by Ross Thomas
“That would make you nineteen,” I said.
“That’s right. I was nineteen.”
“And summa cum laude.”
“He was nineteen,” Necessary said. “I checked it out. The laude stuff, too.”
“Really, Homer, you don’t have to—”
“You want another drink?” I said to Necessary. He drank fast.
“Why not?” he said and handed me his glass.
I got up and went over to the bottle and the ice. “Go on,” I said to Orcutt.
“After graduation I went to Europe and studied international law at the Free University in Berlin for a year and was awarded my doctorate degree, again with honors.”
“In a year,” I said.
“I checked that out, too,” Necessary said. “He’s a fucking genius.”
“I do wish you would do something about your language, Homer, especially when a lady is present.”
Necessary glanced at Carol Thackerty, who was still staring out the window. He said, “Huh,” and took a long swallow of his fresh drink. I followed suit.
“After Berlin,” Orcutt went on, “I came back to the States and toyed with several positions that were offered to me at the time.”
“He got thirty-two job offers,” Necessary said. “None of them for less than thirty grand a year.”
Orcutt preened a little at that and forgot about admonishing Necessary. “Well, as I said, I toyed with them, but they really didn’t interest me. It was all big corporation law and that can be terribly boring. So for a while I even thought that I might join the Peace Corps, but, well, you know—”
“I know,” I said.
“So I simply sat down and made a list of things that I really thought I could become interested in and which, by the way, would enable me to earn a comfortable living. Well, I had this list of about twenty things that ranged from undersea exploration to diplomacy. I narrowed that down to just three things. You know what they were?”
“I wouldn’t even guess.”
“The three areas I finally selected were the practice of law, the problems of our metropolitan areas, and politics. Now guess which one I chose.”
“Private practice,” I said because I had to say something.
Orcutt seemed delighted that I’d guessed wrong and squirmed pleasurably in his chair. “I almost did. Almost. But I decided that I was too young and it would take too long. Not mentally too young, mind you, but chronologically. It would have prevented me from having the kind of clients I would like.” When he talked he supplied his own italics, like a bad editorial writer.
“The kind of clients you wanted were the kind with money,” I said.
“Precisely.”
“What about those thirty-two corporations who wanted to hire you?”
“That’s just it. They wanted to hire me. They wanted me on their payroll at X number of dollars. It would have been most confining.”
“What did you choose, politics?”
“No, I chose to become an expert consultant on the problems facing our fair city. Or cities. You know, Mr. Dye, cities are fascinating microcosms of the world we live in. We’re destroying them, of course, and they in turn are destroying us. Oh, I don’t mean literally, although smog and traffic and fire and riots do take their toll. But the role of the city has changed drastically in the last thirty years—within our lifetimes.”
“So have we,” I said.
“Quite true. But now we flee the city to the suburbs to regain exactly what the city formerly offered—a sense of community, if you will. A sense of belonging, of having some voice in the affairs of the day. The city at one time offered all this, plus a sense of safety, brought about, quite probably, by what was once called the herd instinct, before the term went out of style. Now it offers nothing of the kind. The city is the enemy. And most of those who still live in it, really don’t. They have set up their own private enclaves. Not neighborhoods, mind you, but enclaves from which they rarely stir—except to go to work, usually in neutral territory, or to another friendly enclave. It’s all really quite feudal, if you think about it. People who live in cities are actually afraid to venture into what they quite frankly regard as the enemy camp. Some of this is based on race, some on income, and also on such things as resentment, hate, prejudice, greed, and all the other seven deadly sins. It’s really most depressing if one has a liking for what cities have traditionally provided.”
“All right,” I said, “let’s say that our cities are sick and that some of them are almost terminal cases. What cure do you suggest other than faith healing?”
