The Rat on Fire

by George V. Higgins

  “Try and tell a banker that, sometime,” Leo said, “you got a half a day and nothin’ else to do. He won’t even hear you. He won’t understand a single word you’re saying. He will just keep telling you, you got to pay some money to him and it’s not his responsibility, get it for you.

  “And that, Billy boy,” Leo said, “is when you learn to play with matches.”

  “Leo,” Malatesta said, “that was a different kind of thing. A different kind of thing entirely. That was a vacant warehouse. There wasn’t anybody living in it. The only thing in it was that old truck. I had no problem with that at all.”

  “That isn’t what you told me, Billy,” Leo said. “You said it’d take at least five hundred to get that one traced to the wiring.”

  “That was for somebody else,” Billy said. “That was for somebody else I hadda take care of, or he would’ve gone down there and started poking around and then his price would’ve gone up. Double, at least. I wasn’t in the same position then. I was new. I hadda clear things through guys. I didn’t make a dime off of that deal.”

  “Yeah,” Leo said.

  “I didn’t,” Billy said. “I hadda keep that guy out of there. That was a dog-ass amateur job. If he’d’ve gone in there he would’ve known right off, the way those charrings, alligator burns, showed, he would’ve known you torched it. I hadda keep him out.”

  “Yeah,” Leo said. “Well, it don’t matter. I’m outta warehouses now. I still got loans, and I still can’t pay them, but now there’s niggers livin’ in the collateral, and I can’t get ’em out. I’m no amateur anymore, but I can’t get those bastards out. And I have got to do something.”

  “Don’t come to me, you do,” Billy said.

  “Billy,” Leo said, “I already came to you, long time ago. Don’t give that kind of talk, an old buddy.”

  “Leo,” Billy said, “you can come to me any time. I’m just telling you, I’m not gonna be able to cover you, you do. You touch off one of those joints with niggers in it, you just burn yourself one nigger, and you are on your own. You own those buildings, my friend. They maybe aren’t worth what you owe on them, but you own ’em, and if some tenant goes up with the parapet roof, you’ll be right behind them.”

  “Billy, my friend,” Leo said, “you remember you asked me how come I hired Four-flusher Fein to represent me?”

  “Yeah,” Billy said.

  “Well,” Leo said, “now I am gonna tell you. I didn’t hire Jerry. Jerry hired me.”

  MICKEY ASKED DON for a cigarette and learned that he had none. He got up from the counter and came over to the booth where Leo Proctor sat with Billy. “You wouldn’t have a smoke, would you?” he said.

  “Sure,” Proctor said. He fished a pack of Winstons from his pocket. He handed it to the trucker, who took out one cigarette and returned the pack.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mickey said, patting his pockets, “I haven’t got a match. I’m outta lights, too. I’m tryin’ to quit. You got a match?”

  “Sure,” Leo said, producing a matchbook. The trucker lit the Winston and returned the matches. He thanked Leo and returned to the counter.

  “That, Bill,” Leo said, “is what I’ve got. I’ve got the matches and the know-how and a criminal case that I can’t afford. I also got niggers inna joints and I can’t get ’em out. Thing of it is, Fein has got this ticket, he can practice law. And he has also got buildings with niggers in them and he can’t get them out. Only Fein don’t carry no matches. So what me and Fein figure, maybe we can do some business, you follow me? He will get me out of the court thing, and I will get his niggers outta his buildings, and then we will sit down together and figure out a way, get the niggers outta my buildings, which will get the bankers off my ass.”

  “Uh-huh,” Billy said. “Sounds great. Lot of guys’ve done a lot of time on things that didn’t sound half as good as that does.”

