“Well,” Riordan said, “I don’t have any appointment or anything. If he’s busy …”
“He isn’t doing a goddamned thing,” she said. “They had a short meeting today and he’s on the phone the way he always is, telling lies to his buddies and getting them to tell him stories in return. What’s your name?”
“Riordan,” Riordan said.
“Hey, Seats,” Alice yelled, “man named Riordan here to see you.”
“Hey, Riordan,” Lobianco said, “I haven’t got your goddamned magazine. Nothing I can do about your foglights and your taillights, run around in that surgeon’s car you got, impressing everybody.”
Riordan looked at Alice. “Some other Riordan, I guess,” she said. “Joint’s crawling with them. Go on in and let him find out for himself.”
Riordan opened the door to Lobianco’s office. Seats continued talking until he could see Riordan. “What you got to do is duke the guy five now and then and quit acting so goddamned high and … Who the hell’re you?”
“I’m Riordan,” Riordan said.
Seats took his feet off the desk and stood up. “Sorry,” he said, “I thought you were somebody else I know named Reardon.”
“I guess not, huh?” Riordan said.
“No indeed,” Lobianco said. “Which Riordan are you?”
Riordan took out the credentials and flopped them open as he walked toward the desk. “Inspector General’s office,” he said. “Department of Justice.”
Lobianco sat down fast in the chair. “Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Hey,” Riordan said, “don’t take it so hard. This’s just a courtesy call.” He put the credentials back into his pocket. “Can I sit down?”
“Oh, sure,” Lobianco said, waving his right hand. “Courtesy call. That’s what they always say, just before they come with the wagon. Sure, sit down. How long we got to wait, you figure? They get tied up in traffic? Can I call my lawyer? Shit, what am I saying? I haven’t even got a lawyer. Okay, what’s the beef, huh? I can take it.”
“I’m awful thirsty,” Riordan said. “Is there any chance somebody could get me a Coke?”
“Coke?” Lobianco said. “Coke? Sure, we can get you a Coke. Like some nice Chivas Regal instead, maybe? Little Bombay gin and tonic? You just name it and you got it, General Riordan. Always like to make a man feel comfortable, while he’s waiting to take me away.”
“Coke’ll be fine,” Riordan said. “It’s Agent Riordan. Pete will do.”
“Alice,” Lobianco shouted, “get the nice man from Justice a nice cold Coca-Cola, all right?” To Riordan he said, “You serious? I’m not in the shit? Because I swear to God, I haven’t done anything.”
“Honest to God,” Riordan said, laughing. “I’m here for information, and I hear you’re a right guy. Okay if I take my coat off?”
“Sure, sure,” Lobianco said. “Anything you want. Take your fuckin’ pants off, you want, just so’s I don’t have to go down to the Federal Building. Jesus Christ,” he said, as Riordan took the coat off.
“Relax,” Riordan said, “I’m not here to take you in, and I’m not here to shoot you, either.” He tossed the coat onto the table where the scanner blinked. His tan shirt was wet under the arms. “I know a guy in State Police, says you’re all right.” Alice came in with a can of Coke and a paper napkin, widened her eyes when she saw the gun, and left the room silently. Riordan drank from the Coke can. “Tell me all you know about Michael Magro.”
“Jesus Christ,” Lobianco said. “Here I was sitting here, minding my own business, and then this guy with more firepower’n the Sixth Fleet comes in and he’s the third guy today that wants to talk to me about Magro. I must be losing my touch. I figure you’re gonna want payoffs and kickbacks and stuff like that, information about that, and instead it’s this same two-bit hood that I came back from talking about at lunch and I never even heard of the guy in my life before. And then again at the meeting. I mean it. Until today, I never even heard the guy. And now his name’s on everybody’s lips, like they say.”
“Well,” Riordan said, “his name’s up before the Council.”
