Paradisio told Cavanaugh. "I'm not knocking it. They often tell me if they'd only taken time enough to stop and think, about whatever got them into the shit, well, they never would've done it.
"They've just never had the time. It's the darnedest thing. It always seems to have been they had to act, right off, before every guy named Dave and Al, and everybody else as well, found out and started trying, pull the deal off before they could. So things never turned out quite the way that they hoped, and then look what'd happened. I hear those stories all the time, day in and day out. That's how I've spent my life at work, listening to desperate men convicted and then severely punished for very serious crimes tell me the reason was timing. They've had a lot of time to compose their stories. You'd expect that they'd be good, complete, with no loose ends. But they aren't. They always lack something: any admission or recognition that if Dave and Al had in fact managed to go for the loot first, they would've been just as guilty of committing serious crimes, and if caught then convicted and put in jail. The parolees I deal with in that one respect're a lot like the people I work for and with: they all seem to think that what matters is how good a job you do, not whether you should do the job.
Except of course that the people I work for don't usually do felonies.
The jobs they pull off may not always be good things to do, but most of the time they are legal."
He paused. "I no longer point out to my felons what is missing from their stories. I used to but I gave it up, many years ago. They claimed they didn't understand why the element I mentioned was important to fully understanding what was wrong with what they did. I could not convince them that it was. The smarter ones after a while saw that I wouldn't let them off the hook until I'd made them see the matter my way, so they claimed I'd convinced them. They were lying. I saw that they were never gonna stop lying. So I gave up creating the situations they dealt with by telling me lies I didn't believe. I guess we're partners now."
He was right. The strategy he'd devised to avoid disbelief of what they said amounted to comp licit surrender in their deceit. If he didn't raise the question of repentance, they wouldn't lie to him. "No one's on parole or probation forever. Sooner or later they either die or we have to release them. The agency can't get much bigger. Process them through, regardless of what they've become. Go along, get along, and go home."
He was resigned to the collaboration. "With a name like Paradisio, everybody thinks that anyway, you're in the bag with these guys. "Ah, this guy's probably mobbed-up. Fuckin' ghinnies; most of'em are."
He was not alleging prejudice. As far as he knew he had never been held back from advancement by suspicion that he might be connected, closer to the men that he was supposed to be supervising than he was letting on, concealing stronger loyalties to them than to the government and the department he was working for. He had found the job to be as it was supposed to be at the time he took it. His nickname was just an insignificant aspect of the acceptable prize that he had wanted, and gotten out of his life: a good steady job for himself and his family, Lois and the kids.
Civil Service: that was the kind of job that he'd wanted, the definition of steady. He went into Probation because Probation had openings when he dropped out of American International College in Springfield, for the usual three reasons: no money; no great interest in finishing; and lastly, no reason at all. "I could've dug up the money, I guess, I'd've put my mind to it. Really wanted to try. And the same with the grades. I didn't have to get Cs and Ds; I'm not stupid. But what the hell, I didn't want to, I guess was the main reason. I was young. What the hell do you know when you're young?
Nothin': that's the whole of it. Just that you're young, and you'll always be young so half of what you know is shit.
"I see it in my clients. That's how almost all of them got off to their start. Knowing two things for dead-certain sure, and at least one of those things was pure shit. Time they get to me, they've found out which one. Most of them probably were as strong and tough and smart as they knew they were; that part was true. But now they know that the rules did apply to them; the idea that they didn't was shit.
