Reinhart in Love (44 page)

“Well,” said Reinhart, “you end up with a real emotion, anyway.”

Bee grinned. “There you are, the typical man: any old feeling is good as the next. But a woman is very particular about such things.”

“That would explain something, then,” said Reinhart. “You know, never in my life have I understood my mother.”

Bee shrugged.

“Never,” he repeated, “and you might say that if I can't grasp the principles of a woman I have known for twenty-two years, how can I expect to with one I've known less than four months?”

Bee shook her fine head; never, in whatever state, had she lost what Reinhart liked to think of as her equanimity. “You and your principles! Stop thinking of women in general. Stop thinking of women at all. If you want to get your wife back and keep her, you'll have to catch her attention.” She rose and put her hand out.

“May I ask,” said Reinhart, taking it, “what Niles does in that line?”

“He sent me over here, didn't he?”

“Of course.” Reinhart only hoped that in gaining Gen's eye he wouldn't have to go as far.

“What I like about tonight is that I have profited by it,” he told her. “You never know, do you, when you get up each morning, what the day will bring.”

Bee said shyly: “So long, Carl.” She was really a fine person.

In saying he had profited, Reinhart meant that he had examined adultery without committing it and gained data on women without actually compromising himself. He was getting to be a real exemplar of the American Way.

Because his experience with Bee had turned out without prejudice to anybody, Reinhart maintained his admiration for Fedder. He wouldn't have changed him one iota. The world would be a much better place if it were populated with more Niles Fedders. Fedders who keep the old earth spinning. Long Live Fedder!

Reinhart had seen him twice since the day he had got to know both him and his at close quarters, and greeted him both times with an enthusiasm that caused his neighbor to recoil, for Fedder balked at tasting his own medicine. “Niles!” shouted Reinhart on the first occasion, Monday evening when they emerged simultaneously, each from his own hut, to fetch the garbage cans that had been lifted that morning by the Vetsville sanitary squad and hurled back empty. “Niles, where would that sewer main run? Down by Unit H?”

On Wednesday he encountered Fedder on the University campus. Niles and a group of friends, dressed to a man in T-shirts and chino pants, emerged from the Student Union humorlessly sucking at icecream cones, some vanilla, one chocolate, one mottled. “Fed!” cried Reinhart. “Wouldn't there have to be an auxiliary pumping station for the sewage somewhere between Vetsville and town?”

Fedder introduced his companions, who all seemed to be named Jack, and amiably chided him:
“Now
you get interested in the sewer, now that your boss has been awarded the contract.”

“My boss?” Reinhart asked stupidly and gaped at one of the Jacks.

“Humbold's his name,” said Fedder. “Don't you read the papers?” He waxed bitter. “If you ask me, there's something suspicious about the deal. I thought he was a real-estate man, not a sewer contractor. And his was the only bid submitted. Doesn't that sound strange? That's typical small-town politics for you.”

“I'll tell you, Niles, I haven't seen Claude for some time. But then, we have never been what you might call close. Businessmen are like that….” From the way they held their heads, Reinhart inferred that neither Fedder nor his companions were ready to confirm this statement, and he went on with some defiance: “For all I know that's the way you
have
to be to make good in business. I suppose it's as good, or as bad, as anything else.”

“Not morally?” butted in one of the Jacks, then crunched at his cone.

“Oh, I guess not,” Reinhart answered impatiently. He didn't want to get hung up with these guys. What had become of the good old College Joe with his idiot fraternities and junior proms? “And as to the town,” he told Fedder, a little chary about meeting his eye even though he hadn't cuckolded him—or perhaps
because
he hadn't—“you've been there only since the beginning of summer and already know more about it than I do in twenty-two years.”

Fedder, shrugging, had to step aside for a girl who came down the Union steps and chose to enter the sidewalk at the corner which they were blocking. She had the high, hard behind of the very young.

“No wonder, then,” said Fedder, “that the Yahoos have such an easy time of it. I understand the same mayor has been in office since 1928, and the chief of police is his brother.” He explained to his friends, who apparently lived in other suburbs. “The Vetsville Civic Committee petitioned for this new sewer, but little did we know that the town would jump at the chance to build it, and thereby develop a damned good argument for gobbling us up. Whereas we're seeking incorporation as an independent community.”

