The Pariot GAme

by George V. Higgins

  “Your father,” Doherty said, “I’m telling tales out of school, but the hell with it, your father was absolutely wild when he found out what you had in mind as a means to avoid being drafted into the infantry.”

  “I seem to recall his mentioning something about that to me,” Riordan said.

  “Yeah,” Doherty said, “I’ll bet you do. He lingered after one of those blasted parish council meetings, until we were alone. ‘The Marines,’ he yelled at me, ‘the Marines? The little fool is going to duck the draft by enlisting in the Marines? The Marines are his idea of a way out of the infantry? Can’t you do something about this?’ I said, ‘No. And for that matter, neither can you.’ ‘He could get himself killed doing this,’ your father said to me. ‘He certainly could,’ I said.”

  “He never knew about the Recon part,” Riordan said. “He got lathered up enough just thinking I was busting ashore off LSTs, like they did in World War Two. If he’d known I was spending most of my time in the woods, alone, he would’ve gone straight up in the air.”

  “Well,” Doherty said, “why did you do it? He was right, you know. He could’ve gotten you deferred. All the doctors he knew? Easy. Hell, you could’ve gotten yourself deferred. Just gone right on to graduate school, and waited it out. Why didn’t you do that?”

  “I dunno,” Riordan said. “Partly to goose him, I suppose. He was always feeling my forehead, even when he had to reach up to do it. Taking my pulse. Worrying when I played football.”

  “You were his only son,” Doherty said.

  “Yeah,” Riordan said, “I know that. But I was also pretty well along the way to becoming my only man. Besides, I was young and nutty when I set the whole thing in motion. I read too many books, I guess, believed all that shit about courage and all that crap, the man who tests himself against the enemy. The ultimate peril, faced and faced down. Friend of mine married a girl in college that was so light she would’ve floated clear off the ground if she didn’t have lead weights in her shoes. Here is this guy with an absolutely indecent genius for quantum physics, and he goes out and marries this bubblehead. Maybe he didn’t know that she had Timken roller bearings on her heels. Maybe he didn’t know that whole armies had marched over her. Maybe he knew and didn’t care. Two years later, divorced. Asked him why he did it. Shrugged his shoulders. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time.’ Same thing with me and the Marines. ‘Nothing else to do right now, think I’ll go and become a jungle fighter. Better’n hanging around down at the gas station.’ ”

  “Which at the time I could pretty well surmise,” Doherty said. “We were old friends then. We still are. But we still keep things from each other, and we always will. For a complete inventory of the other guy, you have to draw a lot of inferences.”

  “Draw any from your talk with Father Fahey?” Riordan said.

  “Peter,” Doherty said, “I will tell you honestly, I have never had so much damned fun in my life. Well, maybe as much fun, a long time ago. But not lately.”

  “I could tell that,” Riordan said. “You look a hell of a lot better since you started this Father Brown gig with me. That’s one of my inferences.”

  “Don’t doubt it for an instant,” Doherty said. “What I did was whip it out of him. See, if you’ve known Trimmer for a long time, as I have, you will dislike him but you will also respect him. Trimmer knows that he is not a man of blinding intellect. That’s why he’s so damned aggressive. He starts out trying to throw the other guy off balance. Like the fastball pitcher who’s wilder’n a March hare while he’s warming up, so the hitters come up there worrying about whether they’ll need baskets to take their heads home after the game. If you let him buffalo you at the start of any discussion, he will win by the end.

  “Once he gets the advantage,” Doherty said, “he holds it with partial truths. He knows he’s not fast enough to win an argument with someone who’s smarter, so he distorts the subject. If you say a panda bear is actually part of the raccoon family, and he is committed to the position that it is a part of the bear family, you will never get to the issue. He will spend the rest of the discussion asking you if you seriously mean to say that there is such a thing as a three-hundred-pound Chinese raccoon. Anybody listening will of course conclude that you are crazy and that Monsignor Fahey has the common-sensible best of you, you fool. Even though you happen to be right.

