Bomber's Law (19 page)

“And anyway, to you personally, like I say: Doesn't really matter; either way, you've now been ordered out of the cozy cushioned chair you've had, right here by the fire, and with no ceremony whatsoever escorted out to the distant anteroom. Where the footmen, tradesmen, peddlers, and tinkers remove their muddy boots, and humbly—no complaints allowed—respectfully, wait 'til they're summoned. Beckoned. Nodded to. Whatever. That's where you are now, my would-be heir apparent: plunked down on a hard bench, seated in a nasty draught, and you'd better realize it too. Put a sweater on real quick, and tomorrow wear the woolies even if they lie to you and say
it's coming summer. That's merely the weather forecast for the outside world, where everybody else is. Much colder where you are, and will be for a while.”

“Until I learn to keep a civil tongue?” Dell'Appa had said. “Are you really telling me that I've been sent down to Pawtucket, demoted to triple-A, because I sassed somebody? Hurt some asshole's feelings? By just doing my damned job, the best way I know how? I can't believe it, Brian.

“Partly I mean it's impossible for me to believe in the abstract that any bunch of supposedly-mature and reputedly-intelligent, presumably-adult professionals, engaged in work that every one of us at least seems to believe is difficult and important, that we could ever've reached the point where we're allowing ourselves to be managed like a goddamned junior-high sorority, like kids still in training bras, tying up the phone. The bad boys wouldn't look at us and shudder, fear and loathing in their hearts, if we'd've let that happen to us; they'd've laughed us out of town.

“Then partly from my observations, and I'm pretty good at those if I do say so myself: since the only person I've met since the day I came in here strikes me as obviously unbalanced, unbalanced enough that I wouldn't really dare to predict what he might decide to do in a given situation, maybe even deranged, the only one of those would have to be …”

“Bob Brennan,” Dennison said.

“… my estimable mentor,” Dell'Appa said, “the very same indeed. But while he might be mean enough, or maybe
perverse enough
, to fuck up this office on purpose, he doesn't happen to have the kind of executive position that'd give him the leverage to do it. Praise Jesus; say: amen.”

“Amen,” Dennison said laconically. “We may be a sorority, like you say, but when Bomber was our Great Den Mother, he took good care of us. And since I've been Den Mother, I have followed his example. I don't say this group is perfect, or it's been perfectly bossed, but so far as I've seen, up to now, at least, there's been no heavy damage done that looks permanent to me. Which I would say had been done, if Bomber's departure'd somehow not so incidentally led to Bob's elevation. But it didn't. And it won't, I can assure you, as long as I'm the one in charge.”

“All right then,” Dell'Appa had said, “what you're telling me is that I'm right and it's not Bob, but somebody still did it to me and I'm stuck with it.”

Dennison had shrugged. “That's the gist of it,” he had said. “You've gotten your penance. You can either grind your teeth and do it, or you can leave the church. Simple.”

“Lemme ask you,” Dell'Appa had said, “if it was you in this position, in the situation that I'm in, what would your choice be? Obedience? Or leave the Order? Apostasy, I mean. Which one do you think you'd take?”

“Now?” Dennison had said. “At my age? I'm not really sure I know.” He frowned. “That's something like the trick baseball question, you know? ‘Considering how bad major league pitching's become now, the lousy fielding you see all the time, whaddaya figure Ted Williams'd hit if he was playing today?' And of course the right answer's ‘Two-eighty, two-eighty-five. Somewhere in that neighborhood.' Because as third-rate, incompetent and lazy as the competition is these days, ‘you've got to keep in mind the guy is over seventy years old. He's had one heart attack already, minor one, I guess, and when he was on TV last year he looked really out of shape.'

“So: what would I do now, if I'd gotten myself into the same kind of fix you're in? Well, it's kind of hard to say, and I'd want to think it over, but I think when I got finished, I'd probably resign.”

“You would,” Dell'Appa had said.

