The Pariot GAme

by George V. Higgins

  “You do that lockjaw pretty well, Pete,” Doherty said.

  “I should, goddammit,” Riordan said. “I grew up in this tent cocoon for privileged caterpillars, didn’t I? The fact that I hated getting my suburban credentials doesn’t change the fact that they’re genuine. I can’t hack that stuff, Paul. I wouldn’t be any good at it, and I know it. Every man’s got his own deficiencies, and that’s another one of mine. I hate flying and I’d be a lousy family man.”

  Mrs. Herlihy brought the tea in on a tray. “That isn’t so, Peter,” she said. “When you were senior altar boy, growing up, you were always very kind and helpful to the new boys. I heard many people remark on it, what a fine husband and father you were being brought up to be.”

  “Oh, nuts, Mrs. Herlihy,” Riordan said, “begging your pardon and all. Brought up to be? Sure. Be any good at it now? Uh-uh. Man does well what he does best. Besides, I waited too long.”

  “It’s never too late to start,” she said, serving the tea on the coffee table. She left the room, shutting the door behind her.

  “You’re in better shape today,” Doherty said, drinking tea.

  “Compared to the shape I was in yesterday,” Riordan said, “sure. Compared to the shape of any respectable citizen of the community: mediocre but showing signs of improvement. One more good night’s sleep and I’ll be nearly fit for human society.”

  “What have you got?” Doherty said.

  “Not sure,” Riordan said. “You got anything?”

  “Nope,” Doherty said. “I was afraid I’d screw everything up if I marched in and started hacking around with this thing without more information. You know your sisters after all these years, and I know my brother just as well, for just about the same reasons. I don’t like my brother as well as I like your sisters. Your sisters may be stuffy, but they’re nice and they haven’t kept you in one dire emergency after another since the three of you got out of school. My brother didn’t exactly get out of school—he was thrown out on his big fat arse, and he’s nothing but a wise guy. I know it, and I most emphatically do not like it, but I know him and I know enough not to mess around in anything that involves him without having every available fact at my disposal.”

  “Yeah?” Riordan said. “Well, I know my sisters, and stuffy is far too mild for them. They turned on the afterburners of their life-styles while they were still at Newton College of the Sacred Heart, and they left stuffy far behind. They hit boring ten or fifteen years ago, and they’re still accelerating. Or is it decelerating. Probably. God knows what they’ll be ten years from now. Brain-dead, probably. Still marching around in those goddamned clothes from Talbots but you slap an EEG on their skulls and you’ll get a wave as flat as a shirt cardboard. At least your brother’s alive. He may be a holy terror, and he may drive you nuts, but by God, you have to admit that old Digger’s never dull. I like him much better’n I like that pair.”

  “All right then,” Doherty said, “keeping in mind that it’s much easier to like Jerry if your interest is professional and you’re merely trying to put him in jail, instead of your interest being familial and trying to keep him out of jail, or the morgue—which is much harder—what’ve you got?”

  “I feel like I’m reciting the answers for Confirmation,” Riordan said.

  “Oh, shut up,” Doherty said.

  “Saw Ken Walker at the prison after I left you,” Riordan said. “We were right on the peg about Magro. Walker didn’t have enough information. Gave him what I had. Good guy, Walker. Saw the light immediately.”

  “Good,” Doherty said. “Magro’s not getting out, then. Means we can relax. Glad I didn’t do anything. Always trust your instincts, Pete, always trust your instincts. Its your guardian angel, giving you a little nudge in the right direction.”

  “Always have, Paul,” Riordan said, “always have. Be dead now, I didn’t. Trouble is, guardian angel works a straight forty-hour week. Days, only. No nights, weekends or national holidays, and three full weeks off with pay. Those angels’ve got a union, I think. Doesn’t do a bit of harm, do a little of your own looking out at the same time while you’re waiting for him to give you your messages. Walker can’t stop Magro from getting out. He agrees with me—I didn’t see any need to bring your name into it—but he can’t knock it down all by himself.”

  “Well, for the luvva Mike,” Doherty said, “he’s the damned warden, isn’t he? Doesn’t he have last say on who stays in and who gets out?”

