The Rat On Fire Part 2

"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."

LEO PROCTOR 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 2125 Bristol and the building that was 2731 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 s.h.i.+t 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 s.h.i.+t, 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."

"I still don't like it," Jimmy said. "I am not sure about this. This is exactly the kind of thing I hear about from Bobby Coffey there, when he is telling me he has got a sure thing going and then it turns out that he didn't, or if he did what was sure about it was that me and him was going to jail, which is what we did.

" 'Nothing to worry about, Jimmy,' he's always telling me, 'nothing to worry about at all.' And I keep thinking, 'Yeah, but suppose maybe the guy's not scared of us, and he goes to see the cops and he talks to them, huh? What if that happens?' And that is exactly what he did, and what I ended up doing was time, and Bobby was still telling me, they're carting me off to Norfolk, I shouldn't worry about anything because he will get me out. Except he didn't. It was the parole board that got me out, and they took their own sweet time about it, too. I don't want no more of that s.h.i.+t, Leo. I don't want no more that s.h.i.+t at all."

"Look," Leo said, "if you're gonna have your period here, go have it somewhere else, all right? You wanna back out the job, back out the job. Go ahead. Walk right down the street, take a right on Symphony Road, go down Ma.s.s Ave there and you come to the place they play the music, you'll see this subway thing they got there, which says Symphony on it, and you go down the steps and give the machine there a quarter and pretty soon a train comes along and you get on it and I will go ahead with this matter and I will get somebody else who will help me with it. Because I can, you know, and he will get the money instead of you and I won't have to hear no more f.u.c.kin' b.i.t.c.hin out of your mouth. All right?"

"I'm not b.i.t.c.hin', Leo," Jimmy said. "I am just trying to tell you that I have been on a sure thing before, that was not going to get me in no trouble. And the only thing that was sure about it was that I was going to get in some trouble because exactly what I said to Bobby was exactly what happened. The guy came home early because he didn't feel good or something and he sees where we got this truck backed up his house and he knows he didn't order no movers and sure, he thinks it's his ex-wife who's taking all his furniture and his rugs and TV's and stuff, but he didn't give her no permission either. And he calls the cops, he's gonna have her a.s.s in a sling before dark, and the cops come and they find out it isn't her, it's us. Which I guess kind of disappointed the guy because he really didn't like her a whole lot, but he took what he had and had us put in jail instead of her, that was perfect strangers to him and he didn't even know us at all.

"Now," Jimmy said, "I figure if Bobby Coffey can make a mistake, Leo Proctor can make a mistake. And I am sick of doing time because Bobby Coffey made a mistake. I am also not interested in doing no further time because somebody else made a mistake and did not look at things without his eyes being all bloodshot."

"Look," Proctor said, "lemme tell you something, all right? It is eleven o'clock in the morning. I have got some work that I have got to do on account of how if I do not do the work, the man will come around and he will say to me, 'Leo, I paid you some money to do some work, and I see where the work is not done. Now,' he will say, 'since the work isn't done, where is my money that I would like back and I will get somebody else to do the job of work that I paid you to do and you didn't do it, huh? Because I am going to take that money and give it to somebody else and he will do the work you did not do.'

"Now," Proctor said, "this is going to cause problems for me. This is because I do not have that money anymore, on account of I spent a lot of it and gave it to people who do work for me and they sell me things like meat and the phone and the lights for the family. That kind of thing. In addition to which I got to tell the man I gave a whole bunch of it to this guy Jimmy who took the money with no strain, didn't bother him at all, and he probably spent his share of it, and I dunno, I can get back from him."

"You didn't give me no money, Leo," Jimmy said. "Don't gimme that s.h.i.+t. You promised me money but you didn't give me no money. I don't mind you thinking I'm stupid, but I resent you thinkin' I'm f.u.c.kin' dumb."

"Jimmy," Proctor said, "maybe the reason you get in so much trouble is you don't listen to what a guy is saying. I didn't say I gave you the money. I know what I did and what I didn't do. I also know you. I've known you a long time. I know you got a tendency, you sometimes get kind of nervous and you transcend your word there, you know? You get jittery and a man cannot always depend on you that when you say you will do something, you will actually go out and do it.

