Authors: George V. Higgins
“I don’t think so, thanks,” Cistaro said, and smiled. He left the shop. Outside he looked to his left down Newbury Street toward the maroon Ford Expedition idling at the curb next to the Burberry store and raised his right hand just slightly above his head. Then he turned to his right and walked west five doors down from Imaginings.
The driver of the Expedition let several cars make the right turn off Arlington Street into Newbury, and then swung out between the cars double-parked on both sides of the street, all the way up, pulling up beside a hydrant about a hundred yards from the stop sign at Berkeley Street. Cistaro moved quickly off the sidewalk to the Ford, opening the door and springing up and in, pulling it shut after him.
“Gettin’ up this fuckin’ street’s a fuckin’ bitch now,” the driver said. “Been so long since I been on it here, I didn’t realize.” He was a compact, wiry man in his middle fifties with a blade-shaped face set off by sharply hooked nose, and his transparent skin, permanently tanned, featured dark sandpaper stubble. He had brown frightened-rabbit eyes that he knew revealed fear; they made him very plainly very dangerous, and that was why Cistaro employed him. “No tellin’ how much trouble Rico saves me, lookin’ like he’s about to go off.”
Rico drove with his right hand on the wheel and his left resting on his left thigh, his left shoulder jammed against the outer bolster of the driver’s captain’s chair. “Like tah know how much ah cops rip off the people, stores, not to see ah double-parkin’.”
“I think it’s legal now, actually,” Cistaro said. “I think they got some wrinkle in the law, few years ago, says if you buy a permit, pay a certain amount of money, they can park in front your store.”
“Oh,” Rico said, “I didn’t know that.” He drove up the block between Berkeley and Clarendon streets. “Mustah pissed the cops off, though, city pullin’ that shit. Sellin’ allah double-parkin’ places out from under them.”
“Probably did,” Cistaro said. “Would’ve me.”
“Yeah,” Rico said, “but you, with you wount’ve made no difference—kept on chargin’ anyway.”
Cistaro smiled. “Go the Terrace, have some lunch.”
S
HORTLY
AFTER
1:00
IN
THE
AFTERNOON
, Rascob drove the old Lincoln up to the cement berm marking off the fourth row of the parking lot near Joey’s Clams At The Beach and shut off the ignition. “A little recon,” McKeach called it. “Always do a little recon, ’fore you get into something. Know you’re getting into,
first
, ’fore you get into it. Maybe you decide you don’t
want
to—something doesn’t feel right—always an option. Trust your fuckin’ instinct.” There were six other vehicles in the 221-car lot, all but two of them parked in the row closest to the edge of the beach and the clam shack.
Five men with yellow hard hats, puffy khaki insulated jackets and tan work pants or blue jeans, two of them smoking cigarettes and all of them drinking coffee greedily, were taking shelter from the onshore wind in the lee of the clam shack. They would be the maintenance-and-repair crew from the two vacant white, khaki and blue Bell Atlantic trucks, the big one with a cherry-picker bucket, the small one with a trailer carrying a new utility pole about twenty-four feet long jackknifed across the two rows behind it.
Through the Plexiglas storm windows enclosing the counter area of the shack, Rascob could see the short and stocky elderly
owner in his grey fedora, jacket and white apron working the stand solo, moving back and forth, picking up and putting down, wiping, tidying and rearranging, never getting things quite right; as restlessly dissatisfied with his own work in the slow grey hours of winter as he was during the bright, busy days of summer with the efforts of the mouthy kids he hired out of the vast brick housing project across the boulevard.
The maroon GMC Suburban isolated in the second row had heavily tinted grey windows; Rascob assumed it was occupied, probably by three men, all wearing black foam-padded, studio-quality earphones.
The male passenger and the female driver in the silver Toyota Pathfinder with two ladders and staging planks lashed down on the roofrack were using disposable white plastic forks to eat—clams or shrimp, French fries or onion rings—from white cardboard containers they picked up and put down on a flat surface Rascob could not see. To him their diligent attention to the food indicated they were partners of some kind: parents happily married to other people, their jobs allowing them to enjoy selfishly one quiet meal a day without fussy children or a complaining spouse around; or an ambitious young couple reluctantly interrupting ten or eleven hours of honest daily work for a start-up company they owned, hocked up to the hilt and too busy now at the acquiring stage of life to think much or very often any more about the lovely bond of sexual attraction that had first drawn them together—now slowly vanishing, so that in five or six years, when there was idle time enough to notice its absence, it would be gone, beyond recovery, hardly missed at all.
