Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) (17 page)

Rule Two
:
Everyone has a price, and every price is less than you think.

“I’m wondering,” I say, “if you saw what Mr. Bettenhauser said in the press the other day.”

“He’s a war hero,” says the man sitting across from me, speaking in a voice like the pebble-grain grip of a Smith & Wesson. His name is Thompson; he sells guns and shills for the NRA. The word on Thompson is that his support for the Congressman has been wavering, despite the envelopes he’s pocketed in the past. It’s startling how fickle the bought can be; it’s enough to erode my faith in humanity. Thompson avoids my hard gaze by looking into the drink I paid for. “A lot of our members are veterans.”

“Congressman DeMathis has the utmost respect for veterans,” I say, “and his record on veterans’ affairs has been spotless. I’m referring to Mr. Bettenhauser’s statement on the Second Amendment.”

Thompson looks up. Jowly and fair-haired, with a bristling crew cut, he raises his chin. “Was it in the paper?”

“Not yet. Bettenhauser made it at a fund-raising event that he thought was off the record.”

“Then does it concern us?”

“Does the Second Amendment concern you? Does the right to shoot the stuffing out of hairy little varmints concern you? Does the vision of federal ATF agents swarming your store and rifling your records and hassling your customers concern you?”

“Is that what he’s calling for?”

“He said, and I quote here, about the recent school shootings, that—and here it is, the quote—that, quote, ‘Something needs to be done,’ unquote.”

“He said that?”

“Yes, he did. And I agree with him. Something does need to be done.”

“What are you thinking?”

“A demonstration,” I said. “Something grand and forceful. You know the drill. Signs, shouted slogans, a show of passion for our constitutional protections. Maybe even a waving American flag to demonstrate love of God and country. Bettenhauser’s speaking to an environmental group at a hotel next week. It would be a perfect place to rally in support of the Constitution. Remember, the surest way to lose your rights is to take them for granted.”

“Who said that? Reagan?”

“Sure,” I say, taking an envelope from my bag and passing it across the table. “Saint Ron of the Bushmaster .223. Now here is enough to pay for the wooden posts and the paper and paint and the costs of organizing and putting the notice on your website, along with a small amount for your trouble. Think you can muster twenty to twenty-five?”

He waits a bit, making whatever calculation he needs to make to satisfy his scruples, before sliding the envelope into his lap. “That won’t be a problem.”

“More would be good,” I say.

“I’ll try.”

“No violence.”

“Of course not.”

“But enough sign shaking to show the passion.”

“What about the press?”

“We’ll take care of the press,” I say, “as well as today’s bar bill. Another Maker’s Mark?”

“Any questions?” said Stony as we finished another hard round of Old Fashioneds. “Anything not clear to your satisfaction?”

“Right now nothing is clear except the queasiness in my stomach,” I said. The Briggs Mulroney Rules were becoming a muddle of hard liquor and secondhand smoke, but I suppose that’s the way of it in the lower strata of politics. Maybe the lower strata of everything.

“Wait a second,” I said, shaking my head and feeling my brain slosh about in my skull. “Wait one stinking second. What about rule number one? You didn’t tell me rule number one.”

“Rule number one,” said Stony, “is the only rule you really need to know.”

“Well, don’t hold back now.”

He raised a finger and lifted his chin. “Rule One: It doesn’t matter a whit whose bag he carries or whose ass he wipes, a bagman works only for himself.” When Stony ended the recitation, he lowered his gaze from the heavens to my beady eyes. “And don’t you be forgetting that one.”

“Don’t worry, that one’s in my DNA.”

“My father used to tell me that it doesn’t take a genius to carry a bag, but you need to be quick not to let go. The reports I have been getting show you to be quick enough.”

“Reports?”

“Oh, Victor, my boy, you don’t think we’d let you roam around our fair city with a bag of cash without keeping tabs. We can’t have you skewing the rates for the rest of us.”

“And I’m doing okay?”

“You’re doing just dandy. And I might have a gift for you.”

“For me? What ever could you have gotten for me, Stony?” I picked up my drink and gave it a swirl that matched the swirling of my stomach. “Other than a dose of Maalox.”

“How about the goods on our friend Bettenhauser?”

“You got the goods on our self-righteous son of a bitch?”

“Come for a ride with me tomorrow and I’ll spell it out for you. And bring your bag, boy, I’ve been building up quite a tab.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Another round?”

“I drink another round, I’m going to get awfully stupid.”

“Splendid,” said Stony as he raised his hand. “You’re slipping into the role like a pro.”

CHAPTER 28

POLITICAL FAVORS

I
t wasn’t all Briggs’s Rules and underhanded payoffs, it wasn’t all ugly hats and hard liquor. There were other distractions in the bagman game. Politics and sex: they go together like gin and tonic, like chipped steak and cheese, like syphilis and insanity. Let’s just say one without the other would be beside the point. And as Stony pointed out, I was slipping into the role like a pro.

“Is that what you want?” I whispered into Ossana’s ear. My voice was soft as a breath, a conspirator’s sigh. “Is that the way you like it?”

It was later in the evening of our meeting at the Franklin, where we’d talked of dark secrets and monkeys’ paws. She was laid out beneath me now, slim and pale, arms raised, copper hair tossed, neck turned, breasts rising with each breath above delicate ribs, legs still clad in those red fishnet stockings attached with black straps to a lace belt. I grabbed the inside of her knee and lifted her leg, I cupped a breast, I reached for her neck with my teeth. And all the while she was silent and complacent. There was no urgency in her, no quickening.

“I’m going to devour every inch of you,” I said with a soft growl, and her eyes stared out with neither fear nor passion nor defiance.

