“Okay,” said Ram. “I’ll do the story.”
“We have a deal then. I’m wishing you a safe journey and looking forward to your story. I’ll need it in three weeks’ time.”
It was Ram’s first visit to Hungary and he was looking forward to the day and a half he had available before he was scheduled to arrive in Sopron for the interviews arranged by the publicist. He wanted to visit the Hapsburg palaces, the museums and cafés, and attend an opera or symphony. But when he went to the Am Ex office, there was no money waiting. Ram called Spencer Blood in London and confronted him with the situation. Blood assured him he would take care of the problem.
He returned to Am Ex three times and found the same answer, no money for Ram Le Doir. At five o’clock, Ram went to a cheap restaurant near the Sudbahnhof station and ordered soup, salad, and a Paulaner. He remembered thinking that he’d never been put in such a situation before and wondered why it had come now; and this from a magazine that he had contributed to for ten years. He asked himself that question as he sat in the basement café watching passersby in the street outside. Finally, an idea occurred to him and he laughed loud enough to alarm the nearby patrons. Ram paid his bill, gathered his belongings, and walked toward the train station. Opposite it, was a beautiful old hotel called The Chopin. Ram walked in, placed his bags down near the front desk, and asked to use a phone.
“Let me speak to Spencer Blood,” he said, when the voice at the other end answered.
“May I say who is calling?”
“You may say that a mightily pissed-off Ram Le Doir is calling.”
Blood came on the phone and apologized and promised again to rectify the matter. Ram was tired of hearing it and told Blood where he was. He told him that he was checking into the hotel and handed the phone to the hotel receptionist so she could take the credit card information. When she finished, she returned the phone to him.
“I’m sorry over this breakdown, Ram,” Blood said. “I’m having Annette take care of it and we’ll get the wire out as soon as possible.”
“I’ll believe it when I have it, but I’m pretty pissed off right now.”
“We’ll make it up, Ram.”
“You’re damn right you will. We’ll talk about this later but I’m soaked to the bone. I’m signing for everything I need until the money comes,” he said, hanging up without a good-bye.
When he got to his room, he stripped his clothes off and tossed them in a pile on the bathroom floor. He put on a terry cloth robe, went through his garment bag, and pulled out the items that were soaked. Then he called the valet and said that he had some things that needed dry-cleaning. When that was done, Ram went to the mini-bar and pulled out two Heineken’s and four Moskovskaya, drinking them in rapid succession before falling asleep for an hour. When he awoke, he took a steaming hot bath and ordered two movies from the hotel’s pay-per-view selection…
…Thinking about it now, lying on the bed in the motel in Morro Bay with The Dead flickering on the television set, the Budapest episode slid into focus: the dreariness of that rainy day; the foreign feeling in the pit of his stomach; shuffling along the circular streets of the city center with luggage in tow; meandering about to nowhere in particular, circling the AmEx office in ever widening arcs, returning every so often, always finding, once again, that no money had arrived; the calls to London where Blood’s assistant was “sorting it out,” the same hollow reassurances, the same end result. Nothing was resolved…
When he awoke, it was past midnight, the room lit with the blue light of the TV screen. Ram turned on the bedside light, rose, and turned off the television. He fished in his pocket for change, found some, and put on a robe to go outside. A quarter-moon descended toward the horizon. A few stars gleamed icily in the gray sky. Ram shook out a cigarette and smoked, standing at the railing listening to the muffled waves falling on the beach three blocks away. He remembered what he’d been thinking about before drifting off—of Sopron and Vera and all that happened there: the professional humiliation; the public cuckoldry; the stupid histrionics in the tavern; the train ride back to Paris to pack his things and ship them home; the letter he left for Vera telling her that he’d be filing for divorce in California as soon as he got there; the summoning of two of his Paris friends, David Morrissey, a portrait artist originally from Boston, and Marc Berman, a classical composer from Philadelphia who lived in the same building in Pre St. Gervais as Morrissey, to a going away party at Tigh Johnny’s where Ram was sullen and melancholy. He told Moe and Marc he’d miss them and Paris and that he’d be back someday, bringing to mind the same promise he’d made in Amsterdam years before. But, unlike Amsterdam, Ram didn’t feel it as he said it and it was apparent to them that he was lost at sea. The next day, Marc and his girlfriend Nikki and Ram took in two exhibitions—a Francis Bacon at the Pompidou and a William Klein at the FNAC—and then went for choucroute at a small restaurant on the Rue de Sèvres.
