George Higgins - A change of gravity

"Now I have a question: How much're you willing to pay? "Cause I know you've decided and you wont budge, and you know what Mister Cannes told me: I don't have much latitude either."

"A buck anna half," Merrion said.

"Your original two," the agent said.

"We split the difference," Hilliard said.

The agent looked sour. "Good," he said grimly, 'that was fun. Glad it's over." He looked at his watch. "I may even get lunch today."

They shook hands. "I'll have the lease ready this afternoon. Otherwise tomorrow is fine. Just give me a call. Oh, and bring in the deposit and the first month's rent, too. That'll come to a total of three-twenty-eighty-two. We'll need to have that 'fore you get the keys."

"I'll give it to you right now," Hilliard said. He reached into the right inside pocket of his jacket and brought out a folding checkbook.

He opened it and tore out the first check. Merrion positioned himself so that Hilliard could use the checkbook as a pad and Merrion's left shoulder as a desk. Hilliard made the check out to the Carnes Company for $320.82. On the back he wrote: "First month's rent and security deposit High St. dist. off."

The agent took it and gazed at him. "Can I put this in the bank on my way back to the office?" he said.

Hilliard shrugged. "Sure," he said, "Roy knows it's good."

It was a bleak, painfully resonant room with varnished matched-board oak floors and oak wainscoating. Hilliard walked over to the left along the inside wall, passing the doors opened into the toilets and grabbed the ballet-practice bar still in place there. He tried to shake it. It was firm. "Handy," he said to Merrion. His voice boomed in the emptiness. "We used to put our coats here in the winter. Fold 'em over it."

Down below the front door slammed. Hilliard went to the window in the middle of the front wall. "There… goes… Brian," he said.

"First a stop at the bank and then off to enjoy his well-earned lunch.

Brian's an unhappy man. He thinks he has a hard life." He turned and looked at Merrion, still standing in the doorway. He grinned and said:

"Our first home, dear," he said. "Are you as excited as I am?"

Merrion laughed. "I might say that to you," he said. "I don't think I'd say it to Brian."

"You think Brian's a little light in his loafers?" Hilliard said. "He did mention he has a wife."

"He was careful to mention he had a wife," Merrion said. "He might even actually have one. Who's a woman, I mean I understand some of them do. Wife is a perfect disguise."

"Ever think about getting one for yourself?" Hilliard said, putting an arm around his shoulder as they left the big room. "Not that I'm saying you need camouflage. Just a matter of: Wouldn't you like to?

Maximum of temptation with a maximum of opportunity?"

Merrion shrugged. "I brought it up a couple times with Sunny. The last time she was home, in fact. She told me she'd think about it.

Said that the time before, too. I don't think she thinks she's ready.

Maybe just not ready for me. I'm only twenny-three. Don't think I hafta worry that much yet."

Hilliard followed Merrion down the stairs, their footfalls echoing.

Three steps above the landing he paused and said: "That stuff about cars sliding down the back lot did all of that actually happen?"

Merrion stopped on the landing and turned around. "You didn't believe me?"

Hilliard paused two steps up from the landing. "No," he said, "I didn't mean that. It's just that I've lived in this town all my life, and I never heard that'd happened. I'd've thought I would've."

Merrion turned back down the stairs. "I would've too," he said.

"Well, did it?" Hilliard said, crossing the landing and starting down the second flight behind Merrion.

"I dunno," Merrion said. "It could have."

"You said it did," Hilliard said.

At the foot of the stairs Merrion stood on the black-and-white tiled floor and smiled at Hilliard. "Not exactly," he said. "You told me to go find out about this building, who built it and so forth, and why.

Well, it turned out there wasn't much to find out. A guy named Reynolds built it, along with seven others, almost just like it, between Eighteen-seventy-nine and Nineteen-oh-one. Office space, for the people who managed the mills. And just like Brian told me, the dancing school was originally the Foresters' Hall. But I didn't find out anything, really, that would've helped us to drive down the rent.

"Therefore I asked him about ice. I don't think I ever actually said there was any. Or that any cars slid down the hill. All I said was I was surprised he hadn't heard about it. And I said I guessed he never worked in a car dealership ordering parts, because if he had've done that, then he might've heard about it. Then he'd know the reason for the two posts and the chain across.

"The chain and the posts're definitely there. I'm completely sure of that." '"But ice could be the reason," Hilliard said on the ground floor, laughing. He clapped Merrion on the back. "What do you think's going to happen, when he tells Roy and asks him how come he never heard about the ice, and Roy tells him he never did, either?"

Merrion laughed. "Well," he said, 'nothing, as far's we're concerned.

Brian's putting the check in the bank. Once he's done that, he can't back out. The deal's been cut."

By the end of the next week the room was spaciously furnished, leaving plenty of standing-and-arguing room among four old wooden desks and a scuffed-up oaken conference table long and sturdy enough to accommodate ten telephone desk sets on election nights and eight strong oak armchairs large enough for Hilliard and Merrion and six other robust adult males. Four of them came from the district and worked in it. The two who lived outside it were interested in doing business with the state.

They strenuously and passionately shared the purpose of making Hilliard look good, so that they would prosper along with him. But they didn't always agree on what ought to be done to achieve that. When they did agree they were often united in profane displeasure at some opponent's action or remark. So when they gathered at the table Friday evenings during off-years; daily and nightly during election years they often wound up shouting 'stupid bastard' and 'dumb fucking asshole' either at each other or in reference to rivals and opponents, pounding their fists as their faces grew red from exertion and anger.

At night the space that had been gently burnished in the evenings by the soft light from six floor lamps with golden-fringed red shades, when the lady with the brassy hair had held her Friday and Saturday evening waltz and fox-trot lessons for polite young girls and sullen little boys 'one-two-three, sfy-ud; one-two-three, sfy-ud; yay-uss' was now starkly lit by eight one-hundred-fifty-watt bulbs overhead, enclosed in white-frosted glass globes suspended from green-tarnished brass chains plaited with silk-covered power cords descending from white-spattered green-tarnished-brass ceiling fixtures. The fixtures were mounted flush against the chalky, white-washed, tobacco-browned, stamped-tin false ceiling, ornament ally filigreed at the corners with has-relief representations of palm fronds.

It was a good location. High Street was busy then and the new office, three doors north of the Transcript office at its center, was close to the Sportsman's Cafe where the newspapermen went to pie their own type after work, filled with inside stuff they couldn't print but liked to trade with those they trusted. So a politician facing a late night in the office and a makeshift supper at nine, aware that his best asset is curiosity and a relaxed mind works better, could take a short break around five-thirty and run down to the cafe without coat or umbrella through a light rain for a couple quick beers without getting his clothes very wet, 'just to find out what's going on." In the Sportsman's several of the men who sometimes shouted at each other and belabored the oak table in the second-floor office often met on better terms to drink Hampden Beer, CC or Dewar's and water, and denounced other men and each other in similar rough terms and the newspapermen laughed with them, feeling fortunate to be alive and important in exciting events, and to have such splendid tough friends.