by Peter Quinn
There was a quaver in her voice, subtle. Odds were this wasn’t her first martini of the evening, but her mind reading wasn’t entirely off the mark. The women were decidedly younger than their escorts. And less stiff. Pretty, stylish—if a shade more flashy than classy—graduates of commercial high schools with maybe a year of polishing in a secretarial school, they were aware of how the game was played. None was under the illusion that her companion was about to ditch wife and job for an ethnic outer-borough office girl. But each enjoyed the free meals, attention, lunch-hour trysts in hotels or cheap studio apartments, hurried but intense sex.
Evenings at the Coral were a romantic perk, light and enjoyable, one drink too many, but nothing beyond a touch, a kiss, money for a cab ride home to Pelham Parkway or Jackson Heights, time spent pondering wedding plans now that the boy friend had a full-time job or the prospect of a civil service appointment.
“Can’t get it out of your head I’m Wilkes’s plaything, can you?”
“Can you get it out of yours that I don’t care?”
“But you think it. Admit it. When it comes to women, all men think alike.”
“I’m being paid to find Judge Crater. What I think or don’t think about your relationship with Wilkes doesn’t make any difference.” He turned, expecting to confront an angry pout, eyes charged with resentment and scrutiny.
Her face, poised and beautiful, had no readable expression. “It does to me.”
“Knowing the players is part of the game. Throwing stones isn’t.”
She guessed correctly that he’d already ordered a background check. If he hadn’t, she said, she’d save him the time and expense. Her last name wasn’t Renard, and she wasn’t baptized Adrienne. Wasn’t baptized at all. “I’m Jewish,” she said. Her mother was from Austria, now Poland, and had arrived in America as a little girl. Her father left when she was three, at the bottom of the Depression. Alone and broke, her mother turned for help to her sister. She and her husband ran a hole-in-the-wall grocery on Tremont Avenue, in the Bronx. They raised her. “Anna Resnick is my real name.” She paused, raised her glass, and sipped.
She graduated from Walton High School. Her uncle wanted her to become a public school teacher. She had bigger ambitions and went to City College as a classics major. She planned to win an assistantship at some prestigious Ivy League graduate school that, gag as it might at accepting a Jew and a woman, couldn’t overlook her grades and abilities. But her uncle died during her senior year, and her aunt was left with next to nothing, so she went out to get a job. She adopted the shikseh moniker Adrienne Renard and took the first position that came along. It was with Wilkes Communications.
After a year working in the personnel department, she was assigned to fill in for one of the secretaries in Mr. Wilkes’s office. At most companies that’d be the end. Jewish girl from the Bronx gets secretarial job in corporate sanctum sanctorum, and stays till she marries or makes a lateral move for five dollars more a week. “But Mr. Wilkes,” she said, “isn’t bound by the old-boy snobbery that reigns at places like Time Inc.”
“No need to spill all this.” Dunne wondered how much of it Pully would turn up.
“Maybe you don’t need to know it, but I need to tell it. I know why Mr. Wilkes noticed me. Even to be assigned to his office you have to look a certain way. And it was no secret what he expected. When I made it clear I wouldn’t act in that little play, I expected to be transferred. Instead he dropped a business proposal on my desk and said, ‘You went to college, Miss Renard. Tell me what you think.’
“I did. More proposals arrived for comment. I jumped from secretary to assistant to the chairman to vice-president for special projects. The jaw-dropping among the male executives became a familiar thud in the Wilkes Building. One day he came to me with the idea for a project to flesh out a theory he’d been brooding over for some time.”
“I remember. ‘Birds do it, bees do it … pan-pollination.’”
“Yes, pan-pollenization. That’s Mr. Wilkes’s term for it. We talked it over for months before he offered me the chance to run it. I was scared. I knew if I turned it down, he’d find someone else; just as I know if I fail, I’ll be out of a job. There are no second chances at the Wilkes Organization. And I won’t be looking for any because I won’t fail.”
“What’s Mulholland’s role?”
“With me, none.”
“With Wilkes?”
