[WEBBER]: “I wonder what the fuck it was got Dillon so stirred up then?”
[SCALISI]: “He was worried about Coyle. I believe him. He was wondering
if maybe Coyle was swapping us for that thing he’s got going up in New
Hampshire, there.” (151)Although the conversation does not resolve the tension about Dillon’s initial
motives for informing on Coyle, this authorial disclosure of Dillon’s place in
the criminal network has a ripple effect on our reconfigurations. Rather than
being a marginal figure like Eddie, Dillon is well connected. He knows about
Scalisi’s bank jobs, and he knows that Eddie also knows about them. (Eddie,
by contrast, does not know that Dillon knows about either Scalisi’s operation
or his own involvement in it.) Dillon is not so obviously powerful that Scalisi
and Webber take his advice, since Scalisi reasons that even if Eddie is smart
enough to know about their operation, he has no way of knowing when and
where this job is.
Understanding Dillon’s central place in the network also leads Higgins’s
rhetorical readers to recognize another contrast between his conversations
with Foley and Eddie’s with Foley. Eddie pretends to know more than he actu-
ally does in order to get what he wants from Foley. Dillon pretends to know
less than he does in the interest of keeping Foley on his side while also pro-
tecting himself and those he favors—a strategy that, however, makes Eddie a
sacrificial lamb. Higgins’s rhetorical readers can recognize that in the chapter
23 conversation, both Dillon and Foley are pretending to know less than they
do in order to find out how much the other knows.
[DILLON]: “I think Eddie thinks probably he isn’t gonna go to jail there, and
I wonder why he thinks that.”
“I wonder where he got the money,” Foley said. “That’s what bothers me.
I always understood he was just getting by. I wonder what he’s been doing
to get all that money.” (149)Dillon doesn’t share Foley’s wonder about where Eddie got the money because,
as we learn in the next chapter, Dillon knows that Eddie has been selling guns
to Scalisi. Foley doesn’t share Dillon’s wonder about why Eddie might think
he’s not going to jail because Foley knows that he is going. But neither will
enlighten the other. Foley won’t tell Dillon that Eddie tried and failed to get
the stay-out-of-jail card because he doesn’t want Dillon to know that Eddie
is a fellow informer. Dillon won’t tell Foley where Eddie got his wad of cash
because then he’d reveal that he is far more connected and knows way more
than he pretends to know.
182 • CHAPTER 9