by Ross Thomas
Gorman Smalldane was equally furtive. He also chose the kitchen, which seemed to be the favorite clandestine meeting place for wedding guests. He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to me. “Your wedding present,” he said.
I thanked him and started to put it into a pocket.
“Go ahead, open it,” he said.
I opened it and found a bundle of what seemed to be shares of common stock.
“Two thousand shares,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Smalldane Communications, Incorporated. We just went public. First PR outfit in the country to do it. Maybe in the world.”
“How’s it look?” I said.
“Well, it’s not on the big board, of course; it’s still over-the-counter, but it started at two and it’s only slid to one and a quarter.”
“Encouraging, huh?” I said.
“It’s the big league, kid. By this time next year, I’ll be rich and so will you if you hang on to it. We’ve got offices opening next month in Paris, London and Rome. They’re just desks with telephones now, but they’ll look real fine on the letterhead.”
“Business is good?” I said.
“Terrific. Everyone who’s made more than a million needs a public relations man to get rid of the guilt that the psychiatrists can’t root out. If they see something nice about themselves printed in a newspaper or magazine, they really believe it must be true and their consciences are eased. The potential is unlimited.”
“Thanks for the shares, Gorm.”
“Just hang on to them. They’ll hit fifty before you know it.”
He paused then and looked over my shoulder at something that seemed to be far away. “When’s the last time you heard from Kate?”
“Couple of weeks ago,” I said. “She wrote from Hong Kong, giving me some advice about marriage.”
“She’s dead.”
Tante Katerine was too alive to be dead, of course, and it didn’t register because Smalldane’s words had tripped the switch that brought the automatic denier into operation. It worked for perhaps ten or fifteen seconds before it sputtered to a stop. There must be something else to say besides “no” when you learn of death. I supposed I could have asked “how” or “when,” but instead I denied it, as if the denial would prevent me from having to feel anything, at least for a few more seconds.
“I got a cable yesterday. It was a heart attack. I wasn’t sure that I should tell you. It’s not a very good day for it.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t, but it’s all right—I mean that you told me.”
“I knew you’d want to know.”
“Yes.”
“She wasn’t really all that old,” he said, as if to himself.
“No, not that way, she wasn’t. I suppose I should ask if there’s anything I can do.”
“Nothing,” he said. “What the hell could you do? It’s just over. She’s dead.”
“Okay, Gorman,” I said. “She’s dead. There’s nothing either of us can do.”
“Well, hell—there should be something.”
“But there isn’t.”
Smalldane shook his head. “You know,” he said, “she was something different—really different. Or the times were.”
“Both probably,” I said.
“I paid her back that eleven thousand dollars, you know?”
“I know.”
“Kate’d tell you to hang on to that stock, kid,” he said.
“I’ll take her advice.” But I didn’t. I sold it two years later when it hit twelve and a quarter. It went to sixty-one and a half before it split two for one. The last time I looked, Smalldane Communications, Inc., was hovering somewhere around eighty-three or eighty-four on the American Stock Exchange.
Beverly and I enjoyed each other for the next four years. She turned out to be the one totally unselfish person that I’ve ever known and I suppose that I took what she had to offer greedily, unable to get enough, fearful that the supply would run out before I was full. It was her love that I took, of course, and in the taking finally discovered that it was unrationed and inexhaustible and that I could spare some myself. It required a year or so before I learned what others had known for years and when I did we became impossibly close.
We lived in a small, frame house that I kept threatening to paint a flat black. It was on the edge of the campus, where a portion of what has been described as the silent generation was enrolled. I majored in Oriental languages and history; Beverly studied anthropology which, she once said, was the polite way of expressing one’s concern for humanity.
Sometimes we would go into Baltimore on weekends, or down to Washington, or up to New York where we could stay free with Smalldane who was becoming impossibly rich as the public relations dodge acquired new tones of respectability. He spent his money, as always, on women, some of whom he even married for as long as a year or so.
The check from the foundation arrived on the first of the month along with the one from the Veterans’ Administration, by courtesy of the G.I. Bill of Rights that had been extended to the survivors of Korea by a grateful Congress. The foundation check was my only reminder of the Section Two scholarship. The colonel, working most of the time in Washington, would sometimes disappear for a year or six months and then pop up unexpectedly with the same question:
“He still beating you, Bev?”
As a joke, his infrequent visits made it wear well enough. He never mentioned Section Two and neither did I.
In May of 1957, two weeks before she was to be graduated and I was to be awarded my Master’s degree, Beverly announced that she was pregnant. She did so proudly, as if it were something she had done quite alone in defiance of overwhelming odds.
“Well, we tried hard enough,” I said.
“But not often enough.”
“Any more often and I’d have had to send in a substitute.”
“I was going to suggest it once or twice, but—”
“My tender feelings?”
“You are awfully sensitive.”
“A weakness.”
“Let’s celebrate,” she said, her gray eyes dancing a little—or even a lot. “Let’s celebrate with louder wine and stronger music.”
