John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

A ray of hope. Tad might be right, glowing over the man’s card. But outside of this one case the Parker House event had proven utterly mundane. Croftall’s aide, in fact, had been one of few men on the scene with actual clout. Nearly everyone else worked, as Leo Mirini would say, in the trades. Some made a living contracting for construction, some sub-contracted for the roofing or the windows or the ganglia under kitchen sinks. They’d come to Parker House to ingratiate themselves with the Governor.

Not that the Governor was easy to find. Not that he was out glad-handing, goodtiming, talking the Bruins or the Celts. The Governor waited behind the closed door of the suite’s bedroom. He was in there over a room-service lunch. And simply being on the guest list, like Kit, didn’t get you a meeting. No. In order to get private time with Ed King a man needed to, as Croftall’s aide put it, “make a commitment.” A man needed to make a donation, that is; he needed to lay down some cash for King’s next campaign. The event was a fundraiser. The contractors came with checks, and in return the Governor gave them a lunch-greased handshake. Grease for grease.

“I didn’t meet King,” Kit told Corinna Nummold, his Administrative Assistant.

“Takes money to meet the head guy,” Corinna said. “Kit, I bet you don’t get any building contracts either.”

This was still later on Tuesday. Corinna had poked her head into Kit’s reliquary to remind him she had to pick up her son. Her much-photographed Arturito. Kit blinked up at the woman, then at his glass walls. Finally, out across the office halfwalls, he once more spotted the framed portrait of Arturo on the paper’s reception desk. And Kit thought he had problems. Here was a woman three years his junior with a boy in third grade and no idea where the father might be.

“Nope,” Corinna was saying. “I guess Kit Viddich won’t be getting any contracts from the governor this year.”

Her attempt at gringo conversational biplay. To Corinna, that’s what her position with Sea Level was about, learning the ways of the Norteamericano . Not for her the smoke-ringed ennui of a hipster like Zia Mirini.

“Maybe I shouldn’t make jokes,” she said more gently. “I just mean to tell you, I heard about stuff like this.”

Not for her was Zia’s gaunt punk anti-style, either. Corinna had a meaty Dominican face and frame, and she didn’t try to hide it. She wore big career-girl hair, thick career-girl shoulder pads. Kit hoped his smile looked encouraging.

“If it was me,” she said, “seeing that stuff right in front of my face — Kit, I would’ve lost it. That corruption, I mean. I would’ve started screaming at people.”

“Aw, Corinna. It wasn’t the place. Screaming would’ve done more harm than good.”

She nodded: The way of the Norteamericano .

“Well, it’s not like it was easy for me either, Corinna. I walked out.”

“I can see it wasn’t easy for you.”

The woman touched a pinkie to the corner of one eye, showing a trace of anger. God knows, she must be sick and tired of the skinny Anglo girls getting all the attention.

“Kit, I mean. It’s like you’re hardly here.”

“Corinna. It was just some men in a room.”

Kit had seen the whole show at Leo’s office, yeah. At the Parker House, the only way he’d been able to talk with anyone had been by mentioning Leo. Also the lunch came in one flavor only, Tangy Testosterone. Old-boy testosterone. The event had Leo’s crassness about cash, too. Since this was January, the squeakiest month in the fiscal year, the Governor’s people had brought along loan forms. They’d brought both 60-day and 90-day forms. They’d set the papers in two stacks on a table outside the Governor’s bedroom. Grease.

Kit had found himself getting nowhere, and more than a little disgusted. He’d taken Croftall’s card and walked out. He knew enough about Boston to understand that this sort of thing went on all the time. Patronage, sure. He even knew how someone like Forbes Croftall would defend the system, using words like “commitment,” expressions like “tell the men from the boys.” Kit wasn’t such a saint that he didn’t know. Nonetheless, the experience left him unable to touch his lunch. The arson wave across the city, the rot in Monsod — these must have begun with the sort of deals men were making today up in Parker House. Kit took the aide’s card and walked.

Aw, Leo. What had the old man been up to, arranging Kit’s entré?

Tuesday afternoon, it had reached the point where Kit didn’t know what to tell freelancers. The paper’s assignments had to remain open-ended. And with the Art Director, things got still more complicated. The Director was a friend of Zia’s, another clubgoer, an almost weightless woman named Topsy Otaka. She and Kit huddled over the drafting table in Sea Level’s back room. When he asked for two different front-page mockups, Kit felt sheepish and without a clue. This, in turn, led him into a thoughtless gaffe. He described his source on Monsod — mentioning no names, at least — as a “junkie murderer.” A bad gaffe, since Zia’s friend was herself in a methadone program.

Apologizing, a white knight with egg on his face, Kit made an effort to clear his head. He asked:

“Why would Zia’s father put his money into my paper?”

Topsy, already uncomfortable, started to look even worse. She massaged the inside of one elbow.

“He knows the kind of story I go for,” Kit said. “He knows what his own business is, let’s face it. Mirinex does deals that are borderline, sometimes.”

“Well,” Topsy said, “he wants to help Zia.”

Getting nowhere. What Kit went through Tuesday afternoon had always been the hardest part of his chosen work. Loose ends taking so long to come together — it always put him into a distracted funk. He whispered prayer after prayer for a phone call. He wasted minute after minute with his head back and his boots up, lost in the reflections along his high office glass.

*

SEE SEA LEVEL RUN

Dick and Jane need not apply

As I’m sure everyone on the Pulitzer committee knows by now, Boston has a new newspaper. Or a sort of newspaper, anyway, rather a mongrel, part Rolling Stone , part I.F. Stone. At all events, its name is Sea Level and it does look … interesting.

The editor is Christopher “Kit” Viddich, the husband of the former Elizabeth Steyes(yes, that’s Stye, of the the Brattle Street Sties). Your peripatetic Society gal was lucky enough to attend the party for the first issue, held last Saturday evening at a private address in the Back Bay.

The occasion proved … interesting.

Consider the Belle of the Ball, at Mr. Vidditch’s affair. Belle of the Ball, sans doute , was Zia Mirini, a comely young sylph despite her best efforts to appear otherwise. Her shirt — do my eyes deceive me? — was the upper half from a set of long johns. No ordinary white long johns either; but, well, what would you call that color? Pompeiian red? And then there was the “news” she was “investigating.”

The woman’s writing a piece on a disc jockey. A “radio personality,” as they say. Someone named Oedipus.

Kit got a kick out of Zia’s desktop decorations. Leo’s daughter liked tacky Italian postcards, retouched within an inch of their lives. She had a good half-dozen of these, their pop pastels a shock under the dim plastic desk cover. She had — let’s see. A shot of Naples and the Bay, Vesuvius trailing smoke in the distance. The blue was like heaven, the gray like sin. And she had the Bread and Wine, flesh and blood.