“What I’m saying is that this’s all on a strictly need-to-know basis, that we even have this confidential relationship with them. If someone from the outside asks us if we have it—could be another law-enforcement agency, state police, IRS, DEA, or ATF, doesn’t matter who, U.S. Attorney’s office—what we do is deny it. ‘Nope,’ we say, ‘it isn’t true.’ No matter who is asking.”
“You lie to them,” she said. “To the other cops, and prosecutors.”
“Well, they almost never ask,” he said. “Law-enforcement people as a breed’re quite closed-mouthed. Fact is, I shouldn’t even be telling you, but I know you know how to keep secrets, so you can get the stock before it shoots up, not after. But if someone does ask, you have to lie. This’s not something we want to have everyone—meaning even other agents, in our own field office—knowing, all over the place. There’d be a leak. Someone might get killed. And even if they didn’t, that’d be the end of it, all the good that it’s accomplished. And I can tell you this much—it’s been a lot.
“This case Jack’s working on right now, will be for next several weeks—he’s got eleven men working under him processing the raw surveillance tapes that’re so darned important to this all-out anti-LCN effort that we’re making here. It’ll put the New England Mafia pretty much out of business. This is a major, major case, and it’s one Nick and Arthur helped us make. Helped Jack make; it started long before I got here. We simply would not’ve ever been able to’ve made it without this relationship that Jack inherited some years back from this agent named Fogarty. Who trained Jack before he retired. As he’d been trained by DeMarco.
“Jack tells me DeMarco originally developed it twenty-five or thirty years ago purely as his own idea. This sort of association wasn’t an established specialty within the bureau, that agents were trained to carry out. But since DeMarco, every agent who’s followed him in here has used his formula, developed and nurtured the association over the years, this relationship ‘with the lads.’ Jack’s in the process of training Bob Hinchey, so that when, as and if Jack moves on, say up to SOG, Hinchey’ll be ready to step into line.
“These informal dinners have been very significant in the cultivation of the relationship. For years and years the agents’ve been setting up these occasions to meet and have a meal, the agent in charge of running ‘the lads’ and whoever the squad leader is; maybe some wine, a few drinks—although I’ve noticed Arthur never really has that much to drink, no more’n one or two; ’fraid of losing control, I suppose. And, well, just talk, man to man, in a calm and relaxed kind of atmosphere, a quiet setting free of pressure.
“Secure. Where you don’t have to be wondering all the time who might just happen to walk in, you know, as they might very well do in a restaurant or a bar—as anyone could; public places, after all. Then you’d never know. Who’d come in, not recognize you but recognize them, sitting with you, and as Jack says, ‘Whoosh, all your covers’re blown.’
“Because they’d then go and buttonhole someone else and say, ‘Who’s that with Nick and Arthur?’ And the other guy’d recognize you, and the two of them’d think, ‘Hey, that’s kind of funny—what’re they doing together?’ Find it a little strange—FBI guys’d be having dinner with these particular two guys, talking like old pals, like they’ve known each other a while, and have something in common—as of course we do, but we don’t want to publicize it.
“And so, having it in our homes this way, we avoid that danger, see? This way we can talk, and that’s how come we do it, three-four-five times a year. Or so. One guy or the other’s place—just to keep in touch. So we know what’s going on.”
“But they’re still criminals,” Lily said.
“Well, yeah, yeah, sure they are,” Stoat said. “But when we get together like this, very quietly, sub rosa, they can then feel protected telling us what they’ve been hearing the LCN’s up to. Then we know where we should be watching for.”
“But I thought this big case that you’re making is this Carlo Rizzo,” Lily said. “That you’ve got him now, and all it is now is a matter of time until you bring him in.”
