Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “ ‘Community Auditions’,” she said. “The little fat girls always wore glasses with red frames that they had to keep pushing back up on their noses, and you could see them moving their lips, counting the beat, while they did it. And they always dropped the batons. Community Opticians was the sponsor. And the big-breasted girls who played the accordions that all the nasty-male viewers at home always hoped’d catch and pinch them.”

  “They also had guys who played accordions,” he said. “And looked damned near as foolish. And guys who sang, too. There was one kid once who tried to sing ‘Feelings,’ like Barry Manilow did, and I guess his hormones must’ve just kicked in or something, because you could see he had feelings, all right; if he’d had any more’n he was obviously having then, his zipper would’ve burst.”

  “Nerves,” she said. “Stage-fright doesn’t affect everyone in quite the same way. Some find it all quite exciting. Arousing, even.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Well, Maynard used to have to sing ‘Star of the day/Who will it be?’ at the beginning of the show, and that’s what Mossi should’ve been doing when I got close enough to the glass doors at the entrance for him to check me out. ‘Tail of the day/Who can it be?’ ”

  “Did he recognize you?” she said.

  “Doubt it,” he said. “In fact I’m ninety percent sure he didn’t. Because what way would there’ve been for him to do it, to’ve seen me before, so he could? When I was in Boston on my first tour, keep in mind, most of the work I was doing kept me in the office most of the time. Making the models of that stuff that was going on on the North Shore, first the fires and then the bank loans. And then when I finally did get to go out, all by myself,—after I promised, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, that I wouldn’t talk to strangers or get in any strange man’s car and go for ice cream with him—and actully do a little field-work, well, you know what happened then. Soon’s my own data-acquisition and collection made it so what I was getting was beginning to resemble the data that I needed, even if it wasn’t a perfect match for it, I was out on my butt. No sooner did I reach the point where I knew the investigation was being done in the right way, because I was doing it all myself and I at least knew what I was doing, than somebody got a hair across his big fat ass, became extremely nervous, and ordered me transported to the colonies. So, where would Mossi’ve seen me before, for him to’ve made the connection?”

  “A murder out there, maybe?” she said. “He was out there planning a murder with someone, and somebody pointed you out to him, a bar or some restaurant or something?”

  “Possible,” he said. “Might’ve happened but unlikely. West of the Blackstone Valley’s a different jurisdiction for them, the New York–New Haven–Hartford–Springfield axis. Worcester’s in that orbit, too. Everything east of Worcester’s New York–Providence–Boston. Portland, too, now of course, with the drugs expanding that market. They do import talent from other families, other jurisdictions, now and then, if for some reason or another there just isn’t any way that the regular shooter could do the job without getting caught. But it’s unusual, and besides, nothing like that happened while I was assigned out there.

  “So: No, I don’t think he actually knew who I was, the minute he saw me get out of the car and start toward the door. But he knew what I was and what I looked like, some kind of a cop or other, and since that’s all that really concerns him about anyone he sees around him a lot and doesn’t know, that was the only important thing anyway. So once he got that taken care of, he could sort of melt back into the stream of people moving around inside there, sitting down, handicapping, having their coffee or something. Make himself as inconspicuous as he could, watch me watching him for a while.

  “He wasn’t standing at the entrance when I went in and bought my grandstand ticket. I didn’t actually see him again, in fact, until after I came out of the men’s room and spotted him down by the automated betting machines. He had a gray-blue down-vest on over a red plaid flannel shirt, some kind of dark wool pants, new-looking tan work boots. He was looking straight toward the men’s room exit and talking to another guy. Soon’s he saw me he nodded toward me and said something—‘That’s him there now,’ most likely, or: ‘That guy in the tweed sportcoat that just pissed down his leg, I hope.’ Something along that line.

