The Pariot GAme

by George V. Higgins

  “What’d you name him?” Riordan said.

  “Name him?” Doherty said. “What the devil would you name a grumpy English bulldog?”

  Riordan shrugged. “Spike, I suppose.”

  “Of course,” Doherty said. “I named him Spike. I’ve been sick, perhaps, but I still have some sense of the fitness of things. Those things that I can come close to controlling, anyway.”

  “Things are getting out of hand, Paul?” Riordan said.

  “I have that feeling,” Doherty said. “Priests aren’t supposed to feel that way, and it isn’t really a thought worthy of the name, but yeah, I have that feeling. There’s been a lot of trouble.”

  “Your brother?” Riordan said.

  “Is that what it is?” Doherty said. “You came here because of Jerry? I thought you were after the IRA, and I was going to be able to enjoy this unexpected little get-together, listening to stories about the Provos. Don’t tell me Digger Doherty’s signed up with the rebels.”

  “So far as I know,” Riordan said, “the Digger is not signed up with the IRA. That was something else, the IRA. They’ve got one of their bigger boys in roaming around all over the country, buying guns, and we don’t even have a picture of him. Hell, we don’t know what name he’s using. That fool in Washington sent me because nobody in LA knows me and everybody here does, and that didn’t work either. What I came here for is this: The Digger knows a man named Magro.”

  “I thought Mikie-mike was in Walpole,” Doherty said.

  “He is,” Riordan said. “He’s doing life for that thing and he doesn’t like it. Therefore, being a reasonable man, he is trying to get out.”

  “He blames Jerry for that,” Doherty said, quite slowly.

  “That’s my recollection,” Riordan said. He opened the pack of Luckies, removed one cigarette, tapped it down, put it to his mouth, lit it with a Bic lighter, turned his head to the left, spat a bit of tobacco on the patio, and inhaled deeply. “Magro’s right, too.”

  “Those things’ll kill you,” Doherty said.

  “Another on a long list of things that bore me,” Riordan said. “Something will, no matter what I do. If I ever catch up to this mick guerrilla, he’ll probably do it.”

  “Tell me this,” Doherty said, “and never mind any pretty stuff about sources and that kind of thing you always use for camouflage, just how is Magro planning to get out? A life sentence is a long time.”

  “It’s a little under fifteen years, if you make nice and don’t stir up any ruckus,” Riordan said. “Which is a little longer than the life sentences you’ve handed out to a lot of those brides and grooms that had hearing problems when you got to the part about death being the only thing that could part them.”

  “We’re not going to get into doctrine here, Peter,” Doherty said. “We’re going to deal with the law and the prophets. Prophesy to me: How is Magro getting out? He’s only been in about seven years and he didn’t go in for running a stop sign. Is something going on?”

  Riordan took another drink from the second screwdriver. “That’s what I hear,” he said.

  “Is some money changing hands?” Doherty said. His face had reddened under the tan and his voice was rising.

  “Calmness, Paul, calmness,” Riordan said. “No use in disturbing the ladies and other people who have no interest in this conversation.”

  “Is it?” Doherty said.

  “Your Excellency,” Riordan said, “with all due respect and all that shit—you have lived in this picturesque Commonwealth all of your natural life. Here I am, a poor boy that was born and raised in scenic, affluent Weston and never had a whiff of corruption in his virginal nostrils—thought all the hoods were south of Attleboro and then discovered all manner of things going on. Not in Rhode Island, right here. And that was after I spent a long vacation serving my government in the winning of hearts and minds in the Republic of South Vietnam, getting no experience with real evil at all. So, you are the expert, and you interpret the meaning of things for my benefit. I am sitting here telling you that a gentleman known to you is by way of skipping on his lease at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Walpole. Eight years early, give or take a few months. You know what he needs to pull this off. You know where he has to go to get it. You tell me whether there is something funny going on.”

  “More to the point,” Doherty said, “what is going to happen after he does it?”

  “You tell me,” Riordan said.

  “He’s going to kill Digger,” Doherty said.

  “Ahh,” Riordan said, “I always knew it. Great minds work in the same circles.”

