IT WAS SNOWING IN Washington and I was thirty minutes late when the cab let me out at the Twenty-first Street entrance of the seven-story atrocity of glass and what seems to be dried mud that shelters the U.S. Department of State from the elements, if not from Congress.
I had taken Eastern’s nine o’clock shuttle from La Guardia and despite the snow it had arrived only three-quarters of an hour late, which wasn’t bad, but the taxis had disappeared and it took another half hour to get one and the Washington motorists were, as always, astonished that it should snow so far south, but if you mentioned that Washington was about as far north as Denver, nobody believed you.
So I counted eleven wrecks on the way in from National Airport and remembered that when I’d last been there the thermometer had threatened to break all heat records for August. As I understand it, the nation’s capital is allotted two days of spring and three days of fall. After that it’s either winter or summer.
A Negro guard at the desk just inside the brown marble entrance wanted to know who I was and where I was going and who I wanted to see. If he had asked why, I would have turned around and gone back to New York. But he didn’t and a woman receptionist signed in my name beneath somebody called Emanuel Cory and I rode the elevator up to the third floor and got lost only twice before I found Room 3931. Some of the doors along the corridor had valentines pasted or Scotch-taped all over them and I found the sentiment oddly reassuring. Room 3931 had nothing on its door, not even a name, so I walked in without knocking. The door didn’t seem to deserve it.
The ash blonde sat behind a secretarial desk which was bare except for a blotter, a telephone, a calendar, and her folded hands. There was an electric typewriter behind her, but it was covered. She was around thirty and wore big, wire-framed tinted glasses, not much makeup, a gray tweed dress, and the patient expression of a person who has spent a lot of time waiting.
“Philip St. Ives,” she said, making it a remark rather than a question.
“Yes.”
“Won’t you please sit down.” She indicated one of the two chairs in the room. I sat down and glanced around as she picked up the phone and dialed a single number. There were the two chairs, a green carpet, and a framed picture of the flag blowing in the breeze. I didn’t find it as reassuring as the valentines.
“Mr. St. Ives is here,” she said into the phone, listened a moment, hung up, and turned toward me. “Right through that door,” she said with a small gesture.
“Had I but known what lay behind it,” I murmured.
“Yes,” she said, smiled brightly, folded her hands, and placed them back on the desk blotter. I assumed that she was through for the day.
The office that I entered had only a single window that offered a view of C Street and the snow and not much else. The man behind the desk wore the brooding face of one of those small, compact loners who stand by themselves at the far end of the bar on Saturday night, nursing their boilermakers and counting up their injustices. When the boilermakers and the injustices reach the proper ratio, there’s usually a quick turn, a black glower, and a roundhouse right that’s thrown at whoever’s handy.
He didn’t rise when I came in. He just sat there behind his green metal desk looking as if the delicatessen once again had sent pastrami when he’d ordered corned beef. There was a phone in the room, two chairs in front of the desk, a carpet, and another picture of the flag rippling in the breeze. I didn’t bother to look for any valentines.
“You’re late,” he said.
“I’m always late.”
“Sit down. Anybody tell you about me?”
I sat down and took out a cigarette. He frowned at that and said, “I don’t smoke,” but reached into a drawer and brought out a round black ceramic ashtray which had “U.S. Department of State” printed on it in white letters.
“I also drink,” I said.
He nodded, a little glumly, I thought “I know what you do,” he said. “I know how you live. I even know how much money you made last year. You made more than I did, but I’m beginning to believe that so did everybody else. My name’s Coors and no, I’m not related to the beer people.”
“What beer?”
“Coors beer. They make it out West.”
“Nobody told me about you,” I said, finally getting around to his first question.
“Hamilton Coors,” he said, “if you want to make a note of it.”
“I think I can remember it all.”
“You didn’t know him really well, did you?” Coors said.
“Who?”
“The ambassador. Killingsworth. Amfred Killingsworth.”
“Not well.”
“You worked for him.”
“A long time ago.”
“Thirteen years,” Coors said. “Killingsworth hired you in Chicago. It was your first job. First newspaper job anyway.”
“And fired me a year later.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Incompetency, let’s say. Slipshod work. No nose for news. Things like that.”
