Authors: George V. Higgins
“Not the only one. Lot of guys to deal with. Same kind of position. Never really heard about them—how they wanted it. Never looking to move up in anything, never lookin’ to branch out. And also never took a bust. Not really that involved in things—what’s goin’ on in town, pickin’ sides or anything. Just trynah stay in business, you know?
“For them the war was an inconvenience. Same as ‘The power’s out. Fuckin’ Edison fucked up, house’s dark, and now
fuck
, it’s gettin’
cold
—no way to make coffee.’ People dyin’? Brian G. goin’ down, Rocco, all kinds of guys—to guys like Dominic it was all an inconvenience. Didn’t
care
who controlled things.
“ ‘Just gettah damn thing fixed, all right?’ All they cared about back then; all they care about today. Doesn’t
matter
how it comes out, far as they’re concerned—work with anybody. Will, too. Sit tight ’til it’s over with—that was all was on their minds.
“So I decide I oughta have a talk with Nick. Go and see the Frogman, all right? We always been all right. Find out which way he’s leaning; what he thought that we could do.
“First I call. Those days, hadda be careful. Someone doesn’t know you’re comin’ and then he looks up and sees you? Might get the wrong idea. Could get dangerous, things got straightened out. So, I go and sit down with him. Back room down the Lamplight. And we talk, you know? Saw things the same way I did. This was something we could do, try to get things straightened out. Middle sixties, this was.
“An’ that’s all it was, all right? Not like you may’ve heard some
guys, we just come in, took over. Wasn’t what we had in mind—all came afterwards. No, it was just—we would see what we could do. Sort of date it all from then.
“By then Dominic’s gotta be pushin’ eighty. Hasta be eighty, now. Bastard doesn’t look it. Tougher’n a pail of nails. Hate to be the guy who stiffs him. Dom takes care himself.”
Brown kelp and bleached-out cardboard packaging washed ashore by the severest winter storms lay against the base of the seawall. Ragged lines of weeds and rubbish marked off the beach at intervals of about a yard leading down to the clean dark sand exposed beyond the high-water mark. A faded white sign with red lettering still attached to the broken end of one white post warned that diving and shellfishing were hazardous and therefore prohibited. Idly, as he had each week since he had first seen the sign, Rascob wondered who would have wanted to wade in water too polluted for safe swimming.
“Things’re too good,” Dominic said after they had walked about forty yards north of the steps. Ahead of them a woman in a blue hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants with white piping sat red-faced and breathing heavily on an overturned brown milk crate, staring out on the bay. To the north beyond her the Boston skyline rose indistinctly silver in a light haze, the sunlight approaching midday flat on the glass towers. At intervals of about two minutes big jets disturbed the air around them, then roared past, descending on their right.
“President’s got problems,” Frolio said. “Nobody gives a shit. Everybody’s all got work, much work’s least they need. Bringing paychecks home. That’s what they care about—should, too. Things’re good for them, their families. That’s why it doesn’t matter, what he does, this one or the other one. Wife catches him again? Still stands up for him. She knows—all know—long’s she does this for him, he’s her fuckin’
employee
. Must do what she says. President, United States. Slave to his pecker.”
Rascob did not say anything. Frolio said: “No women, ever, on the job. That’s where he went wrong. Cannot mix pussy and work. Women stay home, take care of babies.
“All this equality and shit, we hear all the time? Absolutely for it. Known a lot more smart women’n smart men. And I’ve known a lot more men—you know what that means. Only two women I have known who made big trouble for themselves by not thinking before they did something with sex, and that is all. Many men? Can’t count ’em. So that is why it is my rule—no women onna job I run.
“There’s a woman inna building, matter how ugly she is, some man will lose his head. His woman’ll find out. Then you will have trouble.”
“I see,” Rascob said, not seeing at all.
“Ford,” Dominic said. “Charlie Ford.”
“Yes,” Rascob said, “the builder? Excellent prospect, I should think. He needs financing?”
“Not him, no,” Frolio said, “unfortunately. For him I would say Yes, at once. A good man, old Charlie Ford. This his son, young Charlie Ford. He came to me. I didn’t go to him. He was the only one.”
