Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

“Then he’s not human,” I said. Carmingler puffed on his pipe two or three times and then waved it at me for either emphasis or reassurance. “Vicker is all right,” he said. “He’s one of the old crowd who came with us during the big war, drifted away, and then came back. He’s solid.”

Carmingler had been either fourteen or fifteen when World War II ended, but he always referred to the OSS as the “old crowd” or “us” or “we.” It was one of his minor foibles that I eventually found time to forgive.

“Does Vicker know anything about insurance?” I said.

“No more than you, but your secretary does. Her name’s Klett, I believe.” He took out a small Leathersmith notebook to make sure. “Francine Klett. Miss.”

“Any more surprises?” I said.

Carmingler looked around for an ashtray to knock his pipe out in, but finding none, settled on a metal wastebasket that was filled with paper. For a moment I thought that he wanted to burn down the post office.

“This is quite a leg up for you,” he said.

“That’s been impressed on me often enough.”

“Vicker should prove quite useful. He’s been out there a long time, knows everyone, and has a quick mind.”

“Then why doesn’t he have my job?”

Carmingler rubbed the bowl of his pipe against some of the freckles that were sprinkled over his large pink nose which some kindly person had once described to me as distinguished. If that meant it was a nose that you wouldn’t soon forget, the kindly person was right. “We thought about that,” he finally said when he finished his internal debate about how much to tell me.

“And?”

“We decided that you were the better man for the job.”

“That still doesn’t tell me anything,” I said. “What’s the matter with Vicker? Does he drink, gamble, whore around, and talk too much? Or does he just diddle the expense account and stay out late at night?”

Carmingler smiled, displaying his long, wide, strong teeth that helped him to resemble a horse. “No, it’s none of that. It’s simply that we find him — well — a bit overly ambitious.”

“Christ,” I said. “I bet he has a lean and hungry look, too.”

Despite the Phi Beta Kappa key there were some gaping holes in Carmingler’s education. He looked surprised for a second and then nodded thoughtfully. “Why, yes, now that you mention it. He does look a bit that way.”

It was no good from the beginning and both Vicker and I knew it. Age had something to do with it, but not all. He was forty and I was barely twenty-seven. He was patronizing and I was insufficiently deferential. He talked too much, sometimes even brilliantly, but I listened too little. His attention to detail was phenomenal and he resented my cavalier attitude. His Chinese had been painfully acquired and my easy fluency irritated him. He had an opinion about everything in God’s world and if I didn’t share them, he sulked. He would spend an hour telling me why a Patek Phillippe was better than a Rolex Oyster; or why a Nikon was better than a Leica and how a Canon was the match for both; or why the memory of Mao would be banished in less than a year after his death. He was shrewd, glib, and forgot nothing. He lied beautifully, fretted incessantly, and vaguely alluded to tragic experiences during his stretch with the OSS. He was a walking definition of overweening ambition that I found awful and which I got stuck with until one August day three years and eight months later.

It was the middle of August, around the fifteenth, and Vicker was already at his desk when I arrived at the then fancy, new downtown island offices of Minneapolis Mutual on Pedder Street, which I’d leased just to shut him up. I did balk, however, when he wanted to issue a press release claiming that the reason for our move was a recordshattering jump in business.

He walked into my office carrying his coffee cup, the one with “Vicker” carefully glazed on it in a Chinese ideograph. He liked having his name on things and his shirts, ties, lighter, and cigarette case were all monogrammed. He sat in one of the chairs and propped his feet on my desk, probably because he knew that it irritated me.

“Lucky I was here this morning,” he said so that I would have to ask why. I think he sometimes sat up half the night figuring out his morning opener which would cause me to ask about something that I didn’t know.

“I’m grateful.”

“Might have missed him if I hadn’t arrived early.”

“You’re always early and it’s earned you a head start in life’s great race.” It also gave him the chance to read the mail first, both his and mine.

“He wants five thousand,” he said.

“Sounds like a bargain.”

Vicker lowered his feet, brushed some imaginary lint from the lapel of his burnt orange, raw-silk jacket, put his coffee cup on my desk where it was sure to make a ring, and reached for his silver lighter and cigarette case. He was about my height and about my weight, but I always thought of him as lean and of myself as skinny. He had a smooth, oval face, nicely tanned, and his black hair was thick and straight. He wore it long for the times and it looped down over his high forehead and then back in a style that would become popular years later. His eyes were deep-set and dark brown and he could hold them perfectly steady in the middle of an enormous lie. They also had that cool glow peculiar to persons who will never need glasses. Some commercial airline pilots in their fifties have eyes like that. Vicker’s nose was a right triangle and he sported a carefully clipped mustache above thin lips that he sometimes licked around lunch time. His chin was unremarkable in any respect.

When Vicker finished lighting his cigarette and putting his case and lighter back where they belonged, he blew some smoke at his brown and green foulard tie and said, “He’s yours, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“They’re on to him,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “Who?”

“Pai Chung-liang.”

“He’s not worth five thousand.”

“He meant Hong Kong, not U.S.”

“He’s still not worth it.”

“He wants to go to Singapore. He said he has relatives in Singapore.”

Pai Chung-liang was a middle-aged man who worked in the Bank of China and occasionally passed us fresh snippets of information of varying authenticity. He swore, for example, that the bank, which serves as Peking’s financial arm as well as its Hong Kong diplomatic, espionage, and cultural headquarters, had a cache of 6,129 rifles and carbines, 100,000 rounds of ammunition, 197 cases of grenades, and enough food to withstand a four-month siege. Just who the siege-layers would be, he didn’t say. He didn’t even guess. But some of his information about Peking’s financial transactions had proved interesting, if not vital, and we paid him enough to make it worth his time.

“What did he do, call?” I said.

“Around eight-fifteen.”

“How did he sound?”

Vicker thought for a moment. “Desperate, I’d say. Panicky even.”

“How does he know they’re on to him?”

“He didn’t say. He just said that they are.”

Pai was a shy, slight man, short by even Chinese standards, barely over five feet, who liked flowers and figures. We had needed someone inside the bank and Pai was the best I could do. I got to him when his wife became ill and needed the services of an expensive surgeon whom Pai couldn’t possibly afford. It was one of those things that you hear about when you’re standing around some cocktail party, halflistening to a doctor talk about his rare ones. Mrs. Pai had been one of the rare ones and when the expensive surgeon mentioned that her husband worked for the Bank of China I began to listen in earnest. I employed the usual flimflam to reach Pai. We made a deal. The life of his wife in exchange for whatever information he thought might prove interesting. I think Pai loved his wife very much, even more than he did figures and flowers. He was embarrassingly grateful, even after she died on the operating table under the skilled hands of the noted surgeon, and he wanted to know how he could demonstrate his gratitude. I told him and he readily agreed, partly because he was grateful, partly out of pique at the bank because it had done little about his wife’s illness, but mostly because of the 500 Hong Kong dollars that I agreed to pay him each month.