16. Meeting
“CAN I GET UP NOW?” MIKE SHANAHAN ASKED AFTER HE had been sitting for almost a full minute in the Body Orifice Security Scanner in the mayor’s outer office. “I think I’m already late for the meeting.” Even before he’d had to stop at the iris scanner and the BOSS, Shanahan had been held up at the security gate by Eddie, his childhood friend, who, explaining that he’d thought of practically nothing else but Grandma Houlihan’s molasses cookies since their last meeting, wouldn’t release the turnstile until Mike recited everything he remembered about the recipe.
“Not yet,” Teresa said, drawing closer to the machine. “Is that a buzz I’m hearing? Would you say that sound is a soft buzz or just sort of a loud tingle? How would you describe that sound?”
“What sound? I don’t hear any sound.”
She walked around the machine, cocking her head to catch the sound that Shanahan couldn’t hear. “With Commissioner DeSilva this morning, we thought it was just a tingle we were hearing,” she said. “And tingles don’t count. But it turned out to be an actual buzz. It was set off by his hearing aid. I let him keep it in, of course.” Then she studied a manual for a while. Then she said, “You’re not, for some reason, holding a tiny dagger in your mouth, are you, Mike?”
“A tiny dagger!” Shanahan said. “You think I’ve swallowed a miniature Sikh for some reason and he left his tiny dagger in my mouth on the way down? You think I’ve got designs on trimming the mayor’s toenails or something?”
Teresa didn’t answer. She simply studied the machine’s dials, occasionally referring back to the owner’s manual. For a while, it was silent in the mayor’s outer office.
Then, suddenly, Shanahan reached inside his mouth and pulled out a wire object that he held in his open palm. “My retainer,” he said, in something close to a mumble.
“Your retainer?” Teresa said. “What are you doing with a retainer?”
“The dentist said my lower teeth are getting out of alignment. That happens to be quite common for people of my age. The retainer is just temporary.”
“Did you have the retainer when we . . . you know . . .”
“Teresa,” Shanahan said, “does it occur to you that we may be approaching the area that some might consider invasion of privacy?”
Teresa, lost in her thoughts, said, “I don’t know how I would have felt about you having a retainer. It definitely would have lent a certain high-school quality to the situation. But whether that would have made it more exciting or less exciting, I just don’t know. I’m guessing maybe less exciting. . . .”
“Teresa, can I go in now?” Shanahan said. “I promise I won’t attack the mayor with my retainer.”
“Oh, sure. Go ahead,” she said.
The meeting had already begun. Mayor Ducavelli was behind his desk. He showed evidence of having spent some time in the sun when he was in Phoenix for the mayors’ conference; his face, which had once been described by a magazine writer as precisely the color of Elmer’s glue, looked almost ruddy. He did not look happy. Several of his aides were sitting on chairs and couches arrayed in front of the desk. The gathering had the look of a seminar in the office of someone known to be the toughest marker in the entire university.
Victor Hessbaugh, the city attorney, was speaking. As the city’s chief legal officer, Hessbaugh was often the person who had to follow up the mayor’s confrontations with legal action—coming up with some interpretation of the regulations governing the city council, for instance, that would permit the mayor to inform a councilwoman who had been critical of his programs that what had been her office had been commandeered for use as a medical supply depot under the terms of the Civil Defense Act of 1952. Hessbaugh was always up to the task. Even in the more bizarre confrontations, Hessbaugh did the mayor’s bidding with alacrity, always discovering some way in which Ducavelli was legally justified in doing whatever he wanted to do. Ray Fannon had written that the city attorney “could find legal justification for armed robbery, assuming, of course that Frank Ducavelli happened to be the armed robber.” Once the precedent had been found, Hessbaugh would explain it in great detail to anyone who’d listen; he always seemed sincerely convinced by his own loopholes. Given his loyalty, Victor Hessbaugh was known among the City Hall press corps as Victor Yesboss.
“. . . the police estimate of the crowd was approximately a hundred and fifty people at the height of the incident,” Hessbaugh was saying, occasionally glancing down at the report in his hand. “There were no serious injuries. As you have undoubtedly surmised, that reference in one of the tabloids to someone being hit in the eye with a pickled herring has no basis in fact whatsoever. Pure fantasy. No herrings were thrown. The man who was shown on Channel Five saying, ‘Ya jerky bastard, ya,’ to the police sergeant had to be restrained at one point, but he was not arrested. Although he’d left his car when the altercation started, and it was ticketed for double parking. None of the people in the crowd around the car were arrested. No charges were brought against Mr. Tepper, who is, as you have probably read, a mailing-list broker who not only has no police record but may have never even gotten a parking ticket, which would be remarkable considering how much time he apparently spends parking. The Parking Violations Bureau is checking on that now.”
“This happened more than a week ago,” Ducavelli said. “The day I left for the mayors’ conference. They can’t run a check of violations in a week?” The mayor looked at Mark Simpkins, the parking commissioner.
“We’ve got it on expedited search,” Simpkins said.
