The Seersucker Whipsaw

by Ross Thomas

  “Nobody’s that young.”

  “I am.”

  “I know some guys who were always too young. They were born around 1936.”

  “That makes them thirtyish. Middleaged.”

  “Right. Middleaged. They can remember World War II—the eat, drink and be merry Gemütlichkeit. But they missed being in it because they were too young. They say it was the last good war. They were also too young for Korea, and although that wasn’t such a hot war, they’re still sorry they missed it. They say. So they mutter into their Scotch about never having the chance to test their courage truly and well under fire.

  “Now there happens to be a very fine war going on in Asia—as sticky a mess as one could hope for. But it doesn’t have the clear-cut issues for the lads who were always too young. Besides, they’re thirty or so now and their careers have called and the mortgage is due. So, they’ll never have that one, right, nice little war with the sides all carefully drawn—good on the left, wrong on the right. They think it will haunt them, but it won’t.”

  “Why?”

  “They’ll become authorities on World War II and know all the battles and the regiments and the corps commanders, but stay politely silent when the potgutted drones start talking about Guadalcanal and Anzio and Eniwetok.”

  “Were you a soldier?”

  “For a while. In Korea. A replacement in the 45th Division.”

  “Were you hurt?”

  “Not badly.”

  “How long have you been in London?”

  “A long time. Ten years now.”

  “You’re not that old.”

  “I’m doddering. I was born in ’thirty-two. That was the year my old man sold soy beans short and made a pile. I skipped the second grade, landed at Minnesota when I was sixteen, enlisted in 1950 when I was eighteen, and got sent home from Korea when I was nineteen. I was graduated in ‘fifty-three and landed a job on the paper at the same time. Got the chronology?” She was using her fingers to count; they were nice fingers. She nodded.

  “I was very bright, they said, so they sent me to Europe as their own very first foreign correspondent in 1955—late ’fifty-five.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Come October, 1956, there were three stories going: the Stevenson-Eisenhower election at home, Suez, and Hungary. I picked Hungary; they picked reaction election Europewise. We parted company. I went to England, went to work for Duffy, married my wife, and got divorced by her seven years later.”

  “Why?”

  “I wasn’t a very good husband.”

  “Was she a good wife?”

  “We were mutually unsuitable for each other.”

  Anne looked down at the table and fiddled with her coffee spoon, making a series of X’s in the cloth. “I told you earlier I’ve never felt like this. I’ve never felt the need for anyone like this.”

  “So you said.”

  “It makes me a little afraid. You know what we were doing earlier?”

  “When?”

  “When we were talking about things—what we liked and didn’t like. We were courting.”

  “I guess we were.”

  She looked up at me. “I’m in love with you, Peter.”

  “I know.”

  “Will it be any good?”

  “I think so.”

  “What will we do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll try loving each other for a while. That will be something new for me at least. I never tried it before.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I’m going to love you very much.”

  “Good.”

  “I want to stay with you tonight.”

  “All right.”

  “You want me to, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but I’m supposed to make the propositions.”

  “We don’t have time. Am I terribly bad?”

  “No.”

  “Could we have some champagne in the room. Champagne and you and a hotel sounds awfully wicked.”

  “We’ll have champagne.” I called a waiter over and with some difficulty arranged for a bottle of champagne and a bottle of Martell to be sent up to my room.

  “We’ll wait until it gets there,” I said. “I don’t fancy any interruptions.”

  “I’ll have to leave you early—around five.” She bit her lip, and shook her head slowly. “It’s happened so fast and that’s such an obvious thing to say.” She leaned across the table towards me and her eyes were pleading. “I’m not wrong, am I, Peter?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s right for both of us, really right?”

  “Yes, it’s right for both of us and I’m not sure how it happened. I don’t know why. I’m not going to think about it for a while, I’m just going to revel in it. I like being in love with you. I like feeling romantic about it. I like the idea that we’re going upstairs and drink champagne and love each other. I suppose I’m just happy as hell and it’s a very strange feeling.”

  She smiled at me again. “That was nice. I liked that. Now I know it’s all right.”

  “Good.”

  We rose from the table and I took her hand. We walked to the elevator and rode up to the room. The champagne was there and so was the brandy. The champagne wasn’t very good, but it was cold, and we drank it and looked at each other.

  After a glass of champagne she smiled at me and said: “Peter, please be patient with me.”

  The sheets were cool and I was gentle and smiled at her small cries and when it happened it happened to both of us and we sailed off to where the teddybears have their picnic and then we came slowly back and I kissed her and ran my hand lightly over her face, touching her brow and eyes and nose and mouth and chin.

  “Was I any good?” she asked.

  “You were perfect.”

  “We were both perfect.”

  I lighted a cigarette and smoked it for a while, staring up at the ceiling in the hotel in Africa with the girl whom I newly loved nestling her head on my shoulder.

  Suddenly, it wasn’t a bad life. I wondered how I’d got so lucky, but my bed partner started to make small noises again, so I put out the cigarette and quit wondering.

