by James Duffy
While they were talking, Scoop noticed two girls sitting together at the bar. One was a redhead in a peasant skirt and sandals, the other was clad in black from top to bottom. Both had been staring intently in their direction. Or, as Scoop realistically told himself, probably staring at the gym-conditioned Genc, one of the more striking males in the place with his Equinox body, copious black hair and angular, chiseled face. As an articulate and usually jolly Mr. Chubby, Scoop knew he had charms, but they did not telegraph themselves as strongly as Genc's to young women in singles bars.
Fortified by the margaritas, and seeing the girls' stares continuing, he suggested that they invite "the peasant and the poet" over to their tiny table.
"No, I think better not," Genc said.
"Oh, come on. Just for a drink," Scoop said. Without waiting for a reply, he went unsteadily to the bar and accosted the admiring ladies. They were coolly puffing at their cigarettes, Joan Crawford style, and needed little encouragement to accept his invitation.
Scoop expansively ordered a new round of drinks and introduced both himself and Genc. (Fortunately, given the first-name etiquette that prevailed at Squiggles, Genc did not have to use his last name, Serreqi, which could have led to a drunken spelling bee for the rest of the evening. "What do you mean, there's no 'u' after the 'q'?")
The black-clad lady (Gretchen by name) had long, tapering fingers, which, very soon, were playfully touching Genc's hard body. A joke would be told, and everyone laughed. Gretchen not only laughed louder than the rest, but simultaneously lightly stroked Genc's leg or pat-patted him on a bicep.
The peasant girl was the Gracie Mansion pantry person, Amber Sweetwater. Her Pre-Raphaelite reddish locks and not so discreetly revealed décolletage intrigued Scoop. He asked the time-honored New York question, "What do you do?" and Amber told him she worked at the mayor's house.
"Social secretary?"
"Not quite. I work for his chef."
"The mayor has a chef?"
"Of sorts."
"Cool."
Amber asked the reciprocal question and Scoop replied that he was an investigative reporter for The Surveyor.
"What's that?"
Jesus Christ, doesn't anybody read my paper? he thought, but explained its status as a hip, jazzy and crusading weekly.
"What do you investigate?"
"Oh, most anything. Corruption, crime. Right now I'm working on a murder case."
"Wow. Whose?"
"Can't say, I'm afraid. You'll see the headlines when I'm done."
"I've never met a reporter."
"You haven't lived, baby. We're the Fourth Estate, remember?"
Genc, who had been half listening, asked what the Fourth Estate was.
"Just a phrase, Genc. Doesn't mean anything." It was too late at night to explain the structure of Louis XIV's government.
By now Gretchen's rubbings and pit-pats had intensified. Genc, and the obbligato of the drumming music, which had been turned up louder, had excited her.
"Why don't we go to my place? It's only six blocks."
Amber was enthusiastic—to Scoop's surprise and delight—but Genc was not.
"Thank you. I must go."
"Why?" Scoop demanded.
"I will be expected. Mrs. Brandberg will be coming home." Then he quickly added, "She will probably want to tell me what I'm supposed to do tomorrow."
"You think about it," Gretchen said, pinching him. She got up to go to the loo, taking Amber with her.
"You jerk!" Scoop told his friend. "Can't you see these girls are asking for it?" He anticipated a sexual triumph, with a girl thrilled to be making it with an investigative journalist. (It was rumored that Woodward and Bernstein had had girls chasing them. Why shouldn't he?)
The prospective conquests returned, but Genc was still adamant.
"I'm very tired. I must leave," he said.
He had put a damper on the après-margarita fun, and the others reluctantly agreed to end it.
"Okay, let's go," Scoop said. "My treat, by the way." He would justify the payment out of the Boyd slush fund.
The group departed in different directions, but not before Scoop had learned that he could reach Amber by calling the number at Gracie she gave him.
