by Ross Thomas
The hair was gone now except for some white tufts above his ears. His skull was the color of old putty and I seemed to top his height by almost half a foot because of the bent way that he held himself. He had gone to fat in his forties and fifties, which he had then carried well enough, but now the fat was gone too and the skin stretched tight across his face, but raddled around the neck. He must have weighed no more than 125 pounds. Only his eyes remained the same, set a little farther back in their sockets perhaps, but still bright pale blue and as skeptical as ever. So was his voice.
“Well, one of us looks healthy,” he said. “Come on in.”
I went in and watched him move across the room to the Scotch and the ice bucket. He walked slowly, as if he had to remember how to do it. With his back to me he mixed two drinks and said, “You’ve seen it before.”
“When did you find out?”
“Two months ago. They cut me open and there it was. Big as a grapefruit, they said.”
He crossed the room with the drinks and handed me one. “I keep going on booze and pills. I think the pills have opium in them because my dreams have been rather interesting lately. I get to screw some real dolls.”
“Well, I won’t say how are you.”
“That’s apparent, isn’t it? I never thought I’d be an ugly old man with the eagle pecking away at my liver. They say that I’ve got a couple of months left. That means a month.”
“You still don’t like hospitals?” I said.
“That’s where they want me so they can stick tubes up every hole they can find. I might last three months that way, but I won’t go through the indignity of it all. I don’t find life quite that precious.”
He eased down into a chair carefully, but it still made him wince.
“Bad?”
“You goddamned right it’s bad. Don’t ever let them tell you it’s not.”
“I won’t,” I said.
He took a long swallow of his drink and then looked at me and grinned with most of his former skepticism. “Now just what the hell are you doing in Swankerton?”
“I’m corrupting it.”
“I hear it doesn’t need much, but if it does, you ought to be better than a fair hand. After all, you did have a fine upbringing.”
“There’s that,” I said.
“Well, tell me about it.”
I told him the entire story, partly because in telling it I brought it into focus, but mostly because I knew that he’d enjoy it and there were few enough things left that he could.
When I’d finished, Smalldane nodded his understanding and held out his empty glass to me. “You mind?”
“Not at all,” I said.
I handed him a fresh drink and he said, “That’s quite a story. You only left out one thing. Why’re you doing it?”
“Lacks motivation, huh?”
“That and an ending.”
“I’m doing it because it seemed to be the thing to do at the time.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“Money,” I said.
“More bullshit.”
“I can see that we’re coming to the stop where the Smalldane Theory gets on.”
“I got one.”
“I never knew you to run short.”
“Born again,” he said. “How’s that?”
“You could give the one at Delphi some stiff competition.”
“A little oracular?”
“A little.”
“You should have brought along your chicken entrails.”
“I forgot.”
“I’ll spell it out for you,” he said.
“I’ll listen.”
“There were two persons killed that night in Maryland. One of them was Beverly and the other one was you. She may have been luckier because that night you turned into a zombie and, as such, a perfect candidate for the spooks because most of them, at least the ones I’ve known, have been zombies, too.”
“Not all,” I said, remembering Beverly’s father.
“For example,” he said. “That redheaded guy at her funeral, the one you never introduced me to.”
“Carmingler,” I said.
“He was a zombie. He couldn’t have been more than thirty then, but he’d been dead for fifteen years.”
“What do you mean dead? Emotionally castrated? Juiceless? Calculating? Cold? Remorseless? Unfeeling? I can go on.”
“You don’t have to. I can see you’ve already been turning it over. What I mean is that you’re like a vacant house. Nobody lives there.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ve seen you among the living just twice, kid. When you were in Shanghai with Kate and me and when you were with Beverly. When they took you away from Kate, that really started it. Beverly stopped it, arrested it probably, and when she died, you went under. Succumbed, if you like the word.”
“To what?”
“To zombieism. What had you and Beverly planned to do?”
“I was supposed to go with the spooks. I was on that scholarship of theirs.”
“But what were you really going to do?”
“Teach.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“After Beverly died? There wasn’t any point.”
“That’s why I said born again. You can’t go back to that time with Beverly so now you’re trying to go back as far as you remember, to Shanghai—back to the whores and the pimps and the crooks who surrounded you then during the only other time in your life you were really happy. Now how’s that for penetrating insight?”
“I still think that you were once a good reporter, Gorm.”
“The funny thing is—” He stopped and coughed. I hadn’t heard him cough before, but if I had heard him without seeing him, perhaps through a thin hotel wall at three in the morning, I would have known he was dying. It was that kind of a cough, the kind that wrenches the whole body, twists it, and sounds like a long series of small, harsh explosions.
He straightened up, used his handkerchief to wipe his lips, and then shook his head. His face had turned a dangerous-looking bright pink. “Not lung cancer,” he said. “Just a side effect of its cousin. Where was I in the lecture?”
“Something was funny,” I said.
“It is funny. You want to hear it?”
“Sure.”
