Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

“I just like to make things up.”

“Oh.”

“Why don’t you get the White House to stop him?”

“They tried, but not too hard. They need his vote on the tax bill.”

“What about the magazine?”

“No chance.”

“You tried?”

“Yes.”

“You’re in a bind,” I said.

“So are you.”

“You could blackmail the senator. Threaten to reveal that slush fund of his.”

“I said they need his vote.”

“That close, huh?”

“It’s that close.”

“So you sent your young friend Franz Mugar down to take care of me.

“That was a mistake.”

“That’s two you’ve admitted. It must be a record.”

“There won’t be any more.”

“Sorry I can’t help.”

“You won’t then?”

“No.”

Carmingler looked at the window and said, “If it’s money—”

“It’s not.”

“It would only be for six months.”

“I don’t have six months.”

He looked at me quickly. “Do you have—”

“Don’t get your hopes up. I don’t have anything fatal. I just don’t have time to sit around in Brazil or the Canary Islands while you try to tidy things up. It’s not that important to me.”

“It is to us,” Carmingler said.

“Why?”

Carmingler’s hand darted to the Phi Beta Kappa key, which hung on the gold chain that decorated the vest of his glen plaid suit. The key didn’t seem to give him as much reassurance as it usually did. For a brief moment, a very brief one, he almost looked bewildered. “What do you want, a lecture?” he said.

“I’ve heard them all.”

“It wasn’t a good question.”

“That’s because you don’t have a good answer for it.”

He shook his head. “You’re wrong. I have an answer.”

“I’ll listen.”

“You asked why it was important.”

“Yes.”

“It’s important because it’s what we do,” Carmingler said with more fervor in his voice than I’d ever heard before. “We do a job, and you know what kind of job it is because you once did it. You weren’t all that good at it because you never really believed in it, but most of us do, and that’s something you’ll never understand because you don’t really believe in the importance of anything, not even yourself. If your wife had lived, you might have changed a little, but she didn’t and you didn’t. So you ask why it’s important. It’s important because form and substance are important to us and we’re part of both, the important part. Without us, there’d be no form and substance — no structure. There might be another one around, but not the one that we shaped. I don’t detach myself from what I do. It’s an important part of me and I’m an important part of it.”

“It’s the job,” I said.

“Yes, goddamn it, it’s the job. I think the job is important.”

“I remember,” I said. “I remember that briefcase in Manila was important.”

“It was the job.”

“You had to cut off his hand to get that briefcase. You chopped it off with a machete. All part of the job.”

“My job. Yes.”

“And your job is to make me go away. To make me disappear as if I’d never really existed. And then I’d just be something else that the senator had found in the bottom of a bottle of Old Cabin Still.”

“We’ll pay you for your loss of identity,” Carmingler said, losing a small battle to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

I said no again for the same reason that I’d once said yes, which was for no reason at all other than that it seemed the thing to do at the time.

“I’ll ask why one more time,” Carmingler said.

“Because I don’t care enough to say yes, I suppose.”

“It would be easier.”

“That’s part of it, too.”

“You don’t think we’re very important, do you?”

“No,” I said. “Not very.”

Carmingler nodded and rose. He took out his pipe, looked at it, and then replaced it in his coat pocket. He studied me for several moments as if trying to decide how to say what I knew that he had to say. “I’m sorry,” he finally said and sounded as if he might really mean it, if he could ever mean anything. “I’m sorry,” he said again, “but you’re not very important to us either.”

I had breakfast with Victor Orcutt the next morning. Or rather he had breakfast while I nursed a hangover, the rotten kind that makes everything taste yellow, even coffee and tomato juice.

“Breakfast is really the only hotel food that I can abide,” Victor Orcutt said, and I nodded my agreement or understanding or whatever it was. I didn’t yet feel like talking.

“Do you like the South, Mr. Dye? I don’t think I’ve ever asked,”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“There’s something about it that fascinates and repels me at the same time.”

“It affects a lot of people like that, I’ve heard.”

“Really? Does it affect you that way?”

“No.”

“Of course, Swankerton isn’t really the South.”

“It isn’t?”

“Well, it’s in the South, but it’s right on the Gulf and it gets all the traffic from New Orleans and Texas and Florida and those places. No, to be in the South, the real South, you have to go about forty miles north of Swankerton.”

I decided to try a cigarette.

“Swankerton is such an ugly name for a city, I think,” Orcutt said, spooning some marmalade on to his toast, which still looked warm as did his link sausage and scrambled eggs. He must have had a different room waiter.

“It also has an unfortunate nickname,” I said and felt as if I were prattling.

“You mean Chancre Town? Isn’t that perfectly ghastly?”

“Terrible.”

“They have such beautiful names down here. Natchez-under-the-Hill. That’s really nice. So is Pascagoula.”

“They’re in Mississippi.”

“But they’re still beautiful names. So is Mississippi. It’s from the Chippewa and they pronounced it more like mici-zibi.” He spelled it for me. “It means large river.”

I put out my cigarette after the third puff.

“You sure you won’t have a piece of toast?” Orcutt asked.

“No, thank you.”

“I called New York and Washington yesterday,” he said.

“Hmmm,” I said to indicate interest.

“I learned that magazine story is definitely scheduled and that any amount of pressure has been brought to have it killed. I also learned that Senator Simon is adamant about making his speech.”

“I heard the same thing.”

“You’re going to bear the brunt of it, you know.”

“I know.”

“Does it bother you? I know that’s such a personal question.”

“It’s what I’m being paid for.”

“I do hope Homer will bear up under it.”

“He’ll be all right,” I said. “He did fine yesterday.”

“I heard! He really seemed to enjoy himself. Let’s see, you have your meeting with Luccarella this morning, right?”

“At ten,” I said.

“I’d so like to be there.”

“I’ll try to give you a spicier report.”

“Do. Please. Incidentally, I had a most curious call this morning.”

“Who?”

“Frank Mouton, the druggist.”

“Our candidate for the City Council?”

“The same. You did turn that evidence of his drug-peddling activities over to Lynch, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, Mouton was weeping and sobbing into the phone. He kept telling me how he had betrayed the Clean Government Association because Lynch had forced him to.”

“That was the plan,” I said.

“But then he stopped crying and started to shout. He said that he knew what we were up to, that we were out to ruin him.”