Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

“I noticed,” I said.

“You wouldn’t have if I’d been trying.”

“But you weren’t.”

“No.”

“All right,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”

“I’m with Victor Orcutt,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“What’s he sell?”

“Nothing.”

“Why me?”

He reached into the pocket of his brown suit and brought out a package of Camels. He offered me one. I shook my head no. He lit it with a stainless steel Zippo, inhaled deeply and then blew some smoke up into the air. He seemed to have all the time that there was. He seemed to have almost as much time as I did;

“He didn’t think you’d be much interested,” the man in the brown suit said.

“In what?”

“An invitation to go see him.”

“He’s right,” I said. “I’m not.”

His blue and brown gaze never left my face. “Like I said, he didn’t think you’d accept an invitation, so he told me to give you this.” He reached into his inside breast pocket and produced a square, buffcolored envelope which he handed to me.

“You could have left it at the desk,” I said, pocketing the envelope, not looking at it.

He nodded slightly, but not very much. His heavy, thick chin moved a half-inch down and then up. Twice. “I could have, couldn’t I,” he said, “except that Victor Orcutt told me to give it to you personally. He gets a little fussy sometimes so I like to do what he says. Makes for harmony, if you know what I mean.”

“Only too well,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, still memorizing my face with his two-color eyes. “I bet you do at that.” Then he turned abruptly and walked on down Sutter Street without a goodbye or even a farewell wave of the hand. I noticed that he still came down hard on his heels.

I didn’t open the envelope until I was up in the hotel room. The buff paper could have been made out of fine old linen rags and it crackled richly as I tore the flap open. Inside there was a single sheet of paper, folded once. Centered near its top was the name Victor Orcutt in discreet, squared-off, capitals and small capital letters. There was nothing else on the letterhead. No address, no phone number, no zip code. The name was printed in dark brown ink, the color of old mahogany, and I ran my thumb over the letters to make sure that they were engraved. The hand-written message, also in dark brown ink, was simple, knowing, and even polite:

Dear Mr. Dye ,

I shall be calling on you late this afternoon (shall we say around four?) concerning a matter that should prove of mutual interest. I hope that your brief stay at Letterman General Hospital was both comfortable and rewarding.

Sincerely,

The handwriting was calligraphy really and it was so good that it almost made up for its air of affectation. It was a clear, bold hand, straight up and down, without an unnecessary whorl or flourish or serif. It was a studied, strangely economical style and I decided that it must have taken Victor Orcutt a couple of years of hard practice to perfect it.

I tossed the letter onto a table, mixed a drink, and stood by the window to watch the fog roll in and think bad thoughts about Carmingler and his sealed-off suite and his Boy Scout security.

They had chartered a C-130 to fly me the eight thousand miles or so to San Francisco. It had touched down only once on the way, at Honolulu International to refuel, and even then I wasn’t allowed off the plane. There had been only two passengers, Carmingler and myself, and it was Carmingler alone who had met me at that gray, crumbling ruin of a prison at midnight when I was released. He wore a hot tweed jacket with leather patches on its sleeves and insisted that there wasn’t time for me to change clothes, but that I should wear the pajamalike gray cotton uniform, the same one that I had worn continuously for three months.

Aboard the C-130, I told him: “I’ve got lice.”

“Really?” he said. “Oh, well, I suppose a great many people do. We’ll get rid of them for you in a few hours. In the meantime, scratch if you like. I don’t mind.”

We flew from Honolulu International to Hamilton Air Force Base where a private ambulance waited with its windows carefully blacked out. The ambulance whisked Carmingler and me to Letterman General and I wasn’t allowed outside the sealed-off suite except to go to the dentist. According to Carmingler, no one knew that I was at Letterman General. And perhaps no one did, except Victor Orcutt. So much for Carmingler’s security measures.

He had talked little on the long flight back, except at Honolulu when we had refueled and he couldn’t smoke his pipe. “There’s been a bit of a flap, you know,” he said.

“How bad?”

“Bad enough, I’m afraid.”

“So?”

He took his dead pipe out of his mouth long enough to give me what I assume he thought was a reassuring smile. “We’ll get it straightened out. In San Francisco.”

“How bad?” I asked again.

Carmingler went through his coltish act. He rose awkwardly, balanced himself on his right foot, and knocked the empty pipe against the heel of his raised left shoe.

“It’s bad enough,” he said, and his head ducked toward the pipe that he was pounding against his shoe. “Actually, it’s about as bad as it could possibly be.”

I had been waiting for the go-ahead signal on Li Teh for more than a week when the childish message arrived instructing me to Cipher the Village Statesman. Translated, it meant that I was to subject Li to a polygraph or lie detector test. Despite his horror of most things mechanical, especially computers, Carmingler’s faith in the polygraph bordered on the mystical. It was the kind of faith that the clergy likes to call deep and abiding.

I decided that it must have been a committee decision. Four or five or even six of them sitting around a table, covering their ruled, yellow legal pads with penciled doodles as they discussed Li Teh and whether he would be worth $3,000 a month to the taxpayers. There would be, of course, the suspicious one, perhaps an old hand, but more likely a new boy trying to make a name for himself. He would chew on his pencil’s eraser for a while, look worried, and then raise the question as to whether Li could really be trusted. You know. Really. After all, if he’s agreed to double, couldn’t he just as easily triple? Young Masterman might have something there, another of them would say, and cock an eyebrow to show the colors of a true skeptic.

And Carmingler, sitting quietly, sucking on his aged pipe, would toss it out casually, as if he didn’t really care, but if they were really worried about Li, the lie machine could clear everything up nicely to the satisfaction of all. If you agree, I’ll get a signal off to Dye this afternoon. So they would all nod in agreement, with the exception of Li Teh, unrepresented, who could blow the whole thing with a farewell address delivered in his normal screech and interspersed with a few choice quotations from Chairman Mao. And there would go six months of work out the window or down the drain or even up the spout, depending upon which cliché I felt like using that day. I sighed and picked up the phone and buzzed Joyce Jungroth.

“Put in a call to Shoftstall,” I said.

“It might take quite a while,” she said. Joyce Jungroth disapproved of the extravagance of overseas calls.

“Just put it through.”

She caught the tone of my voice and said, “Yes, sir.” She called me sir at least three times a year. While I waited for the call I dialed another number and when Li answered, I said hello in English and then switched to rapid, fluent Mandarin. I know it was fluent because I spoke little else until I was nearly six years old.