The Rat on Fire

by George V. Higgins

  “You could say that,” she said. “You could even say that he is kind of teed off about those apartments. You could say that he thinks it was probably the worst day in his life, when he decided to buy those apartments. I mean, this man is angry, you know? He is just about beside himself. He is liable to strangle you, you go in there and start telling him anywhere near like what you just been telling me. Try to strangle you. You’re bigger’n he is. But he’s so mad, he probably’ll try anyways.”

  “What kind of guy is he?” Mack said. “I met him once or twice, but I don’t know him real well.”

  “Well,” she said, “let me think. He is the type of guy who will get desperate, you know? I worked for him, let’s see, about twenty-three years ago, and then I went and had babies and I brought the kids up and Harold worked down at the Navy yard and supported us all, and then I came back. And, Jerry didn’t change in all that time. He is still the same kind of guy, that will work all day and part of the weekend and will not complain about it. But those apartment buildings drive him crazy.”

  “Why?” Mack said.

  “Because he can’t get any rent,” she said. “There’s about three of his tenants, and he’s got nine, that pay him any rent. And the city keeps coming after him. ‘You got to do this. You can’t do that. You better do the other things or we come after you and this and that.’ He doesn’t like it. He really doesn’t like it at all.”

  “There’s rats in those buildings,” Mack said.

  “Sure there are,” she said. “There’s rats in most buildings, I know about. There’re rats in this building. There’re rats where I live. The rats’re taking over, mister, in case you didn’t hear. They’ve got us outnumbered. They breed faster’n we do. They’ve been around longer and they’re not so choosy about what they eat.”

  Mack began to laugh.

  “You can laugh if you want to,” she said, “but I mean it. I know from rats. If you can laugh, you don’t.”

  Mack stopped laughing.

  “You know something?” she said. “You want to know something? There is nothing that Jerry Fein or any other mortal man can do about rats. If that’s what you’re here for, Senator, you are wasting your time.”

  “Who’s with him?” Mack said.

  “None of your business,” Lois said. “This is a law office, even if it does have a picture of Milton Berle up. I’m not allowed to say.”

  “NOW,” PROCTOR SAID to Fein, “I got the rats, right? I got the guys to help me, right? Because there is no way I am going into this swamp you got for a cellar there with a cage full of rats and a can of gas and I haven’t got a guy to hold a flashlight.”

  “Where the hell’re you getting gas?” Fein said. “That fuckin’ Seville, you can hear the goddamned gas going through it. I got a flush at home that runs. Hell, I got three flushes at home that run. Sounds like Niagara Falls in my house, everybody goes the bathroom and all the flushes run and run and run. The people down the Water Department? I am their pension plan. ‘You want a nice condo down Daytona, Sadie? Wait till Feins get home from vacation. Sooner or later they go to the bathroom, and you’ll be set for life.’ ”

  “See?” Proctor said. “Should’ve hired me to fix them, too. Any fool can fix a leaking flush.”

  “Sure,” Fein said. “Twenty bucks an hour, door to fuckin’ door, you come there and you jiggle it, same as I do. Then after it stops you put in what you say’s about thirty dollars’ worth of parts, and you screw around with it for an hour or so, and I end up doing the same thing I was doing before. Which is jiggling the handle. The fools I hire cannot fix toilets. What I need is a new set of fools, and I would think with all of them around that I’d be able to locate two or three.”

  “Jerry,” Proctor said, “why’ncha calm down now, all right?”

  “I am not going to calm down,” Fein said. “I want those buildings gone, and I want them gone last week. I want those niggers out of there. I haven’t had any regular rent out of those goddamned buildings in three months, except for one woman named Davis that pays on time. I’ll be fucked if I know what’s the matter with her. Must be she doesn’t talk to her goddamned neighbors. Doesn’t know she can live for free off of Fein. Dumb broad pays her rent on time every month and she’s the one out of three of nine families that pays at all. The other two pay late. Must be nuts. Doesn’t know I’m running a hotel there and I just take people in. When the hell’re you going to clear those joints out, so’s I can get some insurance money and some rest from all these bastards that’re driving me nuts: that is what I want to know.”

