by Howard Fast
It was delicious, gray-green beluga. “Eighty-eight dollars a pound,” I informed her.
“Really?” She tasted it. “It is good, isn’t it?”
“Millie,” I said, “before they turn up—whoever they are—there’s something that bugs me. Anne said that when she entered my office with the mail, the urn was already there.”
“That’s right.”
“How did it get there?”
“I don’t know. They do things. I suppose they could get into the office. The cleaning women have passkeys.”
“All right. How did they get into my house?”
“Picked the lock.”
“No. You can’t pick those locks. Break the door, break a window—yes. But you can’t pick the locks.”
“Al, it’s a Beverly Hills house. There’s no second floor, and there are three thousand windows and glass doors. If they wanted in, they could get in.”
“I suppose so. I keep thinking of Evelyn.”
“Al!”
“It’s not that she’s a bitch or vindictive or anything like that. She’s a beautiful woman who never learned anything else. She couldn’t—no.” I put the thought away.
The man in the green livery returned now. “Dinner is ready, sir. If you and Miss Cooper will come to the table, the gentlemen will join you.”
“What gentlemen?”
The green livery smiled, as if I had exercised my wit, and led the way toward the dining room. Millie took my arm and we followed, as I whispered to her, “Lambs to the slaughter.”
“Or tigers to the foal. Think positively, Al.”
“Some tiger,” I muttered.
The dining room lived up to all that the living room had promised. Beamed under a twenty-five-foot ceiling, floored with red Spanish tile, hung with reproductions of medieval banners, it contained a single polished mahogany table about twenty feet long. The table was probably calculated to seat every guest the lodge could hold, but now it was set with only four places at the farther end, two at the end of the table and two flanking it, providing a kind of intimacy in spite of the size of the table. The green livery drew out the chairs at the end of the table for Millie and me, and we sat down to a service of English Spode, Irish glass and antique silver such as I had never seen outside of a museum.
“They do themselves well,” I said to Millie.
“And all things willing,” well soon know who they are.
Almost as if her words were a signal, they entered, two tall, well-set and exceedingly handsome men. The first had gray hair, a fine head of hair that swept down over his brow, gray eyes and clean-cut features. The second had a square jaw, piercing blue eyes and a military bearing. The first man was Senator Ronald Bellman. The second was Richards, the Federal Narcotics agent. They entered from the living room across the dining room, and I had time to whisper to Millie:
“We’re in luck. That’s Richards, the Federal agent.”
Through her teeth she whispered back, “Al, don’t be silly about this. He’s one of them.”
And then they were greeting us, warmly and pleasantly, the senator saying, “Good evening, Al. So glad to see you. Really delighted. And you, Millie. I’ve never seen you look better. And this”—he nodded at Richards—“is my associate, General Holbert Martin—but of course you’ve met Marty, Al, as Mr. Richards. You’ll find him much more engaging as himself.” And then turning to Richards or the general, “And I’m sure you’re equally delighted, General.”
“I am.” And then the general said to Millie, “So very happy to see you, my dear. A week can be a long time.” And he walked over and kissed her.
I stared at the senator, at the general and then at Millie. My heart was hammering at my chest, and I felt sick, woefully, terribly sick.
Millie said, “I’m sorry, Al. Yes, I’m one of them.”
PART FOUR
The Beginning of the End
1
I have avoided speaking of myself, because whenever I do, what I say filters out as a thing of no importance. All the clients I handle have a kind of ego-madness; otherwise they would not hire a flak to keep their names in the press and their faces on the media; and I tried to blow my own ego-madness with Andrew Capestone. But I had to crawl into someone else’s shoes. Myself, I am Al Brody, born of an Irish poet who drank too much and whose poetry was just not good enough and of a Jewish mother who used his life insurance, when he drank himself to death, to send me to Harvard. I must have had a little something on the ball, because not many kids out of New Utrecht High School made Harvard, but maybe it was the war. At that time colleges were kind to GIs.
I wanted to be a writer, but I did not raise my opinion of myself enough, and I remembered what freelance writing had done to my father, who worked on construction jobs when he could get work. When my mother and brother died, breaking what few ties there were, I went out to the coast and got a job with a press agent. I married one of his clients, a starlet with a cold, beautiful face and very small talent, and I stayed married. I don’t know whether I was in love with her in the way love is supposed to be or whether I had been simply overwhelmed by the fact that she was willing to be dated by a chubby, freckled kid with thin red hair. I know one thing—I never loved her the way I loved Millicent Patience Cooper for five days. I never loved anyone else that way either.
