Cadillac Jack

by Larry McMurtry

  "How'd you know?" he said, too shaken to be able to hold his tongue.

  "How'd I know what?" I asked.

  It was difficult for Brisling Bowker to look perplexed. Years of selling every imaginable species of object to every conceivable species of buyer had prepared-him for just about everything. The secret lusts of the human heart were no secret to him. Nonetheless, I had clearly perplexed him, a reaction so unexpected that for a moment I couldn't remember what I had just said.

  I looked at him and he looked at me: Then I remembered. I had said the Smithsonian must be for sale.

  Naturally, I had been joking. The Smithsonian would never be for sale. Even Blink Schedel, with his mysterious fleet of trucks, couldn't handle a deal that big.

  Besides, who could sell it? The Smithsonian belonged to America, or at least so I had assumed.

  On the other hand, it is usually a mistake to assume that something can't be sold. France sold Louisiana, and most of the West. Russia sold Alaska. London sold its bridge, MGM sold its back lot. So probably America could sell the Smithsonian, if the right offer came along.

  I was so stunned by the thought that I didn't say another word. Neither did Brisling Bowker, but he did look at me with something like respect for the first time since I'd known him.

  All of a sudden Brisling's workaday auction room took on a new ambiance: the ambiance of a spy novel. For all I knew one of the GS-12s, in their humble woolen hats, might be a liaison man. The transaction of the century might even then be taking place, somewhere in the vicinity of Brisling's Coke machine.

  Blink was no longer actually leaning on the Coke machine, but he was still holding his position, poking absently in a table full of old books that were piled nearby.

  To buy time, which is what one must do in a spy novel, I pretended to be interested in the contents of a row of rusty filing cabinets that were about to come up. Oddly enough, the contents of the filing cabinets actually Were interesting. Their files were still in them, in the form of thousands of copies of a pamphlet on the kangaroo rat. The pamphlet had been written by a retired admiral whose sideline was mammalogy. Evidently the pamphlet had not sold at all well.

  Any other time I would have bought the cabinets just to get the pamphlets, since I knew a pamphlet collector in Mobile who would have bought them in an instant. His name was Beaufort Kiff, and he was one of the most out-of-control collectors I knew. Once at an auction in Pensacola I saw Beaufort buy 4,000 copies of a pamphlet on terza rima, the last effort of an Italian diplomat who had, of course, written it in Italian, a language Beaufort couldn't have told from Finnish.

  Several thousand copies of a pamphlet on the kangaroo rat would have made him deliriously happy, but for once I was derelict in my duty. If the Smithsonian was indeed for sale, how could I afford to take time to mail thousands of pamphlets to Mobile?

  The filing cabinets, with their valuable hoard of pamphlets, were sold to a couple of junk dealers, while I stood around in a quandary, unable to decide what to do.

  I was tempted to go back over to Brisling and just ask him point-blank what was going on, but when I looked, Brisling had vanished. Like many large animals, he could move with stealth when the need arose.

  Blink, meanwhile, had gone nowhere and spoken to no one, though he was standing next to a dumpy little old woman who was apathetically wrapping string ^ound a few of the secondhand books.

  In spy novels, of course, it is just such dumpy little women who manage to throw experienced spies off the scent.

  Tuck stood nearby. One of the more timid of the suburban wives had just given him a bid on some Swedish carving knives.

  "Who's that little woman?" I asked, nodding at her as discreetly as possible.

  Tuck grinned. "Mrs. Lump?" he said. "You're telling me you don't know Mrs. Lump?"

  I was beginning to feel like an amateur, a feeling I hate. Like all professionals, I like to feel professional, which in my case involves knowing, at least by reputation, every important dealer, scout, or collector in the country. Admittedly it's a big complex country, but not everyone in it is an antique scout, either. It was chastening to have to think that I had failed to take note of a woman important enough to be able to sell the Smithsonian to Blink Schedel.

  I always keep a neatly folded $100 bill in my watch pocket, for just such situations. On the flea-market circuit a hundred dollars will usually buy a lot of information.

  But unfortunately Tuck wasn't a flea-marketer. He was a professional, too, with dozens of his own games going. When I showed him the bill he shook his head.

