The Rat on Fire (5 page)

Mooney wore a three-piece brown suit and a stern expression. He got up from behind the desk. He put his hands in his back pockets. He said, “John, John, there’s a difference between free speech and conspiracy to commit a life-endangering felony.”

“There certainly is,” Roscommon said. “I didn’t say these guys’re having a nice little conversation about how the Sox’re doing and where’re we gonna get some pitching. I said from what my guts tell me, it sounds like Proctor is hurtin’ for money and he owns a building or three and he knows another guy who owns some property and it sounds like Malatesta is also in the hole for a buck or three. But so far that is pretty much all we know.

“Now, Terry, my friend,” Roscommon said, “you being an officer of the court and all, what with your obligations about bringing cases that you can only win …”

“I’ve lost a couple,” Mooney said.

“Your modesty’s becoming,” Roscommon said, “although I must say it probably wouldn’t be necessary if you followed some good advice I understand you got in the course of them cases being considered before they got indicted and
you had to take them in because of course they wouldn’t plead. I wouldn’t’ve pleaded either, to those dogs.

“Anyway,” Roscommon said, “would you really like to charge a couple of guys with discussing their money problems in a coffee shop? Did they make that a felony too? Because if they didn’t, you’re gonna have some trouble, I think, on account of that is all we’ve got right now.”

“Lieutenant,” Mooney said, “we know damned right well what they’re talking about. They’re talking about how one guy is going to set a fire in a dwelling place and the other guy is gonna screw up the investigation on purpose, and if we don’t do something, somebody may be killed.”

“We know it,” Roscommon said. “The trouble is, we don’t know
which
dwelling place, so we can’t prove that. They haven’t set any fire, so we can’t prove that.”

“There’s always conspiracy,” Mooney said.

“There’ll always be an Ireland, too,” Roscommon said, “and if we bring a conspiracy on what we’ve got, that’s where we both better head. Only I’ll have my pension and you’re still young yet. You’ll have to go to actual work, out catchin’ the fish in the dories and cuttin’ the peat in the bogs with your teeth all turnin’ black and the wife wearin’ her shawl by the fireside, croonin’ lullabies to the babes, bless ’em, and offerin’ the good Father a nice cuppa tay. We haven’t got an overt act, Terrence me boyo. They haven’t bought a can of gas and they haven’t struck a match. They haven’t even got close to the place where they got in mind to do the dirty deed. They may be snakes and dirty lizards, but they ain’t bit anybody yet, and we got to let them at least get close enough to reach somebody with their teeth before there’s a goddamned thing we can do.”

“Are these guys any good?” Mooney said.

“Any good?” Roscommon said. “Of course they’re no good. Proctor I put in jail myself, when I was about your age. And
Malatesta’s a disgrace to the badge. No question about that.”

“No, no,” Mooney said, “not them. The guys on the case. What’s-their-names.”

“Sweeney and Carbone, you mean,” Roscommon said. “Well, I’ll let you judge for yourself.

“Sweeney,” Roscommon said, “you remember that little pisspot named Leonard James that they called
Jesse
and some starry-eyed liberal jerk let him out of Walpole on three armed robbery charges because he had reformed himself and he was ready to be transferred to Norfolk for prerelease, and he got out of there one fine dark night and went off on a spree that four guys got killed in? Run a cruiser off the road in Braintree one night when he was drivin’ a stolen car and then shot a cop in Plymouth that was blocking the road and he went into the swamp? Well, Sweeney got him out the swamp, and he was armed, too.”

“We haven’t anybody in a swamp in this case,” Mooney said. “I don’t doubt he’s brave. What I want to know is if he’s smart.”

“Lemme finish,” Roscommon said. “Carbone. Carbone, when we started havin’ all that trouble down the North End there with the young guineas leaping around and shootin’ everybody every so often—I tell you, I keep hearin’ there’s no crime in the North End and there’re times when it just about makes me sick to my stomach—and we sent him down there undercover and he brought in four of them.”

“That sounds a little better,” Mooney said.

