by W. T. Tyler
“Can I help you?” asked the bright-eyed young girl at the car rentals counter.
She told him they had Fiats and a few Mercedeses for rent, but she wasn’t sure about Alfas. She thought they might have one. “I can check if you like.” Through the doorway of the small office behind the counter, the toe of a wing-tipped shoe was visible, lifted to the corner of a cluttered desk. A squall of cigarette smoke and the muttered sounds of a random phone conversation drifted out the doorway, idle intimacies being exchanged at the end of a long afternoon.
“Don’t bother,” he said. “Is the lot outside?”
“In the basement, across the street, and then the reserve lot.”
“Where is that?”
“Near Alexandria.” She gave him a brochure and a rate schedule. Inserted in the brochure was a yellow flier advertising weekend discounts for excursions to an Atlantic City casino. “Potomac Towers tenants get a fifteen percent discount,” she told him.
“You do a lot of business that way?”
“Quite a bit, I suppose.”
“What about Caltronics upstairs—did they do much business with you?”
“Oh, yes, quite a bit. They’ve gone now.”
“So I heard. Thanks.”
He left. The manager still hadn’t returned and he went down the concrete steps to the basement, walking past the cars on the first and second subterranean levels. There was only a single Fiat parked in the rental car area. Across the street, a black attendant was listening to a transistor radio in the guard hutch at the front of the parking lot. The Embassy Car Rentals area was far to the rear, identified by a metal sign wired to the cyclone fence. Twilight was coming on by the time he reached it, and he found no Alfa, but he knew by then this was the wrong way to begin. He wasn’t even sure why it mattered.
He went back to the Center. He didn’t feel like having drinks with the Kramers that evening, but he’d promised Rita.
6.
A gold-and-white Moroccan bird cage hung from a Moorish post near the circular leather lounge seat where Artie Kramer sat, and he’d summoned the waiter to have it removed. It was unhealthy, he complained, but the waiter told him the birds were only decorative, part of the decor of the Marrakesh Room. Kramer pointed out that there were live cockatoos in the large white cage inside the door and insisted that something with dirty feathers had just moved in the cage hanging near the table. The headwaiter soon arrived, but by then Rita Kramer had gotten up to inspect the cage and confirmed that the perch held only an exotic facsimile of a tropical bird, fashioned from a few feathery plumes.
“What do you mean, making a fuss?” Kramer said to his wife after the two waiters had left. They were both dressed for an evening in a box at the Kennedy Center. “I saw something move, I’m telling you. Who’s making a fuss? You ever see those tarantulas come in with those banana boats from South America? It might have been a real bird in there, for all you care. People breathe in that stuff and that’s why you’ve got all that TB in Manhattan, all those pigeons roosting outside. You think a New York pigeon is bad, wait till some Mexican pigeon unloads on you.”
“Marrakesh is in Morocco,” said Rita Kramer, looking away.
“Who wants to sit in a bird zoo and have a drink, anyway?” he continued to Wilson. “It’s like this condo my mother’s got in Miami, which is why I don’t visit her like I should. It’s like living in a goddamn bird cage—worse. On the bottom. My old lady, she eats and sleeps TV in a six-room condo; is that healthy or not? You talk to her and that’s all you get—birdseed. Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Donahue, the soaps, Dallas—all these little dabs of TV shit dropping on you all day long. She wants me to have a house in Palm Springs on account of her asthma, so she can come visit me and tell me what she saw on TV. Rita can tell you. Am I right or not, babe?”
She ignored him, gazing out across the lounge, chin on her folded hands. Her eyes, dark with shadow, seemed not so much disdainful as fatalistic.
