Dry Bones

by Peter Quinn

  “Sure, that shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Miss O’Keefe was at her desk scribbling with a mechanical pencil in a composition book. She closed it as soon as he came in. “There were no calls, Mr. Dunne.”

  “Ken Moss will be by at eleven. Have him wait five minutes, then send him in.”

  “Yes, Mr. Dunne.” She returned to her composition book.

  Ken Moss had pestered him the previous October to sit down with Alvin Capshaw to do an interview for an upcoming issue of some magazine he’d never heard of. He refused. Moss came to his office and handed him several back copies. “It’s an industry-sponsored publication. ISC and a consortium of other companies finance it. All the pieces are positive. There are no newsstand sales, but it’s sent to all the major corporations, banks, brokerages, and law firms.”

  “Sounds like malarkey.”

  “It’s public relations.”

  “Stunt?”

  “Tool.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I wish you’d reconsider.”

  “The business of this business is keeping the business to yourself.”

  “Nice line.” Moss wrote it down in his notepad. He stayed around, asked a few more questions.

  Didn’t give it another thought until that morning, parked on a stool at the counter in Chock Full o’Nuts for his regular breakfast of coffee and powdered doughnut, he remembered he’d stuck an envelope from Ken Moss in his case when he’d hurried out of the office the previous Friday.

  He snapped open the case, slapped the envelope on the counter, and extracted a copy of Modern Detection with paper-clipped note: Fin, Enjoy! Ken. He almost spit out a mouthful of coffee and doughnut when he flipped to the table of contents and saw listed, under Profiles, Fintan Dunne: A Soldier’s Soldier. Shock turned to fury at the photo of General Donovan and himself accompanying the piece—the same one Ken Moss had talked him into hanging outside his office.

  He was glad he’d decided against subjecting Moss to a verbal blitz that would have embarrassed them both. Though he was still fuming when he saw Moss in the conference room, Billings’s pep talk/lecture/pronouncement had a smothering effect. The handwriting on the wall, up to now as indistinct as the faces in that Joan Crawford stag film, was now as unmistakable as the gigantic neon Pepsi-Cola sign across the East River.

  True, Billings had skated as skillfully as Dick Button across the thin ice of lofty generalities, but it didn’t take an Ivy League degree to figure out that ISC’s new trajectory meant concentrating on a narrow spectrum of interests and investments.

  Maybe, if Louie Pohl were still alive, there’d be a chance of getting a contract renewal for another four years. But Louie’s mortal remains were on his mother’s mantel in Forest Hills. Dunne had little doubt that when New Year’s rolled around, odds were his office would have a new carpet, a fresh coat of paint, and a younger occupant.

  Maybe he’d go back to running his own agency. But those days were over and done. Small agencies had gone the way of rumble seats and big bands. Even if he were pigheaded enough to try, it couldn’t be done on a part-time basis. Roberta and he would have to spend all year in New York, which neither was prepared to do.

  He thought back to Billings’s phrase, “the velocity of change.” Time had its own momentum, backward as well as forward, the present rises, the past sinks, vice versa. The week before, he’d passed the same playground he passed every day on his way to work. A boy and girl rode the seesaw up and down, chorusing, “Seesaw Marjorie Daw.” He stopped and watched. Suddenly, he remembered his father watching him and his sister, Maura, on a seesaw in the playground in Tompkins Square Park, the day that Mayor Gaynor cut the ribbon to open it—the only time his father had taken them there.

  Seesaw Marjorie Daw

  Johnny will have a new master.

  The boy was bigger than the girl. Without any warning, he stopped the up-and-down motion, squatted on his end, and left the girl suspended in the air.

  “No fair!” she squealed. “Let me down!”

  The boy stayed where he was. The girl kept crying, “Let me down!”

  Dunne hollered, “You heard her! Play fair! Let her down!”

  The identical words his father had used when he played the same trick on Maura.

