George Higgins - The rat on fire

“That’s what I mean,” Proctor said. “That’s why they don’t do it anymore. It makes a helluva lot more sense, but nobody does it because it’d cost too much money up front and nowadays the whole thing is, you put as much money into it as it takes to make it stand up straight for maybe six years and then you depreciate the ass off of it in five and you sell the fuckin’ thing to somebody else. That’s the way it works now, and if you don’t know that everybody figures that you’re just an asshole and there isn’t any point in talking to you anyway.”

“Come on, come on,” Dannaher said, looking around, “open the fuckin’ door and let’s go in there, we’re gonna go in there, all right? Guy could paint pictures of us, we stand here long enough.”

Proctor opened the toolbox and removed a three-cell flashlight. “Not without this,” he said, closing the box. “I’m not goin’ in one of these places without no light.”

“Jerry,” Leo said in Fein’s office, “it was darker’n a carloaa of assholes in there.”

“I never been in there,” Fein said. “You know that? I never been in there. I own the goddamned building and I have never been in that cellar long enough to know what’s in there. What the fuck is in there, anyway?”

“Well,” Proctor said, “naturally of course you’ve got the boiler.”

“Naturally,” Fein said. “The way them niggers’re screaming, there’ve been times that I wondered, but I thought I had one at least.”

“Right,” Proctor said, “and your boiler is one of those old things that they laid up with firebrick and then they wrapped her in about two tons, asbestos sheathing. I think it’s about shot.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Fein said. “Seems like everything else I hear about in that house’s gone to hell.”

“That’s a nice building actually, Jerry,” Leo said. “That boiler’s old, sure. Probably close to sixty, seventy years old at least. There’s an old coal bin over in the corner that doesn’t have anything in it except that somebody finished off the walls with this chicken wire and they got a lot of baby carriages and cribs and stuff in there and they got a tiny little padlock on it that I dunno why they bothered since you could go right through that screen with a pair of hedge clippers in about five minutes if it even took that long. Assuming anybody’d want to steal that junk.”

“Leo,” Fein said, “the people I got living in that building’d steal dogshit if they thought they could sell it to somebody.”

“I dunno about dogshit,” Proctor said, “but there is somebody in that building who has got at least one cat, I can tell you that for sure.”

“Stinks, huh?” Fein said.

“It’s damp in that basement,” Proctor said. “There’s been water in there last winter, I think. Maybe the spring thaw. But it’s wet, and you can smell that there’s been cats in the building.”

“I told the bastards they couldn’t have pets,” Fein said.

“You should tell the bastards the pets can stay, but they gotta leave,” Proctor said. “That’s a nice old building you got there. Shame to have to take it out.”

“What else am I going to do with it, Leo?” Fein said. “You want to tell me that? You have some hot ideas how I can keep my building and I won’t go broke trying to keep it up and the fire inspectors and all them other people won’t be coming around all the time, telling me I got to turn it into some goddamned Hilton or they report me to everybody in sight and make my fucking life miserable for the rest of my life? You got some bright ideas, Leo? You know something I don’t?

“You’re so fucking smart, why don’t you figure out how to collect the rent off of your niggers and when it works, let me know what it is, all right?” Fein said. “What am I going to do? Go down there every month with a wheelbarrow full of cheap jewellery and sell them that so I can get the rent money? I don’t want to take that property out. I just can’t do anything else. I got the taxes and I got the repairs and the building’s not working for me – I’m working for the goddamned building. I’m sick of it. I got to take it out.”

“Look,” Proctor said, “I didn’t mean anything. It’s just that it’s a nice old building. It’s well built. It’s got the stone foundation…”

“Which sweats all winter and leaks all spring and that’s why the goddamned place’s so goddamned damp,” Fein said.

“The beams’re in good shape,” Proctor said. “You got a little sagging problem with the main beam. But I figure, you put a couple jacks in there, you could crank her right back up to where she’s supposed to be.”

“I’m not buying no goddamned jacks,” Fein said. “I already told you what I’m gonna do, and if you’re so attached to the fucking place you can either fucking buy it off me for what I owe, which is not a very good price, considering the trouble I had trying to take a fucking dime out of it, or you can take it out like I asked you to. And if you’re not going to do that, let me know and I will get somebody else.”

“I’m not saying that,” Proctor said. “I’m just saying that it’s a nice old building and it’s well built. That’s all.

“Now,” Proctor said, “what you have got in that there building which is not so nice is this: you have got a whole buncha fuckin’ rats, is what you have got. You have got rats up the gumpstump. You have got rats that are big rats and you have got rats that are little rats. They are all singers. They are practicing for the choir, is what I think. You go in that cellar and you open the door and you shine your light in there and they start squealing and running all over the place. I bet there was fifty of them taking off when me and Jimmy went in there, and some of them were bigger than dogs I used to own.”

“Thanks,” Fein said. “More tenants who don’t pay any rent. At least they don’t complain about the heat all the time and keep bugging me about new bathrooms.”

“This is not bad news, Jerry,” Leo said.

“Rats?” Fein said. “Since when are rats good news? I know rats. When I was growing up on Blue Hill Ave in Mattapan it was a nice neighbourhood. People took care of their yards. They raked them up and they cut the grass. In the winter they shovelled the snow and in the summer they got off their ass and cut the goddamned lawn. Saturdays everybody dressed up and went to temple. You had these fish stories where you could get a piece of fish from Mister Goldstein. Your mother and your father were friends with all the neighbours and their kids went to school with you. You all played baseball over Franklin Field. Two days a week you had Hebrew school and when somebody died you didn’t have any trouble at all getting ten full-grown Jewish men to chant Kaddish and sit Shiva with you.

“You know what happened?” Fein said. “You want me to tell you what happened? I am sitting at home the other night and having a couple drinks with my friend Tommy Gallagher, who runs the restaurant down in Canton and they have a little floor show for which I occasionally get him some talent. Nothing big, nothing that’ll ever make anybody rich, but a nice little club where a kid can go and sing a few songs and maybe play the piano, and if she has the talent it will come out, and if she doesn’t, that will also come out. And maybe even if she has the talent she will decide the hubby’s doing pretty good down at the Fore River shipyard and why the hell should she take off for Las Vegas and peddle her ass to a lot of sleazes on the off-chance maybe she can make it big.

“It doesn’t matter,” Fein said. “I had one girl who sang down at Tommy’s place over eight years, and she finally comes in to me and she says she is quitting, and I thought there was something wrong. So I said to her, ‘Gina, what the hell’s the matter, huh? I thought you and Tommy got along great.’ And she says, ‘We do. But you realise something? I am now forty-five years old. Forty-five. Frankie is forty-eight and he has his twenty years in with the MDC police and he is going to retire. The kids’re grown and they got their own lives. We don’t need the house anymore. You realise what we paid for heat last winter? Almost nine hundred dollars. So, Frankie’s got this job, he’s going to be the boss for a change, this little town outside Fort Lauderdale, and we’re gonna live in a trailer and I’m gonna sit in the sun and get a nice tan and enjoy myself. All right?’ Let me tell you, Leo, of all the guys I know, Tommy Gallagher is one of the best.