“I think you’ve got it backwards.”
“It sounds better.”
“Where?” I said.
“Where what?”
“Where shall we celebrate?”
She glanced around the room as if seeking something that would help her to decide. Then she looked at me and winked. No nice girl knows how to wink like that. “In bed,” she said, “where else?”
We were on our third glass of wine with something by Miles Davis on the record player when the phone rang. For some reason I once liked to answer the phone naked. I don’t know why, but I did. I don’t anymore. It was a station-to-station call before the time of direct dialing and it was the colonel. He sounded bad and his voice was a harsh, bitter croak.
“Get her out, Dye,” he said.
“Where?” I said because I had to make some response.
“That friend of yours—Smalldane. Get her out to him now—they’re—” The phone went dead. I hung it up and said to Beverly, “Get dressed.”
“Why should I—”
“Just get dressed. It was your old man.”
I fumbled through the drawer of the small table that stood next to the bed. I was looking for the .38 automatic that the colonel had given me. I found it, and then I found something to load it with. I had two rounds in the clip when they came in. There was nothing to keep them out. It had been warm and we’d left the front door open with the screen door latched. We did that when it was warm. The screen door latch was only a hook and eye and that hadn’t bothered them.
I held the clip in my left hand and the automatic in my right when they came in the bedroom. They came in fast and both wore dark suits and Halloween masks and revolvers. One was several inches shorter than the other. The shorter one waved his revolve
r at me and then waved it again before I got the idea. I put the automatic and the magazine on the table beside the bed. Beverly pulled the sheet up over her breasts, up to her neck. She did it slowly. The shorter one held his revolver on me and then nodded at the taller one who slipped his revolver into a coat pocket. He started undoing his buckle and the buttons on his fly. Buttons instead of a zipper. He dropped his pants and shorts, blue-and-white striped ones. Then he ripped the sheet away from Beverly. I noticed that he wasn’t circumsized. I started to rise, but the shorter one prodded me back with his revolver and used it to turn my head so that I had to watch.
I watched for fifteen minutes or so while the taller one grunted and sweated and clutched and grabbed. When he tired of the front he turned her over and tried it from the rear. When he tired of that he used her mouth. At first, she said, “Don’t” several times, but he slapped her across the mouth and after that she didn’t say anything. She lay perfectly still and let him rape her. I got to watch her disintegrate, to watch the fear in her eyes grow until it melted away into a kind of resigned madness.
When he was through, he stood up, shook it a couple of times as if he had just taken a pee, and then pulled his trousers back up. He took the revolver from his pocket and turned his head slightly to look at the shorter man whose gun was still pressed against my ear. The shorter man must have nodded because the taller one shot Beverly twice. Once in the right cheek and once through the forehead. It slammed her up against the headboard of the bed. The taller of the two turned his revolver on me. I waited, but the only thing that happened was that the shorter man removed the barrel of his revolver from my ear. He went to the foot of the bed so that I could watch him shoot Beverly in the right breast and stomach. He didn’t have to do that, of course. She was already dead. Still wearing their Halloween masks, they backed out of the room. I watched them leave. Neither had made a sound except the taller one, the one who had raped Beverly without taking off his mask. Or shoes. He had grunted a few times. They backed into the living room, and a moment later I heard the screen door slam. Another moment later I heard a car speed away. I looked at what had been Beverly and clinically noted how the right side of her face had been torn away and how white the bone was. There also seemed to be a vast amount of blood.
Carmingler arrived at four that morning after the police had gone and after they had taken Beverly away. I don’t remember much about that except the confusion and the noise. Carmingler came in without knocking and I didn’t look up until he cleared his throat. He told me who he was and I noticed that he carried a copy of the Washington Post.
He was younger then, of course, only twenty-nine or thirty, but he already wore a vest and diddled with his Phi Beta Kappa key. He also smoked a pipe, but was polite enough then to ask if he could light it. He never asked me that again.
“The colonel’s dead,” he said after he got his pipe going. He never seemed to say anything important until he had lighted the pipe.
I said, “Oh.” I wasn’t really interested.
“The story’s here in the Post,” he said and tapped the newspaper.
I said nothing.
“The police are calling it suicide. They say he shot himself because of what happened to Beverly.”
“But it wasn’t,” I said, “and he didn’t.”
“No. We got the police to say that and it took a little doing. Somebody shot him, of course. They tried to get to him through his daughter. They must have told him what was going to happen to her; probably had it timed down to the minute. He was supposed to break. They even let him make that phone call to you so that he could be sure she was home.”
“He just sat there and let it happen,” I said.
“He couldn’t do anything else. There was always the chance that they were bluffing. When it didn’t work, they gave up and killed him. Not much point to that, really.”
“What about my wife, goddamn it?” I yelled. “What was the point there?”
Carmingler was unruffled. “He might have cracked when they were halfway through. If so, he’d have to talk to her—she’d have to tell him what—well, that’s how it happened.”