  The boy looked over. His face was red. He pushed off the ground with a frog-like spring of his legs. Up he went, down she came. They resumed their chorus:

  Seesaw Marjorie Daw

  Johnny will have a new master

  He shall earn but a penny a day

  Because he can’t work any faster

  Roberta smiled at him from the silver-framed photo beside the phone. Her hat was shaped like a ball of dandelion florets. Already out of date. She’d be irate to know this was the photo he kept on his desk. But she didn’t know, and he didn’t care. Her face was radiant and expectant. The Versailles on East 50th Street, his first week home.

  She’d met him at the dock as soon as he disembarked. She’d rented a room at the Plaza. A lot of lost time to make up for. The passion they shared was fiery, unquenchable.

  And consummated.

  Over and over.

  Ahh.

  New York, thirteen years ago, when Ken Moss was twelve, probably, and Billings sixteen, half their lifetimes ago, yesterday for Dunne, ship slips through the Narrows, into embrace of bay and harbor, sun setting behind the Palisades like a red-hot nickel slowly sinking into a slot machine, whammy, biggest jackpot of all, home alive and whole, towers of lower Manhattan hived with electric light, buzzing hello, not a bomb-pasted building or bullet-riddled street in sight, no rain, no ruins, no rocket’s red glare, booze and gasoline plentiful and free-flowing as the waters of the mighty Hudson.

  Eventually, the gravity of memory—of those who didn’t make it back, of events better forgotten—would reassert its weight. But those first few days, everything is present tense. Roberta is in the bed at the Plaza. No dream, not this time. Listening to Perry Como in the Versailles. (Dunne palms a five-spot to the photographer to snap a shot when she’s not looking.) They are in the cab on the way back to the Plaza. The driver watches in the mirror as they pet like hormone-crazed school kids.

  Intense pleasure like intense pain admits only one moment: Now.

  Seesaw Marjorie Daw.

  That was then.

  He heard Ken Moss bantering with Miss O’Keefe.

  “He’s running a little late. Have a seat. He’ll be with you in a moment.”

  “I’m on a pretty tight schedule myself.”

  “You’ll just have to wait.”

  Dunne pressed the intercom button: “It’s all right, Miss O’Keefe. Send him in.”

  A few seconds of silence told him she was annoyed at being overruled for following instructions given a few minutes before. “As you wish, Mr. Dunne.”

  Thumbing through the magazine on his desk, Dunne didn’t look up.

  Moss lurked by the door. “You wanted to see me? Here I am. In the flesh.”

  “Have a seat.”

  “Wynne is bringing me along to a meeting at GE. We leave in fifteen minutes.”

  “This won’t take fifteen minutes.” Dunne folded the magazine shut, pushed it across the desk, asked, “Alvin Capshaw, I presume?”

  “I wrote most of it.” Moss grinned and sat. “Capshaw lent his name to it. He doesn’t come cheap.” He shunted French cuffs above thin wrists covered with honey-colored fuzz, lifted the magazine on left palm, wet right index finger on tip of tongue, and turned the pages. He held up the picture of Dunne and Donovan. “Can’t argue with publicity this good.”

  “It’s bullshit.”

  “Bullshit?” Moss dropped the magazine onto his lap.

  “I told you I didn’t want any part of this.”

  “Which is why I didn’t bother you.”

  “So you went ahead and made it up?”

  “We’d already paid for the pages.”

  “You should have asked for your mo
ney back.”

  “I did. It was too late.”

  “You’ve made me into a liar.”

  “A liar? How?”

  “I never told you I went to Fordham.”

  “You told me you went to school in the Bronx.”

  “The Catholic Protectory was hybrid reformatory and orphanage.”

  “It was in the Bronx, right?”

  “Not near Fordham. The zoo is near Fordham. I wasn’t schooled at either.”

  Moss ran his finger down the page. “Here: It says you ‘attended’ Fordham. That could mean you went and watched a football game.”

  “With Horatio Alger and William Holden?”

  “Those are allusions, that’s all.”

  “Delusions, you mean.”

  “Modern Detection isn’t Time magazine. It’s not all tied up in fact-checking.”

  “No kidding.”

  Moss sank down in the chair. “I did my best with what I had.”

  “Your best is to have me say, ‘I prefer the warm embrace of sunshine’?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “I sound like a moony schoolgirl. Then again, it’s a cut above drivel like ‘education,’ ‘professionalization,’ and, er, what was the last of the trio?”

