The rat on fire

5

Leo sat in the reception area of Jerry Fein’s office, looking at the pictures of Sinatra, Presley, Garland, Jessel, Young-man, Berle and the Inkspots, while Fein shouted into his telephone. “I am telling you, Michael, and I am telling you once and for all, it don’t matter to me the pastor wants the guy play for nothing. I can’t send the guy over there inna middle of a week at the Chateau de Ville and he loses a show, and he does it for nothing and the people there’re paying him and they got to go around refunding the customers’ money, because they are not going to stand for it and I am not gonna do it because I don’t blame them. They are right.”

Fein paused. “No, Michael,” he said, “that does not interest me. The parish hall does not interest me. This guy has two things in this world, which is his talent and the time he has to sell tickets to people that want to watch him and his talent, and I am not going to start going around and telling this guy he should forget about making his livelihood and go down to Quincy for no money because my old friend Mon-signor Quinlan is raising money so he can put up a parish hall where he runs bingo games.

“Yes, Michael,” Fein said, “I understand that we are old friends and you have done me a lot of favours. I have also done you a lot of favours. You were running that Seabees reunion there, didn’t I get you Tulip Twolips for a lousy hundred bucks, huh? When her regular price for that kind of thing’s five hundred minimum? Didn’t I do that, and all your goddamned friends treat the lady like she was an animal? Right? So I hadda practically get down my hands and knees, I continue representing her? You remember that, Michael? Sure, you remember that. You remember, you had the kid with the bone cancer there that was dying, and you went around shooting off your mouth all the time about how you could get him a visit from his hero that made the record with the goddamned accordion, and I did that because you come crying to me when you talked too much and you couldn’t deliver? Remember that, Michael? You’re telling me I’m a friend of yours? Michael, I know that. I got the scars and the bills to prove it.

“Yes, Michael,” Fein said, “I know. Now and then you did me a couple favours. The night the boys got a little rowdy and they took the car and it didn’t show up in the papers. I know. But I am telling you, this one I cannot do. This time you are asking me the impossible, and I can’t do it for you.

“Yes, Michael,” Fein said, “it’s final. It is my last word. Yes. I cannot do it and I’m not even going to try. No, I am not being unreasonable. You are being unreasonable. Well, then, you go ahead and tell the guys, tag my car every time they see it. You go ahead and tell them that, and they will do it, and then the next time I can do something just as nice for you, I will do it, and both of us will have lost an old friend and gained a new enemy. But if that is the way you feel about it, Michael, you go ahead and you do it.” Fein hung up, noisily.

Leo went into Fein’s office. The lawyer sat at the walnut desk, his tie loosened and flung across his left shoulder, his white shirt unbuttoned at the neck, his face flushed under the short black beard. “Leo, Leo, Leo,” Fein said with his chin in both hands, “why didn’t I do like my mother wanted and be a doctor?”

“Should’ve had mine,” Leo said. “Mine wanted me to be a priest.”

“I tell you, Leo,” Fein said, “If I could make a living selling second-hand clothes instead of this, some days, I would do it. Except, I’m not sure I can. It’s the ignorance that gets you at our age, you know? Maybe there is something that’d pay you good enough so you could dress warm and eat and take care of your family, that would not drive you nuts all the time, but maybe there isn’t, too, and the fuckin’ bank comes around every month so you can’t take a year off and find out, I dunno. How you been, Leo? You making an honest dollar, getting enough stuff to eat and like that?”

“I saw Billy,” Leo said.

“Is that good news?” Fein said.

“It is good news,” Leo said.

“Good news,” Fein said, “having to do with money, I hope. That being about the only kind of good news I am in the market for right now. This guy Murray that I owe a lot of money to, which I think he knows? I am at this UJA thing the other night, or maybe it was B’nai B’rith, some time they’re throwing to raise some dough for this politician who’s going to save us all from going straight to hell and everything, only he’ll probably drop out of politics first and forget all about how he loved Israel so much and he hated all those Arabs like poison.

