High Crimes

by William Deverell

  Mitchell comes back with, “It’s all a game, isn’t it?” And he carries on down the stairs to Water Street.

  I like The Bullet for that. He does not mince words. I mean, it is a game, and everybody knows it except the lawyers and judges. Of course, when you are on the wrong end of a serious beef, you want someone who can win the game. I have seen lawyers who do not even know the rules. Peddigrew is good at the game. But do not let him draw up your rich aunt’s will.

  The smugness disappears from Peddigrew’s face and is replaced by dismay as he sees Pete smiling at him from behind the steering wheel of the Jaguar. Pete is inviting friends in. “Can I borrow your machine, boy?” he says, having done so already.

  Peddigrew complains that Pete doesn’t have a license — it’s expired. “Don’t you worry about me at all, me darlin’ man,” Pete says. The car takes off like a stung horse, spewing slush and gravel.

  Pete is yelling: “Free at last! Thank God a’mighty, we’re free at last!”

  I take Kevin, Merrie, and the kids home in my pickup. I can see that Merrie really wants Kevin to stick around — but she knows that this is celebration night, and in the end she sends him back out to the pickup truck with me. We head for the Blue Boar Lounge. That is where we celebrate. It is the local hangout of Pete and his Masterless Men.

  When we arrive, it is already rocking. Most of the folk from a local band called Stingo have gotten together for Pete and Kelly, and the amps are turned up to a level that threatens ear damage. The music is a kind of rock and reel: old-time Newfoundland jigs and dances electrified and rocked up.

  The evening is what they call there a “shockin’ good toime.” The management, which is Jimmy Arthur, one of the boys, has sprung for the first five rounds. I do not need drink to get loaded, because I am loaded on the vibrations.

  As a student of highs, I can tell you that a contact high is among the best. You are looking into people’s eyes, and you have to smile with them. No choice is offered. Such highs are rare now, although common fifteen years ago when everyone thought the world was going to get better. Business has now taken over the production of highs. Rednecks are dealing marijuana. Car salesmen are snorting cocaine. Cops sneak home with their purloined stashes and toke to Johnny Cash on their eight-tracks. You would not believe how everything has begun to suck.

  After a while the good time at the Blue Boar has begun to peak, and there comes into the air a restlessness that forebodes an ill wind. Pete has been bouncing around like a pinball, a glass of rye whiskey in each hand, a half-smoked reefer hanging from his lower lip. His eyes have that ultimate glazed look, the kind you get before your lights go out for the night. He wears a crooked grin that is warning to everyone who knows him well.

  Pete Kerrivan has just entered a marginal, unpredictable state of loadedness. And that is when the Phantom Riders make their grand appearance.

  Midge Tobin and about ten or twelve of them push in past the lineup outside. By the way, there is nothing Jimmy Arthur or his doorman are going to do about Midge Tobin and the Phantom Riders. If these fellows want to come into a crowded bar, despite the fire marshal’s regulations, they come into that crowded bar. Tobin’s expressed excuse for being there is to give Pete and Kelly a slap on the back, but there is another reason for this visit, which is that Midge Tobin has to show off Julie McIver, sweetly smiling in her new boots and leather.

  Julie is Pete’s most recent ex-lady, who after a while stopped visiting him in the joint and took up with Tobin, for whom she was a status symbol, with her arms around him sitting on the back of his Harley. She was a status symbol in that she used to go with Kerrivan.

  “’Tis a fine grand night for a party, Pete,” Tobin calls out. His eyes are pinned, and to me he looks to have been doing white crosses, some of which were around then. They look like aspirin, hit you like speed, and I have known some laboratory maniacs to stretch them with strychnine. Anyway, Midge’s hand is on Julie’s bottom, on the starboard cheek. He is wearing her like an expensive jewel.

  Pete stops dancing about, and he says to him: “Are you still riding bike, Tobin? And do you like to feel that big ugly machine up between your legs, old son? Are you still riding that dirty old vibrator, and does it get your rocks off?” This is the picture: Pete is just standing there, bellowing at Tobin above the music. “I didn’t hear if you said something, boy,” he goes on: “I asked if you’re still riding the old love machine? Is it a great feeling, that dirty big roaring machine thundering between your legs?” Pete is eyeing Julie McIver all the while.