  Chapter

  9

  It’s ninety-nine miles to Barkandu from Ubondo and the road is a twisting, high-crowned ribbon of patched asphalt that steams in the African sun. On clear stretches, where the rain forest has been cut away, mirages gleam wetly in the distance. Along the road’s edge rest the hulks of rusting sedans and trucks whose drivers missed their last curve. The wrecks seem to wait patiently for the junkmen of the forest.

  The road from Barkandu leads north to the Sahara, and if you follow it far enough, to where the asphalt gives out to red laterite, and the laterite with its washboard ridges turns into sand and dust, you run into Timbuktu. But that’s a long way, farther than most care to travel unless it has taken them an extraordinarily long time to grow up.

  Mostly the road to Barkandu is traveled by the mammy wagons which are two-ton trucks with the right door tied open, the driver leaning halfway out, the better to see and the better to jump. The drivers push their trucks down to Barkandu and up to Ubondo and beyond, sometimes making six hundred miles a day, hauling humans and chickens and goats, bargaining for the fare with enthusiasm and flair. What they lack in driving skill they make up for in bravado. Armed with ten-quid juju charms that bear money-back guarantees in case they’re killed, encouraged by a couple of sticks of Indian hemp, they charge the approaching traffic. They must dominate all who pass their way.

  You can amuse yourself by reading the names of the mammy wagons as they flash by, the drivers mostly teeth and eyeballs as they lean half-out of their cabs, their passengers jolting around in the canvas-covered rears.

  “It’s better than parlor cars, boy,” Shartelle said as William steered the Humber towards Ubondo. “So far, I’ve spotted ‘Don’t Spit in the Wind,’ ‘Sea Never Dry,’ ‘God, Why Not?’
and ‘Death, Where Is Thy Sting?’ You never read any freight train names as interesting as that; weren’t even any names on the Katy parlor cars that could come close.”

  He was slouched down in the back seat, his black hat low over his eyes, a black, crooked cigar substituting now for the long-gone Picayunes and the discarded Sweet Ariels. His seersucker suit was crisp and fresh, the vest bottoned neatly except for the bottom button, a red and black paisley tie knotted carefully into the collar of a fresh white oxford cloth shirt. He had his feet, encased in black loafers, propped up on the walnut table that opened down from the back of the front seat.

  We had started out at nine that morning. He had given me a careful look, murmured something about it being a pleasant day, and asked if I would like some coffee. We had drunk coffee in the dining room at a table that had a view of the bay. “Some harbor,” Shartelle said after he had ordered his bacon and eggs. He didn’t say anything after that. He was polite.

  Anne had left at five in the morning. I had watched her dress and there had been no rummaging to find discarded clothing. She had sat before the mirror of the vanity and brushed her hair and looked at me in the mirror. I had looked back and we had smiled. There was no need to say anything; there would be time for that later. We had time, I felt, to squander.

  She came over to the bed when she had dressed and sat down on its edge beside me. She put her hand on my head and stroked my hair. “I have to go,” she had said.

  “I know.”

  “You’ll call?”

  “I’ll call you this evening.”

  I had kissed her then and she had risen and walked to the door, opened it and left without looking back. I lay there and smoked a cigarette and felt the unfamiliar emotions churning and bubbling around inside somewhere. It had been a peculiar old-young feeling, something like being a thirty-year-old grandfather, I suppose, and it had been especially peculiar because I hadn’t felt anything towards anyone for a long time. So I lay there and got used to it and watched the sun come up over the edge of the window. After that I got up, showered, dressed, and went down into the lobby to meet Shartelle.

  “You know where else I went yesterday?” Shartelle asked around his black and crooked cigar as the car sped towards Ubondo.

  “No.”

  “I went to pay my respects to the Consul General.”

  “I know. I was with you. He wasn’t in.”

  “I mean after that. Even after I went to see the little old Englishman in the Census Office.”

  “You mean you went back again?”

  “There’s more than one Consulate in Barkandu,” he said.

  “Okay. Which one?”

  “Why, the Israeli one.”

  “Clint, I’m not going to sit here and feed you the lines. You went to see the Israeli Consul General. Why?”

  “Well, sir,” he said, shifting farther down into the mohair of the Humber’s back seat, “I figured to myself this way: If I was a stranger in a town in a foreign country and I wanted to know what was going on, now who would I go to? Why, I said, I’d go look up the Israeli Ambassador, or if he wasn’t an Ambassador, I’d look up the Consul General.”

  “And what would you talk about?”

  “Why, kinfolk, boy, kinfolk.”

  “Whose?”

  “His and mine. I got kinfolk in Israel and this little old Jew boy at the Consulate had some in Cleveland that I believe I know. Good Democrats. That made me a Landsmann, prid near.”

  “What kinfolk have you got in Israel?”

  “Second cousins on my daddy’s side. I figure I’m about one-sixteenth Jewish by blood. Of course, I’m not of the persuasion although I do lean towards their oneist’s notions.”

  “Their what?”

  “Their oneist’s notions. You know, like the Unitarians.”

  “I thought Shartelle was French.”

  “It’s purely French, but I think it’s also a little Jewish-French, at least that’s what my daddy said.”

  “Okay. What did the Israeli Consul General have to allow?”