  “Billy,” Leo said, “I’m not a banker. I do live inna real world. I’m not a bad carpenter. I can lay brick, if there’s nobody from the union standin’ around. I can do the pipe work. I dunno how many furnaces and burners I took out and put in. I can install your hot-water heater. I can refit your fuckin’ waste disposal. You give me enough furring and wallboard, and let me into your place in the morning, I will have the joint rebuilt before you can get through the traffic that night and there will be no plaster dust lying around all over the place. I can insulate your attic and I can make your cellar stop leaking, sometimes. I can glaze your windows where the vandals broke ’em and I can point your exterior bricks if I have to. Roofing’s something I learned about thirty years ago. I can put in dishwashers and change your locks and fix your garage-door opener. Custom bookcases and platform beds, bathroom vanities and molded showers, parquet floors and new bay windows: I do all of them things, and I never once had one complaint that was legitimate. You want gold-plated faucets that look like swans? I can put those in. A little orange stove that’s shaped like an ice-cream cone? No sweat. Rewire the upstairs, put in an intercom, put a humidifier on the furnace, put in your sump pump—I done all those things.

  “The trouble is,” Leo said, “doing all them things hasn’t done me enough good as far’s money’s concerned, and as a result I am in a lot of trouble with a lot of bankers who don’t seem interested in my explanations.

  “Now,” he said, “I was satisfied with that, and I don’t really see why I thought I hadda go out and get myself in trouble with the cops too. I didn’t need any cops chasing me around. I had enough on my plate as it was. But once they started, all of a sudden I needed a lawyer.

  “Of course I can’t get no lawyer. None to speak of, anyway. But I can get Fein, and Fein has got the thing there that says he is a lawyer, even though the idea of Jerry Fein in court is something that’d gag a billy goat that had to go to court. But Jerry Fein has to do what I say.”

  “What you ought to say,” Billy said, “you ought to say, ‘Get me somebody else.’ ”

  “That’s what I said,” Leo said. “And that is what Jerry Fein is doing. And that is why I wanted to talk to you. I thought maybe you could use some cash.”

  The truckers left the Scandinavian Pastry Shop revving their diesels on the bumpy parking lot. Billy Malatesta admitted he could use some cash.

  “Billy, Billy, Billy,” Proctor said, “you could use a lot of cash. You had a lot of troubles.”

  “I could use some cash,” Malatesta said. “Shit, I only make about twenty-one, and that’s before they start creaming everything off the top. You ever try to raise a family on what you got left after they get through taking those payroll deductions? Shit. You couldn’t raise a healthy family of goldfish on that, this day and age, let alone a sick one like I’ve got.

  “You know where that money’s going, don’t you?” Leo said.

  “I know where it’s going,” Malatesta said. “I know all right. The taxes’re supporting lazy public employees like me, and the old people and the nutcakes and the sick people that don’t have anybody like me standing in the living room, waiting to pay their medical bills. I’m buying food for families that the guys left when it dawned on them how much it was costing them to feed those women and those kids. I’m buying apartments for women with three kids and every single one of them’s got a different father that the kids never saw and she still won’t learn, what’s gonna happen to her if she lets them fuck her without using a rubber. I’m paying for state colleges some kid that can’t afford to go to school and probably doesn’t want to and most likely hasn’t got the brains to get anything out of it anyway, so my kids probably won’t be able to go to college because I won’t have any money to send them.

  “What they let me keep when I get the check,” he said, “the town takes out of me for lousy schools that don’t teach my kids nothing, and the supermarket gets almost all the rest except what the guy down the gas station grabs. I bought two dentists, three shoe stores, at least five Levi stores and most of the sports stuff Wilson ever made, for my kid
s, and my lovely wife sits there with this dumb look on her face, wondering why it is she’s always so tired and having to lie down when the old bitch knows damned right well it’s because she’s drinking all day. Down at the bank they probably call me ‘Ninety-day Malatesta,’ because that’s usually how far behind I am onna mortgage. Yeah, I could use some money.”

