Росс Томас: The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

The debriefing took ten days in a sealed-off suite in the old section of the Army’s Letterman General Hospital on the Presidio in San Francisco and when it was finished, so was my career — if it could be called that.

They were polite enough throughout, perhaps even a bit embarrassed, providing that they felt anything at all, which I doubted, and the embarrassment may have prompted their unusual generosity when it came to the matter of severance pay. It amounted to twenty thousand dollars and, as Carmingler kept saying, it was all tax-free so that really ran it up to the equivalent of twenty-eight or even thirty thousand.

It was Carmingler himself who handed me the new passport along with the certified check drawn on something called the Brookhaven Corporation. He did it quickly, without comment, much in the same manner as he would shoot a crippled horse — a favorite perhaps, and when it was done, that last official act, he even unbent enough to pick up the phone and call a cab. I was almost sure it was the first time he had ever called a cab for anyone other than himself.

“It shouldn’t take long,” he said.

“I’ll wait outside.”

“No need for that.”

“I think there is.”

Carmingler produced his dubious look. He managed that by sticking out his lower lip and frowning at the same time. He would use the same expression even if someone were to tell him it had stopped raining. “There’s really no reason to—”

I interrupted. “We’re through, aren’t we? The loose ends are neatly tied off. The crumbs are all brushed away. It’s over.” I liked to mix metaphors around Carmingler. It bothered him.

He nodded slowly, produced his pipe, and began to stuff it with that special mixture of his which he got from some tobacco shop in New York. I could never remember the shop’s name although he had mentioned it often enough. He kept on nodding while he filled his pipe. “Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way.”

“No,” I said, “you wouldn’t. But I would and that’s why I’ll wait outside.”

Carmingler, who loved horses if he loved anything, which again was doubtful, rose and walked around his desk to where I stood. He must have been forty or even forty-two then, all elbows and knee joints and what I had long felt was a carefully practiced, coltish kind of awkwardness. The flaming hair that stopped just short of being true madder scarlet half-framed his long narrow face, which I think he secretly wanted to resemble a horse. It looked more like a mule. A stubborn one. He held out his hand.

“Good luck to you.”

Sweet Christ, I thought, the firm handshake of sad parting. “By God, I appreciate that, Carmingler,” I said, giving his hand a brief, hard grasp. “You don’t know how much I appreciate it.”

“No need for sarcasm,” he said stiffly. “No call for that at all.”

“Not for that or for anything else,” I said.

“I mean it,” he said. “Good luck.”

“Sure,” I said and picked up the new plastic suitcase that failed utterly in its attempt to resemble cordovan. I turned, went through a door, down a hall, and out onto the semicircular drive where a pair of chained-down mortars that had been made in 1859 by some Boston firm called C.A. & Co. guarded the flagpole and the entrance to Letterman General Hospital, established 1898, just in time for the war with Spain. In the distance, there was Russian Hill to look at.

The cab arrived ten minutes later and I placed the bag in the front seat next to the driver. He turned to look at me.

“Where to, buddy?”

“A hotel.”

“Which one?”

“I haven’t thought about it. What do you suggest?”

He looked at me some more with eyes that were too old for his acolyte’s face. “You want high-priced, medium high-priced, or cheap?”

“Medium.”

“How about the Sir Francis Drake?”

“Fine.”

He let me off at the Sutter Street entrance and the desk clerk gave me a room on the seventeenth floor with a view of the Bay Bridge. I unpacked the new plastic suitcase they had given me and hung the two suits and the topcoat in the closet. I was wearing one of the three new suits, the gray one with the small, muted herringbone weave. It had a vest, as did the other two, and I suspected that Carmingler himself must have chosen them. He always wore vests. And smoked a pipe. And fiddled with his Phi Beta Kappa key.

I had been mildly surprised that everything fitted so well until I remembered that they had my exact measurements on file, had had them, in fact, for eleven years and even required new ones every January 15th on the off-chance that I might have developed a penchant for sauce-soaked noodles and ballooned out by thirty pounds or so, or even grown too fond of the bottle, given up eating, and dropped unhealthfully below my normal 162½ pounds. They always wanted everything exact. Height, 6′ ¼″. Neck, 15¼″. Chest, 41½″. Waist, 32¾. Arm, right, 34¼. Arm, left, 34″. Shoe 10-B with a double-A heel. Hat, 7¼. But they hadn’t bought me a hat, just the three suits to replace the gray cotton, pajamalike prison uniform that I had arrived in, plus a top coat and six shirts (all white, oxford cloth, all button-down collars — Carmingler again); six pairs of calf-length socks (all black); one pair of shoes: black, plain-toed, pebble-grained and expensive; six pairs of Jockey shorts; one belt, black alligator, and four ties (awful).

I estimated that it had cost them around seven or eight hundred dollars. Less than a thousand anyhow. If I’d been more important, they might have gone as high as fifteen hundred, but what they had spent accurately reflected my former niche in the hierarchy. It also reflected their fussy conviction that no ex-colleague, regardless of how wretched or ignominious, should be shunted into the real world unless he were properly (if not richly) attired.

The contents of the closet and the bureau were my sole possessions other than the new passport and the check for $20,000. I also owned a renewed aversion, or perhaps only antipathy, toward the word debriefing, but that didn’t have any cash value.

After the clothing was stored away I called down to the desk to find out the time and where the nearest bank was and whether it was open. I had no watch. It had been taken from me at the prison, at that damp, sweating, gray stone structure that the British had erected almost a century ago. When I was released after three months, nobody had ever heard of the watch. I hadn’t really expected to get it back, but I had asked anyway.

The man at the desk said the nearest bank was just up the street, that it was now 12:36, that the bank was open, and that if I didn’t have a watch I could look out the window at an insurance building whose flashing tower sign would tell me not only the time, but also the temperature. I told the man at the desk to send up a bottle of Scotch.

When the sad-faced bellhop handed me the bill for the whisky, I was surprised at its cost.

“It’s gone up,” I said.

“What hasn’t?”

“Talk,” I said. “It’s still cheap.”

I signed the bill, adding a twenty percent tip, which made the bellhop happy, or at least a little less morose. After he left I mixed a drink and stood by the window gazing out over the city with its bridge in the background. It was one of those spectacularly fine days that San Francisco manages to come up with sometimes in early September: a few quiet clouds, an indulgent sun, and air so sparkling that you know somebody’s eventually going to bottle it. I stood there in my room on the seventeenth floor and sipped the Scotch and stared out at what was once touted as America’s favorite city. Maybe it still is. I also thought about the future, which seemed to offer less than the past, and about the past, which offered nothing at all. Carmingler had seen to that.