he’ll hear at my press conference tomorrow how I’m gonna shut down his project on Delaney Street.”

  “Yes, sir,” Maggie said.

  “Now what were you saying, Mrs. Waters?” Mahoney said to the Internet crusader.

  A couple minutes later, Maggie came back and said, “Mr. Callahan will meet you this evening at the Copley at six.”

  “That’s better,” Mahoney said, and reached for another cookie.

  The Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel was constructed in 1912 and is across the street from Copley Square. A block away is historic Trinity Church, founded in 1733, and a place where generations of Episcopalians have knelt and prayed. A bit farther to the west is the Old South Church with its magnificent bell tower. It seemed as if the first thing the old New Englanders did when they stepped off the boat was to build a church; Mahoney would have built a tavern with an adjoining bordello.

  To enter the grand hotel you pass under a large red awning and between two stern-looking seven-foot lions made of stone and painted gold. The lobby is as big as a football field but instead of AstroTurf, the floor is covered with thick blue-and-red Oriental carpets. Hanging from a twenty-one-foot ceiling is a chandelier that might have come from the set of The Phantom of the Opera. Mahoney thought it was the most impressive-looking hotel lobby in the city.

  The OAK Long Bar, just off the lobby, has brown leather high-back stools in front of a bar that wraps around a kitchen so you can watch the chefs prepare your meal if you’re so inclined. There are also comfortable cloth chairs—some red, some white—in front of small marble-topped tables, which was where Mahoney was seated: in a red chair, drinking Wild Turkey, and growing increasingly annoyed at Sean Callahan, who was now twenty-five minutes late for their meeting.

  At six thirty Callahan arrived, pretending to be breathless from sprinting to their appointment. “I’m so sorry I’m late, John,” he said. “Damn traffic in this town gets worse every year.”

  Bullshit. Mahoney knew that Callahan’s office was a ten-minute walk away on Exeter Street. But instead of saying how he didn’t appreciate Callahan deliberately keeping him waiting, he said, “That’s okay. I just got here myself, two minutes ago.” And fuck you.

  Sean Callahan was forty-seven and looked as if he might have descended from a Beacon Hill, Boston Brahmin clan. He was six foot two, had a longish nose, thinning dark hair with just a sprinkling of gray, and thin lips best suited for expressing disapproval. His face was unlined due to the skills of a top-n
otch cosmetic surgeon, and he appeared to be in terrific shape thanks to tennis, a personal trainer—and a very young new wife. He was dressed casually: dark blue sport jacket, tan slacks, a blue cotton shirt with his initials monogrammed over the pocket but no tie—sort of a preppy, rich kid look, similar to what the Harvard interns in Mahoney’s Boston office wore. But Mahoney knew that Callahan wasn’t a Brahmin and hadn’t attended Harvard; he’d been raised in Charlestown, had gone to a community college, and it had probably taken him half his life to eradicate his boyhood accent.

  Callahan ordered a tonic water and lime; apparently alcohol wasn’t part of his current fitness routine. “So how are Mary Pat and the girls all doing?” he asked.

  They spent ten minutes chatting about nothing before Mahoney got to the point. “A little old lady named Elinore Dobbs came to see me today.”

  Callahan shook his head and smiled without humor, as if chagrined. “She’s a nut, John.”

  “Maybe, but she tells me you’ve been putting the screws to her to get her out of her apartment.”

  “Did Elinore tell you that I offered her two hundred grand to move? Did she tell you I found her an apartment six blocks from where she is now that’s twice as nice as the one she’s in?”

  “No, she didn’t tell me that.” Mahoney was actually shocked that Callahan had offered Elinore so much; she must be costing him a boatload. “What she told me is that you’ve been cutting off her heat and hot water and power, vandalizing her apartment, and stealing her mail. She told me you got two creeps named McNulty terrorizing the old folks like her who still live in the building.”

  “I offered her two hundred grand, John! Two hundred!”

  “Well . . .”

  “Do you have any idea what it takes to put a project like Delaney Square together? To get the investment money, buy the properties, get all the permits, make all the deals with the city? I’ve been working on this for over seven years, and that woman is interfering with a development that’s bringing new businesses to Boston, providing construction jobs for a lot of people, and, after that, jobs in all the offices and retail stores that will be there. She’s also standing in the way of the city collecting millions in taxes because the people who will move into that area actually pay taxes.”

  Mahoney noticed that Callahan was talking about how much good his development would do for Boston—like he was some kind of philanthropist—but he didn’t bother to mention how much money he was going to make.

  “Goddamnit, John! I’ve tried to reason with that woman but—” Callahan stopped ranting and took a breath. “What do you want, John?”

  “I want you to find some way to work things out with her.”

  “You’re not listening to me! I’ve tried to work things out with her. She won’t budge. She’ll tell you the reason why is because she likes where she lives, that she likes going to all the places she’s always gone to, that she likes to be near her friends. But do you know what, John? Most of the places she used to go to are gone already and her friends have moved away—and she knows that. Do you want to know the real reason she’s screwing with me?”

  “Yeah, what’s the real reason?” Mahoney said. He already knew the reason—Elinore had told him about the stand she was taking—but he wanted to hear Callahan’s spin on the issue.