“Ahh,” Lobianco said, “that goes for lots of guys. They go away for a long time, they try every court thing they can think of to get themselves out, and then when they run out of courts, they try the Governor. Some of those things we just deny. A few of them, sure, we vote a hearing. Guy knocked off his wife or something. Won’t do it again. Kid did a year for B and E when he was eighteen, got out, went in the service, good record, honorable discharge, got himself married, college nights, worked hard, law school nights, then he comes in and he wants a pardon so he can get his ticket, practice law. Sure, no hearing on that either. Don’t need one. This guy Magro? He doesn’t stand a chance, I figure. Why waste everybody’s time on it? We haven’t got as much time as he’s got, and we got more things to do. Then all of a sudden, his case comes up for the first hearing today. I get a call from a Rep, he wants the thing heard. Then a Councillor, same thing. Now you. I called a guy I know, also knows everything, he doesn’t know from this guy either. I was just talking to him when you came in. Because, see …”
“Who’s the Rep?” Riordan said.
“Guy named Ticker Greenan,” Lobianco said. “Edmund Greenan. D. Roslindale.”
“Heavy hitter?” Riordan said.
“Standing joke’d be more like it,” Lobianco said. “They keep sending him back for sentimental reasons, I guess. He’s harmless enough.”
“On the take?” Riordan said.
“Suppose he could be,” Lobianco said. “Pretty hard to believe, though. He hasn’t got enough horsepower to do anything important here. Tell you the truth, Greenan never asks me for anything that he wouldn’t get anyway, without asking me or anybody else. I never told him that, and I’m not gonna, because I think he’s funny.
“I get back from lunch,” Lobianco said. “I go into the meeting, we do diddly-squat on one judgeship that was just a formality, and pretty soon the lady gets her robe. Then we got a first hearing on a Supreme Court judgeship, no particular problem—guy’s well qualified, clean, good family man, you couldn’t pick a better candidate. That gets us to the junkpile. And one of the Councillors says, before I can even call the matter, ‘This Magro case. I think we should address that. In executive session.’ ”
“What’s the Councillor’s name?” Riordan said.
“Tommy Emmett,” Lobianco said. “The Right Honorable Thomas J. Emmett, of Worcester.”
“And did you?” Riordan said.
“Executive session?” Lobianco said. “No. Nobody wants to throw the reporters out in order to discuss something they don’t know anything about. We tabled it.”
“This Greenan character,” Riordan said. “He say anything else to you about Magro, why he was doing this?”
“Yeah,” Lobianco said. “I don’t know if it’s worth a pisshole in the snow, but he said he was asking me for this Magro kid because Monsignor Fahey out at Precious Blood asked him. Precious Blood is West Roxbury.”
RIORDAN ENTERED the narrow gate in the high stucco wall surrounding the stucco rectory and Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Larkspur Street in Weston, the light green Ford sedan having inches to spare on each side. He parked in the oval in front of the rectory, nosing the Ford into the overhanging branches of the rhododendrons, and got out in the morning sunshine. He wore the sunglasses, and a long-sleeved white shirt, open at the neck, with tan chino pants and the Survivor boots. The magnum rode against his hip. He reached into the car and took a light blue linen sports coat from the front seat. He put it on, shut the door and locked it. He noticed, without distinguishing the varieties, flowers blooming along the wall, and the long green lawn extending southward from the rectory, shaded under the black maples. He went to the double door of the rectory, gated in the same wrought iron that framed the driveway gate, and rang the bell.
Mrs. Herlihy, the housekeeper, answered as promptly as she could. She was pushing sevent
y, but was lamed up and bent over with arthritis, and she moved slowly. When she got the door open, a smile spread across her face. “Peter Riordan,” she said, “you rogue. Father told me that he saw you yesterday, and I was very angry with you for not coming here.”
Riordan stepped into the foyer onto the Kerman runner. “Mrs. Herlihy,” he said, smiling back at her, “now I ask you, would I be after doin’ a thing such as that? It’s but little you’re thinkin’ of me these days, I can see.”
She began to laugh, and moving as best she could, embraced him. He hugged her in return, but she stepped back with some agility. “And that thing on your belt,” she said. “Just what might that be, may I ask?”