“Yeah,” Dennison had said, “I think so. No flat, resounding statement, no ‘You can all go fuck yourselves; I don't need this kind of shit.' But I think I probably would take out my retirement papers, fill them out and send them in.”

“But you think I should stay,” Dell'Appa had said. “You think you'd probably quit, but I should hang in here and eat the shit. That's what you're really saying.”

“No, it's not.” Dennison had said. “It's not even remotely like what I'm telling you. You're not thirty-five yet.”

“I'm getting pretty close, though,” Dell'Appa had said. “At least three days now, every week, clearly at my back I hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near. I feel something hot on the back of my neck, too; could be the spittled breath of the horses.”

“Age ain't pitchin' horseshoes, son,” Dennison had said. “No
leaners; close don't count. Next May I turn forty-seven. That doesn't make me ‘close to forty-five,' all right? It is reasonably close, just about as close's it is to forty-seven, but what it
makes
me's forty-six. Eight years and a half from ‘Bye-bye, now; thanks loads' from this outfit. When you get to my age, you'll find you're runnin' the stables where the steeds come in to rest up and the fresh teams get hitched up. They don't have to hurry any nearer, not a bit, when it's my attention they want. Those horses've moved in with me.

“So that's the first big difference between us,” Dennison had said. “The years really change your perspective. If they don't you've got something wrong with you, because they should. So if I were in your place, with my first choice doing a full grovel and kissing ass right now—and also looking like I really mean it, which is the
real
hard part—because that's the only way there is to save a great career doing something that I like and that I'm really good at; and with my second choice being to tell them: ‘Stick it up your ass,' I'd most likely take the second. Because I'd be giving up about a third as many years in this work as you'll be giving up, if that's what you decide to do, and I've got my reputation made and cast in cement. With that record I can get myself a new job that will pay me slightly more than I'm making now, and the only reason I don't take it now is that I'd get hurt retiring early on my pension from this job.

“You haven't been in long enough to get that kind of security yet, so you've still got it to get. That's a big-big difference, Harry. If each of us's got twenty-five thousand dollars to spend on a car, and I can get myself a Porsche for that money, I'm not being extravagant. But if for some crazy reason the Porsche people tell you that same car is going to cost you four times what I'm paying, a hundred thousand dollars—they don't like your looks or something, so your money's not as good—you should be committed for observation if you buy the fucking thing.

“And besides that factor,” Dennison had said, “there's another difference in our situations. Maybe even more important, when you come right down to it. There's a reason, you see, for my ability to analyze your problem so quickly and incisively, and with such confidence. In fact I'm just a bit surprised that a bright lad like yourself hasn't already figured it out for himself.”

“You've got to be shittin' me,” Dell'Appa had said. “A well-behaved
fellow like you are, such nice table manners and all? You actually fell in the toilet?”

“I am not shitting you, not a bit of it,” Dennison had said. “And I went in head-first, just like you did. I'm not saying what I did was
exactly
the same thing you've done now, or that I was
precisely
the same age as you are now when I fucked up good and proper. But the similarities are too big to overlook, and the differences're too small to matter.”

“What'd you do?” Dell'Appa had said.

“Hah,” Dennison had said, “not a chance. Time and the gradual hardening of the arteries have combined to dim the memories of those of my superiors who witnessed my youthful indiscretions. Disrespectful acts, to be sure, but mitigated nonetheless by the fact they'd been committed in nothing more than sheer momentary excess of boyishly-exuberant, animal high spirits. In other words, if you think I'm gonna relive all of that embarrassment for you now, a good three-almost-now years since the last witness to it got shitfaced at his own retirement party and thanked me for driving him home afterwards by reminding me of the whole humiliating episode, in ignominious detail, all the way down Route Three to old Cape Cod, well, you've lost your mind, boy. There's no other explanation.”

“I can find out, you know,” Dell'Appa had said.