“Security stuff, bailing out reporters who get in trouble with the police, that sort of thing. Mr. Wilkes trusts him. That’s no small thing.”
“Any reason he shouldn’t?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“But he doesn’t trust Mulholland enough to get him involved in this. Why?”
“Ask Mr. Wilkes. He’s better acquainted with Mulholland’s strengths and weaknesses. But I gather you know him better than any of us.”
“Longer.”
“My dealings with him have been peripheral, at best. He’s the Billy Goats Gruff type, but that goes with the job, I suppose.”
They ordered dinner. The waiter delivered Miss Renard a fresh drink. Dunne wasn’t in the mood to work at making conversation. He welcomed her monologue on the multiple attributes of the many-splendored Mr. Wilkes—vision, resolve, honesty, bravery, willingness to take risks—big business meets the Boy Scouts. Half-listening, he watched as the couples at the other tables began to leave. Ignoring their colleagues and coworkers at the other tables, they left without so much as glances in their direction.
Nan Renard only played with her food, but finished her drink quickly. “I’m already over my limit,” she said. “But we’re celebrating, Fin, aren’t we? Celebrating our new adventure.” Tempted to declare his low expectations for the Crater investigation, he didn’t. She went on about the future of Wilkes Communications, speaking so emphatically at one point that the couple at the next table looked over. “Oops, better tone it down.” She pressed a forefinger to her lips and giggled.
“And you believe Wilkes is sincere in thinking I’ll find out what happened to Crater when nobody else could?”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘sincere.’”
“How many meanings does it have?’
“The literal meaning is ‘without wax,’ a reference to the practice of ancient art dealers who disguised nicks and cracks in the marble statuary they were trying to sell by filling them with wax. In that sense, Wilkes is sincere. Except for his ears, he’s wax-free. And, yes, when it comes to making money and building his empire, he’s sincere in every sense of the word.”
After they ate, her body slumped softly against his and her head casually leaned on his shoulder. He moved his arm along the booth’s u-shaped ledge, resting it behind, what from a distance might be mistaken for an embrace. Picking up the candle from the middle of the table, he lit a cigarette for her, then one for himself.
She whispered, “If we do it right, it will be glorious.”
It came to him suddenly, where he’d seen the female form depicted on the wall outside Wilkes’s bedroom: Catechism class at the Catholic Protectory.
Forty boys in rows of desks bolted to the floor listened as Brother Flavian droned on in his heavy French accent about the “Body of Glory” that the souls of the saved will assume at the General Resurrection. In these “glorified bodies” of purified soul and spiritualized flesh, rid of imperfections, the faithfully departed would live forever.
The student in the desk next to Dunne’s waited until Brother Flavian turned to write on the blackboard and passed a folded sheet of paper. Dunne opened it on his lap. It was a hastily but artfully done drawing of a supremely voluptuous female, nude, ascending into heaven and playing a small harp. Scrolled across the top were the words “Glorious Gloria in Her Glorified Body.” Once, years later, in “The Cuddles & Cuties Revue” at the Winter Garden Theatre, he’d seen a real-life body to match. “The Venus of Broadway.” Mulholland’s girlfriend, Mary Claire Richfield, the suicide.
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nbsp; “Penny for your thoughts.” Her smile was soft and natural, without wax.
“You’d be overpaying.”
The waiter cleared the dishes and brought them coffee. From across the room, head forward, arms swinging at his sides, a broad-chested man in a well-tailored, chalk-striped suit approached. Big head, big ears, thick, slicked-down black hair, he walked with the lumbering, determined stride of one of those upper-class ape men who’d anchored his college football team’s defensive line. Miss Renard identified him as Herb Johnson, “a key player at Compton Advertising.”
He stopped in front of their booth and exchanged a few pleasantries. She introduced Dunne as a “special assistant to Mr. Wilkes.” Johnson’s eyes tick-tocked back and forth, as if weighing which of them to focus on. He stuck with a known quantity. “Adrienne, my shop is abuzz with rumors of a ‘secret operation’ you’ve got under way.”
“It wouldn’t be a secret if I told you, would it, Herb?”