“Who was it?” I said.
“The colonel had been in the East.”
“East what?” I said. “East Baltimore?”
“Europe,” Carmingler said. “Someone from there probably, but we’re not sure.”
“You’re not sure?”
“No.”
“You want a drink?”
“No.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“We have to know about you.”
“What about me?”
“If you’re coming with Section Two?”
I stared at him. “Jesus, you’re a cold-blooded shit.”
He shrugged. “Not really. We just have to know.”
“Why?”
Carmingler made a vague gesture with his pipe. “With the colonel dead, there’ll be a shake-up. Top to bottom. The Section’s a small, specialized organization. He was counting on you heavily. We want to know if we can.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “He never counted on anyone in his life except his daughter and she’s dead.”
“Have it your way,” Carmingler said. “But are you in or out? We have to know.”
I looked around the room and at the things in it that had once been ours. When they were ours they had looked fine. Now that they were mine they just looked old and worn and used up. I examined the carpet on the floor and noted how shabby it looked. I didn’t think about my answer; I just said it. “I’m in.”
“Good,” Carmingler said. “We’ll be in touch.”
I looked up as he rose, moved to the door, and paused. “By the way,” he said, gesturing toward the chair he’d sat in. “I left the Post in case you’d like to read about the colonel.”
“You’re too kind,” I said and kept some of what I felt out of my voice.
“Not at all,” he said.
I didn’t attend the colonel’s funeral, but Carmingler said that a lot of people were there. I wondered who they were. Beverly didn’t have much of a funeral. She’d once said that she didn’t want one, so it was just a hearse and a limousine from the funeral home that carried Smalldane, Carmingler and me to the cemetery. There was no graveside service either. Some men in blue overalls lowered the casket and I stood there watching for a time, but it seemed to take them forever, so I turned away and walked back to the limousine. Carmingler was still there. He hadn’t approached the grave.
The three of us rode back to town in silence. Carmingler got out first. “We’ll be in touch,” he said, and I said all right.
Smalldane didn’t look at him but stared through a window instead. Finally, he said, “Fuck it.” I nodded and he seemed to understand that I knew what he meant. I don’t think that I ever did introduce him to Carmingler.
PART 2
CHAPTER 21
Victor Orcutt didn’t like my idea and he was telling me why not as we sat there in the living room or parlor of the Rickenbacker Suite on the top floor of the Sycamore Hotel. Only three of us were sitting really, Carol Thackerty, Necessary and I. Orcutt glided about the room, picking up ashtrays and putting them down, straightening pictures that weren’t crooked, and talking endlessly.
“They just won’t believe you,” he said for what may have been the fifteenth time. I had lost count.
“They won’t or you don’t?” I said.
“Oh, I have perfect faith in you.”
“That’s why you’ve been tearing it to pieces for the past thirty minutes.”
“It just won’t work,” he said.
“Sure it will,” Necessary said.
“It’s all conjecture,” Orcutt said. “Sheer conjecture.”
“All right,” I said. “You get me inside if you’ve got a better way.”
Orcutt walked over to a gold-framed mirror and admired himself for a moment. He patted a stray curl of blond hair into place.
&nb
sp; There are those who sneak furtive glances at themselves in every mirror that they pass and most seem afraid of being caught in their act of self-love and admiration. They look quickly and even more quickly look away, either reassured or disappointed. Orcutt liked what he saw and he didn’t care who knew it.
“Suppose we do it your way,” he said. “What’s your first move?”
“I accept their offer for twenty-five percent more than you’re paying me.”
“They won’t believe you.”
“But they’ll pretend to. They may even pay me some money, which would be something of a novelty.”
Orcutt spun around and when he spoke his voice was small and tight and mean. “Carol, write Mr. Dye a check for twenty thousand dollars.”
“No checks,” I said.
“Pay him in cash.”
“Tonight?” she said.
I shook my head. “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow morning,” Orcutt said to her and turned once more to me, smiling as nastily as he could. I thought he did well at it. “Will that be satisfactory?”
“Perfectly.”
“After you count your money,” he said, “what do you do next?”
“What do we do,” I said, correcting him only because I knew that he didn’t like it.
“Very well. We.”
“We establish my bona fides.”
“How?”
“We give them something.”
“What?” Orcutt said.
“Not what, but who.”
“Ah!” he said. Orcutt was with me now. For a time there I thought he’d been slowing down. “A pawn,” he said.
“No. More of a knight or a bishop.”
“Who?”
“Someone on your list of advocates. Someone important. Preferably someone popular.”
“And what do they do with him?”
“They ruin him,” I said, “If your conscience bothers you, pick somebody who needs ruining.”
Orcutt’s eyes were glittering now as he stood before me, his hands jammed deep into the pockets of his yellow silk smoking jacket. “Then what?”
“We—or I—give them somebody else to ruin, again somebody who’s closely linked with our side. And again he’s got to be well known and well liked.”