  “Used to,” Riordan said. “That was before the great enlightenment. Remember all those seminars you gave me, when you still hadn’t given up hope of making me into a civilized human being and maybe even doing a little gentle recruiting for Holy Mother Church? The Great Enlightenment and all? Well, they had a great enlightenment in this Commonwealth a few years back, and some of it seeped into the corrections system. If Walker wants to keep a guy in now, he has to convince a couple of airheads that the fellow is Jack the Ripper, at least. Told me he’s got trouble doing that.”

  “So,” Doherty said, “what’s he going to do? Sit back, throw up his hands, and let him loose to pull the trigger on my brother? I’m a celibate, Peter. I’m a celibate on purpose. I’ve got my flock. It’s diminishing rapidly and it’s getting old before my eyes, but it is my flock and I have to take care of it. I can’t raise my brother’s family for him, after he gets himself plugged.”

  “Gee,” Riordan said, “aren’t you the guy that was peddling the joys of family life to me a few minutes ago?”

  “Easy, Peter,” Doherty said. “There’s a lot of difference between a man your age, your condition, starting a family, and a man my age, my condition, picking up where Digger Doherty never really tried to begin. I’m not saying his kids are bad, because they’re not. Not yet, anyway. Not too bad. But Patricia’s almost fourteen now, and a beautiful young woman. Even a celibate knows what that means, especially if the celibate’s heard a few confessions.

  “The boys’re well into their late adolescence,” Doherty said, “and they never had a great deal of discipline from their father. Hell, he never had much discipline for himself, let alone any left over for them. I’m worried about the middle boy, Andrew. He’s hanging around on the street corners late at night, drinking beer and acting tough with a bunch of punks who drink beer and act tough and dammit, are tough. Andrew thinks his father’s a real hero, because he plays the angles and he did time in prison, and that is not an encouraging sign to me. I’ll do all I can for that family, but a lot of what needs to be done is undoing what Jerry did wrong or didn’t bother to do at all. He’s got a couple of real little roughneck kids coming along there, and quite honestly, I wouldn’t know where to begin shaping them up.”

  “How about military school,” Riordan said. “That’s what Doctor Will always threatened me with, when it looked like I might have some ideas about getting off the reservation.”

  “Yeah,” Doherty said, “that’s a good one. Will’s idea of you getting off the reservation was when you did a jackrabbit start as the light turned green. Digger’s idea of his kids getting off the reservation is when they steal something he can’t sell; so far, I guess, they haven’t brought any of their business to him, if they have any to do. Stoning school buses with black kids in them, though—that’s all right. Drinking underage? Boys will be boys. Skipping school? Jerry didn’t like school much himself. It’s okay to get mouthy with the cops, because Jerry knows all the cops’re jerks and there’s no need treating them with any sort of courtesy because that only encourages them to push you around. Little shoplifting here and there? Perfectly okay—hey, what the hell, goddamned merchants’re ripping everybody else off, do them good to get a taste of their own medicine for a change. Oh, Jerry’s bringing those kids up in the right way, Pete. They’ll be street-smart if he’s got anything to say about it. He makes Fagin look like Father Flanagan. You think I want that job? Raising the James Boys from scratch? Far from it. As a senior altar boy of mine once said: ‘I’d rather pour
horse liniment in my jockstrap.’ ”

  “Sorry I mentioned it,” Riordan said.

  “You should be,” Doherty said.

  Riordan leaned forward. “Paul,” he said, “mentor of my youth and builder of my character …”

  “See?” Doherty said. “That just goes to prove it. You’re blaming me for the disgraceful scoundrel you turned out to be, and you were a fairly promising candidate from a respectable family. Can you imagine how I’d screw up the job of trying to keep those outlaws out of the penitentiary? I mean it, Pete. I don’t want that damned job. I had it for a while when he was in the slammer the last time, and I don’t want it again.”

  “Okay, okay,” Riordan said, settling back. “Anyway, Walker’s going to do something that he figures’ll screw up the do-gooders that want to let every contrite assassin loose in the street, and that should help keep Magro right where he is for a few more years.”

  “Let’s hear about it,” Doherty said, “what exactly is he going to do? Just to make me feel better.”

