The Pariot GAme

by George V. Higgins

  “I obtained my doctorate from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island,” Riordan said. “I haven’t published in any of the leading journals, or even the second-rate journals, because I’ve been out chasing thugs and learning about the real world. Now, Doctor Mayes, are we gonna fuck around here or are we gonna talk business, huh?”

  Dietz had an expression of dismay on his face. Mayes was turning red. Walker was grinning behind their backs. “I didn’t mean any insult, Peter,” Mayes said.

  “Doctor Riordan, to you,” Riordan said. “I’ve got a question pending.”

  “I don’t see any need to use foul language,” Mayes said.

  “I don’t see any need to put up with your fucking airs and graces, Doctor,” Riordan said. “I asked you a goddamned question. I came here to talk about a guy. I didn’t come here to swap résumés with you, you pompous asshole. We gonna talk business or what?”

  “This man Magro is an inmate of this institution,” Mayes said.

  “Right,” Riordan said, “and they got lions and tigers in the goddamned circus. What other news you got for me today? You think I came waltzing out here for the exercise? I came out here because Magro is an inmate of this institution. Magro is an inmate because he was convicted of killing a guy. Somebody is getting set to let him out. I have got it on good authority that when he gets out, he is going to go and kill another guy. That concerns me, Doctor.”

  Walker stopped grinning. “Gentlemen,” he said, “shall we sit down and have our conference?”

  “Sure,” Riordan said. He took the chair at the other end of the table. Dietz and Mayes sat down. Riordan pulled the Luckies out of his pocket and removed one cigarette from the pack. He commenced tapping it down. He looked around the office. He said: “Ken, is there any chance of getting Ruthie to bring an ashtray in here? I haven’t got any cuffs on these pants, and besides, it makes my legs hot when the coals catch fire.” Walker reached around behind him and punched the intercom button. Riordan lit the cigarette. Mayes’s face was still red.

  “Would you mind not smoking, please?” Mayes said.

  “Yes,” Riordan said, “very much so.”

  “The smoke irritates my sinuses,” Mayes said.

  “Good,” Riordan said. “But enough about your sinuses, Doctor. Leave us chat about Mikie-mike Magro.”

  The buzzer sounded on the intercom, Walker reached back and pushed the button. “Ruthie,” he said, “would you bring in an ashtray for this roughneck visiting us?” Her laugh was audible over the intercom. “Thank you,” Walker said. He turned back to face the people at the table. “Pete,” he said, “… oh … do I have to call you Doctor?”

  “Nah,” Riordan said. “We’ve known each other a long time, Ken. Call me Pete, like always.”

  “Thank you,” Walker said. He opened the folder in front of him. “Tell you the truth, Pete, I know about as much about Magro as I do about seven hundred other guys in this little resort.”

  “In other words,” Riordan said, “he’s a vicious beast.”

  “He is not a vicious beast,” Dietz said. “We go through this every time you come here, Riordan. He was convicted of a crime. He was not charged with being a vicious beast and he was not convicted of being a vicious beast. He is a human being who was convicted of a crime.”

  “And,” Mayes said, “he has shown reliable indications of being rehabilitated.”

  “Sure,” Riordan said. “That’s how he plans to get out, bamboozling guys with stars in their eyes. I didn’t say he was totally stupid. He wasn’t convicted of that, either. He was convicted of murder one. He wasn’t smart enough, or lucky enough, to get away with it, but now he’s had some time to reflect on the whole matter, and he’s figured out that he’s got at least one babe in the woods —” Riordan stared at Mayes —“and possibly two—” Riordan stared at Dietz—“that he can deceive.”

  “Magro is not deceiving anybody,” Mayes said, angrily.

  “Of course he isn’t,” Riordan said. “Man who’d commit Murder One wouldn’t lie to a guy that could maybe pave the way to getting him out. Never happen. Would you play Little Boy Blue to get out eight years early, even if it meant making a good Act of Contrition to the guys that could get you out? Of course not. You’d never do such a thing. Neither would Magro. He’s a prince of a fellow. Blew a guy’s head off and did it for money, of course, but nobody’s perfect.”

  “I won’t stand for this,” Mayes said, standing up.

