The Fixer

16

The city of Boston kept all of its old records in a large, bunkerlike building in a remote part of the city called West Roxbury. Back in the day, when Rick had been an investigative reporter for TheBoston Globe, he’d had occasion to drive out to the City Archives. It was a giant warehouse that wasn’t open to the public. You didn’t just show up; you had to make an appointment. Pretty much every historical document or transcript or filing was here, going back to before the city was founded by the Puritans in 1630. Rick had no idea who frequented City Archives apart from historians. Some newspaper reporters didn’t even know about the place.

As he drove back to Boston, he called City Archives and asked for Marie. Marie Gamache had been there forever and had a buoyant good nature that distinguished her from her more introverted colleagues. She also had a tenacity that Rick admired. She could find anything, any scrap of paper, in the sprawling warehouse. She took on every search like a personal challenge, refusing to give up. Very few of the city’s documents before the year 2000 were available online. They were stored in gray archive boxes on shelves that went on for miles. You couldn’t do a computer search. The only search engine was in the heads of the archivists, and none, in Rick’s experience, was better than Marie.

“Hey there,” he said. “Rick Hoffman.”

“Oh my God, Rick Hoffman! It’s so great to hear your sexy voice!”

“Well, you might not be so glad to hear from me once you hear what I want.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I’m going to need a bunch of records from 1996. Buildings Department, Board of Health, Licensing Board, Inspectional Services.”

“Hold on, let me get a fresh yellow pad.”

“You’re still not using computers?”

“Oh, hush. Nothing’s better than a pad and a pencil, and you know I’m right.”

He pulled over to the side of the road and read off to her a list he’d scrawled down in Joan Breslin’s basement.

When he finished, she said, “And I suppose you want them all first thing tomorrow morning.”

“What about this afternoon?”

“I hope that’s a joke.”

“I’m serious. Possible?”

“I think the mayor’s office is ahead of you in line, and they’ve got me pulling registry records for days.”

“Who’s more important, me or the mayor?”

She laughed. “You have a point. Give me three hours.”

“You’re a doll.” As he spoke, he winced. He could hear his father speaking the exact same words. Charming women the same way. He was indeed Lenny Hoffman’s son, for better or for worse.

His next stop was a computer repair shop on a quiet side street in Allston. He knew he’d be laughed out of the sleek Apple Store if he went in with a floppy disk from the 1980s. But the Computer Loft had repaired Rick’s computers for years and they seemed to be able to fix anything fixable, and it was at least worth a try.

A rotund young man, probably in his midtwenties, emerged from the back. He had mouse-brown hair down to his collar, a full reddish beard, and a small hoop in his septum.

“Help you?”

Rick held up the disk. “You have a computer around that can read this?”

“What is it?”

Rick sighed. “Is Scott around?”

The bearded man ducked his head and returned to the back of the shop, and a minute later the owner, Scott, emerged. He was tall and bald and wore a black-and-white bowling shirt that said HOLY ROLLERS.

“Well, look at that,” Scott said. “A real, honest-to-God floppy disk.”

“You got a machine that can read it?”

“Rick, there hasn’t been a machine made that can read them for twenty years at least. I mean, I think the Apple II used them, back in the early nineties.”

“Do you happen to have one of those around?”

Scott shook his head. “Maybe at the Computer Museum. Isn’t there still a computer museum somewhere? Otherwise, I think you’re going to have to look on eBay. Look for one of those old IBM PCs, a 286 or whatever. You might get lucky. People sell all kinds of shit.”

Rick suddenly remembered the IBM computer on his father’s desk. “Actually, I think I know where I can find one.”

On the way to his father’s house he made a stop at Tastee Donuts, an old-fashioned place that served up hand-cut donuts that were still warm when you got them, and bought a box of a dozen assorted.

He noticed a black Escalade idling double-parked outside Tastee Donuts, halfway down the block. He couldn’t see inside; its windows were tinted. He thought he might have noticed a similar black Escalade behind him on the expressway. But such vehicles were common. There was no reason to believe this was the same one.

By the time he got back to his car, the Escalade was gone.