Walking back to his apartment, Scoop was puzzled at Genc's behavior. Here was an attractive, sexy girl eager for him and he had resisted. Was he gay? No prior evidence of that. Albanian. A Muslim, maybe? But they didn't have anything against sex, did they? He was reasonably sure the contrary was true. A born-again Christian? Unlikely.
All the possibilities occurred to him except that it was bedtime at 62nd Street. King-size-bed time with Miszu.
TWELVE
Lingering concern over the Incident was not Eldon's only worry. There was another thorn in his side: Governor Randilynn Foote. The public assumed that the evident animosity between them was simply partisan Democratic-Republican sparring, but the roots of the ill feeling went back a number of years.
The fiftyish governor had grown up in Elkhart, Indiana, where her mother, long since deserted by her husband, had been the proprietress of a rough, working-class saloon, the Rat's Tail.
As a youngster, Randilynn had spent almost every night at the bar; there was not enough money to provide her with a sitter. Usually found doing her homework at a back table, she was subjected to much teasing from her mother's clientele.
The experience had two effects on the future politician: she developed a very tough skin and a rough, obscenity-laced vocabulary. Four-letter and even double-digit indecencies became a natural part of her word stock, much as "thee's" and "thou's" might have colored her speech had she been reared at a devout Quaker hearth. Small in stature (she was five feet five in heels), her outbursts were all the more surprising to others, coming as they did from such a diminutive source.
Randilynn was both smart and energetic and had been right at home at Oregon's Reed College, where she did honors work as a politics major. Graduate study at Columbia followed; she was going to save the world, and shrewdly realized that respectable credentials, of the sort conferred by Columbia, were necessary to achieve her goal.
She arrived at Columbia just in time to join the late-sixties protests that rocked that institution. She became an activist in the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. Older than most of the undergraduate protesters, she was a sort of den mother to the budding anarchists.
It was at Columbia that she first met Eldon Hoagland, the new associate professor in the Political Science Department, freshly recruited from the University of Minnesota.
Randilynn had enrolled in Eldon's graduate seminar on government budgetary techniques, a dull subject he made come alive through his wit, intelligence and fresh-faced enthusiasm. But she was not listening, being more sensitive to the drumrolls of her fellow SDS agitators. She performed badly in the seminar—often absent and delinquent in meeting Professor Hoagland's requirements for papers.
Eldon, still feeling his way, had a traditional view of grading, based on his own experience at Princeton, Harvard (where he had earned his doctorate) and Minnesota. So he gave her a B minus, oblivious to the trend toward grade inflation that made such a graduate school grade the equivalent of failure. Randilynn protested loudly, but Eldon held his ground. She never forgave him and became quite bitter about the issue, even more so when she was turned down for a position as a program officer at the Ford Foundation. It never occurred to her that her Tugboat Annie persona might have had something to do with the rejection; in her mind the B minus blot Professor Hoagland had placed on her record had been the decisive factor.
The newly minted Ph.D. did land a job with the Agency for International Development and spent three productive years helping to get a housing project started in Ankara, Turkey, bulldozing bureaucrats and contractors as she went.
Returning from her foreign experience, Randilynn began her New York career as a civil servant in the State Housing Authority. She soon acquired a reputa
tion for getting things done, and the governor at the time, a Republican, lifted her out of the civil service and gave her a political appointment as the deputy chairman of the Authority. He was intrigued by this small dynamo with a garbage mouth and, when he stood for reelection, asked her to run with him as lieutenant governor. (His first LG, a dim party hack from Buffalo, had been such an embarrassment that he was dropped after his first term.)
Randilynn was torn about accepting the offer. Her housing job was engrossing. The lieutenant governorship, by contrast, was generally thought (correctly) to be one of the most useless jobs in politics. Running as a Republican didn't bother her—the SDS days were ancient history by then and she was not without political ambition—so when the governor persisted, she agreed to accept the nomination, and they won in a landslide.