  I do not catch all the lines in the exchange that follows, but Tobin’s best one was, “You think you’re God, don’t you, you four-eyed finger-knuckle-fucker.” A fuck-knuckles, or a knuckle-fucker, is a Newfoundland rude phrase, and custom demands satisfaction and redress. I recall being in awe that Tobin, who is never straight, rarely sober, is able to get the words out without Peter-Pipering them.

  Pete answers back, but muffs it. “How would you like to go outside and call me a four-eyed fingle-knucker-fucker? Let’s see if you got the nuts to repeat it outside.”

  Midge’s eyes narrow down to little slits, and almost disappear into the beef around them. “Sure,” he says. “Sure, I’ll see you outside.” He leads his boys out; Julie stays. It would not be proper for her to watch the two combatants duel over her honor.

  We all get up to go with Pete. Kelly is there, plus me, and we have thirty other good boys who could be counted on to look after the rest of the Riders. But Pete waves us all down.

  “Easy, boys,” he calls out. “There is no call for violence. I am a man of peace and love.” He does not go outside.

  After a few minutes Tobin opens the door and peeks in, and of course sees Julie caught in a lingering embrace with the man of peace and love. Tobin comes back to the bar, spitting like a jealous cat.

  Pete is very casual, his arm around Julie, and he says, with a surprised look, “Tobin, old son, and what’re you doing back here then? I told you to go outside and call me a four-eyed fuckle-knucker.”

  I don’t see Tobin throw the mug of beer, but I assume he does, because there it is whirling through the air, gushing froth, beer pouring from it over Pete’s face. I am, so far, restraining myself. It is lucky I have had only a few beers because when I get smashed I tend to become King Kong. And I will back Pete up all the way, as he will me.

  Anyway, Pete is standing there, his mouth open in a kind of joy as opposed to hurt or anger, and his glasses have slipped down and are hanging from one ear, and Tobin is thundering towards him. When Pete is drunk his instincts seem to work better. Basically, that is because instinct is all he has going for himself on such occasions. As Midge’s great hairy belly comes flying at him — like a panther in one of the old Johnny Weissmuller movies — Pete lifts his right knee, a very hard and knobby item, and the onrushing groin of Midge Tobin collides with it.

  There is a great grunt from Tobin. He bends double and as he goes by, Pete gives him a crack with the reinforced toe of his work boot, and Tobin is a beached whale, flailing through the slosh on the floor, temporarily out of action.

  The rest of the Riders are pouring inside now, moving towards Pete, and people are getting up, chairs falling over, and the band is rocking like crazy on the stage.

  But suddenly Pete has his arms high in the air and he is yelling. Everyone stops moving and shouting. The lead guitar stops dead in the middle of a riff.

  “Hold it, boys, hold it,” Pete says. “I can’t see without my glasses.”

  Pete is slowly wiping the beer from his lenses with the tail of his shirt, and carefully fitting the glasses back on.

  “I thank you,” he says, “for your patience.”

  Then he picks up a chair and wings it right at Crazy Dewey Fitzgerald, who is the second bike of the Riders.

  Let me not dwell upon the carnage. I do not see it all, anyway, because
I am no innocent bystander. I will say it was a good one; I hear they still talk about it.

  ***

  When the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary comes by, everyone splits except for a few of the staff and Kelly and me and Pete and Midge Tobin, who has been decked to the floor and is just woozily coming to.

  Pete is slumped in a chair studying his broken spectacles, uttering blasphemies. Kelly is holding some ice to Pete’s jaw which, along with cheeks and fists, has begun to purple up. Constable Charlie Johnston is standing there, just shaking his head.

  “I think I may have started it, I’m not sure,” Pete says.

  “I’m an innocent bystander,” Tobin mumbles.

  “Okay, get out of here,” Charlie tells him.

  Tobin limps out the front door.

  Constable Johnston has brought his first-aid kit with him and begins brushing iodine on a beer-glass cut on Pete’s arm.

