Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  Each of Dominic and Philomena’s tenants became partners in that apprehensiveness soon after they moved in. They did not have much choice. They tended to be fortyish couples, the majority of them childless, who had heard that the Mossis managed a quiet, respectable place and didn’t show much interest in documentation establishing either whether they were legal aliens or had been legally married—or if so, to each other. They also tended to move as soon their circumstances improved even slightly, so long as the additional money looked like it would be enough to permit them to live somewhere else, “aw right, anyplace else,” equally clean and well kept. “No hurry, you know? But we’re lookin’ around. We got our eyes peeled, you know? With some luck, a little bigger. Maybe closer the Square, get the groceries home, huh? Anna subway-stop, right? Make it easier, wintertime there.”

  It was not because they did not respect Dominic and Philomena. They always said “the owners’re good people. Heat’s good inna winter and the place’s kept up, you know? Always painted and nice, nobody makin’ a lotta damned noise alia time, fightin’, playin’ the TV, when you’re just tryin’, get some sleep there.” But they considered themselves also to be good, hardworking people, even if they didn’t mind admitting that they did try to take a little pleasure out of life. They felt some resentment at what seemed like constant dunning. Sad-eyed (he also had unusually-long ears, with proportionately-large lobes), soft-spoken Dominic (“da bloodhound”; the tenants found his mournful inquiries entirely bad enough) and narrow-eyed, sawtooth-voiced Philomena (“craziness, aw right? An’ worse. You wouldn’t believe her, this woman”) worked them in relays. Correctly perceiving themselves to be less well-off than Luigi’s parents (but refusing to see also that they were far less determined to become much better off, and that this might account in part for the financial imbalance), the tenants really didn’t like this. So they had left as soon as they could, usually after four-plus years or so at 73 Pittman, without either bitterness or nostalgia.

  Philomena and Dominic had always seen them off without regret, renting out their apartments to newcomers who moved in the day the veterans vacated them, the new occupants not knowing from firsthand experience what they were in for, the Mossis resigned by then to the familiar fugue, starting the cycle again. As long as they kept on paying the rent, the people who came to live in the house could think any damned thing they liked. So long as those rents, combined with their own wages, covered the mortgage each month, what anyone else, outside of the house, cared to think of its owners would be all right. Luigi adopted that attitude too, as soon as he was old enough, and in turn passed it on to his sons. At least to one of the sons.

  The senior Mossis combined those rents with every nickel they could sequester from their own earnings at hard physical labor. Luigi’s father worked as a teamster for a man whom he correctly described to his own friends as “a biggah meanah bastard, even though he’s a goombah himself, ghinny rattabass,” who when Dominic first went to work for him had just begun converting his horse-drawn cartage service (specializing in deliveries of heavy machinery) into a fleet of moving trucks. Philomena did scrubwork in the downtown-Boston financial district, washing stone floors with a fifteen-by-four-inch brush with coarse three-inch yellow bristles, pushing a three-gallon galvanized-steel pail of cold, soapy water ahead of her as she proceeded through the corridors on her hands and knees. They doggedly practiced self-denial every day (except Sundays, when they defiantly relished a bottle of Gabbiano and got slightly tipsy on it, Dominic when the mood was on him sometimes singing “Santa Lucia,” off-key but with enthusiasm), and so greatly had they impressed their son with the rigorous virtue of their lives that before Luigi had reached the age of fourteen he had made up his mind that he would do everything he had to do to show respect to his good parents by living just as they had, except for as many small improvements as God might permit him to make. His son Joseph in time developed a similar-but-not-identical ambition; he wanted to make larger improvements, and he was not interested at all in whether he might have God’s permission to make them, or would have God’s approval afterward of the means he had employed.

  “The thing I realize about this guy,” Brennan had said in the morning, “heck, not just him: about this whole bunch, the longer I’m studyin’ them, you know? Is that there is always continuity in what he always does, and there is always the same kind of nice and gradual development in everything they always do.” Dell’Appa and Brennan had paused long enough at the curb on the boulevard just down the street but still within view of Marie’s Coffee Shop to watch Mossi park the old Cadillac at the curb, lock it up and go inside. Then Brennan had started the Blazer again, to deliver Dell’Appa to the parking lot at the MBTA commuter-rail station on Rust Road in Dedham where he’d left the Lexus that morning.