  “Nobody asked you to, Fred,” Walker said. “You can sit down for this, just like the rest of us.” Mayes glanced at Walker and sat down. To Riordan, Walker said, “What makes you interested in this particular guest of ours, Pete? He do something federal? Because he’s been boarding with us for quite a few years now, and he’s only had two or three brief furloughs. If he did something while he was on vacation from here, he sure must be quick.”

  “Not that I know about,” Riordan said. “And it doesn’t matter a damn if he did something before he signed your register, because he’s been in for over seven years, way I understand it, and almost all our statutes of limitations run out in five. No, it’s not what he did before he came in, and I haven’t heard of anything that’d give us jurisdiction while he was on furlough. There probably was something, but he got away with it if he did it. It’s what I figure he’ll do if he gets out for good.”

  “Just what is that?” Mayes said.

  “All in good time, Doctor Mayes,” Riordan said. “I could be wrong on this and I don’t want to do a lot of talking about it until I’m pretty sure I’m right.”

  “Would you feel more comfortable if Doctor Mayes and I stepped out?” Dietz said.

  “You overestimate yourself as usual, Oscar,” Riordan said. “You don’t have the talent to make me uncomfortable. Not by your lonesome and not with Mayes for reinforcements.” Mayes’s and Dietz’s faces flushed immediately.

  “Let’s get on with it, shall we?” Walker said. “Whaddaya want, Pete?”

  “Information,” Riordan said. “First of all, how come a convicted killer, no crime of passion, knocks off an informer, gets caught with the gun, finally admits it was a contract job, is getting out? And on a pardon yet. Early release I can understand. But a pardon? Is the Commonwealth gonna pretend Dave Holby didn’t get shot twice behind the left ear because he was getting ready to put on a one-man opera for the grand jury and take out some guys that were pretty important then and that’re pretty important now? Doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Mayes cleared his throat. “This is a new program, Doctor Riordan,” he said. “One of the worst problems we have in crowded penal institutions like this is with the men doing long terms with no hope of an early release date. They’re a continuing disciplinary problem. They flare up into violent reaction at the slightest provocation.”

  “Sure they do,” Riordan said. “That’s how they got their tickets in here. When they were out on the street, they flared up into violence at the slightest provocation, and killed somebody. What’re you doing, admitting that you can’t control these birds? You can’t keep order in your own institution, which was built to keep guys like this from wandering around loose and shooting people any time it crosses their minds or somebody else offers them a commission to pull a trigger on some fellow that was making himself inconvenient?”

  “Of course we’re admitting that, Pete,” Walker said. “We’ve got no threat with these men except Block Ten isolation. That’s it. And a lot of them’d rather be in isolation when the weather gets hot. Gets them out of the shop. So that doesn’t frighten them much either. We can’t beat the shit out of them the way we used to, which I’m not saying we should’ve been doing but it did tend to calm a fellow down when he took a good drubbing that put him in the hospital for a couple weeks. And it kept his buddies docile for a month or so afterwards. We do that now and the word takes about twenty-four hours to hit the papers. Because the same judges that said we couldn’t smack the lads around a little also said
the lads’ve got a right to chat with the reporters. So then it’s in the papers, and we barely finish reading the stories before there’s lawyers in battalion strength banging on the gate and starting lawsuits, and every goddamned liberal legislator between here and Hartford’s yelling his guts out about official brutality and what animals we are.

  “No,” Walker said, leaning back in the chair, “we can’t control them. Not all the time anyway. Hell’s bells, we’ve got them stacked like cordwood in here anyway. We’re about two hundred bodies over capacity on any given day, and they don’t like each other any better than they like us. You know what I do this time of year: I pray for thunderstorms. We get about a week of days as hot and muggy as this one, and I can virtually guarantee you, we’re going to have trouble. And somehow I don’t think the taxpayers’d be all that eager to pay for air-conditioning the shops and the cellblocks. Somehow I don’t think I can put that one across with the Governor.”

  “So you see, Doctor Riordan,” Mayes said, “the best we can do is try to encourage them to rehabilitate themselves by making them see that exemplary behavior, no fights and no attacks on guards, can have some effect on what happens to them, within a time frame that means something to them, one with sufficiently limited, foreshortened parameters within their conceptual grasp.”