Some loves die and some waste away and some turn into hatred, and I guess that some last, more or less, and maybe five days is better than nothing. I said I felt sick. That’s a small word. The feeling I had was that I had been reduced. Reduced to nothing. I moved, I functioned, but for the next few moments I understood what it means to be totally destroyed and yet to go on living and breathing and even, as you will see, talking.
“Well, let us sit down now that we’re all together,” the senator said. “Good food, good company, good wine. Here, Al.”
The general had moved around to help Millie into her chair. The senator moved mine for me to sit in. They were polite people. Good upbringing.
I was looking at Millie, but she avoided my eyes. I sat down, she sat down. I must have been fairly calm on the outside, but in my head a crazy film was running at a mile a minute, and another part of me was crying out, No, no, it’s a lie, it’s a ploy, it’s Millie being cleverer than any of them, using them, moving them, turning their own acts against them. The general kissed her. That square-jawed, cold-eyed son of a bitch had kissed her, the way you kiss total intimacy. My Millie, my beautiful, long-limbed Millie—a woman who had worked in my office for six years, faithful, loyal. Push it further—my partner. I accept, we’re partners, AL You and me. You may be forty-seven years old and fat and bald, but I love you. I gave you back your manhood. I showed you that you weren’t impotent. You can do that for a man you love. I’ll take care of you, Al. I’m a good cook. You eat half of what you usually eat. Painless. I took a course in criminal psychology at Wellesley.
Very slowly the anger began, very slowly, just a germ, just a nodule, just a beginning for a practice forgotten. Al Brody never gets angry. Al Brody never loses his temper. Al Brody, he’s the sweetest guy in Beverly Hills. He may be a flak, but he’s one in a million. You know how many people around the industry owe money to Al Brody? Maybe fifty, maybe a hundred, and it won’t be paid back, not a nickel of it, but that’s Al Brody. Never pushes, never drives.
They were talking around me, and then when they addressed me, I nodded. The waiter served a vichyssoise, cold, good, thick. Mechanically I had one spoonful. It was a great effort to swallow it.
“We have a French cook,” the senator was saying. “Not Paris, but Normandy. Sheer genius.”
I glanced at Millie. Our eyes met for a moment, then she looked away.
“Don’t care for the soup?” The senator or the general? Why did I confuse their voices?
“Try the Vouvray, clean, dry, cracking and beautiful. Noble wine.”
“More’s the pity” was running through my mind. “More’s the pity.”
; “A man could come here for the air,” the general said. “Out of the pollution, out of the smog.” He was evidently an ecologist. “Add years to a man’s life. Not that I’m one of those Los Angeles carpers. Smog’s smog. You have industry, you have smog. But this kind of air—”
“More wine for Mr. Brody,” said the senator. I was dry and thirsty and had gulped mine down. “So pleased to see you, Al, really. Millie said she’d bring you. I don’t know how she did it. I said to the general, Brody’; intelligent, civilized. When he’s ready, he’ll sit down and talk. Marty’s impatient. Well, here you are.”
“Here I am,” I managed to say.
The wine was poured. I began to reach for it, then stopped. What did I want? Get slobbering drunk and tell them that they were all wrong, the senator, the general, Millie—all wrong, netted a fleshless fish. Drunk and weeping. This is Al Brody, good guy. I don’t know one damn thing, not why Millie went to bed with me, not why you brought me here, not what I am supposed to know or have, because the stinking bitter truth of it is that Andrew Capestone told me nothing, absolutely nothing, and that’s all there is to it. So please let me go, and let Capestone be dead, and I’ll keep my mouth shut, I swear I will. I’ll get down on my knees and plead for my wretched, senseless, boring life and my house on North Canon Drive and my office on the tenth floor of a Wilshire Boulevard skyscraper and everything the way it used to be.
All this as I reached for the wine, and then I let my hand drop to the table. Two words formed in my mind, “Fuck you.” I looked from face to face, the senator, the general and then Millie. The sickness began to go away. My thoughts broke away to my son and the enormous gap that separated us, and then I wondered how it was at Acapulco. I had never been there. I don’t tan easily.
