The Pariot GAme (23 page)

R
IORDAN PARKED
the green Ford on Chestnut Street, to the west of the State House, under a sign that warned of substantial penalties for leaving vehicles unattended without Beacon Hill residential stickers. He walked up the hill and under the canopy between the two buildings of the State House. He went in through the back door and clicked his way down the corridor to Lobianco’s office. There was shouting in the private office. It was just after three o’clock.

Alice had put aside her
Rich Man, Poor Man
and had gone back to Rona Jaffe. She looked up expectantly. “I’m late,” Riordan said.

“It’s all right,” she said, “sit down and enjoy the fun.”

“What’s going on?” he said.

“The other Reardon’s in there, Ways and Means Reardon. They’re having a fight.”

“Oh,” Riordan said, “well, look, all right? I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass about this, but I did have an appointment which Seats insisted that I make, and I was on kind of a crowded schedule even before that. Think maybe you could buzz him?”

“Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head. “You want to go barging in there, you go barging in there. He’s got the other guy in there with him, and the other guy’s not used to having
people break in on his meetings. Doesn’t matter whether they were scheduled or not. You want to do it, you do it. You can probably get away with it. I can’t. I have to work in this place. I’ve been here for thirty years, and if I didn’t learn anything else in all that time in this building, I learned you don’t go around pissing off the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Not if you’re sensible.”

“Okay,” Riordan said. He stepped to the door, opened it, and went in.

“—lie to me, you rotten wop son of a bitch,” Seats’s visitor was saying. He was a short man, about a hundred and eighty pounds, dressed in a three-piece blue suit. He wore a pink-and-black necktie. He was gesturing at Lobianco, shaking his forefinger at him. “You know that little bastard Donald did that to my lights on purpose. He did it this week and he did it last week, and he did it two other times since the first of the year, and you probably put him up to it. You got any idea what I got to make people go through, get the insurance, pay for those lights every time that little cocksucker breaks them? They don’t believe it’s street vandalism anymore. You take care of this, Seats, and I mean it, or I’m gonna have your ass six ways to Sunday.”

“Hi, Pete,” Seats said.

The short fat man spun around in the chair and stood up. His face was red and jowly. “Who the fuck’re you?” he said.

“Riordan,” Riordan said.

“Not in this building, you’re not,” Reardon said. “I’m the Reardon in this fucking building. Now get the fuck out of here while I finish getting this bullshit settled with Seats.”

“I told you how to settle it, Jackie,” Seats said gently. “Duke the kid a five or ten. Treat him like something besides a hill of shit. You got to learn, you can’t treat these guys like they were something your cat did onna rug. They don’t like it. They don’t give a shit who you are. They’ve been here longer’n you
have. They’ll be here after you’re gone. They’re not impressed with you.”

Reardon whirled on Seats. “Shut up, Seats,” he said. He turned to Riordan again. “I told you, you fuckin’ hippie, you get the hell out of here until I’m finished with this dago bastard that’s getting my new car wrecked for me every chance he gets.”

“And I told you,” Riordan said, “I’ve got an appointment. Ask Seats.”

“I don’t have to ask Seats anything,” Reardon said. “I don’t give a shit about anybody’s appointments. I come before appointments in this building. Anybody’s appointments. I waited around long enough for this day to come, and now I got it and it’s mine. Now you get the fuck out of here or I’ll call the Capitol police and have you thrown out.”

“Really,” Riordan said. He walked toward Reardon, who stood his ground, panting. “Out you go, Mister Chairman,” he said. “Go study your manners someplace.”

“You lay a hand on me,” Reardon said, “and I’ll have you arrested.”

Lobianco sat behind the desk, grinning behind his hand.

“Up you come,” Riordan said, seizing Reardon on the shoulders and clamping down.

“You get your fuckin’ hands offa me,” Reardon yelled. “This is a fuckin’ assault and battery. I’ll have you in court by nightfall. You bastard, you don’t let me go, I’ll have you killed.”

“Aha,” Riordan said, “threatening a federal officer in the course of his official duties. That should give you a certain amount of entertainment down in Post Office Square. Care to come down right now? Come on, I’ll give you a hand. Two of them.” He turned Reardon around, grabbed him under the arms, picked him up two feet off the floor, and said, “Alice, did the rubbish man come yet?”