“I’ve heard you were pretty good.”
“Killingsworth didn’t think so.”
“What’d you think of him?”
“Professionally?”
“Any way you care to tell it.”
“He was a better promoter than he was managing editor. He didn’t like to offend anyone—at least not anyone important—so he didn’t and the paper got a little bland. Even dull. He married the old man’s daughter and after a while the only thing to do was to make him associate publisher and then publisher when the old man died. I suppose you had to make him an ambassador because of services rendered and money contributed, but I still think it was a sorry trick to play on—”
The phone rang, interrupting me, and Coors picked it up. When he learned who was on the line he stiffened into a kind of seated attention and used his lids to half hood his large gray-blue eyes. It gave him something of a secretive look which he may have felt would keep me from eavesdropping. The eyes were the only thing large about him. The rest was spare and small-boned. Even his face didn’t have enough flesh for middle-aged sag and Coors must have been close to fifty. His chin formed a blunt, bony point, a wide, bloodless slash served for a mouth, and the base of his nose started close to his lip and then flared up and out so that you got a good view of his nostrils. His hair was the color of a cigar’s ash, a cheap cigar, and it was thinning a little and he brushed it straight down so that it formed raggedy bangs across a high, pale forehead. His tweed suit was good, I noticed, but nothing spectacular, although he might have gone as high as fifteen dollars for his tie.
Coors said, “Yes, sir,” into the phone, so I assumed that he was talking to at least an Under Secretary of State. He didn’t much look as if he would say “Yes, sir” to anything less.
“He’s here now,” Coors said. “Yes, sir … I understand.” Then there was an audible click and Coors hung up. He turned back to me, unhooded his eyes so that I could hear again, and unnecessarily explained, “That was about you.”
“What about me?”
“Some had grave reservations. So did I.”
“I still do,” I said.
“We might yet use our own people,” Coors said.
“No. If you could, I wouldn’t be sitting here and you’d be back in your real office, the one with your name by the door. Seventh floor?”
“Sixth,” Coors said and then began a close inspection of the fingernails on his left hand. They looked to be nicely bitten. “So you’re none too eager?”
“You know I’m not.”
“It’s all really quite simple.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “If it were simple, there wouldn’t be any question about using your own people. Or even the CIA. Kidnapping American ambassadors still isn’t as popular a pastime as hijacking planes to Cuba, but it’s getting there. I’d even bet that there’s a form memo tucked away in every embassy safe that’s headed, ‘What to Do After the Ambassador’s Kidnapped,’ so you wouldn’t call me in if it were just the simple chore of ransoming the Chicken.”
“The what?”
“The Chicken,” I said. “That’s what they used to call Killingsworth on the paper, because he was. Chicken.”
Coors frowned carefully and it may have been the same frown that he employed when the new African ambassador’s tart of a wife chose the wrong fork in the Benjamin Franklin State Dining Room. “You weren’t exactly our first choice, Mr. St. Ives. You weren’t even our second, and if it weren’t for the time factor, we would—”
“Why don’t you?” I interrupted. “Why not get a bright young Harvard or Yale man from one of those ever so discreet Washington-New York-Paris law firms. You know what I mean. The kind with five or six grand old names strung together that probably got its start sixty years ago when it handled one of those banana revolutions for you and United Fruit down in South America. They don’t charge much. Not more than ten or fifteen times what I do and nobody’s ever complained about their manners.”
Coors hooded his eyes again. “You think you’re an extremely clever person, don’t you?” he said and managed to make person sound like son of a bitch. But there was no venom in his tone despite the reptilian look. There was only a kind of resigned weariness as if his lot in life were to put up with an endless series of jaspers who felt that they were extremely clever sons of bitches.
“I only asked a question,” I said.
“I know you did. You want to know why we picked wonderful you. First of all, you were logical because you’ve had a measure of experience in this kind of business.”
“It’s how I make a living.”
“Secondly, you could become readily available.”
“That only took the threat of a Congressional investigation,” I said. “I liked that. You had to have someone who’d lose if he said no, so whoever remembered me and the African shield fiasco must have gone around chuckling about it all morning.”