  “The other guy, he was wearing a blue blazer, tan pants, pink dress-shirt, striped tie. Slim, one-forty, maybe; five nine or five ten; forty-five or so; wavy, prematurely-grey hair, originally black; all very dapper and clean-cut, you know? Plays a lot of golf, I think. Cheats on his wife now and then, but nothing excessive. Only when he’s out of town, and then only if she’s a married woman who’s got something to lose too. One of those Smilin’ Jacks that always looks like the reason he never takes a seat on at the Ten-o’clock Sundays is because by staying on his feet he’s always all ready to grab one of those long-handled baskets lined up against the wall at the rear of the church, before anybody else can jump up and get it, and smile at everybody when he helps take up the collection. Or: he can’t wait ’til he comes across his next old-lady-on-a-street-corner, so he can help her cross the street, and maybe also give her a little free advice that’ll help to ease her mind some and maybe get her to come in and have him draw up a new will for her—naming himself her executor, of course; one will, but at least two fees.

  “And why does he look like he does all these things? Precisely for that very reason: because he does them, day in and day out, and when those’re the things that you do, you develop, you have to develop, a repertoire, a regular fuckin’ wardrobe, of appropriate smarmy expressions—one to complement, individuate, and enhance, each of the groveling actions. Because he’s been doing them so often for so long that the years of strain’ve remade his whole face, just like your dear mother said was gonna happen to you if you didn’t stop sucking your thumb. Reset all his teeth, too, just like a set of braces. Realigned his facial muscles. The poor fellow now has no choice. If he tried to snarl at you in gargoyle hatred, he’d look like the second alto in the Choir of the Guild of Saint Cecilia, buttering up the soprano with an unbearably angelic, rich harmonic counterpoint to her show-off solo in ‘Adeste Fidelis,’ midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

  “So those’re all the expressions he’s got left now: the ones that go so well with the thoughtful and considerate things he started doin’ twenty years or so ago, when he first opened up his law office and started what’s become his thriving practice over there in East Ingratiate, where he didn’t know a soul: so everyone would like him. And that is exactly what they did, too. The nice people that he did those nice things for, they so nicely saw he was a nice young man, and they all thought that that was nice. So they brought him all their business and made him very prosperous, as he is today. And today he’s even nicer, if that were possible, always very careful not to be showy about it, all his wonderful good fortune, which in other words means he makes damned sure he never, ever, reminds any one of those nice people he sucked in so easily of some fuckin’-rich-Jew-bigshot, because if he does they’ll drop him like he’d become a goddamned snake—and that’s mighty hard for him to carry off, too, because deep down what he thinks is: It’s fuckin’ grrrr-eat, how easy it was for him to suck them in, and it proves he’s fuckin’ smart. So, being smart, what he was doing today was showin’ off for his friend, the nice professional killer, how seriously he’s takin’ the guy’s question, he takes a real good look at me. While I look back at him, of course, memorizing him just like he’s memorizing me. And then he frowns and shakes his head, which means: ‘No, I dunno who the bastard is offhand, but I’ll see what I can find out.’ A favor, of course, which I’m returning to him even as we speak faster’n he can possibly perform his for me, because there’s nothing in the memories his office computer can access but boilerplate legal shit, so he’s got to resort to the primitive phone while my machines ROM the whole world. And then both of them turned their backs on me, and I bought a program and a newspaper and another cup of c
offee, which turned out to be dishwater and lukewarm-dishwater at that, went on up the ramp into the stands.”

  “You did?” she said. “Weren’t you afraid he’d take off or something? Once he knew you were on his trail?”

  “No reason to be,” he said. “In the first place, it didn’t matter if he did scoot. The reason Bomber Lawrence told Brennan in the first place to get off his ass and start tailing Mossi, and he told me this himself, old Bob did, was because anything one of us saw Mossi doing might be something that he did we hadn’t known about before. And Mossi today’d just done that. Shown me that he’s cosy with a guy we didn’t know about before—not in connection with him, anyway. So when I get his name and so forth, get all that pinned down, even if he’s harmless we’ll still know one more thing about Short Joe Mossi’n we did before I went out of this house this morning.