“Well, it is,” he said. “And the way that we made this big case against Rizzo was by Jack some time back taking what Nick and Arthur told him, and following it up, tracking down the leads they gave him, and then putting it down in the affidavits that he made up for the assistant United States attorneys, Warren Marsh and this new girl he’s got working with him now, name’s Andy Sung, the Chinese tiger, Andrea Sung—very nice young woman, even tougher’n he is. And they then went before the judge and presented them as the basis for warrants under Title Three, U.S. Code, which deals with wiretapping and electronic surveillance, that kind of thing. She’s an expert on it. And the judge said those affidavits did the job and gave us the orders to do the surveillance, and we did, and now we’re processing what we got from it. And when Jack and his group get that done then we’ll give that to the AUSAs and they’ll play them to the grand jury, and——”
“Oh, I don’t care anything about all that stuff,” Lily said. “And don’t talk to me like I’m a child and you can put me off with all this mumbo jumbo. The point is that you want to have Jack Farrier and two big criminals from the underworld to dinner here in my house, and me to get out of the way, and before that I assume you expect me to shop for it, and set the table for it and maybe even cook it——”
“I don’t expect you to do any of those things,” Stoat interrupted. “And if that’s the way you feel about it, I don’t want you to. This’s my house just as much as it is yours—you may’ve made the down payment, but I’m the one who pays the mortgage and the heat and lights and everything else, with my money that I earn, while you go to your investment clubs and have your coffee with the other women investing money that they got off of men, one way or the other.
“I wasn’t always married to you, keep in mind, and I didn’t starve to death then either. I’ve shopped for food hundreds of times, and cooked plenty of meals in my time—served them and cleaned up the joint afterwards, all by myself, before I had you floating through my life and in my home every day like the vision of loveliness you are. And if you want the gospel truth, your chicken cacciatore doesn’t hold a candle up to mine, and since what all four of us agree Italian’s the kind of food we like to eat, I not only can, I’d just as soon—I’d rather—cook it myself.”
Lily gazed at him thoughtfully. “You’re afraid of him,” she said.
“Afraid of who?” Stoat said. “Afraid of the lads? No I’m not. Not as long’s I’m FBI, I’ve got my badge and gun. If I wasn’t FBI, I was only a civilian, and I found out that those two guys were sniffin’ round my business, then would I be worried or afraid of them? You’re damned right I would be. Those guys’re dangerous.”
“No, not of them,” she said. “Jack Farrier—you’re afraid of Jack.”
“I am not,” he said. “Jack reports to me, for Godsake. I don’t answer to him.”
“On paper, yes,” she said. “But we don’t live on paper, honey. We live in the real world, and that’s where you’re afraid of him.”
He did not say anything for a few moments. Then he swallowed. “Not really,” he said. “It isn’t really fear. It’s … look, all right? This slot’s my make-or-break assignment. I didn’t really want it, myself, that much; I was happy where I was, doing what I was doing. But this assignment was a plum. I personally know three guys in Washington, well, two other guys in Washington and the other one’s second desk in Chicago, that were pantin’ for this job here, absolutely droolin’ for it. Would’ve done anything to get it. And they weren’t the only ones. Jack Farrier wanted it, too. He was already here, and then there are at least two other OC guys, one down in Miami and one in Buffalo, that I got leapfrogged over …”
He let his voice trail off, shook his head and spread his hands. “I told you at the time that Lanny Ellsworth was the one behind it. Lanny in the office of professional ethics and responsibility. My spon
sor and good friend. Always has been. Used to be my boss in plans and policy. He’s going to be moving up pretty soon. It’s wired—to assistant deputy director, which on paper’s one of the five third-highest jobs in the whole FBI, a very powerful office, but for my money’s one of the five second-highest. The director’s a political appointee. He’s a very sensitive one, and if any future president’s ever foolish enough to think he can do what Nixon did and appoint another empty suit like Two-day Gray, he’ll find out in a hurry the same thing Nixon found out thirty years ago—you can appoint a loser director, if you get your heart set on it and the Senate goes along, but don’t screw around with the bureau itself, or mess with career FBI guys—the outfit still means something to us, and we’ll protect it, against the world.