  “Use your great wonderful brain, Pete,” he says. “For sure, you’ll end up in the slammer again.” He then includes Kelly and me in a wide sweep of his arm. “You, too,” he says, “both of you.”

  “I do no evil,” says Pete. “My role on earth is to make people happy. I buy a little weed for my friends; I spread joy. Jesus, look at this,” he says, and he is wiggling the frames of his glasses, which are broken apart at the middle where they go over the nose.

  Charlie passes him a role of adhesive tape. “That’ll hold them together until you get to an optimist,” he says.

  “An optimist is what I need,” says Pete. “I am broke, ill-provided, and in straightened circumstances.”

  Charlie raises an eyebrow at this. “The Mounties think you should be a millionaire, Pete.”

  “It’s a dream.”

  Pete has never known how to put any profits away. Whenever his ship came in there were suddenly a hundred old friends who had had a bad year fishing, or somebody’s house burned down. Or like the trip three years ago when we came up with three tons in an old tug, right up the snout of Judas Bight while some of our boys were getting the fellows from the police launch drunk at a wedding party. After distributing the usual paltry crew shares to Kelly and me and the landing party, Pete donated the rest to build a doctor’s clinic in his hometown. There has never been a patient in that empty building. No doctor wants to practice in O’Donoghue’s Nose, Province of Newfoundland.

  But that’s Pete. If he wasn’t giving to the poor, he was giving to the rich casino owners in Nassau or Atlantic City. He was a high roller, Pete. We used to call him Captain Jackpot.

  Pete came close a couple of times. Once he was coming in with five tons and started celebrating a little too early, got stoned, and dropped a match into the bales in the hold of his old herring seiner. The bales smoldered for a while, then caught, and everything went down, and there we were, rowing ashore in a dinghy.

  He was years recouping and finally put together enough money to buy a heavy, wooden-hulled dragger from a Lunenburg scallop company, and he persuaded the Ugarte family in Bogotá to front him eight tons on a small down payment. Pete had buyers lined up in Boston, and after making his nut he figured to clear one and a half million. But, as you know, fate in the form of Inspector H.E. Mitchell intervened, and popped Pete’s bubble.

  And now Pete is back to square one. Worse. The square root of minus zip.

  “I am busted,” he says to us.

  “And busted you will be if you try to drive a car tonight,” says Constable Charlie Johnston. “Why don’t you try to earn a legal living, Pete? Would it be too terrible a shock to the system? Take your master’s ticket and fly straight like a goose out of here, down to the States, away from the drug boys. The Mounties are after your blood — Mitchell, and that crowd. Now don’t you be driving, me son, or I’ll take you in for sure.”

  Charlie and his partner hang around for a while helping Jimmy Arthur clean up; then they go off.

  Pete is slipping into a funk.

  “I am a poor man without my boat,” he mumbles. “They have seized and auctioned off my boat, boys.” He looks at us with an expression that suggests he has been the victim of a great unfairness. “And they burned my pot. They’re worse than arseholes, they’re arsonholes. No boat, no pot, and I owe that greasy Mafioso my last coin.”

  I assume he is talking about Ugarte, head of one of the twelve big Colombian dope families. They are called Mafia down there, although there is no Sicilian connection.

  Now Pete’s expression slowly comes alive. I know this look.

  “Well, boys,” he says, “we need to earn some bread quick. Muy pronto. So what are we going to do?”

  He wants the answer to come from us.

  Kelly, who has stated his position many times before, states it again this night. “I am out of it, Pete,” he says. “We did the one too many. The thirteenth.” Kelly is superstitious in the extreme. I have seen him panic if somebody whistles on a boat.

  Pete says, “Ah, but Kevin, me darling man, the next trip will be number fourteen.”

  “I don’t count the last one,” says Kelly.

  “Kevin, me dear son, one final, last, and never-to-be-repeated journey to the land of the Guajira is the very bottom line. As well, it is a necessity of life. The Bullet having put the torch to sixteen thousand pounds of Colombian gold, we are in hock to Ugarte a couple of million, and it may as well be a trillion dollars.”

  “You are in hock, Pete,” says Kelly. “Johnny and me, we are just crew members, persuaded against our will for the last never-to-be-repeated trip.”

