Bentavagnia nodded quickly. “Uh, quietly, and with respect,” he said inanely.
The Judge gave him a puzzled but delighted smile. “Just so. Sometimes it’s necessary to have a quiet, respectful chat to reestablish trust wherever it has... broken down. You follow?”
Bentavagnia made a noncommittal noise.
“Well, that’s the reason as brings me here,” said the Judge. “An outsider’s viewpoint, d’you see? And our little campaign headquarters should make for the necessary privacy, a lot less suspicious than an empty building, what with all these goings in and out. So let me take my time.
“Now it’s trust we’re talking about. Trust, Freddy m’lad, is a matter of deeds, not words. Many a man may talk loyal, but it’s acting loyal that counts. We all remember how persuasively you protested your own loyalty last May, as a for-instance, when one of your, ah, deliveries failed to reach Congressman Peavey. And we believed you, Freddy. We believed that some wino got lucky and picked that package out of the alley before Peavey’s boys got to it. We trusted your word, y’see.”
On and on he went, his musical voice reminding Bentavagnia of chimes.
What about chimes?... He’d gone around the corner, and he’d thought he’d heard a sort of chiming. Or was it a ringing? He couldn’t recall it any more. Had it been as loud as cymbals clashing, as soft as rosary beads clicking? He couldn’t tell, the memory was gone, subsumed in the Judge’s voice.
These Irish sure loved to talk. Bentavagnia thought of the old-time Irish lawyers who had still been around at the end of the war, packing them into the courthouses where Bentavagnia looked for work. That accent had been everything to them, although even then they’d probably been faking it, two or three generations removed from Cork or Killarney. They’d been colorful but stagey, with their crocodile tears and maudlin summations, their quotes from folk songs or Scripture. Judge or not, Bentavagnia thought, he wouldn’t be able to get away with that kind of garbage in court nowadays.
“But as it happened, we didn’t trust Congressman Peavey. We had marked his money so as to be able to threaten to show where it came from some day if need be. It could come in handy, we thought. And it did, it did.
“A few months ago, we were in the bidding for a piece of property in Atlantic City. A very big deal it was. But we lost the bid, and the fellow who won paid cash down, quite a lot of it. I won’t bore you with details — we know you’re in a hurry — but we prevailed upon a local official to give us a look at that money, and lo and behold, some of it was from that bundle meant for Congressman Peavey. Now we began to ask ourselves who was the source of this money, who stood behind the front man? Not some wino, you could bet. Perhaps the Congressman himself. Perhaps he’d lied and had received his cash. We had to check.”
These were secrets Bentavagnia didn’t want to know. But maybe if he didn’t interrupt, the old man would finish faster. Bentavagnia had to be back on the street before the real Angel arrived. But arrived from where? Bentavagnia squirmed in his seat, looking attentive, trying not to listen.
He knew whom the Judge reminded him of. Father Boyle, when Bentavagnia was six years old, at war with the Church and unrepentant. Father Boyle praying over him in his wonderful liquid voice, and little Carmine moving his lips in time and muttering rebelliously, too low to be heard, “Row row row your boat, gently down the stream.” And Father Boyle had said...
“Your own wife’s uncle, lad. Your own wife’s uncle. Now how could he have known where that money was without your telling him? Or giving it to him?”
“You should pay more attention,” Father Boyle had said sadly.
“Well, uh,” Bentavagnia said, realizing that despite the Judge’s smiling geniality, this was his last chance to speak. “Look, let me straighten you guys out. You seem to think I’m Freddy Angel or somebody — all I said was, I’m looking for Freddy Angel, see? I mean, here’s my identification—”
The Judge slapped Bentavagnia’s proffered wallet out of his hand and motioned to his underlings. Without seeming to move quickly, they were to either side of Bentavagnia, holding his arms fast. “Freddy, Freddy, we know how conscientiously you cover your trail when you’re on a job. We know all about your phony IDs,” the Judge said, going through Bentavagnia’s pockets, pulling out car keys and pocket comb and tossing them on the floor. He pulled a paper from Bentavagnia’s jacket pocket, glanced at it, then held it before Bentavagnia’s face. “But if you aren’t Freddy Angel, can you explain why you’ve been served with a summons in Freddy’s name?”
“Who do you think you—” Bentavagnia began, but his tirade was lost in the opening thunder of the Judge’s own.
“You thieving scut! You miserable shabby little dribbet of a no-good! Pledge your faith, then steal! Come ’round for more, then deny your own name! ‘You got the wrong man, Your Honor,’ ‘I wasn’t there, Your Honor,’ ‘He just asked me to hold the bag for him and ran off, Your Honor.’ What do you take me for, a fool?” His guards released him, and Bentavagnia sank into the chair, numbed by the Judge’s words.
Now the Judge lifted the briefcase from the floor and opened it out flat in the air. Inside it, neatly strapped in place against a red-velvet lining, were two silenced pistols and a cassette tape-recorder, its spools turning. The two guards had returned to the Judge’s side. Each took a pistol from the case, their faces reflecting disdain for these ritual theatrics. The Judge was enjoying himself, however, talking into the tape recorder in a stage whisper, cradling the opened briefcase in front of him like an ornate Bible.
“To sum up,” he whispered, then inhaled and began again, louder. “To sum up, the defendant does not deny that he has embezzled Machine funds and used them against the Machine. The defendant has offered no explanation, but has instead attempted, by the most piddling and pathetic means, to escape his just deserts.”
It wasn’t happening. He couldn’t have walked into a felon’s shoes. It was just a dream, a fantasy timed to the melody rising and falling in the Judge’s voice. He could feel the end of it coming, the crescendo before the final cymbal clash.
“As I stand here,” the Judge continued, “looking at this little man of loyal words and traitorous deeds, I am reminded of a nursery rhyme my own sainted mother taught me some fifty-odd years ago.
The guards exchanged sardonic looks. The tape-recorder whirred on.
Bentavagnia wasn’t listening to the dream-summation, not meant for him, anyway. He was listening to something within himself, a chiming in the ears maddeningly out of sync with the pounding of his heart. The Judge put his briefcase down, grabbed Bentavagnia by the lapels, and pulled him to his feet. He shook Bentavagnia rhythmically as he chanted, as if to get a rise out of him.