“I got a cousin, this musician,” Kramer continued, “he plays saxophone with this hotel combo down there and lived with her for a little while. It ruined him, all that talk. He had to get out. You heard about all those sea birds on the beach after an oil spill? Feathers all gunked up with tar and oil? This cousin, he’s a musician, like I say, and after six months in the condo with her, that’s the way he was. She’s got a voice like an ice pick, like a laser beam. You’re shaving at the bathroom mirror, door closed. Electric, even. Zap! She’s got you, right through the walls. A musician, he’s gotta have space, he’s gotta have quiet. After six months with her, this cousin couldn’t write a note, couldn’t blow a tune, nothing, like one of those birds on the beach after an oil tanker’s dumped on him. She did that to my old man for forty years, dumped on him till he didn’t know what the shit was happening to him, why his hair fell out, why he had heart trouble, couldn’t breathe at night, lost his appetite. ‘Never get married,’ my old man told me in the hospital. His dying words.” He looked at his wife. “What’s the trouble?”
“We’re not talking about your mother,” Rita said.
“I feel bad about it ’cause there’s nothing I can do. What do you want I should do—take sides against a dead man?”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“So I’m talking to Wilson. Do you want I should put on my pajamas and prayer shawl and go climb on the couch with one of your Jewish doctor friends for five hundred an hour?”
“Finish what you started,” she said wearily.
“I got together two hundred, maybe three hundred grand for these wimp congressmen I was telling you about. I don’t wanna put a lid on it—the money, I mean. Maybe it was more. But I’m not looking for any payoff, understand?”
“I understand. What did they promise?” Wilson asked.
“Nothing, not in so many words, but we had an understanding, you could say. Then I come to the inaugural ball, put on a white tie, Rita a custom Godolfo dress, and I get the fever again. What do they call it?”
“Potomac fever,” Wilson said.
“What’s that?” Rita asked.
“It’s a respiratory ailment,” Wilson told her. “Defeated senators and congressmen get it, so do retired generals and diplomats. It’s a collapsed ego, curable only in the Washington oxygen tent.”
“Hot air,” Rita said. “Oh, sure.”
“What’d he say?” Kramer asked, distracted by the arrival of a formally dressed couple at the next table. The woman wore a long skirt and sable, the gray-haired man a tuxedo. They moved with a certain graceful indolence, conscious of the attention they’d drawn.
“Tent city. Why don’t you listen when you ask a question?”
“I was listening.” His eyes wandered back. “Being in Washington pumped me up again. Things were gonna change after the Carter mess and I wanted a piece of it, so I got the fever. Some of my friends thought I was out of my mind, crazy.” His small manicured fingers fondled his cheek and jaw, touching his tanned skin. “You think I shaved close enough?”
“That’s not the half of it,” Rita was saying. “Strykker was dead set against it. He told Artie to forget about it.”
“Yeah, well, he had his reasons,” her husband said, his eyes lingering again on the couple in sable and tuxedo. “Some new projects he wanted me in on.”
“That’s pure bullshit.”
“O.K., lemme talk, all right? Don’t talk so loud anyway. You may think it’s bullshit, but your violin wouldn’t fill up Carnegie Hall, either.”
Cocktail music was playing in the background and Wilson nursed his drink as he listened to Kramer describe his talks with the transition committee during that week in Washington. One member of the staff had kept in touch with him after his return to California, but in June he’d returned to private life and his replacement had been less forthcoming. Kramer’s congressional friends had assured him that the White House appointments staff was working on his assignment. Pete Rathbone, who’d been asked to reorganize Caltronics under a n
ew management team, had told him to be patient. Then, to his surprise, quite a few people in Los Angeles seemed to know about his pending appointment.
“That’s because you’d been shooting your mouth off,” Rita said, “all over town.…”
“I don’t shoot my mouth off,” Kramer said indignantly. “Do I look like a guy who shoots his mouth off? A blowhard? Not this guy, not me. You can ask my friends, Wilson. Anyway, all of a sudden I’m getting calls from schmucks I’d never heard of, like everything was up for grabs and I was the guy to see. I get calls from a cable TV outfit, a couple of coin companies that want a piece of the action on these coins for the L.A. Olympics, even a couple of garbage companies that are dumping for these chemical plants. Then this guy comes to see me, a guy that’s collected some money from Caltronics on government contracts—finders’ fees, they call them. He says he’s got real good contacts in Washington, where he’s got an office—”
“Who was that?” Wilson asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kramer said.