The press corps took to Randilynn, with her tough attitude and blue vocabulary. At her insistence, she was always called by her full given name, though the reporters uniformly called her "Randy Randy" behind her back. Receiving more attention than usual as the lieutenant governor (to the annoyance of the man who had brought her into politics), she was the logical candidate to run for her boss's job when he retired at the end of his second term. She did so, and by the narrowest of margins became the Empire State's first woman governor.
The election that Eldon won was deeply frustrating to her. She wanted to see him beaten, but she simply could not bring herself to endorse his rabble-rousing opponent.
One day, while wandering around the second floor of City Hall prior to a hearing in the council chamber, she made an amazing discovery—the building contained an elaborate three-room suite that had originally been set aside for use of the governor when in New York City.
The very next morning she set her executive assistant, Pedro Raifeartaigh, to work finding out about the suite.
(Raifeartaigh was the governor's ever-patient sounding board as well as trusted adviser. Born Peter Rafferty, he had decided in midlife, at roughly the time he had given up drinking, to honor the heritage of his Hispanic mother and Irish father by changing his name. A political operative who had first worked for the governor when she was at the Housing Authority, he had moved with her as she successively became lieutenant governor and then governor, to the chagrin of copy editors at newspapers throughout the state.)
After a few hours of research and inquiries, he confirmed that the rooms had indeed been intended for the governor's use when City Hall was completed in 1811. The privilege had never been exercised and there did not appear to have been any agreement between the city and state concerning the space.
This did not deter Governor Foote, who hatched a plan that she told Raifeartaigh would drive Mayor Hoagland "apeshit." She would simply request that the suite now be put at her disposal for use as her personal city office.
How could Eldon refuse? she asked her assistant. The new mayor had promised economy in government, and what more visible example could there be than converting the Governor's Suite, now a museum that was seldom visited due to antiterrorist security precautions, to office use?
She asked Raifeartaigh to set up an appointment with Hoagland. She would come down to see him (the better to show him the hidden treasure upstairs from his own quarters).
Eldon was puzzled. Why was the mountain coming to Muhammad? He found out when the governor, looking like a miniature Michelin Man in her unfashionable alpaca parka, arrived at the scheduled time the next afternoon. She wasted no time on small talk but quoted Eldon's inaugural address on the subject of saving the people's money and then made her bid for the Governor's Rooms.
"We should carry out the original intention," she told him. "If I use this space, we can cut back on the rent we pay uptown. A win-win game."
Eldon was more than a little confused. He had been vaguely aware that the suite in question was called the Governor's Rooms, but he had never been inside it. And certainly no governor he remembered had used it. Now he was confronted with the prospect of having a politician who loathed him sitting practically on his lap.
"Randilynn, I don't think this is such a great idea. You have your offices uptown and in Albany, I have mine here. Why make confusion? And if there's any formal agreement to make the space upstairs available to you, I'm unaware of it. No, Randilynn, the more I think about it, no. I don't have to do it, and I won't."
"Okay, Mr. Mayor. Have it your way. But when I walk out of here, I'm going straight to Room Nine, to the reporters. I'm going to tell them that all your talk about economy and saving money is bullshit. Presented with a practical suggestion for saving a few thousand—in state money, not city, I grant you—you turned it down. Instead you declared war on the governor. That what you want?"
Eldon needed time, which he now asked for.
"Can I get back to you? I really have to think this through."
"Twenty-four hours. Then I go to the mattresses."
"Randilynn, I'll call you tomorrow."
In a hurried conference with Jack Gullighy after the governor had left, the two men agreed that she had them "by the balls," as she would have put it. If he persisted in turning her down, the two men knew The Post-News would fan the flames and turn the petty dispute into a civil war, a blood feud. And she would yap interminably about the money Eldon refused to save.
"Let Randy Randy use the goddam rooms," Eldon concluded. "It's not worth putting up a fight. Just one condition—her people have to call us whenever she leaves the building, so that I never have to run into her."
THIRTEEN
One of Mayor Hoagland's campaign proposals had been to find ways and means of increasing tourism in New York City. Money exacted from tourists was an effective and efficient way of pumping up the local economy, he had argued: increasing revenues through the sales and hotel taxes, enhancing the city's status as a cultural hub for the world, promoting employment among less privileged citizens—actors and artists, busboys and bartenders.
