“You devil, you,” Farrier said. “No. A putting green? Or maybe a real beer tap?”
“A real beer tap, half-keg in a little icebox? They make those now—home beer taps. Expensive, but it might be worth it. But no, not that. What I’m gonna have is a refrigerator where the part I have to see into to find the stuff I’m looking for, like a beer when I want one, is the part I’m looking into when I’m standing up. Instead of the part I practically have to get down on my hands and knees to look into it, and the part I don’t need to look into, except maybe Easter and Hallowe’en, the damn freezer, is the part on the top.” He opened the first beer. “You wanna glass?”
“Yeah, you don’t mind,” Farrier said. “I never did get into this new-vogue thing, drinkin’ long neckers outta the bottle. Never appealed to me, somehow. Tried it once—gave me gas.”
“You’re probably too old for it,” Stoat said, putting the two beers and two pilsner glasses on a circular pewter tray and starting toward the living area.
“That’s probably it,” Farrier said. “That’s usually the explanation for most things I don’t understand lately.”
“Something, anyway,” Stoat said, bending again to set the tray on the coffee table in front of Farrier. As he straightened up, Farrier leaned forward, picking up a bottle and a glass and tilting it in order to pour the beer down the side. Stoat backed over to the club chair nearest the door and sat down. He absently watched Farrier pour as though not really seeing, seeming to have become lost in thought.
Farrier put a two-inch head on the beer in the glass and sat back again on the couch. He looked at Stoat. “What’re you, you’re not having a beer? Or’re you saying grace there or something?” he said.
Stoat shook his head once, frowned and collected himself. He leaned forward and took up the other glass and bottle. “No,” he said, duplicating Farrier’s care in pouring. “No, I was just thinking, is all.” He put the empty bottle on the table and sat back.
“Dangerous habit,” Farrie said. “I’d have to check the manual, but if I recall correctly it’s not generally approved for SAs with less than twelve years’ experience, at least nine of which’ve been in Interstate Flight to Avoid Prosecution—or Transportation Stolen Motor Vehicles, also always a crowd pleaser. About what?”
“About the Frogman, mainly,” Stoat said, scowling. He drank about a quarter of his beer. He kept the glass in his hands. He shook his head again. “Lily isn’t comfortable, what we do with these guys. Having gunsels in our homes. Says it doesn’t look good. Of course she’s not your basic FBI wife—she’s always had her own career, had it long ’fore she married me, and she came to this later in life’n most the bureau wives I know. Doesn’t have the same outlook.”
Cheri Farrier mocked Lily Stoat every time her name or her husband’s came up. “Oh, Ducal Melilly, with all her degrees? She’s so fuckin’ smart, somebody tell me—how come she married that dork?” Farrier lived in mixed dread and thrilled anticipation of the night when Cheri after too many vodka tonics at a bureau Christmas, farewell or retirement party, instead of taking off her high-heeled sandals and dancing on the bar, as she still did now and then, or going topless as she had one night in Buffalo—when she was still but resentfully married to her first husband, to wild approval that night and stern reprimands next day—would commence her imitation of “the internationally famous belle of Memphis, Lily—Weymuss—Stoat.” He had timed one private performance at more than eight minutes, and found it hilarious, so much so that he knew a more public one before Lily and other bureau people who also knew and disliked her would be devastating.
“Ah, background doesn’t matter,” Farrier said at once, smoothly. “All the wives I’ve ever known who found out about it, got to know about it—and I mean every single one of them—Helen Fogarty; Don Hulse’s wife, Jill, and Bobbi Sherman, Kenny Sherman’s wife, when they worked with Fogarty; my wife Cheri, for heaven’s sake, and she’s a bureau brat from the day she was born—none of the women married to men who got close enough to this understanding Al developed with the lads, they actually knew about it, saw how close it was—none of them’ve ever been comfortable with it. Ever.” He paused and thought a moment. “Maybe it’s a guy thing; they just can’t understand it.”