“He was a friend of Strykker,” Rita put in.
“What’d you say that for?” her husband asked, annoyed.
“Because he asked.”
“We’re not talking names, we’re just talking, O.K.?”
She ignored him. “You want to know his first name?” she asked Wilson. “It’s Chuck. He came out to the house for drinks after he called Artie, using Strykker’s name. He just walks in and five minutes later it’s ‘Artie’ this and ‘Artie’ that, and I’m ‘Rita’ and he’s ‘Chuck’—a real greaser.”
“What was his last name?” Wilson asked. Neither answered. Rita sat in silence, looking at her husband, who was still sulking, slumped down in the lounge seat and looking off across the shadowy lounge.
“So this jerk came to see you,” Rita began quietly, still watching her husband, a sudden invalid, a pouting child. “Go ahead, finish it. We’re trying to help.”
After a minute, he stirred. “So this guy comes to see me,” he said in a weak voice. “I’m not saying who. I’m no rat snitch. He comes to see me on account of he’s heard I’m lining up a government job. He tells me what I should go for, the jobs that pay off the best. First, there’s this thing called the property disposal board that’s going to auction off all this government property. He says I should go for that. There’s this here one job on the board still open. He tells me I should go for it. Then he starts talking about the government property they’re gonna sell off, like this piece in Vegas, about a hundred acres of sagebrush near the airport, just down from the Strip. It’s worth twenty, thirty million. Maybe we can cut a deal, he tells me. Can you imagine this schlemiel? I tell him he’s got rocks in his head.”
“So what did he say?”
“He keeps on talking. A motor-mouth, this guy. He tells me I ought to think about this GSA outfit, since they do all the government purchasing, handle the property, the leasing, buy all the furniture. He says they even have a computer section and that would tie in good with Caltronics. I’m really hot by this time. I tell him if I’m going to Washington, it’s not gonna be as any warehouse clerk—”
“A definite sleazebag,” Rita said.
“O.K., but he’s Strykker’s buddy and did him some favors on government contracts. I don’t wanna step on any toes. He’s got connections here—”
“For Christ’s sake, grow up!” Rita exclaimed. “He’s just a cheap hustler, the way Strykker started out. I knew that as soon as he walked in the door.” She took a cigarette from the silver case on the table and lit it. “Artie’s just being loyal,” she told Wilson. “Maybe he can’t say it, but I can. Strykker once tried to get Artie interested in this film outfit his brother-in-law picked up. It’s a good thing he stayed out. Artie knew then what Strykker was all about, even if he won’t admit it.”
“It was just small potatoes,” her husband grumbled, “rabbit turds—nothing worth getting excited about. Anyway, that was ten years ago.”
“Strykker had big plans for this film company,” she continued. “real classy—motel room peep shows, funky porn on closed-circuit TV. A real Cecil B. De Mille type, this Strykker.”
“That was a bad rap,” her husband said, stroking his tan jaws again. “He’s got a new image now.”
“Oh, yeah. A new image, sure. He got baptized. They baptize them every week that way out in L.A. The district attorney does it. The district attorney and the grand jury.”
“Rita’s got it all wrong,” Artie said. “An investigation, not an indictment. Strykker told me all about it. It wasn’t him, anyway; it was his brother-in-law, and it was eight, ten years ago.”
“A few smut shops, a couple of outcall massage parlors. Takeout sex.”
“Come on, that wasn’t Strykker. What’d you have to bring that up for?”
“To let him know what Strykker is all about. He’d sell anybody, just like he’d buy anything if he thought he could get away with it. People like that don’t change.”
Wilson frowned, watching her face.
“What’s the trouble?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you what Strykker is all about,” her husband continued. “Over two hundred million last year, maybe more. You’re always getting hot about something, all the time complaining about someone trying to hustle me. Me, I just take human nature as it is. I don’t second-guess nobody.”