  “Conglomeration.”

  “That’s it. I guess when General Donovan calls to find out how I had the nerve to make commercial use of his photograph, I can tell him I was ‘conglomerated.’”

  “The picture is on your wall.”

  “My wall isn’t printed and distributed across the country.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way. I thought I was doing you a favor.” Moss folded his hands together, an almost penitent gesture. “I really did.”

  Whatever residue of anger Dunne entertained drained away. Moss accepted his offer of a cigarette and pulled out a lighter. His fingers shook as he thumbed the flint wheel. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not that way.”

  “What way?”

  “Wynne and his buddies.”

  “What about them?”

  “Wynne is in a hurry.”

  “I figured that out on my own.”

  “But he’s not trying to throw you overboard. He wants to bring new ways of thinking to ISC—a strategy in sync with the changes going on all around us. It’s dogma with him: ‘Change is good.’”

  “I don’t think the change from Weimar Republic to Third Reich was so hot.”

  “You know what I mean, Fin.” Moss snapped his fingers. “Times change, and we change with them. The velocity of change makes it all the more urgent. Put the right pieces together in the right way, snap, snap, each part of the company has got to support the others, snap, and if we do it right, snap, the way Wynne has laid out, snap, snap, we’ll achieve amazing synergies.”

  “Synergies?”

  “When the parts work together to achieve what they couldn’t on their own. A pile of bones is just a pile of bones. Assemble them correctly, snap, snap, you get a Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris. Wynne respects you as a professional—as I do—but also as a vet, somebody who did his fair share—and more—when it really counted.

  “As we move into synthetics, electronics, and avionics, the need for investigation and security grows exponentially. Not the old-style grunt work like with Pepsi and Miss Crawford. But on a new, higher level. Wynne didn’t mention it at the meeting, but the biggest factor of all is national defense; twenty-six billion dollars for highways is cheap change compared to what it’ll take to trump the Reds in Europe, Indo-China, the Americas, and, last but not least, outer space.

  “Wynne put it to me this way: ‘Change is nothing more than a synonym for opportunity.’ He might have borrowed from Dale Carnegie—he does that a lot—but that can’t take away from the truth of it.”

  Moss stood, crushed his cigarette in the ashtray on Dunne’s desk. “I have to run or I’m going to be late for that meeting with GE. We’ll talk more when I get back.”

  Miss O’Keefe entered simultaneously with Moss’s exit. She placed a sheet of paper on his desk. “Here are your appointments for the rest of the day. You’re scheduled for lunch with Mr. Lawson at Longchamps at twelve thirty.”

  “Lawson?”

  “Mr. Brigham Lawson from Pan Am. Mr. Billings arranged it, remember? Unfortunately, he can’t join you, so the reservation is just for two.”

  Lawson, Brigham: Billings brought him by the office several weeks before on the way back from lunch. Lawson was flying on a full tank of martinis or Manhattans. Friendly to the point of blustery, he was very taken with the picture of General Donovan. He’d served with the statistical control unit for Major General Curtis LeMay’s Bomber Command during the devastating B-29 raids on Japan.

  “All I got to fly was a desk,” he joked. “Must have been a thrill to work with Wild Bill. We had a saying in Bomber Command: ‘The Marines did the fighting, the Army muddled through, the Navy grabbed the glory, the Air Force won the war, and the OSS had all the fun.’ Ha, ha, just kidding.” The back pat he landed bordered on painful.

  Dunne wasn’t looking forward to lunch.

  Miss O’Keefe perched her eyeglasses on her nose, picked up the copy of Modern Detection Moss had left on the chair.

  “Keep it if you’d like. Might be of interest to a novelist.”

  “A novelist?” she asked in the questioning tone of someone unsure whether to feel affronted or appreciated. “What makes you think I’m a novelist?”

  He felt a flush of embarrassment. Crassness of peeking in her drawer without permission. He swiveled in his chair and fussed with a stack of papers on the window ledge. “Aren’t all English majors would-be novelists? Goes with the territory, no?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Or poets. A buddy of mine in the war majored in English at Harvard. He was mad about poetry.”