“What?” she called back.

“Never mind, Alice,” Riordan said, “just open the door if you would.” The door to the outer office opened. Riordan carried the Chairman through the door and raised him another foot off the floor. The Chairman waved his arms helplessly. Diane and the other clerk-typists crowded to their door to watch. Two elevator operators, passing in the corridor, stopped to watch. “Ever see a slam-dunk in the National Basketball Association, Mister Chairman?” Riordan said.

“No,” Reardon said.

“No?” Riordan said. “I’m surprised. How about a touch-down spike in the NFL, the pro football. Ever see one of those? Lot in common.”

“No,” Reardon said. “Just put me down. Lets forget about it.”

Riordan held him up there. “Yeah,” he said, “you’re probably right. No use in prolonging our little chat, is there, where I’m running late and you’re such a hell of an important guy and all. Just let bygones be bygones.”

“Yeah,” Reardon said, weakly.

Riordan sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Okay.” He released the Chairman from three feet in the air. The Chairman landed on his left buttock. He sat there on the floor, rubbing it, looking up at Riordan. “For your complaint to the cops, in case you change your mind,” Riordan said, “it’s Agent Peter Riordan, U.S. Inspector General’s Office. The other cops all know where to find me. And, of course, if they do, mine’ll also know where to find you, for a little Q and A in the federal court. Have a pleasant day.” He went back into Seats’s office. He sat down in front of Seats’s desk. “What a fucking zoo this place is, Seats,” he said. “How the hell’ve you stayed sane, all these years?”

Seats was laughing openly now. “Who the fuck says I did?” he said. “There’s a lot of people that’ll tell you that I’m
crazier’n a goddamned coot, have been for years. Tell you that’s the only way I could’ve stood it. And there’s others’ll tell you, I came in crazy and made everybody else hoopy. What do I know? They could be right. I’ll tell you something, though: as crazy as everybody is in this joint, if I’d’ve gone around this place yesterday telling people they could see Ways and Means Reardon sitting on his ass in his blue suit on the floor of my outer office at three-fifteen today, I think they would’ve had the guys in the white suits coming in for me this morning.”

“He’s an asshole,” Riordan said.

“Of course he’s an asshole,” Seats said. “Everybody also knows that. Difference is, everybody in here’s afraid of him. He screams and he hollers and nobody wants to take a chance on pissing him off, so he gets away with it. I’d love to be in his office in about fifteen minutes from now, when those elevator guys get through telling the reporters about Ways and Means sitting on his ass outside my office, though.”

“What’ll he do?” Riordan said.

“Do?” Seats said. “Deny it, of course. He can’t make a thing out of it. Then he’d have to explain what he was doing in here that got him thrown out. He’d look even sillier than he did when he was rolling around on the floor. People’ll be laughing at him enough as it is. I tell you, Pete, you done good work for the rank and file in this coop today, taking that asshole down a peg.”

“Good,” Riordan said, “how about the return on my investment?”

“Return?” Seats said. “You charge for the entertainment now? Not that I’d blame you if you did. I been saying for years we should charge admission to see what goes on in here.”

“No, no,” Riordan said. “What you wanted to see me about? Those phone calls yesterday? You had something for me?”

“Yeah,” Seats said. “Okay, lemme give you, little background here. Guy I put on this thing’s named Mattie Dyson. Lieutenant in the Cap Police. Nice guy. Done pretty well for himself, all these years and everything. Got himself a little investment on the side. Runs a bar down off Broadway in Southie. Knows fuckin’ everything. So I called up Mattie, like I always do when I want some information that I know I’m not gonna be able to get by myself, right? I mean, after all, I am a greaser, if you listen to people like Ways and Means. Nobody tells me anything about the IRA and them guys. The hell’d I know about something like that? Might as well ask me the Hadassah or what them Kennedys were serving for Sunday dinner. I don’t know.

