Two women standing near a large gray file cabinet looked up at my entrance. One was a blonde with a short asymmetrical gamine-style cut; the other had straight, shoulder-length hair, dark red or auburn, perfectly parted down the middle. They wore identical short-sleeved white blouses and navy blue skirts that just brushed the tops of their knees, and either of them could have spotted the Girl from Ipanema seven and a half points when it came to being tall, tanned, young, and lovely.
None of us spoke. The large digital clock on the far wall changed from 09:29:59 to 09:30:00, and at that precise second a discreet buzzer sounded at Auburn’s desk. She pressed a button on her earpiece and listened, then looked at me again and smiled. It was a professional smile only, but my knees buckled all the same.
“Mr. Mallory? Mr. Cramer will see you now.”
Post time. I nodded at Auburn and walked through the door she indicated, into the biggest and darkest office I had ever seen.
Chapter Two
Although at first, “not seen” would have been more accurate. The big heavy door shut pneumatically behind me and the latch engaged with a too-loud click that heightened my sense of incarceration. The sound of the ensuing silence was even louder. It took several seconds for my eyes to readjust to the point where I could make out any details.
There was enough space to install a basketball court. Fifteen-foot-high mahogany walls and a vaulted ceiling made me feel small and insignificant. The carpet, near as I could tell, was a deep russet color, with a pile high enough to slow down pedestrian traffic. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase occupied half of the wall to my right, and every shelf was filled to capacity. I was too far away to make out any of the titles.
The room had no windows. The only illumination of any significance came from a fluorescent banker’s lamp that cast a small trapezoid of soft white light onto an otherwise empty desktop—and threw everything behind it into even blacker darkness. I sensed movement behind me and glanced over my left shoulder, where two huge flat-screen monitors silently streamed updates of stock and commodity prices.
The scents of rich leather and cigar smoke permeated the atmosphere. Across the room, a bright orange dot blazed, then faded, providing a clue to the smoke’s point of origin.
The point of origin rose from his chair, came around his desk, and walked over to me, hand outstretched. He was even larger than I remembered. We met halfway. I braced for the handshake, but his grip was strong and firm, no more, and possessed of as much flab as one might reasonably expect to find in a block of granite.
“Delighted that you could come, Mr. Mallory,” he said. “I’m Bentley Cramer. Please, have a seat.”
The “seat” was a vast upholstered Cartwright chair, and could easily have accommodated a pair of defensive linemen. I sat, and Cramer glided back around his desk. For someone who I guessed was in his late fifties or early sixties and who couldn’t have weighed less than three hundred fifty pounds, he moved with the lithe grace and agility of a dancer, much the way the late Jackie Gleason used to.
“Cigar, Mr. Mallory?” he asked. “You smoke Upmanns, don’t you?”
How did he know that, I wondered. Had he seen and identified the one I had in my shirt pocket Tuesday night? It was barely possible, I decided. He was, after all, a newspaperman, and close observation would be second nature to him.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Hmmm.” He swung round in his chair and opened the glass door to an upright humidor that was bigger and better stocked than my refrigerator. After a few seconds, Cramer emerged.
“See what you think of this,” he said, shoving a cigar across the desk. It came at me arrow-straight and stopped two inches short of the edge.
I leaned forward and picked it up. It was a monster, over nine inches long and nearly an inch thick. The modest brown and white band simply read “Montecristo Habana.” I examined it reverently for a few seconds.
Then I realized that I had a problem. Was I supposed to smoke the thing now, in the middle of a job interview? That didn’t make sense. Or was I supposed to take it with me as some sort of souvenir? That didn’t seem right, either. But then I reminded myself that it wasn’t really a job interview. I was looking for answers, not for work. I flipped a mental coin and stuck the cigar in my shirt pocket.
“Thank you, Mr. Cramer,” I said. “It’s a magnificent specimen. I’m looking forward to it already.”
