Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) (5 page)

CHAPTER 9

THE OPERATIVE

I
flew into O’Hare with only a briefcase and a question.

Off the plane and through security, I spotted my driver holding his little sign. I didn’t break stride as I nodded and followed him to the exit. The car was black and plush and hummed like a cat. All the way down I-94 I felt like a ninja in a navy-blue suit.

The driver had been advised of the address where we were headed, I was simply along for the ride. I expected to end up in one of the great granite buildings on Michigan Avenue or in a modernist skyscraper smack in the Loop, but I found myself instead on the west side of the highway, in a shabby business district with a nail salon, a blues club, and a storefront selling “Energéticos Hormonas.” The driver told me the man I was meeting was on the second floor of the boxy brick building that held the club. The greasy scent of Cuban food from the restaurant next door followed me up the stairs.

A woman sat behind a desk in front of a frosted glass office door, leaning on her elbows in an almost Zen-like stillness. From the size of her, I figured she was part-time receptionist, full-time bouncer. With those forearms, she could have tied me into a pretzel.

“Victor Carl,” I said. “Here to see Mr. Flores.”

She didn’t respond; she simply blinked and stared at me as if I were just another cockroach scuttling across her floor.

“I have an appointment,” I said.

“Mr. Flores has no appointment today with a Carl or a Victor,” she said. “So whichever one you are, sorry, but no.”

“I’m both,” I said.

“Two first names?”

“Yes.”

“Usually one is enough.”

“You would think.”

“Mr. Flores is no taking appointment today with no one who has no appointment. In fact he never takes appointment with no one who has no appointment. It is a rule as firm as a fist.”

“Tell him I’m the man from Philadelphia.”

“Philadelphia? I have cousin who live in Philadelphia. Her name Adalia Martinez. Maybe you know her.”

“It’s a big town.”

“She’s a witch.”

“Oh, I’m sure she’s not that bad.”

“I mean a real witch. Dead chickens, charred corn.”

“Sounds like dinner.”

She reached over and picked up a phone, pressed a button, waited. I heard a muffled sound from the other side of the door.

“El hombre de Philadelphia está aqu
í
,”
she said.
“Su nombre es Carl Victor. S
í
. Carl Victor.”
A chuckle.
“En serio. Improbable. Sí.”

She put down the phone and nodded toward the door.

I hesitated outside that door as the woman stared. Melanie had given me the assignment, and I had jumped at the hourly pay—ten hours of travel and this meeting would bring in enough to cover my rent for the next month—but I didn’t know who I was representing, or why I was asking the question I had been given to ask. There is a myth that lawyers tell themselves about their service to client and community and the rule of law. And in representing Colin Frost, making the state prove every aspect of its criminal case, including the constitutionality of the stop, I could believe I was working within the proud tradition of the profession, despite Selma’s help. But walking through this door, I could no longer sustain such illusions. Melanie Brooks had made of me a tool, handy and expensive, yes, like a premium wrench from Sears, yet a tool nonetheless.

And how did I feel about that?

Evidently Craftsman tough and Craftsman shiny, because though I hesitated a moment, a moment was all. I knocked twice, pushed open the door, and walked into my future.

The office was dark and spare, full of shadows. It smelled of aftershave and tobacco, of thin ties and secret deals and a generation long gone. The desktop was clear, the shelves in the bookcases empty, the walls bare, the lock on the file cabinet depressed. I had walked into a Hopper painting. Standing behind the desk, his back to me, was a tall, thin man in a brown checked suit.

“So you’re Carl Victor from Philadelphia,” said the man, in a gentle voice with only a trace of an accent.

“Close enough. Thank you for seeing me.”

“It is nothing,” he said. “Do you want something to drink?”

“No, thank you.”

“A cigar?”

“No.”

He turned, a glass filled with amber in one hand, an unlit cigar in the other. His face was thin and handsome, his hair was gray, and his eyes were surprisingly kind. “Perhaps, then, a plate of empanadas from downstairs.”

“Tempting, but no.”

“Your loss. I own the restaurant, and the chef is marvelous.” He stepped around the chair and sat down, leaned back, took a sip of his drink, put the cigar in his mouth. He stared at his glass for a moment, as if appraising a jewel.

“I don’t know you, Carl Victor,” he said, his voice just as gentle as before. “Normally, I have a rule that I will not meet with someone I do not personally know. It is a rule that has well protected me over the years.”

“And yet here I am.”

“I was told by someone that I must see you. There are only a few people in this world that I trust enough to cause me to break such a rule. Whether fortunately for you or not is still to be determined, but he was one, and so here you are. What can I do for you, Carl Victor from Philadelphia?”

