The Pariot GAme

by George V. Higgins

  “What’ll he do?” Riordan said.

  “Do?” Seats said. “Deny it, of course. He can’t make a thing out of it. Then he’d have to explain what he was doing in here that got him thrown out. He’d look even sillier than he did when he was rolling around on the floor. People’ll be laughing at him enough as it is. I tell you, Pete, you done good work for the rank and file in this coop today, taking that asshole down a peg.”

  “Good,” Riordan said, “how about the return on my investment?”

  “Return?” Seats said. “You charge for the entertainment now? Not that I’d blame you if you did. I been saying for years we should charge admission to see what goes on in here.”

  “No, no,” Riordan said. “What you wanted to see me about? Those phone calls yesterday? You had something for me?”

  “Yeah,” Seats said. “Okay, lemme give you, little background here. Guy I put on this thing’s named Mattie Dyson. Lieutenant in the Cap Police. Nice guy. Done pretty well for himself, all these years and everything. Got himself a little investment on the side. Runs a bar down off Broadway in Southie. Knows fuckin’ everything. So I called up Mattie, like I always do when I want some information that I know I’m not gonna be able to get by myself, right? I mean, after all, I am a greaser, if you listen to people like Ways and Means. Nobody tells me anything about the IRA and them guys. The hell’d I know about something like that? Might as well ask me the Hadassah or what them Kennedys were serving for Sunday dinner. I don’t know.

  “So,” Seats said, “what I do is, I call Mattie. And I ask him. So I do that, and I can tell right off, Mattie don’t want to tell me nothing. Oh, he says it’s because he don’t know nothing about what I’m asking him and all that, but he’s not comfortable with it so I know he is lying to me and he just don’t want to talk to me about this guy Magro and what the fuck everybody is running around like hell for, trying to get him out. So I say to him, I say, ‘Mattie, you know something? I know something. I know there is nothing going on down that neck of the woods you don’t know nothing about, and I want to know what it is that I don’t know anything about. Because there is a guy that I said I would help that wants to know about it. And if you’re gonna give me this, that you don’t know, I am gonna find I am losing the sound portion of my program next month when that kid Derry McEvoy is coming up for that clerkship in the District Court down there and the guys onna Council start talking to me to see if maybe there’s one we get for nothing from the Governor because we gave him this one for nothing. Am I right, Mattie? You seen my little radio. I’m gonna be just like that. No voices on any channel. Just the flashing lights. Got that?’

  “Well,” Seats said, “I guess he got it. Because he calls me back and he says if somebody happened to be interested in what was going on with this Magro thing, he might try going down to the Kildare off of Broadway and look around. But Mattie would advise him to watch his ass, because there is a lot of rough customers in there and they don’t like strangers. ‘And if I was your friend, if he is one,’ Mattie said, ‘I would tell him that I hear tell there is a guy name of Brennan that is in there a lot of the time and he can make every cop in two counties, maybe three, inside of fifteen minutes watching. This Brennan could be anywhere. He kind of prowls around and he makes sure nobody takes them little white canisters that people put money in on the bars. He works down the trolley and he’s an American and everything, but he has got this hobby and he don’t like people interfering with it. He’s got those canisters in my bar, for Christ sake. You think I’m gonna tell him, take them out? No fuckin’ way.’

  “ ‘You tell your friend also,’ Mattie said, ‘that I understand there is a guy named Scanlan that’s traveling around here and there these days, and I hear his name maybe isn’t Scanlan. I never seen the guy, but he is apparently a hard case to handle. He has got some kind of an eye that was hurt. I heard he always wears a leather scalley cap, and a coat, which maybe he has got something under it he don’t want seen all the time, no matter how warm it gets. And he is not very big but he can make a lot of noise when it suits him. I would be careful if I was out looking around where Brennan might be, and especially now because the chances are that if Brennan is in the neighborhood, Scanlan is somewhere around in there with him, waiting in the dark.’ ”

  “I think I’ve already met Brennan,” Riordan said.

