“And I’m doing okay?”
“You’re doing just dandy. And I might have a gift for you.”
“For me? What ever could you have gotten for me, Stony?” I picked up my drink and gave it a swirl that matched the swirling of my stomach. “Other than a dose of Maalox.”
“How about the goods on our friend Bettenhauser?”
“You got the goods on our self-righteous son of a bitch?”
“Come for a ride with me tomorrow and I’ll spell it out for you. And bring your bag, boy, I’ve been building up quite a tab.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Another round?”
“I drink another round, I’m going to get awfully stupid.”
“Splendid,” said Stony as he raised his hand. “You’re slipping into the role like a pro.”
CHAPTER 28
POLITICAL FAVORS
It wasn’t all Briggs’s Rules and underhanded payoffs, it wasn’t all ugly hats and hard liquor. There were other distractions in the bagman game. Politics and sex: they go together like gin and tonic, like chipped steak and cheese, like syphilis and insanity. Let’s just say one without the other would be beside the point. And as Stony pointed out, I was slipping into the role like a pro.
“Is that what you want?” I whispered into Ossana’s ear. My voice was soft as a breath, a conspirator’s sigh. “Is that the way you like it?”
It was later in the evening of our meeting at the Franklin, where we’d talked of dark secrets and monkeys’ paws. She was laid out beneath me now, slim and pale, arms raised, copper hair tossed, neck turned, breasts rising with each breath above delicate ribs, legs still clad in those red fishnet stockings attached with black straps to a lace belt. I grabbed the inside of her knee and lifted her leg, I cupped a breast, I reached for her neck with my teeth. And all the while she was silent and complacent. There was no urgency in her, no quickening.
“I’m going to devour every inch of you,” I said with a soft growl, and her eyes stared out with neither fear nor passion nor defiance.
It hadn’t been like this with her clothes on; with her clothes on, it was like she could barely wait to get mine off. She was all urgency and rush and sharp teeth, grabbing and loosening, laughing, hurrying to meet some deadline of her own desire. I struggled to catch on, to catch up. “Whoa, Nellie,” I said as she ripped at my shirt, buttons popping like popcorn in hot oil.
And then there I was, fully on board, yanking at her skirt, pressing my face between her cotton-covered breasts, feeling the power of ancient desire crest over us both. There is a moment when blood washes the newness off the thing, when the nervous hesitations fall away like iron shackles undone and all that is left is the raw wanting and the act itself. And we were there, both of us, I could feel it in her pulse, her breath, the pull of her teeth on the flesh of my breast.
I threw her on the bed and she laughed as I kissed her deep, and her shoulders rose as she reached her arms around my neck to kiss me back. We were on the precipice of pure abandon and then, like a switch, she turned.
And now I rubbed and kissed, caressed and stroked, and yet the deeper I reached, the less I found. She was pale and stretched and lovely and distant, as distant as a cold white star. I played rough, I played soft, I was silent, I bayed in my wanting. I was all manner of contradictory things, and none of it seemed to matter.
“Are you okay, Ossana?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Has something happened?”
“No,” she said.
I rose to my knees and stared down at her as she lay sprawled beneath me. Her soft skin glowed in its pallor, her red hair swept across her face and neck, her delicately lined palms were raised above her head like a bored go-go dancer at a second-rate club. The birds on her wrist meandered.
“Don’t stop,” she said, her voice now as flat as the gaze from her prairie eyes.
I grabbed her arm and pulled it to the left and it lay where I left it.
“Keep on,” she said.
I shifted her red-clad leg, her other arm; she was a stuffed rag doll, amenable to my every whim. This was not what I’d expected, this pale passivity. This was not what lived in my feverish imaginings when all the possibilities had spurted through my perverted soul. And yet, and yet, my God this was beguiling, too.
She was passive as a corpse with blood-red stockings, and I couldn’t get enough.
“Do you want a cigarette?” she said.
“I’d rather put your breast in my mouth.”
“Still?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. We were back in my apartment a few days after the first attempt—sadly, sans the red stockings, which I rather liked—trying again and ending with the same peculiar result.
“I thought you’d be plotting to get rid of me by now, shuffle me off to Buffalo.”
“Oh, I’m plotting all right.”
“You’re not disappointed?”
“Puzzled.”
“I’m a puzzler, I am. I even puzzle myself. My psychiatrist says I revel in being an enigma.”
“So open up, tell me those deep dark thoughts of yours.”
“Oh, Victor, isn’t it enough to know they’re paralytic? I want to forget them, not share them. That’s why psychiatry doesn’t work on me.”
“Then why do you keep going?”
“It’s like a form of yoga. I lie to her to empty my mind.”
“Is that what sex is, a way to forget?”
“No, that’s what alcohol is. Sex is what I use when the alcohol doesn’t work.”
“And thus . . .”
“Yes. Isn’t it romantic?”
“We’ll work on it.”