“Nonsense, son.” He slid a cutter and a lighter over to me. They also stopped two inches short of the edge. I got the feeling he could do it ten times out of ten with any ten objects. “Go ahead and light up. Why look forward to something you can enjoy right now?”
I reached back inside my jacket. Fifteen-love to Cramer, but I suspected that it would have been so no matter what I did, and gave him grudging credit for making a good play. I didn’t care much for being called “son,” though, and I cared even less for being manipulated. I was glad I wasn’t actually going to go to work for him.
I took my time clipping the Montecristo and getting it lighted properly. The first draw provided, I felt, a sneak preview of how the cigars would taste in heaven. I took a second draw to make sure, then set the cigar down in a large black marble ashtray on a low table to the left of my chair.
Cramer watched me with what looked like approval.
“You begin well, Mr. Mallory. I like and respect a man who knows how to take care of a fine cigar. But to business. How would you like to come to work for me?”
“As a reporter?” Brilliant probing question, that, I thought. It’s easy to tell you’re a highly-trained journalist.
“More or less,” Cramer said. “But what I have in mind for you might just be slightly more, ah, demanding at times than your job at the East Lambert Tribune. How much are they paying you there, by the way, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Subtlety wasn’t Cramer’s strong suit. I shrugged.
“Thirty-two five,” I said, inflating the real number by fifteen percent. At least I knew to do that much—and if it scared him off, so what?
Cramer smiled. Either he didn’t believe me or he didn’t care. Probably both. His next sentence confirmed at least the latter.
“Your starting salary here will be one hundred four thousand dollars a year.”
I almost choked on the world’s greatest cigar.
“What’s the job?” I asked.
Cramer looked at me.
“Tell me, Mr. Mallory,” he said. “Before we spoke Tuesday night, were you even remotely aware that such a thing as the Cramer Press Syndicate existed?”
That was a question, not an answer, but I let it go.
“No,” I said.
“And what did your subsequent research reveal to you?”
“Nothing. As I’m quite sure you already know.”
“Quite. What does all of this suggest?”
It suggests that you’re an evasive son of a bitch, is what I wanted to say. No point in that, though. Probably he already knew as much.
“You wouldn’t pay me two grand a week even to run one of your papers, let alone write for it,” I said, “so I’m guessing you want me for the wire service. What I don’t get is why me? I’m a rookie sportswriter living out in the middle of nowhere, working for a newspaper that’s even smaller than…” Oops.
“Smaller than mine?” Cramer said, smiling.
I squirmed and sensed the onset of a serious case of flop sweat. I hoped that my antiperspirant would be up to the task.
“Um, er—”
Cramer waved a giant hand of dismissal at me.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Mallory. You’re absolutely correct, of course. But ‘small’ doesn’t necessarily equate to ‘bad,’ does it, son? Suffice it to say that I know your work, and I think that a man of your skill and talent might be a very useful man to have in my employ.”
I still didn’t know what he was talking about. Three new questions instantly suggested themselves, but I went back to my original.
&n
bsp; “What’s the job?”
“Good,” he said. “That in itself demonstrates that I was right about you. At least five other questions must have occurred to you just now, but you didn’t allow yourself to be diverted. Excellent.”
While I was thinking of what the other two questions would have been, he held his cigar up and examined it closely. There had been no accumulation of ash when I came in (remember, I saw a bright orange dot), but the big man had smoked two inches of the thing in the last ten minutes. He reached out and tapped the Montecristo once, and a long gray cylinder tumbled end over end into the center of an ornate gold ashtray the size of a Frisbee. With that done, he returned his attention to me.
“Your primary job will be that of a news analyst,” he said. “You will read, watch, and listen to everything that comes out of Mexico, Latin America, and the Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean. You will report to me daily, seven days a week, on whatever strikes you as out of the ordinary, no matter how small or large. From time to time—twice or thrice a year, perhaps—I will send you out to cover a story personally.” He chuckled. “To boldly go where few men have gone before, if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing Star Trek.”