It hadn’t been like this with her clothes on; with her clothes on, it was like she could barely wait to get mine off. She was all urgency and rush and sharp teeth, grabbing and loosening, laughing, hurrying to meet some deadline of her own desire. I struggled to catch on, to catch up. “Whoa, Nellie,” I said as she ripped at my shirt, buttons popping like popcorn in hot oil.

And then there I was, fully on board, yanking at her skirt, pressing my face between her cotton-covered breasts, feeling the power of ancient desire crest over us both. There is a moment when blood washes the newness off the thing, when the nervous hesitations fall away like iron shackles undone and all that is left is the raw wanting and the act itself. And we were there, both of us, I could feel it in her pulse, her breath, the pull of her teeth on the flesh of my breast.

I threw her on the bed and she laughed as I kissed her deep, and her shoulders rose as she reached her arms around my neck to kiss me back. We were on the precipice of pure abandon and then, like a switch, she turned.

And now I rubbed and kissed, caressed and stroked, and yet the deeper I reached, the less I found. She was pale and stretched and lovely and distant, as distant as a cold white star. I played rough, I played soft, I was silent, I bayed in my wanting. I was all manner of contradictory things, and none of it seemed to matter.

“Are you okay, Ossana?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Has something happened?”

“No,” she said.

I rose to my knees and stared down at her as she lay sprawled beneath me. Her soft skin glowed in its pallor, her red hair swept across her face and neck, her delicately lined palms were raised above her head like a bored go-go dancer at a second-rate club. The birds on her wrist meandered.

“Don’t stop,” she said, her voice now as flat as the gaze from her prairie eyes.

I grabbed her arm and pulled it to the left and it lay where I left it.

“Keep on,” she said.

I shifted her red-clad leg, her other arm; she was a stuffed rag doll, amenable to my every whim. This was not what I’d expected, this pale passivity. This was not what lived in my feverish imaginings when all the possibilities had spurted through my perverted soul. And yet, and yet, my God this was beguiling, too.

She was passive as a corpse with blood-red stockings, and I couldn’t get enough.

“Do you want a cigarette?” she said.

“I’d rather put your breast in my mouth.”

“Still?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. We were back in my apartment a few days after the first attempt—sadly, sans the red stockings, which I rather liked—trying again and ending with the same peculiar result.

“I thought you’d be plotting to get rid of me by now, shuffle me off to Buffalo.”

“Oh, I’m plotting all right.”

“You’re not disappointed?”

“Puzzled.”

“I’m a puzzler, I am. I even puzzle myself. My psychiatrist says I revel in being an enigma.”

“So open up, tell me those deep dark thoughts of yours.”

“Oh, Victor, isn’t it enough to know they’re paralytic? I want to forget them, not share them. That’s why psychiatry doesn’t work on me.”

“Then why do you keep going?”

“It’s like a form of yoga. I lie to her to empty my mind.”

“Is that what sex is, a way to forget?”

“No, that’s what alcohol is. Sex is what I use when the alcohol doesn’t work.”

“And thus . . .”

“Yes. Isn’t it romantic?”

“We’ll work on it.”

“How chivalrous, Victor. You want to save me with your lance. But maybe I don’t want to be saved.”

“Tough.”

“My sweet hard-boiled boy. You should wear your hat when you say that.”

“You think?”

“Absolutely.”

I rolled out of bed, headed to my living room, put on the hat and the beige raincoat with belt tied behind, grabbed my briefcase. Back in the bedroom, Ossana was sitting up now, one of her long legs bent at the knee and tilted over the other, her soft, full breasts pointing in opposite directions. When she saw me in my getup, her eyes brightened.

“The dashing bagman,” she said.

“You bet I am.”

“Now what are you going to do?”

“Take my cut.”

“As long as you don’t take off the hat.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, moving onto the bed, crawling forward on my knees until I was straddling her, my hips over her pale hips, the trail of my raincoat covering us both.

“You are such the grimy political fixer,” she said, her eyes widening with electricity that hadn’t been there before.

“You bet I am, sister, and it’s time to take your stinking payoff.”

And I gave it to her, yes, I did. And there was no death this time. I’m not talking
la petite mort
the French go on about—oh, those overly dramatic French, experts in food, fashion, and fornication (and what do we get, fantasy football?). I’m talking the death of will I had seen in her eyes. She didn’t turn into a corpse in the middle of it, passive as I had my way with her. This time she was a willing participant, and oh was she willing.

“You were like a different person,” I said after, as I rubbed my nose between her breasts.

“Was I?”

“You know it, too.”

“I stopped getting in the way.”

I flicked a nipple with my tongue and looked up at her. She was staring at the ceiling. “So if it wasn’t you, who was I having sex with?”

“An abstract interpretation of myself, a Rothko painting.”

“Rectangular fields of color?”

“Yes. Black. Or blue. Or both, with a single line of red.”

“Fishnet red.”

“You liked?”

“Oh, yes. And if you were a Rothko, what was I?”

“You were a Jasper Johns.”

“A flag?”

“And a hat. And a trench coat. And a bag.”

“So it wasn’t me you were screwing, it was the costume.”

“My psychiatrist says I have a problem with intimacy.”

“Your psychiatrist is a hack.”

“Of course she is. I wouldn’t dream of going to anyone who wasn’t.”

“You know, Ossana, I’m more than just a bagman.”

“Don’t ruin it, darling.”

And there it was, now out in the open, the sad truth I was only just beginning to learn. We like to think we are in control of our destinies, that our tools toil in service to our ends. The Crusader wielded his sword to glorify God, but how long was it before the sword wielded him? And who among us are not slaves to our smartphones?

The bagman carries his satchel of sour political crimes all around the town, selling bits of his soul with each transaction designed to keep someone else’s power flowing. How could he ever have expected that the bag wouldn’t soon be lugging the man?