The long ride up Crenshaw Boulevard, once he got away from the sound of the planes overhead, was a kind of ordeal by concentration. By some quirk he was almost the only person on the bus as it lumbered along past the pizza parlors and the karate studios and the used car lots; each time it wheezed to a stop the doors would open to let in a gasp of stale, hot air smelling of asphalt, but no one ever seemed to get on or off. It was possible to imagine the journey would be endless, and Austen was not above hoping that it would be. He was suffering through an agony of dread.
“Mr. Dunstable can’t see you now; your appointment isn’t until four o’clock.” The receptionist peered at him from behind her desk, exactly as if she were some sort of mechanical device.
“I know. I’ll just wait if you don’t mind.”
He perched himself on a loveseat covered with what looked like blue burlap and, just for appearances, picked up a magazine from the coffee table in front of him. He was going to be good as gold.
. . . . .
An hour later he was back on the street; the interview had lasted exactly seventeen minutes. They had already decided on their candidate, if he was any judge, and it obviously wasn’t Frank Austen.
You have terminal cancer, my boy. The harelip can never be repaired, all your underwear got shrunk at the laundry, and your best girl has run away to Norman, Oklahoma with a three-legged Bible salesman. He couldn’t imagine why he was so fucking surprised.
He should have known from the first moment, when he first entered the room and Mr. Dunstable didn’t come out from behind his desk to shake hands. He got a nod and a “Good afternoon, Mr. Austen,” and that was it. In fact, the man hardly looked at him, confining himself instead to alternately making little penciled checkmarks on the front of a manila folder and tapping the eraser against his desktop. He simply wanted to get rid of him as soon as he decently could. It wasn’t something he even bothered to disguise.
“Your difficulties with passing the bar. . .” Tap, tap, tap went the eraser head.
“Well, ah, I think you could say it was a matter of timing. In the first instance I just wanted a crack at it before I got drafted, and in the second I had gotten so far away from all that. . . The army didn’t leave me much chance for. . .”
“And your precise duties at that time were—”
“Classified.” Austen smiled, perhaps a little thinly. “I’m sorry, but I can’t discuss any of that. All that’s classified.”
Mr. Dunstable frowned, making a few more checkmarks on the folder, and pursed his lips as if in the presence of some palpable falsehood. Or maybe he just didn’t like being told that something was none of his business.
And so it went.
“Well, certainly we’ll be in contact as soon as we feel we have a suitable opening,” he had said, standing up and extending his right hand like an object offered for measurement. The human touch at last—perhaps it was meant to be some sort of consolation prize.
Austen had no idea how far he had walked along Wilshire Boulevard before the sight of a cement and wood-slat bench next to a bus stop reminded him of how tired he was. According to his watch it was nearly quarter to six, and he couldn’t remember having eaten anything the night before. There was a Zim’s directly across the street.
A hamburger and a large glass of iced tea didn’t make him any cheerier. He felt restored, but not to favor with the world. “As soon as we feel we have a suitable opening.” Who did he think he was kidding, the prick?
All right. If they wanted to play hardball they might discover that that sort of thing was very much in Frank Austen’s line. After paying his tab, he went back to the public telephone and put in a call to the Los Angeles Times. Pete Freestone was out, probably gone for the day, but when he showed up for work the next morning he would find the message.
II
“You see the situation?”
They were sitting on Pete Freestone’s sofa with the newspaper clipping file spread out in front of them on the coffee table, where it competed for space with empty beer cans and a couple of bowls of potato chips. Pete had very definite ideas about keeping your strength up for the ordeal.
Yes, in outline it was clear enough what had happened. It seemed that the current attorney general for the state of California, a man named Edward Tilson, had once, some years before entering public life, committed the unpardonable blunder of accepting a favor from one Giancarlo Salvarini. The precise nature of this favor would probably never be discovered, but since Mr. Salvarini had begun life as a coat holder for Albert Anastasia and had only decided to test the promise of the West after that gentleman’s assassination in a barber’s chair in 1957, the possibilities were endless.