“A mere trifle required in me job by the government of the United States of America, Mrs. Herlihy,” Riordan said. “Have not a care for it; I never discharge it in friendly surroundings.”
“Yes,” she said, “I had me granduncles, made the same claim, I did. And when I was but a little girl I lost me two of them at the Post Office at the Rising of the Moon. I suppose you want to see Father.”
“I do,” Riordan said, “although I’m beginning to wonder why he stays here. At the club yesterday, they called him Your Excellency, and here he comes home and the best he can expect is Father.”
“Father is what he prefers,” she said. “When he was raised to the bishopric, they started to call him Your Eminence, and he asked them to continue calling him Father, so they started calling him Your Excellency. Makin’ fun of the poor man as usual. I believe he should have his own preferences, in his own house, and if Father is what he chooses, then Father it shall be, as far as I’m concerned. I’ll take you to him.”
She turned and started down the hall, moving with difficulty, Riordan limping behind her. “And a fine pair we make, don’t we, Peter,” she said. “Here I am, all crippled up and long before my time, barely able to get around at all, and you, staggering along there like you spent all the night in some pub. And himself in the study there, nothing but a bag of bones as he is since he’s sick, waiting for the rest of us other wrecks to come in. A fine business it is, when the meek and the merciful are punished like this for the sins of the rest.” Riordan began to laugh.
“I mean it,” she said with firmness. “Why, would you look at all those brave young men, so fine in their clothes and their fancy cars, escorting their families to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and not one of them with the common decency to have fought for his country in her hour of need, they was all hidin’ out in university or somethin’. And a fine brave fellow like yourself that goes and does his duty, comes back here exactly the same age as them, all shot up and wounded like a common criminal, with nothin’ to show for it and the back of the hand from the people he was defendin’. That isn’t right, you know. And then there is the poor Father here, a better man you could not hope to find, still in the prime of his life and the best of it left, and what happens to him? Struck down like a steer in for the slaughtering and it’s only by the grace of God he lived at all.”
“It was that serious, then?” Riordan said.
“It was that, Peter,” she said. “And here we are, always seein’ these mealy-mouthed priests with not half the courage nor a third of the brains that he’s got, out there paradin’ with the do-nothin’ lazy welfare people and raisin’ their voices for this and for that, on the television every night—why, I tell you, Peter, it’s enough to make you sick at heart. Why don’t it happen to them, I ask you? The likes of them that care nothin’ for people but only for gettin’ up with a microphone there and makin’ a lot of damned noise and gettin’ their pictures on the television. And then what do they do? Why, they take off their collars and run off with some nun and get married. That’s what they do.”
They were at the open door to the study. Paul Doherty in a rose-colored golf shirt and light blue trousers, both garments too large for him, was practicing his putting on the rose-colored Oriental, aiming toward an automatic ball-return device in front of the French windows that looked out on the lawn. In the kneehole of the desk, a large, liver-and-white bulldog inspected Riordan with dignified thoughtfulness.
“Mrs. Herlihy,” Paul Doherty said, bending over the ball, “if you keep on ranting like that about all of the young priests and nuns running off to get married, you’ll be the next to have an attack in this house.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s true and you know it. Breakin’ their vows like that, and all. Breakin’ their solemn word to God. Priests and nuns. A fine thing.”
He attempted the putt, straightened up, and watched as it rolled up the slight incline of the device and back down again onto the carpet. “These things’re great, Peter,” he said, turning to face them. “The wonders of modern ingenuity. You get the ball in the hole and the little thing in there fires it right back down to you. The thing of it is, you have to get the ball into the hole first. And anyway, I’ve seen very few putting greens where the hole was at the top of a little hill.”
“Some coffee, Father, Peter?” she said.
“Uhh,” Riordan said, “you wouldn’t have any of that breakfast tea around that I remember, would you?”
“I do,” she said, “and you, Father?”
“The same, please,” he said. After she had left the room, he said, “I see your memory of Mrs. Herlihy’s coffee hasn’t faded, Peter.”