  “Jerry,” Proctor said, “I can’t do it tonight. You and me, remember? We got to be in court tomorrow, out in Framingham. I got a little problem with the Staties, and you have to represent me.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Fein said. “I forgot about that.”

  “Yeah,” Proctor said.

  “I did,” Fein said. “Look, I been booking dates all over the place. I’ve been as busy as a sex maniac in a women’s prison. Gimme a break, will you? I’ll represent you. I said I would, and I will.”

  “That’s good,” Proctor said. “Because if I haven’t got a lawyer there in court tomorrow, I am going to get convicted and then I am going to go to jail, and it’s kind of difficult to transpire the jail and go light off the buildings, you know?”

  “You are not going to jail,” Fein said. “Not on those charges.”

  “You know what the charges are?” Proctor said.

  “You drove the car in a lake,” Fein said.

  “Wrong,” Proctor said. “ ‘Driving Under, Driving So As To Endanger, and Drunk.’ Plus ‘Attempted Manslaughter.’ Them is no Christmas cards for a guy with my record. And I didn’t think you knew what they were, either. You’re yappin’ at me all the time about your problems and you haven’t done a fuckin’ thing about mine. But, you don’t do something about my problem, there is no way I’m gonna be able to do anything about yours. My arms’re too short, light off a building in Boston from the old jailhouse.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” Fein said.

  “When?” Proctor said.

  “This afternoon, of course,” Fein said.

  “Isn’t hardly good enough,” Proctor said. “You should’ve been on it two weeks ago.”

  “I been busy,” Fein said.

  “Everybody’s busy,” Proctor said. “God’s busy, cops’re busy, Proctor’s busy, Fein’s busy. Fein ain’t busy on the right fuckin’ things. You oughta be running the goddamned Red Sox: ‘Whaddaya mean, pitching? The hell we need pitchin’ for? You mean the guy that throws the goddamned ball up the goddamned plate? We got guys that hit the goddamned ball, other guys throw it up the plate. Don’t need no pitchers. All you need is guys with bats, win the pennant and all that stuff.’

  “Nuts,” Proctor said. “You want me to do something for you, and in order to do it, I have got to have you do something for me, and you haven’t done it. Asshole. I go to jail, I might have a couple, three things to say about you. Keep in mind, Jerry, I know what you got in mind for those buildings, there. That’s a conspiracy.”

  “Now look,” Fein said.

  “Now look, nothing,” Proctor said. “This here is not a game that the cops play with Monopoly money, all right? Those guys know who I am, and I don’t think they like me. They think I am a no-good guy, and a fellow that’s a bad influence on the young. They take a look at me and they think that here is a guy they would like to see wearing stripes, you know?

  “This makes me nervous,” Proctor said. “It makes me nervous because those guys can fit me out for stripes, if they get a good grip on my nuts, and right now they have a good grip on my nuts and I haven’t got anybody who looks to me like he can make them let go right away. Which makes me even more nervous.”

  “Take it easy,” Fein said. “I’ll think of something.”

  “Bullshit you will,” Proctor said. “You’ll fuck around here all afternoon tryin’ book some stripper into an American Legion hal
l, and then when it comes time, drop the shovel, you will, and it won’t be till after you get home and you had your dinner and you seen the ball game and you’re watching the goddamned eleven o’clock news with some clown who talks like the Lone Ranger, and then you’ll think of it. Which will be too late, because I bet you haven’t even read the complaints yet.”

  “Well …” Fein said.

  “You don’t even know where they fuckin’ are,” Proctor said. “I am not a betting man, but if I was, I would bet the fuckin’ ranch you don’t know where the complaints are.”

  “Lois does,” Fein said.

  “Lois ain’t no lawyer,” Proctor said. “I wished she was, but she isn’t. Lois can’t come to court with me tomorrow morning and stop me from going to jail. Which is what I am gonna need.

  “Now, Jerry,” Proctor said, “I am a reasonable man. I pride myself on being a reasonable man. And going to jail ain’t reasonable, right? No reasonable man would go to jail if he could think of a way that he wouldn’t have to go to jail. I can’t escape. I’m too old and I’m too fat and I can’t climb fences and I can’t run as fast as I could when I escaped about twenty, thirty years ago. And that didn’t work out too great neither, because they ended up catching me and giving me some more time for duckin’ out on the rest of the other time.