The mayor’s response to that was to roll his eyes. The Parking Violations Bureau was notorious for being the most maddening bureaucracy in the city. Everyone in the room had his favorite PVB story. Shanahan’s was of the hospital office worker named Luis Hernandez, who, some years before, had his salary attached for $4,152 by the bureau for back tickets despite the fact that he couldn’t drive and had never owned a car. Shanahan could still remember some of the responses newspaper columnists had imagined PVB bureaucrats having to Hernandez’s protestations that he’d been dunned in error (“No car! You think we haven’t heard that one before? You think you’re dealing with a bunch of farmers here, Luis?”).
After a short pause, Hessbaugh continued. “Tepper was seeing a series of people in his car,” he said. “But the investigating officer noted in his report that even after the altercation had been halted and three people put in the wagon, Mr. Tepper still had seven minutes left on his meter.”
“It’s legal now to carry on a business in your car?” the mayor almost shouted. “No license is required? Are you telling me that a shoemaker could just put some tools in the backseat and set up shop? What about the honest tradesmen who have to pay rent on their premises and city sales tax on their transactions? What about them?”
“Well, that’s a murky area,” Hessbaugh said. “You may remember the knife sharpeners who used to go around in little trucks, conducting their business on the street? We’ve checked to see what kind of licensing they required, but it’s doubtful that such licensing would apply to this case anyway, since there’s no evidence that Mr. Tepper was charging any of the people who came in to chat with him, so it would be hard to prove that he was running a business. And he was, of course, in a legal spot.”
“Legal!” Ducavelli almost shouted. “It’s a way to mock the law is what it is. When you strip away all the legalisms, the man’s an anarchist. That’s what he is—an anarchist. What he’s doing is just the sort of thing that could trigger complete chaos. This city would be in the hands of the forces of disorder.”
The mayor paused and looked intently at those gathered in front of him. A couple of people shifted nervously in their chairs. Nobody said anything. Then Hessbaugh said, “Apparently, Mr. Tepper uses certain spots on certain days of the week, and since those were mentioned in the press, more people have been waiting to talk to him at those spots, although so far, no other disturbances have—”
The mayor st
opped him with a finger wag. It was a gesture, as it happened, not far from the gesture that Tepper sometimes used to stop questions about whether he was going out—although when accomplished in the mayor’s peculiarly jerky way of moving, the wag seemed to begin at the shoulder and involve the entire arm. There was more silence. After a few moments, the mayor said, “Any ideas? Am I to assume that nobody has any ideas about how to stop this?”
There was a longer silence. Finally, Mark Simpkins, the parking commissioner, said, rather tentatively, “Well, Mr. Mayor, we could remove the meters from that block in front of Russ & Daughters and make it No Parking Anytime.”
The mayor stared at Simpkins. Simpkins smiled weakly. The mayor continued to stare. His lips were pursed and he was nodding slightly. Everyone in the room had seen that nod before. It wasn’t a nod of agreement. It was a nod of confirmation—the mayor having confirmed once again that he truly was surrounded by idiots, that he could count on nobody but himself in the fight against the forces of disorder. It was a nod that was often followed by an explosion. “Or even,” Simpkins quickly added in a voice that was beginning to sound desperate, “No Standing Anytime. That would, of course, include Sundays.”
The mayor didn’t say anything. There was silence in the room. Then the mayor began speaking, in a surprisingly soft voice, to Mark Simpkins. “So let me get this plan straight,” he said. The others in the room leaned forward to hear. “We’re going to get rid of the parking meters on the block of Houston Street in front of Russ & Daughters. Put in No Standing Anytime. Then when he moves next Sunday to the next block, the Katz’s Delicatessen block, we remove the parking meters from that block.”
Simpkins was nodding and shrugging tentatively, although it was apparent that what he was hearing from the mayor didn’t sound exactly right to him. The mayor was still speaking softly: “Then he moves to the next block. We take away the meters. Then the next block. Sooner or later, this rabble-rouser has forced us to remove all parking meters in the city. Nobody who wants to stop for ten minutes to buy a dozen bagels can do it. We have warehouses full of parking meters. The revenue brought in by the parking meters is gone. Is that the plan? I’m just trying to make sure I understand the plan.”
“Well,” Simpkins said. “Sort of, only—”
“GET OUT OF THIS OFFICE!” Ducavelli shouted at the top of his lungs. “THAT IS THE MOST IMBECILIC IDEA I’VE EVER HEARD! GET OUT OF HERE!”
Simpkins scurried out of the office. Mayor Ducavelli sat back in his chair, took some deep breaths, and looked around the room. His glance fell on Mike Shanahan. “What do you have on this, Mike?” he said, in a more or less civil tone.
“Well, we did the quickie you asked for when you called from Phoenix,” Shanahan said. “Phone survey. A hundred residents, chosen at random. This was four or five days after the hoo-ha in front of Russ & Daughters. It had been on the local news two nights running—although one of those was Sunday night, which is less watched than the weekday newscasts—and in one round of papers, with the News, Post, and Newsday all carrying it prominently and the Times running it on the front page of the Metro section. It was pretty much out of the papers by Tuesday. That’s not a sustained period of coverage, really, but, despite that, only eight percent of the respondents said they never heard of Murray Tepper or didn’t know enough about what happened to comment. That’s remarkable, really. It’s axiomatic in the business that if you took a survey the day after the Second Coming at least ten percent would say that they never heard of it or didn’t know enough to respond. We asked a spectrum question about what the respondent thinks about Tepper—admires a lot, admires somewhat, doesn’t admire at all, et cetera, et cetera—and a few questions designed to ascertain whether the public basically sees him as someone gumming up the works in the city or someone who’s standing up for his rights. Then a couple of questions about how this has affected the public perception of you, Mayor.”