“The last, but not least of our considerations, is that you’re an outsider and as such will have a controlled, strictly limited access to others in the department.”
“How’s that an advantage?” I said.
“Security,” Coors said.
“You don’t trust your own kind?”
“Not with this.”
“What about the CIA? There’re days when they don’t talk much. Fridays, I think.”
“It’s our own dirty linen,” Coors said and looked mildly pleased with the cryptic flavor of the worn phrase.
“How dirty?”
“Filthy.”
“What makes you so sure I won’t gossip down at the corner laundromat?” I said, poking a flicker of life into the dying analogy.
“If you did,” Coors said slowly, “you might find yourself in a rather embarrassing position.” He shook his head decisively. “No, you won’t ever talk about our dirty linen, Mr. St. Ives.”
“I’ll ask again. Why?”
The smile that he gave me had a fine chill in it which fully matched the snow and slush outside. “You won’t talk about it,” he said, “because before you’re done, you’ll be wearing it.”
IT HAD ALL STARTED the day before in one of those cold, drafty halls that you can hire by the hour over on West Thirty-ninth Street and the canvas banner that hung above the platform spelled out CHEAPAR in fat Gothic letters and also portrayed a cuddly-looking rat with mellow blue eyes.
The audience consisted of nearly three-dozen men and women whose common denominator was a warm, misty expression and a prosperous, even rich appearance. I estimated that at least three of them had yet to celebrate their sixty-fifth birthdays.
The audience just escaped being outnumbered by members of the New York press who, as usual, had nothing either warm or misty about their expressions. We had drawn three local television news teams, four radio reporters, three photographers, a brace of wire service men, and accredited representatives from the Times, the Daily News, the Post, and The Village Voice. The Wall Street Journal had failed to show.
Myron Greene, the lawyer, crept into the hall and carefully chose a rear seat just as our chairman pro tem, Henry Knight, broke down and had to be led away sobbing, overcome by his own vivid account of the death screams that escape from the throats of furry little bodies that have just nibbled at poison.
At forty-three, Henry Knight was still much in demand for juvenile leads on and off Broadway, but his finest performance may well have been that Monday afternoon in February as he huddled in the folding metal chair, his handsome, ageless face buried in a handkerchief, his body wracked by uncontrollable sobs. Or laughter. He got a warm round of appreciative, even sympathetic applause from everyone in the audience but Myron Greene, the lawyer, and for a moment I worried lest Knight rise to take his bows.
From the way his wheezes had rasped over the phone earlier that day I could tell that Myron Greene had been either angry or excited. Probably both. His asthma never bothered him when he talked to other clients. But then he could scarcely afford to get angry with six- and seven-hundred-million-dollar conglomerates, and the only excitement they ever supplied came but once or twice a year, if that often, when the Justice Department threatened an antitrust suit or two.
Nodding slightly at Greene, who refused to nod back, I moved quickly to the podium and informed the audience, now even more misty-eyed than ever, that because our temporary chairman’s sensitive nature precluded him from continuing, we would next hear from the founder and executive director of CHEAPAR, Park Tyler Wisdom III, who presumably was made of stronger stuff. That earned another round of applause from the audience, a faint cheer from the press, and an impatient, exasperated glare from Myron Greene.
Wisdom must have been all of thirty then, round of face, merry of eye, and possessed of that beaming confidence which comes from having inherited a seven-million-dollar trust fund from grandma at twenty-two. He had doffed his usual attire of sweat shirt and army surplus trousers in favor of a swallowtail coat, striped pants, a gray double-breasted vest, and a wing collar garnished by a plum-colored cravat. All in all, he looked very much like the slightly overweight second secretary of some pre-World War II Balkan embassy. The faintly tinted pince-nez that he wore did nothing to spoil the effect.
Waving the pince-nez around, Wisdom made a stirring five-minute pitch for contributions and succeeded in securing pledges that totaled nearly $1500. A few wrote checks on the spot. I moved over to him, whispered into his ear, and he beamed once more and held up his arms for attention.