“Well, even so,” Rascob said, “he should be enough to do it, if what he’s got is big enough.… Which wouldn’t be unusual, in that kind of thing. And even if he couldn’t use the whole of it, you know, two-forty or three hundred, well, we could live with that. The other sixty, someplace else—it wouldn’t be that hard.”
“He asked me for a million six,” Frolio said. “He asked me, could we do that.”
Rascob whistled. “Quite a lot,” he said, “but still, it would be doable, I think—he still reliable?”
“Has been before,” Frolio said. “Not that he has that much himself that he can get it from, but if a deal went bad for him, he could make it good. The thing is that the first time it was a little
thing, a small matter of forty large for a little union problem. And the other time we did some business with him, the much larger matter. He was doing something else. That time for the fishing boat, taking guns someplace—Ireland, I believe.
“Gut said No. Too many people; sentiment involved. Bad combination, sentiment and money. Coast Guard … we were lucky. Buyers paid—advance. Two anna quarter. Young Charlie’s father would’ve covered him, the nature of that deal, if the money hadn’t been there.
“This time, the father wouldn’t. Not a business of this kind. Cocaine. Father would turn away.”
“Would the father have to know?” Rascob said. Two helicopters skittered in before the tallest buildings on the skyline, heading for the airport.
“He would,” Frolio said. “The risk is big. His plan is not to use the planes again.” He made a small gesture with his right thumb toward the sky above the water. “Too risky. To have the transporters swallow the condoms the day of the night that they come here from Puerto Rico, Mexico, whatever.
“I say to him that I agree. ‘Won’t work. Ever since the time the rubbers burst inside the people, they got sick. At least one died. Now they watch the airplanes, getting on and off. Profiling—kind of people who they know would do such a thing for pay. You try a thing like that again and you lose all the money—drugs and people too.
“ ‘Besides, we do not do that. Family rule—we do not conduct such business.” ’
“Well,” Rascob said, drawing the word out.
Dominic looked grim. “ ‘The man is dead,’ young Charlie says to me. ‘The son is dead. The boss in jail.’
“ ‘
Viva la Famiglia
,’ I say to him. ‘And the Family’s not in jail. The rule is of the Family, not the boss, who is in jail, or the son and father, dead.” ’
Rascob gazed straight ahead and said nothing. The wind gnawed at the back of his neck and he reached back with both hands, awkwardly, to pull his hat down on his head and tug up the collar of his trenchcoat.
“You don’t agree,” Frolio said.
Rascob said, “Oh, I agree. The Family rule is as you say—of course we honor it. But as you know there’s been an exception made in recent years. Many times, in fact. For money to be made. The business has become so great—if we don’t participate we will lose control. So—conducting it is not allowed, but financing is permitted.
“As I’ve understood it now to be arranged.”
“I have not,” Dominic said. “If you go to McKeach and report what I have said, and he tells you I am wrong and the money should be given, then you tell him I said that someone else must take it—put it on the street for this forbidden business. This one—if he decides to do this one, he does it himself. That is all I have to say.”
A
S
CASUALLY
AS
A
REGULAR
VISITOR
with an interest in the three-story leasehold, Nick Cistaro just before noon the same day opened for the first time the low gate in the black iron fence on the sidewalk and walked onto the brick patio of Imaginings at 73 Newbury Street in Boston. He wore a black calfskin single-breasted safari jacket, a white merino turtleneck, custom-fitted stonewashed blue jeans, black Gucci loafers. His head was large, well furnished with carefully tended silver-grey wavy hair, the face below it expressionless behind the blue-lensed wraparound Vuarnet sunglasses. He latched the gate behind him and scanned the facade—half a flight of stairs led up to a portrait studio with a display window on the elevated first floor—before crossing the patio and descending the three flagstone steps to the Imaginings door. It was forty percent grey-tinted glass invisibly hinged at the left of the display window. The window contained a life-sized stuffed-toy tawny lioness posed resting but watchful under a broad swatch of gilded cat-o’-nine-tails, a small ivory card with black calligraphy reading “S
TIEFF
C
OURTESY
F.A.O. S
CHWARTZ
” lying next to its left haunch.
