Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “That’s what I’m gonna say to him, Ernie, very first thing in the morning. All of that clear to you so far?”

  Ernie licked his lips again and looked away from Dell’Appa. Dell’Appa deliberately raised his left arm, shot his left cuff, and started the stop-watch again.

  14

  “Well, I don’t know as you could say that he actually said it,” Dell’Appa said. “Didn’t say it to me, at least—I happened to be the only person who was in the room with him at the time when he made the sounds, and I certainly heard what he said, but I don’t think I’d go so far as to say it was really directed at me. He wasn’t looking at me when he made them, the sounds he was making …”

  “… yes, those noises that did happen nonetheless to be recognizable English words,” Dennison said, “which was probably not by coincidence; we most likely shouldn’t overlook that here, I think.”

  “Oh yeah,” Dell’Appa said, “they were words, too, all right, they were words. No question of them being that. But when he uttered them he was gazing off into the distance. It was more like he was thinking out loud, sort of talking to himself, in some kind of a reverie, you know? Even though there was someone else there, even though I was also there with him.”

  “Well, okay,” Dennison said, “I’m not sure I follow, but what was it you heard him say then? In this trance-state you’d put him into?” Dennison, arriving home about twenty minutes after Dell’Appa had located the long maple-lined drive leading to the mauve villa in Westport, had gestured to him to wait in the Lexus in the cold rain until he had gone around to the back and opened the house. Then, holding the front door open as Dell’Appa parked in front of it and trotted up the two steps to the entrance, he had said they would “talk in the drawing room.”

  “Gee,” Dell’Appa had said, “I never actually knew anyone with a drawing-room before. There was this kid in grade-school that I knew, had a hare-lip and a cleft palate, but he had corrective surgery and had them fixed. But, a real drawing-room? Wow, boy, I am impressed.”

  “You can go and fuck yourself at your earliest convenience here, you know,” Dennison had said, ushering him into it.

  It was about thirty feet long and at least fifteen feet wide, the walls and the high ceiling as well darkened by carved fruitwood panels two feet square, the floor dark parquet around the edges of an Oriental rug predominantly pastel-blue. They occupied matching navy-blue leather armchairs flanking a low cherry round table. In front of the table was a fireplace set into the inner wall at the center of the room. The fireplace was tiled in an intricate blue-and-white delft scroll design. There was a spray-bouquet of white stock in a white straw-patterned vase in the center. Across the room behind them there were tall French doors framed with dark-blue velvet drapes, giving out over a meadow sloping away from rear of the house. The rain off the bay of the sea to the south of Westport beat more heavily and steadily against the glass than the rain that had come in over the land against the window of the prison-chapel at Plymouth.

  “ ‘You son of a son of a bitch,’ ” Dell’Appa said. “And then he said it again: ‘You son of a son of a bitch.’ Like some kind of mantra or something, something you’d hear an old medicine man say, one of those tanbark-stained, leather-faced, big-mother kahunas, some kind of kachina-dancer, NBA-sized, enormous from where you’re standing, on the ground, up on the top of his mountain, tilting his head back with his eyes closed, defying a thunderhead sky, long spear with white feathers at the point in his right hand, and in his left, a long, fat, angry rattlesnake, his shiny familiar, cellular-phone to the spirit-world, coiling, and poising to strike. And then when he’s come down and face to face with you on level ground, he turns out to be five-foot-three and talks with a lisp. He tells you he bought his big scary pet snake in a joke shop; fuckin’ thing isn’t real at all; it’s got a spring like a Slinky inside, runs on four double-A, alkaline batteries he hadda buy separately, ‘and were they a bitch to install.’ ” He felt chillier than he had at the jail, and shivered inside his tweed jacket.