"Now this," Proctor said, "this is all right, Jimmy. It is something like some guys're bald and some other guys like me have trouble keeping their weight down. It is just the way we are. And that is the way you are, that you do not always deliver when you say you are gonna deliver. And everybody knows this about you."

"I do so," Jimmy said.

"Yes, as a matter of fact, you do," Leo said. "It is something about you that everybody who knows anything at all knows. Which is that Jimmy Dannaher is a nice guy and he means all right and he will always agree with you that he will help you to do something if he thinks that what you are going to do will get him some extra money so he can go down Wonderland every night and always and invariably pick the wrong dogs on the card and lose all the money that he went out and took some risks to get. But that is the way he is and there is nothing you can do about it and you may as well just forget about it. There is nothing wrong with the guy except that he does not always listen to you, and there are lots of times probably when he does not even listen to himself too careful, and he does not remember what he said he would do when he accepted the money there.

"That is why, Jimmy," Proctor said, "I did not give you any money. I did not say just now that I gave you any money. I said I was gonna tell the man who asked me to get somebody and do this work for him, I said I was gonna tell him that I gave you some money. I did not say that I actually gave you the money, because like I say, I know you pretty good and you do not get any money out of me until you have actually done what you said you were gonna do. And when that is done, you can go down Wonderland and gamble your f.u.c.kin' brains out and it will be all right with me as long's the work's done. Because then I don't care what you do.

"Now," Proctor said, "of course what you want to think about is this. If I tell the man I gave you some his money and you did not perform like you were supposed to for that money, then he will of course believe me and he will come around looking for you. You will try to talk to him, naturally, but he is not gonna believe you. Because like I say, a lot of people know about you and there have been too many times when you took some money from somebody who wanted you to do something and then it slipped your mind or something and you didn't do it."

"You c.o.c.ksucker, Leo," Dannaher said.

"I am not a c.o.c.ksucker," Proctor said. "I have done a lot of dumb things but I never sucked a c.o.c.k in my life. Now are you gonna come in that cellar with me, or am I gonna get somebody else to help me and also put your tail inna crack, just on general principles?"

"I just hope you're right," Dannaher said. "You better be right, Leo, is all I can say. I'm not goin' back to the can for anybody."

"You are goin' in the cellar, though," Leo said. "You are gonna come into that cellar with me and you are gonna help me and if you help me you will get your fifteen hundred bucks and if you don't, you won't. Clear?"

There were four stone steps leading down to the green wooden door made of matched boards. There was a large padlock on a heavy hasp on the door. Proctor took a key out of his pocket and opened the lock with difficulty. "f.u.c.kin' thing's all rusted," he said.

"Those're supposed to be good locks, too," Dannaher said. "They cost a lot of money. They shouldn't do that."

"s.h.i.+t," Proctor said, removing the lock, "n.o.body makes anything right anymore. Look at these steps, all right? Been here probably a hundred and fifty years. They're all right. Oh, they're a little worn, sure, but they're here and you can still go down them without figuring you're gonna break your neck when they fall apart under you. You try gettin' somethin' like that done today. Just try it.

"You tell somebody," Proctor said, "you want a cellarway put in a building, or you're doing a job for somebody wants a cellarway put in, and the first thing that's gonna happen if you're the guy hiring the job is they're gonna come back at you with the specs and you're gonna get wooden steps, open-framed, and one of those G.o.dd.a.m.ned steel bulkheads they sell down to Grossman's. And you gotta paint the f.u.c.kin' thing every year with about three hundred bucks' worth of Rustoleum because if you don't it'll rust out in a year.

"Or you're the guy," Proctor said, "that's doing the job and you try to tell the guy, 'Look, you're better off, leave it open, put some stone steps down there and the weather isn't gonna hurt them and they'll last forever. And besides that n.o.body can jump on them and probably wreck them inna month like they can a bulkhead.' And he's gonna look at you and ask you how the h.e.l.l you expect him to pay for quality work like that.

"That's what I mean," Proctor said. "That's why they don't do it anymore. It makes a h.e.l.luva lot more sense, but n.o.body does it because it'd cost too much money up front and nowadays the whole thing is, you put as much money into it as it takes to make it stand up straight for maybe six years and then you depreciate the a.s.s off of it in five and you sell the f.u.c.kin' thing to somebody else. That's the way it works now, and if you don't know that everybody figures that you're just an a.s.shole and there isn't any point in talking to you anyway."