“You know, you guys’re lucky,” Fein said. “You give a little at the church, you go to a dinner or two maybe once a year, every so often the Cardinal gets broke and I got to shag up a couple of guys who haven’t told a clean joke in years and give the guy free entertainment so he can build another parochial school, and on top of that they have to get up new material they can do for nothing. But that’s about it.

“You,” Fein said, “you got your paper drives and your bands that go around making a lot of noise. But being Jewish in this town is like living next door to Tap City except they keep moving the fence closer’n closer to your house. I tell the guy: ‘Murray, Murray, Murray, this is the third time I’ve been hit this week. I had the Hadassah thing. I had the dinner honouring Judge Barf and also the wife at the country club and the food was awful. I’ve been out to Brandeis more nights than I’ve been home. I’m telling you, Murray, I just can’t do it. I’m just a guy. I haven’t got a Cadillac agency. I don’t run a wholesale liquor business, I haven’t got a string of movie theatres or a whole bunch of parking lots or a nice little dry goods business and I never did any business in raw wool, billboards or anything else like that. I am just a poor starving lawyer. I make out if my people make out and I water the soup for the kids when they don’t. You got me two grand for Israel bonds, you got me a thousand for something else, I’m down to the lint in my pockets already and you’re telling me a dinner, five hundred bucks a plate and I got to bring Pauline too? You got to be kidding. I haven’t got it, Murray. I just haven’t got it. You know where it’s going – I’m giving it all away.’

“And Murray says, ‘Holocaust.’ Says it like he was saying Kaddish. You guys don’t know what it’s like, Leo, being Jewish. You’re Jewish and some guy calls up on the phone and he asks you for money. You tell him you haven’t got it and all of a sudden it’s your fault six million people died. The only way you can get free, that you can escape taking all of the blame for it, all at once, and never mind maybe you weren’t even born when it happened, is produce the cash. Or a certified check. You don’t pony up, Hitler was all your fault and you are probably sneaking off at night to meetings with the Palestinians.”

“Let me tell you about the Cardinal’s Stewardship Appeal,” Leo said.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” Fein said. “If I didn’t hear about it already from some priest that’s got oil all over his tongue and wants about three grand worth of free entertainment the evening, it’s because they haven’t got around to planning no free entertainment the evening yet, that I’m going to have to supply. If it happens, it will happen soon enough and I will not like it then. It don’t happen? This is also all right with me. Will you tell me this? Will you tell me why some priest with a name like Mahoney or something thinks he has to come around bothering a poor Jew like me, get him somebody to sing ‘Danny Boy’ for nothing at a dinner for a bishop? Why is that?

“All you micks,” Fein said, “go around singing ‘Danny Boy,’ and doing it for priests, and us Jews have to come up with the guys to do it. Boy, did I have a guy who could sing ‘Danny Boy’ until a couple years ago. Also very good on ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’ and ‘Galway Bay’ and he could do an ‘Ave Maria’ that would bring tears to your eyes. My eyes, even. When Jewish eyes are crying. Kid’s name was Pasternak and I booked him as O’Brien for those things. Which was not really what he wanted to do.

“ ‘Tell him you’re black Irish,’ I said to him. See, his father was Jewish but his mother was Italian and he has this dark hair and that sort of thing, but what he wanted to do, really, was magic shows in the Catskills. He was a talented kid. It was just that he didn’t have much talent in magic, and I had a hell of a time with that kid. The jobs he wanted I couldn’t get for him. The jobs I got for him, he didn’t like, and then I would lay one of them communion breakfasts on him for which all I gave him was cab fare, because I’m not collecting anything and I’m not even Catholic, and he would scream bloody murder. He would tell me he was not a Catholic and what was I making him do this stuff for when I couldn’t even get him a job doing magic in the Catskills like he wanted. And I would tell him, if he ever wanted to get any place, he had to pay the dues first and take what he could get.

“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.”

“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.”