  “Yeah,” Seats said. “Mattie had that impression. He said to me, ‘You better tell this pal of yours, I hear tell Brennan thinks there’s a Fed in town and he thinks he spotted him one night down the Bright Red. Tell him also, when I say Brennan and Scanlan, I don’t mean just Brennan and Scanlan. Those guys travel in packs.’ ”

  “This I knew,” Riordan said. “Well, okay, Seats, much obliged. Let’s go see him.”

  “Go see who?” Seats said.

  “This guy Mattie,” Riordan said.

  “Nice try, Riordan,” Seats said. “You think Mattie’s gonna get caught dead sitting around you? Somebody might see you. You’re hot, Pete. You’re way too hot for a Southie barkeep to be hanging around you. You oughta know that.”

  “I do, I do,” Riordan said. “Still, you can’t blame a guy for pressing his luck.”

  “Here it’s all right,” Seats said. “Down there, I dunno as I’d try it.”

  “Guess I got to,” Riordan said, standing up.

  Seats extended his hand. “Well,” he said, “if I don’t see you again, best of luck. And if I do, I’ll give you some tickets.”

  “Thanks,” Riordan said. “Thanks very fuckin’ much.”

  FREDDIE AND JENNY came home from shopping in the late afternoon, lugging packages, and found Riordan, wearing only his pants, lying on his back on the living room rug and snoring. The gun was on the bookcase. His jacket, shirt and tie were thrown on the couch. His boots and socks lay on the floor next to it. His feet were gnarled and bony, and there was a yellowish cast to his toenails. There was a pattern of four white scars, each about a quarter-inch wide, which curved up from his beltline at the right of his navel around his rib cage and stopped under his right shoulder blade. There was a thick white welt on his left bicep, puffy along its perimeters.

  “My God, Ma,” Jenny said, “he certainly is one scraggly-assed son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah,” Freddie said. “Keep your voice down. You know how those animals are when you wake them up. They’re either mad and they want to bite somebody, or else they feel frisky and they want to play. I’m not sure the floor beams can take it.”

  They sneaked around him and he continued to burble peacefully, sounding like an old diesel engine running in good repair—some clatter from the valves but nothing alarming.

  “Actually,” Jenny said in the kitchen, “it is kind of peaceful, having him grumbling away in there, isn’t it?”

  “Well,” Freddie said, opening the refrigerator and removing a can of iced tea, “I try to look at it this way—he’s less trouble than a big dog, because he takes himself out for his own walks. And as far as being a watchdog is concerned, he is far superior.”

  “He does look sort of dangerous, doesn’t he?” Jenny said. “I never think of him that way. He’s just old Pete around here.”

  “Yeah,” Freddie said, “but he didn’t get all those scars at the Country Club dances.”

  “Did he ever tell you about how he got them?” Jenny said.

  “Once,” Freddie said. “We’d just started sleeping together, and we’d been out all day with some friends on a boat up at Marblehead and gotten absolutely shitfaced. We were sleeping on their sunporch, and there was a full moon, and we’d had some wine with dinner and some drinks afterward. We’d all been sailing in our bathing suits, and it was our first sun of the season, so we were all red and sore and those scars really stood out, even in the moonlight, and I asked him about them. He told me. The ones on his side were from a pitchfork. American Tools for Peace. He’d killed this guerrilla by jumping out of a tree on him and garroting him.”

  “Garr
oting?” Jenny said.

  “Yeah,” Freddie said. “He had two wooden handles and a piece of heavy barbed wire between them. He jumped out of the tree onto the man’s back, wrapped the wire around his throat, and strangled him. It was quiet. It was the way he killed people who were setting up ambushes for the regular South Vietnamese patrols. Before he finished killing the guy, the man’s younger brother sneaked through the bushes and tried to stab him with the pitchfork.”

  “What’d he do?” Jenny said.

  “He said he managed to get the guerrilla between him and the kid, so the kid finished the job on his own brother with the next lunge, and then Pete threw the corpse aside, got the pitchfork away from the kid and stabbed him through the chest with it. He said the kid was about twelve, thirteen, but if the kid thought that was old enough for mortal combat, who was Pete to argue with him?

