Pleading Guilty Read Free Page B

actually grew up not far from here on the West End of the city, near the Callison Street Bridge, a phenomenal structure of enormous brownish stones and concrete filigree, designed, I believe, by H. H. Richardson himself. A mighty thing, it cast a shadow for blocks over our gloomy little Irish village, a neighborhood really, but a place as closed off as if there were a drawbridge and walls. The dads were all firemen, like my father, o r p olicemen or public-payroll hacks or guys who worked in factories. A tavern on every corner and two lovely large churches, St. Joe's and St. Viator's, where the parish, to my ma's constant regret, was half Italian. Lace curtains. Rosary beads. Until I was twelve, I did not know a kid who went to public school. My mother named me for John McCormack, the famous Irish tenor, whose sad ballads and perfect diction left her trembling over the sadness of life and the forlorn hope of love.
    "Seedy" is not the word for the Russian Bath; better "prehistoric." Inside, the place was vintage Joe McCarthy--exposed pipes overhead, with the greenish lacquered walls darkened by oil and soot, and split by an old mahogany chair rail. The motif here was Land That Time Forgot, where was and would-be were the same, an Ur region of male voices, intense heat, and swinging dicks. Time would wear it down but ne'er destroy it: the sort of atmosphere that the Irish perpetuate in every bar. I paid fourteen dollars to an immigrant Russian behind a cage, who gave me a towel, a sheet, a locker key, and a pair of rubber shoes I purchased as an afterthought to shield my tootsies. The narrow corridor back was lined with photos in cheap black frames, all the great ones--sports stars, opera singers, politicians, and gangsters, a few of whom fit in more than one of these categories. In the locker room where I undressed, the carpet was the gray of dead fish and smelled of chlorine and mildew.
    This Russian Bath is a notorious spot in Kindle County. I'd never set foot inside before, but when I was working Financial Crimes, the FBI always had somebody sitting on a surveillance here. Pols, union types, various heavy-browed heavyweights like to take a meet in this place to talk their dirty business, because even the Feebies can't hide a transmitter under a wet sheet. Bert is down here, relishing the unsavory atmosphere, whenever he can break free--lunchtime, after work, even for an hour after court when he's in trial.
    Inside his head, Bert seems to live in his own Boys Town. Most of my partners are men and women with fancy degrees-
    Harvard, Yale, and Easton--intellectuals for a few minutes in their lives, the types who keep The New York Review of Books in business, reading all those carping articles to put themselves to sleep. But Bert is sort of the way people figure me, smart but basic. He'd been law review at the U., and before that an Air Force Academy grad and a combat pilot in Nam in the last desperate year of war, but the events of his later life don't seem to penetrate. He's caught up in the fantasies that preoccupied him at age eleven. Bert thinks it's nifty to hang out with guys who hint about hits and scores, who can give you the line on tomorrow's game before they've seen the papers. What these fellas are actually doing, I suspect, is the same thing as Bert--talking trash and feeling dangerous. After their steam bath, they sit around card tables in the locker room in their sheets, eating pickled herring served at a little stand-up bar and telling each other stories about scores they've settled, jerks that they've set straight. For a grown-up, this sort of macho make-believe is silly. For a guy whose daytime life is devoted to making the world safe for airlines, banks, and insurance companies, it is, frankly, delusional.
    The bath was down the stairs and I held tight to the rail, full of the usual doubts about exactly what I was up to, including going someplace I didn't know without my clothes on, but it proved to be a spot