  “Well, he’d heard about Renesslaer already. He said that there was a team of four through Barkandu three days ago heading north by plane.”

  “Did he mention any names?”

  “No. He said they opened a five-figure pounds sterling account in Renesslaer’s name at one of the Barclay branches. High five-figures, he said. He also said that two of them were colored—Stateside colored—and the other two were white.”

  “We can check them out through London.”

  Shartelle nodded. “I figured Pig might do that.”

  “What else did he have to say?”

  “Well, he swore he’d deny he said it, but his government is afraid that the British are pulling out too quick. He said he thought that there could be trouble, especially if the election wound up in a donnybrook without a clear-cut win for one side or another—or at least for a strong coalition. He also said he thought he’d never see the day when he would admit that the British could leave any colonial possession too quick. But in this case they were.”

  “Everything considered, it was quite an admission,” I said.

  “You haven’t seen Martin Bormann around, have you?”

  “Who?”

  “Martin Bormann. You know, old Hitler’s deputy Führer who supposedly escaped from the bunker just before the Russians moved into Berlin.”

  “No,” I said, “I haven’t seen him around; not lately anyhow.”

  “If you do, let the Israeli Consul General know, will you? He’s been out here about three years and he figures he could get back home to Tel Aviv if he could get his hands on Bormann—or any other Nazi who’s still on the loose. He asked us to keep our eyes open.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “You know where else I went?”

  “No, but I’m sure I’m going to learn.”

  “Well, after I had tea at the Israeli’s I wandered down around the marketplace—where all those plump little old gals are all gussied up in their blue wraparounds?”

  “What did you find out?”

  “Well, I bought some razor blades here and some more of these cigars there. Bargained a bit, told a few jokes, and just funned them along. They’re real nice little old gals. A bit on the plump side, but neighborly.”

  “Neighborly,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. So we got to talking about the election. And they got to arguing back and forth, you know, one of them being for Chief Akomolo and another one being for old Alhaji Sir and the other being for the other guy, the one from the east, uh—”

  “Dr. Kologo,” I said.

  “Doctor, lawyer, merchant-chief,” Shartelle said. “Maybe I can keep them straight that way.”

  “So what was the consensus?”

  “The consensus, boy, was that they just don’t give much of a shit one way or another because they—the little old plump gals—think they’re all crooked and just out for the quick buck.”

  “We should be able to work that to our advantage.”

  “You know I told you yesterday I figured we’d have to whipsaw it, but I hadn’t quite figured it out and I thought it was nudging around in the back of my mind?”

  “I recall.”

  “Well, it came to me last night and after I got the big one, then the rest of it sort of fell into place. I think I’ve got it, but it’s going to cost a packet and its success’ll depend upon the venality of some and the patriotism of others. But successful politics usually does. I’ll be needing some fancy writing.”

  “Such as?”

  “Used to be an old newspaper boy that worked on one of these combination morning and afternoon papers that were supposed to be rivals, but are really owned by the same outfit?” He made it that kind of a Southern rhetorical question, the inflection rising until it keened out on the last word.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This old boy would get up in the morning and go down to his typewriter and whang out an editorial knocking h
ell out of FDR and Harry Hopkins and all that New Deal crowd. That was for the afternoon paper. Then he’d go out and get a couple of belts into him and come back and whang out another one—this time hoorahing it up for Mrs. Roosevelt, Jimmy, John, FDR, Jr. and calling down the wrath of God Almighty on their enemies and detractors. Now he was what I would call a versatile writer.”

  “I wonder which editorials he believed?”

  Shartelle shoved back his hat slightly and looked at me with a puzzled expression. “Why, he believed both of them, boy. Wouldn’t you?”

  I sighed and leaned back on the mohair. “You’re right, Clint, I probably would.”

  “Well, I figure you’re going to be doing some writing something like that old newspaper boy used to do.”

  “I’m your man. Just put the paper in the typewriter and I’m off. Either side.”

  William slowed the Humber, turned around and looked at us. I winced as a truck called “It Pains You Why?” nipped by us a couple of inches away.

  “Mastah want beer?” William said and redirected his attention to the road.

  “Beer?” I asked.

  “Yas, Sah, we stop for beer always at halfway house.”

  “Well, I never had anything against beer in the morning,” Shartelle said. “Let’s stop.”

  “Fine.”

  It was a combination roadhouse and gasoline station. It was built of whitewashed mud and inside it had deep wooden chairs with wide arms that looked like Midwestern porch furniture. The chairs were gathered around low wooden tables. A bar stood near the door, conveniently placed underneath the only ceiling fan, which spun at a leisurely and useless pace. A sign painted in an attempt at old English script hung outside over the door. It said the name of the place was The Colony. We sat at one of the tables. A man came over and in a flat American accent asked what our pleasure was.

  “Three beers,” Shartelle said. “Nice and cold.”

  “Nice and cold,” the man said. He walked back to the bar and uncapped three quart bottles of Beck’s. He put them on a tin tray, got some cold glasses out of a refrigerator, the kind that had the coils on top, and brought them over.

  “Nice and cold, gentlemen,” he said and served the beer. “That’ll be twelve and six.”