  “Paul, Paul,” Riordan said, “you’re asking too much of me now. Do you think if Ken Walker or anybody else asked me what you said to me in private, I would tell? Is that really what you think?”

  “Oh oh,” Doherty said, “now I think I’m the one that’s in trouble.”

  Riordan sighed. “You certainly are, Paul. I thought we had it all straight, that there’s a seal of the confessional in my line of work too.”

  “All right,” Doherty said. “More tea, Agent Riordan?”

  “Is there any chance,” Riordan said, “that we could maybe persuade Mrs. Herlihy to let us have a couple beers, if we ask politely? I assume you still stock that Amstel.”

  “It isn’t noon yet, Pete,” Doherty said.

  “When I want the time, Paul,” Riordan said, “I will ask for the time.”

  “Just a minute,” Doherty said. He went over to the desk and pressed the intercom button. He asked Mrs. Herlihy to serve two bottles of Amstel.

  “Airs and graces,” Riordan said. “Intercom and all, I see. Go with being a bishop?”

  “Goes with having a lame housekeeper,” Doherty said, returning to the couch. “I hate it myself.”

  “Used to be, as I remember it,” Riordan said, “man could actually get up on his hind legs in his room and walk his own butt out to the icebox and fetch his own beer. Take care of his own health and safety.”

  “At night, Pete,” Doherty said, “only at night, when she’s supposed to be off duty. Hurts her pride if you do it during the day. She thinks you’re suggesting that she’s too infirm to do her job anymore. So, I put the intercom in, and I told her it was orders from my doctor, while I was recuperating from the attack. You see, Mrs. Herlihy was put on the earth first to take of the late James Herlihy, and then to take care of me. It is perfectly all right in her estimation for me to be feeble. In fact, it is only right that I be feeble, because otherwise God would never have dispatched Mrs. Herlihy to see to my care and upkeep.”

  “Complicated, isn’t it?” Riordan said.

  Doherty shook his head as he sat down. “Complicated? Good Lord, I had no idea how complicated it would become as I got older.”

  “So I’m discovering,” Riordan said. “All right, that’s Walker out of the way. I left him and I went in to the State House, where there is this fellow that may not know where Captain Kidd hid the gold, but when it comes to where the bodies are buried, he is supposed to know everything.”

  “Seats Lobianco,” Doherty said immediately, laughing. “Salvatore Lobianco.”

  “You know him, then,” Riordan said.

  “I’m alive in the Commonwealth, am I not?” Doherty said. “If you’ve ever been at the intersection of Beacon and Park Streets on a sunny spring day, you know Seats Lobianco. He’s been around since the statue of George Washington on horseback in the Garden, but with one important difference: No pigeon in his right mind would ever dump on Seats Lobianco. Seats would ruin his career without ever raising his voice above a whisper.”

  “Is he all right?” Riordan said. “My guy said he is all right. I went on that. I had to. I’ve been out of the state for a while, you know. Out of the States, for that matter. And since I’ve been back, I had very little to do with that place on the hill. I don’t know much about all that back-and-forth they’ve got going up there.”

  “Nobody does,” Doherty said. “A great many people think they do, and even more say they do, but very few actually know. There’s too much of it. It’s like watching the Marathon. There’s more than twenty-six miles of it. Nobody’s ever seen the whole Marathon because there’s too much Marathon to see. What they see is a little bit of it, and they think they’ve seen the whole thing. Comforting, I suppose, but a myth. Talk about wheels within wheels. When Cushing was alive, I used to go up there now and then. Spent quite a lot of time up there for him, doing one thing and another and you’re not to ask me too many questions about that, either.”

  “Bingo,” Riordan said.

  “Damned WASPs,” Doherty said. “WASPs and mobsters. Pretty lethal alliance against the forces of light and truth and a solvent bourse in the parishes of the Archdiocese of Boston.”

  “Is Lobianco straight?” Riordan said.

  “Oh, sure,” Doherty said. Mrs. Herlihy hobbled in with the tray of beer. She looked suspiciously at Riordan and disapprovingly at Doherty. “You can look out for yourself, Peter,” she said, “I guess you’re old enough and young enough. But you, Father, you remember what the doctor told you about this sort of thing.” She set the Amstels on the table.