“How chivalrous, Victor. You want to save me with your lance. But maybe I don’t want to be saved.”
“Tough.”
“My sweet hard-boiled boy. You should wear your hat when you say that.”
“You think?”
“Absolutely.”
I rolled out of bed, headed to my living room, put on the hat and the beige raincoat with belt tied behind, grabbed my briefcase. Back in the bedroom, Ossana was sitting up now, one of her long legs bent at the knee and tilted over the other, her soft, full breasts pointing in opposite directions. When she saw me in my getup, her eyes brightened.
“The dashing bagman,” she said.
“You bet I am.”
“Now what are you going to do?”
“Take my cut.”
“As long as you don’t take off the hat.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, moving onto the bed, crawling forward on my knees until I was straddling her, my hips over her pale hips, the trail of my raincoat covering us both.
“You are such the grimy political fixer,” she said, her eyes widening with electricity that hadn’t been there before.
“You bet I am, sister, and it’s time to take your stinking payoff.”
And I gave it to her, yes, I did. And there was no death this time. I’m not talking la petite mort the French go on about—oh, those overly dramatic French, experts in food, fashion, and fornication (and what do we get, fantasy football?). I’m talking the death of will I had seen in her eyes. She didn’t turn into a corpse in the middle of it, passive as I had my way with her. This time she was a willing participant, and oh was she willing.
“You were like a different person,” I said after, as I rubbed my nose between her breasts.
“Was I?”
“You know it, too.”
“I stopped getting in the way.”
I flicked a nipple with my tongue and looked up at her. She was staring at the ceiling. “So if it wasn’t you, who was I having sex with?”
“An abstract interpretation of myself, a Rothko painting.”
“Rectangular fields of color?”
“Yes. Black. Or blue. Or both, with a single line of red.”
“Fishnet red.”
“You liked?”
“Oh, yes. And if you were a Rothko, what was I?”
“You were a Jasper Johns.”
“A flag?”
“And a hat. And a trench coat. And a bag.”
“So it wasn’t me you were screwing, it was the costume.”
“My psychiatrist says I have a problem with intimacy.”
“Your psychiatrist is a hack.”
“Of course she is. I wouldn’t dream of going to anyone who wasn’t.”
“You know, Ossana, I’m more than just a bagman.”
“Don’t ruin it, darling.”
And there it was, now out in the open, the sad truth I was only just beginning to learn. We like to think we are in control of our destinies, that our tools toil in service to our ends. The Crusader wielded his sword to glorify God, but how long was it before the sword wielded him? And who among us are not slaves to our smartphones?
The bagman carries his satchel of sour political crimes all around the town, selling bits of his soul with each transaction designed to keep someone else’s power flowing. How could he ever have expected that the bag wouldn’t soon be lugging the man?
CHAPTER 29
POLLS
Have you seen the latest polls?” said Tom Mitchum in a hotel suite high in a tower just off the Parkway. He was standing at the window, looking out over his boss’s fiefdom, his jacket off, his suspenders tight. “The numbers aren’t pretty.”
“Maybe your pollster could jazz up the charts,” I said. “Add some color, use a better font.”
“What Tom is trying to say,” said the Congressman, giving me the stare and speaking slowly, as if I were a Frenchman, “is that we’ve lost ground despite your much-appreciated efforts.”
“I’m doing what I can with the tools I have,” I said.
“Do more,” said Ossana DeMathis, standing in the corner with a drink in her hand. I turned my chin toward her and kept my eyes flat. That was how we were playing it, per her instructions, like nothing more than business associates, and since she was higher up in the organization, her instructions held. But there was a harshness in her voice I didn’t like, a sense of overweening authority. I don’t mind taking orders from someone I’m screwing—sometimes I actually like it—but I prefer it to be in bed.
I had been summoned to the suite to give a report on my activities. Politicians just love their hotel suites. Parked by the door was a service cart, with the leavings of a meal scattered across its linen-covered surface: half-eaten club sandwiches, a gnawed pile of bones, an empty bottle of Perrier. I hadn’t been invited to the party portion of the afternoon. I wasn’t the kind of employee you lunched with; I was the kind of employee you instructed to enter the hotel through the rear entrance. As for me, my only thought on looking around the room was that politics would be so much simpler without the politicians.
“So where are we on your efforts?” said Mitchum. “Tell us about your progress.”
My progress?
I could have waxed about my descent into the shadowy netherworld where the gears of politics and money brutally mesh, about my journey into the inferno with my guide Stony Mulroney, about how Maud had ferried me across the River Stinks, and about how I’d finally found a world where the grit and grime matched the darkness at the root of my soul. Oh, I could have gone on and on, and bored them all to tears, but no one in that room, including me, was interested in metaphysics. And so instead I told them about the labor leader, about my run-in with Hanratty, the community sports organizer, about the ward leaders I had reached, the election judges, the opinion makers and local columnists.
