Pleading Guilty

'That's what I know. You always talked too much, Gino. Especially to me. Couldn't live with me thinking I'd skunked you one more time, could you? You couldn't resist straightening me out when I called to tell you about Jake this afternoon.'

His belt buckle was still under my belly, his nose was one inch from mine. But a certain caution had set in. Once badly bitten, Pigeyes was an unusual creature in the depth of his respect for me.

'All of these things I should have seen,' I said, 'I couldn't explain. Why you never arrested me. Or served me. You must have thought I was deaf, dumb, and blind. You say you knew I was spreading manure this afternoon with that myth about Archie and Bert, but you left Bert alone even so. Why? Why didn't I see it? You'd been called off. Whoever hired you in the first place unhired you. The capo, or whoever. What are they holding your marker for, Pigeyes? Gambling? Dope? G-Nose take one sniff too many? Or are you doing it for one of the old buds from the neighborhood? You're the guy, though, right? You're the one who was supposed to get Archie to give up his connect. You're the one who was going to make the connect grateful for staying alive so he could throw basketball games for some ungrateful types. It's you.' I had his attention now.

'How could I not catch on? I should have known as soon as you said you were following Kam with the credit card. Christ, where the hell do you come by that card? I know where I found mine. And the envelope was open. There were footprints on the mail. You were in there before me, Gino. At Bert's. And that wasn't the first time.

'The first time, Pigeyes, was when you guys put Archie in the icebox. You were gonna scare Bert into telling what you wanted to know. Big-time lawyer? I don't care whose windpipe is severed. Bert couldn't call the police, because he can't answer their questions. He's not gonna throw away the money, the shingle, by admitting to the coppers how he's been fixing national sporting events. He'd be meat when he saw that body. He'd be yours. Bert would cry on the telephone. Beg for his life. He'd tell you just where to find this Kam fucking Roberts who Archie kept mentioning. Bert would even have to take care of dumping Archie himself. It never figured he'd run — not when all he had to give you was a name. But he wasn't there when you called.'

Pigeyes's dark eyes were caving in. He was not as smart as me. He'd always known that.

'So that was trip number two to Bert's, right? Looking to find where he'd gone. That's when you picked up the credit card. And decided you better lujack Missing Persons' case. That way you'd be the only cops looking for Archie. You got Missing to send the case to Financial — those guys are always happy to lose one — then you went sniffing around the Bath to see if you could get a hot lead on Kam.

'And if guys didn't do dumb things, Gino, they'd never get caught. Why didn't you get the body out of Bert's when you had the chance? What was the problem? Upstairs neighbor at home that week? Not enough help? But when you nabbed me with the bank card down at U Inn you knew where I'd been. And what I'd seen. I mean, Gino, who's the guy who taught me to look first thing in the refrigerator? But dim-bulb Malloy, he gives you the perfect excuse to go back in. With a warrant, no less. That's why the body disappeared then, right? Before I could tip Homicide. That's why we had our scene in the surveillance van. So you and Dewey could get me on paper in front of a prover, saying I never saw anything of interest in Bert's apartment. I mean, Christ, was I dumb or what? Why would you wanna make me say that? And that's why you didn't want to run me in on any of the chicken-shit that you could have. It wasn't worth it. I'd be out in an hour, so why take the chance that I'd have second thoughts and start free-associating to some stray Homicide dick about this body I'd seen?'

Somewhere along there he had gotten off my toes. If we had been having this discussion out on a dark road, he'd have shot me. But we were standing in the subway stop underneath the airport, and various passengers burdened with heavy cases and garment bags were coming and going on the platform, glancing back to get a load of what looked like it might turn into a fistfight. Pigeyes was not a happy dude.

'Tell me you didn't start out to murder poor Archie, Pigeyes. Tell me you just got carried away when Archie wasn't coming up with Kam's real name. Tell me you felt sorry.' I pulled away the briefcase from where he had continued resting his hand.

