Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “Those angles, though, do not include whether it’s right, whether it’s appropriate, for it to be pissed off. It always knows when it is, just like as we do: ‘Whaddaya mean, “ ’m I pissed off”? Naturally I’m pissed-off. Anybody would be.’ No, it wants the time to think about what’d be the best thing to do, what’ll not only cut you off at the ankles, or at least no higher’n the knees, but also perform the amputation in such a way that you won’t be able to do anything about it afterwards, to get even. By dropping dimes on the media or something, so the papers every morning and the TV every night’ll get all worked up about ‘numerous reports of a crisis of morale among seasoned long-time members of State law enforcement agencies merged in the new Department.’ ‘Secretary Said “Out of Touch.’ ” ‘Harrumph, and harraw, and all that shit.’ Oh, the new breed wouldn’t like that at all; that’s why it thinks: to prevent it. But it’s smart, and sooner or later it thinks of something that looks like it might be a way to safe revenge. Then it chews that over, overnight, and if it still can’t find anything wrong with it by morning, then finally it does it. By which time, of course, you’ve just about forgotten what it was that you did in the first place that set the whole damned thing in motion. So your feelings’re hurt when you’re justly punished, and you come running in tears to see Brian.

  “Sadly for you, that changes nothing. All that thought and stuff’s worked. The new breed turns out to’ve planned revenge well. You have been cut off, neat and clean. ‘And you can’t do a blessed thing about it, you fresh punk, so how do you like that?’ ”

  “And that’s the reason then, for it,” Dell’Appa had said. “You’re telling me that that is what it is for.”

  “Far as I know it is, yeah,” Dennison said, radiating innocence. “Why, can you think of another one? Or don’t you think that that one’s enough, giving the bosses the finger?”

  “Yeah,” Dell’Appa had said. “Well, all right then. Consider me chastised, and properly so—if you wanna insist. On to the next thing: what do I do about it?”

  “ ‘Do’?” Dennison had said. “Just what the hell do you think you can do here, boy? You got very limited options. You’ve got a written order from the Secretary’s secretary, detaching you from here, and dispatching you out there, and it tells you to go out there and sit, and stay, out there until you’re called to come back here. Or else for a year, whichever may come first. Now I may be wrong, of course, but that doesn’t seem to leave you a whole lot of room for improvisation. So if I were you, and I wondered what to do, that’s what I would do. I would go out there, where I’ve been sent. Or else I would resign. Them’s the options, baby.”

  “Well, no,” Dell’Appa had said. “No, I didn’t mean that. What I meant was, I guess: What can you do now?”

  “Me?” Dennison had said. “What can I do now?”

  “Yeah,” Dell’Appa had said.

  Dennison had shrugged. “Same thing I was doing when you came in here,” he had said. “Finish as much of my afternoon’s work as I can before quitting-time comes. Drop it in the Out box. Then put what’s still left of it back in the In box and light out for the territories. The In box being where a good chunk of what’s in front of me right now was when I came in this morning: because that’s where I put it yesterday, when the quitting whistle blew and I dropped the pick and went home. Those environmentalists, boy, they think they’ve got the lock on recycling stuff, and when it comes to wine bottles and other dead soldiers, well, maybe they actually have. But when it comes to recycling work, work that I really don’t want to do, I can make a stack of it last longer’n a little kid can stow a Belgian-cheeka Brussels-sprouts ’til his mother gets distracted so he can feed the veggies to the dog.”

  “Cut it out, Brian,” Dell’Appa had said. “You know what I’m talking about. What can you do?”

  “I take it neither one of those two options that I mentioned really appeals to you,” Dennison had said.

  “No, they don’t, as a matter of fact,” Dell’Appa said. “I’ve got this little house in Whitman that I can’t afford and a woman that I really like lives in it. With a little boy she says is mine and he looks like he might be, too, every now and then, when the headmaster lets him come home for vacation, so I, his own father, can see him for vacation. And every day when the late afternoon changes into the blue hour, or if it’s already night when the guy that I’ve been following all evening finally decides that it’s time we both went home, I like going back to that house where I live with those two people.