  “Does he always talk like this, Ken?” Riordan said to Walker. “Do you have to sit through this kind of a performance every time you guys have a conference?”

  “Doctor Riordan …” Mayes said.

  “No,” Riordan said, “I’m gonna talk for a while now before we all gag on our circumcised parameters and lose our own conceptual grasp. In the first place, I thought this rehabilitation giddiness for maximum security prisoners was something that went out with the Hudson Superjet and the Studebaker. If you think you can rehabilitate a contract killer, he is more than likely smart enough to figure it out. And if he isn’t, his hearing is probably good enough so that when one of his buddies clues him in, he will see that you’ve got light cream in your veins and Cool Whip in your head, mush in your belly and stars in your eyes. And he will go back and lie down on his bunk, and instead of trying to figure out how he’s gonna get his horn up the ass of that cute little eighteen-year-old bank robber that just got processed in, he is going to start thinking about how he can blow smoke up your ass instead.”

  “You concede my point, I take it, Doctor Riordan,” Mayes said, smiling. “Homosexual rape is one of our biggest concerns in this institution. Of course we want to reduce it. This program isn’t intended to prevent it entirely. Nothing can do that. But it’s an ameliorative palliative for a very problematical situation, and to the extent that it does that, it is at least a qualified success. That’s why we implemented it, and we are very encouraged by that result as well as a good many others. It is rehabilitative.”

  “It’s bribery,” Riordan said. “Call things by their right names, will you, for Christ sake? You’re telling these lifers that they’ll do at least fifteen unless they kiss your ass. But, if they’ll be good little boys, with good table manners, eat all their porridge, and promise never, never, to do anything naughty again, you will let them go out and play in seven years or so. You think these guys with long bits to do’re calling this little song and dance ‘rehabilitation’? Is that really what you think? They’re calling you a pushover, which you are, and they are losing any respect they might’ve had for authority. Which was damned little to start with or they wouldn’t be in here, and you’re waltzing around in the parameters of your little dream world, pretending you’re converting sinners. Hogwash.”

  Mayes stood up, his face red and his jaw muscles working. Dietz, hurriedly taking the bulldog pipe out of the ashtray as Riordan stubbed his butt into it, stood up a split second later. “I don’t have to tolerate this, Kenneth,” he said to Walker. “If this is the sort of cooperation we can expect from the federal authorities, I for one am going to recommend that we terminate their privileges.”

  “What’re you going to do to me, Doctor Mayes,” Riordan said in a whining voice, “put me back doing hard labor? Or is it that I can’t have any pudding for the next week and my allowance is cut off? Please sir, please, I didn’t mean no harm.”

  “Okay, okay,” Walker said, “I’ll talk to you and Oscar later. Now just let’s everybody calm down.”

  “Kenneth …” Dietz said.

  Walker held up his left hand. “Later, Oscar,” he said, “later.” Mayes and Dietz left the room. “Well,” Walker said, leaning forward, “I can’t say I didn’t expect it, and after Oscar, I assume, warned him, I told him what’d probably happen. But you say what you want about Mayes, keeping in mind that I’ve already said most of it, he is still one stubborn son of a bitch. You tell him he’s walking into a straight right and he hunches up his shoulders and climbs through the ropes into the ring.”

  “Where, I assume, he gets hit with a straight right hand,” Riordan said.

  “Invariably,” Walker said. “The guy … look, the guy’s job was mandated by that same group of people that you always find reforming the prisons. They’ve never been in a prison in their lives, most of them. They’ve never had any contact with the poor mistreated men and women that they want to save for Jesus, or for happy, productive lives in the community. It doesn’t matter what the justification is. They are doing good, and they don’t give a good goddamn what the facts might happen to be. All a guy needs to do is make two or three speeches to those groups about how he found the Lord and was reborn while he was doing time, and they start to swoon with the joy of it all. They never even stop to think about how the guy got all that time to find his Saviour. Ahhh, it makes me sick.

