Reptile of the Month

By Brad Darrach

COGAN'S TRADE by GEORGE V. HIGGINS 216 pages. Knopf. $5.95. "Mark Trattman's game got hit a couple nights ago."

"Somewhere around fifty-three thousand they got?"

"Two kids. They had long hair and they smelled like animals. Trattman said."

"Trattman said."

"The last time, I gather, the man who did it actually was Trattman himself."

"We start with Trattman and we start real good."

The conversation takes place in a silver Toronado parked on Tremont Street in South Boston. The man in the driver's seat is a lawyer representing a family the Cabots do not speak to. The man next to him is named Cogan, and Cogan is the man to keep your eye on in George V. Higgins' third novel about the Boston underworld. In The Friends of Eddie Coyle and The Digger's Game, drawing on his drastic experience as Assistant U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Higgins followed a couple of very small cockroaches as they skittered every which way to elude the extermination man. In Cogan's Trade he sees the action from the other end of the gun.

In the police state of organized crime, Cogan is a top cop--the man behind the hit man, a professional enforcer who solves the crime before he hires the punishment. As an investigator, Cogan favors the direct approach. He sends two of the boys around to "talk about things" with Trattman. When they stop talking, Trattman's nose, jaw and several ribs are broken, but his story is still in one piece.

Cogan asks around and soon gets the skinny: Squirrel Amato set up the job and two small-time hoods named Frankie and Russell pulled it. But Tratt man has to die anyway. His customers think he is guilty, Cogan explains, and won't come back to the game until he is "whacked out." The whacking is done with shuddery efficiency. Cogan drifts up beside Trattman's Coupe de Ville and pumps five shots through a side window.

The people who actually brought off the original stickup suffer assorted fates.

Russell, for example, gets off easy. Cogan tips the narcs, who bust him for deal ing. For Amato and Frankie, Cogan sub contracts a well-known torpedo. When the torpedo proves unreliable, Cogan "does a double" that compares to most literary killings as an IBM 360 compares to chicken tracks.

Higgins is a miniaturist, and at his best a Fragonard of the nefarious. But in Cogan 's Trade he is not quite at his best. He spends too much time away from his strongest character and sput ters four-letter words until some pages read like excerpts from a washroom wall. Talk is his forte, and the talk in this book is uninspired. But the action is sharp, and Higgins provides some hilarious glimpses of the home life of the North American gorilla -- one thug is on cortisone for colitis, another takes a contract because his wife needs some root-canal work. Cogan himself is a memorable meanie, easily the reptile of the month.

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