  "Keep it," he said. "I don't know that much about the deal."

  "I've got to start somewhere," I said.

  "Start by asking the fat man," he said. "If God knows more than the fat man I ain't noticed it."

  Chapter X

  Tuck was right, of course. Boog would know about the Smithsonian, or if he didn't know he would find out. Boog had more sources than the Post and the Times put together, which is why large segments of the staffs of those papers were apt to be found in his kitchen at any given moment.

  Since it was plain to me that I wasn't going to learn anything by watching Blink Schedel and Mrs. Lump, I left and headed for Boog's office as fast as I could go. When I passed the National Portrait Gallery, which I knew to be a part of the Smithsonian, I half expected to see Blink's minions loading the national portraits into the fleet of trucks. The fact that it wasn't happening gave me heart.

  Boog's office was in a sinister-looking black building on First Street, not far from Union Station. I didn't expect to find him in it, and I didn't. Since he had left politics to become an all-purpose consultant he felt free to use his time inventively.

  His lobby was filled with lobbyists, all of them wearing expensive suits and hopeless expressions. The hopeless expressions probably meant that they knew in their heart of hearts that Boog wasn't going to show up and tell them what they needed to know.

  Boog's secretary was a grizzled old girl from Winkler County named Bobbie Proctor. She was smoking as fast as she could smoke, and reading the National Enquirer when I came in. So far all my efforts to get on her good side had failed. It was entirely possible that Bobbie didn't have a good side.

  "Morning," I said.

  "Yeah, it is,” Bobbie said, glancing at her watch.

  "I just need to see Boog a minute," I said.

  "I don't know why you come here, then," she said. "This is just where he keeps his telephones."

  "Got any notions about where he might be?"

  Bobbie sighed, not happy to have her reading interrupted.

  "I got a notion he's off gettin' his rocks hauled," she said.

  Beyond that she refused to contribute a syllable of information, though even that was enough to inflame the lobbyists' hopes. When I went out, five or six of them were strung out down the line of pay phones in the foyer, calling various madams and massage parlors, in the hope of stumbling on Boog.

  After some thought, I picked up my car phone and called Boss. Micah Leviticus answered.

  "Hi, Micah," I said. "Can I speak to Boss for a moment? I need to find Boog."

  "Isn't he at the Little Bomber's?" Micah asked.

  "The what?"

  "The Little Bomber's Lounge," Micah said, impatiently.

  Then he began to giggle.

  "What's the matter?" I asked.

  "Oh, nothing," he said. "Boss is just tickling me with her hair."

  "Where's the Little Bomber's Lounge?"

  "It's in Arlington," he said. "If you find Boog tell him not to forget to buy the new TV Guide. The ones they put in the Sunday papers don't have much depth."

  "I'll tell him," I said. "Sorry if I called at a bad time."

  "It's not a bad time," Micah said. "Bob Newhart doesn't come on for half an hour."

  I zipped right across in front of the Capitol, which was looking very white in the bright fall air. Then the next thing I knew I was in the south parking lot of the Pentag
on—no real surprise, but something I had been sort of hoping to avoid.

  When I claimed mastery of every freeway system in the country I should have excepted the bewildering vortex that innocent travelers get sucked into when they cross the Potomac going south.

  Instead of being filled with soldiers, the south parking lot is usually filled with bewildered old couples in Buicks and Winnebagos, from places like Minnesota and Nebraska, who stand around scratching their heads and wondering what their chances are of escaping the parking lot and getting back home. The freeways near there don't seem to quite connect with one another, so that if the old couples did find their way out of the parking lot they were probably doomed to swirl around in a vast concrete roller-rink for an hour or so before they could get pointed toward Nebraska. Seeing them always made me slightly melancholy, since I knew that the Buicks and Winnebagos were filled with ashtrays with the Capitol stamped on them, or else with hideous little embroideries showing the pandas in the National Zoo.

  Eventually I found the Little Bomber's Lounge, squeezed in between a 7-Eleven and a TV repair shop.

  There was no doubt that Boog was somewhere near, since a muddy black Lincoln with his name on the license plate sat directly in front of the Little Bomber's Lounge.

