to be even more beleaguered than Eddie, as he explains to Foley the fear that
keeps him from testifying before the grand jury. The most salient relation-
ship between authorial and conversational disclosure involves the connection
between this conversation and the first mention of Dillon in chapter 3—Scalisi
and Eddie say they hear something about Dillon and the grand jury that they
don’t like. The implication is that Dillon is going to testify. But once chapter 6
reveals that he is not, Higgins uses the authorial disclosure across conversa-
tions to reveal that the information that travels across the criminal network is
not always reliable.
At the end of the conversation in chapter 6, Dillon gives Foley a teaser
about Eddie, saying that Eddie and Jimmy Scalisi are calling his bar leaving
messages for each other—but that he does not know what is actually going on.
In chapter 11, he extends the tease with a dramatically told story about how
distressed one of his customers is to get a message that Scalisi needs to talk to
him about something important, revealing only at the end that the customer
is Eddie. By chapter 23, Dillon has become much more assertive with Foley.
After telling another story of Eddie’s behavior at the bar—he displays a roll
of bills and gives a few to somebody whom Dillon won’t identify—he urges
Foley to go and “think about how come a little fish has got a lot of money all
of a sudden” (149).
Higgins also uses the structural parallel to highlight two major dif-
ferences between the Eddie-Foley and the Dillon-Foley conversations: (1)
Higgins makes Eddie’s motive for informing on Jackie clear from the out-
set (Eddie wants his stay-out-of-jail card), but he does not disclose Dillon’s
motive for informing on Eddie. (2) Higgins uses Eddie’s informing on Jackie
to significantly complicate the global instability—Foley arrests Jackie, and his
phone call to the New Hampshire prosecutor does not yield any clemency for
Eddie—but Dillon’s informing on Eddie does not have any such consequences.
Although Foley uses the information to get himself transferred back from
drug enforcement to monitoring the mob, he never gets enough evidence to
go after either Eddie or Scalisi. As a result, Higgins uses these scenes to intro-
duce and complicate a tension about Dillon’s motives for telling. Higgins very
slowly resolves this tension, as he gradually discloses the complexities of Dil-
lon’s character and his place in the crime network.
Dillon’s growing assertiveness with Foley and Foley’s own comments to
his colleague Waters that he feels as if Dillon is playing him are part of Hig-
gins’s gradual revelation that Dillon is a far more artful poser with Foley than
Eddie is. But the pivotal authorial disclosure comes in chapter 24, in a con-
versation between Scalisi and his partner Fritzie Webber as they drive to the
bank job during which they get arrested.
CONVERSATIONAL AND AUTHORIAL DISCLOSURE IN DIALOgUE • 181