“I told you, when you said you didn’t want to leave Bethesda, at first I didn’t want this job—it was Lanny’s idea I should take it. He said, ‘When I go up where the air starts getting thin, I want it so that you go up along with me—I want someone I can trust watching my back for me. But unless you’ve done something besides sit down here and read reports, something in the field that I can point to and say “This shows he’s got the street smarts too,” someone with another guy in mind for the same job is going to be able to shoot your plane right out of the air.
“ ‘This thing up in Boston is a year or eighteen months away from becoming a career year for the guy who’s running the show when the big balloon goes up. So go up there and be him when it happens—run the circus. You’ve run lots of other stuff, and when you supervised assessments and evaluations, you showed us you know how to manage.
“ ‘Contrary to widespread belief, that is all the guy who runs the OC squad needs to know. Not who dumped Kid Twist out the hotel window back in Prohibition days, or that Lucky Luciano’s real name was Salvatore Lucaina—no, what he needs to know is the same stuff that the guy in charge of the fraud unit needs to know or the chief of the antiterrorism unit needs to know; which agents’re doing real good work, and which one’s let his personal life get in the way of his duties, to the point where his buddies’ efforts to cover up his problems’ve impaired the unit’s function. And then first what needs to be done to stop it, and then second to have the common balls to do it.
“ ‘Those qualities I know you’ve got, so I know you can do this job. Now go up there and do it, and then come back here combat ready. After a year or two in an all-out pissing contest with the Mob, paper tigers in this place’ll look to you like little pussycats.’
“So, all right—didn’t want to be, but I’m here. The other guys who wanted to be here are not. But on paper they’re still more qualified’n I am, and you can bet that they’re still watching, waiting for me to slip up—just once. And Jack Farrier—he won’t do anything to sabotage the job, just to make me look bad. But anything that he can do to make it so that anyone looking at it down in Washington would know I may’ve been the man in charge but Jack did all the work? That thing he will do.
“So, no, I’m not afraid of Jack, but I do have to be careful. Not to do anything that he might interpret as my trying to usurp credit for something he actually did. And also not to make any real dumb mistakes that he could use to undermine me at SOG. Get on one of the back channels that these old OC hands all have, every single one of them, and fix it so when this thing breaks, he’s the only fair-haired boy.
“If I went up against him now, stood up and challenged him for being cozy with the lads, I’d be questioning what’s been under way in the Boston bureau, in the OC squad, for about thirty years. If I said ‘This doesn’t feel right, doesn’t smell right, doesn’t look good—maybe we should pull back here,’ I’d be bucking a tradition set down by guys who went on to become legends in this specialty—just as their work was about ready to bear the precious fruit they cultivated so long and patiently all the years I was doing something else, completely unrelated, down in Washington.” He paused two beats. “My FBI career’d be over. I’d be crucified.”
She said, “Pigs don’t bear fruit.”
“Oh, cut it out, Lillian,” he said. “I don’t have a choice here, I have to play the cards I’ve been dealt. And that’s really all’s involved here—take my word for it.”
She gazed at him for a long time and then she nodded. “Well, okay,” she said, “if you say so. But it still looks funny to me.”
He gave that some thought. Then he nodded. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “But I also have to remind you that if things work out the way that Lanny’s got them mapped out, and I do get that promotion to be his deputy, then that would mean I’d go up about four pay grades, plus a lot more in the pension poke, every year thereafter. Just—like—that.” He snapped his fingers. “And the way that I recall it, that kind of consideration’s always been important to you. Or did I get that wrong?”
She smiled and patted him. “No, you got that right,” she said. “You boys have a real nice dinner.”
10
STOAT HAD HAD THE TOWNHOUSE to himself since late afternoon when Farrier arrived and rang the door chime—the first seven notes of “Dixie”—just after 6:45. Having filled the house with the smell of tomatoes, wine, sage, garlic, and chicken, doubling the cacciatore recipe; turned down the heat under the pot, leaving it to simmer; and disposed sensibly of the half bottle of Chianti Classico left over from from the preparation, Stoat had run out of things to do and appropriately drink alone shortly after 6:00, and was genuinely glad to see him. Smelling strongly of wine, he led Farrier to the left from the front entrance into the entertaining area, making a gesture with his left hand meant to suggest that Farrier select a place either on the black leather couch or one of the two black leather club chairs flanking the coffee table.