Some residents, strolling in midtown, wondered if the promotional efforts that Hoagland intensified had gone too far, confronted as they were with regiments of foreigners marching five across. But Eldon persisted and his persistence had paid off in healthy increases in the revenues attributable to the tourist trade.
His Office of Tourism had sponsored a poll to find out just who was coming to visit and spend. The results were hardly surprising: Europeans and Asians and Latin Americans, of course, but newly prosperous residents of the Third World as well. Domestically, Southerners and Midwesterners dominated, with Californians, presumably content with the Disneyland they called home, lagging far behind.
There was one strange incongruity—residents of upstate New York tended to avoid the metropolis. Reviewing the results with Esther Henriques, his commissioner of tourism, Eldon theorized that the upstaters had been brainwashed by the Sodom-and-Gomorrah rhetoric of their parochial legislators. And he urged Ms. Henriques to find ways to correct the anomaly.
Having given this command, he was hardly in a position to object when Esther informed him that she had arranged for a "New York City Day" at the annual State Fair in Syracuse, just before Labor Day. She had half-promised an appearance by the mayor and he felt, albeit reluctantly, that he could not refuse.
Edna declined to accompany him. She had recently volunteered what spare time she had as a dermatologist at a Bronx AIDS clinic, where she quietly and without publicity undertook the unpleasing but necessary task of treating the raging skin eruptions of HIV patients. Eldon could hardly argue that this work was less important than an excursion to Syracuse.
The mayor asked Commissioner Henriques to accompany him, along with Jack Gullighy. The latter was not overjoyed at the prospect—he claimed he broke out in a rash once more than 25 miles outside the city limits—but as usual he acceded to the mayor's wishes.
The mayor was not encouraged by the hour's delay on his commercial flight.
"Would have been faster to go by the Erie Canal," he muttered.
He was not comfo
rted by the briefing sheet on Syracuse that Esther handed him once they were in the air: industry leaving, population falling, family income well below the national average.
"You sure the citizens aren't rioting in the streets?" he asked.
"No, Eldon. Be calm," Gullighy said.
"We go directly to the fairgrounds. For three hours. That's it," Henriques added.
At the fair, the mayor was greeted by a band from a Queens high school. He pronounced the band members' performance "magnificent" though he knew it wasn't. (He'd played the clarinet in a school band back in Minnesota that was the pride of the state. We played Sousa, for Christ's sake, he thought to himself, not this simple do-re-mi stuff.)
After the ruffles and flourishes there was a tour of the fair exhibits and a picnic lunch with the local mayor—a Democrat, Eldon was pleased to note, though the area was known to be very Republican.
Then came the event that memorialized the visit. On the way back to his car, the mayor's party walked through the tents where prize cattle were on show.
"Can you milk a cow, Eldon?" Jack Gullighy asked casually.
"Of course I can. I'm a farm boy from Minnesota, remember?"
"Bet you can't."
"Dammit, I'll prove it."
It was late afternoon and the cows' udders were full. Jack, to call his friend's bluff, told a young farmer watching the visiting celebrity pass that the mayor wanted to milk a cow. Magically a stool and a pail materialized and Jack pointed to the docile Holstein in front of them.
"Watch now. I'll show you!" Eldon said. He sat down on the stool and, to the wonderment of the crowd, began stroking the cow's teats and, mirabile dictu, produced milk.
This unusual event did not go unrecorded. A photographer snapped a beautiful shot of the mayor, hard at work but smiling. The photo even showed the milk dribbling into the pail.
"See?" Eldon said to Jack, getting up. "Some things you never forget."
The rest of the trip was uneventful. Describing it to Edna, he somehow forgot to mention his prowess in dairy land. So the next morning she let out a shriek from the dining room that Eldon could hear upstairs while he was shaving. He rushed down, half dressed, to see what had set her off.