“You’re teasing again. Oh, I do like that! No, Mr. Dye, I don’t propose to cure all of the ills that afflict our metropolitan areas. I specialize. You see, the fears of those who continue to live in our cities often prevent them from taking an active role in their community. They become apathetic, indifferent, and spend most of their time staring at television or drinking or wondering whether they shouldn’t really move to the suburbs—for the children’s sake, of course. A climate of such apathy is a perfect breeding ground for civic corruption. And that’s where Victor Orcutt Associates come in. We cure civic corruption and we’re paid handsomely to do it. Of course, all we cure is the symptom, not the disease. But most of our clients cling to the belief that if the symptom disappears, the disease will shortly follow. They’re wrong, of course, and sometimes out of sheer deviltry, I tell them that they’re wrong, but they usually smile knowingly and thank me for a job well done and then hand over a fat check. Over the last four years, Victor Orcutt Associates have been moderately successful.”
“What’s moderate?” I said.
“Well, we netted a little over four hundred thousand dollars last year, and our gross—which included all of our living expenses—was approximately four million dollars.”
“Four million two,” Carol Thackerty said.
Orcutt shrugged. “Miss Thackerty does have a head for figures. By the way, I met Miss Thackerty and Homer Necessary when I landed my first assignment.” He mentioned the name of a city in the Midwest that was about the size of Youngstown, Ohio.
“The mayor’s son was a college buddy,” Necessary said. “That’s how he got his in.”
“Well, what are friends for, Homer?” Orcutt said. “Incidentally, Homer was chief of police there, and my first recommendation was that he be fired. You’ve never seen such graft—or perhaps you have, in China.”
“Perhaps.”
“Well, I immediately hired Homer as a consultant. I did it quietly, of course, but I thought to myself, now who would know more about foxes than another fox?”
“Maybe a chicken,” I said.
“Mr. Dye, you’ve just ruined my favorite allegory.”
“Sorry.”
“At any rate,” Orcutt said, “that city was absolutely corrupt. Rotten to the core. To the very core. The police sold protection along with football betting cards. They had a burglary ring going. The numbers’ racket flourished. The tax assessors could be had for as little as five dollars per five thousand dollar evaluation. Gambling was nearly wide open. Not quite, but nearly. Dope was peddled in the junior high schools. The city itself was bankrupt. The city manager was a drunk, pathetically inept, and hadn’t been paid in nearly three months. Neither had the police, but they didn’t seem to mind. Prostitution. Well, it was simply awful. Anything the perverted taste wanted, from thirteen-year-old girls—or boys—on up. Shocking. Really shocking. And, of course, Miss Thackerty here, then a senior in the local college, was part of the vice ring. She’d even bought a very large motel out on the edge of town.”
“Just working her way through college,” Necessary said.
Carol Thackerty shifted her gaze from the window to Necessary. She smiled shyly, even sweetly, and in a quiet tone told Necessary to fuck off.
“Swell kid, huh?” Necessary said to me. “Nice, I mean.”
“To continue,” Orcutt said, ignoring the exchange as if it happened often eno
ugh, “we first—Homer and I, that is—turned our attention to the police. Homer had collected enough evidence to fascinate a grand jury, but unfortunately most of it was self-incriminating. We decided we needed something else. Homer came up with the idea. My word, he should, I was paying him enough.”
“I made more as a chief of police,” Necessary said.
“But not honestly, Homer.”
“Who cares about how?”
Orcutt shook his head sadly. “Totally amoral. But he did have a splendid idea, one that would bring the city’s police immediately into line. Of course, we had to enlist Carol’s aid, and that took some persuasion, but she finally agreed that cooperating with us would be better than spending a number of months behind bars. I must say she cooperated so nicely that I asked her to become my executive assistant. That was four years ago, wasn’t it, Carol?”
“Four,” she said, still staring out the window. I noticed that her teacup was empty.
“Through her cooperation we were able to obtain some rather provocative photographs of most of the police force as they lay, deshabille, shall we say, in the arms of a series of very young ladies.”
“What he’s saying is that we got pictures of most of the cops shacking up with some of her high school whores,” Necessary said. “That’s what he means. We mailed prints to them at headquarters. They shaped up real good after that.”