  Even if the car hadn't looked like it had just come out of a swamp I would have known it was Boog's by the back seat, which was piled with whiskey bottles. Penguin paperbacks, Xeroxes of bills Boog had an interest in, and piles and piles of brochures on every imaginable product, from antitank weapons to racquet-ball paddles—all of which one of the lobbyists waiting hopelessly in his office probably hoped Boog would persuade some contact in the procurement division of the Pentagon to buy in vast quantities and disperse to army bases around the world.

  When I stepped into the lounge I immediately met a couple of little bombers, both in the process of getting bombed. They were both as plump as ducks and as cheerful as they could be. At most they were in their early twenties and a happier two girls would have been hard to find. Between giggles they drank rum Cokes and watched the same Bob Newhart rerun that Micah was probably watching across the river in Boss's bedroom.

  "Lookit them yell-ah boots," one said, in a voice I would have said belonged to South Carolina, possibly the vicinity of Myrtle Beach. In fact the girl, whose name was Lolly, hailed from Nashua, New Hampshire.

  "Hi, girls," I said. "Do you know a man named Boog?"

  The girls laughed heartily. They were so cheerful I felt like laughing myself, though up to that point I had been feeling rather tense.

  "I guess we should know him," Lolly said. "He's putting us through secretarial school."

  "Yeah, only I'm fixin' to quit," the other one said. "I don't see why ah need it."

  "Well, if you quit I'm quittin'," Lolly said. "I ain't goin' all the way to Thirteenth Street by myself, I can tell you that."

  "I don't mind the typin'," the would-be drop-out said. "Shoot, I don't even mind the niggers. What I hate is that shorthand."

  "All right, Janie Lee," Lolly said. "You know good an' well Boog ain't gonna let us be his executive secretaries unless we can take shorthand."

  The notion that the two plump blondes were being groomed to succeed the redoubtable Bobbie Proctor struck me as funny. It also afforded me a rare glimpse into Boog's working methods. Probably half the secretarial schools in the D.C. area were filled with chubby teenagers whose tuition Boog was paying.

  "Well, you know what," Janie Lee said defiantly, "I'd rather stay over here in Arlington and suck people off in whirlpool baths than to learn shorthand. I don't mind suckin' people off in whirlpool baths. Sometimes it's kinda fun, 'specially if you drink a bottle or two of champagne first."

  "I know," Lolly said agreeably, "but it still ain't glamorous, like bein' an 'xecutive secretary.

  "Besides," Lolly added, tapping Janie Lee on the wrist, "Boog said once we get our diplomas he'd introduce us to Teddy Kennedy."

  Janie Lee looked sulky for a moment. Obviously a chance to meet the Senator was not to be taken lightly—on the other hand, her dislike of shorthand was great.

  Nobody was in the lounge except myself, the two girls, and a small Mexican with a mop. The small Mexican had become engrossed in the Bob Newhart show and was leaning on his mop, watching it. The question of whether fellatio was a better way to make a living than typing and shorthand did not appear to interest him.

  In fact, it had even ceased to interest the girls. They were giving my outfit the once-over.

  "I seen somebody like you in Las Vegas," Janie Lee said. "Only he had red boots instead of yell-ah."

  "We both been to Las Vegas," Lolly said. "We won the Happy Hooker contest."

  "Who organized that?" I asked, though I could have guessed.

  "Why, Boog," Janie Lee said. "He's real generous. It was an all-expenses-paid weekend."

  "The only bad thing about the weekend was the plane ride made my ears ring," Lolly said.

  "Where is Boog?" I asked.

  "Up at the Bubble Bath, two doors up the street," Lolly said. "We'll take you. We gotta get to work anyway."

  "Hey," Janie Lee said. "We could offer him the Double Bubble Brunch. It ain't but ten-fifteen."

  The suggestion seemed to dispel all thoughts of secretarial school. I was being looked at significantly by two happy little professionals, their faces slightly pinked by early-morning rum Cokes.

  Though well aware that I was already in enough woman trouble, I couldn't claim to feel 100 percent resistant, even with the Smithsonian hanging in the balance.

  "What's involved in a Double Bubble Brunch?" I asked.

  Lolly ticked off the essentials on her fat little fingers.

