Authors: George V. Higgins
“Funny …” he said as though musing, “funny how when you get something that you thought you always wanted, and then when you finally get it—and you’d know this, Nick, ’cause you are
on
it, heard a tape of you today, tellin’ Carlo all about the night Hugo got you your first washer and drier, and then you picked him up in Cambridge …” He hesitated one beat.
Cistaro was impassive.
“Well, anyway,” Farrier said, “then you start to think, ‘My God, what have I got here? These guys’re vicious
animals.
Did I
really want this thing?’ But anyway, that’s what I do most days. So, for anything worthwhile.”
Stoat got up. “We should eat,” he said.
“Amen to that, brother,” Farrier said. “That okay with you, Nick, we don’t wait any longer, see if Arthur’s showing up?”
“Oh,
yeah
,” Cistaro said. “I am personally hungry. No, all I say ’s I am worried about the guy; and where he is; and how come he isn’t here, and so forth; but we’ve all still got to eat.
“And anyway, Jack, I was saying, there’s also another thing on my mind when I am thinking about Arthur, and you’ll know what I mean by this, Jack, is that Arthur now and then … well, put it this way—from time to time he has been known to go and do a thing that he has been thinking about, thinking maybe about doing it for quite a while, you know? But he did not see any need, any reason or whatever, he just never got around to telling me about it. Or anybody else, either, as far as that goes.
“And then one day he would have just decided that, okay, the time has
come
, the time has come to go and
do
it. And then he would go where he had to go to do it. Just, you know,
disappear
on you, he’d vanish, and you wouldn’t see him for a while, or hear from him, either. But you didn’t dare touch anything that was his, any operation, because you didn’t know when he’d show up again, just as unexpected, take it back and most likely shoot you for trying to take it over.
“One day there he’d
be
again, right where he’d been before, doing the same thing that he always’d been doing, and you would say hello to him and he would say hello to you, just like he’d never been away. Maybe some time later he’d tell you something about it, drop some hint or something, that would at least give you some rough idea of where he’d been and what he did. And maybe he wouldn’t. In fact usually he would not. And you’d just never know where he’d been or what he did, and the reason would be because he didn’t want you to.”
“I’m going out in the kitchen,” Stoat said. “Open the wine and dish out the food. Keep talking—place isn’t that big. I’ll be able to hear you.”
“Right,” Farrier said. “And this’s also something that I think that you’d know, Nick. The worst thing you could do, the absolute worst thing that you could do, was to react, when he’d disappeared like that and’ve
been
gone a while, and then he had come back, was
ask
him where he’d been and what he’d done.”
Cistaro nodded vigorously. “Absolutely,” he said, “that is absolutely right.”
“Well, I know it is,” Farrier said. “Fogarty told me that when he was first getting me ready to take over from him as, what, as liaison to you guys, and he said he got it from DeMarco. Al DeMarco’d had to learn it for himself, find it out the hard way, but
when
he did, he remembered it; he never forgot it. And when the time came for
him
to leave, when he retired, he’d handed it down to Fogarty. Passed it down to him. Which was that you never
did
that, ask McKeach, or even not exactly
ask
him, but just indirectly say something to him,
tell
him that he’d had you worried, or that he’d even pissed you off, when he pulled that shit of his.
“Because if you did that, one thing it told him was that what you’d thought when it happened, he was missing, not around, you didn’t see him and nobody else had, either, was that maybe he’d pissed someone else off that you didn’t know about, and as a result he was now in the trunk of a stolen car someplace, with a couple in the head. You know—dead.”
“Oh, Jesus, no,” Cistaro said. “You got that right—never, ever ask him. Because to him that means you’d actually been thinking—
worried
—that maybe he couldn’t take care of himself. That if anyone came after him they might actually get him. That it would be him that then got clipped and not the other guy. No, he prides himself on that. That if anyone came after him he
would
always
know about it, before the guy could make a move, and take care of it himself—the other guy would always be the one who said good-bye.