  “He don’t do anything sudden, you know? Like he won’t just, he won’t do the same thing at the same time every day, like: ‘Hey, it’s ten-thirty, so now I’m gonna do this.’ No, not like that. Usually he will, and he’ll fool you. You get to thinkin’: ‘Well, then this’s when he must always do this, then.’ But then all of a sudden, no reason at all, he won’t do that anymore. And there isn’t any reason either. That’s just not what he does, how he goes about doing things. The things he usually does. But he’s still orderly, you know? Very orderly. We’ll go over Dedham now, and get the car, and like I say, the guy is smart. And he knows I’ve been on him, and that when I bring him here, he’s here for coffee and he goes inside, that when he comes out again and looks up or down the street, I’m gonna be here. He expects it now, that I’m still going to be right here where I was, when he went into Marie’s. Like I was his shadow.

  “And he knows this. He knows it because when I first started gettin’ on him like this, it was after when I went in to Bomber and I told him: ‘Hey, I’m not gettin’ anywhere, you know? Talkin’ to this guy’s old pals. A good half of them, for Christ sake, they tell me they don’t even see him for a hundred years or so and they’re not sure he’s still alive. Shit, they’re the ones that’re askin’ me alla questions about him, for Christ sake. I know more’n they do about him. I’m not the one askin’ them.’

  “And he looks at me and he says, fuckin’ Bomber, real sarcastic like he could be sometimes, fresh bastard he was, right? You know what I mean, when he’d say something but he wouldn’t really mean it. He looks at me and he says: ‘Well then, you asshole, quit wasting your time then. If the people that you’re talking to about the guy don’t know, don’t know what he’s been up to or who he’s up to it for, then they don’t know. So show some initiative for a change, for Christ sake. Go back to basics. Start following the guy around. ’til when he goes out inna morning and he don’t see you around, he’s not sure he’s fully-dressed. And then that way you find out for yourself.’

  “ ‘Well, Jesus Christ, Bomber,’ I say, ‘I mean, I know we can do this to a guy if we want to. Wake him up inna morning, make sure he’s off to school, and then at night we bring him home an’ tuck ’im in. I mean, I know we can do that and all, we can put a tight tail on a guy even though it is, it’s gonna, guaranteed to piss him off, the minute he finds out we’re gonna do him. Every time he goes out, that the guy leaves his house, there we’re gonna be, sittin’ there lookin’ right up his ass. But Jesus, Bomb, do it to this guy? Are we sure we wanna do that?’

  “And he says, this’s Bomber, he says to me: ‘Aw, what’s the matter, ’oo scared?’ Oo scared of the nasty big man? ’Fraid he’ll sic his lawyer on you?’ And I say, ’Cause it’s not that: ‘Nothin’ like that, Bomb, you know that. You know that I’m not scared of nothin’. Except maybe cancer or somethin’. Cancer, yeah; cancer’d scare me shitless. But no, not afraid. It’s just all I’m just thinkin’s the time and the money. What’s all of this gonna cost? And not just in money—in time. We really sure we wanna, put this much of that, of either of them things, into this guy? Into him?’

  “ ‘Well, yeah,’ Bomber says, ‘least, I think we are
.’ Which naturally means, since Bomber’s the boss then, you can bet we are sure. We know, we wanna do that. ‘We can’t lose, we invest in this case. Joe Mossi knows what we don’t know, and what we—what you, fuckhead, all right?—what you want to find out. He can’t help but tell you, right? He’s gotta know himself, what he’s doing for somebody. So he’s gotta have a way, a way that he finds out, what he’s supposed to do. Has to.

  “ ‘Now what is it we already know? Or at least we can be pretty sure of. The feds’ve taken down too many of the old ginzoes with the mikes inna vents and the phones, the minicams aimed at the doorways. So all right, you still with me here? We already know, we’re at least pretty sure, it’s not gonna be phones that he’s usin’, he is not checkin’ in usin’ phones. Unless they are both using pay phones, him and the guy he checks in with, in which case they’re usin’ the same three or four, and changin’ them every two weeks. Which I doubt on account of it’d just get to be too much, too much of a pain in the ass.

