Authors: George V. Higgins
“Or maybe someone they knew dropped outta sight, and it’d go around he might’ve made some kind of a deal with cops, and he knew a lot of things that would make some people
nervouss
—so
he
would disappear. Like guys do now when the talk onna street is the reason why you haven’t seen someone a while was because he took Witness Protection. They didn’t call it a ‘program’ back then, but the cops could do the same kind of thing.” He looked sad.
“But back when I’m now talking about, with Brian and Hugo still in charge, when the guys started turning up dead, one by one? After the first one or two then you knew this wasn’t some pissin’ contest over a bum check that got outta hand, a beef about a loan that went south, or a fight two guys’re havin’ about a woman. This’s now gonna be war.”
He looked worried. “The first three or four guys—no one much cared about them. If they were dead then they were dead, and that’s too bad, hard on their families, but the fuck, who’s gonna miss ’em? Must’ve pissed somebody off. Can’t go to war about fights over women and fights over money and somebody called someone out from a barroom—those things’ve had nothin’ at all to do with business.
“But then the big guys get involved in private fights, one of
them
floats in onna tide? Reason don’t matter—if he’s big then his guys’re involved, they don’t have no choice. It’s then a matter of honor. And besides, if the guys who
aren’t
dead, if they expect to keep what they’ve got, well then, they’d
better
get involved too. Show some respect for their guy who is dead, and retaliate, right? Because otherwise the guys who did
him
’ll come around
and do
them
, take over his whole territory. So—never mind
why
he got dead, he is
dead
—revenge is their duty to him, and themselves, to show they’re still men, who don’t stand for that shit to happen.
“So, I forget the order now, things happened in. I think two or three guys’d gone down, but only a couple, and no one knows what’s going on. And then someone took out Brian G. A clear setup job, ’hind the old Boston Arena. Obviously someone’d called him on the quiet, ‘Okay, let’s have a meet, see what we do about this.’
Really
hush-hush—he didn’t tell me about it, no one but Danny, kid he had drive him. Who also got hit, of course, but not fatal—he got better, I gave him a job. And where was I at the time? I was out gettin’ laid—which I would’ve put off and gone with him, not that I would’ve liked the sound of it; would’ve tried to talk him out of it first. But he didn’t tell
me
about it. Anyway, that took care of any doubt anyone may’ve had—if Brian was dead, it was war.
“After that things started happening fast. Rocco Monti went down two nights after Brian. Brother Bernie, heir apparent, all right?
He
thinks, little shit: alone with the cops he’s a fist fullah butter, but now with, he thinks, Brian’s guys behind him, now he’s just fulla courage. Doesn’t
dare
come to me, ask me do something for him, obvious reason. So he hired the guys that did Rocco, and naturally one of them, Sean McGary, shot off his mouth—so he’s the next one to go.
“Then Bernie hires Mickey to work full time for us, Mickey Hunter, and that was one
mammoth
mistake—Mickey
loved
to shoot people; he’d shoot
anyone.
And then he’d tell anyone who’d listen all about it. Or anything else that he did. With Mickey, nothing he did ever was finished ’til he told a lot of people. So it got around fast he now had steady work, and someone said ‘No, we can’t take this,’ and went and took Mickey out.
“Word about
that
got around, and pretty soon the rumor was, ‘The talent’s from Federal Hill—Providence.’ Which of course meant the Mafia.
“Everyone
believed
it. It felt so right, they wanted to. Explained so many things—guys going down for no reason anybody knew—could their
friends
be doing this? No one wanted to believe
that.
So, the
Mafia
—of course.
“It’s right about now that Al shows up again. This’s when he makes his pitch. That’s another thing he had—he had timing. He not only confirms the Mafia rumor, and gives me the obvious reason, I already thought of myself—he tells me what’s gonna come
next
—and this’s what gets my attention.
“Smarten up, kiddo—they’re already here. Groundwork was laid months ago. Now all they’re doing’s expanding. You guys started shooting each other last year? They decided, ‘Boston can be had.’ So they put in what amounted to a new outpost or two, tested you out for a while. And sure enough, you showed ’em you’re ready for the plucking—so busy clippin’ each other, you didn’t even notice them. They’d thought Boston was
ripe
, and it was. Pretty soon, you won’t have the manpower to fight them.
“ ‘They think they can come in here now and set up an office, take over what you guys’ve built up. What Brian G. had and what Hugo has got, but won’t have now for much longer—he’ll be the next one into the trunk; only question now’s which night and which Caddy. And then after Hugo they’ll take out the Frogman—the same time they come after you. If you two guys don’t do them the favor, which they think you might, of killing each other off first.
“ ‘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.”