by Ross Thomas
The man from the CBS television station was up first. Wisdom acknowledged him with a grand wave of the pince-nez. “Mr. Wisdom,” he said, “could you explain once more for our viewers just what CHEAPAR stands for?”
“Delighted,” Wisdom said, “CHEAPAR is an acronym which stands for the Committee for Humane Extermination of All Park Avenue Rats.”
The Daily News wanted to know what was so special about Park Avenue rats. It was one of the questions that Wisdom was waiting for.
“You must understand,” he said with another fine flourish of the pince-nez, “that only recently have rats invaded Park Avenue. A number of residents there complained. I did so myself—as did most, if not all, of the ladies and gentlemen here today. This is understandable.”
He put the pince-nez back on his nose and started jabbing at the air with a forefinger. “I want to make it perfectly clear that CHEAPAR is no organization of bleeding hearts. We well recognize that rats, through no fault of their own, are often the carriers of dread disease.
“But,” he said, taking off the pince-nez and again holding it up for emphasis, “no sooner had our complaints been lodged than the city responded with what can only be described as terrifying alacrity. The Park Avenue rats were singled out for mass slaughter by the most barbaric means—as Mr. Knight tried to tell you before he was overcome by the horror of his own description.”
Wisdom paused to give Knight a benign look and Knight let the audience have another glance at his profile before he ducked it back into his handkerchief.
The Post reporter wanted to know what Wisdom suggested. “Decompression,” he answered quickly. “The rats should be captured alive in cagelike traps and then put to sleep in a chamber from which the air is almost instantaneously removed. The method is recommended by many humane societies. It’s quick and painless—just like taking a nice, long nap.” That got another fine round of applause from the audience. I noticed that Myron Greene now held his head in his hands.
A wire service reporter asked if CHEAPAR planned to limit its operations to the rats on Park Avenue.
“Certainly,” Wisdom answered with some asperity.
When the wire service man wanted to know why, Wisdom replied, “Because Park Avenue rats—and I don’t make this charge lightly—but Park Avenue rats are the only ones being discriminated against by the City of New York.”
Well, that was the lead and they all knew it and, as usual, they went along with Wisdom who could be counted on to brighten their day about seven or eight times a year. The girl from The Village Voice, struggling to keep a straight face, asked, “Can you explain what form this discrimination against Park Avenue rats takes as opposed, say, to the rats of Harlem or Greenwich Village or Bedford-Stuyvesant?”
“Indeed I can,” Wisdom said. “Take your average rat in Harlem. Nobody bothers him, particularly not the City. He’s left alone as long as he stays in Harlem. But let him try to improve his lot, let him try to move downtown to Park Avenue, and the vicious, discriminatory rat control forces are unleashed. He is clubbed, poisoned, and there is even talk of using—yes, there is! There are those who would use gas!” That produced a sharp chorus of no’s from the audience and another faint cheer from the press. Myron Greene was now slumped back in his chair, staring at the dirty ceiling. Knight whimpered a couple of times.
The Times man gave up a valiant battle to maintain his grave expression and asked, “Do you think, Mr. Wisdom, that politics or pressure may have caused this—uh—discrimination?”
“Possibly, sir, possibly. Thus far, we have had no complaints of rat brutality from any area other than Park Avenue. We of course hope that this is not a political football, but nevertheless we have asked Mr. St. Ives to investigate.”
“How about it, Phil?” the man from the Post asked.
I rose and nodded in what I hoped was a somber fashion. “Our preliminary survey,” I said, “indicates that both politics and pressure have played no small part in the discriminatory brutalization of Park Avenue rats. We’re preparing a White Paper on this and I hope to have copies of it to you within the next few days.”
There was a muffled groan from the rear that came from Myron Greene who had his head back in his hands.
After several more questions the man from the Times said, “Thank you, Mr. Wisdom,” and the press conference was over. The superannuated audience, representing a collective net worth of around a half-billion dollars, rose creakily and crowded about Wisdom and Knight to congratulate one and comfort the other.
I walked to the rear to find out what Myron Greene considered so important that he would stop off at a hired hall on his way downtown. After listening for ten minutes, I agreed that it might be important, even vital, but told him that I wasn’t interested. It took him another fifteen minutes to tell me why I was.
3
THERE HAD BEEN A time, nearly five years ago, when I might have been sitting in that rented hall on Thirty-ninth Street with the rest of the press, feeding lines to Wisdom and Knight, more or less serving as an accommodating shill for their put-on.
But then it had been my job to write a column five times a week for a now defunct and largely un-mourned newspaper about the cards and cautions who infest New York. I had developed a breezy, perhaps irreverent style, the source material had been limitless, the hours flexible, and I found myself with a respectable readership and inexplicably the trust and confidence of a swarm of thieves, cops, hustlers, high rollers, con men, prophets, assorted saviors, bums, middle echelon Mafiosi, and people who seemed to spend most of their time hanging around telephone booths waiting for someone to call.