The Jacks gasped.

“I mean,” said Fedder, “we didn't think of that when we started making noise about the sewer. After all, we are only amateur politicos up against this local Tammany. What can you expect? I wouldn't sneer if I were you, Carl. Most of the rest of us come from somewhere else. Your advice could be invaluable. In addition, you work for Hum-bold.” Fedder fell on the ice cream that the sun was rapidly causing to dwindle, and made short work of it. Reinhart wanted to drive home and get the rest of the data from the horse's mouth, i.e., Claude himself, but felt he owed it to Fedder to tarry here with him.

Wiping his face, Fedder said without warning: “Know who likes you? Bee.” Then with a glint in his eye, he asked: “Anything new on the domestic front?”

Reinhart called his bluff by explaining to the Jacks: “My wife left me, is what he means.” He had succeeded in his aim: they were all rendered uncomfortable, including Fedder. So much of life consists of embarrassments that sometimes the best you can do is beat the other fellow to them.

Without further ado, he bade them goodbye and repaired to the parking lot; he was actually amused at the thought that Fedder might calumniate him in absentia. It gave him status.

As Reinhart had told Fedder, he and Claude Humbold had not crossed paths for a length of time that could be called unconscionable, if you were looking for an excuse to use that word. It occurred to Reinhart because he had on his conscience a statement by Genevieve that Claude's paying him a salary for doing nothing seemed pretty fishy to her. Having made allowances for her overwrought state, Reinhart still was left with a conviction that it also smelled funny to him. The boss had been eluding him for weeks, though oddly enough paying his salary on schedule, through the mail. The more you thought about it, the more pathological it seemed for Claude to put out money without being beaten into it.

Reinhart had a secret: for some time he had not taken out a single client. It really was impossible to read the complete
Iliad
, etc., not to mention the assignments in Psych and French, and work too. Every afternoon he drove to one of the listings at the edge of town, a vacant cottage in a yard full of weeds, concealed the Gigantic behind a decaying toolshed, crept into the house, and lying upon an old blanket that smelled of dog, read till five. Not only did he misrepresent these workdays to Genevieve; he lied about them to himself: the ebullience of ego he had enjoyed until Gen left, owed to his belief that in himself, alone in the Middle West, were both spirit and matter united in Renaissance proportions—the cultivated realtor, the practical intellectual, Carlo de' Medici.

To take money from Claude under such conditions was thievery. Reinhart supposed he could literally be sent to prison for so doing, but that aspect did not interest him at present, no more than did the adjustments that should be made in his self-picture. What he found intriguing was that Claude, who would not without coercion pay you for an actual service honestly performed, here seemed to be naively conspiring in a fraud against himself…. Which was unlikely. He was cooking up something.

Gen had suspected, with her woman's nose for smelling out shenanigans. Women are very wise. This makes up for the fact that they are seldom well educated. Gen certainly wasn't; she didn't know Dante from Adam. There was something grisly about a woman who did.

He drove straight to the office, intending first to do some reconnoitering in and around the boss's desk, though one of the telling features of the situation was that Claude seemed to have stopped going there. The most difficult phase of the campaign might be in finding him at all. Reinhart planned to start with something modest, like examining his files. But when he rounded the corner by Maybelle's Beauty Salon, he saw the big white Cad parked in the middle of the next block. The Gigantic saw it too and, as always, lost face and began to miss in the valves. “You cowardly son of a bitch,” Reinhart said to the dashboard, though he knew a mechanism's agony is no small matter. To be decent, he ran on a way and parked it near a shabby Nash.

The glass door of the office, the one that had in a sense brought Reinhart and Genevieve together, was locked. Yet he knew from the Cad that Claude lurked within the inner sanctum; and from certain drifts of blue smoke, that at least one other individual, no enemy of the Kings, was with him.

He stole around the back of the building and, taking care not to trouble the gravel, sidled under the open window.