“He’s a real dinosaur,” Pete assured Frank, his fingers disappearing into the potato chips. “He goes around on crutches because somebody blew half his spine away in a gang war back in the late forties. He’s the genuine article—a real old-fashioned crime czar.”
Austen nodded and continued studying the faces in the news photos. He could see how it might have happened. Perhaps at the time Mr. Tilson hadn’t considered the matter very serious, just some trivial emergency for which you procured the services of the nearest professional thug, but if so he had been mistaken. Giancarlo Salvarini looked like someone who had learned very early the advantages of keeping a tight hold, and doubtless over time, favor had followed favor. Somehow you never got to pay these things back; link was forged upon link until the weight of the chain made itself felt.
Yes, indeed, we all knew what that was like. Austen closed his eyes for a moment to concentrate on the throbbing that seemed to center just behind them. It had been a long day. He had never made it back to Berkeley; he had picked a motel out of the phone book—the one that happened to be closest to the restaurant from which he was calling—and had left the number with the girl at the Times. Twenty minutes after he checked in, Freestone was on the line, and they had been at it ever since. It was only quarter after eight in the evening, but he felt as if he hadn’t seen a bed in days.
But enough of that—it was Salvarini he had to think about now. You were dealing with an empire. Salvarini’s interests were nothing if not extensive—he was rumored to have a hand in everything from the cocaine trade to the recording industry—but the particular piece of business that had led him to the brink of a grand jury indictment was a reasonably small-change operation, nothing more than a sideline.
By that not-very-mysterious process by means of which the strong tend to absorb the weak, Salvarini had found himself in possession, two or three years previously, of what amounted to an underground railroad through which illegal Mexican labor was provided to some of the lettuce ranches and vineyards in the central part of the state. And, needless to say, Salvarini’s organization collected a brokerage fee at both ends of the transaction.
But perhaps the scheme hadn’t appealed to the artist in him, or perhaps he hadn’t had any faith that there was ever going to be any real money in it. Certainly there had never been any particular shortage of desperate, exploitable wetbacks around, so the growers weren’t without sources of their own, and, God knew, Salvarini’s ideas of an acceptable margin of profit were anything but modest. In any case, he turned the management of the thing over to one of his lieutenants and, apparently, forgot all about it.
He must have forgotten about it, because it came as enough of a shock to him when twenty-three Mexicans from one of his consignments were found wandering around half-dead in the middle of the Anza-Borrega Desert, and it came as quite a shock to everybody when the authorities were led back to where the bodies of another twelve were strewn out over the sand like pieces of driftwood on a beach. The survivors, when they were feeling up to it again, proved understandably spiteful and talkative. The chain of incrimination led very quickly up to Salvarini’s lieutenant, who, in turn, offered to testify against the boss in exchange for immunity from prosecution. It was all very uncomfortable.
And it was from this dif
ficulty that Salvarini expected Edward Tilson to rescue him.
“Awkward, isn’t it.” Pete Freestone lifted up an empty beer can that was beginning to leave a damp circle over the newspaper account of Tilson’s announcement for the Senate and, apparently not knowing what else to do with it, set it down on the floor. “The grand jury convenes again in two weeks, and the only chance Salvarini’s got is to have it all quashed right there. We’re talking about a big fall here. We’ve got twelve dead Mexicans, which means, in addition to the racketeering charges, they could tack on an additional twelve counts of felony murder. And with somebody like Salvarini, either they leave him alone or they throw the book at him. Tilson wants to settle for nailing the lieutenant, who’s already said enough to put himself on death row, but he’s under heavy pressure from his staff. They want to go for the brass ring, and a couple of them are ready to resign and make no end of a public stink if their boss chickens out. Remember, he’s only a month away from the primary, and he’s supposed to be a lead-pipe cinch—he doesn’t need this.”