“Shell roast, Al, or fish?” the senator asked me. “We have some lovely sand dabs, sautéed the way you’ve never tasted a very plebeian fish. Damn it all, we don’t get up here enough. The cooking’s the best in the state.”
“Best in the country,” said the general.
“Are many guests as lucky as I am?” I asked.
“Very few, Al. This is not a public place, as you may have gathered. It was once, but the general bought it.”
“And you’re his partner?”
“So to speak.”
“And Millie—is she also a partner?”
“We’ve thought of taking her into the firm.”
“I’m glad. Millie favors partnerships.”
“Can’t we get on with it?” Millie said.
“All in good time, dear. I will not talk business over a meal like this,” the senator replied. “Over cigars and brandy—yes, that’s reasonable. But not over the soup or roast. Have you made up your mind, Al?”
“I’ll have the roast. And beer if you don’t mind.”
“Good. Marty’s a beer drinker. We’re well stocked—Mexican, German, Dutch?”
“Montezuma?”
“Good taste. I think I’ll have some myself.”
2
Coffee, brandy and cigars. I had died and returned. The human mind is the most incredible thing, and I had come to the realization that I still possessed the sense of aliveness that I had lived with for five days now. Love turned into a sick nausea, and the nausea into despair, and despair into a kind of memory of being alive.
The cigars came in a large, polished humidor with six sections. The green livery had been resurrected to hold it before me, and the senator was saying:
“If I remember, your taste runs to the Spanish, Al. You might try the Cubans. We have them direct from Havana and not via Europe. There are two of Dunhill’s, but I find them rather flat. The little ones are Dutch, if you care for a baked cigar.”
I selected a Dunhill, bit off the end and allowed the general to lean past Millie and light it for me.
“Coffee, brandy, a good cigar and a beautiful woman to grace our board—how much more can life offer, Al?”
“One or two things, self-respect, love—and power, I suppose.”
“There’s more to Brody than meets the eye,” the general said.
“About thirty pounds more,” I agreed.
“And now to business,” the general said.
“Yes,” I said, “now to business. But not with her here.” I nodded at Millie. “The three of us.”
“That’s ungallant, Al,” said the senator.
Millie had said almost nothing during the meal. She turned to me now and smiled slightly. “After all my good instruction, Al? How ungrateful!”
“I shall never forget your good instruction.”
She nodded at me, smiled again and then walked out of the room. The general renewed his brandy. “That’s a remarkable woman,” he said.
“And a very beautiful one,” the senator agreed. “Forgive us our childish games, Al. Our own minds don’t run that way. We are businessmen, practical but not perverse. A man lives with a decent regard for the sensibilities of others—otherwise?” He spread his hands. “Still she is a remarkable woman. She suggested that we put Capestone in your house, not to frighten you, heaven knows, but to get you out. We had to have enough time to search the place, and by God, we did.”
“As few places have been searched,” the general added with a touch of admiration. “I don’t think there’s a grain of dust in that house that we haven’t examined.”
“What makes you so certain it’s in the house?” I asked.
“It’s in the house,” the general said.
“No secrets, Al. We put all our cards on the table. We’ve been working with Capestone a long time. He spent the last ten years in Mexico. Pity he’s gone. His contacts there are invaluable. He brought the stuff up; we made that possible. But the problem is always where to put it, where to keep it. Everything else pales into insignificance against that—where to keep it. I thought of you. Millie had a duplicate key made, and Thursday a week ago, when your housekeeper was off, your wife out shopping or golfing or whatever, your girl at school, Capestone put the stuff in your house. So it’s there, and if we have to tear the place apart, board by board, we’ll find it.”
“There are simpler ways,” the general said.
“Of course there are, Marty,” the senator agreed. “And the simplest way is to sit over cigars and brandy like gentlemen and discuss it.”
“I could have taken it out and put it somewhere else,” I suggested.
“That’s a possibility, Al, which we don’t entirely exclude. We’re not beyond error, but we are thorough. We’ve had the place watched. We think it’s still there. More brandy?”
I shook my head. Clear head now, and step by step. The five days were clarifying.
“Why did you kill Leone?”
“Al, that’s not worthy of you. He and Capestone were playing games. You know that.”