Two days later, Ram took the train to Amsterdam where he stayed two nights at The Doelen, wandering the canals with the overhanging elms and planes beginning to leaf out. Then he was home again, and other than that one brief journey through the hills and valleys and waterways of old California, it had been death and mayhem ever since…
…Outside the motel, Ram finished his cigarette, stubbed it out, and tossed it in a nearby butt can. The smell of the kelp coming up the street from the Pacific was potent. He looked at his watch and saw it was 3:15. Off to his left, in a clump of cypress trees, Ram made out the shape of something dark. He tried to identify what it was. The shape moved slowly and deliberately. Something hard reflected the moonlight. Was it a man? Was that a gun? They’d been haunting Ram for so long now that he had gotten used to it. They hadn’t moved on Ram openly for a while now, but the mortal fear he lived in these past three years had now become a part of his general condition.
Now, he walked not in a nimbus, but in a smoky mist of uncertainty; calls to or from safe houses, midnight meetings in parking lots where documents or audiotapes were handed to him from cars with tinted glass; visits to libraries where he collected research materials, nights in cheap motels in out-of-the-way places such as this one. The dark shape moved again in the trees, sending a shiver down Ram’s spine. But as it rose and the moonlight illuminated it, Ram could see that it was just a large bird of some kind. As it flew closer to the moon, Ram was hoping the light would reveal it to be an owl—a good omen. He wasn’t surprised when the moonlight showed it to be a crow…
…It was at a hearing in Sagrada when Ram stumbled onto what was going on with the landfill projects. The panel choosing the selected contractors for it was trying to jam the decision through as quickly as possible without making proper considerations. Ram scanned the panel making notes while reading the in-house publication of the State Solid Waste Management Agency. His eye wandered up the page to a sidebar near the top. In the squib was a picture of the founder of the board, Dick Madrone, whom Ram knew from the Orange County Airport expansion.
Something about the landfill project smelled strange and familiar to Ram almost from the beginning. But it wasn’t until after the first of the next year that Ram could cover the story. When he did, it became dangerous. Ram’s old research papers from the airport expansion substantiated his initial hunch and every subsequent record search further confirmed it. Verde and his bunch were doing it in the open now—with one project after another being used to benefit companies in which Verdes gang owned a great deal of bank stocks. At first, Ram found the story exhilarating, but after going to magazine after magazine and newspaper after newspaper and having them all cancel out on him—some of them after he had signed contracts with them—it became clear that what Ram had stumbled onto was an unpublishable truth. And the four death threats that he’d been issued since then, once by Big Louie himself, only underlined this fact. Ram had not flown off the runway as Louie suggested he might, but Louie had done everything he could to poison Ram’s well. Claims that Ram was unst
able circulated through newsrooms, salacious stories were circulated to politicos Ram knew who now wouldn’t return his calls. Police were very much in presence at events Ram attended. Rumors about Ram’s supposed penchant for teenage girls were rampant and overheard by friends of his whom now avoided him actively or pretended not to notice him in public. Like Hester Prynne, it was as though Ram had a red letter around his neck. Hers was the “A” for Adulteress. Ram’s was the “P,” for Pariah.