“Mr. Philip St. Ives, our public relations secretary, informs me that CHEAPAR’s volunteer legal counsel has just arrived.” Wisdom pointed to the rear of the hall. “Could we have a nice round of applause for Mr. Myron Greene?” Old necks craned, arthritic hands clapped, and lined faces smiled and bobbed their greetings at Myron Greene who, looking completely miserable, did manage a half wave at the audience and a glare of sheer malevolence at me.
I was Myron Greene’s client chiefly because at thirty-six he still dreamed of becoming a flashy criminal lawyer or a gentleman racing car driver or an international troubleshooter or almost anything other than what he was: an extremely successful corporation attorney with offices on Madison, a home in Darien, and a 475-horsepower Shelby Cobra that he got to drive on weekends if he promised the wife and kids not to go over sixty-five.
By having me as a client, Greene mistakenly believed that he injected an occasional dose of excitement, intrigue, and God knows what else into what he considered to be his otherwise staid life. And if he usually had to pay for it with asthma, annoyance, and even anger, he seemed to feel that it was well worth the price and I was too diffident to tell him that it wasn’t.
Earlier in the day, Myron Greene had called and tried to explain, in between wheezes, that he had to see me immediately, within the hour—sooner, if possible. I’d interrupted him to ask, “You ever call that doctor I recommended?”
“What doctor?”
“The specialist in psychosomatic disorders.”
“My asthma is not a psychosomatic disorder and I resent your—”
“Calm down, Myron,” I’d said. “Take a deep breath.”
“Damn it,” he’d said, “what I have to see you about is important.”
“So is my meeting.”
Myron Greene had been silent for several moments. Not even a wheeze. He could have been counting to ten—or perhaps twenty. “All right,” he’d said finally, “how long does this circus of yours last?”
“Thirty minutes, I think. Maybe forty-five.”
“Well, I have to do downtown around four. I suppose I could stop by. Where is it again?”
I’d given him the address and he’d wheezed as he wrote it down. I assumed that he wrote it down. “This is the most childish—the most juvenile—”
“No, it isn’t, Myron.”
“If it’s not juvenile, what do you call it?”
“A noble cause,” I’d said and hung up.
Wisdom was explaining that we were holding a combination membership meeting and press conference and that he would now entertain questions from the press. If he couldn’t answer them, he was sure that Mr. St. Ives could, or perhaps Mr. Knight, providing that the chairman pro tem had recovered sufficiently from his emotional ordeal.
The man from the CBS television station was up first. Wisdom acknowledged him with a grand wave of the pince-nez. “Mr. Wisdom,” he said, “could you explain once more for our viewers just what CHEAPAR stands for?”
“Delighted,” Wisdom said, “CHEAPAR is an acronym which stands for the Committee for Humane Extermination of All Park Avenue Rats.”
The Daily News wanted to know what was so special about Park Avenue rats. It was one of the questions that Wisdom was waiting for.
“You must understand,” he said with another fine flourish of the pince-nez, “that only recently have rats invaded Park Avenue. A number of residents there complained. I did so myself—as did most, if not all, of the ladies and gentlemen here today. This is understandable.”
He put the pince-nez back on his nose and started jabbing at the air with a forefinger. “I want to make it perfectly clear that CHEAPAR is no organization of bleeding hearts. We well recognize that rats, through no fault of their own, are often the carriers of dread disease.
“But,” he said, taking off the pince-nez and again holding it up for emphasis, “no sooner had our complaints been lodged than the city responded with what can only be described as terrifying alacrity. The Park Avenue rats were singled out for mass slaughter by the most barbaric means—as Mr. Knight tried to tell you before he was overcome by the horror of his own description.”
Wisdom paused to give Knight a benign look and Knight let the audience have another glance at his profile before he ducked it back into his handkerchief.
The Post reporter wanted to know what Wisdom suggested. “Decompression,” he answered quickly. “The rats should be captured alive in cagelike traps and then put to sleep in a chamber from which the air is almost instantaneously removed. The method is recommended by many humane societies. It’s quick and painless—just like taking a nice, long nap.” That got another fine round of applause from the audience. I noticed that Myron Greene now held his head in his hands.
A wire service reporter asked if CHEAPAR planned to limit its operations to the rats on Park Avenue.