  “So I have to think of something,” Proctor said. “I have to figure a way that I can get myself out of going to jail without climbing any fences and trying anything else that I probably can’t do and which would give me a heart attack anyway. And I thought of one, if I get to the point where they are going to put me in jail. And that is conspiracy to commit arson.”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” Fein said.

  “Mister Fein,” Proctor said, “I can see where you and me’ve got to get some things straight. We don’t seem to understand each other, and that makes me even more nervous’n I was before.

  “You got to get it into your head that I will do what I say I will do,” Proctor said. “I don’t just go running around, bullshitting people. I haven’t got time for it. I got too many other things which are pressing on my mind, and what I have to do is, I have to transcend myself from the bullshit and tend to business, you know? All the time.

  “Now,” Proctor said, “this is the thing, all right? I happen to know the same thing as you know, which is that you know about as much about being in a courtroom like a lawyer as I know about maybe taking a trip to the moon, and you are about as interested in going into one of those rooms for me as I am in going to the moon for somebody else. Which I would probably be as good at going to the moon as you are going to be, going to court with me. Except, when you go to court with me, I am not going to the moon. I am going to jail.

  “Now, Jerry,” Proctor said, “I have done some things and I admit I done them, except I am not gonna admit what things I did and where I did them, because so far nobody figured out who did them, and that is all right with me, on account of the jail thing. But they were not anything like driving a Chevy into a pond when I was drunk, all right? They were a little more serious, and I did not get caught for doing them, and I am very glad of it. Because, if I had’ve been, I would be in the shit up to my knickers, and I’m not.

  “You, my friend,” Proctor said, “you are not gonna get me in that shit, that I stayed out of so long, on something like I drowned my own car. So what I want to tell you is this: if you do not get me out of the shit, I will get me out of the shit. Of course this will mean that you go into the shit, but that is tough shit. Tough shit for you, that is.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Fein said.

  “My mother wouldn’t like your choice of words,” Proctor said, “but I have to admit, there was a time when I agreed with you, and since you’re not the first man that’s said it, you may have something there. I ain’t sure, but you could be right. I was never proud.”

  “I’ll have you killed,” Fein said.

  Proctor began to laugh. He laughed for perhaps twenty seconds, an arid laugh. He threw his head back and slapped his rib cage with his right hand. When he had finished, he took a dirty handkerchief out of his pocket and dried his eyes, which were not wet. He leaned forward in his chair. “Aw right,” he said. “Now, let’s talk. You’re not gonna have anything done to anybody, and you and I both know it. You were down at the Royal in Hyannis last weekend and you had the lovely wife with you. You had on the maroon pants with the silver threads and the white belt and the white shoes, and you played the goddamned golf tournament and then that night the two of you went the formal dinner dance, and she had something on that was a little low in the front.

  “And this drunk comes up to you in the bar,” Proctor said, “and he gets a look at the cupcakes and he’s staggering all over the place, and he grabs her right by the left tit and gives her a nice little milkshake, on the house. And you didn’t do a goddamned thing to him.”

  “He was an elderly man,” Fein said. “That was …”

  “I know who he was,” Proctor said. “I know he was drunk and he’s got a heart condition. And I also know he grabbed your little lady by the left tit and pulled it out of her dress and shook it up and down in front of about three hundred people and she started screaming and you didn’t even get between them and stop him from doing it and help her get her boob back in her dress. You didn’t have to chop him down, Jerry. All you had to do was stop him. A little shove would’ve knocked him flat on his ass, and you didn’t have the goddamned guts to do that.”

  “I’ve known him for a long time,” Fein said.

  “You’ve known me for a long time, too,” Proctor said. “That mean I can go out to where you live and feel up your wife? Maybe pork her, if she’s interested? And you won’t do anything about it?”

  “You bastard,” Fein said.

  “I doubt it,” Proctor said. “I seen my old man and I look a lot like him. Now, are we gonna talk a little business here?”

