Authors: George V. Higgins
“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
?”
“You devil, you,” Farrier said. “No. A putting green? Or maybe a real beer tap?”
“A real beer tap, half-keg in a little icebox? They make those now—home beer taps. Expensive, but it might be worth it. But no, not that. What I’m gonna have is a refrigerator where the part I have to see into to find the stuff I’m looking for, like a beer when I want one, is the part I’m looking into when I’m standing
up.
Instead of the part I practically have to get down on my hands and knees to look into it, and the part I
don’t
need to look into, except maybe Easter and Hallowe’en, the damn freezer, is the part on the top.” He opened the first beer. “You wanna glass?”
“Yeah, you don’t mind,” Farrier said. “I never did get into this new-vogue thing, drinkin’ long neckers outta the bottle. Never appealed to me, somehow. Tried it once—gave me gas.”
“You’re probably too old for it,” Stoat said, putting the two beers and two pilsner glasses on a circular pewter tray and starting toward the living area.
“That’s probably it,” Farrier said. “That’s usually the explanation for most things I don’t understand lately.”
“Something, anyway,” Stoat said, bending again to set the tray on the coffee table in front of Farrier. As he straightened up, Farrier leaned forward, picking up a bottle and a glass and tilting it in order to pour the beer down the side. Stoat backed over to the club chair nearest the door and sat down. He absently watched Farrier pour as though not really seeing, seeming to have become lost in thought.
Farrier put a two-inch head on the beer in the glass and sat back again on the couch. He looked at Stoat. “What’re you, you’re not having a beer? Or’re you saying grace there or something?” he said.
Stoat shook his head once, frowned and collected himself. He leaned forward and took up the other glass and bottle. “No,” he
said, duplicating Farrier’s care in pouring. “No, I was just thinking, is all.” He put the empty bottle on the table and sat back.
“Dangerous habit,” Farrie said. “I’d have to check the manual, but if I recall correctly it’s not generally approved for SAs with less than twelve years’ experience, at least nine of which’ve been in Interstate Flight to Avoid Prosecution—or Transportation Stolen Motor Vehicles, also always a crowd pleaser. About what?”
“About the Frogman, mainly,” Stoat said, scowling. He drank about a quarter of his beer. He kept the glass in his hands. He shook his head again. “Lily isn’t comfortable, what we do with these guys. Having gunsels in our homes. Says it doesn’t look good. Of course she’s not your basic FBI wife—she’s always had her own career, had it long ’fore she married me, and she came to this later in life’n most the bureau wives I know. Doesn’t have the same outlook.”
Cheri Farrier mocked Lily Stoat every time her name or her husband’s came up. “
Oh
, Ducal
Melilly
, with all her
degrees
? She’s so fuckin’ smart, somebody tell me—how come she married that
dork
?” Farrier lived in mixed dread and thrilled anticipation of the night when Cheri after too many vodka tonics at a bureau Christmas, farewell or retirement party, instead of taking off her high-heeled sandals and dancing on the bar, as she still did now and then, or going topless as she had one night in Buffalo—when she was still but resentfully married to her first husband, to wild approval that night and stern reprimands next day—would commence her imitation of “the internationally famous belle of Memphis,
Lily—Weymuss—Stoat.
” He had timed one private performance at more than eight minutes, and found it hilarious, so much so that he knew a more public one before Lily and other bureau people who also knew and disliked her would be devastating.
“Ah, background doesn’t matter,” Farrier said at once, smoothly. “
All
the wives I’ve ever known who found out about it, got to know about it—and I mean every single one of them—Helen Fogarty; Don Hulse’s wife, Jill, and Bobbi Sherman, Kenny Sherman’s wife, when they worked with Fogarty; my wife
Cheri
, for heaven’s sake, and she’s a bureau brat from the day she was born—
none
of the women married to men who got close enough to this understanding Al developed with the lads, they actually knew about it,
saw
how close it was—
none
of them’ve ever been comfortable with it. Ever.” He paused and thought a moment. “Maybe it’s a guy thing; they just
can’t
understand it.”