  “And you don’t think he was talkin’ to you,” Dennison said. “You were the only other guy in the room when he said: ‘you son, of a son, of a bitch,’ after you just got through as good as flat-out fuckin’ tellin’ him that tomorrow you’re gonna start doin’ the very best that you possibly can to see if you can’t get him killed. See if you can’t spook Mossi into knockin’ him off, and you don’t think he was talkin’ to you? You think he didn’t have you in mind, when he said a bad name twice there, and you were the only other guy who was present; that’s what you’re telling me here.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Dell’Appa said. “If I was in a room, and you were in the same room, the same time, and I heard you say, ‘you son of a son of a bitch,’ and you even said it in that same soft tone of voice this kid used, I would know, the minute you said it, there would not be the slightest doubt in my mind whatsoever, that you, you son of a son of a bitch, were usin’ that term about me. Because that is the kind of a son of a bitch that you are, that you just happen to be. You’re just not in the kind of person who has got a habit of dreaming himself off into space. But this kid? I don’t think so. I don’t think he is that, the kind of a person you are.

  “You have to have a fairly strong character to be what you are, someone who’d call another son of a bitch, a son of a bitch to his face. And mean it. Especially if it is true, and he knows it, knows he’s a real son of a bitch. He’s liable to do something to you. Kick the piss out of you, something. Make blood come out of your ears. This kid doesn’t have that much fibre. What he said, well, he could’ve said anythin’, really—wouldn’t’ve meant anything more. Anything either, anything at all, maybe. He was like one of those guys that didn’t want to learn how to play the piano, but his parents made him take lessons, much against his will, and so, okay, he took them, he did it. They were still bigger’n he was, back then, and if he’d said no, just refused, well, they would’ve beat the shit out of him. But he was still able to thwart them; he never did try to learn how to do it, to play, and his teacher saw this, about the third week or so, so she just sat back and let him make a mess of things, and took her hourly fee. And so therefore he never did. He still, to this very day, doesn’t know how.

  “But that doesn’t stop him from sitting down at it, the piano you’ve got at home, when your wife’s invited him to the very first party he’s ever come to at your house—and it’s gonna be the last one, too, not because he threw up cold ratatouille on your best pair of pants or down your wife’s lowest-cut dress, or grabbed your thirteen-year-old daughter’s left tit and said to her: ‘That’ll be sixty-nine cents for the milkshake, that’s the special this week, I hope you got your coupon with you’; no, won’t be nothing like that—because he’d never do any of those things. It’ll be because no one remembers him, even if he was there, as though when he was there, well, he was there but he was completely invisible—and pickin’ away at the keys.

  “And noises’re gonna come out of that, there, maybe even sound something a lot like a song that exists and that you know you heard, you just can’t place it right now. But if that does happen, it’ll be just an accident, something offbeat, happened purely at random, like a cloud forming up in a high summer sky that looks exactly like Gene Autry’s white Stetson hat. Or when the ten-millionth monkey, the one in the very last seat at the very left end of the very last row, in your private simian typing-zoo, almost replicates Hamlet or something, only he doesn’t quite pull it off: ‘To be or not to be, muhfuck, yaah, that’s the gefilte fish, yick-yick, and if she can stand it, I can, so play it, yick, you heard me, yick, you asshole you: play it-ah, play it-ah, afuckin-gain, thassit.’ Well, that isn’t Shakespeare, old pal of mine, and what the guy plays, at your piano, that will not be playin’ a song. No matter how much it sounds like one, not inna real sense of the word. It didn’t just come to him all at once, he’s a natural, he can play the piano; all he’s doin’ is makin’ some noise, that happens to sound
like a song. It isn’t music if what you had in mind to make when you produced it was spaghetti sauce or something. Intention precedent is critical; you’re not cursing a guy when you say bad names unless you intend to curse him, and we first-chop philosophers know this.

  “Well, that’s what I’m sayin’ with this kid. He could’ve started in sayin’ ‘Hail, Holy Queen’; recitin’ Five Glorious Mysteries; disclosin’ his secret of fluffy-light sponge cake, or how your cat can learn to do simple repair jobs, around the house, case somethin’ breaks, you’re not there. It wouldn’t’ve meant any more about me, had any more to do with me’n the words that he actually said.”