“I have a question,” I said.

“No request, no favor, no point you want to get across? Just a question?”

“Just a question.”

“Go ahead and ask your question and we’ll see if I will answer it.”

“What do you want?” I said.

“What do I want?” He laughed. “You’re the one who came all this way. What do you want?”

“I want to know what you want.”

“What does anyone want? Wealth, sex, a fine Scotch and a Cuban cigar. Peace on earth, goodwill for all men, the White Sox to win another pennant.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” I said. “But I didn’t ask what anyone would want. What do you want?”

“Me.”

“You. Specifically.”

“And you will grant my every wish, is that the idea? Make me rich beyond my wildest dreams?”

“Is that what you want, money?”

“Who doesn’t want money?”

“I look at this office, and I look at your secretary, and I doubt very much that what you want most is money. Oh, you like your Scotch and your cigars, and I assume they’re both premium—we all want to maintain a certain lifestyle. But this office tells me that money is not what you are about.”

“Your eyes are sharper than your tie, Carl Victor. So maybe what I really want is power.”

“Power.”

“Who doesn’t want power?”

“And why do you want all this unlimited power? So you can stand with senators and governors and have your picture snapped? I figure you can already do that, or I wouldn’t be here. And yet, your walls are bare of trophy pictures. No smiling pols, no glowering moguls, no evidence of a single lever of power.”

“I am maybe discreet.”

“You are definitely discreet. And you are also cautious. Even with all the power you have, you sit in this spare little office and refuse to meet anyone you do not personally know. How much more power do you want? Enough so you would be unwilling to meet with your own brother?”

“It is a conundrum, is it not? If you were faced with such a question, Mr. Carl Victor, what is it that you would want?”

“Money and power, or maybe for someone to get my name right, but it is not a question for me.”

“I see. It is my question only.”

“Yes.”

“And what will I have to do in return for having my most secret desires filled?”

“Nothing.”

“Excuse me, Carl Victor, I don’t see fairy wings on your back.”

“I have been assured that there is no quid pro quo here.”

“No quid and no pro. A freebie.”

“To the extent there is such a thing,” I said.

“Who sent you?”

“Even I don’t know.”

“And I am to give you an answer with no idea of who is asking the question and with what motive?”

“Yes.”

“Why would I do such a thing?”

“Because I’m from Philadelphia, the place where dreams come true.”

“Is that your city’s slogan?”

“No, I just made it up, but in your case it might be true.”

The man looked at me, looked at his cigar, looked at me again. He took a long silver rectangle from a desk drawer, something that looked like a pistol clip. He flicked the top, and a flame erupted. He took a moment to light his cigar. He leaned back, puffing away. The smoke settled between us like a shifting curtain of motive. I sat before him as calmly as a tick on a blade of grass waiting for a fat golfer to pass by.

Finally, he took the cigar out of his mouth, leaned forward until his clasped hands rested on the desk, and shook his head with deep resignation.

“I have a daughter,” he said.

About half an hour later I called the information into Melanie from the curvy bar of some steak house just south of Division Street. It was an expensive meat market in more ways than one, but I had time to kill before my flight and I had developed a sudden hunger for a slab of animal flesh, well charred. Fortunately, Melanie had given me an American Express card to cover my expenses. After I downed a quick Sea Breeze, and after a waiter showed me a tray of aged cuts of prime beef and I pointed to something round and red, I made the call.

“He has a daughter who started a catering business in Miami,” I said into the phone as a woman a few seats down eyed me with something more than mild interest. “He wants it to be a success.”

“The doting father,” said Melanie. “I’m surprised.”

“That he loves his daughter?” I said, smiling back at the woman. She had thin wrists, and her lipstick was candy-apple red, and she was not the kind of woman who would usually eye me with interest in a bar, but there she sat and there she eyed.

“No,” said Melanie. “I’m surprised that he said anything to you at all. The read we got on Flores was that with strangers he was as close-lipped as a clam. Nice job steaming him open. The partners will be pleased.”

“And I aim to please the partners.” I waved a finger in an oblong circle, letting the barkeep know he should refill my Sea Breeze and buy the woman whatever it was she was drinking. “I got the sense, based on the level of his concern, that it’s going to take a lot of weddings to make his daughter’s business work.”

“Let us worry about the weddings. You just get back here.”

“My plane leaves in two hours,” I said as I nodded in acknowledgment of the woman’s mouthed thank-you. She was tall and lush and blonde, as tasty and well marbled, no doubt, as the rib eye I had ordered. And she smiled as if I were exuding some sense of newly won authority. “Before I depart, I’m going to have a steak and three more drinks and nuzzle the earlobe of the woman four seats down from me, and then I’m going to sleep like a narcoleptic on the flight home.”