“So for a modest fee you brought in honest government, morality, and reform?” I said.
Orcutt smiled that meaningless smile of his, rose and walked over to the ice, put another cube into his glass, and filled it with the remains of the Dr Pepper. “No, Mr. Dye, we didn’t. You see, although the city was in bad condition, it really wasn’t bad enough. The majority of the citizens weren’t yet ready. They liked paying off fifteen-dollar traffic tickets with a dollar bill. They liked the close-by gambling and the teenage prostitutes. They liked paying less real estate taxes, if all it took was a small bribe. I’m afraid I misjudged that town. Six months later it was worse than it was when I came. But by then some people from Chicago had moved in. They run the city now. Formerly, its vice and corruption were home-grown products. Now they come from outside and the people are frightened. I can’t say that I blame them.”
“Did they ask you to give it another go?” I said.
“Yes, they did, as a matter of fact. But I wasn’t interested in dying.”
“I can understand that.”
“But I did gain two things from that experience,” Orcutt said slowly, apparently speaking to the Dr Pepper in his glass. “I acquired the services of Miss Thackerty and Homer. That’s one. Secondly, I was able to formulate what I’m vain enough to call Orcutt’s First Law. I haven’t come up with a second one yet.”
“What’s the first one?”
“To get better, it must get much worse.”
“I’m afraid it’s a little familiar.”
“Not really. Not when applied to my particular field. And that, I think, brings us to the crux of this meeting, which is how I hope to involve you with Victor Orcutt Associates.”
“All right,” I said. “How?”
“You first of all should understand, Mr. Dye, that I’ve spent a considerable amount of money investigating your background, experience, capabilities, and even your philosophical leanings.”
“I wasn’t aware that I had any.”
“Oh, but you do! You do, indeed. A little existentialistic perhaps, but admirably suited for the task at hand. As are your experience and training and educational achievements. With just a few exceptions, you’re almost perfect. Now I’ll bet no one has ever called you almost perfect before.”
“You’re right,” I said. “They haven’t.” Not even you, Carmingler, I thought. “Just what do you have in mind?”
“You remember that I asked whether you were Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“It would be better if you were. Or Negro or Polish or even Italian. You see, Mr. Dye, I need a scapegoat—a whipping boy, if you prefer. Someone whom the citizens of a particular town can chase to the city limits. A kind of a ‘don’t let the sun set on your head in this town, boy’ thing, if you follow me, but I’m speaking figuratively, of course. They wouldn’t actually do that; it would just be the tone of their attitude. A member of a minority group is so suited for such a role.”
“Maybe they could just dislike me for myself,” I said.
“Oh, my, that’s very good,” Orcutt said, and to prove that he meant it he let me see that empty smile of his again. The smile went as quickly as it came and he paused to take a sip of his Dr Pepper. After that he produced a white handkerchief, Irish linen, I assumed, and patted his lips dry. “Now then,” he said, “in return for your services I’m prepared to offer the usual incentive: money.”
“What kind of money?” I said.
“The fifty thousand dollar kind.”
“That is a nice kind. What do I do to earn it?”
“You perform certain tasks—under my direction, of course.”
“What tasks?”
“They revolve around Orcutt’s First Law, Mr. Dye. What I want you to do is to corrupt me a city.”
CHAPTER 6
I was born December 5, 1933, the day they repealed prohibition. Although the information surrounding my birth is largely hearsay, most of it came from my father’s diaries and I have no reason to suspect that it isn’t true. He didn’t have enough imagination to make a good liar.
I was the only child of Dr. and Mrs. Clarence Dye, a couple of Texans from Beaumont, who bought a medical practice in Moncrief, Montana, in 1932. Moncrief is the county seat and its population was then around 360. I understand it’s dropped some since. The first year in practice, my father earned $986 cash, sixty-two chickens, two sides of beef, several bushels of vegetables in the late spring and summer, and about two hundred quart Mason jars filled with something called chow-chow, pickled beets, string beans, corn and tomatoes. “We’ve always eaten well,” my father wrote.