“Certainly,” Wisdom answered with some asperity.
When the wire service man wanted to know why, Wisdom replied, “Because Park Avenue rats—and I don’t make this charge lightly—but Park Avenue rats are the only ones being discriminated against by the City of New York.”
Well, that was the lead and they all knew it and, as usual, they went along with Wisdom who could be counted on to brighten their day about seven or eight times a year. The girl from The Village Voice, struggling to keep a straight face, asked, “Can you explain what form this discrimination against Park Avenue rats takes as opposed, say, to the rats of Harlem or Greenwich Village or Bedford-Stuyvesant?”
“Indeed I can,” Wisdom said. “Take your average rat in Harlem. Nobody bothers him, particularly not the City. He’s left alone as long as he stays in Harlem. But let him try to improve his lot, let him try to move downtown to Park Avenue, and the vicious, discriminatory rat control forces are unleashed. He is clubbed, poisoned, and there is even talk of using—yes, there is! There are those who would use gas!” That produced a sharp chorus of no’s from the audience and another faint cheer from the press. Myron Greene was now slumped back in his chair, staring at the dirty ceiling. Knight whimpered a couple of times.
The Times man gave up a valiant battle to maintain his grave expression and asked, “Do you think, Mr. Wisdom, that politics or pressure may have caused this—uh—discrimination?”
“Possibly, sir, possibly. Thus far, we have had no complaints of rat brutality from any area other than Park Avenue. We of course hope that this is not a political football, but nevertheless we have asked Mr. St. Ives to investigate.”
“How about it, Phil?” the man from the Post asked.
I rose and nodded in what I hoped was a somber fashion. “Our preliminary survey,” I said, “indicates that both politics and pressure have played no small part in the discriminatory brutalization of Park Avenue rats. We’re preparing a White Paper on this and I hope to have copies of it to you within the next few days.”
There was a muffled groan from the rear that came from Myron Greene who had his head back in his hands.
After several more questions the man from the Times said, “Thank you, Mr. Wisdom,” and the press conference was over. The superannuated audience, representing a collective net worth of around a half-billion dollars, rose creakily and crowded about Wisdom and Knight to congratulate one and comfort the other.
I walked to the rear to find out what Myron Greene considered so important that he would stop off at a hired hall on his way downtown. After listening for ten minutes, I agreed that it might be important, even vital, but told him that I wasn’t interested. It took him another fifteen minutes to tell me why I was.
THERE HAD BEEN A time, nearly five years ago, when I might have been sitting in that rented hall on Thirty-ninth Street with the rest of the press, feeding lines to Wisdom and Knight, more or less serving as an accommodating shill for their put-on.
But then it had been my job to write a column five times a week for a now defunct and largely un-mourned newspaper about the cards and cautions who infest New York. I had developed a breezy, perhaps irreverent style, the source material had been limitless, the hours flexible, and I found myself with a respectable readership and inexplicably the trust and confidence of a swarm of thieves, cops, hustlers, high rollers, con men, prophets, assorted saviors, bums, middle echelon Mafiosi, and people who seemed to spend most of their time hanging around telephone booths waiting for someone to call.
A small-time thief, who proudly described himself as Constant Reader, had stolen a goodly amount of jewelry from one of Myron Greene’s clients and then informed the lawyer that he was perfectly willing to sell it all back at nominal cost providing that I served as the go-between. I had done so because it provided material for a couple of fair columns that appeared just before the newspaper folded on Christmas Eve, a date much favored by publishers to suspend operations, possibly because of the attendant poignancy, but more probably because few persons really give a damn about reading a newspaper on Christmas Day.
Just as the last of my severance pay was running out three months later, I again was approached by Myron Greene, this time to serve as the intermediary or payoff man in the kidnapping of the son of a client of a fellow attorney who recalled how I had handled the jewelry thing. So for $10,000 in what Greene, to my dismay, insisted on calling “danger money,” I traded a satchel stuffed with $100,000 for the missing heir who, I felt—once we became acquainted—should have stayed missing.