  Dennison had switched on only the pharmacist’s brass floor lamp next to the chair he had offered Dell’Appa as they had come into the room; the bulb added no more than sixty paltry watts to the thin and diminishing, gray, residual, late-November, late-afternoon light collected like airborne lint by the tall glassed doors. Dennison’s face across the round table from Dell’Appa was becoming indistinct in the fading daylight and the weak incandescence. Dell’Appa shivered again, this time making no effort to conceal the rictus or keep it from his face. “Are you all right, Harry?” Dennison said in the dimness.

  “I’ve felt better,” Dell’Appa said. “And one common feature of every time, I recall feeling vividly better, I recall as well feeling much warmer. Have you got any heat on in here, or are you being respectful to fuel-making fossils, so their sacrifice wasn’t in vain? I don’t want to be rude with you, here in your very own house, boss, but the truth of the matter’s: I’m cold.”

  Dennison sighed. “Well, I’ll tell you, Harry,” he said, shaking his head and lightly slapping his right hand on his thigh, “there’s two answers, both true, to your question. One is ‘yes’ and the other is ‘no.” Yes, we do have the heat on, insofar as anything we’re able to do affects heat production in this house. We’ve got the thermostats upstairs and down all carefully set: sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit, though sixty-two’s most likely more what we actually get, insofar as we get anything. But then again, no, we do not have the heat on, because no matter where we set the thermostats, fifty-five, or eighty-five, it really won’t make that much difference. All we really affect by setting to bake, or conversely by setting to freeze, are the temperatures in the rooms directly above the furnace, or opening right onto them.

  “The oil-burner’s under the northeasterly corner of the house. This room occupies the southwesterly corner, which puts it just about as far from the burner as it’s possible to get without going out in the yard, so you see what the problem is with it: the heat’s all at the other end of the house; there’s none left to warm up this end.

  “Now why, you may well ask, as we have ourselves, did the all-seeing, all-knowing architect pull a boneheaded dumb stunt like that, putting the oil-burner there? For an excellent reason: a house as big as this, no matter what he did, was going to require a lot of BTUs to heat, and because his client, the rug merchant’s son, wouldn’t be here for much of the winter—he’d be down in West Palm, I guess, having another house there—he’d want to be sure he had enough oil to last him for months at a time; no fuel-degree-day charts in those days, I guess—you had to order each load. So the design called for a mammoth tank, a thousand gallons of oil—the days when the oil man fills that fucker up are days that your checkbook remembers; whole vacations, fur coats, and new stereo rigs’ve drowned in that thing with nary a trace. If they’d put it inside, that big bastard would’ve taken up the whole basement and ruined the billiard room plans, so the architect had it buried in the yard, out next to the driveway there, so the delivery men wouldn’t have to drag their heavy hoses all across the lovely lawns. So that made the heat a little spotty, room-to-room? So who cared? The owner never bitched about it—owner was in Florida, the heat came on in the winter, so the owner never knew. Caretakers knew, freezin’ their asses off, they’re in here takin’ care, but since they didn’t count, that didn’t mean anything—once again: who on earth gave a shit? No one did, that is who, no one.

  “ ’Ginia did, though,” Dennison said, “because she lived here, and since we moved in, so’ve we. So we do the best that we can. Since the rooms we use a lot tend to be places like the kitchen, the bedroom and bathroom, the library where we both have our desks, those far from the furnace chase have quartz heaters in them. But since this isn’t one of those often-used rooms, it doesn’t have such a device.”

  “Okay then,” Dell’Appa said, “how ’bout having a fire then, the fireplace? The flowers’re pretty, I’m not saying that, but they don’t make me feel warm; they mean maybe I’m gonna be dead soon. That’s not an idea that I like.”

