At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  “ ‘And you know they’re right about that. You’re watching Cistaro now. He’s watching you, and both of you’re planning ways to get rid of the other one.

  “ ‘Then no matter how many of your guys’re still left, they’ll be outnumbered—nothing to worry about. So what my fellow Italians’ll do then is what they always do, every place that they go in—buy up the local PD. Given what cops make, this’s easy. And cheap. They’re very astute about that.’ I’ll never forget him sayin’ that. ‘Very astute about that.’

  “Al was a very intelligent guy, which was another thing. Keep in mind now, I am getting close to thirty. Got more sense’n I had than the first time I met him, I’m inna can. I listened the guy. You know how I know how intelligent he was? I can tell you how, very easy—he knew enough to treat me like I also was, a very intelligent guy. Not like I was an educated guy—which he was, went to Saint John’s in New York, think he said—because I wasn’t, and he knew it and I knew he knew it. So if he’d’ve pretended he thought that I was educated, I would’ve known right off he was a phony. But an intelligent one? Different thing—you don’t have to have an education to be an intelligent man.

  “Now, tell you the truth, I’m not really sure that was true, least in those days. Or that Al really thought it was, either. All I really knew, you came right down to it, was how to do things that if you didn’t get caught would make you a lot of money. And if you did get caught would probably get you a fair amount of time—and then how to do the time. But even if he didn’t think it, he was smart enough to act like he did, and since this was something that I naturally wanted to think about myself—everybody does, that they are intelligent—pretty soon he had me believin’ it, too.

  “Even got me readin’ books. Al was a great one for reading—he was always talkin’ about books, some book he’d just read, and enjoyed. So I hadda, too, to keep up. Understand what he’s sayin’ to me. Found out I could do that, no trouble—just never’d done it before. I got so I really enjoyed it. Which of course made me think, ‘He is right—I am an intelligent guy.’ Al DeMarco’s one very smart man.

  “ ‘It’s always the first thing they do,’ he told me—now he’s back to tellin’ me about the Mafia. ‘And you should listen to me now; these’re my people now we’re talkin’ about, even if I don’t think much of the way they act and I’ll do anything I can to stop them—I still know how they think. The first thing they do when they come into a new place is corrupt the police, and after that it’s just a matter of time ’til they own the town.

  “ ‘After they buy the cops, then if you book a bet or shylock a loan, it’s still against the law that the cops’ve never enforced, but now you are gonna get grabbed. Guarantee it—that’s part of the deal they make. But if they do it, that’s okay, and a cop standing next to them when they loan a guy five for six Friday won’t see a thing going on. So unless you’ve now got as much clout with the cops as they will when they get up to speed, you’ll be doomed the day they open up.

  “ ‘Newton’s first law. The conservation of energy. A body in motion tends to stay in motion. A body at rest stays at rest. When the Mafia comes into a place or a community where they haven’t been, they don’t have an established organization, it’s not because they think the people who live there don’t want what they have to sell—it’s because they know the market’s there, and now that something’s happened, they think they can take it.

  “ ‘They don’t infiltrate convents and Cub Scouts, altar and rosary guilds—no money in those outfits for them. But they know they can make money in Boston running gambling, lending money, fencing hot goods, and financing people who hijack trucks and rob banks and so forth, because you people’ve been doing those things for years, and making boatloads of money. So all they have to do is two things—get rid of you, then take over your markets and expand them.

  “ ‘So, assuming you don’t want this to happen, I think this’s what you should do. First—unless I’m wrong now and you’re not the boss and Bernie G.’s now in charge, you should sit down with Hugo and Nick, or maybe just Nick, pretty soon and see if you can’t get together. Split up the town like it was before and stop shootin’ guns at each other.

  “ ‘And the second thing is, you should talk to me. Nick should also talk to me. I’m a straight guy. What I want is your information. Just in the course of doing what you’ve been doing for a good many years, and Brian was doing before you and someone did long before him, you’re now going to be finding out a lot of stuff I want to know. Because you’re going to be competing with LCN, what amounts to the same block of business. And the Frogman and Hugo—same thing.