“It’s not a matter of understand,” Stoat said. He drank some more beer, and seemed calmer. He belched silently, inflating his cheeks and then swallowing. “Understand’s only the word that they use. And as usual they’re not being candid with us. What it is is a matter of like. Or approve.” He shook his head. “Which they don’t.” He kept the glass in his hand. “McKeach and the Frogman,” he said. “The two of them, coming here—bothers her. And therefore, it bothers me, too—some. The Frogman especially. Bothers me, I mean. I mean, I know he’s evil, ’cause I know what he does. He has to be evil, to do that. But we don’t seem to have much on him. He doesn’t have a record, to speak of. Some juvenile stuff. Sealed. Service record, navy—medals—actually looks very good. Fine.” He shook his head again, frowning. “But otherwise—nope, can’t find out that much about him. How do we know he’s for real?”
Farrier laughed. “Okay,” he said, “one thing at a time. First thing, about the wives—I’ll buy that. May have something there—it’s not that they don’t understand it—it’s that they don’t approve. But this thing—well, bear with me here, now; I’ll get back to the Frogman.”
“Okay,” Stoat said. He finished his beer.
“ ‘Disapproval,’ okay,” Farrier said, “probably part of it. But there’s another reason all the women always get uneasy when they get around this LCN stuff. It’s not because they think it’s violent. It’s because—and I don’t think they even know this, or realize they know it if they actually do? It’s because the OC squads remind them of the clubhouses we had in the woods, when we were kids. The best thing they had about them was the signs—‘NO GIRLS ALLOWED.’ Always had those signs—in big red letters.
“Which they never would’ve seen if we hadn’t shown them to them, let them know they were excluded. The treehouses and the forts we used to have, you know? I assume you Rebs had them too.”
Stoat laughed. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Ours had Confederate flags.” He frowned and studied the empty glass, the residual foam brownish on the sides.
“Right,” Farrier said. “Well, the mob still has them. Grownup, adult, dangerous men have all the rituals and stuff, the voodoo initiations with the holy cards and finger pricking, and the taking of solemn oaths? You look at this objectively and you have got to think that basically it’s silly—it is really—silly—shit.
“If you brought a smart woman into one of those super-secret, mystic-shrine, omerta ceremonies, all right? Unless you had her bound and gagged, she would bust out laughin’. ‘What the hell is goin’ on here? Have you guys all gone nuts? What time’s the tooth fairy arrive? Are we goin’ trick-or-treatin’?’
“Because organizationally, before they get to what they do and why they do it, that’s what the Mafia is, what it amounts to—a big fuckin’ treehouse, the exact same kind of thing. The boys’re a lot older, and bigger, more brutal, but otherwise it’s the Secret Blue Knights and the Shady Lane Outlaws and that stuff. It’s a wonder they don’t have softball leagues.” He paused but Stoat did not laugh. Farrier picked up his glass and drank about a quarter of it. He set the glass down again and contemplated it. “You know, that’s really not bad beer at all.”
“It really isn’t,” Stoat said, appearing to rouse himself. He considered his empty glass, turning it in his left hand. “You know,” he said, thoughtfully, “I think I might have another one.” He stood up with it in his hand, looking at Farrier. “You?”
Farrier shook his head, laughing. “No, no,” he said, nodding to his glass. “I still got some of mine left. But you go right ahead.”
“Well, I will, then,” Stoat said. He bent and put his glass on the coffee table and turned away. “You keep talking, though,” he said. “I can still hea
r you. This’s all stuff I should know.”
Farrier shook his head and smirked at Stoat’s back as he disappeared into the kitchen. “Oh, I dunno,” he said. “It’s all ancient history, going back to the Crusades, Sicilians getting together and arming themselves to fight off marauding Christian knights returning from the Holy Land. You’ve done all right without it, so far. We work in the modern day.”
Stoat returned to the entertainment area with two more bottles of Pete’s Wicked Ale. He put one down on the table and poured the other into his glass. “For when you’re ready,” he said, nodding toward the second bottle. “Save me a trip.” He sat down, heavily.