“And?” Ducavelli said. It was apparent to everyone that the mayor wanted a report on the last series of questions first.
“Well, I know you don’t like looking back, Mayor, but in all candor I have to say that when you were asked to comment on this while you were at the conference, it might have been better to have chosen some phrase other than ‘a leech on the body politic.’ I mean better for your numbers. Generally, people admire Tepper. They think he might be a little eccentric, but just about everyone in this town is a little eccentric. They tend to think that he’s got a right to sit in his car if he’s in a legal spot and why he’s doing it is his own business. Frankly, I was surprised at how few people are irritated at him for taking up a parking spot he doesn’t need. I guess they think maybe he does need it, for some reason.”
“I’m not guided by what would be better for my numbers,” Mayor Ducavelli said.
Shanahan nodded. That was more or less true. Although Frank Ducavelli always did want to know the effect of an issue on his numbers, he often seemed to disregard that information. Some of what seemed like his most intemperate acts did indeed help his numbers—attacking the Ukrainians and the other diplomats at the United Nations over their refusal to pay parking tickets, for instance. He was obviously pleased when railing against the Ukrainians built the public impression of him as a straight shooter who wasn’t afraid of any adversary, even an adversary that had a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. But Mike Shanahan had come to believe that Frank Ducavelli might have attacked the Ukrainians even if such an attack were devastating to his numbers. Telling everyone to stand on the sidewalk while hailing a cab obviously wasn’t good for his numbers. Putting a homeless shelter in Councilman Norm Plotkin’s neighborhood—something Shanahan knew the mayor was perfectly capable of doing—would not be good for his numbers. When the mayor got worked up, he could lose track of how someone who had to run for office ought to behave.
The mayor was silent for a while, and finally his chief of staff let everyone know that the meeting was over.
As Mike Shanahan walked by Teresa’s desk, she said, “So how come, then, it didn’t buzz the other day?”
“What didn’t buzz?”
“The machine. When you sat in it. It didn’t go off. Why?”
“Well, unless your machine was on the blink, I guess I wasn’t wearing my retainer.”
Teresa nodded. “That’s what I figured,” she said. “You must have had a date.”
17. Hero
THE HOSTESS SMILED AT MURRAY TEPPER AS SHE LED him toward the table where Jack was seated. “Medium well man is here before you,” she said.
Tepper smiled and nodded. He had the feeling that two or three people might have recognized him as he walked through the restaurant, but then he thought he had probably just imagined that. Most of the customers certainly didn’t give him a glance. Some of them were deep in conversation. At one table where four people were waiting for their food, three were on cell phones and the other looked around at photographs of Japan on the restaurant’s walls, like someone who can’t find anybody to talk to at a cocktail party and feigns interest in the books on the shelves.
He was just sitting down across from Jack when a man who’d been at a nearby table came over. The man looked to be in his late thirties or early forties—neatly dressed in a suit and tie. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, Mr. Tepper,” the man said. “I’ve never done anything like this before, but I recognized you from your picture in the newspaper. I wonder if I could get your autograph for my son, who’s eleven. His name is Kevin. He’d seen the television coverage of the altercation on Houston Street a couple of Sundays ago—the fat man yelling, ‘Ya jerky bastard, ya,’ and all that—and last night at dinner we talked through the entire incident. He’s going to use you as the subject for an essay he has to do for school on courage.”
“I have to tell you that there wasn’t really any courage involved,” Tepper said. “When that fat man started yelling at me, I made sure the doors were all locked and the windows rolled up.”
“I m
ean the courage to do what you think is right,” the man said.
“Well, the right and wrong certainly wasn’t hard to figure out,” Tepper said. “It says right there on the sign that it’s One-Hour Metered Parking, Sunday Included, and I was paid up. After it was all over, I still had seven minutes on the meter. No big deal.”
The man nodded and put one of the restaurant’s place mats in front of Tepper. It was one of those paper place mats for Japanese restaurants which illustrate various types of sushi and sashimi. “His name’s Kevin,” the man said again. Tepper shrugged and signed the place mat just above the picture of an eel-and-cucumber hand roll.
The man started to turn from the table, but then, after some throat clearing and a couple of false starts, he said, “Mr. Tepper, I’ve got a little problem at home. Not with Kevin. He’s great. A great kid. Soccer team. Does real well in his studies. No, it’s his mother—my wife. And she’s a fine person, Mr. Tepper. Don’t get me wrong. A fine person. That’s not the problem. . . .” He looked at Jack and then back at Murray Tepper. “I don’t mean to disturb you at lunch,” he said.
Tepper Isn't Going Out: A Novel Page 10