In the front seat of the green Jeep Grand Cherokee a man with a blond pigtail and a woman with long brown hair sat motionless without talking, slouched against the doors as far from each other as possible, staring out at the bay. To Rascob their posture and stillness said they were dealing with an enormous
and insoluble problem that they shared and he did not; he was grateful for that.
He remembered the last year with Brenda. Still technically married, in the first stages of the crisis they’d been too filled with fear and working too frantically, trying to repair what he had done at the credit union, to look after such a lighthearted thing as love. He had gone along with the chivalrous assumption made by the state police detectives and the young assistant AG: It had all been his idea, to play the regional real estate market, buying up options, doing it by “borrowing” from idle funds deposited by customers foreseeing events years away. The market went down. Since then, while doing time, he had come to believe that from the beginning she had subtly encouraged and helped him to do it.
“Our very own conspiracy,” she called it, so simple and obvious it could not be illegal. “Going to be rich. What’s wrong with that? Everyone wants to be rich.” After the first three months or so in the Plymouth County House of Correction, he found it incomprehensible that he ever could have felt greed enough or found an emergency thrilling enough to make him forget about the sex that they’d had, what she liked him to do to her and liked to do to him, enough to risk it. “Another friendly animal in the dark,” she would say and her delight would make her laugh; that was what they were and always would be to each other. So she said.
After he had been locked up for six months she had divorced him, on the irrebuttable statutory grounds that he had been sentenced to prison—his mild punishment for grand larceny an indeterminate one-to-ten but still a prison bit; to make it easier for his family to visit him (she was it, then, in Massachusetts), he had been administratively allowed to serve his time in the House. He saw one planting season through to harvest on the Farm; his specialty, root vegetables. On his way out after eleven months
the corrections officer in charge of counseling reminded him his accountancy certificate had been revoked on the basis of his guilty plea. “Doesn’t seem like they left you with much, I know, but do the best you can, willya? Don’t want to see you back in here again. Does no one any good.”
That brought it home to him. As McKeach said about Giunta’s fall, “Well, at least if he hadda do it, Nino did it right—never fuck up small.”
“The trouble with country music,” Brenda said once when it was still a smart remark for them, “is the words’re always true.”
McKeach in a faded black suede tanker jacket, jeans and black cowboy boots stood alone about thirty feet down the beach with his back to the parking lot, near the fourth sun- and salt-bleached redwood picnic table in the right arm of the eight-table crescent Cozy Bartoldi had installed around the clam shack back in ’74, when he bought the food-and-beverage operation from Blackie Brinkley.
Having grown up in the neighborhood, and knowing why he had been sole bidder—McKeach controlled the beach—Cozy would have known enough to ask how much if Blackie hadn’t told him he should also pay $200 a week during the summer to John Sweeney before lunch on Tuesdays, down at The Curragh at the circle. In 1977, after his wife Suzanne died at the age of fifty-one—in an accident on the afternoon of July 4, driving home to Jamaica Plain on Route 1 after visiting her mother in Saugus—Cozy winterized the shack, adding insulation and electric baseboard heat without asking anyone’s permission. “Hey, I got nothin’ else to do now but sellah hot dogs anna coffee, and it’s my ass I’m freezing off if I don’t put the heat in—which
I
pay for, I might add—how’s that someone else’s business? Why the fuck I hafta ask?”
Rascob opened the door of the Lincoln against the wind and got out, using his left hip to keep the door open as a windbreak
while he buttoned his trenchcoat and pulled his hat down firmly on his head. Then he shut the door and locked the car, making his way across the pavement and onto the beach, the wind making his eyes water. McKeach seemed to detect his approach, turning his head slightly to the right in order to verify it and then turning back again toward the bay.
This day McKeach wore the black baseball cap with the white Chicago Cubs script
C
logo and, as always, gold-framed Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses. His white hair was cropped short above his ears and the skin on his face was seamed and weathered. He was chewing while he stared out over the grey-green water whitecapped by the breeze, holding a hot dog with bright yellow salad mustard in a roll in his left hand. He had lifted it out of its cardboard serving sleeve when he took it from the counter. If someone had reminded him that the law had had his fingerprints on file for coming up on forty years, he would have said “Congratulations, bright boy—now you figured out the reason I don’t leave ’em anywhere. No need to make it easy, someone prove you been somewhere.” There was a can of Sprite on the table near his left hand.