  “There ain’t a guy alive that couldn’t,” Leo said. “You show me a guy, couldn’t use some cash, I will show you, maybe, some fuckin’ goddamned Arab that has got an oil well. Except, I can’t show you no Arabs on account of how I do not know too many A-rabs. Until I see one of them A-rabs and he’s riding around in the Rolls with a Caddy on a rope tied the back to get him to the sidewalk, like the little boats they got hooked on the big boats down the Savin Hill Yacht Club there, until I see one of them motherfuckers and figure out a way that I can take him, I am gonna assume that every guy I meet needs cash, and the only way he’s gonna get some cash and I’m gonna get some cash is this: him and me, we gotta sit down, the two of us, and figure out a way that we can get together and make some cash, and split it up.”

  “I understand,” Malatesta said. “I do understand what you are saying.”

  “This is good,” Proctor said. “My life’s been full, misunderstandings. My goddamned wife don’t understand me. My goddamned kid don’t understand me, the one that’s still at home when he’s not running off someplace. I don’t understand my goddamned kid, which could have something to do with him running away three times this year already, and I am sure my goddamned kid does not understand why I keep on bringing him back. Which I don’t understand myself, and I also do not see how that goddamned kid can be so goddamned stupid he can run away three times in seven months and he still can’t get it right so he gets someplace where I can’t find him.

  “The kid is thicker’n shit, is what he is, and that is what he’s got for brains. He takes after his mother. I am stupid, but even I could run away and make a go of it if that was what I wanted to do. I ran away when I was twenty-three, for Christ sake, and I ran away from a prison, and I made it. I know it was medium security and all I hadda do was get over the barbed-wire fence inna dark without snagging my pants, but I made it and I didn’t tear my pants and I was gone for fourteen months. And now I got this here kid that claims I had something to do with him being on the earth and he’s unhappy about it, and I look at that great big fat woman and I know he’s right but I do not fuckin’ believe it.

  “I do not believe it,” Leo said, “because I look at her and I know I would never in my right mind fuck a goddamned Goodyear blimp like that—I would figure Don Meredith and Howard Cosell’re in the broadcast booth down onna field, asking me how it’s goin’, onna TV. ‘He’s on top the fat lady now, fans, and we’ll get back to the Dolphins and the Redskins here at the Orange Bowl in just a minute.’ And I would never do that. But the kid says he’s my kid, and furthermore, he don’t like being my kid, it was a bad hand God dealt him, being my kid. But still he don’t have the common ordinary brains, he’s gonna steal a car, he doesn’t park it the next day beside a hydrant with a cop standing there, but I guess he doesn’t. If he does, he don’t show it, because the dumb son-bitch keeps doin’ it and things like that, so I’m inclined to think: he don’t.

  “That kid,” Leo said, “that kid, that kid. He runs away and he ain’t gone more’n six hours on his best night, which was the one I figure he was finally gone and I didn’t have to worry about the little bastard anymore. So there I am, I go up his room, see what he took, and it wasn’t much, and I think, ‘He’s nine years old. He’s done it before. This time with all that experience, maybe he makes it.’

  “Can you believe that, Billy?” Leo said. “Nine years, ten years ago, I must’ve fucked that woman. Here I am, pushing fifty like it was a rock up a hill, I got more troubles’n God gave the Jews, and I must’ve actually fucked that woman. I know I must’ve. No angel’d touch her, no matter what They offered him. Besides, nothing came out of there could save anyone from anything. No human guy would do it because she always looked like a tractor, ever since we’re married for a year. Jesus Christ, I was seventeen years old and she was sixteen years old and she had this pair of tits on her and this nice little ass and all I could think about was gettin’ her clothes off and gettin’ my dick in her twat and I did it. Of course she got pregnant. Of course we hadda get married. Don’t know why it didn’t occur to me, that was what she wanted when she took her pants off. Worked, though. Two years later and there I was, married to this woman that if she was in town no hot fudge sundae was safe. When I married her she looked like a little cat, or maybe a pussy, with these brown eyes and she bleached her hair and she was really tight in the ass. Two years later she began to look like something that escaped from a fat farm, and when I got out of jail the first time, she’d found out about the Manhattan cocktails, as she calls them. The hair was brown and the back end of her looked like something that finished last in a fifteen-hundred-dollar claiming race at Suffolk, and I chewed her out for it and you know what she did? She got worse.