“You’re a real expert on this stuff, aren’t you, Terrence,” Roscommon said. “Lemme tell you something else—it takes more’n a pair of balls to get a man out of a swamp in the dark when he’s armed and you don’t know where he is and you’re pretty much alone, all right? You haven’t got any brains, that guy is liable, jump out a tree on your head, you know.”

“They’re all right then, you think,” Mooney said.

“They will be,” Roscommon said, “you can just keep your dick in your pants until we get these guys set up for you to fuck them. You come jumpin’ in now with your bowels in an uproar, the case is blown and the day is not far off that you’ll regret it.”

L
EO SAT
in the reception area of Jerry Fein’s office, looking at the pictures of Sinatra, Presley, Garland, Jessel, Youngman, Berle and the Inkspots, while Fein shouted into his telephone. “I am telling you, Michael, and I am telling you once and for all, it don’t matter to me the pastor wants the guy play for nothing. I can’t send the guy over there inna middle of a week at the Château de Ville and he loses a show, and he does it for nothing and the people there’re paying him and they got to go around refunding the customers’ money, because they are not going to stand for it and I am not gonna do it because I don’t blame them. They are right.”

Fein paused. “No, Michael,” he said, “that does not interest me. The parish hall does not interest me. This guy has two things in this world, which is his talent and the time he has to sell tickets to people that want to watch him and his talent, and I am not going to start going around and telling this guy he should forget about making his livelihood and go down to Quincy for no money because my old friend Monsignor Quinlan is raising money so he can put up a parish hall where he runs bingo games.

“Yes, Michael,” Fein said, “I understand that we are old friends and you have done me a lot of favors. I have also done you a lot of favors. You were running that Seabees reunion there, didn’t I get you Tulip Twolips for a lousy hundred bucks, huh? When her regular price for that kind of thing’s five hundred minimum? Didn’t I do that, and all your goddamned friends treat the lady like she was an animal? Right? So I hadda practically get down my hands and knees, I continue representing her? You remember that, Michael? Sure, you remember that. You remember, you had the kid
with the bone cancer there that was dying, and you went around shooting off your mouth all the time about how you could get him a visit from his hero that made the record with the goddamned accordion, and I did that because you come crying to me when you talked too much and you couldn’t deliver? Remember that, Michael? You’re telling me I’m a friend of yours? Michael, I know that. I got the scars and the bills to prove it.

“Yes, Michael,” Fein said, “I know. Now and then you did me a couple favors. The night the boys got a little rowdy and they took the car and it didn’t show up in the papers. I know. But I am telling you, this one I cannot do. This time you are asking me the impossible, and I can’t do it for you.

“Yes, Michael,” Fein said, “it’s final. It is my last word. Yes. I cannot do it and I’m not even going to try. No, I am not being unreasonable. You are being unreasonable. Well, then, you go ahead and tell the guys, tag my car every time they see it. You go ahead and tell them that, and they will do it, and then the next time I can do something just as nice for you, I will do it, and both of us will have lost an old friend and gained a new enemy. But if that is the way you feel about it, Michael, you go ahead and you do it.” Fein hung up, noisily.

Leo went into Fein’s office. The lawyer sat at the walnut desk, his tie loosened and flung across his left shoulder, his white shirt unbuttoned at the neck, his face flushed under the short black beard. “Leo, Leo, Leo,” Fein said with his chin in both hands, “why didn’t I do like my mother wanted and be a doctor?”

“Should’ve had mine,” Leo said. “Mine wanted me to be a priest.”

“I tell you, Leo,” Fein said, “if I could make a living selling second-hand clothes instead of this, some days, I would do it. Except, I’m not sure I can. It’s the ignorance that gets you at our age, you know? Maybe there is something that’d
pay you good enough so you could dress warm and eat and take care of your family, that would not drive you nuts all the time, but maybe there isn’t, too, and the fuckin’ bank comes around every month so you can’t take a year off and find out. I dunno. How you been, Leo? You making an honest dollar, getting enough stuff to eat and like that?”

“I saw Billy,” Leo said.

“Is that good news?” Fein said.

“It is good news,” Leo said.