“So Salvarini will want to be reminding him whom he’s supposed to be more afraid of. Or is that putting it too crudely?”
Pete gave a little astonished laugh and shook his head. “My friend, it’s a bit difficult to put things too crudely where this particular Siciliano is concerned. He learned his trade in a rough school; I wouldn’t want to be Tilson for the next two weeks.”
“How did you put all this together?”
Pete grinned—he was such a clever boy. “I was doing background interviews on the campaign—you know the sort of stuff; what a saint the great man is to work for—and I had a couple of quick drinks with a guy in the organized crime section who wanted to know why the AG was being so very kind to Giancarlo Salvarini. It really bothered him. He didn’t have any answers and neither did I, and it didn’t seem very likely that Tilson would be terribly illuminating. So about three weeks ago I was up in San Francisco for an exclusive with Simon Faircliff, and on a hunch I went to see whether his wife would have anything to say about it.”
He saw the puzzled expression on Austen’s face and smiled, getting up to disappear into the little kitchenette for another couple of beers.
“Tilson’s wife, stupid—Faircliff’s wife died about three years ago.” His voice sounded hollow behind the refrigerator door. “Mrs. Tilson was very forthcoming. It seems that Edward’s moved out on her and wants a divorce as soon as the election’s over; he’s got himself a girlfriend about half his age, and the wife isn’t real pleased about it.
“Anyway, the wife knew about the Salvarini connection. Not much—she seemed to think the Don might have helped her husband cover up some old hometown scandal. But she knew enough to bring everything else into focus. Can you imagine anybody being that dumb, letting his wife in on a secret like that and then walking out on her a month before announcing for the Senate?” Pete reappeared in the doorway, laughing softly to himself.
“She was ripe to spill her guts,” he went on, offering a can of Hamms. “I just happened to be the first person who asked her. We must have talked for about two hours, right there in her front parlor, over cookies and tea. She told me everything she could think of that would make Mr. T look bad, but the Salvarini thing was the best, hands down. She really hates her old man, wants to see him go down in flames. She’s a sweetheart.”
Austen took the beer can that was offered to him and held it against his head for a moment. It was lovely and cool and made him feel almost human again.
“What makes you think Salvarini will want to make his pitch himself?” he asked wearily. “Why shouldn’t he just send one of his goons, or a tame lawyer? Why take the risk?”
Freestone shook his head. “No, he’ll come himself. The risks are all the other way.” He smiled and held up his hands, palms out, as if he were stating the most obvious proposition in the world. He was a nice guy, but it was clear that he was having a lot of fun with Messrs. Tilson and Salvarini. “Figure it from his point of view. Tilson’s a prize; maybe he’s going to be a United States senator in six or seven months. If you had a handle on a deal like that, how many people would you tell about it? Salvarini’s a very jealous man, not the least little bit trusting. And besides, he likes the feel of your face under his shoe. I met him once; it was about a year before I got posted to ‘Nam, and he was having some IRS troubles and I happened to see him at a Lakers game and decided, what the hell, I’d give him a try. Jesus, I thought he was going to come right out of his box after me and beat my fool head in with one of those crutches of his. He’s an animal—he’ll enjoy scaring the shit out of Tilson.”
“How much time have we got?”
“It’s hard to say. Two weeks until the grand jury sits—that’s the bottom line. Any time before then.”
“And you’re sure the big reunion hasn’t already taken place?”
“Reasonably sure. My police contacts tell me that Salvarini hasn’t left Los Angeles in the last ten weeks, not since before this whole business blew up, and Tilson’s been up north campaigning, I think largely to be out of Salvarini’s reach. Anyway, his staff’s still working up the brief, so he hasn’t told them to be good and crawl back into their cages yet. Maybe he’s still making up his mind.”
Suddenly there didn’t seem to be a great deal more to say. They had cut their deal: Pete would bankroll the operation, and Austen would set it up—and, just by the way, take the rap if he got caught—in exchange for one copy of the physical evidence and forty-eight hours’ grace before Pete filed his story. Pete had no desire to know what Austen wanted with those forty-eight hours; he was satisfied as long as his precious scoop wasn’t blown.