“Some secrets are better shared than kept. You care about having advertisers like Lorillard and Proctor & Gamble aboard, better not stay tight-lipped too long.” He turned and went to the door where his buxom tablemate was waiting.
Miss Renard blew a trail of smoke after him. “Television has them confused. It brings in oodles of money but unlike radio and print, TV has generated a high degree of uncertainty. Don’t have their bearings like they did with radio and print. They’re scared of what might be next, and when men are scared they revert to their most primitive emotional state. Ever read Freud?
“No, but you’re not the first one to tell me I should.”
“No matter. Now you know all there is to know about Madison Avenue. It’s the Kinsey Report as written by Franz Kafka.”
“Haven’t read them either.” When it came to thinking about sex, he preferred looking to reading. Wink. Titter. Eyeful. The rear-rack magazines. Last month’s Playboy, with the Betty Page centerfold.
“Everything in this business comes down to sex and paranoia.”
Roberta had recommended both of Kinsey’s books. The more recent one, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, was on her nightstand. He thought about mentioning it, then thought again. “What about sin and gin?”
“They’re included in the other two.”
Another executive approached. “Here comes Ron Fuller,” she said. “He worked on the Eisenhower TV spots. Now all the politicians are courting him.” More cordial than Johnson, Fuller made passing mention of his hope that “if something big is cooking, we won’t be left in the dark,” and went on his way.
Soon, the only people left were several waiters loitering near the door and a couple in a corner booth in a slow-motion version of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “Come on,” Dunne said. “Time to let the waiters go home.”
“From the looks of those two in the corner, the waiters will have to stay all night.”
He moved sidelong out of the booth; stab of pain in his knee made him grimace. She took his hand. “Something wrong?”
“Bum knee, that’s all.”
“From the war?”
“From kneeling to say the rosary.”
“So you’re not as irreverent as you claim?”
“Not while I’m in the Church of Saints Sin and Gin.”
Stumbling slightly as she stood, she bumped against him. “You all right?”
She slipped her arm in his. “See me up the aisle, I’ll take it from there.”
He retrieved their coats from the checkroom and held hers as she slipped into it. His hands lingered on her shoulders. She turned her head. He bent toward her, and their lips brushed in a tease of a kiss. Waft of perfume, alcohol, cigarette smoke, distinct and seductive, the spell a good café casts, wholly unlike church. “Sorry, but I have to visit the ladies’ room.”
“I’ll wait in the bar.”
The crowd had thinned out. There was now one bartender instead of two. Dunne ordered a Scotch straight up. The tank behind the bar put him in mind of the rendezvous of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth in Lady from Shanghai: glass walls of an aquarium for a backdrop, the fish inside as large and menacing as sea monsters. Not these. Except for what looked like a miniature shark moving in fretful circles near the surface, the tank’s small, placid, brightly colored tenants—striped, fan-tailed, needle-nosed, and a pair of sea horses—swam in slow contentment.
The woman on the stool in front of Dunne pointed out the miniature shark to the man sitting next to her. He called over the bartender. “Carlos,” he said, aiming his finger at the tank, “see that fish? What’s he called?”
Carlos shook his head. “I learned long ago, you want to do good in this business, don’t never ask nobody their name.”
The woman and her companion laughed. “You know what I mean, Carlos,” he said. “What kind of fish?”
“Unless it’s filet of sole, I don’t tell one kinda fish from other.”
They laughed again. Carlos sauntered down the bar to serve a customer. “Poor fish,” the woman said. “Must be hungry.”
“If he was hungry, he’d eat the other fish,” the man beside her said.
“He’s too small to do that.”
“Small fries are the ones to watch out for. He’d take the rest of them if he wanted, but, nah, that’s not his problem. I know the look. That shark is no different. A horny fish is what he is.”
Dunne stood against the wall. Horny fish, horny men. One has feet, the other fins; but their brain is the same. A rule every bit as golden as “pace yourself”: Don’t think with your testicles. Except for the times when you can’t help it.