“Still off the clams, I see,” Rascob said, coming up on McKeach’s right. “What is it now, two or three years? Wasn’t that ban lifted?”
“I dunno,” McKeach said. “Still got me spooked. That E. coli shit, man, you imagine you ate that? Of all the things can kill you, Jesus, think if it was that. Spend your whole life lookin’ out for your ass, watchin’ what you do, start to think you’re pretty smart. And then some day you don’t feel good, you go and see the doctor. And he tells you that you’re dyin’—you ate someone’s
shit
.”
He put the last of the hot dog and roll in his mouth and chewed it fast. Swallowing, he picked up the Sprite can and emptied it onto the sand. “How smart do you look then?” He
handed the can to Rascob; Rascob put it in his coat pocket. McKeach started walking at a normal pace diagonally down the beach toward the high-water mark. Rascob went along, half a pace behind. “After that, you’d
want
to die, you’d feel so fuckin’ foolish. Ashamed of going out that way, anyone found out.” He sucked food out of crevices between his teeth, using his left forefinger to nudge at stubborn bits. Then he put his hands into the pockets of his jacket.
“Saw Rusty,” he said, looking down at the sand.
“Saw Rusty this morning, Rozzie Square,” Rascob said. “Deal with him, way it looks now, still in the real early stages. ‘Just futzin’ around,’ he says. So he isn’t really sure, but it still looks all right. Stage they’re in right now’s hotel rooms and scoutin’ locations. Are there rooms available? Many as they need, and if so, how much they cost. If there’re places they could use for locations around here, and if there are, will the people let them use them for an okay price.
“ ‘You say “the movies,” people get crazy,’ Rusty says. ‘All a sudden want twelve million dollars for a couple days’ use of their fuckin’ beach house—’at’s worth at the very outside eighteen K, throw inna char grille inna back anna boat trailer, the side yard. If that’s where they’re comin’ from, Nova Scotia’s where the crew’s gonna end up—guaranfuckintee it.’ ”
“Well, shit,” McKeach said, interrupting, “they gotta be here to do it, don’t they? I diddun readah fuckin’ thing, but everything I heard about it, whole thing happens here. Fenway Park and that stuff? Shit, I mean, it’s
gotta
be here, you can’t do it noplace else. You tellin’ me a Sox game—shoot
that
in Halifax? A Bruins game? They could do that—any fuckin’ rink at all, all those places look alike, now the fuckin’ Garden’s gone, fuckin’ rats they had in that place, dead monkey inna rafters.”
“Well, some of it, they gotta, yeah,” Rascob said. “Assuming they don’t change it, which they can always do. Rusty says all
they want’s the title, really, story that goes with it. ‘That’s what people know. Not they ever read it—just they
recognize
it.
“ ‘Man and woman love each other—love their little boy. Father takes him to the ball game? Okay—don’t hafta be the Red Sox, even baseball, far as that goes. Could be basketball instead, Bulls or Indiana Pacers—difference does it make? And then the kid gets sick, all right? It’s cancer inna book, but doesn’t have to be, the movie. And where they take him? Hospital—that’s all it hasta be, a hospital—
any
hospital. Doesn’t hafta be the Dana Farber, Jimmy-Fund-thing Hospital. Can be blood poisoning, HIV or something, and he goes any hospital Chicago or LA, and then gets kidnapped from there.’
“You see I’m sayin’ here?” Rascob said. “Basic story’s all they need. Rest of it they don’t. Inside of buildings, shit like that—well, it’s like you just said. Any hockey rink, or any street or beach, you know? Don’t want no palm trees inna pictures, hula girls or elephants, but otherwise, well, he was sayin’, alla rest is flexible.”
“Yeah,” said McKeach, “but that’s the whole point, what we’re doin’, why we’re doin’ this. They go to Canada—unions aren’t so strong up there. They get it done lots cheaper. But all the work they hafta do there, to make it look like here—don’t get that for
free
. Canucks up there may work for less, but you still gotta
hire
’em—once you do that it takes dough, matter how you slice it. Can’t tell me they work for nothin’.”