“What you’re doing down here and why. The funny thing is that it might work. Lucifer Dye might rise to live again.”
We talked through dinner, which we had in Smalldane’s room. We got a little drunk, but not very. I had a steak; he had a bowl of oyster stew. We both had a quantity of Scotch.
“I lied to you over the phone the other day,” he said.
“How’d you lie?”
“I said I wanted in on this deal just for kicks. I didn’t really. I can’t do you a damned bit of good. I’m washed up and the pain’s too bad. There are four other guys and one woman that I’m going to see in the next week and then I’ll go back to New York and sit around and wait for it. If I get tired of that, I might speed things up.”
“It’s that bad?”
“It will be in another week or ten days. There won’t be any funeral.”
“All right.”
“You need some money?” he said.
“No.”
“I’ll leave you some anyhow. I got plenty. I got it from zombies like you. They’d spend twenty or thirty years hustling for it and then discover that they weren’t immortal after all, so they’d come to me.”
“For what?”
“For a slice of immortality. So somebody would remember their name ten years after they were dead. I’d set them up a foundation, have a couple of books ghostwritten for them, maybe have them endow a chair at some university. And then I’d present the bill and to a man they thought it was the best money they’d ever spent.”
I switched to Mandarin. “The master said: ‘The noble man hates to end his days and leave his name undistinguished.’ “
“The Analects,” Sm
alldane said.
“Book Five, Number nineteen.”
“Substitute rich for noble and you have one of the secrets of my success. There’s only one thing more that I really want to do and I think, Lucifer, by God, you’ve given me the opportunity.”
“Delighted,” I said.
“I saw a picture show a long time ago.”
“So did I. I sometimes think I spent my entire adolescence in picture shows. Carol does, too.”
“Carol who?”
“Thackerty,” I said. “The girl you checked on.”
“The one I saw had Ned Sparks in it,” Smalldane said. “You remember Ned Sparks?”
“Never had the pleasure.”
“Well, he had a long sad, bloodhound face and a deep voice and a cigar. So this gal and her Negro mammy were running this restaurant where the Negro mammy made the best pancakes in the world from her secret recipe. I think it was secret. Anyway, Ned Sparks comes in and orders some pancakes. He’s so impressed that he offers to make their fortune with just two words.”
“What was his cut?”
“That isn’t important. Say ten percent.”
“Okay.”
Smalldane took another swallow of Scotch. “Well, he did it in just two words. You want to know what they were?”
“What?”
“Box it.”
“The pancake mixture?”
“Right.”
“He stole that from Coca-Cola,” I said. “The guy there said, ‘Bottle it.’ “
“Well, this was supposed to be something like Aunt Jemimah.”
“And everybody got rich?” I said.
“Sure.”
“And happy?”
“Of course.”
“And that’s your ambition, to make me rich and happy?”
“In two words, just like Ned Sparks. Right here in Swankerton.”
“They call it Chancre Town.”
“Don’t blame them.”
“And you’ve got two words for me?”
Smalldane nodded. “Two words.”
“Maybe I’d better get something and write them down.”
“You’ll remember. Maybe.”
“I’ll try.”
“Ready?”
I nodded.
He spaced them carefully. “Take,” he said, “over.”
“The whole town?”
“The whole town.”
“By God, Smalldane, that’s brilliant, that’s what it is.”
“I think so, too.”
“You think I could?”
“That’s the only way you’re going to get out of it.”
“All right, I’ll do it.” On that much Scotch, anything was possible.
“You’ve made an old man happy. Now get out of here so I can get some sleep.”
I rose, a little unsteadily, and headed for the door. Smalldane followed, tacking a bit, much as he had done the first night that I’d seen him coming up the path in Tante Katerine’s garden. I turned at the door.
“Just like Ned Sparks,” he said.
“Two words.”
He pulled himself up so that he stood straight and taller than I. It required an effort that apparently caused considerable pain. Suddenly, he seemed completely sober. He held out his hand and I took it and was surprised at how thin it was.
“This is the real goodbye, kid, I’m leaving in the morning. Early.”
“All right.”
“That crap I was talking earlier. That zombie crap. Forget it.”
I nodded.
“And those two words. Forget them, too. It might be fun, but you’d never make it. You’re not put together that way.”
“All right.”
He held on to my hand and looked at me for a long time, his eyes steady and for once almost gentle. He nodded after his inspection. “You’re not quite dead after all, are you?”
“Not quite.”
He grinned then and released my hand. “Well, that’ll leave one of us around anyway.”
CHAPTER 32
I bought a new suit to go to Homer Necessary’s swearing-in ceremony. It was a dark blue poplin that cost all of sixty dollars plus tax at Biendorfer’s department store across the street from the Sycamore Hotel. I bought two others of the same material, one tan and the other gray.
The ceremony was held in the City Council chamber, which was on the seventh floor of the same new municipal building that housed Police Headquarters. Attendance was by invitation only and I went alone. Lynch had stubbornly refused to invite either Orcutt or Carol Thackerty.
