“I know that,” the prosecutor said. “I also know he was driving a car that
cost four grand and he’s twenty-seven years old and we can’t find a place he
ever worked. He’s a nice, clean-cut gun dealer, is what he is, and if he wanted
to, he could probably make half the hoods and forty per cent of the bikies
in this district. But he doesn’t want to do that. Okay, he’s a stand-up guy.
Stand-up guys do time.”
“So he’s got to talk,” Clark said.
“Nope,” the prosecutor said, “he doesn’t have to do a damned thing
except decide which he wants to do more, talk, and make somebody impor-
tant for us, or go down to Danbury there and get rehabilitated.”
“That’s a pretty tough choice to make,” Clark said.
“He’s a pretty tough kid,” the prosecutor said. “Look, we don’t need to
stand here and play the waltz music. You know what you got: you got a mean
kid. He’s been lucky up to now: he’s never been caught before. And you know
what I got, too: I got him fat. You’ve talked to him. You saw him and you told
him it was talk or take the fall, and he told you to go and fuck yourself, or
something equally polite. So now you got to try the case, because he won’t
plead without a deal that puts him on the street and I don’t make that kind
of deal for machine gun salesmen that don’t want to give me anything. So
we try this one, and it’ll take two days or so, and he’ll get convicted. Then
the boss’ll tell me to say three, or maybe five, and the judge’ll give him two,
or maybe three, and you’ll appeal, maybe, and some time around Washing-
ton’s Birthday, he’ll surrender to the marshals and go down to Danbury for
a while. Hell, he’ll be out in a year, year and a half. It isn’t as though he was
up against a twenty-year minimum mandatory.”
“And in another year or so,” Clark said, “he’ll be in again, here or some-
place else, and I’ll be talking to some other bastard, or maybe even you
again, and we’ll try another one and he’ll go away again. Is there any end to
this shit? Does anything ever change in this racket?”
“Hey Foss,” the prosecutor said, taking Clark by the arm, “of course it
changes. Don’t take it so hard. Some of us die, the rest of us get older, new
guys come along, old guys disappear. It changes every day.”
“It’s hard to notice, though,” Clark said.
“It is,” the prosecutor said, “it certainly is.” (179, 181–82)This passage is very effective in its context, but I choose it in part because,
if we look just at its textual features, it does not appear to be an especially
innovative piece of storytelling. We’ve all read many other scenes of dialogue
that work much like this one. Let’s take a closer look at the passage and its
fit—or lack thereof—with Chatman’s model.
AUTHORS, RESOURCES, AUDIENCES • 15