“No more’n my memory of my own cars, get the parts and supplies down at Western Auto and save a couple dollars. And the first time I ever drained a crankcase, I recognized it right off. ‘So that’s where they get the stuff,’ I said. I didn’t taste it, but then again, I didn’t have to—it looked the same and it smelled about the same, so it had to taste the same. I took it on faith.”
“How is your own dear mother?” Doherty said. “Your own dear father, as far as that goes, God, it’s been years since I’ve heard from them, seems like. Card at Christmas, and that’s about it. How do they like it out there?”
“I think they don’t, actually,” Riordan said. Doherty rested the putter against the desk and motioned toward the red leather two-cushion couch and and two high-backed chairs at the fireplace opposite. There was a coffee table between the couch and the fireplace, and there was a large spray of daisy chrysanthemums in the grate.
“I thought they were making a mistake when they moved away from here,” Riordan said. “Actually, I thought my father was making a mistake when he sold his practice and retired early. I wouldn’t go for spending any part of my life doing what he did, examining squalling brats all day, giving shots, taking phone calls in the middle of the damned night from some hysterical parent whose kid coughed once in his sleep, but he loved it. My mother loved it here too. All their friends’re around here, were then, and most of them still are. Every letter I get from my mother, she tells me how So-and-so’s thinking about moving out there to join them, and as soon as this one gets her husband’s estate settled, she’s coming out. And then there’s Mister Whoever-the-hell-it-is, who’s moving out as soon as his wife’s long illness is finally over. But they never do, I guess.
“Funny, I can’t even remember half of those people,” Riordan said. “Well-to-do insurance men and brokers and their wives who puttered around in real estate and had Tuesday afternoon luncheons on each other’s sunporches, getting silly on a small glass of white wine and eating tomatoes stuffed with chicken salad. They bored me when they came to visit my parents, and their kids bored me when I got dragged along to visit with my parents. But it was their life, and they did love it. I don’t care how much they save on oil in Sun City or Roy Rogers Villa Estates or whatever the hell they call that damned thing out in Arizona, they are lonely.
“That’s what I think, anyway. They play golf every day, and there’s a pool that all the neighbors share, but all the neighbors are old. Everybody in that town is old. My parents aren’t old. Not like that. Not young, certainly, but not old either. That’s why the people’re in that town. They’re old. They spend their nights hav
ing one cocktail on each other’s terraces and talking about their pension plans and what’s going to happen with Social Security.
“My mother writes to me every week. I write to them every week, and even though there’s a lot of stuff I can’t tell them—and a lot more I wouldn’t tell them if I could, because they would be packing for the next plane east, come and save their darling boy—that still leaves me with more to write about’n she’s got. The only fun any of them seem to have out there is when somebody comes to visit with grandchildren, and then I gather the poor little kids get no peace at all. God, must be awful, paraded around like prize pigs to every goddamned meeting place in town. ‘And these are our grandchildren. Tom and Edith, meet young David, little Priscilla, and this is the youngest, Orville. Confidentially, Edith, they haven’t said anything to us yet, but we think Orville’s going to have a little brother, Wilbur, around Christmas.’ Jesus.”
Doherty was laughing as they sat down. “Getting a little heat from June about settling down and starting a family, Pete?”
“I have that impression,” Riordan said. “Although if what I’m getting is a little heat, God pity the poor stokers in the Pittsburgh steel mills.”
“Why don’t you do it?” Doherty said.
“Ahh,” Riordan said, “that’s my sisters’ department. Joansie and Anne grew up in organdy frocks and spent their summers on the Irish Riviera, wearing little white slacks with strawberries on them and having everybody simper at them. Doctor Will’s little daughters. Both of them married guys who’re just perfect, talk with their teeth clenched and flail Volvos around the charming lanes of the better areas of New Jersey. ‘Take the eight-forty into the city, you know,’ because being partners and all, and doing so well, they don’t have to be at the office at any special hour. ‘Let’s drop the kids off in Arizona with June and Will for our holidays,’ while the couples jet off by themselves for a couple weeks à deux in Honolulu. Really zoomy people.”
The Pariot GAme Page 9