It was masterful how Big Louie and his crew made the whole thing work, a money machine that produced profits out of thin air, a speculation-driven scheme involving state bond issuances relating to landfill projects and garbage collection. As soon as the legislation relevant to the landfill project was introduced and the amount of money for the project was specified, the newspapers would start writing stories to promote them. When it was clear that the project would be approved and the bonds would eventually be issued, the inside players would start buying stocks in the publicly traded banks that would be issuing the bonds, having advance knowledge of this from the State Treasurer, Carl Khachigian, an Armenian wizard who was a member of Louie’s old guard from the legislature. The insiders would buy huge chunks of the bank’s outstanding shares right before the process got going, and when the news was announced what bank would be issuing the bonds, their stocks would jump, and Fuquar was the one who wrote the bills. It was one slick profit producing machine, and Louie Verde was running the show.
He thought about this and the effort that went into researching the affair and how fruitless an effort it had proven to be. Nobody would publish it and Ram thought there was more in it than a story that couldn’t find a home. A greater truth was also being denied. It related to the times and how they were signified.
He felt like a combination of Rip Van Winkle and the Ancient Mariner: he’d been asleep for years and when he came to, it was to a world he hardly recognized. To anyone who would listen, Ram told his story in the hope he’d find someone who cared. Nobody did. Now he was on his way to LA to see if he could make a deal and save his hide from the Verde gang. It was no joke. It was that bad. Ram was marked and he knew it…
…The scent of the kelp was softer now and Ram lit another cigarette, closed his eyes, and listened to the waves dropping on the shore. He stood with his eyes closed for a while, waiting for something to happen. When it didn’t, he went inside and fell asleep, waking at eight and heading south to LA.
In Ventura, Ram stopped for a lunch of chicken-fried steak and eggs and made two phone calls—one to The Palm’s Motel where he made a reservation under an assumed name, and one to Phil Le Gris. Ram told Phil he was in town and would call later.
Now Ram felt the pull, the power, and velocity of Los Angeles and its dissembling languor. He smiled as he drove south through Malibu and turned left on Sunset, the route he always used to take to go to Phil and Jill’s and his other friends up in the canyons when he was a known entity.
That was done now. Ram had few friends who wanted to see him now; few invitations to receptions or openings with follow-up calls to determine whether or not he and Vera would be in attendance or if Ram wanted to write something about it. His friends and associates from the palmy days now avoided him, knowing what he was doing with the Verde affair that involved most of California’s major players, including the Governor and a seated U.S. Senator. Some would tell him they thought they’d been followed after meeting with him. All of them wished him luck and all said they admired his guts for taking on the machine and sprinkling enough of it along the tracks to grind them to a halt. But all of them made it clear to Ram that they wanted no part of it, or of him if that’s what he was doing.
Ram thought about that last bit and asked himself just what that was, and what he had become, and why was he doing it. Was it vanity and ego and desire for recognition from his peers? That was what Fran said the one time that Ram had seen him since coming home from Paris.
But it was a different motivation that now seemed to drive Ram; now his pursuit of the quarry was more akin to his original principles of why he’d entered journalism in the first place. It surely wasn’t for the money that he persisted so doggedly on the story, for he had bankrupted himself on it. In some sense, it was a litmus test—he was testing himself to see whether or not he could see it through to a successful end, although Ram couldn’t at all fathom how that success could be quantified. In another sense, it was a test of his profession as well: just how long would the factual truth of his reporting be ignored? How long would the conspiracy of silence continue? There were other questions and considerations that Ram often pondered long into the night during those lonely hours spent in cheap motel rooms. Something was different now, something had changed. But whether or not it was the nature of the game itself that had been altered during his time in France or whether it was something more transformative that had occurred to Ram during the story, or both, he couldn’t say. All that he knew was that it, or he, or both, were different now, and that he was frightened and exhausted but somehow exhilarated as a result of the process.