But Farrier instead stood still at the couch and looked on, a smile at his mouth, like an adult watching a child deal with a new kitten. Stoat snatched up the thick oatmeal-colored china navy mug of tea steaming atop the copy of Time open on the coffee table, and, muttering “guess we can turn this damned thing off now,” bustled somewhat unsteadily toward the twelve-inch Hitachi TV set on the rotating base at the wall end of the pass-through counter between the kitchen and the dining area, as though to shut off the ABC Evening News with Peter Jennings. But after veering right into the kitchen and disposing of the tea in the sink, he appeared to have forgotten that intention, and Jennings, with an air of weariness, continued with a report of “yet another in the recent series of fatal confrontations between rebellious Palestinians and Israeli troops in Jewish settlements along the West Bank of the Jordan.”
“Get you something?” Stoat said in the kitchen, rinsing the mug. “Now that you’re finally here I was thinking I might have an actual drink myself.”
“Got a beer?” Farrier said, sitting on the couch. He clasped his hands in his lap and the amusement disappeared from his face. “I’d been sort of off it quite a while, last summer sometime. Forgotten how good a beer can taste. And then Cheri had me invite Bob Hinchey over our place Saturday, meet another one of her new girlfriends from the flower shop—I tell her that it isn’t gonna happen, but she isn’t gonna rest, she gets him married off again. Although I do have to say if any one of the candidates oughta have a chance, this one should—legs that go all the way up and a rack should be insured with Lloyd’s of London. Brain about the size of a peach pit, but if a man could block his ears a couple hours, once or twice a week, tell her slowly and distinctly what to do and when to do it, she could be a memorable lay. Too bad Bob’s still so damn Catholic.”
“I didn’t know he was one,” Stoat said idly, opening the refrigerator and bending from the waist, peering into the lower part of it.
“Oh, yeah,” Farrier said. “He doesn’t make a big thing out of it or anything, cram it down your throat, but one the reasons—he told me he’s been divorced since ninety-one, never remarried or even lived with a woman since he left his wife in eighty-two. Sixteen nonfuckin’ years. I doubt he’s even had himself a one-n
ight stand along the way—to do that you at least have to recognize when a woman’s coming on to you, wants to get laid and she’d like you to do the decent thing. But I doubt our Robert’d let himself. That’d be … adultery. Told me he doesn’t understand how Clinton can behave the way he does. ‘Not a Catholic, I know, but it’s against his religion too.’ As though Slick Willie had one.”
Stoat, moving articles around in the refrigerator, said “Damn.”
Understanding Stoat’s comment to refer to something other than what he had said about Hinchey, Farrier said, “Anyway, instead of a bottle of cheap red wine, he brought a twelve-pack of Corona. So I had one. And it was really good.” He laughed. “ ’Course then I had three more, which’s far too many you accept Cheri’s expert opinion, but that is a real good beer.”
“Ahh,” Stoat said, his voice coming out of the refrigerator, “as a matter of fact, I do have beer.” He straightened up. “I got Pete’s Wicked Ale and Watney’s Red Barrel. I like to try various kinds. Which you want?”
“Gimme Pete’s,” Farrier said. “Ale, beer, it’s all beer to me. And that English stuff—must be fresh, they drink it there. Lukewarm. But the time they get it bottled and they ship it over here? I think it’s stale.”
“Pete’s it is,” Stoat said, pulling two bottles out of the refrigerator with his left hand and closing the door. He arched his back and rubbed the small of it with his right hand. “You know what I’m gonna get someday?” he said, turning toward the counter opposite the refrigerator. “When I retire and quit moving around, get a real house of my own, my very own damn building, single-family dwelling, no other people living other side my outside walls? Where I can play my CCR and Eagles, BST and Chicago, and my Janis Joplin CDs just as damn loud as I like, any hour that I like, the rest of my damned life?”
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