  “That’s gonna be mighty tough to do, boss, if I’m out in Northampton every night when the cocktail hour comes. If I’m ninety miles from home, and I’ve got to be back out there when the sun comes up next day. What’m I supposed to do then, when that’s what’s in front of me, huh? Say: ‘Hey, no problem, buddy, you got investigators in place out there, boundin’ around all over the joint like a buncha beagles chasin’ bunnies, but for some reason, the other, you want me out there instead? Well, sure. Happy to oblige, old pal. This’ll be fresh cake.’ No, I don’t think so, Bry—I don’t like this idea at all.”

  “But at the same time,” Dennison said, “you don’t want to quit.”

  “No, I don’t,” Dell’Appa said. “I went through a lot of specialized training and education on top of what I already knew about the technology stuff so I could do this kind of work. Now I’m to the point where I can do it, and I like it, and I’d just as soon not quit.”

  Dennison had dropped his voice an octave to the broadcaster’s message-from-our-sponsor depth. “Very commendable, son,” he had said. “If more of our young people would only take your attitude toward public service, this society of ours would be—”

  “Oh shut up,” Dell’Appa had said. “This thing isn’t funny to me.”

  “It sure damned-right-well isn’t,” Dennison had said in his normal voice. “And it damned-well shouldn’t be, either, because what you’re doing here now is facing the kind of decision that can make or break your career. The wrong one turns you into instant dogfood in this outfit: ‘dead-dried meat, just add water.’ You might as well just go ahead and quit right now if that happens, because no matter how long you hang around afterwards, after you make that mistake, you’ll always be the sad-sack guy in the office; every unit’s got one: ‘He came in here? He was golden. Had all the talent in the world. Just had talent to burn. But for some reason or other he never did manage to amount to much. Never did understand it, myself, why he never went anyplace. Maybe just one of those poor-bastard guys, never did catch the right break.’

  “See, Harry, this is a test that you’re facing now, and you’ve got to treat it like one. You had a solid record in the blue suit with the tunic and the hat on, worked hard and showed good judgment when your judgment was called for. And didn’t volunteer it when it wasn’t, which is at least as important. And even more important, you had real friends in uniform, decent people generous enough so that when they saw a nice young fellow working hard and doing a good job, they made sure the word got around to some place where it’d maybe do the kid some actual good, ginger his life up a little. Get him a real place to shine.

  “You’re not here because you’re smart and honest, Harry. Let me tell you that right now, case you’re under that illusion. You wouldn’t’ve lasted here long if it’d turned out you were stupid and you stole, this’s true, but you’re still here so it must be you didn’t. But that still isn’t how you got here, Harry, no sirree. You got here ’Cause you had friends. Not only did some senior officers, whose word on talent counted, see right off you had it; they also liked you well enough, had faith enough in you, so they wrote your name down on one of their secret lists. And those’re real short lists, my friend. It’s an honor when you make one.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Dell’Appa had said, flicking his left hand away from his face, “this song I’ve heard sung a great many times. Never did like it that much, learn how to dance to it, either. Let’s cut to the chase, shall we, Bry?
”

  “ ‘Yeah-yeah’ nothin’,” Dennison had said. “There’s a lot of happy horseshit in this business, Harry, and I’ll never be the one to tell you different. But the mistake smart guys like you make—well, maybe mostly-smart guys like you make, because sometimes you are stunningly-stupid—it’s your very favorite, is when you get to thinking that it’s all bullshit, you know? That it’s never the real thing. And then when it is, when it’s really the real stuff, when some veteran, some guy who probably trained you and’s always been the first one to start laughing when some jerk began slinging the crap; when that guy you respect starts talking about loyalty, hard work, and having balls, and always, always going through and doing what you said that you were gonna do, you go into your guffawing mode: no hemming, just plain haw-haw-haw.