"Come on, come on," Dannaher said, looking around, "open the f.u.c.kin' door and let's go in there, we're gonna go in there, all right? Guy could paint pictures of us, we stand here long enough."

Proctor opened the toolbox and removed a three-cell flashlight. "Not without this," he said, closing the box. "I'm not goin' in one of these places without no light."

"JERRY," LEO SAID in Fein's office, "it was darker'n a carload of a.s.sholes in there."

"I never been in there," Fein said. "You know that? I never been in there. I own the G.o.dd.a.m.ned building and I have never been in that cellar long enough to know what's in there. What the f.u.c.k is in there, anyway?"

"Well," Proctor said, "naturally of course you've got the boiler."

"Naturally," Fein said. "The way them n.i.g.g.e.rs're screaming, there've been times that I wondered, but I thought I had one at least."

"Right," Proctor said, "and your boiler is one of those old things that they laid up with firebrick and then they wrapped her in about two tons, asbestos sheathing. I think it's about shot."

"I wouldn't be surprised," Fein said. "Seems like everything else I hear about in that house's gone to h.e.l.l."

"That's a nice building actually, Jerry," Leo said. "That boiler's old, sure. Probably close to sixty, seventy years old at least. There's an old coal bin over in the corner that doesn't have anything in it except that somebody finished off the walls with this chicken wire and they got a lot of baby carriages and cribs and stuff in there and they got a tiny little padlock on it that I dunno why they bothered since you could go right through that screen with a pair of hedge clippers in about five minutes if it even took that long. a.s.suming anybody'd want to steal that junk."

"Leo," Fein said, "the people I got living in that building'd steal dogs.h.i.+t if they thought they could sell it to somebody."

"I dunno about dogs.h.i.+t," Proctor said, "but there is somebody in that building who has got at least one cat, I can tell you that for sure."

"Stinks, huh?" Fein said.

"It's damp in that bas.e.m.e.nt," Proctor said. "There's been water in there last winter, I think. Maybe the spring thaw. But it's wet, and you can smell that there's been cats in the building."

"I told the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds they couldn't have pets," Fein said.

"You should tell the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds the pets can stay, but they gotta leave," Proctor said. "That's a nice old building you got there. Shame to have to take it out."

"What else am I going to do with it, Leo?" Fein said. "You want to tell me that? You have some hot ideas how I can keep my building and I won't go broke trying to keep it up and the fire inspectors and all them other people won't be coming around all the time, telling me I got to turn it into some G.o.dd.a.m.ned Hilton or they report me to everybody in sight and make my f.u.c.king life miserable for the rest of my life? You got some bright ideas, Leo? You know something I don't?

"You're so f.u.c.king smart, why don't you figure out how to collect the rent off of your n.i.g.g.e.rs and when it works, let me know what it is, all right?" Fein said. "What am I going to do? Go down there every month with a wheelbarrow full of cheap jewelry and sell them that so I can get the rent money? I don't want to take that property out. I just can't do anything else. I got the taxes and I got the repairs and the building's not working for me-I'm working for the G.o.dd.a.m.ned building. I'm sick of it. I got to take it out."

"Look," Proctor said, "I didn't mean anything. It's just that it's a nice old building. It's well built. It's got the stone foundation ..."

"Which sweats all winter and leaks all spring and that's why the G.o.dd.a.m.ned place's so G.o.dd.a.m.ned damp," Fein said.

"The beams're in good shape," Proctor said. "You got a little sagging problem with the main beam. But I figure, you put a couple jacks in there, you could crank her right back up to where she's supposed to be."

"I'm not buying no G.o.dd.a.m.ned jacks," Fein said. "I already told you what I'm gonna do, and if you're so attached to the f.u.c.king place you can either f.u.c.king buy it off me for what I owe, which is not a very good price, considering the trouble I had trying to take a f.u.c.king dime out of it, or you can take it out like I asked you to. And if you're not going to do that, let me know and I will get somebody else."

"I'm not saying that," Proctor said. "I'm just saying that it's a nice old building and it's well built. That's all.

