Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

By 1939 the Japanese had taken control of the maritime customs and in the months that followed they absorbed the postal system, the Chinese-run radio stations, the railroads, the telephones, and the telegraph lines. They also clamped down on the press, except for those newspapers that were located in the sacrosanct French Concession and International Settlement. But if the Japanese couldn’t influence editorial policy, they could influence the editors themselves and they proceeded to do so in a forthright, graphic manner.

I think it was near the busy junction of the French Concession and the International Settlement. Tante Katerine had taken me shopping with her. I was wearing my Buster Brown suit (the brocades and silks were my working uniform) and was minus the powder and paint. I think she got the idea for the Buster Brown suit from an ancient issue of The Woman*s Home Companion that had happened to come her way. I’d have preferred corduroy knickers, although I’m still not sure how I knew that they even existed, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings because she thought that my tailored Buster Brown suit would please me immensely.

There was a crowd gathered at the junction, I recall, and Tante Katerine, always curious, used her elbows and parasol to snake us through it until we were on the front row with the rest of the professional gawkers. There were an even dozen objects to admire and I remember she said, “Oh, my dear Mary Mother of God!” grabbed my hand, and plowed our way back through the crowd with Yen Chi following as best she could.

“Who were they?” I asked.

“Men,” she said in French. “Very good men.”

“What did they do?”

She was grim now. “They wrote the truth, Lucifer. Always remember that. They wrote the truth.” Tante Katerine was much given to dramatics.

“Then why,” I said, speaking French, which I often did when I had a logical question to ask, “are their heads on poles?” They were really pikes, but I didn’t know the difference.

“Because—” she began and then changed the subject. “How would you like a sherbet?”

I forgot about the Chinese newspapermen whose heads the Japanese had chopped off and stuck on pikes for all to see. “Oh, that would be sehr schön ,” the multilingual little bastard said.

I can thank Tante Katerine that by the time I was eight I was a streetwise, cynical little snot, much given to gossip and slander, a toady when it suited my purpose, which it often did, and enough of a ham so that I fully enjoyed my role as whorehouse doorman. The tips that I got from the arriving guests, along with what I rolled the pipe smokers and the drunks for, never taking more than five percent of what they had in their pockets, gave me an income that was equivalent to around fifty to sixty American dollars a week which, at first, I dutifully turned over to Tante Katerine, who said that she was investing it for me. I didn’t understand what investing meant, but I did know that I never had a dime, so I started squirreling away about a third of my weekly take. I must have been about seven then and on my eighth birthday, three days before Pearl Harbor, I had stashed away a little more than a thousand dollars in American and British currency. I didn’t trust anything else. If Tante Katerine suspected that I was skimming a third of my tips, she never said anything. If she had, I would have denied it. Hotly. I was already an accomplished liar. I think she approved of my rolling the drunks and the pipe smokers as long as I didn’t get too greedy, but she never said anything about that either.

Another of my daily tasks after school was to provide an audience for Tante Katerine during the two hours that she took to make up her face. She regaled me with tales of her social life in St. Petersburg before the Bolshevik swine took over and it wasn’t until years later that I discovered that most of her plots had been borrowed from some of the more impossible Viennese operettas. As I’ve said, I didn’t believe the stories even then, but I was fascinated by the intrigue, the duels (always over her), the romance, and the vivid descriptions of balls, parties, and court receptions. All in all, it was far better than Mother Goose and quite on a par with the Brothers Grimm.

It was also during these daily two-hour sessions that Tante Katerine tried to provide me with a philosophical approach to life that would steer me around a long list of pitfalls, provide comfort and solace in moments of stress, and possibly keep me out of jail. It was a curious mixture of copybook maxims, borrowed and invented proverbs, and what I later came to regard as pure Katerinisms.

“Never trust a redheaded Mexican,” she once said. That one was lost on me because I didn’t even know what a Mexican was. My geography had been so neglected that I was quite sure that Berlin was just on the other side of the International Settlement and that San Diego lay a couple of miles farther on. One of the girls had once told me that the world was round like a ball, but that, I reasoned, was obviously a complete fabrication.

Tante Katerine, sitting before her vanity, slapping on creams and unguents, plucking an eyebrow or affixing an earring, would break off one of her more fanciful tales in which all the men were handsome and all the women beautiful, turn those dark green eyes of hers on me, lower her voice until it was almost a high baritone, and say: “Get this straight, my little Kuppler , free advice is the worst kind you can buy.” Or, “Listen well, petit ami , nobody’s ever as sad or as happy as they think they are. They’re more so.” But the one I liked best, because I was never sure that I really had it figured out, was one that she always said at the end of the two-hour operation when she was staring at herself in the mirror and perhaps patting a stray wisp of blond hair into place: “My known vices are my hidden virtues, did you know that, Lucifer?” and I would always say yes, I knew that.

After Victor Orcutt got through telling me what he wanted done and how much he was willing to pay me to do it everyone sat there without speaking while I digested the information, much as if it were a half-dozen oysters that could have been a trifle long from the sea. Homer Necessary cleared his throat once. The fretful cable-car bells clanged and railed against the afternoon traffic. A foghorn moaned twice, as if seeking commiseration, or at least sympathy. I got up and mixed a drink and on the way back to the couch stopped to look at Orcutt, who seemed fascinated by the tip of his left shoe.

“How’d you get on to me?”

He looked up and smiled that meaningless smile of his “Do you mean how or why?”

“Both.”

“Very well,” he said. “I think you should know. First how. It was through Gerald Vicker. You know him, I believe.”

“I know him.”

“But you don’t like him?”

“It runs a little deeper than that. A mile or so.”

“He has quite an organization,” Orcutt said. “Expensive, but reliable.”

“Then he’s changed,” I said.

“Really? He came well recommended and he did produce on extremely short notice.”

“He recommended me?”

“Highly. But you weren’t our only candidate. There were three others who were put forth by organizations similar to Mr. Vicker’s.”

“Who?” I said.

“The candidates?”

“No. The organizations.”

“I don’t really believe that concerns you, Mr. Dye.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

I put my drink down on the coffee table and leaned forward, resting my arms on my knees. I stared at Orcutt, who stared back, not in the least perturbed but only curious about what came next, if anything.