  “My turn again,” Doherty said. “Wow. He’s going to go for a pardon.”

  “That,” Riordan said, “is what I hear. Can we have that waiter back again? I’m starting to feel better.”

  SEATS LOBIANCO said he was not sure that he could do what Ticker Greenan wanted. “I know I took your call, for Chrissakes, Greenan,” Seats said, hunching over the glass-topped desk and cramming the handset of the receiver into the jowls on the left side of his face. “You don’t have to tell me that I took the fuckin’ call, for Chrissakes. I’m talking to you right now. Why the hell wouldn’t I take your goddamned call? I don’t owe you any money. Matter of fact, the only thing outstanding between us is, you owe me lunch. When’re we gonna have lunch, Ticker, you buying and everything? You owed me lunch since ’seventy-eight, for Chrissakes, I got you tickets that playoff game they had with the Yankees. The fuck you trying to do, huh? Outlive me, you can beat me out of a lousy lunch? I know you’re cheap, Ticker. I can get witnesses that you are cheap. There’re probably two or three dozen guys right here in the building that had personal experience with how cheap you are. You give me about an hour, for Chrissake. I can get them all together in the Gardner Auditorium and we can have a fuckin’ full-dress legislative hearing on how cheap you are. No subpoenas or anything. Guys’ll show up for miles around, testify how cheap you are. ‘Greenan?’ they will say. ‘Do I know Ticker Greenan? I sure do know Ticker Greenan. Little shrimp of a guy he is, gets his suits from the Good Will and his shoes off of guys that fell asleep on the way to the Pine Street Inn for the fifty-cent bed but they saw this empty doorway down on Dover Street before they changed the name and they thought that looked pretty comfortable. That’s where Greenan gets his shoes, soon’s the warm weather starts again. Goes cruising up and down East Berkeley Street, pretending that he’s going through the barrels, until he spots a pair he likes on some poor old bum’s feet that’s sleeping, and he goes right up and takes them. Cheap? Is Greenan cheap? He is so cheap that every year on his anniversary he brings his wife home a loaf of bread that’s only one day old. The last time he had her out to dinner it was when the tenement got too hot and they took their tuna fish out and ate it in the yard under the clothesline. Yeah, Greenan is cheap all right. He owed Seats a lunch for over two years and he still didn’t pay him and now he’s back again, looking for another favor, as usual.’

  “I tell you what you do, Ticker,” Seats said, “and this is it. You meet me over the Colonnade in one hour and we will say hello to Stradivarius there and he will give me a nice table because he knows me and I have even given him a tip now and then, which I tell you even though I know it is sure to shock you, and we will sit down and have a bloody and then a piece of fish or something, and while we are having lunch you can try telling me again how come this fine upstanding citizen that you know does not deserve to be in MCI Walpole and I should do everything I can to get him out. And then I will think about what you say in a much better frame of mind, because I always get into a better mood when I have had my lunch and somebody else is paying for it. Especially you, Ticker. Especially you. Having lunch on you in my book ranks right up there with taking that supersonic jet plane that they got there to Paris and having lunch there at the top of the Eiffel fuckin’ Tower. One hour, Ticker. One fuckin’ hour.”

  Seats, grinning, put the phone down. He clasped his hands behind his
head and leaned far back in the blue leather chair. He put his feet on the glass-topped desk. He regarded the high shine on the Johnston & Murphy tasseled loafers with satisfaction, and beamed at the color pictures of his daughters and grandchildren beyond them. The walls of his office were painted light blue and crowded with plaques from the Holy Name Society and the Knights of Columbus. There were several pictures of him with Richard Cardinal Cushing and one personally autographed picture of John F. Kennedy. There was a long table, also glass-topped, against the wall to his right. In the center there was a photograph of his late wife. At the end nearest the desk, there was a Bearcat Scanner radio, its lights flashing sequentially but the volume turned down to the limit. Seats had received the radio in appreciation for his fundraising efforts on behalf of the drum and bugle corps of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which he had completely outfitted and sent to march in the inaugural parade of Lyndon B. Johnson. He did not listen to the radio.