“Good,” said Melanie. “So you’ll be well rested when you land.”

“Don’t.”

“There’s a hysterical woman in Fairmount who is threatening to kill herself. You need to talk her down.”

“Get a psychiatrist.”

“We need someone we can trust, someone with tact and absolute discretion.”

“Boy, do you ever have the wrong man.”

“I’m betting not.”

“But if she’s threatening to kill herself, what can I do? I won’t be back for four hours.”

“Trust me, she’ll wait.”

CHAPTER 10

SHAKE AND KISS

T
hat lying bastard. I love him so much I swear I’ll stick a knife in my throat and watch the blood spurt.”

Amanda Duddleman, barely old enough to order a beer in a bar, was sitting on her couch with her bare legs curled beneath her, naked inside a white terry-cloth robe stolen from some high-priced adultery hotel. Her tearstained face was dramatically aimed at the ceiling, a knife the size of a Chihuahua in her hand. We were in her town house by the art museum, quite the tidy love nest, with hardwood floors and comfy furniture.

“And you know what hurts the most?” she said, absently patting the back of the blade against her neck. “The part that makes me really want to kill myself, beyond even the betrayal?”

“Let me guess,” I said, sprawled in a chair, my tie loosed, the flatness of exhaustion in my voice. “It’s the lying.”

“How did you know?”

“Because it’s always the lying.”

I had been wrong about what I had told Melanie on the phone in Chicago. Yes, I had eaten the steak and downed the drinks and nuzzled the ear, but I hadn’t slept an ounce on the flight home, and I was neither fit nor in the mood to be part of a scene where I played the straight man for some love-crazed sweet thing. And yet there I was, supposed to fix whatever it was that had driven Amanda Duddleman to feign suicidal distraction. There wasn’t enough glue in Kentucky. I didn’t know who the lying bastard she was referring to was, but I figured if I didn’t let on to all I didn’t know, I’d find out soon enough.

“I just can’t take the dishonesty anymore,” said this Amanda Duddleman. “I know it’s built into the bones of what we have. I went to Barnard, I studied Derrida, I know how to deconstruct the text of our relationship. He’s married, which means that every bottle of champagne, every kiss, every hump on the kitchen floor is a lie to his wife, and ultimately to the people.”

“How will they ever survive?”

“I am nothing but his lie, and I can handle that. Truthfully, I’m not sure I would want to be anything more. His little helpmeet? A bauble on some congressman’s arm? His wife can have that honor. I went to Barnard, for Christ sake. But when he starts lying to me, that’s the part I can’t abide. Lying to his lie, my God, where will it end?”

“Exactly what I was wondering,” I said.

She tilted her head down to stare at me for a moment. Her eyes lost their desperate wobble as she pointed the knife at me. “Some questions are rhetorical.”

“I thought I’d help move things along.”

“I’m sorry if my trauma is keeping you awake.” She was unaccountably lovely, Amanda Duddleman, young and tawny, with perfect skin and healthy teeth. She must have been quite the sight cutting across the Columbia campus, legs flashing, sunlight glinting off her hair, the very perfection of raw youth. She must have destroyed the hearts of all the mad young boys.

“You don’t mind if I doze off here, do you?” I said.

“You’re not being very sympathetic. I’m in crisis here. I love him. I love him so much I want to rip out my heart and serve it to him on a silver platter.”

“With fava beans and a nice Chianti?”

“But when I call him with sobs and pleading and the worst kinds of threats, instead of coming himself to kiss my tearstained face and make sweet love to me, he forces me to wait for hours, and then you show up. And you’re no prize, let me tell you. Who are you, anyway?”

“All you need to know is that for the time being, as long as you’re putting on the crazy, I’ll be the guy you’ll be dealing with.”

“Where’s Colin? Colin knows how to calm me down. We talk, share a joint, listen to some tunes.”

“Colin’s in rehab.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re Pete’s new errand boy?”

“Something like that.”

“I suppose you don’t have any weed.”

“No, sorry, I’m straighter than a crossing guard in a back brace. But enough about me. Let’s go back to the lying.”

“Yes, let’s. The lying.” Her chin tilted up as she lifted her hand so that the handle of the knife was on her forehead. “I just can’t take the lying.”

“What was he lying about?”

“Is that important?”

“Always.”

“Isn’t the lying itself enough?”

“Never.”

“Really?”

“No one gets upset when someone lies about a surprise party. Or in a deposition. Or about their mother-in-law’s hair. But, just to grab an example, when someone is upset that her lover is lying about cheating on her, I’ve generally found that, no matter what she says, she is more upset about the cheating than the lies. So what is he lying about?”