  "Well, the double part means me an' Janie Lee," she said—"I mean both of us in the bath with you at the same time. The bubble part is just a bubble bath, of course."

  "He can get a color of his choice," Janie Lee reminded her. "We got purple an' all kinds of colors."

  "Yeah, color of your choice," Lolly said, ticking off a finger. "An' naturally it's a whirlpool bath and you get a bottle of champagne and a massage first, if you want one, and it's only a hundred dollars up to eleven a.m."

  "We used to run it till noon and it was real popular," Janie Lee said. "The Congressmen used to just pour in here about eleven-fifteen, hopin' to squeeze it all in between votin' or whatever they do."

  "It got too popular," Lolly said. "Nobody wanted to pay the afternoon rates, so now it's only good till 'leven."

  The thought of lolling around drinking champagne in a purple whirlpool bubble bath with two chubby girls was pretty diverting, though it was the last thing I would have expected to find myself doing when I left Cindy's apartment that morning.

  I probably would have given Lolly and Janie Lee the hundred bucks and had a nice bubbly time with them had we not happened to meet Boog Miller just as he was coming out the door of their aptly named establishment, the Bubble Bath.

  Chapter XI

  "Aw, no," Boog said when he saw us. "Comert again."

  He had an orange tie in his hand and looked content enough to have just completed a Double Bubble Brunch.

  Full of fun though they were, the girls seemed a little ticked at Boog. Lolly went over and tried to kick him in the shins, while Janie Lee moved in from the other side.

  Boog backed up against his Lincoln and made his tie into a garrote, daring the girls to come and get kim, an invitation they declined.

  "It's just 'cause he spent the whole morning with Ginger when he could have spent it with us," Lolly explained. "Just 'cause she's from Texas don't mean she knows everything."

  They looked at me significantly again, but the spell of the totally unexpected had already been broken.

  "I guess I'll have to miss the special," I said. "I gotta see Boog for a minute."

  "Well, there's six days in a week," Lolly said. "You just come anytime."

  "Ain't they sweet?" Boog said, once they had gone into the Bubble B
ath. "I love 'em like daughters."

  "Let me ask you something," I said. "Is the Smithsonian for sale?"

  "Yeah, they're tryin' to sell it, but the deal ain't set," Boog said. "Let's go find a barbecue palace."

  We got in my car and drove on out Wilson Boulevard, a street so seedy it gave me deja vu. I kept thinking I was back on Little York Road, in Houston. It was at a flea market on Little York Road that I first met Boog, seconds after I beat him to a narwhal tusk. Shortly after that, I sold it to him and we became friends.

  Boog tied his orange tie and put on some wraparound sunglasses, which he immediately took off in order to examine the fine Armenian icon propped in the back seat.

  "I meant to buy that thang and hang it in the Winkler County courthouse," he said. "It'd give some of them old dirt farmers a pretty good scare."

  Then he took out a little inhaler and squirted an antihistaminic substance up his nose, a noisy process that sounded like somebody trying to start a worn-out car.

  "If you was to offer me a fair deal on that icon I'd tell you about the Smithsonian," he said.

  "I might," I said. "I'll let you know in a day or two."

  Boog looked at me closely. He was a hard man to fool.

  "There must be a new woman in the picture," he said. "One with the hots for icons.

  "It's a hard life," he sighed. "I was thanking your passion for Cindy would last till at least nine-forty-five. If it had you wouldn't have got there in time to bid. You're a fucking lost generation. Can't even fuck till nine-forty-five."

  Soon we left Arlington behind and were in Falls Church, not that it was easy to tell them apart. Falls Church had fewer massage parlors and more TV repair shops, but that was the only appreciable difference.

  The barbecue palace Boog had in mind was called The Cover-Up, and was about as covertly located as any barbecue palace in the land. It was in a little warren of run-down shops behind a construction site in a more than normally depressed part of Falls Church.

  Nonetheless, it was packed with men, most of them with their security clearances hanging around their necks or clipped to their shirt pockets. A couple of sullen Pakistanis were slicing barbecue as fast as they could slice, and a grinning Chinaman who was built not unlike Boog slapped it onto plates, splashed a little sauce over it, and handed it to whoever was at the head of the line.