Now I had two more questions. The first one was, who the hell says “thrice” these days? But I went with my second.
“How did you know I knew Spanish at all, let alone well enough to do the kind of job you’re talking about?”
“The same way I know most things, Mr. Mallory. I know where to look and whom to ask, and I have the wherewithal to put that into practice.”
I took a hit off the Montecristo and thought about it. Once again, he hadn’t answered my question, but was it a battle worth fighting? Certainly there was no big secret about my knowing Spanish, though it did leave me wondering how much else Cramer knew—and it didn’t begin to tell me how I’d gotten caught in his net in the first place.
“But you must have had to start somewhere,” I insisted. “Why should you know, let alone care, that I exist? Who ever heard of Paul Mallory? I’m nothing special.”
“You are not the best judge of that. Why did you give up your umpiring career just as it was getting under way?” he asked. “By all accounts, your prospects would have been most promising.”
I squirmed again—where did that one come from?—but my growing irritation with Cramer’s diversionary tactics served, oddly, to keep me on an even keel.
“Private reasons,” I said.
“Indeed? And was it also ‘private reasons’ that led you to resign your commission as a naval officer as abruptly as you did?”
I squirmed a third time. Nobody really knew my reasons in either case because I’d never given any official reasons—it was nobody’s damned business but my own—but anyone who had followed my life story closely enough (read: Bentley Cramer) would have little trouble putting two and two together. That didn’t mean I had to make it easy for him. I’d spent most of the last eleven years trying to forget my past. There were parts of it that weren’t pleasant to contemplate.
And this wasn’t any too pleasant either. Real or not, it was the damndest job interview I’d ever been on, and the completeness of the dossier that Cramer seemed to have compiled on me was unnerving. Any minute now, he would be telling me the name of the girl I took to my high school prom (Susie Cosgrove) and how far I got with her in the aftermath thereof (not very). It was time to slow him down. I stood up.
“We’re done here, Mr. Cramer, unless you tell me right now not only why those questions are relevant, but also exactly what the hell this fishing expedition is all about. You approached me, remember, not the other way around. Now do I get some answers or not?”
For the tiniest fraction of a second, Cramer looked at me as though the chair had spoken instead of its former occupant. Then the expression was gone. He leaned back, drew deeply on his cigar, and blew three huge and perfect smoke rings that seemed to hang in mid-air as if suspended by invisible cables. Mesmerized, I stood there watching them until they finally and reluctantly dissolved.
“Sit down,” he said. “Please.”
I sat—but on the edge of the chair. I wasn’t staying.
Cramer fiddled with his cigar some more, then looked at me. He smiled.
“A fishing expedition, Mr. Mallory? Only if your idea of a fishing expedition is going to the local aquarium and picking guppies out of a tank. I already know almost everything I need to know with respect to your curriculum vitae. Whatever questions I may put to you are not so much to fill in the few insignificant gaps that remain as they are to find out what kind of a man you are.”
I resisted the impulse to ask him how I was doing so far. I might not have liked the answer.
“To be specific,” he continued, “my questions are pertinent because you’ve walked out on two potentially excellent careers already. I am offering you a third such career, and I have an obligation—to you as well as to myself, son—to determine whether you are likely to walk out on this one as well. Wouldn’t you agree?”
I added stupidity and shame to my irritation and uneasiness. He was a jerk, but he was right on this one. In any case, I shouldn’t have lost my temper with him.
“Fair enough,” I admitted. “I apologize. It’s just that a lot of your questions and observations so far have been highly personal, and I—”
Cramer laughed, a deep belly laugh that reverberated around the room and hit me from all four sides. The building didn’t actually shake as a result, but it wouldn’t have surprised me to see it crumble to dust around us. If Bentley Cramer had been running things at the start of the battle of Jericho, it wouldn’t have taken seven days for the walls to come tumbling down. It wouldn’t even have taken one. The Israelites would have been out of there in time for their morning coffee break.