A small-time thief, who proudly described himself as Constant Reader, had stolen a goodly amount of jewelry from one of Myron Greene’s clients and then informed the lawyer that he was perfectly willing to sell it all back at nominal cost providing that I served as the go-between. I had done so because it provided material for a couple of fair columns that appeared just before the newspaper folded on Christmas Eve, a date much favored by publishers to suspend operations, possibly because of the attendant poignancy, but more probably because few persons really give a damn about reading a newspaper on Christmas Day.
Just as the last of my severance pay was running out three months later, I again was approached by Myron Greene, this time to serve as the intermediary or payoff man in the kidnapping of the son of a client of a fellow attorney who recalled how I had handled the jewelry thing. So for $10,000 in what Greene, to my dismay, insisted on calling “danger money,” I traded a satchel stuffed with $100,000 for the missing heir who, I felt—once we became acquainted—should have stayed missing.
The third time around I became Myron Greene’s client. He now negotiated my fees in exchange for ten percent of whatever I earned. He also reluctantly agreed to perform a few personal chores such as handling my divorce (his first and last such case), dispatching my alimony payments, paying my bills, and seeing to it that my quarterly income tax statements were filed on time. Since it couldn’t possibly have been the money that interested him, I decided that he harbored a sneaking admiration for the thieves, rogues, and mountebanks that I palled around with and it was a charge he never bothered to deny.
I found it to be a trade that needed neither advertising nor a hard-hitting publicity campaign. Word of mouth did nicely. Thieves who got caught recommended me to fellow inmates who were soon to be released. Insurance companies recommended me to their customers and to rival firms. Lawyers recommended me to other lawyers and sometimes even the police would damn me with a grudging bit of faint praise. “Well, he’s as honest as you could expect.” That sort of thing.
So if I didn’t quite prosper, I at least survived, sometimes going south in the winter and to Europe in the spring or fall, content with the three or four or even five assignments that came my way during a year and always sympathetic when each of them brought on another of Myron Greene’s asthma attacks.
The rest of the time I read, went to the f
ilms in the morning, played table stakes poker, chased and even caught a few girls, fed stray dogs and cats and the pigeons in Central Park, visited the galleries and some friendly bars, showed up at all parades, joined a few respectable demonstrations, and some not so respectable, took magazines and cigarettes to jailed thieves whom I’d done business with, dropped out of group therapy after one disastrous session, and sometimes just sat around in my “deluxe” efficiency apartment on the ninth floor of the Adelphi on East Forty-sixth Street and stared at the wall.
So it really wasn’t until the young thing from the Daily News called some four years after my own paper had folded and requested an interview that I realized I’d become, willy-nilly, one of those about whom I used to write: a social deviant, a professional pariah, even, for God’s sake, a character.
I had recently returned from Washington where I had almost bungled a job that had involved the theft of a priceless brass shield, a couple of feuding African nations, and the international oil crowd. Some people had been killed, one had been arrested with the shield in Rotterdam, and another was still sulking because he thought he had been cheated out of a few billion dollars’ worth of oil.
The young thing from the Daily News wanted to know all about the go-between calling, remarked that I must live a fascinating life, ate six brownies (the young today are constantly famished), and then trotted off to write up the lies I’d told her.
I called Myron Greene. “No more,” I said.
“No more what?”
“No more international stuff. No more African colonels with big warm smiles and greedy little lies. No more State Department types. No more dead bodies, imported or domestic. No more—”
“I thought we handled it all quite well, everything considered,” he said.
“You think we did?” I said, bearing down hard on the we only to notice that it flitted right by him.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. I’ve already made arrangements with the museum for your fee to be paid in full.”
“They must have liked that,” I said.
“Not really; not after I pointed out that a lawsuit could prove most embarrassing to all concerned.”
“Let’s keep it simple from now on, Myron. You know. The purloined necklace, the missing bearer bonds, the stolen securities, even the kidnapped company comptroller. They’re more in line with whatever talents I have to offer. An international diddle isn’t.”
“We’ve never had a kidnapped company comptroller,” he said with all the earnest literalness of his profession.
“If we do, let’s make sure he’s a local boy. Or even a du Pont from Delaware. But no more international trade. They’re not at all keen on following the rules.”
“Very well, if you insist,” he said a little stiffly, I felt, as if making a note to send me a white feather that afternoon. “But I think you should admit that the entire affair was fascinating.”
“Fascinating,” I said, hung up, and tried to recall the exact day that an incurable romantic had been foisted on me as lawyer, business manager, and principal source of income. I wanted to mark it off on the calendar as a date not to remember.
So now we stood there in the rear of that drafty, rented hall which had seen ten thousand meetings held and ten thousand committees formed and perhaps fifty thousand resolutions passed, all for or against something that no longer mattered to anyone, while I listened to Myron Greene explain why I had to be in an office on the third floor of the State Department in Washington the following day.
When he finished, I said, “I told you no more international stuff, Myron.”
“But you know him,” he said. “And they know that you know him.”