  “The way to stop that,” Doherty said, “is to embarrass him before you ever get to the thing you want to talk about. Get him on the defensive. If you can get the bastard rattled, he’s nowhere near as cute as he is when he’s got the upper hand. Just by chance I found out that he’d been lying to the kid that’s at the desk at the club. Seems Trimmer was the warrior priest who single-handedly liberated Normandy on D-Day, or so he led the kid to believe. So I blew him out of the water with that one, and allowed as how I’d make a fool of him with the kid, who lives in his parish, and pretty soon everybody in town would be laughing at him. Then I whacked him with Greenan and Magro, and much as he hated it, I think he told me enough of the truth so we can guess the rest. I think he regurgitated most of it.”

  “Another round?” Riordan said, finishing his beer.

  “By all means,” Doherty said, finishing his vodka. The waiter, peeking around the door to the lounge, caught Doherty’s circular motion for a second round.

  “The housekeeper’s nephew story about Magro is bullshit,” Doherty said. “Like most of the stuff that Trimmer tells people, it’s true. But it’s bullshit. Magro is the housekeeper’s nephew, and she apparently is on her last legs. But she doesn’t give a curse about springing her nephew from Walpole. She thinks he’s a no-good killer and a scandal to her sister that gave him birth, and she blames all of this on her sister’s selection of a husband. There was bad blood in the Magro family, she’s convinced, and it’s all the father’s fault. But Magro is her nephew, and unless Trimmer’s learned to tell lies better than he ever did before, that is really all he told Greenan. Greenan, of course, is solid bone from earlobe to earlobe, and he’d give his right testicle as well as his left for the chance to ingratiate himself with the good Monsignor who holds sway over much of his district.”

  “That’s what Seats told me,” Riordan said. “Seats said Greenan’ll do anything a common ordinary voter asks him to do. Says Greenan’d jump in the cesspool in a white suit if a priest asked him.”

  “That’s no compliment to the clergy,” Doherty said. “Greenan’d jump into the sewer naked in front the sodality, if he thought it’d get him a vote. But he’s still just a dupe on this one.

  “Piecing things together,” Doherty said, “and it’s no easy task, the cornerstone of this little adventure, as far as Fahey’s concerned, is a fellow who goes by the name of Scanlan.”

  “Scanlan have a first name?” Riordan said.

  “Probably,” Doherty said, “but Fahey swears he doesn’t know what it is. Says he’s only met the guy once.”

  “Believe him?” Riordan said.

  “Yeah,” Doherty said, “I think I do, actually. I don’t think the guy’s name probably is Scanlan, and I don’t think Fahey believes it is either, but I do believe that Scanlan is the only name that Fahey’s got for the guy.”

  “Fahey would get himself out on a limb like this for a guy that he knows is giving him a phony name?” Riordan said. “He really is stupid.”

  “Sure,” Doherty said, “and he has another weakness too: he loves conspiracies. Inside stuff. Top secret. Eyes only. Burn before reading. The surest way in the world to get Fahey’s undying loyalty is to let him think he’s working undercover on some plot, and the people that he’s talking to are engaged in some clandestine work. He was that way when we were all jockeying for position in the Church, and he’s that way now, when all that stuff is dead and gone. For us. So he’s found something else.”

  “Which would be?” Riordan said.

  “I’m guessing, Peter,” Doherty said. “I think it’s a pretty firm de
duction, but that’s all it is. I think Fahey’s gotten himself hooked up with the Provos. It’s the sort of thing he’d do. Right in character. Or the lack of it.”

  “Does he admit it?” Riordan said.

  “Not in so many words, no,” Doherty said, “but yes, he admits it. I put it to him, right between the eyes. Asked him if he was running guns for the IRA. He never answered me directly. Just gave me one of those Up the Rebels harangues. Went all the way back to the Battle of the Boyne. He would’ve reviewed the career of Brian Boru, if I hadn’t shut him off.”

  “Does he really believe all that shit?” Riordan said. “Do any of them really believe all that shit?”