“So,” Seats said, “what I do is, I call Mattie. And I ask him. So I do that, and I can tell right off, Mattie don’t want to tell me nothing. Oh, he says it’s because he don’t know nothing about what I’m asking him and all that, but he’s not comfortable with it so I know he is lying to me and he just don’t want to talk to me about this guy Magro and what the fuck everybody is running around like hell for, trying to get him out. So I say to him, I say, ‘Mattie, you know something? I know something. I know there is nothing going on down that neck of the woods you don’t know nothing about, and I want to know what it is that I don’t know anything about. Because there is a guy that I said I would help that wants to know about it. And if you’re gonna give me this, that you don’t know, I am gonna find I am losing the sound portion of my program next month when that kid Derry McEvoy is coming up for that clerkship in the District Court down there and the guys onna Council start talking to me to see if maybe there’s one we get for nothing from the Governor because we gave him this one for nothing. Am I right, Mattie? You seen my little radio. I’m gonna be just like that. No voices on any channel. Just the flashing lights. Got that?’

“Well,” Seats said, “I guess he got it. Because he calls me back and he says if somebody happened to be interested in what was going on with this Magro thing, he might try going down to the Kildare off of Broadway and look around. But Mattie would advise him to watch his ass, because there is a lot of rough customers in there and they don’t like strangers. ‘And if I was your friend, if he is one,’ Mattie said, ‘I would tell him that I hear tell there is a guy name of Brennan that is in there a lot of the time and he can make every cop in two counties, maybe three, inside of fifteen minutes watching. This Brennan could be anywhere. He kind of prowls around and he makes sure nobody takes them little white canisters that people put money in on the bars. He works down the trolley and he’s an American and everything, but he has got this hobby and he don’t like people interfering with it. He’s got those canisters in my bar, for Christ sake. You think I’m gonna tell him, take them out? No fuckin’ way.’

“ ‘You tell your friend also,’ Mattie said, ‘that I understand there is a guy named Scanlan that’s traveling around here and there these days, and I hear his name maybe isn’t Scanlan. I never seen the guy, but he is apparently a hard case to handle. He has got some kind of an eye that was hurt. I heard he always wears a leather scalley cap, and a coat, which maybe he has got something under it he don’t want seen all the time, no matter how warm it gets. And he is not very big but he can make a lot of noise when it suits him. I would be careful if I was out looking around where Brennan might be, and especially now because the chances are that if Brennan is in the neighborhood, Scanlan is somewhere around in there with him, waiting in the dark.’ ”

“I think I’ve already met Brennan,” Riordan said.

“Yeah,” Seats said. “Mattie had that impression. He said to me, ‘You better tell this pal of yours, I hear tell Brennan thinks there’s a Fed in town and he thinks he spotted him one night
down the Bright Red. Tell him also, when I say Brennan and Scanlan, I don’t mean
just
Brennan and Scanlan. Those guys travel in packs.’ ”

“This I knew,” Riordan said. “Well, okay, Seats, much obliged. Let’s go see him.”

“Go see who?” Seats said.

“This guy Mattie,” Riordan said.

“Nice try, Riordan,” Seats said. “You think Mattie’s gonna get caught dead sitting around you? Somebody might see you. You’re hot, Pete. You’re way too hot for a Southie barkeep to be hanging around you. You oughta know that.”

“I do, I do,” Riordan said. “Still, you can’t blame a guy for pressing his luck.”

“Here it’s all right,” Seats said. “Down there, I dunno as I’d try it.”

“Guess I got to,” Riordan said, standing up.

Seats extended his hand. “Well,” he said, “if I don’t see you again, best of luck. And if I do, I’ll give you some tickets.”

“Thanks,” Riordan said. “Thanks very fuckin’ much.”

F
REDDIE AND
J
ENNY
came home from shopping in the late afternoon, lugging packages, and found Riordan, wearing only his pants, lying on his back on the living room rug and snoring. The gun was on the bookcase. His jacket, shirt and tie were thrown on the couch. His boots and socks lay on the floor next to it. His feet were gnarled and bony, and there was a yellowish cast to his toenails. There was a pattern of four white scars, each about a quarter-inch wide, which curved up from his beltline at the right of his navel around his rib cage and stopped under his right shoulder blade. There was a thick white welt on his left bicep, puffy along its perimeters.