“He’s cheating on me.”

“Well, blow me over and call me Kip.”

“I had a fish named Kip.”

“A salmon?”

“Of course he’s cheating on me, Kip, he’s a politician. But to be so obvious about it, and then to lie to my face. What must he think of me?”

“Maybe that you went to NYU. So what was the giveaway, the tell? Let me put it in my book of things not to do when I’m cheating on my mistress.”

“Do you have a mistress, too?”

“Not yet, but we all have aspirations. Was it lipstick on the collar? A strange perfume?”

“Lipstick or perfume could just be from his wife.”

“Who he’s cheating on with you.”

“Right. No, it was the condoms.”

“Ahh, the condoms.” I nodded sagely. “You’d be surprised how often it is the condoms. What did he do, write the wrong name on them?”

“Do men do that? I mean, really?”

“No.”

“Good, because that would be creepy. I have to buy them for us—he can’t very well go into a store and pick up a box, now can he? I mean it would be all over the front page of the
Daily News
.”

“I can imagine the headline.”

“‘Congressional Party Hat,’ ” she said.

“‘Political Rubber Match.’ ”

“I counted the number in the box I bought and there were too many missing. I counted twice to be sure. The son of a bitch is using my rubbers to screw someone else. Can you imagine?”

“I’m actually impressed. He got you to buy his rubbers for him. Maybe I should put in an order, too. Two boxes, extra large.”

“Really?” One eye squinted in disbelief. “What’s your shoe size?”

“Ten,” I said, and then after a slight pause, I added, “and a half. So that’s why you want to kill yourself, the condoms?”

“You don’t seem so concerned that I’ll go through with it.”

I stood up and spread my arms. “It’s late, I’m tired, and you’re too smart to be counting condoms. Give me the knife.”

She looked at me a moment, looked down at the knife, and placed it on the coffee table. I leaned over, picked it up, whirled, and tossed it for effect at her wall. I wanted it to stick in with a thud and then twang back and forth with that ominous sound, but it didn’t stick. It just sort of slammed against the wall and clattered on the floor.

“I’m going home,” I said. “I’m going to sleep for a week and forget that I was ever here. You don’t want to kill yourself, you just don’t want to be ignored. Try the rabbit and don’t forget to tip your waiter. How’d you meet the Congressman anyway?”

“I write for the
City Weekly
.”

“The free rag? Nice gig.”

“I majored in journalism.”

“At Barnard.”

“Well, I took advanced courses at the Columbia School of Journalism. And I was assigned to write a profile on Congressman Peter J. DeMathis, and I was impressed with what I saw. He seemed to really care about things.”

“A politician who seems to really care? Boy, that’s a new one. And to prove how much he cared, he screwed you in his socks.”

“Why would I be wearing his socks?”

“Good night,” I said.

“Nothing happened while I was writing the article, I’ll have you know. I’m a journalist, I have my standards. But after my profile came out, he called to thank me and we ended up having drinks, and things sort of—”

“I get it.”

“—happened.”

I looked around at the town house. “Does he put you up here?”

“That would make me a whore. No, this is mine.”

“I didn’t know the
City Weekly
paid so well.”

“I get some help.”

“Are Mommy and Daddy tired of supporting you?”

“Not yet, but they’re getting there.”

“Can I give you some advice, Amanda, good serious advice?”

“Please, God, no.”

“Men don’t like crazy, especially married men. They want sane and fun and young and beautiful, and you’re already three out of four.”

“You don’t think I’m too fat?”

“If you’re too fat, then I’m too smart, and we both know that’s not true, because I’m here. If you want him to stop cheating on you, then don’t give him any of the crazy. No more phone calls threatening to kill yourself, no more wild scenes about missing condoms, no more showing up at campaign rallies in the shake-and-kiss line.”

“How do you know about that?”

“No matter what he’s told you about love and the future, he’s simply screwing around with you. Nothing wrong with that, but treat it like what it is, a stupid fling with a stinking politician, and have fun with it. Call him tomorrow, apologize, promise him it won’t happen again, and then wait for him to call you. He will, and soon, too. You’re pretty enough to infect his dreams. But in the meantime, find yourself someone your own age to play with when you’re not with him. Get your life together. Don’t forget what you are.”

“What is that?”

“You’re a Barnard girl.”

“Who the hell are you, really?”

“I’m a nobody and a nothing, a suit who does what he’s told. I’m your friendly neighborhood fixer.”

“You’re actually pretty good at it, Kip. How long have you been doing this?”

“About a day and a half,” I said.