  “ ‘Your answer is, “What do I get? What’s in it for me, I should do this?” And my answer to you is this, I’m an ambitious guy. I want to do my job well, because that’s where the big money is. I’m assigned here, but I work for my boss, the Seat of Government, and J. Edgar’s butt is in Washington.

  “ ‘SOG has discovered the mob. For years SOG’s been harping on communist spies, stealing secrets about atom bombs—that’s what the Congress was worried about, so that’s where the big budgets were. The way your ambitious FBI man made a big name for himself was digging out Russian agents. Then Bobby Kennedy landed on Hoffa, and his brother made Bobby AG, and now all of a sudden that’s where the action is—same place it’s been for at least forty years, starting when they said “No more booze.” But now it’s okay to know that.

  “ ‘You make me look good by filling me in so I know where to look when the Mafia’s got something good? I will look good down in Washington when the Boston Field Office makes major mob cases. In exchange for which I’ll look out for you, and cover for you when I can.’ ”

  Stoat inhaled deeply and then exhaled most of it, not realizing he was following the instructions he had learned for preparing to shoot in close-range combat-firing of small arms. He was pleased to hear his voice sound as he wished it to, pleasant but nonetheless firm. “What, exactly, did that mean?” he said.

  McKeach snorted. “You know,” he said, “that’s almost the same thing I said, when he said that—‘And just what the hell does that mean?’

  “And he looked at me, and he smiled, and he said, ‘Well, it doesn’t cover murder, won’t ever go that far—that much I am perfectly sure of. You do anyone, and you mess it up? If you get caught you’re on your own. Not that I’m suggesting you’d do such a thing, but if you do and get caught, for my purposes you are gone.

  “ ‘Obviously what I’m telling you is that I don’t expect you to stop running the businesses we both know you’re running, against state and federal law, because if you did then you wouldn’t be competing with LCN anymore, and not only would you have nothing to gain from talking to me—you’d have nothing to talk about.

  “ ‘So, this much at least—as long as you’re talking to me, if you get snarled up in some federal matter, I’ll do what I can to get you out of it. Or if I can’t do that, I’ll get word to you. So that then when the indictments come out, you can arrange to be … out of town. And insofar as I have any clout with the state cops, the same thing with anything state—do the best that I can to protect you from getting indicted, or at least let you know when it’s coming.

  “ ‘Beyond that, I don’t know what it covers. But it’s still early yet. I’m making this up here as I go along. So far as I know, no one’s done this before. If they did, they sure didn’t tell me, and there’s nothing in the manual—I don’t have a set of directions. So I’ve got no more idea’n you have what comes next. What you’ll want me to do; what I’ll want you to do; what we’ll be able to do, you and me and the Frogman; or where it’ll all go from here? Short answer is—I dunno. And that’s probably as specific as I’m ever gonna get.’ ”

  He paused. “I dunno, though,” he said, “Nick maybe did, sometime when I wasn’t with them. You ever ask him, Frogman? He tell you something he didn’t tell me, exactly what he could do?”

  “Nope,” Cistaro said.
“Nope—I didn’t ask him. And nope—he didn’t tell me. After Hugo went down was the first I saw of him. He told me the deal that he had with you, which was basically what you’d already told me. I said that sounded all right, as far as it went, but I asked him, ‘How far does that go?’ And he said to me what you just said—he wouldn’t know until we’d tried it out. So I went along on that basis, and like you say, it seemed to go okay. I didn’t ask him again.”

  “Long time ago,” McKeach said. “Al got his commendations, think he said they were—you law guys’re big on that shit—and they got him transferred, just like he wanted. Sent him to the promised land, where they play golf all year ’round. ‘I always did like happy endings,’ he said, the last time we had dinner like this, him and Fogarty and us. What’d I say that was, eighteen years ago? I forget. Quite a while. I thought same as he did, every-thing’d gone good—I never did ask him again.”

  “Because you … you didn’t have to,” Stoat said, somewhat bleary. “By then you knew and he knew what was involved, without talking about it … and all of you … made out just fine.”