  “ ‘Okay then, that’s the first thing. That is the first two things that we know, or we’re pretty sure of at least.’ I say to him: ‘Whoa, Bomber, slow down here. I’m not getting it now, I don’t think. The first thing I got, that we already know. The second thing I don’t see yet.’

  “ ‘Well for Christ sake, Bob,’ this’s what Bomber says, ‘they’re not writin’ letters, each other. They’re not passin’ notes, like in school. So, if they’re talkin’ each other, which they’ve got to be, they’ve gotta be face-to-face, am I right? They’re not meetin’ down at office, ’Cause the mikes and cameras. We’d know that if they were, if that’s what they were doing, ’Cause we’d have ’em, home-videos, right? And we don’t. Therefore they’re meetin’ some other place, Mossi and either the guy he works for, or some other guy, also works for him. Some new guy we don’t know about yet. Well that’s what Short Joey’ll have to tell us, tell us by showing us, right? Since he won’t do the right thing and just tell us. If we follow him, he will do that. Because he won’t have any choice. Sooner or later he’ll have to, and then we’ll know what we want to know.’

  “ ‘Well,’ I say to him, I says: ‘But Bomber,’ ” Brennan said, “ ‘he doesn’t have to, I mean. You’re just assuming he does.’

  “ ‘No I’m not,’ Bomber says, ‘no such thing. This guy we got, what do we know? For starters, we know at least this much. We know that he did not inherit no fifty million dollars from his long-lost cousin that invented toilet paper. And yeah, we know he likes the puppies, goes the track once every week, and he could’ve gotten lucky, even killers can do that. But nobody down at that track, nobody including him or any other hoods that might’ve dropped by, no Episcopalian bishops or anybody else, has hit a Pik Six—or a twin trifecta, even—lately for the kind of dough that’d let him live forever, ’thout a payday now and then. Some day or night soon, somebody’s gonna walk off with a lulu jackpot, high six-figures at least, maybe seven, most likely some deserving fat broad with brown teeth, dips Red Man, and bowls overhand: every Tuesday night, men’s league down New Beffa; every Thursday, men’s league up in Lowell. But so far not our man that we know of, so this guy needs dough to live.

  “ ‘Okay then: How much dough? A little? A lot? Somewhere in between, I think, based on what we know. Closer to a little ’n a lot. There’s no flash to him, this I know. He’s got no big-spending habits. I think the last time he’s in Vegas was in Sixty-six or so. Went to see an Elvis show because the blonde that he was screwing then, her tits and her other thing, the thing his thing liked to visit, they all just hadda see the King, there. But her poor hopes got dashed. The King didn’t see her. Fucked somebody else that night, I guess. Or maybe had ice-cream and speed. But that was the last time Joey did that, did anything that high-priced like that.

  “ ‘But so what? So fuckin’-what if he’s frugal? This ain’t no yuppie spendthrift we got on our hands here maybe, but he’s got a TV set, I bet, and most nights he watches it. It warms my heart like a brown-’n-serve roll, his retarded brother can work, but somehow I doubt the kid brother brings home enough money to stock up the fridge. Joey likes a can of beer? Danny likes one too? Has to pay for all their beer, just like all us working stiffs. At night the sun goes down on his house. Just like it does where we live. There goes more electrical, and in the winter it gets cold, unless he pays for oil. Or gas. There’s taxes on that house, too, and that’s one thing about taxes: you may not like ’em, anymore’n anybody else does, but by God you’re gonna pay ’em. Hitman or not: doesn’t matter. The Cadillac, the car he’s got? Well, he drives a Cadillac, and that’s all anybody needs to say about that. It’s old, maybe, and if he bought it second-hand he didn’t pay much for it. But it’s still a Cadillac, and that means you can hear the gas just sluicin’ through that baby while it’s only sittin’ waitin’ for the light to change. And that sound you hear is high-test, pal, which spells money, my friend, good old American money.