The City Council was a seven-man body that sat at a long oval walnut table, the Lynch crowd on one side, the opposition on the other, and the popeyed mayor at the end near the door. Lynch himself sat in a spectator’s chair that was only a few feet from the far end of the table and gave Mayor Robineaux something reassuring to look at. Three tiers of chairs ran around three sides of the room and during the City Council’s regular meetings were used to seat witnesses, reporters, city officials and employees, and citizens who just wanted to kill a dull afternoon. If Lynch’s chair had been any closer to the table, it would have occupied the spot usually reserved for a city manager, except that Swankerton didn’t have one and, as far as I could see, didn’t need one as long as Lynch was around.
The three television stations were represented, as were five or six radio stations. The two newspapers had sent reporters and photographers. There was a handful of ranking police officials and one of them was the captain who had been playing poker a few afternoons before at the table next to Necessary and me.
The seven city councilmen were already in their seats when I arrived. The three who composed what passed for the loyal opposition were middle-aged, mild-mannered men who smiled a lot, wore sensible suits, and favored rimless glasses. The four who belonged to Lynch’s crowd seemed heavier and jowlier, liked cigars, and twisted around in their chairs to wave at friends and acquaintances. Fred Merriweather, big-jawed and stupid-eyed and owner of The Easy Alibi bar, covered all bets and even waved at me. I waved back. He was the only one on the council whom I knew.
All of the ones that I had met that first day in Lynch’s house were in the room, with the exception of Cal Loambaugh. Ancel Carp, the city tax assessor and surveyor, sat next to Lynch, looking as outdoorsy as ever. On the other side of Lynch was Alex Couturier, executive secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, who wore a big, pleased smile on his face, but that meant nothing because he never wore anything else.
Channing d’Arcy Phetwick III crept in with the aid of his cane, surveyed the room through his thick-lensed glasses, spotted me and came over and sat down at my left. “I understand this was all your idea, Mr. Dye,” he whispered. Before I could say that it wasn’t quite all mine, he whispered, “Splendid. Perfectly splendid.”
Homer Necessary sat in the first row of the tier of seats directly behind the mayor and I found myself wondering if he had called his wife about his new job.
Mayor Pierre (Pete) Robineaux picked up a gavel and tapped it apologetically against the table. The councilmen quit waving their arms and gossiping. The small crowd did the usual amount of coughing and throat-clearing. The mayor said, “This special session of the Swankerton City Council is now convened. Good to see y’all. Our first order of business is the resignation of Calvin Loambaugh as chief of police. I’ve sent you all copies of it, so we can dispense with its reading. Is there any discussion?”
He waited, but nobody said anything. After almost a full minute Fred Merriweather stuck up a big hand and said, “I move we accept it.” Somebody else seconded the motion, the mayor called for the ayes and then for the nays, and Cal Loambaugh was out of a job.
“Now before we go into the second order of business I’d like to make a few personal remarks, if nobody objects,” the mayor said. Nobody did, so he said, “Chief Loambaugh’s resignation came as a surprise to all of us, I know. Now my first thought was, where in the world are we gonna find somebody of high c
alibre, competence, and experience to take his place, and then how in the good Lord’s name, if we do find a man like that, are we gonna find enough money to pay him?” He waited for his laugh and he got it.
“Well, the good Lord smiled down on us. That’s all I can say. Because right after I got the bad news about Chief Loambaugh’s resignation, I got some good news. I learned that there was a man right here in Swankerton on private business who’s generally acknowledged as one of the top law enforcement officers in the whole United States. And not only that, but I learned that although he was mighty successful in private industry, he just might be interested in getting back into his first love.” That brought a titter from the press, if from no one else.
“Well, sir, I didn’t let any grass grow under my feet, so to speak. I contacted this man and asked him to come see me and when he did, I laid my cards on the table. We talked man to man and heart to heart. We discussed Swankerton’s law-and-order problems and I liked what he had to say. Now this man knows police work. He should because he was chief of police of a city larger than Swankerton when he was twenty-seven years old. Think about that. Twenty-seven. Course, he’s a bit older now, but still in his prime. We talked money, too, and I don’t mind telling you that I was downright embarrassed when I had to tell him what we could offer. I bet I even blushed some. Well, he said he understood our problems, but he also said that he’s a great one for merit increases. So I took the bull by the horns and said I’m going to offer you the job as chief of police, providing the City Council will go along, of course, and what’s more I’m going to recommend that we raise the salary of that job up to fifteen thousand dollars a year where it should be. So now I formally recommend to you, the City Council of the City of Swankerton, that we hereby employ Mr. Homer Fairbanks Necessary as chief of police. The meeting is now open for discussion.”
Fred Merriweather was the first to stick up a hand. “Your honor, do you think we might ask Mr. Necessary some questions?”
“That’s why he’s here, Fred,” Robineaux said. He turned in his chair and beckoned at Necessary. “Mr. Necessary, you might be more comfortable sitting up here by me.”