“Because Arthur thinks if
anyone
, even his friends, ever even
thought
it, that he
could
get taken out, and then that kind of thinking got around, then that would be the beginning. People would get
used
to it, you know?
Used
to the idea it could be actually done. And if that idea ever did get started, then sooner or later some dumb bastard would actually
try
it. And he
might
even get lucky, just get off one lucky shot, and then if that should happen, he would in fact be dead. So, he saw it as a threat.
“There were a few times when I almost made that mistake, myself. When I thought that maybe something in the paper or I maybe heard from someone, that explained me where he’d been and, you know, what he might’ve been up to.
“Like, I remember one time when he was gone there, that time back in the late seventies, seventy-seven, seventy-eight, in there, one of those years anyway, I know it was in the spring of, and he was gone for quite a while, too. Long time, six-eight weeks, maybe more. And as usual he comes back and he didn’t say a word. So you now knew that that meant all he wanted you to know was just that he’d gone
away
, and he’d been away a
while
, and now he was
back
again and that was the
end
of it. And what I remember first I noticed that he didn’t have a tan, so you knew that it was not that he’d been down south someplace, wherever he’d gone. But I still did not know where.
“And then that whichever year it was, seventy-seven, seventy-eight, sometime in July or August, now, good while after he came back, there was this item in the paper where they said police in Ireland, or else maybe it was coast guard or the army, Irish army, coast guard that I’m talking about here, not the British army there. Anyway, it said that they had gotten wind of someone shipping arms over there in this big fishing boat that came from
here, from Boston. This big oceangoing trawler you could go all the way across the Atlantic in, very easy, any time. And basically what these guys’d done was pick up guns in Canada, and the plan was they were then going to land them on the Irish
coast.
“And what it was, the IRA would then’ve
come
down from up where they are, up in
Northern
Ireland, come down and pick up the guns, and then smuggle them
across
the border, back up there to
Northern
Ireland, Belfast probably, I guess. And they would then use them to kill British soldiers with. And also to kill Protestants, of course, naturally, those crazy bastards all still then fightin’ with each other, no good reason whatsoever. Like whichever
church
you went to, it could get you fuckin’
killed
, Christ sake, and nobody’d even be surprised.
“And this thing in the paper said that what’d happened was the guns’d
gotten
there all right, been landed on the coast, but that then apparently somebody over there that either was involved in it himself or else he knew some people were, they caught him doing something else, with a bomb, I think it was.
“He had some explosives with him and the feeling was I guess that what he’d been plannin’ was to go blow up the queen, Queen Elizabeth I mean—she went out in public somewhere. Or maybe it was Princess Di, I’m not really sure on that. All I’m
really
sure of is that it was someone in the royal family. Anyway, it was about as serious as it could get unless he’d actually
done
it, them catchin’ him with that in mind, and so they didn’t needah tell him he’s goin’ away for a
good long
time, for havin’
that
idea in mind.
“And so to save his own white ass he told them about the guns. Who was involved, at least in Ireland, once they’d gotten there, and where it was they had them stashed, and that was how they grabbed them.
“And like I say now, this was in the summertime of that next year I read this, when Arthur’d gone away inna spring, the year
before, and come back in the spring of that year, and so after readin’ it I naturally think, ‘Now I know where Arthur was when Arthur wasn’t here. He was on the deep blue sea, takin’ arms to Ireland.’
“And so the next time that I see him I say, ‘Hey, Arthur, my Irish friend, now I know where you were when you’re not around last year and this. Too bad that guy on the other end wrecked all your hard work.’
“I’m just kiddin’ him, you know? And he gives me that
look
he had, you know, when he’s irritated? When something that you maybe said irritated him? And he says, ‘The hell’re you talkin’ about?’
“And I say then, ‘This spring, Arthur, when you’re gone, six weeks, a couple months. Now I know where you went and what you were doin’ there—you were takin’ guns to Ireland, and from what I see the papers, everything that you did, your end, seems to’ve worked out pretty good. Isn’t your fault, some asshole got himself grabbed and turned rat—you did a good job.’