'What do they pay for a job like that? Fifty? Seventy-five? You getting ready for retirement, is that it? I'll make that in interest in a couple of weeks.' For emphasis, I tapped him right over the heart, grazing my fingertips on the same dirty knit shirt he'd been wearing for days. We both knew I had him.

'So turn me in,' I said. 'Think I can swing a deal for immunity if I give them a hit man who walks around with a star?' He didn't answer. He'd been to Toots's school. 'The guy I hung with,' I said, 'my old partner, he wasn't that bad. He cut some corners, he did some things. But he didn't torture people for money. Or dope.' I picked up my suitcase and nodded to him.

With that, I had a serendipitous recognition. If you gave Pigeyes truth serum he'd explain to you how this was partly my fault. Years ago I'd taken his good name. And cheated to do it. The neighbors, his ma, the people in church — they now knew what he was. He couldn't pretend. He looked to them suddenly the way he looked to himself. I put it to him out loud, here in the public way.

'You're a bad guy,' I said.

You know how he responded: Fan-gull Fan-gull 'I gotta take that from you?'

'Have it your way, Gino. We're both bad guys.' I didn't mean it. I wasn't as low as him, not in my mind. We were two different types, two different traditions. Pigeyes was like Pagnucci — really tough, really mean, capable of courage and cruelty. One of those men for whom it's always wartime, where you do what you have to. I was the second in a line of thieves — deceivers. But we'd both touched bottom, Gino and I, and I saw then that was the point of all the bad dreams: I am him and he is me, and in the dark feelings of night there is no discernible difference between wishing and fear.

So that's where I left him, on the train platform. I looked back once, just to make sure he was absorbing the full effect of letting me go. I made my plane to Miami, and now the connection to C. Luan. I'm sitting here, in first class, telling the end of my story to Mr Dictaphone, whispering so that my voice is lost below the engine's great hum.

When I get off, these tapes, every one of them, are going to Martin. I'll send them Federal Excess. I will be wildly pie-eyed by then. At the moment, on the fold-down table in front of me, four little soldiers, hot off the attendant's drink cart, are dancing with the vibration of the plane, the sweet amber liquid bobbing in the throat of each bottle so that I can almost feel it in mine. I will be drunk, I promise, for the rest of my life. I'll travel; I'll sun. I'll engage in prolonged dissipation. I'll think about how ecstatic I was sure this gig would make me and how, in that frame of mind, I couldn't tell the right guys from the wrong ones, the merely plain from the plain ugly.

Now that I'm done, I'm thinking that telling this whole thing was for me. Not for Martin, Wash, or Carl. Or U You. Or Elaine up above. Maybe it's me I meant to entertain. A higher, better me, such as Plato described, a kinder, gentler Mack, capable of greater reflection and deeper understanding. Maybe I wanted to make another of those failing efforts to figure out myself or my life. Or to tell it all in a way that is less ambiguous or boring, remembering it with my wit sharper and my motives more defined. I know what happened — as much as memory serves. But there are always blank spots. How I got from there to here. Why I did whatever at a particular moment. I'm a guy who's spent so many mornings wondering just what happened the night before. The past recedes so quickly. It's just a few instants under the spotlight. A couple of frames of film. Maybe I recount it all because I know this is the only new life I will get, that the telling is the only place where I can really reinvent myself. And here, I am the man who controls not just the words but with them the events they record. The higher, better Mack, sovereign over history and time, a fellow more earnest, honest, more fully known than the mysterious guy who has always recovered from one disaster just in time to rush on to another, that incomprehensible being who blinks at me in the reflections on windowpanes and mirrors, who treated most of the settled items in his life with scorn.

Nonetheless, I've had the final word. Taking blame where it is due and otherwise assessing it. I don't make the mistake of confusing that with an excuse. I have regrets, I admit, but who doesn't? Still, I had it wrong. Completely.

There are only victims.