  “Sure,” Doherty said. “It’s exciting. Why the hell do you think he misleads kids about his heroic deeds in the Airborne, huh? Excitement. He lives vicariously. You think he feels like a conqueror, dominating the first graders at the parish school? Oh, he does the best he can, but his thirst is for glory on the field of battle.”

  “Huh,” Riordan said, “probably turn tail and run when the first shot was fired. I love people like that, full of big talk and no experience. There’s nothing quite like firsthand acquaintance with hostiles to take care of that problem.”

  “No,” Doherty said. “No, you’re mistaken. Fahey wouldn’t run. He’s not bright enough for that. He’d think he was Patton. Charmed life and all that foolishness. Invulnerable to bullets. He’d stand up straight, his cross in one hand and his carbine in the other, and lead on his troops in the name of the Lord.”

  “He’d get his ass blown off in short order,” Riordan said.

  “Of course,” Doherty said. “That’s how you can tell for sure he never was in combat—he’s still walking around in our midst. He’s pretty old now for active service, and besides, he’d miss his swimming and his comfortable life, but he’s not about to relinquish that dream of his. So, this Scanlan, whatever his real name is, is Vinnie’s free ticket to the land of his own private enchantment. Fahey not only suspects that the real name isn’t Scanlan—he prefers it that way.”

  “Get a description out of him?” Riordan said.

  “Not a very good one,” Doherty said. “He was evasive. He kept asking me why I was so interested in this thing, being as how I am not a patriot. By which I took it to mean that he doesn’t think I am a partisan of the IRA. Which I am not. And I in turn had to be evasive with him, because I was not about to tell him that I was trying to figure out why he was cooperating in some enterprise that seemed pretty likely to get my no-good brother knocked off. Best I could wring out of Vinnie was that the guys fairly short, five seven or so, but very strong and very dangerous. Vinnie wanted me to think that Scanlan’s on the run from the British, which as a matter of fact he probably is, and that he got into this country using a forged passport.”

  “As indeed, he probably did,” Riordan said. “He could hide out for months if he got into the right neighborhoods in Cambridge or Southie or Dorchester. What’s he doing, raising money?”

  “I think that’s already been done,” Doherty said. “I’m not sure Vinnie really knows, but from what he said, I think the money is in hand. The problem now is locating the goods that they want to buy with the money.”

  “Guns,” Riordan said. “Shipped over there in furniture boxes and packages of bedsheets and towels to blind aunts and dead cousins in the peaceable Irish Republic, and smuggled north across the border three nights later. The damned fools.”

  “What they want Magro for,” Doherty said, “at least what Vinnie thinks they want Magro for, is that he is the guy with the contact who can get the weapons. Is there such a thing as an AR-fifteen?”

  “Sure,” Riordan said. “Looks just like the M-sixteen that the army used in Vietnam, which was a piece of thirty-caliber junk. The AR was the pilot model, seven-point-sixty-two millimeter, lightweight, full-automatic for combat, reliable, accurate, the whole bit. Naturally the army didn’t like it, so they crapped around with it until they got the M-sixteen. Those Micks may be crazy, Paul, but nobody ever said they didn’t have good taste in firepower.”

  “Could somebody like Magro get them?” Doherty said.

  “Sure,” Riordan said. “Just about anybody can get one. All you need in this Commonwealth’s a firearms ID card. Go into a gun store, show the card, ask to see one, buy it.”

  “A machine gun?” Doherty said.

  “Semi-auto, in the stores,” Riordan said. “Hunting weapon. Probably wouldn’t take a good gunsmith more’n an hour to figure how to make it full-automatic, and if he was casting the parts to modify one, he could cast enough to modify a hundred of them in a day or so. Wouldn’t really matter if he couldn’t. Machine guns aren’t much good anyway, the kind of work the IRA prefers. All everybody does is spray the buildings and the landscape with scarce bullets. You got a semi-auto, you aim on each target, and you can still fire damned fast even pulling the trigger every shot.”

  “Well,” Doherty said, “if anyone can buy them, why do they need Magro? All they need’s some respectable citizen who hates England. Let him go out and buy as many as they want, legally.”

  “Couple hundred of them?” Riordan said.