“He just
flared
at me, that horrible look that he gets on his face and his eyes, they’ve got this look in them that some of the guys I trained with—I trained
under
’s what I mean, back when I was in the navy; they’re career UDT men, underwater demolition teams. And they had it too, I mean. ‘Thousand-yard stare’ was what I heard one guy call it. These guys were stone-cold killers.
“Now I don’t mean I never, I mean, I was trained to do that too, that was how I got to know them, learning how to do that stuff, and when I had to do it, well, that was what I did. But I never, I don’t think I ever, had that look in my eyes they had and that he gets. I thought he was gonna kill me. I thought I was gonna die.
“He backed
me
off with that look. Even
me
, I’m on his
side—did
things with him.
Been
with him thirty
years
, more—even
I
backed away. ‘
Hey
,’ I said, ‘now don’t get mad now, I was only foolin’ with you,
teasin
’, for the luvva Mike, givin’ you a little shit. Like I could’ve said, you know, all along I was afraid you’d gone and joined the Program.’
“Well, as you well know by now, Arthur isn’t famous for his sense of humor. He is not well known for that. He’s got one—if you tell a joke he gets he does think certain things’re funny, and he’ll get on a guy and ride him, although I think he has to be in a good mood that day. Because as you can see, I’m here tonight and talkin’; he must not’ve killed me yet.”
Stoat had put two bottles of Antonori Chianti Classico Riserva and three wineglasses on the pass-through counter. He put three plates of chicken cacciatore on the counter. The Hitachi segued from a Bell Atlantic “Wild Things Are Happening” ad featuring cartoon monsters into the 8:00
P.M.
rerun of the 6:00
P.M.
Channel 5 News. “Gentlemen,” he said, “dinner is served. A bit overcooked and a little late, but dinner is served nonetheless.”
Cistaro and Farrier moved to the table, Cistaro taking his usual seat and Farrier going around his customary place at the end of the table farthest from the kitchen to the chair McKeach had occupied opposite Cistaro. Stoat brought large serving dishes of linguini and more cacciatore from the kitchen and set them at the center of the table. He put a plate of food and poured a glass of wine at each place, and as they began to eat proposed a toast: “to our absent friend, Arthur, whom we hope to hear from soon.”
“Hear, hear,” Farrier said, and Cistaro said “
Yeah.
” They clinked glasses and drank.
“Because,” Cistaro said around the first forkful of chicken in his mouth, “even though I was just sayin’ I have known him to take off like this without givin’ any warning, what makes me nervous this time is that I know he’s never done it without havin’ some good reason, and therefore without knowin’
tonight what it could’ve been that made him do it, I still have to think there is one, and I don’t know what it is. That he might’ve heard something, you know? Heard something that I didn’t, but that he would assume I did, that if he did so must’ve I, and therefore without callin’ me or anything like that, that he would just take
off.
”
“Well, how could that’ve happened?” Stoat said. “Where you and he ’re partners, and’ve
been
partners for so long? How could it’ve happened that he’d hear about something that would frighten him enough——”
Cistaro, now chewing his second forkful of chicken as he used both hands and the large serving pieces to lift linguini to his plate, shook his head and said, “No, un uh, no, not ‘frightened.’ ” He swallowed as he replaced the serving pieces in the large dish. “Arthur now, he would
be pissed
, he heard you say he was frightened.
“Frightened’s one thing I would doubt that Arthur’s ever been. Frightened is what he makes other people. No, if he did hear something and that was why he cleared out, the reason that he wouldn’t contact me first before he left?” He continued to eat while he talked, twirling linguini onto his fork in his soupspoon, cutting meat from the chicken breast with the knife in his right hand and delivering to his mouth with the fork in his left.
“Well, first,” Cistaro said, “it could have been something that he knew would not be something that would concern me. See, while it’s true that as partners for a very long time now we have had a number of interests that have produced income for both of us, we have also, each of us, had a few interests of our own, that we kept separate. He had some things from when he was with Brian G., all right? That he kept when Brian went down and after we got together. And also some other things that came out of those things, you could say grew out of what he had with Brian G. And there were quite a few of these.