  “Well, so’ve you guys,” McKeach said, his eyes narrowing again. “You guys’ve got Carlo and all of his cowboys right by the short ’n’ curlies. Whole bagful of scalps for your personnel files. You ain’t done bad out of this either.”

  “We realize that,” Farrier said soothingly. “All Darren’s saying, as I understand him, is still being new here he has some concern that we all know about where we stand. For the future. Now that it looks like old Carlo’s group’s going. I think that’s all that’s concerning him now.”

  “That what’s on your mind?” McKeach said to Stoat, his voice hard and flat.

  “What is?” Stoat said. “I don’t understand your question.”

  McKeach glared. “My question’s simple. I wanna know if what he just said, what Jack just said to me there, is about all that you got on your mind here.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Stoat said. He belched softly, pouching his cheeks and putting his chin down against the base of his neck. Then he lifted it again. “The way that I feel … what you’ve told me, tonight … is that you haven’t told me a lot. That tells me just where you think we stand now. With Carlo’s group now on the skids. I think what you’ve said leaves me and Jack—well, maybe not Jack—but leaves me … pretty much in the dark. And I’m … well, getting uneasy about this.”

  Farrier, Cistaro and McKeach frankly studied him for a while, saying nothing. After he had rotated his gaze onto each of them twice without getting reassurance, he put his hands on the table, pushed his chair back, stood unsteadily, and said, “Gennelmen … ah meeting’s adjourned.”

  12

  CONVINCED OF SPRING’S ARRIVAL by the breezy cloudless afternoon bringing the first seventy-degree sunshine of the year, on the fourth Wednesday in April, Rascob in the old grey Town Car turned right off Old Colony Boulevard onto B Street in South Boston and immediately swung right again, into the off-street loading zone behind the two-story store on the corner. The building was whitewashed, its window and door frames painted emerald green. On the northerly wall under the four long narrow windows a foot below the top, three rows of bright green block letters eighteen inches high, decorated with a cluster of six bright green shamrocks, identified it in the top row as FLYNN’S SPA; in the second as offering Beer & Wine * SUPERETTE * Fresh Fish & Choice Meats Daily; and in the third offering Lottery, Newspapers, Cigarettes, Gov’t Checks Cashed, Money Orders, Fax.

  Rascob drove the Town Car all the way into the narrow space remaining at the southeast corner of the chain-link fence enclosing the loading area, easing it carefully tight against the fence next to the shiny bronze ’96 Lincoln Mark VIII coupé John Sweeney had backed into the space nearest the building. He jammed the transmission into Park, shut off the ignition, reached around into the back seat and working by feel pulled a large black nylon zippered duffel bag out from under his trenchcoat, then slid across the seat and, being careful not to ding Sweeney’s car, squeezed out through the passenger door.

  The Naughton kid, his black hair cropped against his skull, his face and arms deeply tanned from his Patriots’ Day package weekend—four days and three nights in the Cayman Islands—showing off his muscles with a tight white tee shirt and beltless jeans riding low on his pelvis, using both hands slammed out onto the cement loading dock through the double-hinged wooden doors with the curved steel dolly bumpers on the bottom, letting them bang back and forth behind him. He came to the edge of the platform and leaned his left shoulder against the four-by-eight steel upright supporting the corner of the corrugated steel roof and siding closest to the street, shaking one cigarette out of a pack of Winstons in his right hand and snapping a flame up from a neon-blue disposable lighter with his left thumb. When Rascob had fully emerged from his car, Naughton shouted, “Max, my man,” exhaling a billow of smoke and grinning, his teeth gleaming.

  “Well, Jesus, Captain Marvel, ain’t you pretty now,” Rascob said. “You’d’ve been that dark ten years ago, you would’ve gone to Southie High—judge would’ve bused you over here, all the other jigaboos.”

  Naughton’s grin widened. “Max,” he said, “you’re gettin’ in deep shit, drivin’ that shitbox. Good King John says you embarrass his fine ride, parkin’ that old beater beside it every day. When you gonna give in, admit it, you gotta get a new car?”

  “When you get your start date, the academy,” Rascob said, opening the trunk of the Town Car. It was nearly filled with small brown paper bags. “Soon’s I know you can get along ’thout the dough I’m always givin’ you to fix it.” He put the duffel bag into the trunk and began stuffing the paper bags into it.