  “Is he the one who gave you The Oxford Book of Modern Verse?”

  “The what?”

  “The book in your bottom drawer.”

  He slipped open the drawer and lifted some papers. “I forgot it’s here.”

  “I’ve borrowed it on occasion. I hope you don’t mind. I know you don’t consider bottom drawers sacrosanct.”

  Miss O’Keefe showed him a smile he hadn’t seen before, slightly askew, street-wise. “Oh, one more thing.” She pulled a slip of paper from her jacket pocket. “While you were at the meeting, I was away from my desk and the receptionist took a call for you from”—she looked at the slip—“a Mr. Bassante.”

  “Bassante?”

  “Tourloff Bassante.”

  “T-u-r-l-o-u-g-h?”

  “Yes, that’s how it’s spelled.”

  “It’s pronounced ‘Tur-low.’”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve never heard the name before.”

  “What was the message?”

  “No message, no number. He said he’d call back.”

  Summer dragged, June wilted into August. If Roberta was around, she’d have them going to clubs, movies, plays, and on weekend jaunts. With her on a cruise, Dunne mostly went to work, came home, made himself a Manhattan and a sandwich, and watched television, which mostly consisted of summer reruns. Three (sometimes four) nights a week he swam a mile worth of laps at the Grand Central Y.

  Bassante never called back. Miss O’Keefe checked the phone directories for the five boroughs and surrounding counties, didn’t turn up any Turlough Bassante. Dunne assigned Mike Del Giudice, an Iona College graduate fresh out of Naval Intelligence and an eager-beaver recruit in PISS, to see what he could find.

  Del Giudice reported what Dunne already knew (Bassante was raised in Hoboken, educated at Yale, joined the Foreign Service, was recruited into the OSS and subsequently into the CIC); he also answered what Dunne didn’t know: What happened to Bassante in the wake of the accident in Nuremberg that killed Corporal Mundy?

  (Though Del Giudice attached no significance to the name—a passing reference: Harry Mundy—Dunne saw him clearly. Face again
st the windshield. That’s the marble soapbox where Hitler did his spouting. Dunne recalled some things clearer than others. No surprise. The surprise was in the swiftness and vividness with which they came back—jolting immediacy triggered by word, sight, smell—like sticking a finger in a light socket.)

  Dunne had a hazy recollection of Bassante coming to see him in the hospital, sharp nose pointing down, words repeated softly several times: Fin, I’m so sorry.

  By the time Dunne felt himself again, he was on a ship home. He wrote both Bassante and Van Hull. Neither responded. Once, on a whim, he called the Adams-Thayer Academy, where Van Hull had taught before the war. The secretary said Van Hull was no longer connected to the school. She had no knowledge of where he currently lived or worked. There was no listing for Thornton or Richard Van Hull in the white pages.

  Eventually, once he was settled back with Roberta and felt as though he had his bearings, he looked into the fate of SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Karsten Heinz. He’d never been brought to trial. Sent to London for “special interrogation,” he escaped hanging but not death, meeting his end when he contracted a fatal case of “bronchopneumonia.”

  Bassante had stayed with the CIC, Del Giudice reported, until 1947, when he transferred to Research & Analysis at the Pentagon, which was to a large degree a reconstituted version of what had existed in the OSS. From there, he circled back to the Department of State.

  The paper trail that Del Giudice turned up on Bassante contained newspaper accounts of testimony he gave in 1952 before a congressional committee investigating Communist infiltration of the State Department. Bassante was closely questioned about his participation during his senior year at Yale in the “Student Congress for Economic Recovery and World Peace,” held in New York, in 1931.

  Q: Were you aware the Student Congress was a Communist front?

  A: No, Congressman, I was not.

  Q: How’s that possible? Everyone knew.

  A: Not everyone.

  Q: Who besides you, Mr. Bassante?

  A: The Vice President of the United States, Mr. Curtis. He sent a greeting.

  Bassante was dismissed from the State Department the following year, 1953, when John Foster Dulles became secretary. He taught a course at Georgetown for a semester, then left Washington.