The Rat on Fire by George V. Higgins Read Free Book Online

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 somethingthinks 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. Becausethe 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