“Thanks,” Farrier said. “Anyway, the only real differences between the LCN and other big-boys’ social clubs like the Lions, Elks and Moose’re the outlawry and the violence. LCN exists to break the law. And in addition to being a violent fraternity, it’s also a union. Used to run—still tries to run—a closed shop. The guys who belong to it got their invites to join because the guys who already belonged to it and did bad things for a living spotted them doing bad things and said, ‘Hey, this kid’s got promise. We don’t need him competing with us. Let’s ask him to join.’
“In the old days if he didn’t join they killed him. Or if it turned out he really was as good—meaning as bad—as they thought, or were afraid he was, then he killed off them to take over the club.”
Stoat drank some of his beer. He had begun to look contented.
Farrier, observing Stoat drink, picked up his beer and drank a long pull. “This’s the basic difference that makes women nervous when their husbands hang around with Mafia.
“Generally, FBI womenfolk all tend to be fairly clean-cut, like their husbands—in most cases even more so. My first wife, Linda, all right? I met Linda when I was a junior at Saint Louis U, majoring in English, and among many other BOMC things that I was doing, I was taking ROTC—and doing very well at it. I was expecting to become cadet colonel in my senior year, and then when I got out, in nineteen sixty-nine, I was going to be commissioned, and then go to Vietnam.
“Now, I was different than the kids that everyone remembers, the late sixties, seventies, using drugs and getting laid, demonstrating ’gainst the war. This did not bother me—I wanted to be different. I was probably going to be assigned to JAG—in those days the army was so glad to see a college boy who actually wanted to go, he generally got what he wanted. That’d look good on my law-school applications when I got out three years later. And if something happened, so I didn’t get JAG, then I had a lock on Intelligence. For law school, almost as good.
“So, when I met Linda, Linda Slattery, in October, junior year, her freshman mixer at Fontbonne College—where well-to-do Catholic couples from Missouri send their comely daughters to take courses in education and music and browse Saint Louis U for husbands—my future through the next seven years was pretty much set, all mapped out. Senior year, my army hitch, and then three years of law school—I knew where I was going.
“Knocking Linda up was therefore not on my agenda. Getting knocked up was not on Linda’s; she wanted her degree. Purely a case of raging hormones, temptation—no condoms, of course; good Catholics didn’t carry such items—and opportunity. One warm weekend at her parents’ house, spent the day out by the pool, Linda in her white bikini, spilling out of it. In the evening we’re alone—old folks seeing Showboat at the Light Opera. Off with Linda’s white silk panties; in with my stiff dick, and in a jiffy, there we were, prospective parents ourselves, having to get married.
“Both of us were absolutely flattened. This was a disaster. She was going to have to drop out of college, and Linda’s a smart girl. Children were for later. She wanted her education and a shot at a career, and she’d wanted me to have the one I’d planned on, too—what’d looked like a bright-line armed service, then legal career, made to order for a shot at politics. Which we’d already talked about, politics as a career. Now all those dreams were in shambles.
“So we did what you do—the best we could. We’d get married, which’d take care of the family-disgrace matter—hard to believe now how all bent out of shape people got about that then, unmarried women getting pregnant, but they did.
“Being an expectant father I was now exempt from the draft, but unlike most horny guys caught in the tender trap, I had a contractual service obligation—I’d taken all that lovely ROTC pay, and now I’d gone and done something that made it look as though I wasn’t going to keep my promise to serve. So my father and Linda’s father pulled all strings they could locate, and somehow they cut a deal so that I could work it off if I got accepted by the FBI. Which I did, no trouble.
“It was like morning. Everything was golden again. This was great. Farriers and Slatteries—all of us were patriotic—we all thought it was great. I could do the right thing by this lovely young woman that I’d ravished, who’d loved every blissful minute of it, and still serve my country, too? Redemption during this life—it was wonderful.
“Point of it is, if any young FBI couple should’ve been able to weather the stresses that come with the job, you would’ve thought it’d be us. But by the time I got to Buffalo, our marriage was in trouble. I’d already started spending more time on my career when I was still in Houston than I had on the two of us—and by then our three kids. And then once I got to Buffalo I just about disappeared.