  “I can’t stand the fuckin’ noise,” he explained. “Who the hell wants to listen to a buncha fuckin’ cops yakking? It’s the lights I like. All us wops love colored lights flashin’ on and off like that. Fascinates us. You guys think we came over here to make money? You’re crazy. It was all the lights. The Statue of Liberty? The first thing you see, you come here onna boat, is the Statue Liberty. Got lights on it. Right behind that you got New York, huh? Millions of lights. Some colored lights, some regular white lights, some lights that come on and just stay on, some that blink and some that flash. You think were sending all that money back to Naples, we want all our gumbahs come over and get rich? Nah. ‘Colored lights, Giovanni, you should see the colored lights. They got more lights here’n they know what the hell to do with. Save the money and come and see them. You save up enough, you come here and you work, pretty soon the two of us can open a restaurant and have our own sign with colored lights on it.’ I never listen the fuckin’ radio. I just turn it on. Makes me feel like my family made good in America and I got my very own restaurant with a buncha spades ‘n’ spics out back throwing food on the floor and robbing all my booze and not turning in the money from the checks. I want to hear a lot of goddamned talk, all I got to do is come the office inna morning. I don’t have no choice about talk then. At least it’s about something. Anybody comes in to see Seats, it’s not four choice for the Celtics or six onna first base line for the Red Sox, it’s about a judge or something, not just some dumb mick down on A Street had his car catch on fire or something.

  “Alice,” Seats said. He did not change his position at the desk. Alice did not move from her desk outside his office. “Yeah?” she said. “Alice,” he asked, “what is going on that I don’t know about that will stand up all of a sudden and whack me on the nose when I least expect it?”

  Alice Vickery continued to read the Herald American while she answered. She had finished reading the Globe and had a Rona Jaffe novel which she had started reading the day before, as a backup to the papers. Alice did a lot of reading outside Lobianco’s office in the summer. “I wasn’t here,” she said.

  “Alice,” Seats said, “you have been here for almost thirty years and you have never been here. You must have something wrong with your bowels or something.”

  “I was in the Ladies’,” she said. “Diane was answering the phone.”

  “That’s what I asked you,” Lobianco said. “What is going on? Did Diane maybe tell you if anything was going on, while you were in there taking a goddamned bath or something?”

  “No,” Alice said.

  “There was one message,” Diane said from the room where she sat with the other three secretaries, each of whom was reading a novel.

  “Ahh,” Lobianco said, “a bulletin from the fuckin’ library. Don’t tell me one of you broads actually went and picked up a telephone and wrote something down for a change.”

  “It was a guy named Riordan,” Diane said.

  “Good,” Lobianco said. “Riordan. That tells me a lot. Was it Ways and Means Reardon from the House, maybe? Or Public Health Riordon from the Senate? Or Political Corruption Reardon from the DA? There’s a hell of a lot of Ree-or-dans around, Diane. Which Riordan was it?”

  “Dunno,” Diane said. She snapped her gum. “He didn’t say.”

  AT THE FOOT of the sloping driveway, behind the Cyclone fence with the reverse-curve top ten feet off the ground, the low white building with the main entrance sat flanked by guard towers. The exercise yard and the cellblocks were concealed behind it, but six more guard towers were visible, concrete buildings with mansard roofs and plate-glass windows and balconies near the top. Riordan pulled the green Ford up to the main gate and opened the window. The guard in a gray uniform came out of his house. “Yessir?” he said.

  Riordan produced his credentials again. “Your business, sir?” the guard said.

  “Superintendent,” Riordan said.

  “Is he expecting you, sir?” the guard said. He was a young man and a thin one. He had a discouraged expression.

  “Yup,” Riordan said, “called him this morning.”

  The guard stood in the sun and thought about that. He looked at the credentials again. “Something to do with a prisoner, sir?” he said.

  “Yes,” Riordan said, “something to do with a prisoner. Why the hell else would anybody come here, if it didn’t have something to do with a prisoner, can you tell me?”

