An Excerpt from Chapter 36 of Penance for Jerry Kennedy
George V. Higgins

"I do not explain things twice," Bertram Magazu told me when I visited his office for the first time on the morning of Good Friday of the year in which I became forty-six years old. I told him that was fortunate, inasmuch as I was getting along in years myself and had no extra time to spend listening to people repeat things they had already told me. "If that's impolite," I said, "I guess I'm slightly sorry. But only very slightly, Mister Magazu, and not very sincerely."

"Good," he said, leaning toward me over his enormous rosewood desk. It was a free-form slab, the edges left unbeveled like the edges of my life -- the desk was glossier. His windows high in 2 State Street faced north and they were tinted on the inside, so that light from God's sky did not seem to affect much the gray and maroon decorum of his Art Deco furnishings. He was a compact man, perhaps five-ten, with a curly black fro hairdo and a sort of Middle Eastern face. He wore a heavy gold Rolex GMT Master watch and a blue shirt made of silk which had been woven to resemble oxford cotton cloth. "That will save time. Tell me what is eating you and why you think it should be. Give me just as much detail as you think I might need."

He gestured over his shoulder at the long rosewood credenza behind him. I noticed two silver microphones, aimed so they converged upon the chair where I was sitting. "Those will get what you say," he said. Then he glanced up at the ceiling over my head where two more of them were aimed down at his chair. "Those will pick up what I say." He touched the edge of the desk with his right forefinger."I am arming the system now," he said. "Except for those little gadgets, this room is quite dead. That switch I just hit cuts off power to the phones," which were not visible to my inspection, at least, "and even though there is no way for anyone to get in here, I have the place swept every night. That is every single night, Mister Kennedy, okay? This room is secure, in other words, and I can guarantee it. Nothing that you say in here will go anywhere but into my transcription system. Tapes from that system are sealed and locked until I have a need for their transcription into print."

"Understood," I said, and I began at the beginning. I told him how Lou Schwartz had accepted the fact that Frank Macdonald couldn't defend him, and approached me with the burden. I told him about Nunzio, as much as I really knew about that remote mafioso whose life seemed to have affected mine adversely. I described my meeting with the charming Agent Wainer, and my conversations with he prosecutor, Michael Dunn, of the U.S. Attorney's Office. I reported the ominous predictions Lou had made to me about the tax men. I told him how Lou's statements had echoed what Frank said to me, so many years ago. I gave him as much information as I had from Mack about the audit of her taxes. I was candid about my portion of the goods of this world, pausing for an instant to allow him to interrupt me and conclude the conference if it should seem to him that I was not worth his consideration, but he remained silent and I resumed my report. I informed him of my meeting with the genial Mr. Everson, and the obligation I had to call him that afternoon. I gave him all the background about Everson's colloquies with Gretchen. I told Bert Magazu that Gretchen, unbeknownst to me, had failed to file three quarterly employer's unemployment compensation contributions when they were actually due. I assured him I had filed those returns on Monday, the two that were then still owing. I opened my briefcase and removed from it my copies of my tax returns for the past five years, and I told him that the fax expanding folders tied with ribbons which remained inside the briefcase were my supporting documents -- canceled checks, accountant's worksheets, and explanatory notes for the tax years Mr. Everson had designated. Without speaking, Magazu made it clear that he wanted those fat files as well, and I put them in all their shabby disrepair on the shining surface of his lovely rosewood desk. I stopped talking for a moment and reflected.

"I prefer to start with the general," he said affably, "and proceed from it to the particular. If you have no objection?" I shook my head that I did not.

"What you have to understand," Magazu said, "and I mean: you really have to understand it, get it through your skull so you can almost feel it there when you are dealing with these guys, is that you make them very, very nervous. See, you are not like them. Their entire world is based on the idea of regularity, everything from bowel movements to Christmas coming in December, not in April this year and September, maybe, next year. People like us bother them."

"People like them bother me," I said.

"I know," he said, "but this is supposed to help you with that. These people get paid every two weeks. Do you know what that means? Every fourteen days a check arrives. It is always for the same amount, unless they are increasing it for some reason. Government checks are never for less than the checks that came before them. And when one of them is for more than the checks that came before it, the ones that come after it will be for that newer and larger amount. Never less."

"Those checks are always good, too," I said. "This is not always a feature of the checks that I receive."

"Right," Magazu said, nodding, "always good and always printed on stiff green paper that is almost cardboard, with purple marks on it that say how much they are for and a printed picture of somebody's name with wavy lines around it so you can't copy it or anything. And they have little holes punched in them. They say: `Treasury of the United States' on them and they always come on time and they are always good. The company is always solvent.

"This is why," Magazu said, "they get so upset when somebody tries to get them to believe, say at the beginning of the year, that he doesn't know how much he will have made by the end of it."

"Or managed to collect out of what he has made," I said.

"That too," Magazu said. "People who work for the government, and the vast majority of people who are employed by the private sector, always know at the beginning of the year how much they will have made by the end of it. No, strike that: they know at least how much they will have made by the end of it. They may turn out to have made more, but never less."

"It must be a great comfort to them," I said.

"It is not," he said. "It would be if they thought about what it would be like not to know that when you wake up New Year's morning with a mild hangover, not to have that assurance, but that is not something which appears on their screens as a possible version of the real world. Therefore they do not take any more satisfaction, or relief, or whatever you choose to call it, from it than they do from the fact that they can breathe the air and live that way. They have regular and secure incomes. That is the way things are. Therefore everybody has regular and secure incomes. Basically, when you start handing them papers that claim you do not, they do not believe you."