“See, being brand new there, no one on the street knew me. I was a natural for the Strike Force, hanging out the strange joints and keeping the weird hours, up to no good with strange people. Working under cover, you lead a whole new different life. And you really have to lead it, act like a real hood yourself. And furthermore, you’d better make it convincing—wise guys get really pissed off when they catch on one of their big pals is an undercover cop.
“We were so damned young, compared to you and Lily. Besides growing up in University City and going to college, all that Linda’d ever done in her whole life was be Mrs. John H. Farrier and the mother of his children, married to the FBI. She defined herself that way, but now all of a sudden there she was, all by herself, East Aurora, New York. We had a nice place; it’s a nice enough town, and she did have the kids—but I wasn’t there.
“I couldn’t be, being Franny ‘Soot’ Barillo thirty miles away, just blew into Buffalo from LA with a whole load of connections in the movie business. Soot called it ‘the industry’—you could tell he’d been around. I could do that shit then, be Soot Barillo—I’d been Soot in high school, I was playing ball, lots of black hair I still had, and so when somebody said ‘Soot’ I quite naturally looked around.
“Anyway, the upshot was I discovered I had a positive knack for it. I loved being someone else, especially a gangster. Gangsters live large; act like they don’t give a shit, even though there’s always some cop watching them. I didn’t have even that concern.
“So I was having a great time for myself, but with me out of character like that, Linda didn’t know who she was anymore. Didn’t know how to behave around me anymore, what little time we did get to spend with each other. And I had my share of trouble remembering how to act when I was with her. Made me kind of sympathize with actors, what they must have to go through, becoming different people every time they go to work.” He leaned forward, picked up his glass, and drained it. He refilled it from the second bottle.
Stoat drank thoughtfully.
“Made me very self-conscious,” Farrier said. “I couldn’t let go of it, just be with my wife. All the time I was calculating, same way I did on the job—‘Now, how does Soot Barillo act if he’s suddenly around this nice, white, boring lady, who bleaches her own hair at home, wears shorts from Sears disguised as skirts? This nice young mom who takes such good care of her three kids while her boring workaholic husband’s far away?’
“It was like I was seducing her, when I slept with her. Doing two mean things at once. Fucking around with this nice housewife while her nice straight guy was out of town, and at the same time chea
ting on my girlfriend—which I had, by the way, after three weeks in the part. Told myself I had to—Soot was just that kind of guy.
“Of course I had a wife somewhere. Everybody’s got one. Soot’s wife’s name was Irene. We got married way back in our early twenties, hardly remember it now. She’s a good broad, cosmetologist, works in television, does make-up at CBS. We live in West Hollywood, nice little two-bedroom stucco, jacaranda the front yard and a whole damn bunch of jasmine, two blocks up from Beverly, one in from Sequoia. But Soot didn’t see her much, you know? ‘Always onna road these days.’
“Okay, you talk the talk and walk the walk, you better live the life. Soot in any town he went to, gonna be there a while, he would get himself a girlfriend, okay? Nothing serious, but hey, you know how it is, the guy’s in Buffalo, for Chrissake—everyone knows how cold it gets there inna winter. It’s even cold there inna summer. Besides, Denise’s nineteen, fresh, with a very nice chest, ass; this chick is a cookie. And of course a pushover for a guy who’s with the movies. She is Sootie’s type, all right? It all fits together nice—if I corrupt union guys for the FBI, must be okay if I fuck Denise for my country as well. Part of the schtick.
“So now, this Linda chick—like what gives with this, all right? What’s he doin’ with this older broad? Soot’s type she’s not at all.” He drank again and set the glass down on the table.
“When I was in the clubs and bars, the back rooms, all right? Everything’s fine. When I did get home, long weekend I’m supposedly back in LA, ‘taking care of a few things,’ but I’m actually in East Aurora, nothing was right. Linda and the kids were just not Soot’s type of shit at all—and neither was Soot theirs. I could’ve told them that, they asked me—Soot wasn’t a bad guy at all; he was fun to be around—but he was not a family man.
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