"Now," Proctor said, "what you have got in that there building which is not so nice is this: you have got a whole buncha f.u.c.kin' rats, is what you have got. You have got rats up the gumpstump. You have got rats that are big rats and you have got rats that are little rats. They are all singers. They are practicing for the choir, is what I think. You go in that cellar and you open the door and you s.h.i.+ne your light in there and they start squealing and running all over the place. I bet there was fifty of them taking off when me and Jimmy went in there, and some of them were bigger than dogs I used to own."

"Thanks," Fein said. "More tenants who don't pay any rent. At least they don't complain about the heat all the time and keep bugging me about new bathrooms."

"This is not bad news, Jerry," Leo said.

"Rats?" Fein said. "Since when are rats good news? I know rats. When I was growing up on Blue Hill Ave in Mattapan it was a nice neighborhood. People took care of their yards. They raked them up and they cut the gra.s.s. In the winter they shoveled the snow and in the summer they got off their a.s.s and cut the G.o.dd.a.m.ned lawn. Sat.u.r.days everybody dressed up and went to temple. You had these fish stories where you could get a piece of fish from Mister Goldstein. Your mother and your father were friends with all the neighbors and their kids went to school with you. You all played baseball over Franklin Field. Two days a week you had Hebrew school and when somebody died you didn't have any trouble at all getting ten full-grown Jewish men to chant Kaddish and sit s.h.i.+va with you.

"You know what happened?" Fein said. "You want me to tell you what happened? I am sitting at home the other night and having a couple drinks with my friend Tommy Gallagher, who runs the restaurant down in Canton and they have a little floor show for which I occasionally get him some talent. Nothing big, nothing that'll ever make anybody rich, but a nice little club where a kid can go and sing a few songs and maybe play the piano, and if she has the talent it will come out, and if she doesn't, that will also come out. And maybe even if she has the talent she will decide the hubby's doing pretty good down at the Fore River s.h.i.+pyard and why the h.e.l.l should she take off for Las Vegas and peddle her a.s.s to a lot of sleazes on the off-chance maybe she can make it big.

"It doesn't matter," Fein said. "I had one girl who sang down at Tommy's place over eight years, and she finally comes in to me and she says she is quitting, and I thought there was something wrong. So I said to her, 'Gina, what the h.e.l.l's the matter, huh? I thought you and Tommy got along great.' And she says, 'We do. But you realize something? I am now forty-five years old. Forty-five. Frankie is forty-eight and he has his twenty years in with the MDC police and he is going to retire. The kids're grown and they got their own lives. We don't need the house anymore. You realize what we paid for heat last winter? Almost nine hundred dollars. So, Frankie's got this job, he's going to be the boss for a change, this little town outside Fort Lauderdale, and we're gonna live in a trailer and I'm gonna sit in the sun and get a nice tan and enjoy myself. All right?' Let me tell you, Leo, of all the guys I know, Tommy Gallagher is one of the best.

"So I am sitting there with Tommy," Fein said, "and we are having a couple drinks and the phone rings. It is my mother. My mother who's living over at the Brook House in Brookline. Which looks like something that was headed for Miami but somebody f.u.c.ked up the s.h.i.+pping invoice. And she says to me, 'Jerry, you got to come over. Ellen's husband died two days ago.' Ellen is my mother's best friend, they play gin all the time, her and my mother and her husband, Jack, who died two days ago. I don't know these people. I met Jack and Ellen once or twice, I guess. He used to run a liquor store in Newton. Nice guy, but he's dead. Dead two days, right? So what? What is that to me? I say, 'Died two days ago? They should probably bury him.' She says, this is my mother, she says, 'They did bury him. They haven't got enough men for Kaddish. You got to come over. They are two short and you have to come over and bring somebody else.'

"I told her," Fein said. "I said, 'It is Sunday night. I don't know where anybody is. I will come over myself, but I can't find anybody else at this hour on a Sunday night. Are all the men dead who live in Brook House?' She tells me, 'Jerry, it is Sunday night. How the h.e.l.l you expect me to find somebody who is a man here on a Sunday night?' I tell her, 'I cannot find another guy this late this fast on Sunday night.'