"Well, damnit," I said, "it is the truth, after all. Those are the goddamned facts."

"Bear with me," Magazu said. "The part of their brain which does addition and subtraction, which prepared questions and interprets answers, that part of their brain pretty much goes along with the idea that you don't have a regular income, and that the income which you do have fluctuates. But it sort of does that arguendo, you know? `Okay, Jack, you say you live from hand to mouth, and we'll go along with that for now if saying it makes you happy.' But their lizard brain, the one which tells them to put warmer clothes on when it gets cold out, go inside when it starts raining, evacuate their bowels after they have their morning coffee: that does not go along with this idiotic notion. All the time they are sitting there, looking at your forms and listening to you tell them that you made this much last year and it cost you that much to do it, but you only made tow-thirds as much this year and it cost you about twenty percent more to do it, and that is really all the money that you have, or had, back in their heads that beady little lizard brain is saying: `Bullshit.' It is nudging at them every single minute not to forget while you are talking about this four-thousand-dollar fee and how this guy that hired you for eight grand only paid you six, that all of these large chunks of cash are just what you're admitting to, see? You don't ever say anything about what you were always making every two weeks in addition to that, which was your regular check that they think everybody gets because they do."

"Despite the fact that I don't get one," I said.

"Right," Magazu said. "You get, say ten grand as a fee. It happens to be the only fee you have taken in this month, and the only one of any size that you are likely to get for the next month. You see it as eight weeks' salary for Gretchen. Two months' rent for the landlord. Two payments on your house mortgage. The light bills, the phone bills, two payments for the guy who delivers oil to your house, something for the MasterCard, and maybe a hundred bucks a week down at the supermarket. This is the money you are going to live on until you get some more money. You hope."

"Right," I said.

"These tax guys that are calling you," he said, "they look at that ten grand in terms of what it would mean to them, if they got it. It would be ten thousand dollars extra. Those checks every two weeks already take care of the mortgage and the credit cards, the phone bill and the lights. After those bills are paid, there isn't anything left, or much of anything, but those bills are still all paid. That ten grand is two weeks on the Riviera, if that is what they want to do with it, or maybe a new board with a motor and a trailer. It is also, unlike what they get in those checks, not subject to withholding. They know they would not enjoy paying the estimated taxes on it, and they know you don't like the idea either, and because they think that ten grand which you got is all gravy, they believe you should pay half of it to them the minute you get it. And when you don't, because it wasn't all gravy, they think you are cheating."

He paused and stared at me the same way I look at new clients who have just finished solemnly assuring me that the arresting officers are lying and they would never dream of committing the foul deeds alleged against them. The clients always treat this as my accusation that they are lying to me, and it isn't that at all -- what it is is my inadequate effort to assess whether the client has the fiber to stick to his story, and the talent to make twelve reasonably skeptical strangers believe it. Its truth or falsity doesn't matter to me in the slightest. It is not my job to decide whether the story have been told is what actually happened, because whether it is plausible enough to warrant its presentation to a jury, or so lame that the client had best plead guilty, even if what he is blathering is the truth as the Lord spoke it. Magazu was trying to decide how bright I am.

"It is almost impossible," Magazu said to me slowly, "to convince two or three of these people that you really are not cheating. You may overwhelm them with so many documents and statements that they will concede at last that they can't prove you cheated, but as you might expect, this does not make them feel happy. They take it to mean that you are an unusually good cheater, that you think you are too smart for them to catch, and that you are gloating at them. Sneering at them from behind their backs."

"But are they graceful about it?" I said. "Do they admit their defeats and go home quietly?"

"Very seldom," Magazu said. "Almost never, in fact. What they do, when they can't prove you cheated them out of a lot, is what amounts to silently accusing you of cheating them out of a little. The chances are you won't be able to prove that you did not. Therefore when the final report goes upstairs in the Service, it will show that the agent was at least as smart as you were, because you didn't get away clean. He collected something from you. Generally he tries to make that an amount which is large enough to justify some of the effort he put into chasing you, but small enough to make it uneconomic for you to fight him any further."

"It's an ego trip," I said.

"Yes," Magazu said, "but isn't everything? And it is something else too, at the same time: it's the agent's only reliable means of making his regular salary checks bigger than the cost-of-living adjustments would have made them if he just sat there and breathed."

"They get bounties for us?" I said.

"Essentially," Magazu said. "They deny that's what it is, but that is what it is. Merit promotions, grade jumps bigger than you'd get anyway from longevity, and lots faster ones, are not distributed within the IRS according to how many honest and trustworthy taxpayers the agent has provided with clean bills of health. If he puts you through a full field audit and fails to come up with anything, he's wasted a great deal of time. He looks like a fool. Fools don't find their names at the tops of promotion lists, not very often, anyway. And besides that, keep in mind this guy has been motivated in the first place by some office manager who looked at your return and decided you were up to something. He assigned you to the agent, who then motivated himself a great deal more by beginning with the assumption that you are a crook and he is the relentless lawman out to catch you. These agents don't entertain each other over coffee by telling stories about all the honest taxpayers they're investigating -- they talk about the thieving bastards who think they can get away with bullshitting the IRS. You can guess who the heroes are in those stories."

"I get the impression," I said, "you are trying to tell me something that I think I probably don't want to hear."

misc/penance