The door opened and closed silently when he entered. The shop was deep and narrow, eighteen feet across, carpeted with
beige rush matting and illuminated by baby floodlights recessed into the ceiling. Along the right wall there was an elongated grouping of oversized green and gilded bamboo furniture—two wing chairs, a trunk, three tables, each with two straight chairs, a chest of drawers—arranged in front of a triptych screen depicting a porticoed walkway facing on a North African marketplace long-shadowed in late-afternoon light. An audio source played a Bach piano suite arranged for guitar; he did not recognize it. At the rear of the shop were two unoccupied kidney-shaped birch desks and tan chairs facing four beige leather director’s chairs and a love seat with beige hopsack cushions. Under the overhang of the mezzanine were four two-drawer brown-metal file cabinets set against a cocoa-colored wall decorated with shiny chocolate-brown masks and crossed spears festooned with beige feathers. In the center of the wall a dimly lighted narrow corridor opened into gloom. Steam rose from a squat brown mug on top of the file cabinet at the left of the door.
To the left of the desks was a stainless-steel semicircular staircase with narrow black carpeted treads; it led up to and continued along the mezzanine above. There was one black arched door off center to the left beyond the top of the staircase and another about twelve feet farther over to the right. Cistaro sniffled, pushed the sunglasses up and back on his hair and started up the stairs. At five feet eleven, 218, he made the staircase flex and creak. He tried to rest his weight lightly and no longer than necessary on each tread.
On the balcony Cistaro without knocking opened the first door. He found Crawford in the eight-by-twelve grey tweed cubicle behind it, recognizing him by the small Florida-shaped port-wine birthmark on his lower left cheek and jaw. Cistaro went in immediately, shutting the door behind him; it was hollow anodized aluminum and clinked like play money.
Crawford, talking on the phone at his cluttered desk in shirt-sleeves, had been looking down through gold half-frame granny glasses and doodling fairly good Snoopys with a hexagonal gold automatic pencil on a foot-square pad of bright yellow paper. He looked up, vexed and puzzled. “Uh huh, you’re Crawford,” Cistaro said, nodding. “You’re Crawford and you’re late.”
In the corners behind Crawford were two aluminum easels displaying hand-painted one-third-scale copies of paintings by Claude Monet, one sunset-golden-orange of the facade of the cathedral at Rouen, the other evening-blue of the Thames side of the Houses of Parliament. Crawford sat between them also carefully fashioned, a compact man in his early thirties with rather long bleached-blond hair parted precisely in the center. He wore a lavender Egyptian cotton shirt with white French cuffs linked with gold sunbursts, a white collar with a gold collar pin, a navy blue tie with gold five-pointed stars, and navy blue suspenders with a wide gold stripe down the center. He had never seen Cistaro before and, distracted by his entrance, only half-heard what he said. Therefore he had not understood what Cistaro had said—but instead of saying that, he scowled. He held up his right forefinger irritatedly and shook his head. Then, looking down, he nodded. “Yes, I know it is, Dee,” he said into the phone, “and I know it’s annoying. And I know just what to do. But it’s like everything else—won’t take any time at all to do it, we go back out there together and I show you how. But I can’t go out there today, and if I try to describe it to you it’ll take me a while. So I’ll have to call you back—someone’s just come in.” He stared up at Cistaro. “No, very
un
expectedly.” He frowned. “Yes, then, all right. See you.”
He replaced the phone in the black desk set with his left hand and gazed at Cistaro with exasperation. Then he said, “Who are you?” with the chill soft muted politeness that paralyzed museum-quality finish carpenters; quailed temperamental
artisans who worked with tile, intaglio and metals and haughtily refused to learn English; and partially compensated clients who had lots of money, modestly realized they did not have extreme good taste but could afford to buy, regally, as much as they felt they needed (more than their friends had), and rather expected condescending insolence from its more reputable purveyors.
Cistaro smiled tightly, showing six teeth in the front row of his upper jaw. “I’m the guy you owe money to,” he said. “You’re late—paying me.”
“I owe lots of people money,” Crawford said calmly. “I’ve never laid eyes on most of them in my life. Nor have I wished to—there’s no need. I’m sure I’m late on many of my accounts. It happens all the time. The kind of work I do? People who I do it
for
, fall behind on
me
. Happens to
them
all the time? Happens to
me
all the time. When
they
get caught up,
I
get caught up.”