  “One more trip,” says Pete. “It gets us just dead even keel, and then we retire to a life of dissipation.”

  Kelly just shakes his head. He is one of the best marine mechanics you will find, a good man from anchor to anchor, as they say, and over the years he has kept many of Pete’s broken-down tubs afloat with gum and old bolts.

  Pete tries a different approach. “My dear man, I am going to need your help on one more trip just to save myself from some asesino they send up here who wants to put a knife in my back. Ugarte, you pay him in hard dollars, or you pay him en sangre fria.” Which is to say, in cold blood.

  “He won’t send anyone up here,” Kelly says.

  “You bet your biff he will,” says Pete.

  “You have no boat, anyway.”

  Pete slumps in his chair, realizing this is a good argument. His trawler has been auctioned off for a song.

  “Ah, God,” he says. “Lard Jesus, b’ys.” His brogue is pronounced when he has been drinking. “It’s a terrible hard life running a small business.” He pulls himself together, gets up on his feet. “Just the same, I’m going down one more time.” And he looks at Kelly through his puffy eyes. “You certain you don’t want to come?”

  “My dear man,” says Kelly. “I am as certain as the stars.”

  Pete does not bother to ask me. He knows me well, and he understands that I am a smuggling junkie. I will go with him even if I have to row the pot back up in a ten-foot dory. But Kelly, I could not blame him, with his kids and wife.

  We all get into the Jaguar. Pete stamps on the pedal. We go off to the Grand Ballroom, which stays open until four a.m.

  Chapter Four

  James Peddigrew’s first thought, as he struggled to wake from a dream in which he was being pursued, was that a lynch mob was at the door. He looked at his watch: six-thirty in the morning. The sound from outside his hotel suite was the sound of Pete Kerrivan, drunken and raucous.

  “All right, all right,” Peddigrew called, and he crawled from his bed, put a robe on, and unlocked the door. Kerrivan looked like the wrath of God and smelled like an alehouse bum. Leaning against him, half-asleep, was an attractive young woman.

  “I thought I’d return your car, James, boy. Sorry about the left door, but the poor fellow in the truck wouldn’t stop for the green light. He must have
been drunk.”

  Peddigrew muttered a weary oath.

  “I thought if you were checking out today, we’d use your room to crash for the rest o’ the mornin’.” The words came with a south Newfoundland lilt.

  “It’s six-thirty, for Christ’s sake,” said Peddigrew.

  “Yes, an unholy hour, for certain. This, my dear man, is Belinda. Belinda, darling, I’d like you to meet my mouthpiece, Mr. Peddigrew.”

  “Hi,” she murmured.

  “You’re a mess,” Peddigrew told Kerrivan. “What happened to you?”

  Kerrivan led Belinda into the room, squeezing past Peddigrew. “I was set upon by some unruly men,” he said. He found Peddigrew’s bottle of single malt scotch on the bureau, and splashed a few ounces into a glass.

  “Can we talk alone?” Peddigrew’s voice had a hushed, conspiratorial edge.

  “We’ve got no secrets,” said Kerrivan. “I owe you money, no getting around that. I’ll pay you as soon as I get my affairs in order.”

  “How are you going to do that? You don’t have a pot to pee in.”

  “Pot. Ah, my dear man, pot is the answer. The Sierra Nevada is abloom with flowers at this season. It’s a wonderful grand sight.”

  “You’re going back down?” Peddigrew looked nervously at Belinda, who was in the middle of the room, swaying drunkenly.

  “Why, sure, and I’m going to put together the biggest damn smuggle of the century. I’m aiming to pick myself up twenty tons of Colombian gold, somehow. So I thought you could lend me a little cash to get me going. Enough to buy a couple of trawlers and a bit of diesel fuel, and a little spending money.”

  “That’s crazy.” Peddigrew emitted a nervous snort. He went to the door of the bathroom, and motioned for Kerrivan to follow. “Come in here for a few minutes. I want to talk to you.”

  “Keep the bed warm, Belinda, love, and I’ll be joining you in a minute.” Kerrivan eased her towards the bed, gave her a nudge, and she toppled onto it.