“Good news,” Fein said, “having to do with money, I hope. That being about the only kind of good news I am in the market for right now. This guy Murray that I owe a lot of money to, which I think he knows? I am at this UJA thing the other night, or maybe it was B’nai B’rith, some time they’re throwing to raise some dough for this politician who’s going to save us all from going straight to hell and everything, only he’ll probably drop out of politics first and forget all about how he loved Israel so much and he hated all those Arabs like poison.

“You know, you guys’re lucky,” Fein said. “You give a little at the church, you go to a dinner or two maybe once a year, every so often the Cardinal gets broke and I got to shag up a couple of guys who haven’t told a clean joke in years and give the guy free entertainment so he can build another parochial school, and on top of that they have to get up new material they can do for nothing. But that’s about it.

“You,” Fein said, “you got your paper drives and your bands that go around making a lot of noise. But being Jewish in this town is like living next door to Tap City except they keep moving the fence closer’n closer to your house. I tell the guy: ‘Murray, Murray, Murray, this is the third time I’ve been hit this week. I had the Hadassah thing. I had the dinner honoring Judge Barf and also the wife at the country club and the food was awful. I’ve been out to Brandeis more nights than I’ve been home. I’m telling you, Murray, I just
can’t do it. I’m just a guy. I haven’t got a Cadillac agency. I don’t run a wholesale liquor business, I haven’t got a string of movie theaters or a whole bunch of parking lots or a nice little dry goods business and I never did any business in raw wool, billboards or anything else like that. I am just a poor starving lawyer. I make out if my people make out and I water the soup for the kids when they don’t. You got me two grand for Israel bonds, you got me a thousand for something else, I’m down to the lint in my pockets already and you’re telling me a dinner, five hundred bucks a plate and I got to bring Pauline too? You got to be kidding. I haven’t got it, Murray. I just haven’t got it. You know where it’s going—I’m giving it all away.’

“And Murray says, ‘Holocaust.’ Says it like he was saying Kaddish. You guys don’t know what it’s like, Leo, being Jewish. You’re Jewish and some guy calls up on the phone and he asks you for money. You tell him you haven’t got it and all of a sudden it’s your fault six million people died. The only way you can get free, that you can escape taking all of the blame for it, all at once, and never mind maybe you weren’t even born when it happened, is produce the cash. Or a certified check. You don’t pony up, Hitler was all your fault and you are probably sneaking off at night to meetings with the Palestinians.”

“Let me tell you about the Cardinal’s Stewardship Appeal,” Leo said.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” Fein said. “If I didn’t hear about it already from some priest that’s got oil all over his tongue and wants about three grand worth of free entertainment the evening, it’s because they haven’t got around to planning no free entertainment the evening yet, that I’m going to have to supply. If it happens, it will happen soon enough and I will not like it then. It don’t happen? This is also all right with me. Will you tell me this? Will you tell me why some priest with a name like Mahoney or something
thinks he has to come around bothering a poor Jew like me, get him somebody to sing ‘Danny Boy’ for nothing at a dinner for a bishop? Why is that?

“All you micks,” Fein said, “go around singing ‘Danny Boy,’ and doing it for priests, and us Jews have to come up with the guys to do it. Boy, did I have a guy who could sing ‘Danny Boy’ until a couple years ago. Also very good on ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’ and ‘Galway Bay’ and he could do an ‘Ave Maria’ that would bring tears to your eyes. My eyes, even. When Jewish eyes are crying. Kid’s name was Pasternak and I booked him as O’Brien for those things. Which was not really what he wanted to do.

“ ‘Tell him you’re black Irish,’ I said to him. See, his father was Jewish but his mother was Italian and he has this dark hair and that sort of thing, but what he wanted to do, really, was magic shows in the Catskills. He was a talented kid. It was just that he didn’t have much talent in magic, and I had a hell of a time with that kid. The jobs he wanted I couldn’t get for him. The jobs I got for him, he didn’t like, and then I would lay one of them communion breakfasts on him for which all I gave him was cab fare, because I’m not collecting anything and I’m not even Catholic, and he would scream bloody murder. He would tell me he was not a Catholic and what was I making him do this stuff for when I couldn’t even get him a job doing magic in the Catskills like he wanted. And I would tell him, if he ever wanted to get any place, he had to pay the dues first and take what he could get.