“I’ve gone through the list Ossana gave me,” I said. “We’re right on track. And I’m setting up an anti-Bettenhauser demonstration that should move the needle on those polls of yours.”
“What kind of demonstration?” said the Congressman.
“Tom told me what Bettenhauser said in response to the most recent school shooting. I paid the local NRA guy to picket Bettenhauser’s environmental speech next week.”
“You should have cleared that with me first,” said Mitchum. “I’m not sure it’s so wonderful to emphasize that Bettenhauser is pro–gun control and pro-environment at this point in the race.”
“It’s all in the packaging,” I said. “We have to make sure the news reports show him as a divisive figure, an anti-gun crazy and a climate-change crazy at the same time. A daily double for your base.”
“What does someone like you know about our base?” said Ossana.
“More than you would think,” I said cheerfully. “One could say my whole career has been nothing but base.”
“Maybe I should follow up with a speech about the need to reach across the aisle and build consensus,” said the Congressman. “That always goes over well.”
“Let’s wait until after the primary to start reaching for the middle,” said Mitchum. “How are you set for financing, Victor?”
“That’s a problem,” I said. “I told you about Mrs. Devereaux’s unhappiness. She’s cut off the spigot until you can convince her that her priorities are being looked at.”
“I’ll talk to her,” said Mitchum.
“That won’t do it. She wants to talk to the Congressman himself. What is it that she’s after, anyway? She made it sound pretty specific.”
“That’s not your concern,” snapped Ossana. “Just do what you need to do to keep her happy.”
“I don’t know if I’m man enough to keep her happy,” I said. “I think six matadors and a stable of bulls aren’t man enough to keep her happy.”
“She is a feisty one all right,” said the Congressman. “You find anything on Bettenhauser?”
“I’ve got a man on it who says he’s found something interesting. I’ll get you the details when I can.”
“We don’t want the details,” said Mitchum. “We need deniability. Any dirt you find, give it to Sloane.”
“Sloane? You trust that dirtball?”
“I trust his unabashed desire for a story,” said Mitchum. “He’d eat dog shit if it got him the front page. Just make sure it’s the dog shit we want him to eat.”
“All right. Tom, Ossana,” said the Congressman. “Why don’t you leave Victor and me alone for a few moments?”
“You don’t think it’s better if I stay?” said Ossana.
“No, I don’t,” said the Congressman, with a straight razor in his voice. He sat there without looking at his sister, and I spied something on her face just then, a stain of anger that was more real and intimate than any emotion I had seen spill across her face in our nights of wanton sex. The emotion was so raw it was hard to look at, like I was stealing something. I turned my face away until she stalked out after Tom Mitchum and slammed the door behind her.
“My sister is . . . quite protective of me,” said the Congressman.
“It must be nice. I’m an only child.”
“In some ways you’re lucky. I’ve been questioned about the Shoeless Joan murder by that Detective McDeiss. The police know you met with her.”
“Yes.”
“How did they know that?”
“Somebody led them to me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Damn inconvenient. I refused to answer any questions, but McDeiss promised he’d be back with an immunity offer to make me talk. Is there anything I need to know?”
“Just tell the truth.”
“He’ll want to know what she was blackmailing me with.”
“Yes.”
“Did she say anything when you met with her?”
“No.”
“Nothing about her secret?”
“No.”
>
“Did she give you anything?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Good. Hopefully, they’ll solve the thing before he gets back to me. Now this is what I really wanted to talk to you about.” He leaned forward, twisting one hand in the other. “Have you heard from Miss Duddleman? She doesn’t answer my calls, she’s not at her home when I stop by . . .”
“I don’t want to be the one to break it to you, but maybe she’s moved on.”
“She couldn’t, not so easily. You don’t know what we were together. She wouldn’t just go off without telling me, or at least having a scene of some sort.”
“She does love her scenes.”
“I want you to find her for me, Victor.”
“I don’t know if that’s such a—”
“I can’t work, I can’t function. I don’t care about the job, the election, anything. I want you to tell her that. Have you ever been in love?”
“You’re married.”
“What does that matter?”
“She’s half your age.”
“She makes me feel half my age. I’m not asking for your permission, Victor, I’m asking for your help. You’re the only one who can get through to her. Find her. Talk to her. Make sure she’s okay. Tell her I am desperate to see her, to touch her. Tell her that I love her.”
“You want me to tell Amanda Duddleman that you love her?”
“If that’s what it takes for her to return my calls. If she doesn’t want to see me anymore, I’ll have to accept that. I’ll move on. But, Victor, I need to know.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll talk to her?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
“But don’t get your hopes up. She’s an independent one, that Duddleman.”
“I know. I know. It drives me crazy.”
“No arguments on that.”
On the way out of the suite, bag in one hand and hat in the other, I was stopped by Ossana with a palm on my chest. She pulled me into a bedroom, closed the door, kissed me hard. I let her, but I didn’t join in the party.
Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) Page 18