  “But this time you notice it’s not all the same. ‘Something’s different,’ you think, and it is. No one else is doing it. You’re laughing all by yourself. And that’s when you start to realize: Oh-oh. Somewhere along the line here, could just be, you made a major-league mistake. You look around, and, damn, that’s what it is, all right. Your worst nightmare came true. You’re standing there by yourself, and you’re the only one who’s laughing. You laughed in the wrong place. Or you might say, if you liked, that you stepped on your own dick, ’Cause that’s exactly what you did.

  “That’s when the people who’re jealous of you, don’t have your ability, intelligence, but’re still dangerous because what they do have’s just enough to let them see they don’t and you are better, or who maybe just don’t like you—and as hard’s it is for guys like us, really nice, great guys, for us to believe a thing like that, there’re always some who don’t—that’s when they know they’ve got you. And they really have got you, too; boy, have they ever.

  “Now I’m not saying the Assistant’s one of those people. And I’m not saying it’s the Secretary, either, that he’s the one who’s your enemy. Although he could be—either one of them could be. All I’m saying is that now you know for sure that there’s at least one out there, a real saboteur. Somewhere in this outfit, there’s at least one someone who’s decided that he bigtime doesn’t like you, and therefore does not wish to have to watch any more good things happening to you. Or she really doesn’t like you, and is just as out to get you as any man could be.

  “Either one; doesn’t matter; the effect’s the same. Your long-term career outlook just sneezed a violent sneeze. It may be coming down with something which could lead to something worse. More dangerous, I mean. Maybe even fatal. Because as you found out today, when you got your messages and mail, took them to your desk and read them, whoever this person is has either neatly muttered a bad word about you where the Secretary or his faithful Indian companion could hear it, and it worked, or else the one who doesn’t like you’s one or both of those two people, and didn’t need a prompt.

  “I myself tend to doubt it’s either one of those fine gentlemen. Being as how they’re both butt-sucking, glad-handing, bottom-feeding career-type politicians, they’ve got stations far above ours. They’ve got lots of dignity, mucho dignity, in fact. God, I mean, these guys’re so dignified, they’ve got bearing. Their topcoats are of fabric woven from the chest hairs of the camel. Can you imagine how many bare-chested camels there must be, going topless out there, shivering like mad, freezing their asses off out there in the Sahara, while the chubby Secretary and his portly deputy walk like ducks down Beacon Hill, nice and warm in camels’ hairs, to lunch at the Parker House? Hundreds, thousands of them. Millions even, maybe. Camels all over far-away Arabia, wearing sweatshirts and wool mufflers so pols in Boston can keep warm. And they are warm, too. They’ve got that special warmth, that inner warmth, the kind you get from knowing you’ve got tassels on your loafers, you don’t even have to look; the Commonwealth buys lunch for you and pays for all your gas. You can park anywhere you like—hydrants, cross-walks, doesn’t matter—and certainly not the least of it, you’re,”—Dennison hushed his voice—“a member of the bar.” He spoke normally. “It ain’t Hog-heaven, maybe, but if you are a porker, natural-born to wallowing, little grunting now and then, those surroundings aren’t half-bad.

  “So, what’re we to guys like that, humble guys like us: Can I ask you that? No: Can I tell you, then? Sure, I can, you ask polite. Hell, even if you don’t; I’ll do it anyway. Absolutely. As fleas to wanton dogs are we, they bite us for their sport. Common drudge is what we are, synonym for piece of shit, career professional policeman. No possible threat to them. Unless one of them should get stupid at the same time you get lucky, so you come up with enough PC to get a judge to sign a paper that’ll let you look at all their bank records. But: nah, that’ll never happen. They’re ’way too cute for that.

  “And anyway, to you personally, like I say: Doesn’t really matter; either way, you’ve now been ordered out of the cozy cushioned chair you’ve had, right here by the fire, and with no ceremony whatsoever escorted out to the distant anteroom. Where the footmen, tradesmen, peddlers, and tinkers remove their muddy boots, and humbly—no complaints allowed—respectfully, wait ’til they’re summoned. Beckoned. Nodded to. Whatever. That’s where you are now, my would-be heir apparent: plunked down on a hard bench, seated in a nasty draught, and you’d better realize it too. Put a sweater on real quick, and tomorrow wear the woolies even if they lie to you and say it’s coming summer. That’s merely the weather forecast for the outside world, where everybody else is. Much colder where you are, and will be for a while.”