  The guard looked thoughtful. “I’ll call the office, sir,” he said. The guard went back into his cubicle and shut the door behind him. Through the tinted glass, Riordan could see him pick up the phone and push buttons. The guard talked. He nodded. He put the phone back in its cradle and nodded at Riordan. He pushed a button. The main gate rolled open.

  Riordan drove down the slope and parked in the visitors’ lot, deserted except for his car in the afternoon sun. He got out of the car, removed the sports coat, took the credentials from his pocket, put the coat in the car and locked the doors. Swiveling the right leg, he walked up to the main entrance and opened it.

  Inside it was cooler. There were two wooden benches to his left. In front of him there was a green barred door. Behind it there was a second, identical door. There was a desk behind a glass window to his right. It had a steel counter under it. There were three signs: ALL WEAPONS MUST BE CHECKED; VISITORS MUST IDENTIFY THEMSELVES; STATE NAME AND PURPOSE OF VISIT TO ATTENDANT. There was a sliding drawer under the glass and a speaking port about five feet off the brown linoleum floor in the center of the glass. Two guards sat on stools behind the glass, arguing about something. Riordan could not hear what they were saying. He rested his hands on the counter and rapped on the glass. The guard on the left interrupted the conversation and leaned forward. He spoke into a microphone. “Name, sir?” His voice was amplified, and carried through the room and the barred doors to Riordan’s left.

  Riordan spoke through the port. “Open the drawer,” he said.

  “Name, sir?” the guard said.

  “Open the drawer,” Riordan said. “My name’s on this.” He displayed the black morocco case. “I’ll put this in there.”

  “I have to have your name, sir,” the guard said.

  “You’re about to get it, if you’ll open the drawer,” Riordan said. “You think I’m going to climb into it, ride in and bite you?”

  The guard glared through the glass. “Come on, come on,” Riordan said, “open the drawer. I don’t know if you’ve got all day, but I haven’t.” The drawer slid open. Riordan put the credentials into it. The drawer slid shut. The guard removed the credentials on the other side of the glass and looked at them. He leaned toward the microphone. “Shut up,” Riordan said at once into the port. “I don’t want my visit announced to the whole damned prison population. That’s who I am. No damned need to treat me like the Duchess of Windsor at a goddamned cotillion. Put that back in the drawer and slide it back to me. I’ll take it out and put something else in it that you’ll want to keep until I come out.”

  The guard on the left lo
oked puzzled. The guard on the right got off his stool abruptly. “Do what I tell you,” Riordan said. “Have your partner call the Superintendent.” The second guard told the guard at the mike that he was calling the Superintendent. “I read lips,” Riordan said. “Glad to hear it. Now open the damned drawer and be quick about it.” The drawer slid open with the credentials in it. Riordan took them and removed the magnum from its holster. He opened the cylinder and pushed the ejection rod to clear the chambers of the bullets. From his right front pocket he removed a trigger guard lock and snapped it onto the gun. He put the revolver, cylinder open, and the bullets, into the drawer. He spoke into the port. “You be damned careful with that thing,” he said. “It was balanced when I came in here and it’d better be balanced when I get it back.”

  The guard at the mike opened the drawer and removed the magnum. He tagged it. He took a small brown envelope from a drawer under his desk and put the bullets in it. He put the magnum and the bullets in a pigeonhole behind him. The guard on the telephone hung up and nodded to the guard on the stool. The guard on the stool pushed a button.

  The barred door to Riordan’s left began to slide open. The guard who had used the telephone left the booth. Riordan walked toward the door. The guard came out of the booth as Riordan waited at the barred door. When it was open, Riordan went in and the guard patted him down. The barred door slid shut behind Riordan. The guard who had conducted the frisk opened the door to the booth and backed in. When it was shut, the second barred door in front of Riordan opened slowly.

  The floor beyond the second door was steel. Riordan turned right, his boots making a clanking sound, and went to the Superintendent’s office. He went in to the receptionist’s area and shut the door behind him. He grinned at the short, dark-haired woman behind the desk. “Ruthie” he said, “does the boss really think I came to see him?”