Claude was speaking: “… no, boy, no! Absolutely not, Bobby, never! Bob pal, would you mind pointing that stogie towards the neighbors? I never indulge, old son, and your smoke makes the peepers burn. No offense, Bob. Robert, say you don't hate me for it! Now just let me flush out the old windpipe with a shot of 100-proof H
₂
0, gents, and I'm your man.”

Hardly valuable eavesdropping as yet, but then you could not expect that it would be all pertinent stuff, which only happens in films. Wearing of bending, Reinhart sat on his heels and waited for Claude to return from the water cooler.

He was still there when the torrent descended upon him. Momentarily, all he could see was water; then he discerned, back of the up ended bottle, the grim, dedicated visage of Claude Humbold. Imagine, all by himself Claude had lifted the big jug from the cooler, carried it to the window, and tipped it out. But Reinhart could spare no more time for awe. He was being soaked by the fall, which was spasmodic, as air and water struggled for the bottle's narrow mouth with
gloop-gloop
noises. He scrambled away.

“No you don't!” shouted Humbold. “Halt, fugitive! Call out the dogs! Stop or I'll hurl this hand grenade and blow you to flinders.”

Squeezing the water from his shirt—luckily he wore no more than that and wash trousers—Reinhart sheepishly smiled and said: “Sorry, Claude, I was looking for a lucky piece I dropped in the gravel.”

“Silence, spy!” ordered Humbold, letting the rest of the jug's contents gurgle out to no purpose. “You are covered by an unseen automatic. Just give your age, name, and employer, or you're a dead chicken.”

“Claude! Don't you recognize me?”

The boss peered over the bottle, making his eyes mean. “Walk two paces forward, Prisoner…. Why are you disguised as Bud? You'd never fool a soul, you poor devil…. Bud, that ain't you? Why in the world are you standing there all wet?”

“I had no intention of spying, Claude,” said Reinhart. “There is a hole in my pocket and as I was passing the window, all my change fell out.”

The bottle at last empty, Claude pulled it inside. He reappeared grinning wide.

“Do you a world of good. Never turn off the old radar, bud. Never show your throat to a wolf, lest he rip it asunder. I believe you'll find that in the Good Book; but if you don't, don't call me heathen. Bud, whyn't you come in, or was you waiting for it to rain?” Gargling a laugh, he fell back indoors.

Owing to one thing or another, Reinhart had not stopped at Maw's for a bath in some time. Consequently, this soaking had done him no harm. Then too, it was a hot day, particularly back there on the gravel. Indeed, by the time he had got around front, he was almost dry.

In Claude's office sat two other men whom Reinhart recognized instantly though he had not seen them in the flesh since before the war, and the photoengravings of their images used by the local newspaper, made in the Twenties, had been run through the presses so often that they nowadays tended to overink and print Negroes.

“Bud,” said Claude. “I want to give you a thrill. I want to innerduce you to two of the great statesmen of our era, two of the gents who enrich this country, one nation under God invisible.”

“Claude,” said Reinhart. “I wanted to explain what I was doing under that window. I had lost my pen, see—”

“Bud,” said Claude, “silencio, if you please! And kindly meet the Messers Gibbon, the Honorable Bob J., our esteemed mayor, and Mr. C. Roy, police chief.”

Reinhart said how-do and shook their hands. Bob J. resembled his toad in most features, even to a complexion mottled with liver spots, and little forearms that he held in close to a squat trunk. C. Roy, in a blue uniform, was as thick through as his brother but tall as Reinhart and with a larger head, on which his hair grew iron-gray and rather in the shape of a Trojan helmet. He gave Reinhart a hard shake indeed, with a judo twist that sent pains far as the elbow. The mayor shook limp, cold, and oily; it felt like sorting anchovies.

The Gibbon boys had held office continuously since 1928, except for a two-year term won during the middle Thirties by a Reform ticket which promised to remove the slot machines from the confectionery across from the grammar school. Before the war, Reinhart had been wont to jeer at the Gibbons. But now that he was some years older and wiser, and in his new character—young businessman, veteran, husband—his vision was less murky. Actually, there was something reassuring about them. If you had to have politicians, may as well settle for the machine kind; they are steady. Moreover, they will never persecute a man for his own good.