  “Call him up, Mrs. Herlihy,” Doherty said, “and tell him that I’ll anoint myself on the way out if one beer carries me off. And if it does, I wasn’t long for this world anyway.”

  “Well,” she said, “you just remember, that’s all.” She walked slowly out and shut the door.

  Doherty began laughing. “Tyranny,” he said, “absolute tyranny. I hear all these complaints firsthand from the kids that their parents’re tyrants, and I get all the beefs secondhand from the parents that the clergy’s tyrannical, but not a one of them has the faintest notion of tyranny, real absolute rule, until he’s been subjugated to the will of a pedigreed rectory housekeeper.

  “Yeah, Pete,” Doherty said, leaning forward to pour the beer. “Seats is all right. He plays the clown, and he puts on a good act about being a plotter and a conniver. Which in a way I suppose he must be, or he never would’ve survived as long as he has in that place. But he is absolutely dead honest.”

  “He told me that he is,” Riordan said. “I wasn’t sure I believed him, though.”

  “Ah, Peter,” Doherty said, after drinking beer through the head of foam, “the Holy Scriptures are right: ‘Wiser in the ways of the world are the children of Mammon, than are the children of the Light.’ Every one of those birds up there will tell you he’s as honest as the day is long, and then he will take you aside and whisper that you better watch them other guys, though. Lobianco is one of the lot that actually means it. He is straight. What’d he tell you, or is it another sin if I ask you that?”

  “Nah,” Riordan said, “you have that one, free, gratis and for nothing. He said I was the third guy came at him yesterday on Mike Magro. Up till yesterday morning, Lobianco’d never heard of the guy. He was damned if he could figure it out.”

  “Who were the first two?” Doherty said.

  “The guy right before me,” Riordan said, “was one of the Councillors. Fellow by the name of Thomas Emmett. Democrat out of Worcester. He was the only guy on the Council that’d apparently ever heard of Magro before the meeting, and he wanted the pardon application rammed through all at once, executive session.”

  Doherty furrowed his brows. “Emmett,” he said, “that’s odd. Tommy Emmett.”

  “You know him?” Riordan said.

  “Little,” Doherty said, “not a heck of a lot. Never draws much attention. Which of course’re often the most devilish kind, becau
se nobody notices when they pull something off. Never heard anything much about him one way or the other, though. Oh, the standard stuff—covers his district when there’s a judgeship, clerkship, something like that. Any judgeships coming up?”

  “Lobianco said one filled yesterday, and the other ones locked up for delivery the next meeting.”

  “Can’t be that, then,” Doherty said. “Besides, doesn’t make any sense. Where the hell would a thief and killer like Magro get the weight to pull a judgeship out for somebody? Unless Emmett also wants Jerry killed, which is equally hard to imagine. I doubt they even know each other, let alone one of them carrying that kind of a grudge.” He shook his head. “Nope, can’t do anything with it. There’s obviously something there, but I don’t know what it is. Who’s the other guy?”

  “Rep name of Greenan,” Riordan said, “from Roslindale.”

  “Ticker Greenan as I live and breathe,” Doherty said. “One of the grand characters out of vaudeville, now continuing an extended engagement in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.”

  “He was in vaudeville?” Riordan said.

  “I don’t think so,” Doherty said. “He’s funny as the devil, but he doesn’t mean to be and he doesn’t know he’s doing it when he does it. Where does he fit in?”

  “Told Lobianco at lunch before the meeting,” Riordan said, “he was pushing Magro’s application as a favor for a priest.”

  Doherty leaned forward and put the beer down. “Ahh,” he said, “now we are getting somewhere. The priest is a domestic prelate.”

  “Right,” Riordan said.

  “He’s got a parish in West Roxbury,” Doherty said.

  “Right,” Riordan said.

  “His name is Fahey,” Doherty said.

  “Also right,” Riordan said.

  “Right Reverend Monsignor Vincent J. Fahey, to be exact,” Doherty said. “Or, as we called him affectionately in the seminary, Trimmer Fahey. Ah yes, my dear Watson, it all comes clear now. Clearer, at least. Trimmer Faheys at the root of this little adventure.”