George Higgins - The rat on fire

“I lost that kid,” Fein said. “The little son of a bitch got tied up with this guy named Taglieri that was married to an Irish broad and got roped into going to one of those damned parish nights that I had Pasternak singing at, and the kid tells him what he really wants to do is magic tricks in the Catskills and the guinea son of a bitch gives him a job doing magic tricks with the books at his three restaurants. Because the kid was also trained as an accountant from some courses he took while he was trying to get a ticket to the Catskills.

“The last I see of Pasternak, he’s got the goddamned Jag-u-ar sedan and he’s coming out to look the country club over, think about maybe joining it on account of how Taglieri’s getting old and Pasternak’s running all these goddamned wop restaurants and making about three million dollars a week, and on Sundays he goes into one of them and does magic tricks for the families having the noodles and the veal for Sunday dinner. ‘Very popular with the customers, Jerry,’ he tells me. ‘Like I always told you,’ he says, ‘you could’ve gotten me a break, I would’ve been famous.’ ‘Right,’ I says, ‘and in your whole lifetime you wouldn’t’ve seen as much cash as you now blow by the IRS in a week.’

“I don’t know,” Fein said, “I never had a helluva lot of luck, I guess.”

“Things’re lookin’ up,” Leo said. “Billy is in the same kind of hole.”

“Oh, great,” Fein said. “Is there anybody who isn’t?”

“Not’s bad’s he is,” Leo said. “What he is doing, he has got this wife that’s drinking too much, and the kids, and he also, we got through talking there last night, it was about ten, I guess, I have to let him have fifty, on account of how he is out of cash and it’s too late to cash a check.”

“He had a date, I assume,” Fein said.

“Of course,” Leo said. “The guy don’t know anything about that kind of stuff. He’s fooling around with this broad that’s a secretary over in the Registry. She’s about twenty, twenty-one, and more guys’ve had her’n’ve had Budweiser. Nice lookin’ kid, but she was going with a friend of mine when she was seventeen or so, and then she met another guy she liked better because he had more money or something, I guess, and then she dropped him and starts hanging around with this guy that was the bouncer at that club with the zebra stripes in Kenmore Square. Then he gets himself shot one night in a little argument with a fellow, and she was playing around with this guy that used to be on the City Council over in Chelsea and then she got tired of him and run into Billy Malatesta and that’s what he needs the fifty for.”

“Jerk,” Fein said.

“I dunno,” Leo said, “he’s not a bad guy, but what’s he gonna do that’s better, at his age? The old lady’s a lush, the kids’re killing him with expenses, he hasn’t got enough time in to retire and take the pension and get another job, but too much time in to retire and kiss off the pension. Guy’s trapped. Only thing he knows how to do is be a cop and he’s not a very good cop or he wouldn’t be inna fire marshal’s office. He’s not a bad guy. He just didn’t get any luck and by the time he figured out what was happening to him it was too late to do anything about it.”

“Lots of guys’ve got problems,” Fein said. “Look at you. You got problems. Paper out all over town, and you can’t meet it. Look at me: real estate out all over town. I could kill myself. I make a few dollars and I am still pretty young, I was only thirty or so, and I think, well, I’ll have some security, myself and my family, because after all, maybe it is not my good fortune, year after year, I am booking the hot acts all the time and making a bunch of money off of it. Maybe in a few years I will be getting old or I will be losing my judgment or something, or maybe I will not be as lucky, and then I will be spending all my time getting jobs for drummers in third-rate joints and making ten bucks for it on a good day. This will not keep my elderly mother in knishes in Brookline and she will not be going to Lake George in the summer every year and spending the month, July, telling all her friends while they’re sitting on the porch after lunch so they can rest up good for dinner, what a nice boy she’s got that sends her to Lake George every summer and don’t even let her see the bill because they send it to him.

“No,” Fein said, “this I am not going to be able to do, I go around thinking that because now I am hot, I will always be hot, because I know something about the various aspects of this business from having studied it pretty close, and one of the songs I hear when I was doing my studying was that one about how nobody loves you when you’re down and out. I see a few guys that were and nobody did. Not even me. When you are in that situation, what they do is shun you, Leo, and if you were to go around town and ask people that didn’t even know you, and you didn’t tell them your name, if you did that they would tell you that Leo Proctor, poor bastard, hasn’t got it anymore and he is all finished. And that is all you need, my friend, because when people you do not know are saying that you’re finished, you are.

“So,” Fein said, “I think about all of this, and my family and my poor old mother, and I decide I will get some security for us.

“Now,” Fein said, “unless you have a job with the government that will keep paying you as long as you keep breathing, you got to get something else. The trouble is that I do not know what else to get. What do I know about investing money, huh? My father was the guy who knew about investing, right? He sure did. My father knew so much about investing that three years after he dies, I am supporting my mother, that’s how much he knew. You think I’m going to fuck around the stock market like he did? Bullshit,I am. The big wheeler-dealer type, he’s buying this and he’s selling that, he’s not paying any attention to his own business, he’s so busy getting rich buying stock in Studebaker and selling General Motors. Shit. Spent the whole goddamned day memorizing the Wall Street Journal, Didn’t have time to figure out what his clerks were doing, stealing him blind when he wasn’t watching the shelves. He was too busy studying the London gold market.

“My Uncle Sherman,” Fein said. “Sherman tried to help him. He was all over my father like a rash. ‘Julian,’ he would say, I heard myself, ‘Julian, will you take care of the business, please,’ ‘Sure, sure,’ the old man says, and he didn’t. Drove Sherman nuts. At the time I didn’t understand, although I have to say that now I do, paying for those goddamned vacations at Lake George. Anyway, I have this idea, I go to see Sherman. Sherman will know what to do. ‘Real estate,’ Sherman says. ‘Buy real estate. Real estate is always there and they cannot take it away from you or steal it in the middle of the night.’

“This,” Fein says, “this was not a half an hour ago. This was fifteen, sixteen years ago. Sherman is now dead and he doesn’t know he was wrong. ‘A nice little parcel of rental property, you can rent out the apartments and deduct the taxes and you got a good regular income which you will always have because housing goes up with inflation and it’s automatic,’ he tells me. My Uncle Sherman did not know anything about niggers. Nothing. He thought they were all slaves that ought to be allowed to get in a different line of work and shouldn’t have to go out in the fields and bring the cotton in all the time, or whatever the hell it is they do with cotton. I went out and bought three buildings all hitched together and they had nice people in them who took care of the place and paid their rent on time, and then the niggers come in the neighbourhood and the nice people who didn’t die of old age died of fright or left. So pretty soon all there was to rent places to was niggers, and I did that, and now look what I got.”