  “Now probably what I learned today won’t turn out to be important. Most of us know a lot of people who have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with how we make our livings, and this guy’s most likely nothing more’n an acquaintance of Mossi’s who’s got no idea in the world why a guy in my line of work’d be interested in him. But there’s still the possibility that who he is is in fact important. The theory’s been all along that Mossi doesn’t go to that dogtrack just because he’s nutty about dog-racing. It’s obviously not against his religion or anything, because if he didn’t like it at all he would’ve picked someplace else where anyone who had a reason to want to see him, to discuss something confidential, would know he could always find him Tuesdays and Thursdays, every week, except if he was sick in bed. Or away on vacation, naturally.”

  She laughed. He looked at her quizzically. “No, no, nothing,” she said. “I know it isn’t funny, that this man’s a hired killer, but it just sounds so funny, that’s all. Almost like he’s an orthodontist or something. If he had a secretary or a receptionist she could take a letter for him to his customers. ‘Our office will be closed for the month of July to enable our staff to enjoy their summer vacation, so we won’t be able to kill anybody for you between June thirtieth and the first of August.’ ”

  “Yeah,” Dell’Appa said, “but that’s what makes this kind of case so frustrating. These guys are actually fairly well organized, considering that the managerial system that they use is still basically a feudal autocracy that hasn’t been significantly changed, updated, since the thirteenth or fourteenth century, really. And this is a big global operation we’re talking here. Someone like Brennan, or like me, as far as that goes, it’s altogether too easy for someone like us to get tunnel-vision working on a file like this. Get so narrowed-down and focused-in on Mossi, or on Franco, assuming he succeeds Nunzio like everybody thinks he will when the old man goes to jail—as everybody seems to think he’s going to; word is that the feds’ve really nailed him good—that you lose sight of what they really are: the local branch of an international, diversified conglomerate. Agriculture, mining, raw-materials handling, manufacturing, international development and distribution, transportation, construction, entertainment—cripes, are they ever in entertainment—labor-management relations, banking, governmental relations: hell, you name it and they’re in it, all around the world.”

  She looked skeptical. “Agriculture?” she said. “You aren’t telling me the Mafia’s really like a big Grange or something, are you? Farmers who happen to shoot each other if things don’t go right, there’s a drought or something?”

  “Well, you tell me,” he said. “Opium comes from poppies that’re cultivated like any other crop, and that’s where the heroin comes from. The people who harvest the coca-leaves in the Andes aren’t doing work much different from the ones who harvest coffee-beans, and Juan Valdez maybe doesn’t exist, but if he did he’d be considered a farmer. Marijuana grows like the weed it is, but the quality stuff’s cultivated just like any other plant. During Prohibition the mob had a considerable interest in cane sugar, malt, hops, barley, corn, you name it. Looks like agriculture to me, ma’am.”

  She did not say anything. “So, like I was saying,” he said, “you lose sight of what they are, the people in the mob in Boston. They’re not a free-standing, sort of romantic, contemporary version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the good old Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. A bunch of raffish characters with names like ‘Nathan Detroit’ and ‘Nicely-Nicely’ who sing songs about love and shoot crap to the innocent delight of all looking on. No, Damon Runyon was a fucking liar. These’re the real hoods we’ve got on our hands here. What they are, the people you see and know’re in the mob, they’re the staff of the Boston office of a big international operation that grosses billions a year; supports thousands of employees, entrepreneurs, and more-or-less-independent contractors—who’d better not start acting too independent or they’re liable to become subjects of contracts themselves, wind up dead; influences the governments of most industrialized countries and pretty much runs several of them; most likely’s never finished a fiscal year in the red, unless you count the blood; nets an annual profit as big or bigger than the combined earnings of half the corporations on the Fortune lists; and’s got all that loot invested in things all over this world that no civilian in his wildest dreams ever thought of.