  “Until I learn to keep a civil tongue?” Dell’Appa had said. “Are you really telling me that I’ve been sent down to Pawtucket, demoted to triple-A, because I sassed somebody? Hurt some asshole’s feelings? By just doing my damned job, the best way I know how? I can’t believe it, Brian.

  “Partly I mean it’s impossible for me to believe in the abstract that any bunch of supposedly-mature and reputedly-intelligent, presumably-adult professionals, engaged in work that every one of us at least seems to believe is difficult and important, that we could ever’ve reached the point where we’re allowing ourselves to be managed like a goddamned junior-high sorority, like kids still in training bras, tying up the phone. The bad boys wouldn’t look at us and shudder, fear and loathing in their hearts, if we’d’ve let that happen to us; they’d’ve laughed us out of town.

  “Then partly from my observations, and I’m pretty good at those if I do say so myself: since the only person I’ve met since the day I came in here strikes me as obviously unbalanced, unbalanced enough that I wouldn’t really dare to predict what he might decide to do in a given situation, maybe even deranged, the only one of those would have to be …”

  “Bob Brennan,” Dennison said.

  “… my estimable mentor,” Dell’Appa said, “the very same indeed. But while he might be mean enough, or maybe perverse enough, to fuck up this office on purpose, he doesn’t happen to have the kind of executive position that’d give him the leverage to do it. Praise Jesus; say: amen.”

  “Amen,” Dennison said laconically. “We may be a sorority, like you say, but when Bomber was our Great Den Mother, he took good care of us. And since I’ve been Den Mother, I have followed his example. I don’t say this group is perfect, or it’s been perfectly bossed, but so far as I’ve seen, up to now, at least, there’s been no heavy damage done that looks permanent to me. Which I would say had been done, if Bomber’s departure’d somehow not so incidentally led to Bob’s elevation. But it didn’t. And it won’t, I can assure you, as long as I’m the one in charge.”

  “All right then,” Dell’Appa had said, “what you’re telling me is that I’m right and it’s not Bob, but somebody still did it to me and I’m stuck with it.”

  Dennison had shrugged. “That’s the gist of it,” he had said. “You’ve gotten your penance. You can either grind your teeth and do it, or you can leave the church. Simple.”

  “Lemme ask you,” Dell’Appa had said, “if it was you in this position, in the s
ituation that I’m in, what would your choice be? Obedience? Or leave the Order? Apostasy, I mean. Which one do you think you’d take?”

  “Now?” Dennison had said. “At my age? I’m not really sure I know.” He frowned. “That’s something like the trick baseball question, you know? ‘Considering how bad major league pitching’s become now, the lousy fielding you see all the time, whaddaya figure Ted Williams’d hit if he was playing today?’ And of course the right answer’s ‘Two-eighty, two-eighty-five. Somewhere in that neighborhood.’ Because as third-rate, incompetent and lazy as the competition is these days, ‘you’ve got to keep in mind the guy is over seventy years old. He’s had one heart attack already, minor one, I guess, and when he was on TV last year he looked really out of shape.’

  “So: what would I do now, if I’d gotten myself into the same kind of fix you’re in? Well, it’s kind of hard to say, and I’d want to think it over, but I think when I got finished, I’d probably resign.”

  “You would,” Dell’Appa had said.

  “Yeah,” Dennison had said, “I think so. No flat, resounding statement, no ‘You can all go fuck yourselves; I don’t need this kind of shit.’ But I think I probably would take out my retirement papers, fill them out and send them in.”

  “But you think I should stay,” Dell’Appa had said. “You think you’d probably quit, but I should hang in here and eat the shit. That’s what you’re really saying.”

  “No, it’s not.” Dennison had said. “It’s not even remotely like what I’m telling you. You’re not thirty-five yet.”

  “I’m getting pretty close, though,” Dell’Appa had said. “At least three days now, every week, clearly at my back I hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near. I feel something hot on the back of my neck, too; could be the spittled breath of the horses.”