The third time around I became Myron Greene’s client. He now negotiated my fees in exchange for ten percent of whatever I earned. He also reluctantly agreed to perform a few personal chores such as handling my divorce (his first and last such case), dispatching my alimony payments, paying my bills, and seeing to it that my quarterly income tax statements were filed on time. Since it couldn’t possibly have been the money that interested him, I decided that he harbored a sneaking admiration for the thieves, rogues, and mountebanks that I palled around with and it was a charge he never bothered to deny.
I found it to be a trade that needed neither advertising nor a hard-hitting publicity campaign. Word of mouth did nicely. Thieves who got caught recommended me to fellow inmates who were soon to be released. Insurance companies recommended me to their customers and to rival firms. Lawyers recommended me to other lawyers and sometimes even the police would damn me with a grudging bit of faint praise. “Well, he’s as honest as you could expect.” That sort of thing.
So if I didn’t quite prosper, I at least survived, sometimes going south in the winter and to Europe in the spring or fall, content with the three or four or even five assignments that came my way during a year and always sympathetic when each of them brought on another of Myron Greene’s asthma attacks.
The rest of the time I read, went to the films in the morning, played table stakes poker, chased and even caught a few girls, fed stray dogs and cats and the pigeons in Central Park, visited the galleries and some friendly bars, showed up at all parades, joined a few respectable demonstrations, and some not so respectable, took magazines and cigarettes to jailed thieves whom I’d done business with, dropped out of group therapy after one disastrous session, and sometimes just sat around in my “deluxe” efficiency apartment on the ninth floor of the Adelphi on East Forty-sixth Street and stared at the wall.
So it really wasn’t until the young thing from the Daily News called some four years after my own paper had folded and requested an interview that I realized I’d become, willy-nilly, one of those about whom I used to write: a social deviant, a professional pariah, even, for God’s sake, a character.
I had recently returned from Washington where I had almost bungled a job that had involved the theft of a priceless brass shield, a couple of feuding African nations, and the international oil crowd. Some people had been killed, one had been arrested with the shield in Rotterdam, and another was still sulking because he thought he had been cheated out of a few billion dollars’ worth of oil.
The young thing from the Daily News wanted to know all about the go-between calling, remarked that I must live a fascinating life, ate six brownies (the young today are constantly famished), and then trotted off to write up the lies I’d told her.
I called Myron Greene. “No more,” I said.
“No more what?”
“No more international stuff. No more African colonels with big warm smiles and greedy little lies. No more State Department types. No more dead bodies, imported or domestic. No more—”
“I thought we handled it all quite well, everything considered,” he said.
“You think we did?” I said, bearing down hard on the we only to notice that it flitted right by him.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. I’ve already made arrangements with the museum for your fee to be paid in full.”
“They must have liked that,” I said.
“Not really; not after I pointed out that a lawsuit could prove most embarrassing to all concerned.”
“Let’s keep it simple from now on, Myron. You know. The purloined necklace, the missing bearer bonds, the stolen securities, even the kidnapped company comptroller. They’re more in line with whatever talents I have to offer. An international diddle isn’t.”
“We’ve never had a kidnapped company comptroller,” he said with all the earnest literalness of his profession.
“If we do, let’s make sure he’s a local boy. Or even a du Pont from Delaware. But no more international trade. They’re not at all keen on following the rules.”
“Very well, if you insist,” he said a little stiffly, I felt, as if making a note to send me a white feather that afternoon. “But I think you should admit that the entire affair was fascinating.”
“Fascinating,” I said, hung up, and tried to recall the exact day that an incurable romantic had been foisted on me as lawyer, business manager, and principal source of income. I wanted to mark it off on the calendar as a date not to remember.
So now we stood there in the rear of that drafty, rented hall which had seen ten thousand meetings held and ten thousand committees formed and perhaps fifty thousand resolutions passed, all for or against something that no longer mattered to anyone, while I listened to Myron Greene explain why I had to be in an office on the third floor of the State Department in Washington the following day.
When he finished, I said, “I told you no more international stuff, Myron.”
“But you know him,” he said. “And they know that you know him.”
“That was a long time ago. I didn’t like him even then and it was a fully reciprocated feeling.”
