Ross Thomas - The Seersucker Whipsaw

A secretary brought in a stack of letters and placed them on the coffee table and handed Duffy a pen. “Sign these,” she said. “Now.” Duffy signed and kept on talking. “We could fly somebody in from the States if you want, or I got a couple of Canadians we could pass off on the Chief as Americans — U. S. variety.”

Shartelle was pacing the room again. He waited until the secretary scooped up the letters from Duffy, removed her pen from his coat pocket, and left. “I knew a man once who kept on talking real private business when his private secretary was in the room and one day he came down to his office and they were moving out the furniture and scraping his name off the door.”

“I didn’t say anything she’d understand.”

Shartelle sighed. “You just keep talking. You’ll say one here and two there and some pretty little old gal is going to add up to three and you won’t know what hit you. But to get back to my need for help, I reckon old Pete here and I can handle it. He is coming with me?”

“Yes,” Duffy said firmly, “for the duration. You’ll be in charge, of course, Clint.”

“Oh, I’ll just do the thinking and the talking and the nosing around and Pete can do the writing and the administrating.”

“You can employ some secretarial help down there,” Duffy said.

“When do you expect us to fly down?” Shartelle asked.

Duffy looked at me. “How about tomorrow? If you give me your passports, I’ll arrange for the visas this afternoon. Okay, Pete?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll have been back an entire day by then. I can leave tomorrow.”

“Now Pete, this is an experience that you could never acquire anywhere else. You’re the best we have, and with a little more seasoning like this, there’s no telling how fast you’ll move up. Downer agrees, and so does Theims.”

“He sure talks a pretty piece, don’t he, Pete?” Shartelle said with a wide grin.

Duffy got up and moved over to my chair and clapped a well-tended hand on my shoulder. “He’s good, Clint. He’s one of the best naturals I’ve ever seen. He’s got that ability to synthesize. He’s better than I was at his age — and I was one of the best.”

Shartelle nodded, without the grin. “I’ll say that for you, Pig. You were one of the best.”

“I still keep my hand in, you know.”

“Doing what?”

“When they need a few words, I can usually come up with them. Now then,” Duffy continued. “Your passports.” He collected them from Shartelle and me, called the secretary, and handed them to her with instructions to have them back in the afternoon. “I’m having my own physician drop by at four to give you the necessary shots.”

“What kind of shots?” Shartelle asked.

“Smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid, and tetanus. Unless you have had them recently?”

“No, I haven’t.”

The secretary came in again, walked over to Duffy, and whispered something to him. He nodded.

“He’s here,” Duffy said.

“Who?” Shartelle asked.

“Chief Akomolo. We’re having lunch with him in the executive dining room. Special dishes and all. You’ll like groundnuts, Clint. We found an Albertian cook who’s able to whip up a remarkable potage with them.”

“What’re groundnuts, Pete?”

“Peanuts,” I said.

“Can’t say I plan to get all worked up over goober stew, Pig.”

“Try it, Clint. Just try it with an open mind.”

“Want me to predict the rest of the menu?” I asked.

“What?”

“Chicken curry.”

“And hot,” Duffy said. “The way the Leader likes it.”

“The what?” Shartelle asked.

“The Leader. That’s what we call him. It’s — well, more precise than Premier and not quite as intimate as Chief.”

“I’m going to call him Chief,” Shartelle said firmly. “It’s the first time I’ve ever worked for anybody who was a real chief and I’m not going to pass up the opportunity to address him by his rightful title.”

Duffy looked pained. “Be polite, Clint. These people are very sensitive. The English don’t know how to treat them. In fact, they’ve treated them shabbily.”

“Now, Pig, you ain’t telling me how to treat niggers, are you, old buddy, me who was raised with them?” His voice, normally warm and even mellow, developed a cutting edge that had a chill in it. It was the same voice he had used with me when we first discussed the campaign in Denver.

“God knows, Clint, I’m not telling you anything. I’m just saying that the Albertians are sensitive about their treatment from the whites. Especially the British. You can’t make any more out of it than that.”

Shartelle walked over and admired a painting that Duffy had hung on the leather-covered wall. It was an abstract done in frozen blues that blazed out coldly from the brown and tobacco colors of the room. “You know, I don’t feel that I’m going to justify my attitude towards the colored race to anybody else, Pig. Now if you think that my polite Southern up bringing and my country manners are going to offend this client of yours, perhaps we had just better call the whole thing off. I’ll spend a couple of weeks nosing around London, and then just fly on back and there’ll be no hard feelings.”

“Goddamn it, Shartelle, don’t be so childish. All I said was that these people are sensitive.”

“This sure is a nice picture,” Shartelle said. He turned and looked at Duffy for a long moment. “You’ll never learn, will you, Pig?”

“All right, forget it,” Duffy said. His face was pinker than usual and little beads of sweat popped out on his wide forehead just below the thinning black hair that he combed straight back. It wasn’t thick enough to cover some balding patches. I noticed all this with a sense of satisfaction. “Let’s get down to the dining room,” he said. “I don’t want to keep him waiting.”

We walked out the doorless door, past the junk metal monster, and down the corridor to a firedoor. We went through that and down a flight of stairs. With the number of food accounts that DDT had, Duffy had turned the entire first floor of the agency into a hotel-sized kitchen and individual dining rooms where the senior staff could lunch with clients. Duffy led the way and Shartelle and I followed.

The Chief was waiting for us in the dining room. He was seated in a low-backed chair and rose when we came in. I had seen him before at a distance, but we had never met.

“Padraic,” he said warmly, “it is good to see you.” His English was precise, but muddied with a noticeable accent.

Standing by him was a tall young African. He neither smiled nor frowned. His brown face was fixed in a placid, almost content expression, but his eyes flicked over Shartelle and me, paused long enough to register and classify us, and then moved back to the Chief. The young man was not only tall, he was broad. He wore a chalk-striped blue suit and black shoes that must have been size thirteen, triple E width. He stayed close to Chief Akomolo’s elbow, but slightly to the rear. His black eyes roamed the room, rested on Duffy briefly, then back to Shartelle and me, then back on Chief Akomolo. He was a very observant young man.

The Chief himself wore robes of his country. There was the flowing ordona, or outer garment, that slipped over the head and fell in graceful folds to the ankle. Loose trousers of matching fabric peeked out from under the robe whose V-cut neck revealed a round-necked shirt that was embroidered with gold thread. A red pill box velvet hat perched on his head at a somewhat rakish angle.

Akomolo’s face creased into a smile as he greeted Duffy. They shook hands and the African’s eyes glittered behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. Six deeply cut scars formed parallel trenches down each of his plump brown cheeks. They were the markings of his tribe, cut into his face at the age of six and made to fester so that the scars would run deep for the rest of his life.