  “That one on the left arm,” Freddie said, “wasn’t exactly a mere flesh wound. It got in deeply enough, the bullet, so that it had to be dug out. ‘Fortunately,’ he said, ‘I’m right-handed.’ ”

  “God,” Jenny said, “did he have any morphine or anything?”

  “Had it but wouldn’t take it,” Freddie said. “Said you don’t get all sleepy on painkillers when you’re out in the woods with real killers. He couldn’t go back into the aid station, and he couldn’t leave the bullet in, so he stayed out and took the bullet out. He’s got a couple more marks in places where you can’t see them, too. There was one slug that missed his manhood by about a quarter of an inch, and you’ve seen how strange that knee looks, all bent out of shape. He’s really all banged up.”

  “I wonder how many people he’s killed,” Jenny said.

  “Honey lamb,” Freddie said, “not even I have ever gotten him drunk enough to get that information from him. I guess he thought I had a proprietary interest that entitled me to know how he came by all his physical blemishes, but there he drew the line. I got kittenish with him one night in front of a roaring fire at a little inn up in Manchester, Vermont, the weekend when you went away with Kathy to the horse show.”

  “That drip,” Jenny said.

  “Drip,” Freddie said. “There’s one I haven’t heard in some time.”

  “Well, she is,” Jenny said.

  “You didn’t think so then,” Freddie said.

  “Well, she is,” Jenny said.

  “Anyway,” Freddie said, “we were the last ones still up in the bar. The owner’d gone to bed. The fire was burning down. I was feeling romantic, so I came up with my best make-out line: ‘Pete, how many men’ve you killed?’ ”

  “Jesus, Ma,” Jenny said, “what an opening. Does that turn you on or something?”

  Freddie drank tea. “If anybody else asked me,” she said, “I’d say no. But I’m trying to raise you right, so I’ll give it to you honestly. Yes, a little bit, I think it does. I’d never admit it to anybody else, but I think initially one of the things that turned me on to Pete was that he was obviously a very dangerous man. Your father is safe. He is proper and he is distinguished and he never uses the wrong fork. You can take him anywhere. He will dress up for you. He loves to dress up. He will never fly off the handle, give the finger to Mrs. Van Floot, tell the client’s chief executive officer to go fuck himself, or complain that the soup’s cold when it’s supposed to be. There’s a lot to be said for that kind of man. But not by me. I thought he was dull. Smart, but dull. He thought I was unruly. We were both pretty intelligent people, and we were both right. Right about, not right for, each other. Pete is a pirate. He just happens to work for the government. But it’s not too difficult for me to fantasize that he’s Cole Younger and I’m Belle Starr. It’s silly, but it’s not difficult and it is kind of fun.

  “Anyway,” she said, “he wouldn’t tell me. He didn’t say he couldn’t remember. He just said he wouldn’t talk about it. I pressed him. He didn’t get mad. He said finally that he would answer my question that once, but only on the condition that I never ask it again. I was too relaxed to notice that he hadn’t offered me a responsive answer, and I took it. ‘I’ve killed a total of men exceeding by one the total of men who’ve tried to kill me,’ he said. And that was it. So the best answer I can give you, Jenny, is that I don’t know how many men he’s killed, but it must be quite a few.”

  On the living room rug, Riordan abruptly stopped snoring.

  “My God,” Jenny said, “he’s dead.”

  “No,” Freddie said, laughing, “he always does that just before he wakes up. The resurrection of Lazarus will occur in about thirty seconds.”

  Riordan sat up on the floor and yawned. “Hi, Pete,” Freddie said. “Nice nap?”

  He reflected on the question. Then he nodded, scratching. “Yeah,” he said, “nice nap.”

  “You looked like you were dead, Pete,” Jenny said, “and you sounded like you ought to be.”

  Riordan stood up slowly, the knee grinding as he did so. “No,” he said. “Appreciate the concern, but not dead yet.” He shambled unsteadily out of the living room, paused at the kitchen and kissed Freddie on the lips. “Your breath stinks,” she said. “Good,” he said. He patted Jenny on the head. “Nice lunch, ladies?” he said.

  “Very,” Jenny said. “The Haymow in Cambridge.”

