Bruce DeSilva - Providence Rag

Lomax drove home, cracked open a fresh bottle of Scotch, and sipped from it all night, too agitated to sleep.

At seven o’clock on Monday morning, Mulligan grabbed a breakfast sandwich and coffee to go at Charlie’s diner and ambled past the old Biltmore Hotel toward the Dispatch . When he reached Fountain Street, he saw that the newspaper’s windows had been reinforced with masking tape.

He stopped to watch two Providence cops order Iggy Rock to move WTOP’s mobile broadcast van from an illegal parking spot across from the newspaper’s front door. The van swung around Burnside Park and claimed two metered spaces next to Union Station, a 114-year-old yellow-brick train station that had been converted to house an array of offices, pubs, and retail shops. From there, Iggy had a good view of the street in front of the newspaper.

As Mulligan reached the Dispatch ’s front door, he saw Gloria trotting down the sidewalk. He waited for her, and together they flashed their newspaper IDs at the Wackenhut guards. They entered the lobby and took the elevator upstairs to the newsroom. There they found Lomax already at his desk, two empty newsroom vending machine coffee cups in front of him and a fresh one in his hand.

“Mulligan,” Lomax said, “you’ll be writing the protest story. That means monitoring Iggy Rock’s broadcast, checking with the circulation department on cancellations, and watching the street activity from the roof.”

“The roof? I should be on the street.”

“No way. This means you, too, Gloria. You can get all the photos we need from there. The story’s not worth either of you getting hurt.”

“Okay, boss,” she said.

“And keep away from the windows today,” Lomax added.

By seven thirty, the telephones in the circulation department were ringing off the hook. Mulligan spent a half hour listening to a dozen clerks try to talk angry readers out of canceling the paper. He asked a few of them what the callers were saying and got a bunch of quotes, most of them unprintable. Then he returned to his desk, snapped on a radio Lomax had placed there, and listened to Iggy rant about the “criminal-loving left-wing extremist Dispatch .” The host urged his listeners to mass in front of the paper for the day’s protest.

At nine A.M., Mulligan joined Gloria on the flat, tar-paper roof. The crowd on the sidewalk across the street had swelled to about four hundred people, some carrying signs reading “Screw the Dispatch ” and “Cancel Your Subscription.” As the crowd spilled into the roadway, Providence police cruisers blocked off Fountain Street. A hundred yards to the north, thirty cops massed Burnside Park.

By noon, the crowd reached a peak of eight hundred people by Mulligan’s estimate. They had been chanting off and on all morning. Sometimes, “Screw the Dispatch .” Sometimes, “What are you thinking?” A few tossed eggs that broke against the newspaper’s red-brick walls and splattered the uniforms of the Wackenhuts.

“They’re so angry, ” Gloria said.

“And scared,” Mulligan said.

The day was hot and humid, the tar paper sticky under Mulligan’s Reeboks. Gloria’s arms were turning red. She dropped the camera, letting it hang by its strap from her neck, and smeared on some sunscreen.

Shortly after one P.M., two young men broke from the crowd, crow-hopped toward the building, and threw baseball-size rocks. One caromed off the brick, bounced off the sidewalk, and clipped the thigh of a woman protester. From the roof, Mulligan and Gloria heard her shriek. The other rock must have hit a window, because they heard glass shatter.

Five Wackenhuts bolted from the front steps and charged the rock throwers, two of the guards firing cans of pepper spray and one swinging his billy. The rock throwers fell to the pavement. The crowd surged forward, driving the guards back. The police stood fast in the park, perhaps realizing their intervention would only make things worse. Gloria’s shutter clicked, capturing a bird’s-eye view.

By two o’clock, storm clouds gathered over the harbor. Gloria looked at the sky and shivered. Thunder boomed, and a bolt of lightning struck the Sportsman’s Inn’s neon sign. It exploded in a shower of sparks as the rain came down hard and heavy.

Gloria’s shoulders shook. She closed her eyes and began her breathing exercise.

“Give me the camera,” Mulligan said. “I’ve got this.”

“I’m okay.”

“Get your pretty butt inside. The show’s about over for today, anyway.”

Gloria surrendered her camera and headed for the stairwell.

Below, the crowd was breaking up. Soon only a dozen stragglers remained, some of them holding umbrellas. Mulligan raised the camera and took a few shots of a nearly deserted street littered with abandoned, rain-soaked protest signs.

The city’s old retail district, squeezed into four compact blocks between Pine and Fountain Streets, had been crumbling since the 1960s; and after Waterplace Park and the Providence Place Mall were built in the 1990s, all of the action had shifted several blocks north. The early-twentieth-century storefronts that were left behind-the ones that hadn’t been torn down to make way for Johnson & Wales University dormitories-now housed discount liquor stores, bucket-of-blood bars, secondhand shops, palm readers, unlicensed massage parlors, or nothing at all. The governor’s limousine, a state trooper behind the wheel, idled at the curb in front of Hopes on Washington Street, as out of place as a debutante in a sweatshop.

Mulligan pushed through the front door and found Fiona waiting for him at a table in back. He grabbed a Killian’s at the bar, wandered over, and dropped into the seat across from her.

“Thought you weren’t supposed to hang out here anymore,” he said.

“So my press secretary kept telling me,” she said. “According to him, cheap bottle beer, restrooms with condom dispensers on the walls, and a warped linoleum floor that gets mopped once a week are not in keeping with the image a governor needs to cultivate. This morning, I reminded him that, despite our downtown renaissance, our little city-state is still a working-class bastion, and that this is exactly the image a governor who wants to be reelected should cultivate.”

“You did?”

“Yes. Just before I fired him.”

“You fired him for that ?”

“Not just for that, no.”

Mulligan whipped out his notepad and said, “Tell me more.”

When she finished enumerating her former staffer’s deficiencies, Mulligan asked, “Have you named a replacement yet?”

“I was hoping you might take the job.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

“It pays twice what you make now-and a lot more than nothing, which is what you’ll be making when the Dispatch goes under.”

Mulligan held his longneck up to the ceiling light and studied its contents through the amber glass. “If I was going to flack for anybody, it would be you, Fiona, but it’s just not in me to tell lies for a living.”

“I prefer to think of it as spin.”

“Same thing. This why you wanted to see me? To offer me a job?”

“There’s more,” she said, and slid a nine-by-twelve-inch manila envelope across the table. “I thought you might want a look at the psychiatric evaluation of Diggs before Judge Needham’s hearing tomorrow.”

“What’s the headline?”

“That he’s fucking nuts.”

“Crazy enough to be involuntarily committed?”

“That depends,” Fiona said.

“On what?”

“On what Needham cares about more-the legal niceties or his personal safety.”