  “She has an agenda, a political agenda. She says guys like me—the ones who create all the jobs and pay all the taxes—are making the city unaffordable for working-class people. And that’s what this is all about. It’s about the one percent depriving the ninety-nine percent of affordable housing. That’s the drum she’s beating.”

  “Well, she’s got a point.”

  “No! She doesn’t! People with money—the ones with the brains and the drive and the education—have a right to live in decent places. Even luxurious places. And I have the right to build the places where they want to live. Do you want this city to become like Detroit, John? Do you want the people who create jobs and pay taxes to go someplace else? I’m sorry, but this is the way it’s always been and the way it will always be. This country doesn’t support communism, and everyone isn’t guaranteed the same standard of living. You get the standard of living you earn. And nutcases like Elinore Dobbs, goddamnit, don’t have some God-given right to stop progress.”

  By the time he finished talking, Callahan’s face was as red as the chair Mahoney was sitting in, but Mahoney said, “I can’t be on your side on this, Sean. I’m sorry, but I can’t appear to be supporting a guy as rich as you while people like Elinore are getting hurt. At least not publicly.”

  “How much did Elinore Dobbs contribute to your last campaign, John? I contributed fifty grand.”

  “And I appreciate that, Sean. I really do. But when I’m running for reelection every two years, I have to at least pretend that I care about people like Elinore because there are a lot more of them than there are guys like you. And the fact is, I do care about them. So I’m asking you to find a way to work it out with her, and to knock off the strong-arm shit. It may take you a little longer to finish your project but in the end, everybody wins. And tomorrow, instead of me holding a press conference where I say Sean Callahan’s a bad guy and a bully, I’ll say I’ve talked to Sean Callahan and he’s a good guy. I’ll say he had some people working for him who behaved in a bad way, and he’s going to fire those guys and do right by Elinore and the rest of the tenants in that building.”

  Callahan didn’t say anything for a minute, as he stared into Mahoney’s bloodshot blue eyes. Then he said, “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, I’m not going to do right by her. I’ve tried to do right by her but she’s screwing me over. And I’ve got investors relying on me to get this project completed. I’ve got schedules to meet and every day I’m delayed from knocking down her building is adding to my losses.”

  “You mean it’s cutting into your profit,” Mahoney said. “You’re not going to lose money on this thing.”

  Callahan didn’t respond.

  “Sean, I’m asking you to be reasonable here.”

  Callahan stood up. “Go to hell, Congressman. And when you come around next time with your hand out for a contribution, I’ll tell you the same thing. And I’m going to talk to my friends and tell them that John Mahoney is a man who’ll take your money then screw you to make himself look good. So go to hell. You need guys like me a lot more than I need you. I’m going to help your opponent in the next election beat you, and when I do, he’ll show some gratitude.”

  Callahan spun on his heels and left.

  Sean was furious as he left the Copley, so mad he could barely see. Delaney Square was the most complicated development he’d ever taken on and now, on top of everything else, he had that hypocrite Mahoney meddling in it. But in the time it took for him to walk back to his office on Exeter, he realized that he shouldn’t have lost his temper with Mahoney. He certainly shouldn’t have said what he did. He could have been more diplomatic. He could have even lied and said that he’d try harder to come to some agreement with Dobbs. Then he thought: Screw it. Like he’d told Mahoney, Mahoney needed him a lot more than he needed Mahoney. And there was a larger problem: the people who’d invested in Delaney Square were not the kind of people he could afford to disappoint. He needed that old bitch out of that building and out of his way now.

  Mahoney ordered another drink after Callahan left. He was steaming.

  What he was really pissed about, more than anything else, was the lack of respect. Go to hell? Who did Callahan think he was talking to?

  But more and more these days, rich guys like Callahan didn’t even pretend they were impressed by politicians. Not anymore. These guys knew their money controlled politics, not the people who held public office.

  Just the other day, Mahoney had watched a Senate hearing on television. The Senate Banking Committee had summoned a couple of Wall Street bankers dow
n to D.C. to grill them on some outrageous, risky thing they’d done that resulted in about ten thousand ordinary people losing all the money they’d socked away for retirement. But those bankers, surrounded by a platoon of lawyers in pin-striped suits, weren’t the least bit intimidated. In fact, they sat there smirking. They knew they weren’t going to jail. They didn’t break the law—they just bent it a little—and a bunch of senators, half of them in the banking industry’s pocket, wouldn’t do a damn thing to stop them.

  Well, Mahoney was sick of the disrespect—and the guy that was going to find out how much power he still had was Sean Callahan. Normally, he’d be worried about the threat Callahan had made, about how he’d rally his fellow developers to contribute to his opponent, but this time . . . This was no longer about Elinore Dobbs. This was about an arrogant punk with money who needed to be taught a lesson, the lesson being that you didn’t tell John Mahoney to go to hell.

  4

  Mahoney called Maggie Dolan, who was still toiling away in his district office, and told her not to let the interns leave. He said he was coming back and wanted a briefing on all the things they’d learned. He also told Maggie to call the Globe and the TV stations and tell them that he’d be making a speech at ten a.m. tomorrow—in time for it to be on the twelve o’clock news—down there on Delaney Street, right outside Elinore’s building, with Elinore by his side.

  And that’s what he did.