  “Well, Max,” Naughton’s kid said, “get ready to shop ’til you drop. I’m in the class startin’ May.”

  Rascob stopped his activity. Exaggerating his motions, he straightened up and turned to face the loading dock, leaving the paper bags and duffel in the open trunk. A gull overhead, flying north toward the Fort Point Channel, shrieked loudly. “Son of a bitch,” Rascob said, feigning amazement, “so that’s why you got the deep tan. And the very next week you get in. Made the minority quota work for you. You’re smarter’n I thought you were.”

  Then he grinned. “Hey, though, congratulations.” He started toward the loading dock, extending his right hand, Naughton’s kid crouching and extending his right hand to meet him, but then Rascob stopped, held up his left forefinger, wheeled around, and slammed the trunk lid shut.

  “Yeah, you’d better,” Naughton’s kid said. “Wouldn’t wanna go leavin’ that open, someone come along an’ help themselves, the work.”

  Rascob still grinning turned again and this time made it to the dock. “Yeah, but pity the guy who tried it,” he said. “He’d be one dead fuckin’ man.” He shook hands with Naughton’s kid, clapping him on the right elbow with his left hand. “But son of a bitch,” he said again, this time with undisguised pleasure, “that really is great news, Todd, just the greatest damned news. Your dad and mother must be very proud.” He laughed. “Shit,” he said, “old man must be insufferable, takin’ this news to headquarters. Pity the people have to work with Emmett this week.”

  The Naughton kid’s smile faded a little. He frowned and shook his head once. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he said. “I don’t think I’d be too sure.”

  “Well, Jesus Christ, why?” Rascob said.

  Naughton shook his head again. “Dunno,” he said. “I told him night before last, got home from over Hagan’s, get cleaned up ’fore I went out—the department envelope’s waiting. So I opened it and made sure it said what I thought it did, and then I waited, he got home, before he went to work. And I showed it to him, told him.

  “He said, you know, ‘congratulations,’ but he didn’t look that happy. ‘Hope you enjoy the job as much as I have. And at least try to treat it as well.’ But he wasn’t keen on it. Heart wasn’t really in it.”

  “Really?”
Rascob said. “The cop’s cop’s not happy, his son wants to be a cop? Doesn’t make sense. What’s his problem? Afraid you’ll get hurt or somethin’? Shouldn’t be; he never did, and old Emmett never ducked nothin’. He should have faith in his genes.”

  Naughton shook his head once more. “He’s jumpy,” he said. He frowned. Careful to avoid splinters, he put his right hand knuckles down on the rough wooden floor of the loading platform and pivoted on it to jump down onto the ground in front of Rascob. “We know each other, right, Max?” he said. “I know I feel like that, at least.”

  “Well, geez, so do I,” Rascob said. “Eight or ten years, isn’t it, you started pumpin’ gas at Hagan’s? Anything I can do?”

  Naughton hiked up his jeans. “I dunno,” he said. “Gimme some advice, I guess.”

  “Fire away,” Rascob said.

  “My mother, ‘Lady Caroline,’ my father calls her that. He says we may all be peasants but she’s always been a true aristocrat. Her attitude’s always been … I dunno. She’s never put any pressure on us, what we’d be when we grew up. Never said much about it. Since Eileen and Ed and I’ve been old enough, seems like, say what we’d like to be, from her it always was that we should be whatever we wanted. Cowboys, firemen, pitchers for the Red Sox—‘anything but priests or nuns.’ Which surprised people now and then, they didn’t know her, but she meant it. ‘It’s an unnatural way to live. That’s why there’s so many disgraces.’ ”

  He folded his arms and leaned back against the dock. “I don’t think any of us, growing up, ever once said we’d like to be a cop,” he said. “And Dad never said, even once, to consider it. ‘How about becoming a cop?’ But he never said we shouldn’t, either, touted us against it, like ‘too dangerous’—‘too hard on the family.’ Which of course we all knew that part anyway, growin’ up with him a cop. But he just never promoted the idea.