"You know what happens?" Fein said. "I will tell you what happens. I make Tommy Gallagher into a Jew. I say to Tommy, 'All right, you mick a.s.shole, you are going to get into my car and we are going over to Brookline and you are going to put on a little hat and you are going to be a Jew for one night for a change.' And he says to me, 'I can't do that. I don't even go to church anymore. My own church. I went there last Christmas and they dumped the regular Gospel and read about the prodigal son, they saw me. How the h.e.l.l can I be a Jew, I'm not even a good Catholic?' I tell him, 'Get in the car.' He gets in the car and we go and Tommy does better with the chanting than I do. 'All that altar boy training,' he says.

"Now," Fein said, "the h.e.l.l you think that is, huh, they got to haul in the goyim for a quorum, they can sit s.h.i.+va in Brookline, huh? I will tell you what it is. It is rats. Rats, Leo. Big fat f.u.c.kin' rats that run around all the time looking like the Pittsburgh Steelers, they're so big. Rats in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Rats in the yard. Rats in the garage and rats in the rubbish in the side yard. Big, fat, f.u.c.kin' rats.

"Rats," Fein said, "rats was among the things that when my father died, I said to my mother, 'You got to, you have got to move out of this f.u.c.kin' neighborhood.' I did not say f.u.c.kin', because I didn't need to and besides if I did need to, the minute I said that she would not have heard nothing else. And I said to her, 'What you have here is this: you have people here who do not take care of the things they own and they are always throwing away food that they buy on the money I give them with the taxes I pay, and they attract rats. If I was a rat, I would also come around here for a while and sit down and have a nice lunch for myself every day. Looks like pretty good food to me. You got the chicken wings and the hambones and they throw out the vegetables and stuff and it isn't bad. See? So, you got to get out of here. Because the n.i.g.g.e.rs're in and the rats're on the way and the first kind of animals aren't leaving and the second kind's gonna come in larger numbers. If I make myself clear. And they're gonna breed when they get here, because there is only one thing that a rat likes better'n a free lunch and that is making more rats. So you got to get out.'

"Well," Fein said, "you would've thought I went and told her, 'Cut your foot off.' She came out of the box like something that'd been penned up for a h.e.l.luva long time, and she tells me she will not do it. That this is her home. That isn't it enough, she lost her husband when he died too young. That I am no good as a son and not much better as a human being, and I also have other character defects and deficiencies. I thought I was getting indicted for something. I was sitting there waiting for my lawyer to come in, and I didn't even have a lawyer at the time. I wasn't even indicted. And she finally stops for breath and I tell her again. I go back to the rats.

"Leo," Fein said, "it was f.u.c.king awful. Now, you are sitting there and you are telling me that I got rats in that place. I suspected this, but I liked suspecting it a h.e.l.luva lot better'n I like having somebody tell me it. And you are sitting there and you are telling me that this is good news, that I have these animals running around with all the other animals that I already knew were living in that house, that don't pay their rent neither. And therefore I would like you to be so good as to tell me why I should be happy, I have rats in my building, considering that it was rats among other things that drove my mother outta Mattapan and I have to pay the f.u.c.kin' rent in Brookline and in addition to which, I have to drag Gallagher over for Kaddish. You want to tell me that?"

"Sure," Proctor said. "You know what rats do?"

"I am intimately acquainted with rats," Fein said, "for the reasons which I already told you, all right? I know from rats. Speak to me."

"Rats run up inside walls," Proctor said.

"No s.h.i.+t, d.i.c.k Tracy," Fein said. "Rats run up inside walls, huh? I didn't know this. I thought probably the rats were on the third floor because G.o.d put them there and it was a punishment. Or maybe there was one rat tall enough to push the elevator b.u.t.ton in a building where there was an elevator, and he invited all his friends up. 'View's much nicer on the third floor, ladies and gentlemen. We'll all go up there. Folks on the third floor eat nothing but pork chops.' Are you s.h.i.+ttin' me?"

"No," Proctor said. "I am trying to tell you something and you don't seem to wanna listen to me."

"I am listening," Fein said. "I already told you. Speak."

"Rats're not the only thing which runs up inside the walls," Proctor said. "There is also plumbing and heating and wiring."

"Right," Fein said. "And, the sun comes up in the east and goes down in the west and when you get a lot of clouds it is often gonna rain. Except in winter, when it snows. What else you have for me?"

"Plumbing does not start fires," Proctor said.

"Not so far as I know," Fein said.

"Heating can start fires, but it don't happen very often," Proctor said.

"Not that I know about," Fein said.

"Wiring can start fires," Proctor said.