“Good lord, man,” he boomed. “Of course they’ve been highly personal. What better way to learn about a person than to get personal with him? I should have thought that much was obvious. You are, what, thirty-one years old? Thirty-two?”
“Thirty-one,” I said, telling him nothing he didn’t already know. How old was I, my ass. He could probably have drawn my astrological natal chart from memory.
“Old enough to know better, then,” he said. “Perhaps I was wrong about you after all.” He shook his head and looked sadly at his cigar as if it was to blame for his lapse in judgment.
That was fine with me. Now I really was done with him. A hundred grand a year wasn’t nearly enough money for me to sit around here and put up with this kind of bullshit. I stood up again.
Cramer waved his hand at me a second time.
“Oh, feel free, son, by all means,” he said. “Please, be my guest. You’re not tethered to that chair, Mr. Mallory, and the door behind you isn’t locked. Yes, I made the initial approach, but you made the decision to follow up on it. You did that of your own volition. You can choose not to answer these ‘personal’ questions—which would in and of itself reveal a great deal about you—or, as you said, you can simply terminate the interview. It’s entirely your choice to make.” He puffed at his cigar. “Until and unless you do make it, however, it’s my party…as Connie Francis once sang.”
Connie Francis??
My heart soared. Oh, boy, I thought. This was too good to be true.
“Lesley Gore,” I said.
Cramer stared.
“I beg your pardon?”
I gave him the short version.
“Lesley Gore sang ‘It’s My Party’, not Connie Francis. It was a number one song for her in, let’s see, June of 1963. Seventeen years old at the time, she was the third-youngest solo female artist to reach Number One, after Little Peggy March and Brenda Lee.” I grinned at him. “Connie Francis came along a bit earlier, I’m afraid.”
The room became as still and quiet as a freeze frame. Even the smoke curling up from the ends of our cigars seemed to stall in mid-flight. For the first time all morning, the score was advantage, Mallory. I picked up the
Montecristo and settled back in my chair. The die was cast, but I just didn’t give a damn. I wasn’t uncomfortable any more.
Cramer’s face stayed impassive. He spun round in his chair and took a laptop computer from atop a large mahogany credenza. Then he placed it on his desk and started typing. His hands engulfed the keyboard, but his big thick fingers moved with virtuosic speed and accuracy: it’s easy to tell when someone has to backspace to make a correction, and I never saw him do it. When he was done, he studied the screen for several long seconds. I guessed that he was checking up on my answers.
Let him, I thought.
Across the desk, Cramer lifted his eyes to mine. They showed nothing. I’d have hated to play poker with him.
“Tell me about your favorite Connie Francis song,” he said.
“That’s easy. ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.’ She hit number one with it in 1960. It was originally written as a blues ballad, strangely enough, but she converted it into a sort of polka number—she was actually aiming the song at what was then the West German market—and—”
Cramer held up his hand and I stopped.
“How do you know so much about this?” he asked. The tone of his voice was as close to that of a normal human being as I’d ever heard it in the short time I’d known him.
You mean you don’t know? I thought, but didn’t say. I would be a magnanimous winner. All I wanted to do now was get out of here, eat an early lunch, and maybe spend a few hours at the park—Belmont Park. There was something in the fifth race that looked promising, and the track was right on my way home. (Either that, or I’d wake up from this crazy-assed dream and see whether there was anything in the apartment to eat for breakfast.)
“I had a department head in the Navy who knew all there was to know about the music of that era,” I said, “and he never got tired of illustrating the fact. More out of self-defense than anything else, I read up a little on the subject. Before I knew it, I was hooked.”
Cramer nodded. “Indeed,” he said.
“I’m something of a trivia addict anyway,” I continued, quasi-apologetically. “Old movies and TV, too. Even radio. My mother believed in reincarnation; she always used to tell me that’s how I knew all that stuff.”
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