They sat in silence. The fog of cocktail music had evaporated, uncovering in the far corner a small figure who’d just taken his place behind a piano. His first chords were muted but tender, an anniversary request for two tables of nearby tourists.
“There’s a question I wanted to ask,” Wilson said, “something I’m not clear on.”
“Go ahead,” Kramer said without enthusiasm, still wounded by Rita’s revelations.
“That day at the house on the Potomac, you seemed to think it was some kind of scam. I didn’t understand that, I still don’t.”
Rita looked at her husband, waiting. “Yeah,” he began, “something funny going on. It didn’t add up. Not right away. It was something I didn’t tell Rita.” He turned to her. “This guy comes to see me again, this guy we were talking about, the schlemiel that hears I’m lining up a government job.”
“Chuck, you mean?” she asked.
“Names don’t matter. I didn’t tell you, but I might as well. So what do you think this crumb has the nerve to say to me this second time? It’s at my office. He tells me he hears my appointment’s got lost. Remember, this is the guy with the Washington connections, the guy that’s got those finders’ fees from Caltronics. What do you think he says?”
“I don’t know,” Rita said. “Where was I?”
“You were here, looking for a house, that first week.” He turned to Wilson. “What do you think this crumb says?”
“I couldn’t guess,” Wilson said.
“I’ll tell you what he says,” Artie continued, sitting up indignantly. “He tells me, ‘You wanna federal job, Artie, you got one,’ just like that. ‘No sweat.’ So I remember these government contracts he’s gotten for Strykker. I’m talking maybe fifty, sixty million, understand. So that’s what comes into my mind. Big dough. So I ask him, ‘How much?’ ‘Ten grand,’ this sleazebag says, and I tell him to get the shit out of my office. I mean, here I raised all this money for the Republican campaign committees, these congressmen, maybe two, three hundred thou, and this crum bum in a fifty-dollar suit is asking me to take ten grand for a federal job. Can you imagine this guy? I got Mexican cloth cutters down at the dress factory could hustle me with more class than this slob. I’m burned, really burned. I mean, it takes me the whole morning to get my head together. What the hell do they think I am—some cheap little shyster that’ll take a ten-grand fix? That’s gotta be peanuts, you know what I mean? I mean, I’ve got my self-respect.…”
Rita looked away suddenly. Wilson was the prisoner of the outraged eyes and the small hand that clutched his sleeve, bathed momentarily in a mist of expensive Sc
otch, light shampoo, and exotic skin bracer.
Even larceny had its protocol, Wilson thought dismally.
“Then I get to Washington and on Sunday Rita shows me this house out there. Maybe that’s O.K. for her, trying to impress a few flaky friends down at Malibu, but what about me? There are a couple of cops in blue uniforms around the gate, the place is wired up like a rock band, and I get the word you and this lawyer were feds at the Justice Department, the guy that owns it is CIA. Something’s going on, right?”
Feeling very stupid, Wilson said, “I still don’t understand.” Rita hadn’t turned.
“It’s a setup,” Kramer said. “That’s what I’m thinking—it’s a setup. I don’t go for the ten grand this schlemiel is dangling, maybe I’ll go for something bigger. You’ve got my hundred-and-fifty-grand deposit, only when settlement time comes, you feds are gonna give me a pitch. I’m your pigeon now and you guys are gonna rip me off, only with more class this time, something that breaks big all over the front pages, like an Abscam.” He neatly drew the headline in the air with his manicured fingers. “‘L.A. Businessman Pays Thirty Grand for Political Appointment.’ You see what I’m thinking?”
“I see what you’re thinking,” Wilson conceded, “but it’s a little primitive, isn’t it?”
Rita had turned to look at her husband. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“I’m talking to Wilson. You’re telling me Abscam wasn’t primitive?”
“Possibly. But that means you thought this approach in L.A., the ten thousand, was a government sting,” Wilson said.
“I’m nervous, I’m real nervous. What do I know what to think? This guy Chuck has real good connections in Washington. Too good, you know what I mean. Like you and this lawyer, Donahan—”
