The Rat on Fire (6 page)

“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 neighborhood 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.”

“Yeah,” Leo said.

“I was in the middle of one the other morning,” Fein said. “I am not inspecting any one of them after the sun goes down, I can tell you that. My own property that I am renting out to give me and my family some security in our old age so that we do not have to go on welfare like a bunch of fuckin’ niggers, and it’s full of mean niggers on welfare that
won’t pay me and’re tearing my property apart and I’m afraid, go in there. Into property that I fuckin’
own?
You’re goddamned right I’m afraid. I would no more go in there when the sun is down than I would go over to the zoo and shack up in the snake house.

“I go there in the morning,” Fein said. “I go there and here is this bastard leaning against the front door so I can’t get through it. And he is about nineteen, maybe, not very big, got on the jacket and the pants, doesn’t look like anything special, toothpick hanging out his mouth, and he looks at me. I say, ‘Excuse me.’ He says, ‘Whuffa?’ I say, ‘So I can get in the door.’ I don’t really see why I should have to explain to this fuckin’ kid why I want him to move on the steps of my own building, but it is possible that this kid has a knife in his pants and has been looking for somebody like me to stick it into. ‘Who you?’ he says. ‘Landlord sent me over,’ I say. ‘Just routine.’ He says, ‘You got any
identification
?’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, but there is no way I am taking my wallet out so he can see exactly where it is, ‘yeah, I got
identification
, and I’m going to have it when I leave here, too. Now get the fuck out the way.’

“ ‘Landlord, huh?’ he says. But he did move a little. ‘You’re talkin’ that man, you tell him, see? You tell him there is
bugs
in here. Bugs, and
rats
. You tell him that. You tell him we want them bugs and rats out, we ain’t payin’ no
rent
.’ Shit. They’re not payin’ the rent now.”

“Rats?” Proctor said.

“Yeah,” Fein said, “rats. ’Course I’ve got rats in there. I got rats that walk on two legs. Why the hell wouldn’t I have the rats that walk on four? That place is a hellhole, what they’ve done to it. There’re holes in the walls in the hall. There is only about two ways that you could make those holes. One is with rocks and the other one is with a bat or something like that. This was done on purpose. Six months ago, I get a call that there is no hot water. I couldn’t get hold
of Randy, the guy that does the plumbing, so I went over there and even I could tell the reason: somebody swiped the copper tubing that sends the water to the heater. I don’t know how many gripes I had with the light company—I keep telling them I’m not the guy who puts the pennies in the fuse box. And they don’t believe me. I got windows broken in the basement. Somebody ripped up the boards on the stairs. They piss in the hallways and they throw their garbage out the window on the third floor instead of carrying it downstairs. An alligator could get into that house and nobody would notice, no matter how bad he stunk. Of course I got rats. I got niggers and I got rats.”

“Good,” Proctor said. “Since you got both, you get a package deal. Thirty grand and I will solve your problems for you.”

“Thirty
grand
,” Fein said, “for a fire? You must be out of your mind.”

“Two fires,” Proctor said. “Two fires and one lieutenant and guy to help me. Plus what I get. Thirty.”

L
EO
P
ROCTOR AND
Jimmy Dannaher, wearing green cotton Eisenhower jackets and green cotton pants, got out of the blue Ford Econoline van at the curb of Bristol Street and walked down the alleyway between the building that made up 21–25 Bristol and the building that was 27–31 Bristol Street. The buildings were three-story brick, with tall front windows and mansard roofs with parapets. They had been built during the Federal period. The front doors had arches over them and the street numbers were painted in faded gold. Proctor carried a large gray metal toolbox.

“These people aren’t stupid you know, Leo,” Jimmy said. There was broken glass in the alleyway, and a discarded porcelain bathroom sink. There were eleven open rubbish barrels chained to the wall, and flies buzzed around them. “You tell them we come here to fix something, they’re gonna remember us. Besides, what if there isn’t anything like that that is broken? How we gonna be supposed to know the furnace is busted, it’s summertime and the goddamned thing isn’t on anyway? They’re gonna get suspicious. I wouldn’t be surprised, something happens, they’ll remember us, you know? Tell the cops.”

“Now look,” Proctor said.

“Now look nothing,” Jimmy said. He stopped. “Don’t tell me ‘Now look.’ I heard that kinda song and dance before. I heard that from a guy who was gonna do all these great things for me and all I had to do was help him, and he was always tellin’ me, everything was gonna be fine. Not to worry. I should not worry. And I did not worry, and everything did not turn out all right, which is a very kind way of putting it. So, do not start telling me ‘Now look,’ and ‘Stop worrying,’ because I had some experience with that shit and
when somebody says it to me now I start thinking and remembering about how it was, my family, the only time my family sees me is on Sundays. Got it? So, don’t give me any of that shit, because it does not interest me.”

“Now look,” Proctor said, “all right? I am a regular type of repairman, which is true. You are a regular type of repairman, which is also true. The guy who owns the building told me the tenants’re screaming about hot water and he asked me to go over and check out the furnace. Which is a perfectly legitimate thing, because the tenants
have
been screaming about no hot water and unless you get it offa the stove you will generally find that the hot water in most buildings is something that comes out the furnace thing there. They will have this boiler, unless they got gas or electric which these old buildings have not got because the people who live there’d rip the things out and sell them. All right? So anybody who wants to can remember seeing us all they want, and that will be all right too, because we are here on a job that they been screaming about having done. If something else happens in the next few days, then something else happens in the next few days, but that hasn’t got nothing to do with us.”