Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

“Teach.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“After Beverly died? There wasn’t any point.”

“That’s why I said born again. You can’t go back to that time with Beverly so now you’re trying to go back as far as you remember, to Shanghai — back to the whores and the pimps and the crooks who surrounded you then during the only other time in your life you were really happy. Now how’s that for penetrating insight?”

“I still think that you were once a good reporter, Gorm.”

“The funny thing is—” He stopped and coughed. I hadn’t heard him cough before, but if I had heard him without seeing him, perhaps through a thin hotel wall at three in the morning, I would have known he was dying. It was that kind of a cough, the kind that wrenches the whole body, twists it, and sounds like a long series of small, harsh explosions.

He straightened up, used his handkerchief to wipe his lips, and then shook his head. His face had turned a dangerous-looking bright pink. “Not lung cancer,” he said. “Just a side effect of its cousin. Where was I in the lecture?”

“Something was funny,” I said.

“It is funny. You want to hear it?”

“Sure.”

“What you’re doing down here and why. The funny thing is that it might work. Lucifer Dye might rise to live again.”

We talked through dinner, which we had in Smalldane’s room. We got a little drunk, but not very. I had a steak; he had a bowl of oyster stew. We both had a quantity of Scotch.

“I lied to you over the phone the other day,” he said.

“How’d you lie?”

“I said I wanted in on this deal just for kicks. I didn’t really. I can’t do you a damned bit of good. I’m washed up and the pain’s too bad. There are four other guys and one woman that I’m going to see in the next week and then I’ll go back to New York and sit around and wait for it. If I get tired of that, I might speed things up.”

“It’s that bad?”

“It will be in another week or ten days. There won’t be any funeral.”

“All right.”

“You need some money?” he said.

“No.”

“I’ll leave you some anyhow. I got plenty. I got it from zombies like you. They’d spend twenty or thirty years hustling for it and then discover that they weren’t immortal after all, so they’d come to me.”

“For what?”

“For a slice of immortality. So somebody would remember their name ten years after they were dead. I’d set them up a foundation, have a couple of books ghostwritten for them, maybe have them endow a chair at some university. And then I’d present the bill and to a man they thought it was the best money they’d ever spent.”

I switched to Mandarin. “The master said: ‘The noble man hates to end his days and leave his name undistinguished.’ ”

“The Analects,” Smalldane said.

“Book Five, Number nineteen.”

“Substitute rich for noble and you have one of the secrets of my success. There’s only one thing more that I really want to do and I think, Lucifer, by God, you’ve given me the opportunity.”

“Delighted,” I said.

“I saw a picture show a long time ago.”

“So did I. I sometimes think I spent my entire adolescence in picture shows. Carol does, too.”

“Carol who?”

“Thackerty,” I said. “The girl you checked on.”

“The one I saw had Ned Sparks in it,” Smalldane said. “You remember Ned Sparks?”

“Never had the pleasure.”

“Well, he had a long sad, bloodhound face and a deep voice and a cigar. So this gal and her Negro mammy were running this restaurant where the Negro mammy made the best pancakes in the world from her secret recipe. I think it was secret. Anyway, Ned Sparks comes in and orders some pancakes. He’s so impressed that he offers to make their fortune with just two words.”

“What was his cut?”

“That isn’t important. Say ten percent.”

“Okay.”

Smalldane took another swallow of Scotch. “Well, he did it in just two words. You want to know what they were?”

“What?”

“Box it.”

“The pancake mixture?”

“Right.”

“He stole that from Coca-Cola,” I said. “The guy there said, ‘Bottle it.’ ”

“Well, this was supposed to be something like Aunt Jemimah.”

“And everybody got rich?” I said.

“Sure.”

“And happy?”

“Of course.”

“And that’s your ambition, to make me rich and happy?”

“In two words, just like Ned Sparks. Right here in Swankerton.”

“They call it Chancre Town.”

“Don’t blame them.”

“And you’ve got two words for me?”

Smalldane nodded. “Two words.”

“Maybe I’d better get something and write them down.”

“You’ll remember. Maybe.”

“I’ll try.”

“Ready?”

I nodded.

He spaced them carefully. “Take,” he said, “over.”

“The whole town?”

“The whole town.”

“By God, Smalldane, that’s brilliant, that’s what it is.”

“I think so, too.”

“You think I could?”

“That’s the only way you’re going to get out of it.”

“All right, I’ll do it.” On that much Scotch, anything was possible.

“You’ve made an old man happy. Now get out of here so I can get some sleep.”

I rose, a little unsteadily, and headed for the door. Smalldane followed, tacking a bit, much as he had done the first night that I’d seen him coming up the path in Tante Katerine’s garden. I turned at the door.

“Just like Ned Sparks,” he said.

“Two words.”

He pulled himself up so that he stood straight and taller than I. It required an effort that apparently caused considerable pain. Suddenly, he seemed completely sober. He held out his hand and I took it and was surprised at how thin it was.

“This is the real goodbye, kid, I’m leaving in the morning. Early.”

“All right.”

“That crap I was talking earlier. That zombie crap. Forget it.”

I nodded.

“And those two words. Forget them, too. It might be fun, but you’d never make it. You’re not put together that way.”

“All right.”

He held on to my hand and looked at me for a long time, his eyes steady and for once almost gentle. He nodded after his inspection. “You’re not quite dead after all, are you?”

“Not quite.”

He grinned then and released my hand. “Well, that’ll leave one of us around anyway.”

I bought a new suit to go to Homer Necessary’s swearing-in ceremony. It was a dark blue poplin that cost all of sixty dollars plus tax at Biendorfer’s department store across the street from the Sycamore Hotel. I bought two others of the same material, one tan and the other gray.

The ceremony was held in the City Council chamber, which was on the seventh floor of the same new municipal building that housed Police Headquarters. Attendance was by invitation only and I went alone. Lynch had stubbornly refused to invite either Orcutt or Carol Thackerty.

The City Council was a seven-man body that sat at a long oval walnut table, the Lynch crowd on one side, the opposition on the other, and the popeyed mayor at the end near the door. Lynch himself sat in a spectator’s chair that was only a few feet from the far end of the table and gave Mayor Robineaux something reassuring to look at. Three tiers of chairs ran around three sides of the room and during the City Council’s regular meetings were used to seat witnesses, reporters, city officials and employees, and citizens who just wanted to kill a dull afternoon. If Lynch’s chair had been any closer to the table, it would have occupied the spot usually reserved for a city manager, except that Swankerton didn’t have one and, as far as I could see, didn’t need one as long as Lynch was around.