Austen cocked his head to one side and pulled back his sleeve to have a look at the time. “Come on, then, my plane leaves in an hour.”
“You sure you’ll have enough money?”
“No fear.” He touched the place where his wallet now bulged under his jacket. “The fellow’s a friend of mine from La Guerre; he’s letting us have his special veterans’ rates.”
. . . . .
The “special veterans’ rates” turned out to be twelve hundred fifty dollars for about as much eavesdropping equipment as could be conveniently fitted into a child’s lunchbox.
“And I want the receiver and the headset back, Frank.” Arnie Schwab, to emphasize his point, held up the first and middle fingers of his right hand like a bishop displaying a crucifix. “Two grand they cost new. I want ‘em back, Frank. The rest of the stuff, I can understand that it might be a little inconvenient, but because it’s you I’ll refund twenty bucks an ear on what you don’t use.”
Then his hand dropped flat to the little circular wooden table at which they were sitting, almost the only two people in what had to be one of the dingiest bars south of Market Street. Arnie, with his coarse black hair sticking out over the neckband of his green tee shirt and his eyes glittering darkly in his meaty face, looked like he belonged there. He also looked like he expected you to kiss his hand for the enormous favor he was doing you, but that was where appearances were misleading. Anyone who took Arnie Schwab’s first offer was a doorknob.
“I’ll give you nine hundred for the whole package, and I’ll want two back for the receiver. I’ll also give you long odds you stole every wire of it out of the back of a supply truck in Saigon.” Austen smiled and Arnie started forward in his chair, apparently stung to the bone with indignation.
“Sure I did, what did you think? I could’ve gotten five years for it—aren’t the risks I take worth something? Eleven hundred, and one-fifty back for the receiver, and that’s my last offer.”
“An even thousand, and one seventy-five back.”
“Done.”
Afterward Austen walked back down the dark street to where his car was parked, scared to death every minute that some clown would come rushing out of the shadows and try to mug him, and drove back to his apartment in Berkeley. He had come straight into San Francisco from the airport,
and his plane back to Los Angeles left at quarter to three in the morning.
So there was no time for even a couple of hours of sleep; the best he could do was take two aspirin and a cold shower. He packed his suitcase with enough to last him a week—at last report, there were still such things as laundromats in LA—and looked around him, at the Michelin calendar pinned to his closet door and the open copy of Humphry Clinker lying print-side down on the chair in front of his desk, and wondered whether he would ever get home, or whether these were items he would be getting out of storage someday, when he had finished his stretch in the Los Angeles county jail. He didn’t know; the sort of thing he was contemplating might be worth five years too.
. . . . .
The attorney general is entitled to police protection. In addition to a bodyguard, this protection consists of a uniformed officer on duty in front of his apartment door. The attorney general was not due back in town until the next afternoon, so the guy at the door would be the only problem.
Actually, it was no problem at all—in fact, it was dead simple. Austen went downtown and bought himself a tan work shirt and trousers, along with a pair of black rubber boots, a paper surgeon’s mask, and a pump can shaped like a fire extinguisher and filled with some particularly nasty-smelling “insecticide,” and he was your complete exterminator man. He even had one of those machine-stitched cloth nametags for his shirt pocket. He was a “Phil.”
Tilson’s bachelor pad wasn’t in nearly so grand a building as you might have expected. His estranged wife had the house in San Francisco, the one he had bought with his share from one of the most successful law partnerships in California, and for appearance’s sake his girlfriend had her own place about three-quarters of a mile away. Besides, most of his time in recent months had been spent either in Sacramento or on the campaign trail, so why should he burden himself with a palace? There was no doorman; Austen would have been interested to learn what the poor slob was paying out to Mrs. Tilson in support.
The President's Man Page 4