“That was a long time ago. I didn’t like him even then and it was a fully reciprocated feeling.”
“He hired you,” Greene said. “He gave you your very first job.”
“And fired me. From my very first job.”
Myron Greene was silent for a moment as he carefully undid and then refastened the six leather-covered buttons on his heather tweed Norfolk jacket that I hoped wouldn’t shake the confidence of whomever he was seeing downtown. When he was through fooling with his jacket he smoothed back his blond hair whose length would draw no stares on Madison, but might earn a disapproving glance from a Superior Court judge, providing Greene ever ventured into a courtroom, which he had done only twice during the five years that I’d known him. Myron Greene’s clients, but for me, weren’t the kind who were haled into court.
“Well, I’m afraid that you’ll have to keep the appointment in any event,” he said and directed a stubborn stare past my shoulder. I turned to see what was so fascinating but it was only Wisdom and Henry Knight chuckling at each other as they took down the CHEAPAR banner. The audience and the press had gone.
“Why?” I said.
“Because they want to explain it to you personally.”
“Tell them to call me.”
“I told them you’d be there at eleven. Tomorrow.”
“Now you can tell them that I won’t.”
“Sorry, but it’s either-or now.”
“Either-or what?”
“Either you show up in Washington at eleven tomorrow or a federal marshal serves you here with a subpoena at noon.” His stubborn stare turned on me and now it was corporation lawyer Greene informing the executive board that there was nothing to be done but file bankruptcy proceedings and yes, it was a damned shame about all those widow and orphan stockholders.
“Subpoena for what?” I said.
Myron Greene smiled slightly. “For Congressman Royker’s subcommittee.”
“Royker’s a fool.”
“Even a fool can open up a can of worms,” Greene said wisely.
“What can?”
“He could start poking into what really happened to the shield and the Africans and the oil crowd. He’s good at things like that as long as they produce headlines. And the headlines should be interesting, but you’d know more about that than I would.”
“You were supposed to have fixed it,” I said. “You were supposed to have gone around with dustpan and whisk broom and tidied it all up.”
Myron Greene smiled again. It was broader this time, almost friendly. I also noticed that he was no longer wheezing. “Oh, I did,” he said. “I told them that you’d be there.”
I walked over to the door and gazed down the long flight of stairs. If I hurried, I could be in Mexico tomorrow. Guadalajara perhaps; that had a nice ring. Instead, I turned and went slowly back to Myron Greene.
“How much are the kidnappers asking?”
“For the ambassador?”
“For the Chicken.”
“Is that what you called him?”
“We did when he was managing editor. I don’t know what they called him when he got to be publisher. He’d fired me by then.”
“A million dollars.”
“You didn’t say it right, Myron. There wasn’t enough reverence in your tone and that means that there’s not going to be any ten percent.”
He nodded.
“Five?” I said without much hope.
He shook his head this time. “Three,” he said, “and I had to press for that.”
“Hard?”
“Very hard.”
“State must not think he’s worth a million either,” I said. “How long have they had him?”
“Since day before yesterday. Saturday.”
“Another day or two and whoever’s got him will make State an offer to take him back.”
“I don’t think so,” Myron Greene said.
“You don’t know him.”
“The kidnappers are demanding something more.”
“What?”
“Not what. Who.”
“All right. Who?”
“Anton Pernik. The poet.”
“He’s in jail.”
“House arrest really.”
“I never could read him.”
“He won the N
obel Prize,” Myron Greene said.
“So did Sinclair Lewis and I can’t read him either.”
“Well?” Myron Greene asked.
“I don’t know anyone in Belgrade.”
“It didn’t happen in Belgrade,” he said. “It happened in Sarajevo.”
“It sometimes does,” I said, “but I don’t know anyone there either.”
“The Yugoslav government has expressed its willingness to cooperate.”
“They’ll give up Pernik?”
“Yes.”
“They probably can’t read him either.”
“Your services were requested, of course.”
“By whom, Killingsworth?”
“No,” he said and smiled again, even more broadly than before. Myron Greene was enjoying himself. “Not by the ambassador. By Anton Pernik.”
“Maybe I’ll try to read him again,” I said.
4
AMFRED KILLINGSWORTH HAD BEEN managing editor of the Chicago Post only six months in 1957 before Who’s Who got around to sending him a form letter that contained a request for a brief life history along with the usual hard sell pitch to buy the 1958 edition at a sizable discount.
Killingsworth ordered a dozen copies and then used four 8½” x 11” sheets, single-spaced, to tell all about himself and the high points of his life, beginning with the American Legion oratory prize of five dollars that he won in 1932 when he was eleven and in Miss Nadine Cooper’s 6-A class at Horace Mann school in Omaha. I know because he gave me his own draft to boil down to three pages.
“Four pages is just a shade too long, don’t you think?” he said in that deep butterscotch voice of his that made “please pass the salt” sound even better than the first line in Moby Dick.
“I don’t know,” I said, rolling a sheet of paper into my typewriter, “you’ve led a rather fulsome life.”