“It’s not a matter of
understand
,” Stoat said. He drank some more beer, and seemed calmer. He belched silently, inflating his cheeks and then swallowing. “
Understand’
s only the word that they use. And as usual they’re not being candid with us. What it is is a matter of
like.
Or
approve.
” He shook his head. “Which they don’t.” He kept the glass in his hand. “McKeach and the Frogman,” he said. “The two of them, coming here—bothers her. And therefore, it bothers me, too—some. The Frogman especially. Bothers me, I mean. I mean, I
know
he’s evil, ’cause I know what he does. He
has
to be evil, to do that. But we don’t seem to have much
on
him. He doesn’t
have
a record, to speak of. Some juvenile stuff. Sealed. Service record, navy—medals—actually looks very good. Fine.” He shook his head again, frowning. “But otherwise—
nope
, can’t find out that much about him. How do we know he’s for real?”
Farrier laughed. “Okay,” he said, “one thing at a time. First thing, about the wives—I’ll buy that. May have something there—it’s not that they don’t understand it—it’s that they don’t approve. But this thing—well, bear with me here, now; I’ll get back to the Frogman.”
“Okay,” Stoat said. He finished his beer.
“ ‘Disapproval,’ okay,” Farrier said, “probably part of it. But there’s another reason all the women always get uneasy when they get around this LCN stuff. It’s not because they think it’s violent. It’s because—and I don’t think they even know this, or realize they know it if they actually do? It’s because the OC squads remind them of the clubhouses we had in the woods, when we were kids. The best thing they had about them was the signs—‘N
O
G
IRLS
A
LLOWED
.’ Always had those signs—in big red letters.
“Which they never would’ve seen if we hadn’t shown them to them, let them know they were excluded. The treehouses and the forts we used to have, you know? I assume you Rebs had them too.”
Stoat laughed. “Oh yeah,” he said. “
Ours
had Confederate flags.” He frowned and studied the empty glass, the residual foam brownish on the sides.
“Right,” Farrier said. “Well, the mob still has them. Grownup, adult, dangerous men have all the rituals and stuff, the voodoo initiations with the holy cards and finger pricking, and the taking of solemn oaths? You look at this objectively and you have got to think that basically it’s
silly
—it is
really—silly—shit.
“If you brought a smart woman into one of those super-secret, mystic-shrine,
omerta
ceremonies, all right? Unless you had her bound and gagged, she would bust out
laughin
’. ‘What the
hell
is goin’ on here? Have you guys all gone
nuts
? What time’s the tooth fairy arrive? Are we goin’ trick-or-treatin’?’
“Because
organizationally
, before they get to what they do and why they do it, that’s what the Mafia is, what it amounts to—a big fuckin’ treehouse, the exact same kind of thing. The boys’re a lot older, and bigger, more brutal, but otherwise it’s the Secret Blue Knights and the Shady Lane Outlaws and that stuff. It’s a wonder they don’t have softball leagues.” He paused but Stoat did not laugh. Farrier picked up his glass and drank about
a quarter of it. He set the glass down again and contemplated it. “You know, that’s really not bad beer at all.”
“It really isn’t,” Stoat said, appearing to rouse himself. He considered his empty glass, turning it in his left hand. “You know,” he said, thoughtfully, “I think I might have another one.” He stood up with it in his hand, looking at Farrier. “You?”
Farrier shook his head, laughing. “No, no,” he said, nodding to his glass. “I still got some of mine left. But you go right ahead.”
“Well, I will, then,” Stoat said. He bent and put his glass on the coffee table and turned away. “You keep talking, though,” he said. “I can still hear you. This’s all stuff I should know.”
Farrier shook his head and smirked at Stoat’s back as he disappeared into the kitchen. “Oh, I dunno,” he said. “It’s all ancient history, going back to the Crusades, Sicilians getting together and arming themselves to fight off marauding Christian knights returning from the Holy Land. You’ve done all right without it, so far. We work in the modern day.”