"Right," Fein said.

"Wiring is in the walls," Proctor said, "and rats're in the walls."

"Yeah," Fein said.

"There is no safe way to make a wire start a fire, as far as cops're concerned. There's too many things you got to do to get at it," Proctor said.

"This is true," Fein said.

"There is very little you have to do to get at a rat and have him start the fire," Proctor said.

"Back up a little bit," Fein said. "How do you get a rat to set a fire?"

"Very simple," Proctor said. "You catch the rat. Just to be on the safe side, you catch maybe a dozen rats. This is not very hard. You just go down the f.u.c.kin' dump and catch a few rats and you put them inna cage. Then you take the cage fulla rats to the place that's got rats and you put the cage down onna floor and you take a can of gasoline and you pour it all over the rats while they're in the cage.

"They don't like it," Proctor said. "Makes their skin sting or something. And they start to go nuts. Then you take the f.u.c.kin' cage over to where the wallboard starts, and you open it up, and them rats're all running around in there and they're looking for a place to run away to, and you just give it to them. Except just as they're starting out, what you do is drop this here lighted match in there, in that cage, and all of a sudden those rats've got more'n stinging skin to look out for, because they are on fire."

"Ah," Fein said.

"And those rats that're on fire go running right up inside all those walls where the wiring is, and they set the building on fire," Proctor said.

"And anybody," Fein said, "that was looking at it, they would think that it was probably the wiring."

"See?" Proctor said. "That is why rats're good news."

"Finally," Fein said. "Finally, I am gonna get even with the rats."

WILFRID MACK WORE a light blue three-piece suit with silver blazer b.u.t.tons, black Gucci loafers and a light blue s.h.i.+rt with a dark blue necktie knotted precisely over the gold collar pin. He had a gold identification bracelet on his right wrist and a gold Corum watch with a black alligator strap on his left wrist. On the brick wall behind his chromium and rosewood desk he displayed his diplomas from the University of Kentucky and the Syracuse Law School, his certificate of honorable discharge with the rank of captain in the Judge Advocate Corps of the U.S. Army, his certificates of admission to the Ma.s.sachusetts and federal bars, his award from the Jaycees as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men of 1963, and his members.h.i.+p scrolls in the Urban League, NAACP, ACLU and American Legion. His appointment as a member of the Presidential Commission on Neighborhoods was preserved in a frame standing on his desk, next to the picture of his wife, Corinne, and the snapshots of his three children.

Alfred Davis and Walter Scott sat in the blue tweed chairs in front of the desk. Walter wore a dark blue blazer and tan slacks. Alfred wore a dark green tee-s.h.i.+rt with sweat stains at the armpits and dirty blue jeans. Alfred talked and Walter listened, looking at Wilfrid.

"I am telling you, Mister Mack," Alfred said. "That is exactly what it is that I am doing. I am telling you. I am telling you that these guys are out doing a number on us, and that is exactly what they are doing and we all know it. Now if we can't come in when this kind of thing starts going down and talk to you who is our elected representative and is always coming around the community center and stuff and telling the kids that he is on the job because he wants to help us and that is why we should all get out and vote him back in the job because he wants to help us, then what good are you, huh? What good's that do us, huh? You tell me that? You tell me to tell you things and I am doing that. How about, you tell me something?"

"Alfred," Walter said, "Mister Mack isn't arguing with you. He didn't say that. He just said that it wasn't doing anybody any good for you to just sit there and call people names. You've got to tell him what happened."

"That's right," Mack said. "Alfred, maybe I can't do anything for you. Maybe I can do something for you. I won't know until you tell me exactly what it is that's bothering you, and what you think ought to be done about it. Maybe I will tell you something else that I think I can do, and maybe I will tell you I can't do anything. I don't know. And I won't know, either, unless you can stop hollering and yelling like a little baby and tell me what happened that's bothering you."

"Oh, shee-it," Alfred said. He waved his hands. "You gonna try and give me that s.h.i.+t, man? You're supposed to be our representative, right? We elected you. You're supposed to help us, when somebody is doing this kind of thing to us. You're supposed to give us all this here effective leaders.h.i.+p thing. Isn't that what you said?"

"That's what I said," Mack said, "and that's what I want to do. But I can't lead you any place if I don't know where you're coming from, and so far you haven't told me."