  “Calm yourself, Harry,” Dennison said. “I’ll keep a close eye on you, and if I hear you starting to babble ah green fields, or bidding me put more clothes on, I’ll take strong measures at once. But they won’t consist of a fire; that’s a fake, not a wood-burning fireplace. When we moved in here with Tory’s mother, ’Ginia didn’t know if it worked. She and Lucy’d never even bothered to try it. Well, it didn’t, at least not the way that you and I would expect a fireplace to work—throw some logs in and open the flue. The only thing this thing can handle’s one of those electric logs, the fireplace accessory that does for ambiance what pantyhose did for finger-fuckin’. But which wasn’t really all that surprising—lots of these old showplace, show-off, homes had vanity fireplaces like this, solely for decoration, no more’n holes in the walls, really, no chimneys or flues attached to them, flaunting the owner’s wealth, as demonstrated by his possession of the very latest improvements in central heating.”

  “Okay,” Dell’Appa said, “how ’bout the library then? Can we go in there and turn on the heater?”

  “We could’ve done that,” Dennison said, “and it would’ve been right if we had, but to make it right we would’ve had to’ve made our plans to meet here before Tory asked her client this morning to come here this afternoon and go over proposals to redecorate the whole first floor of her new house in Falmouth.”

  “I didn’t see any other cars here, I come up the drive,” Dell’Appa said. “That’s why I stayed in my car; I thought nobody was home yet. How many ways you got into this place?”

  “Attaboy, Harry,” Dennison said. “Way to go, Harry, old kid. Keep up that full-time sleuthin’ shit there, ’case some bastard here’s greasin’ your goose for you. You didn’t see any other car parked in the driveway because there’re sixteen rooms on that first floor of Tory’s client’s house, her Cape house overlooking the lighthouse at Nobska, and ladies of her certain age who’ve got summer houses with that many rooms in their downstairs, and thus more dignity’n Eastern potentates ’n prophets, perceive no good and sufficient reason to operate their motorcars themselves. They have people they employ to drive their motorcars for them, as, I am sure, they would also have people to handle for them many other such tiresome daily transactions as defecation and micturation, even have their cases of swine flu, if only, God, only, they could. Tory’s client’s chauffeur springs out of the driver’s seat at each destination and opens the rear door of her pearl-gray Bentley Turbo for her; when it’s raining, like today,—as it most certainly shouldn’t when this lady wants to go out, but then mustn’t grumble, must one—he shields her head with an umbrella ’til she’s under cover. Then he gets back in the car and goes to where she told him to, does what she told him to do when he got there, and then returns to pick her up precisely at the hour she appointed, thus sparing her the tedium of explaining frequently to lesser breeds without the law, whom she has hired to do still other things, that she must away, and simply cannot tarry longer in their company; her time’s too valuable for that.

  “Now,” Dennison said, “the library, right above us here, heated toasty-warm by no less than two quartz heaters, is certainly large enough to accommodate one person working at the desk at one end and two other persons talking across the desk at the other. I know because I’ve been in that room
when it’s done it, accommodated that number, doing those things, very nicely indeed. But that doesn’t mean that room is also large enough to accommodate two somewhat volatile and animated ladies, one of them quite refined and fucking filthy rich, and whose contentment is thus quite important to the other one that’s married to a goddamned fucking cop who’s paid at the poverty level, who are talking about what ladies really talk about instead of baseball and politics: not of good old Mickey Angelo there, as old T. S. Eliot had it when he wasn’t petting kitties, giving them preposterous names, but of wall- and window-treatments, carpets and upholstery fabrics, while waving fabric swatches in the air like gonfalons, and house at the same time two fuckin’ roughneck cops who’re dispassionately discussing, in appropriate terms, lowlife finks, stoolies and sewer-rats, and how to complicate their worthless rotten useless lives. You read?”

  “I copy,” Dell’Appa said. “The kitchen? We could do what the folks who don’t work have to do, when their landlords don’t fix the heat: turn the oven on, open the door.”