“Not where you're going, you can't,” Dennison had said. “So if you try you'll have to do it somewhere around this end of the world, and if you do that,
I'll
find out, and I will take offense. Whereupon I'll then proceed to fix your ass so good you'll never get it back here. Your kid'll have children of his own, swimming in your pool in Whitman, begging Doctor-Grammy Gayle to tell them once again the story that's a legend in your family, bigger'n the one about good old Rip Van Winkle: how Grampy Harry left for Hampshire County one day, on a big hush-hush assignment, and never did come back.

“ ‘That was the last time that we ever saw him,' she'll say, with a tear in her eye. ‘None of us ever laid eyes on him again, the rotten son of a bitch, no-good, skip-town scalawag. Not once after that fateful day. He's with God now, kiddies, down there with his God.'

“ ‘But God isn't “
down
there, Grammy,' ” the kiddies will then clamor, ‘God's
up
there, in Heaven, with the angels. It's the Devil
who's
down
there in Hell, Doctor Grammy, with the bad men: all the bad men and the Devil.'

“ ‘Don't contradict
me
, you fresh little bastards,' Doctor-Grammy Gayle'll say to the kiddies, giving each of the tykes a smart cuff. ‘Doc Grammy knew her old Harry lots better'n you did and needs no cheap lip from you ilk. Harry had his own God: he worshipped the Devil, he did. That's what “full of the old Harry” means.'

“And, coincidentally enough, that is now exactly what you've got to convince the Man or Someone Who Knows Him that you really aren't full of. That you're basically an extremely nice guy, and if you somehow gave
him
the impression that you're a real wise-ass, and a rule-breaker and scape-grace, which in fact you are, in spades, that was totally inadvertent and entirely incorrect. Or, in the alternative, if someone else, some malicious, underhanded, lying, treacherous sneak, deliberately gave him the impression that is what you are, well, all you can say is that you really regret that and you're sure he knows, from his own experience, it's pretty hard to go through life in this kind of job without picking up some enemies along the way.” Dennison had made wet kissing sounds, like someone calling a cat.

Dell'Appa had sighed, slapped his palms on his thighs and stood up. “Okay,” he had said, “what's done is done. No help for it, I guess. It just seems awful strange to me, is all. I came in here fifteen months ago. I survived Bob Brennan's hazing without even getting in a fistfight with him, let alone shooting him or tampering with the brakes on his car. I took over that Salem arson thing that'd gone nowhere for almost a year, had Cannon going nuts, got it modeled, and now right after Christmas it's going to the grand jury. Wrapped up. Finished. Complete. Last couple weeks I've been doing what you told me, pulling up all the data that we've got on those small-banking interests, and we've really got a lot of it, to see if it looks any different when we get it integrated, as of course it will. It's begun to already. And now all of a sudden here I'm getting shipped out for more seasoning in the minor leagues.

“I dunno, Bry,” he had said. “I still don't really know what to make of it. If it wasn't you sitting there, if it was someone that I didn't know and trust like I do you, who was sitting in that chair right now and telling me what you just told me, that it's strictly personal, just
someone that I happened to piss off without even knowing I was doing it at the time, and he's getting even now, I would almost have to think that there was something funny going on. That the reason for this memo, for the decision to do this, this sudden so-called ‘detachment,' has to be that I've gotten someone somewhere very fucking nervous about something he's been doing for a good while, or he did 'til pretty recently, that made him a lot of money—but that no one's found out about yet. And he doesn't want them to, either. That's why he's been so careful to cover his tracks, up to now, and he's done a good job of it, too. I don't even know myself yet what it is I've gotten into, that in time'd lead me to him if I kept on with what I'm doing.

“As I won't, of course, keep on, not if I'm going to be out there in Northampton, catching someone in the sheriffs office padding county purchase orders, for eighty pounds of powdered eggs to feed the House inmates breakfasts in August, when they only used seventy-two. Invoicing fifty gallons of green-vomit paint to redecorate the basement of the courthouse when the job only took eight, and the other forty-two weren't even green paint; those were the cans of various colors chosen by county employees having their own homes redone. Using the labor of ten of those inmates who didn't eat all of the eggs, and who promised not to run away if they could have conjugal visits while they were out on the jobs.”