  “So, when you start treating those people like office workers and managers of a small regional company, or partners in a local business—good old Al there, your bookie in the barber shop, you’ve known each other so long now that to you he’s no different than Sylvester, your genial neighborhood pharmacist who not only makes up your allergy prescription every May but also recommends this new ointment, just came on the market, that’s so great for hemorrhoids—you’re just being a pliable jerk. You don’t see the conglomerate when you look at Sylvester, though there is one that’ll sue you if you bounce a big bad check off it and you don’t make it good. And you don’t see, either, the organization behind Al that has a man who comes around if you don’t pay your losses promptly, menaces you good, and if that don’t pry the dough off you damned quick, who’ll put you in the hospital at no extra charge. These guys ain’t folk-heroes, you know? They are really bad men. But evidently folk-heroes’s what they’d like to be, what they want to be, and so that’s what they always pretend.”

  “And you think that’s the explanation for what he did,” she said. “You think he was trying to insinuate himself into your good graces, so you’d lay off of him? Sounds kind of far-fetched to me.”

  “Well,” he said, “maybe it isn’t the real explanation, but I’d be willing to bet, if it’s not, that the real one looks a lot like it. Short Joey Moss, keep in mind, isn’t like a lot of the stereotyped muscle that you hear and read about, bruisers who can squeeze anything out of anything except the ideas in a book. The guy is not dumb. Now I’m not saying he’d be able to articulate what his plans are, in any scholarly sense, nothing like that. All I’m saying is that whatever he had in mind today when he did what he did was proof that Bob was right when he said this guy never does anything without a good reason for doing it, and the simple fact that he’s done it before, that it’s been one of his regular habits, part of his usual routine, is not a good enough reason. He may seem to learn more slowly than some autodidactic polymath who decided to invent instant photography one Wednesday morning because he didn’t happen to have anything else to do that day, but that’s not because he’s slow of wit. It’s because he only learns empirically. If he doesn’t see it, or hear it, or otherwise encounter, some observable phenomenon that can’t be otherwise explained, then he’ll never have an explanation for the event, or ever think about a way to prevent or replicate it.

  “But, if he does happen to observe or otherwise experience something, whether it’s one event or a series of related phenomena, and it looks to him like his own interest may be involved, well, then, he’ll puzzle it out. It may take him an agonizing while longer to figure out the causes and effects than a more sophisticated, trained, and systematic intellectual would need, but that’s perfec
tly all right. It’s all right because he’s got lots of time, always as much as he needs. He’s the man who decides when everybody else’s time is up; nobody else rushes him.

  “Now, what I think about this guy is this: I think the way he saw today’s events unfolding, as opposed to the way you or I or Brennan might’ve seen them, is to begin with, with himself as the victim. Maybe that’s too strong a word; the person acted upon. The one being stalked, the passive party to this transaction. Brennan and I being the people who’re active in the whole equation, were the ones acting on him. So what he did after I went up the ramp into the stands and left him talking to his friend was start thinking about how he could turn the equation around. So that he’d become the actor and I’d become the object.

  “It didn’t come to him right off. That was why, after I’d picked out my seat, second one in from the stairs to the left of the ramp, four rows up in the second-tier section, gotten myself settled, figured out how to turn on and tune in the little Quasar TV on the swivel stand in front of me—so it’d show me the Coldstream closed-circuit programs, late scratches, program-consensus selections, all that sort of thing, instead of some late-morning talk show about the special emotional problems and unsatisfied needs of transvestites still in the closet that came on when I turned the set on—he was by himself below me outside, leaning on the fence between the track and the concourse, trying to think up some way he could throw sand in my gears. Then after maybe half an hour, forty minutes more’ve gone by, he’s staring at the track, watching people getting ready for the first race at one o’clock and by now it’s long-gone noon, he decides he’s thought of something. He turns around and faces the clubhouse. He starts scanning the people, all of us, who’re sitting in there behind the big windows, the sissies who don’t like God’s sunshine and breezes, like second-hand cigarette smoke much better.