Ram collected documents whenever he could, which was most of the time, as the landfill story held public meetings and hearings, with numbered bill histories, and lobbying reports, and records of campaign contributions, not to mention the NYSE tickers and the SEC filings listing all the stock transactions during these bank stock issuances and bond sales. It was at another of Big Louie Verde’s press conferences Ram let out that he was onto the game and where Louie and his machine were heading. Assemblyman Phillip Spike, another power player and Louie’s best friend, had introduced a new piece of legislation. The language in it referred to the possibility of consolidating the garbage collection contractors into regions, and when Ram analyzed it, he saw that it would benefit businesses directly connected to the Verde machine. The Spike bill had been entirely ignored by the press, but it caught Ram’s attention. Ram stood up and asked Verde a pointed question that he hoped nobody in the assembled press corps would get. They didn’t, but Louie did, shooting Ram a steely-eyed stare and telling him that he knew nothing about what Ram was asking and would have to have his people get back to him. Ram pressed in with a follow-up question and Verde said, “You’d better watch yourself, Le Doir, or you’ll be trash.”
Then the smear campaigns began: backroom slander and anonymous letters to editors causing him to lose assignments when deadlines were upcoming, all because of a garbage collection story. Les Beak declined Ram’s request for a character reference to The Wall Street Journal. Michael Gates wouldn’t provide one either.
…It only got worse when nobody would join him in this quest. Ram was out on his lonesome, and, boy, did this suck, he thought. These people mean to hurt me, maybe finish me with a shot in the head this time. There isn’t any point in pretense any more. The cards have already been dealt and the play is in progress. Who knows how it will end? Ram didn’t. Everything he thought it would bring him turned out to be false. He was what? At least 0 for 25 so far? That was the last count of how many publications he’d contacted and been rejected by, even the Wall Street Journal twice. Who wanted to rattle that cage? Nobody other than Ram. That story was never going to get any play, not from the players who ran the news business now.
Ram had been seeing a doctor named Howard Maltz since he’d had a shoulder injury playing tennis some months ago. When he told the doctor what he was working on, Maltz sighed. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” he said, “not at this stage of your recovery. You should avoid stressful situations.”
“Not this one. I have to do this story. It’s an important issue. People need to know,” Ram told him.
“Why don’t you put it aside until you get better? You need to focus on your recovery, Ram.”
“I can do both,” Ram boasted.
“I hope you’re right, but my recommendation is rest and recovery. You had a serious injury and I’d like to test you more extensively.”
“We can do that w
hen I get done with it.”
“How long do you think that will take?” Maltz gently inquired.
“A few weeks,” Ram offered.
That was two years ago when he’d made that prediction…
…Ram drove through Santa Monica on Ocean, past the ‘No Vacancy’ signs at the upscale hotels. A convention was going on and the streets were full of out-of-towners wearing badges and hats. Ram thought of the days with Vera when they’d hole up for a week at the Oceana, lying by the pool with Phil and Jill, in terry cloth robes, sipping drinks and ignoring the always ringing phone. Vera might even be there now; with some new beau, or over at the Marmont, or maybe the Marquis. She wasn’t in Paris anymore—that much Ram knew from reading the trades. When he called Molly, her agent, Ram was only told that his message would be conveyed. But where that was, Molly wouldn’t say.
Ram turned left on Pico, headed east. He had already passed it when he saw the neon palm and flashing ‘vacancy’ in the rearview. He hooked a U-turn on 15th, turned back west, then left on 13th and pulled into the motor court. It was a string of bungalows—maybe 20 all told—with flags from different countries painted on the stucco exteriors. Ram parked in front of Switzerland—number 13. He buzzed at the office and Paul opened the door. “Hello, Ram…or good evening, Mr. Butterworth,” he laughed.
“Paul, it’s good to see you. Anybody call for me using that name?”
Paul shook his head no and handed Ram the key and said they’d do the paperwork later. Ram stood his things in the room, a little chamber with a shower and toilet, and walked around the corner to The Speakeasy where he told the bartender to give him a Mai Tai. Then he called Jose Cifuentes, an old coke connection that Phil Le Gris had introduced Ram to some years back. He told him where he was, and asked Cifuentes to meet him at midnight. He went back to his Mai Tai, pumping dollars into the jukebox.
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