  “Couple dozen, couple hundred,” Doherty said. “What difference would it make?”

  “Records,” Riordan said. “The state laws’re pretty tough. And the federal laws’re even tougher. Every gun sale’s logged. Those logs’re regularly inspected. Same legitimate credentials start showing up in store after store, some guy’s stockpiling AR-fifteens, going to make a lot of people curious. Nobody can use two hundred rifles all by his lonesome. Chances are, he’s planning to sell them to somebody, or outfit a private army. Can’t do that. Got to have a dealer’s license to sell guns in quantity. Got to have a dealer’s license to buy guns in quantity. Got to have permits to shift guns across state lines. You want to export guns, you got more paperwork to do than the Post Office loses in a month.

  “That’s why the IRA hooked up with the PLO—those Palestinians’ve got Kalashnikov assault rifles, which is an even better weapon, and the Soviet Union doesn’t make it nearly as difficult for the PLO to get Russian guns as the good old USA does with American guns. There’ve been stories that the PLOs’ve got the Israeli machine guns too, the Uzis, but I tend to doubt that. They would’ve had to capture those, and they haven’t had much luck capturing Jews or their equipment. Still, the AR’s a fine weapon. Perfect for your informal little bushwhacking. No terrorist organization in its right mind would turn down a few crates of those little gadgets, Russian guns or not.

  “No,” Riordan said, “if you want ARs in quantity like I expect they probably do, there is only one way to get them, and that is: steal them. Get into a warehouse, get into a few sporting goods stores, that kind of thing. Hijack a truck. That’s what Magro specializes in. He’s good at cutting chain-link fences and getting doors open, and he’s been around long enough so he knows where they store the stuff that people want. He’s good enough so he never got caught at it, either. It was only when he branched out into shooting a guy that the cops grabbed him and put him away. Magro’s a thief, and he’s a capable one. Doesn’t matter to him what he steals, especially if being willing to steal something that somebody really wants will get him sprung from a murder rap eight years early.”

  “And put him on the loose to take care of a little private business on the way through,” Doherty said.

  “You don’t think your brother’s involved in this?” Riordan said.

  “Nope,” Doherty said, “I don’t. For once I think Jerry’s skirts are clean, at least from this escapade. He’s probably doing something else, equally bad, but I don’t really think, from talking to Fahey, that Jerry’s got anything to do with this IRA thing at all. If he is, Fahey isn’t clever enough to keep it from me, and Fahey never said a word about him or even somebody that sort of sounded like him.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Riordan said. “That’s kind of upsetting.”

  “I don’t fo
llow you, Pete,” Doherty said.

  “Oh, no offense, Paul,” Riordan said. “I didn’t mean I was sorry your brother doesn’t seem to be tangled up in this. I’m glad if he isn’t. It’s just that I’ve been convinced for quite a while that he was, and I don’t like making mistakes like that. I dragged you into this mess and got you thoroughly worried for absolutely no good reason. I’m sorry.”

  “Pete,” Doherty said, “you’re not going to duck out on me now, are you? No good reason?”

  “I don’t follow,” Riordan said.

  “Is there any doubt in your mind that Magro will go after Jerry if he gets out to steal those guns?” Doherty said.

  “No,” Riordan said. “No, not in the slightest. Far as I know, that’s what he’ll do.” He stood up suddenly, skidding the chair back from the table.

  “Where’re you going?” Doherty said.

  “I’m not going anywhere, dammit,” Riordan said. “I just locked my damned knee, is all. That damned scrap metal gets in between the joints when I move in just the wrong way, and it locks on me.” He shook his leg awkwardly.

  “Spike does that,” Doherty said, laughing. “He did that very same thing the night he peed on the Holy Water font.”

  “I know it looks silly,” Riordan said, “but it works. That’s all I ask. There.” He sat down again.

  “You ought to get that fixed,” Doherty said.

  “There’s nothing anybody can do about it without dismantling my whole damned leg and putting me in traction for about six months,” Riordan said. “I can’t do that, for the luvva Mike. I haven’t got time.”