  “Gack,” Riordan said. “Ferns. Harvards. Interior decorators. Toy food. Bean sprouts. Tofu. Vietnam food for the intellectually chic. People who read the Kenyon Review. Rather have lunch at a drive-in enema center. Next time you get visitation, you stay home and I’ll go to New York and let Arthur take me to the Four Seasons. I’d be properly grateful. Chat with his honeys, everything. You don’t know when you’re well off, young lady. Ungrateful generation, all of you.”

  “Har, har, har,” Jenny said.

  “Nice little end-around up in Maine there, from what Freddie tells me,” Riordan said, scratching his belly again. “They’ll be calling you ‘Gray Ghost’ up in that establishment if you don’t look out. Very neat.”

  “You don’t approve?” Jenny said, grinning.

  “Not entirely,” Riordan said. “I would’ve short-sheeted the beds and put dry ice in the hot water bottles or something before I left. Maybe set an incendiary device in the garage or something. But not bad for a beginner, not bad.”

  “You are going to change, aren’t you, Pete?” Freddie said. “Speaking of enema centers, you do kind of stink.”

  “Pay close attention, now,” he said, and started for the bathroom.

  “Oh, Pete,” Jenny said, “I’m going down to do a wash. Collect all your overalls and throw them in, if you want. I have to take two loads anyway.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’ve been saving some stuff.”

  “You got to go out tonight, Pete?” Freddie said.

  “Yup,” he said as he entered the bathroom. “Another carefree, footloose, glamorous pub crawl in the Athens of America, all in the service of our Uncle Sam.” He shut the door.

  Riordan came out less than three minutes later. He was wearing a tee-shirt he had taken from the hamper, and the gray twill pants with the green suspenders. He was knotting and unknotting the tan twill shirt. “Pete,” Freddie said, “those were supposed to go to the cleaners.”

  “Yup,” he said. He held up the shirt. It was suitably rumpled, and still stained under the armpits. “Fine,” he said. He came into the kitchen. He opened the drawer next to the sink and took out a pair of pinking shears. “Only in this menagerie,” he said, “would the pinking shears he kept with the butter knife and the forks.”

  “But I can always find them there,” Freddie said.

  “Good thing for me you don’t have to store your hammers and nails in the bed in order to keep track of them,” he said.

  “What would you care?” Jenny said. “You sleep on the floor anyway.”

  “When I can make a place in the middle of your school books and field hockey sticks, for Christ sake,” Riordan said. He laid the shirt out flat on the kitchen counter. He used the pinking sh
ears to cut out three quarters of the circle next to the left sleeve seam on the torso of the shirt.

  “Hey,” Jenny said, “I gave you that shirt for Christmas.”

  “Yup,” Riordan said.

  “That goddamned shirt cost me almost forty dollars,” Jenny said. “Forty dollars of my own money, once I paid the postage and the extra for one big enough to cover you, you big oaf. That’s a nice shirt.”

  “Very nice shirt,” Riordan said. He held the shirt up and examined the cut. “Okay,” he said. He spread the shirt down on the counter. He made a horizontal incision on the left, about two inches long, at the middle of the rib cage. He made another the same length behind the torso seam, in the same location.

  “You’ll ruin it,” Jenny said.

  “Naw,” Riordan said. “That’s why I’m using pinking shears. Won’t fray. I’m through using it for this, stitch it up again. Good as new.”

  “Won’t be as good as new,” she said. “It’ll have all mends in it.”

  “Everything’s got a lot of mends in it,” Riordan said. He held the shirt up again. “That’s how you tell whether something’s good. Not if it breaks or gets damaged. Everything does that. The good stuff you can fix afterward and use it some more.”

  “It’ll look funny,” Jenny said.

  “Not to me,” Riordan said. “I got lots of shirts like this. I never felt funny in them.”

  “Lots of them, huh?” Jenny said. “How come you don’t wear one of them, if you already destroyed some other shirts? Why wreck mine?”

  “Others’re all clean and fresh,” Riordan said, starting for the living room. “Don’t want to waste a clean shirt on this operation. Nice dirty shirt, that’s what I need. Feel more comfortable in it.”