Unfortunately, at least for my mother, my father was out celebrating repeal the day I was born and when he got back to the house he found himself confronted with a Caesarian. He was drunk, “Godawful drunk,” he wrote later, and he never was sure what really happened. Either the scalpel slipped or he forgot to wash his hands and sepsis set in or it may have been that my mother was just one of those women who is destined to die in childbirth. He was never certain because he blacked out during the delivery and when he came to my mother was dead and I was lying well wrapped in a crib that they had bought for me. He’d managed that while out on his feet. The temperature outside, my father wrote, was 11 below zero and a blizzard had started. He wrapped my mother up in a sheet and carried her out to the garage where she froze nicely and stayed that way until the blizzard ended four days later and he could get around to having her buried in Missoula. He never did write why he decided to name me Lucifer.
My father really wasn’t a very good doctor. He barely passed his pre-med at the University of Texas and the only medical school that he could get into in the twenties was the University of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City and that was by a fluke. Somehow he made it through, working as a theater usher at night at the old Empress on Main Street. He had married my mother by then and she worked in a department store, Rohrbaugh-Brown’s it was called then. He made $9 a week; she made $12.
My father interned at St. Anthony’s hospital in Oklahoma City and got through that without killing anyone. He had enough sense to realize that he would never be a good doctor and barely a competent one. For a while he thought about becoming a ship’s physician, but the competition in 1932 was too stiff. Then he heard about the practice that could be bought for a thousand dollars in Moncrief. He borrowed the money from my mother’s parents, who died in a car wreck before he had to pay it back. My father didn’t kill anyone in Moncrief either, except my mother.
After she died my father suffered fits of what he diagnosed as “depression and remorse.”
He drank a lot and scribbled long passages in his diary, alternately blaming himself and me for her death. Ultimately, he accepted all of the blame. But I still remained Lucifer Clarence Dye.
He had hired a sixteen-year-old farm girl to look after me. Her name, I later read, was Betty Maude Christianson and he paid her $3.50 a week plus room and board and whatever pleasure she got from his thrice-weekly visits to her bedroom. Or so he wrote.
It was in the spring of 1934 that he sobered up and began writing the letters. He wrote to the Methodists and the Baptists and the Presbyterians. He sent long letters to the Assembly of God, the Church of the Brethren, the Episcopalians, the Christians and Missionary Alliance, and the Ethical Culture Society. He wrote to the Evangelical Covenant, the Evangelical Free, and the Evangelical and Reformed. He wrote to the Lutherans, the Friends, and the Latter Day Saints. He wrote to the Pentecostal Holiness and the Christian Scientists. Finally, he wrote to the Seventh-Day Adventists and, in desperation, to a Catholic cardinal in St. Louis, I think, offering to “come over to your side.”
My father, in a spirit of atonement, had decided to become a medical missionary, preferably in China, and he was offering his services to any organized religion that would accept them. None did, unless you can call Texaco a religion. Through an old college friend whose father was the vice-president in charge of Texaco’s overseas operations in Asia, my father was offered a job as company doctor in Shanghai. We sailed from San Francisco on August 19, 1934, aboard the Midori Maru, bound for Kobe and Shanghai.
My father and I lived in a company house in the International Settlement on Yuen Ming Road with my amah, Pai Shang-wa, a thirty-five-year-old spinster from Canton who spoke Cantonese as well as Mandarin and the harsh Shanghai dialect. She insisted that I learn all three, and when I made a mistake she slapped me, but not very hard. I didn’t speak English too well until I was nearly six, and this made it a little difficult to communicate with my father, who spoke no Chinese, not even passable pidgin. We also had two other servants, a cook whose name was Ma Yiu-ha, and a house boy-driver, Fu Ying. I remember that I called him Foo-Foo and sometimes he carried me around the house piggyback.