  WILFRID MACK STOOD UP as Leo Proctor came out of Fein’s private office at a measured pace, nodded at Lois Reynolds and left.

  “I hate to be a nuisance about this,” Mack said, after Proctor had shut the door, “but I am in sort of a hurry. Can I see Mister Fein now?”

  “If you’re in a reckless mood,” she said. “Want to chance it?” She grinned.

  “Difficult client?” he said.

  “Not a bit,” she said. “Mister Fein likes seeing him almost as much as I’d enjoy finding a big spider in my bed.”

  “I’ll take a shot at it,” he said, grinning back.

  Fein was irritable but composed when Mack entered his office. He stood and they shook hands.

  “Counselor,” Mack said, “I know your problems. I’ve got the same kind myself.”

  “I doubt it,” Fein said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Mack said. “I only spend part of my time in the Senate. The rest I spend dealing with difficult clients. I hope you come out of the wringer better’n I usually do. Must be awful, dealing with those show-biz types. All I have to do is get young punks out of jail on car-theft charges, after they’ve stolen police cruisers. What’s that guy do, anyway, wrassle alligators?”

  “He is an alligator,” Fein said. “Son of a bitch. No, he’s sort of a general-purpose roustabout that I got to know years ago, and if I’d’ve known what I was getting to know, I wouldn’t’ve got to know him. What can I do for you?”

  “I don’t know as you remember me,” Mack said. “We met at a dinner, some time ago, and I thought maybe we could talk.”

  They both sat down. “Senator,” Fein said, “I don’t doubt we met at a dinner. I have met half the world at dinners. If what we are going to talk about is dinners, the answer is: No, we probably can’t talk. I’ve been to so many dinners that cost at least a hundred a plate that I am almost busted out, and the thing of it is, I never get anything to eat. The chicken population is about a third of what it was when I started going to dinners, and I think I saw some feathers starting to grow on my wife Pauline a
nd me, but I just can’t afford this kind of high living. Not any more. What is it this time, the NAACP?”

  Mack laughed. “Nothing to do with organizing,” he said. “The reason I’m here, I’m not looking for a contribution or anything like that. I represent the Bristol Road neighborhood, and I’ve been getting a lot of heat from some people who live in those buildings.”

  “Who’ve been telling you that I don’t give them any heat,” Fein said.

  “Look, Mister Fein,” Mack said, “hear me out, okay? Believe me, I don’t want to make your life more difficult. It’s just that these people came to me and I said that I would come and see you. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that these are my constituents and I have to listen to them.”

  “You ever tell them anything?” Fein said.

  “I told them that I’d see you, and see if we could reach some sort of understanding,” Mack said.

  “Well,” Fein said, “let’s try. Let’s try to do that, reach some understanding. And if we can do it, my friend, I will be a lot happier man.

  “The first thing,” Fein said, “is that I would like your constituents that are my tenants to stop tearing the copper piping out of the walls and selling it to junkmen. I would appreciate that. It plays hell with the plumbing when your constituents tear the pipes out. You got no idea how hard it is to get water around a building where the pipes’ve been ripped out and sold for scrap.”

  “These people complain that the premises suffer from rodent infestation,” Mack said.

  “And they do,” Fein said. “I don’t doubt that for a minute. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that had something to do with the habit your constituents have of throwing the garbage in the yard. You think that might have something to do with it?”

  “Perhaps if there were adequate facilities for disposal,” Mack said.

  “Mister Mack,” Fein said, “those buildings are rent-controlled. I am allowed to charge one hundred and thirty-five dollars a month for five rooms. The buildings are not tax-controlled, and they are not controlled in the cost of heat in the winter. I have provided the best disposal system I can afford, which is barrels. No, that’s wrong—I can’t even afford the barrels. I can’t put in chutes—those buildings’re over a hundred years old. I’d have to rip the place to shreds. And if I did it, I couldn’t afford to install the incinerator. I can’t put in sink units—your constituents rip the pipes out, and those pipes’re necessary to conduct the water. All they have to do is bag the garbage and cart it downstairs and put it in the barrel and put the cover on the barrel and tie the cover down. But they won’t do it.”