  “Just the same,” Leo said, “I must’ve fucked her. No other human guy would touch her except some poor, fat, sorry son of a bitch that was out someplace and people were buying him drinks and he drank them and got himself so fuckin’ plastered he would screw a snake and a groundhog and a large goat if they approached him right, on account of not having had any pussy for years. And that, apparently, is what I did. Which is where that rotten little kid came from. I can’t account for the little bastard no other way.”

  “Leo,” Malatesta said, “it’s no different for anybody else.”

  “Don’t matter to me if it is,” Leo said. “I haven’t got time to worry about it, and I haven’t got the money to do anything about it. What I did was take my life and pour it right down the fuckin’ sewer. I will never get ahead and I know it. I got all I can do, and I’ll need a hell of a lot of luck, just to get even.

  “Now,” he said, “I have got a deal for you. It is a deal which you will like. It is a deal which you will like a whole lot better’n you like the deal you got now.”

  “This,” Malatesta said, “would not require a great deal of improvement.”

  “WELL, TERRY, my friend,” Roscommon said to Mooney, “the reason we did not arrest anybody is because we haven’t got nobody that did anything yet, you know? And this can cause a few problems, you go around arresting people who haven’t done anything except talk, because I believe there is something in the Constitution, the United States, about how you can talk all you want. But you would of course know more about that’n I would, on account of you are the lawyer and all.”

  Mooney wore a three-piece brown suit and a stern expression. He got up from behind the desk. He put his hands in his back pockets. He said, “John, John, there’s a difference between free speech and conspiracy to commit a life-endangering felony.”

  “There certainly is,” Roscommon said. “I didn’t say these guys’re having a nice little conversation about how the Sox’re doing and where’re we gonna get some pitching. I said from what my guts tell me, it sounds like Proctor is hurtin’ for money and he owns a building or three and he knows another guy who owns some property and it sounds like Malatesta is also in the hole for a buck or three. But so far that is pretty much all we know.

  “Now, Terry, my friend,” Roscommon said, “you being an officer of the court and all, what with your obligations about bringing cases that you can only win …”

  “I’ve lost a couple,” Mooney said.

  “Your modesty’s becoming,” Roscommon said, “although I must say it probably wouldn’t be necessary if you followed some good advice I understand you got in the course of them cases being considered before they got indicted and you had to take them in because of course they wouldn’t plead. I wouldn’t’ve pleaded either, to those dogs.

  “Anyway,” Roscommon said, “would you really like to charge a couple of guys with discussing their money prob
lems in a coffee shop? Did they make that a felony too? Because if they didn’t, you’re gonna have some trouble, I think, on account of that is all we’ve got right now.”

  “Lieutenant,” Mooney said, “we know damned right well what they’re talking about. They’re talking about how one guy is going to set a fire in a dwelling place and the other guy is gonna screw up the investigation on purpose, and if we don’t do something, somebody may be killed.”

  “We know it,” Roscommon said. “The trouble is, we don’t know which dwelling place, so we can’t prove that. They haven’t set any fire, so we can’t prove that.”

  “There’s always conspiracy,” Mooney said.

  “There’ll always be an Ireland, too,” Roscommon said, “and if we bring a conspiracy on what we’ve got, that’s where we both better head. Only I’ll have my pension and you’re still young yet. You’ll have to go to actual work, out catchin’ the fish in the dories and cuttin’ the peat in the bogs with your teeth all turnin’ black and the wife wearin’ her shawl by the fireside, croonin’ lullabies to the babes, bless ’em, and offerin’ the good Father a nice cuppa tay. We haven’t got an overt act, Terrence me boyo. They haven’t bought a can of gas and they haven’t struck a match. They haven’t even got close to the place where they got in mind to do the dirty deed. They may be snakes and dirty lizards, but they ain’t bit anybody yet, and we got to let them at least get close enough to reach somebody with their teeth before there’s a goddamned thing we can do.”