Away from Roberta for over two years, overseas, before those OSS missions, he’d had no desire to pray, confess or kneel for last-minute repentance sincere only until the threat of death had passed. Get holy and then, if you survive, renege on the deal. How smart could God be to be fooled by such a clumsy, self-serving logic? Better a round of café nights, mutual seduction and repeated satisfaction, the kind that calmed anxieties in a way nothing else could—neither booze nor physical exertion nor fear-induced piety.
If war teaches any lesson, it’s that in the face of death, it isn’t damnation you fear, only death itself, instant end, obliteration of self, or even worse—like that Kraut, the boy lieutenant—a self left with only death to crave. Same fear for hero and coward, the gap between the two far thinner than those who’d never been in combat imagined, a matter of seconds, inches, jumping right instead of left.
Maybe, as the saying went, there are no atheists in foxholes. Yet, if fear is the impetus for faith in God, that faith resides in the sole hope of being spared death; death so imminent and near it has a color—white, enveloping, obliterating blur—as well as taste—dry, stale, acidic—and sound: high-pitched, droning monotone that drains other sounds of meaning. In his experience, making love and facing death were the only two instances of a full, unqualified union of mind, soul and physical self.
First time he saw death face to face was in France, during the first war. At dusk, the regiment trudged up a shell-pocked road. Suddenly, the dimness filled with the menacing whine of an approaching shell; then, electric flash and concussive shock as it hit near where Billy Sullivan had gone to piss. They ran to his side, hoping he’d only been knocked down, and froze in a half-circle. The shell had taken off his helmet together with the top of his head, splattering brains and blood across the dry brown grass. Not yet equipped with the battlefield skill of looking at the dead without noticing the nature of their wounds, they peered down at Sullivan’s cleaved skull.
No way to tell if he’d died with a clear conscience or not. The expression on his face was pretty much like that on all the faces of all the dead men in both wars, those not contorted by pain and agony, but a mix of emptiness and shock. O God, why me?
Another shell hit. Dropping to the ground, each fervently begged not for eternal life in paradise, angel’s wings, proximity to God, but for a few more ordinary hours on earth. Indiscriminate, chance-ridden,
war-driven death stirred no noble feeling—no grand revelation—save the solitary urge to live. Spare me, God, and I’ll be good. I’ll never sin again. Answered prayers, at least for now. But, hours or days or weeks or months later, away from the guns, those praying, pleading, believing faces were the same flushed, fevered, pleasure-driven ones frequenting brothels.
Years later, late 1945, just before shipping back to the States, on the way out of a London pub with Jack Lynch, a Jesuit chaplain from Jersey City who’d gone ashore on D-Day—he mentioned anxiety at returning to Roberta. Happiness/regret/ nagging awareness of a vow he didn’t keep. Café nights in Paris, two weeks with an English nurse, among others. A sin? Maybe there was a less harsh, less bitter word for something so human, but he couldn’t think of one.
Lynch took out the thin purple stole that priests wear in confession, tucked it discreetly beneath the collar of his coat, listening as they maneuvered amid pedestrians and traffic before whispering the Latin absolution. “Fin,” he said as they parted, “given what’s gone on these last years, I’m not sure God had time to notice sins as ordinary as yours. But what I’ve found is that though love doesn’t always make us faithful, it always makes us suffer for our unfaithfulness. It’s your wife’s forgiveness you should ask for. Make it up to her when you get home.” He went on his way without imposing any penance beyond that.
The scaled-down shark continued its frantic back and forth, thinking with its testicles. It was possible Miss Renard had an agenda besides the one she was pursuing for Wilkes. Or maybe Wilkes hadn’t revealed his true hand. Then again, it could be Miss Renard was lonely, attracted by a man twice her age. Maybe part of the chemistry she had with Wilkes was a grasping for the father who walked out on her when she was three. Didn’t have to be Freud to speculate something was up with her. Consider Bogie and Bacall. Twenty-five years between them. She never saw her father after she was six.
Whatever was going on had to be more than Wilkes let on. More than the million-to-one odds of finding Judge Crater. A lesson every dick learned, at least those eager not to get themselves killed: listen to your gut.