“He hired you,” Greene said. “He gave you your very first job.”
“And fired me. From my very first job.”
Myron Greene was silent for a moment as he carefully undid and then refastened the six leather-covered buttons on his heather tweed Norfolk jacket that I hoped wouldn’t shake the confidence of whomever he was seeing downtown. When he was through fooling with his jacket he smoothed back his blond hair whose length would draw no stares on Madison, but might earn a disapproving glance from a Superior Court judge, providing Greene ever ventured into a courtroom, which he had done only twice during the five years that I’d known him. Myron Greene’s clients, but for me, weren’t the kind who were haled into court.
“Well, I’m afraid that you’ll have to keep the appointment in any event,” he said and directed a stubborn stare past my shoulder. I turned to see what was so fascinating but it was only Wisdom and Henry Knight chuckling at each other as they took down the CHEAPAR banner. The audience and the press had gone.
“Why?” I said.
“Because they want to explain it to you personally.”
“Tell them to call me.”
“I told them you’d be there at eleven. Tomorrow.”
“Now you can tell them that I won’t.”
“Sorry, but it’s either-or now.”
“Either-or what?”
“Either you show up in Washington at eleven tomorrow or a federal marshal serves you here with a subpoena at noon.” His stubborn stare turned on me and now it was corporation lawyer Greene informing the executive board that there was nothing to be done but file bankruptcy proceedings and yes, it was a damned shame about all those widow and orphan stockholders.
“Subpoena for what?” I said.
Myron Greene smiled slightly. “For Congressman Royker’s subcommittee.”
“Royker’s a fool.”
“Even a fool can open up a can of worms,” Greene said wisely.
“What can?”
“He could start poking into what really happened to the shield and the Africans and the oil crowd. He’s good at things like that as long as they produce headlines. And the headlines should be interesting, but you’d know more about that than I would.”
“You were supposed to have fixed it,” I said. “You were supposed to have gone around with dustpan and whisk broom and tidied it all up.”
Myron Greene smiled again. It was broader this time, almost friendly. I also noticed that he was no longer wheezing. “Oh, I did,” he said. “I told them that you’d be there.”
I walked over to the door and gazed down the long flight of stairs. If I hurried, I could be in Mexico tomorrow. Guadalajara perhaps; that had a nice ring. Instead, I turned and went slowly back to Myron Greene.
“How much are the kidnappers asking?”
“For the ambassador?”
“For the Chicken.”
“Is that what you called him?”
“We did when he was managing editor. I don’t know what they called him when he got to be publisher. He’d fired me by then.”
“A million dollars.”
“You didn’t say it right, Myron. There wasn’t enough reverence in your tone and that means that there’s not going to be any ten percent.”
He nodded.
“Five?” I said without much hope.
He shook his head this time. “Three,” he said, “and I had to press for that.”
“Hard?”
“Very hard.”
“State must not think he’s worth a million either,” I said. “How long have they had him?”
“Since day before yesterday. Saturday.”
“Another day or two and whoever’s got him will make State an offer to take him back.”
“I don’t think so,” Myron Greene said.
“You don’t know him.”
“The kidnappers are demanding something more.”
“What?”
“Not what. Who.”
“All right. Who?”
“Anton Pernik. The poet.”
“He’s in jail.”
“House arrest really.”
“I never could read him.”
“He won the Nobel Prize,” Myron Greene said.
“So did Sinclair Lewis and I can’t read him either.”
“Well?” Myron Greene asked.
“I don’t know anyone in Belgrade.”
“It didn’t happen in Belgrade,” he said. “It happened in Sarajevo.”
“It sometimes does,” I said, “but I don’t know anyone there either.”
“The Yugoslav government has expressed its willingness to cooperate.”
“They’ll give up Pernik?”
“Yes.”
“They probably can’t read him either.”
“Your services were requested, of course.”
“By whom, Killingsworth?”
“No,” he said and smiled again, even more broadly than before. Myron Greene was enjoying himself. “Not by the ambassador. By Anton Pernik.”
“Maybe I’ll try to read him again,” I said.
AMFRED KILLINGSWORTH HAD BEEN managing editor of the Chicago PostWho’s Who