Stoat returned to the entertainment area with two more bottles of Pete’s Wicked Ale. He put one down on the table and poured the other into his glass. “For when you’re ready,” he said, nodding toward the second bottle. “Save me a trip.” He sat down, heavily.
“Thanks,” Farrier said. “Anyway, the only real differences between the LCN and other big-boys’ social clubs like the Lions, Elks and Moose’re the outlawry and the violence. LCN
exists
to break the law. And in addition to being a
violent
fraternity, it’s also a union. Used to run—still
tries
to run—a closed shop. The guys who belong to it got their invites to join because the guys who already belonged to it and did bad things for a living spotted
them
doing bad things and said, ‘Hey, this kid’s got
promise.
We don’t need him competing with us. Let’s ask him to join.’
“In the old days if he didn’t join they killed him. Or if it
turned out he really
was
as good—meaning as
bad
—as they thought, or were afraid he was, then he killed off
them
to take over the club.”
Stoat drank some of his beer. He had begun to look contented.
Farrier, observing Stoat drink, picked up his beer and drank a long pull. “This’s the basic difference that makes women nervous when their husbands hang around with Mafia.
“Generally, FBI womenfolk all tend to be fairly clean-cut, like their husbands—in most cases even more so. My first wife, Linda, all right? I met Linda when I was a junior at Saint Louis U, majoring in English, and among many other BOMC things that I was doing, I was taking ROTC—and doing very well at it. I was expecting to become cadet colonel in my senior year, and then when I got out, in nineteen sixty-nine, I was going to be commissioned, and then go to Vietnam.
“Now, I was
different
than the kids that everyone remembers, the late sixties, seventies, using drugs and getting laid, demonstrating ’gainst the war. This did not bother me—I
wanted
to be different. I was probably going to be assigned to JAG—in those days the army was so glad to see a college boy who actually wanted to go, he generally got what he wanted. That’d look good on my law-school applications when I got out three years later. And if something happened, so I didn’t get JAG, then I had a lock on Intelligence. For law school, almost as good.
“So, when I met Linda, Linda Slattery, in October, junior year, her freshman mixer at Fontbonne College—where well-to-do Catholic couples from Missouri send their comely daughters to take courses in education and music and browse Saint Louis U for husbands—my future through the next seven years was pretty much
set
, all mapped out. Senior year, my army hitch, and then three years of law school—I
knew
where I was going.
“Knocking Linda up was therefore
not
on my agenda.
Getting
knocked up was not on Linda’s; she wanted her degree. Purely a case of raging hormones, temptation—no condoms, of course; good Catholics didn’t carry such items—and opportunity. One warm weekend at her parents’ house, spent the day out by the pool, Linda in her white bikini, spilling out of it. In the evening we’re alone—old folks seeing
Showboat
at the Light Opera.
Off
with Linda’s white silk panties;
in
with my stiff dick, and in a jiffy, there we were, prospective parents ourselves, having to get married.
“Both of us were absolutely
flattened.
This was a
disaster.
She was going to have to drop out of college, and Linda’s a smart girl. Children were for later. She wanted her education and a shot at a career, and she’d wanted me to have the one I’d planned on, too—what’d looked like a bright-line armed service, then legal career, made to order for a shot at politics. Which we’d already talked about, politics as a career. Now all those dreams were in shambles.
“So we did what you do—the best we could. We’d get married, which’d take care of the family-disgrace matter—hard to believe now how all bent out of shape people got about that then, unmarried women getting pregnant, but they did.
“Being an expectant father I was now exempt from the draft, but unlike most horny guys caught in the tender trap, I had a contractual service obligation—I’d taken all that lovely ROTC pay, and now I’d gone and done something that made it look as though I wasn’t going to keep my promise to serve. So my father and Linda’s father pulled all strings they could locate, and somehow they cut a deal so that I could work it off if I got accepted by the FBI. Which I did, no trouble.