“When cheap, small-time hoodlums like Joe Leone are killed,” the general said carefully, “even the police accept it as a normal hazard of the profession.”
“My dear Al, we approach you as a man of intelligence. What are we to do? Murder you, take your house apart stone by stone and then possibly discover that nothing is there? Torture you? Beat it out of you? Do you buy this kind of nonsense? Millie spent five days trying to get it out of you—and she’s no fool. A man covers himself. One doesn’t play for this kind of stake like a kid. You leave a letter in a safe deposit box, or with your lawyer, or with your wife and send her to Acapulco. So simple. I would guess that it’s your lawyer?”
I met his gaze but said nothing.
“We don’t want to make waves,” the general explained. “A smooth sea for smooth sailing.”
“But how do you know,” I couldn’t help asking, “that Capestone told me anything? That’s been puzzling me. How can you be so damn sure?”
“Because you made your one fool play,” the general said.
The senator was smiling. “I don’t know that it was such a fool play. It was an immediate response, quick, well executed and very creative. If
you had known a little more about Capestone, it would not have occurred to you. Still it had its points, and I suppose that under different circumstances your resurrection of Capestone and your dispatching him to Africa might have worked. He’s alive, and therefore his secret stays with him. Conceivably, we might have followed his nonexistent self to Rhodesia.”
“Rather farfetched,” the general said.
“Considering that Al was playing a lone hand with very few cards—well, not so farfetched. You went up in my estimation, Al, if I may say so.”
“I am flattered.”
“You should be. But it was two-edged, Al.”
“How’s that?”
“There was no other explanation for what you did. You know where the stuff is. Now suppose we get down to business. What do you want?”
I was wondering where Millie had gone. Was the house her house? How many weekends had she spent at this place? Was there a special room upstairs that was hers? The fantasies danced in my head even as I spoke to them.
“Al, did you hear me? What do you want?”
Of What, I said to myself. What in God’s name are you talking about? What am I doing here with you two incredible specimens of the American way of life? What am I supposed to tell you that you would believe?
“Al?”
“Half,” I said.
“Half?”
“Don’t put us on,” the general said. “We have dealt with you in all good faith, Brody. So don’t put us on.
“You’re not serious,” the senator said.
“Very serious.”
“Do you know what that stuff is worth?”
“Don’t write yourself out of it, Brody,” the general said. “We understand desire and necessity, but we just happen to be discussing seventy pounds of pure, uncut heroin. On the street that has a value of between forty and fifty million dollars. We’re not street dealers, but it still adds up to almost eleven million dollars.”
“Ten million, six hundred thousand dollars to be precise,” the senator said. “Now listen to me, Al. I’m going to talk a little straightforward common sense. This stuff originates in Thailand. We bring it in through Mexico. It’s not a simple or a cheap operation. We have already invested over a million dollars in this single operation. When you turn it over, you don’t sell with a bank draft or for cash. You can’t put together and move ten million dollars of cash in this country without blowing the whole thing wide open. And you can’t sell this stuff without months of careful preparation, and anyone who tells you otherwise is feeding you a line. The money has to be prepared in advance in Switzerland, in France and in Germany. The accounts for transfer must be set up, and every account and every transfer must have a cover in the way of securities. I am telling you nothing that every narcotics department in this country doesn’t already know. Let me be specific. A company is formed, in Luxembourg or Liechtenstein or some such place. A thousand shares of stock are issued, sold for a dollar a share, resold for a hundred dollars a share, resold again for a thousand dollars a share. But there must be stock, and there must be a company, and everything must be registered and open and aboveboard. You are not dealing with cheap hoodlums; you are dealing with an international combine of power and substance, an entity that has taken years to put together. In one way, it is quite true that you have almost eleven million dollars in your possession; in another way of looking at it, you have nothing. What will you do with it? Where will you peddle it? You can only deal for cash. You know that. Suppose that by taking every risk, you could unload it for a million dollars. How would you be paid? You’d have to take it in cash. What do you do with a million dollars in cash? Do you have any idea how much hot money is floating around this country, how much counterfeit? You’d be a fool to accept bills higher than twenties. Everything over that is scrutinized, checked. How long before something backfired? Did it ever occur to you to ask why Capestone didn’t turn around and make a deal? Because he knew better—because he chose to wait and do it right. Now suppose we talk sense.”