  “You put Mayes in front of one of those groups,” Walker said, “and he comes on like an admiral at the budget hearings of the House Armed Services Committee. He has got charts and he has got graphs. He has got plastic overlays and sheets of statistics. He has two or three pet trusties that he brings with him and they do everything but cartwheels and handsprings for the crowd while Mayes tells about the structural dynamic of the rehabilitative environment, and how fine and inspiring the results of his programs have been. You get him in front of sixty ladies at the Acton Town Hall, the Rotary Club in Boxborough, or some legislative committee, and those folks can barely contain themselves when they see that their tax dollars are really being used to reclaim these unfortunate men, these victims of society, from a life of crime. They think he’s great.”

  “Does he really believe all that shit that comes pouring out of him?” Riordan said.

  “Sure,” Walker said, “That’s why he got so mad when you started needling him. And if he didn’t believe it before he started going around and wowing the innocents, the reception he’s gotten from them’d be enough to’ve convinced him by now. He’s on Channel Two and he’s a Globe profile and he does daytime talk shows on the radio—no night shows, though, because he got some rough handling when he started giving his spiel to the guys coming off the night shift driving cabs, or working down at the shipyard. Mayes doesn’t like disrespect. He’s not used to it. And since he’s got a statutory appointment and the Governor loves his Commissioner of Corrections that’s another dreamer, he’ll probably never have to get used to it.”

  “He’ll have to stay away from me to avoid it,” Riordan said. “My God, what a shithead.”

  Walker laughed. “Ah, Pete,” he said, “the guy drives me nuts, but that’s to be expected, because I’ve been at this line of work for twenty-five years. Naturally I get pissed off when somebody like him comes along and tells me I’ve been doing everything all wrong. But I’m an antique. You’re not. Your age, you should be taking his side. You’re a throwback.

  “See, what I have to keep remembering,” Walker said, “is that my way wasn’t very successful either. We had riots when I was just starting out and the weather got hot. We had fights with shivs in the chow line—they were over moonshine then, not pills and heroin, but the result was the same:
A guy we had in our custody got killed by another guy we had in our custody. When Mayes starts preaching to me, I just sit there and listen as politely as I can, because if I start arguing with him, he can always ask me why my approach got such lousy results. And I haven’t got an answer for him. So when he starts all that goofy talk about giving the men something to look forward to, I just try to scrape off all the bullshit and the fancy words he picked up in school and translate what’s left. Maybe he can get us through the summer without me having to holler for the State Police and the National Guard armor. Maybe he can’t. Maybe this thing, maybe nobody can run it. Maybe it just can’t be done, and we’ll end up admitting that we’re doing exactly what we have been doing all this time without admitting it—when a guy gets convicted of doing something serious, nobody’s figured out how to give him the proper outlook on life. So we will lock him up for a good long time with a bunch of other rats just as vicious as he is, and see if by the time he gets out he’s lost interest in raising hell. Maybe he’ll be too old to have the energy to do it again. Maybe he’ll never get to be old because somebody’ll throttle him with a piece of steel cable in the machine shop, or stick a screwdriver in his belly. Maybe he’ll throw one gob too many of his own shit at the wrong guard some night, and get pounded to death in the corridor before anyone else can come and pull the guard off him. Just admit it. Come right out and say it. ‘We don’t like it, and we know it’s no good, but then again, you’re no good and we caught you at it, so we’re going to put you in and if you’re lucky you’ll come out. If you aren’t, you won’t, but it’s your life and you made the decision to take the chance on wasting a good chunk of it this way. You lost your bet. In you go.’ ”

  “Yeah,” Riordan said, “but Magro’s apparently coming out again.”

  “It looks that way, Pete,” Walker said. “Lemme put it this way: Nobody won’t tell me for sure that he isn’t, and that usually means he is. Why’s it bother you? Guy’s a short-hitting hood. That guy he took out, David Holby? When I got wind of Magro getting ready to check out of my little fantasy island here, I pulled his folder. Holby wasn’t much, so far as I could tell. Oh, he was taking up singing, like you said, but the only guy he had a real chance of making, far as I could see, was some fence in Millis that handled mostly hot washing machines and television sets. The only thing the fence had going for him was that he did time down Cranston with some buddy of the boss, and he called up the guy and asked him for a favor and the guy was feeling generous and got it cleared.