  “ ‘He’s got to get it somewhere,’ Bomber says. ‘I know he’s got the rep. I also know he deserves it. Hell, back when he’s still in the ring, fightin’ undercards on greasy Thursday nights inna fuckin’ roller-rinks, winners getting twenny-five, losers gettin’ ten or maybe gettin’ nothin’—if you saw what he did to people then, that he didn’t know and nobody that he worked for’d told him that he really didn’t like, even though he’d never seen the guy before that night, in those days for that money, you wouldn’t need to be a bad boy now who just got the boss pissed off—you’d give him some room yourself. On general principles, such as living a long life and being able to walk through it, see, an’ chew your food and stuff.

  “ ‘I saw him box,’ this’s still the Bomber talkin’, ‘I suppose this must’ve been now thirty years or so ago, back when they still had a lotta fights during the week, and guys would go to see them. I saw a lot of young fighters comin’ up—I wasn’t married then, settin’ a good example for all you young studs in here by goin’ straight home every night—or thinkin’ they were comin’ up, at least. They had all the good moves. The rollin’ shoulders when they walked, the shirt too tight across the chest; you shook hands, they mashed your fingers, happy-horseshit stuff like that. Made believe they’re sparring with you, they run into you onna street. Shadow box if they’re out just walkin’ by themselves. Every wakin’ minute, every fuckin’ day, they were bein’ fighters, that was all they thought about.

  “ ‘Now most of these punks,’ Bomber says, ‘where most of these kids’re concerned that was just about all the thinkin’ they were up to anyway. Couldn’t’ve handled much more’n that, even if they’d wanted to. These guys were not people you would’ve called real competition for a Thomas Edison, or that Socrates or anybody like that would’ve seen, a major threat. The big event in their families was still Great-great-uncle Bobo’s birthday, they still celebrated that. That glorious day Bobo the Great was born into this world with real opposable thumbs. Thumbs that nobody in the family before’d ever seen on one of their own, that he could move so he could grab ahold of things, you know? And that made him the first one in the family, the very, very first one, that could stand up and walk around, on just his back legs alone.

  “ ‘Well, you couldn’t really blame them. That was one big day for them. Since then they’d learned all kinds of things. How to live in a house, if they didn’t get home from the barroom so drunk they just passed out and spent the rest of the night inna car. How to use forks and spoons to eat their food, at least now and then, like if they were in too much of a hurry or something. Drink water from a glass. Instead of just sticking their faces, their snouts in their dishes, rippin’ meat with their teeth offa roast pigs. Drinking out of the toilet, like their ancestors always did. Thanks to Bobo the Great, they even learned to wear clothes sometimes, like if they were going out, cover up their private parts. Go out lookin’ just like humans? They thought that was pretty nice.

  “ ‘Stupid guys in other words,’ Bomber says, ‘but guys who still would�
�ve been completely harmless if it wasn’t for two things: they had cocks and they were strong. The cocks made ’em want to fuck women who didn’t necessarily have any real enthusiasm about letting them, and who had boyfriends or husbands who happened to be around, handy, and felt just like their women did on that particular subject. And the strength: That made them think that if the particular woman that they decided they wanted to fuck, on a particular night, if she either wasn’t interested or her boyfriend didn’t go for the idea, well, that didn’t matter: They could just punch the boyfriend’s lights out and fuck her anyway.

  “ ‘Or they could also get dangerous if they felt like it for some other reason. Decided they had to show off for some broad, hadn’t decided yet maybe that they wanted to screw her, just wanted to hear her say: “Oooh,” or something like they saw Marilyn Monroe or Rita Hayworth, maybe, saw a movie-star do in a movie. So since there was only one thing they could do, that they thought was really outstanding, that’d have to impress any broad, them being a fighter and all, this meant that some guy must be laughing at them, and they had to fight him. What they would call “teach him a lesson.” Some guy who didn’t even know them, prolly didn’t even realize they’re on the same earth with them, let alone the same barroom. But that didn’t matter. When they were lookin’ for a “fight,” which was what they called those charades, that was all they needed for an excuse to punch his face in, knock his teeth right down his throat. Real pains in the ass was all they all were, colossal pains in the ass.