The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

by Ross Thomas

“My last question—for tonight, at least. The New Orleans adversaries or bunch or crowd. Who runs it?”

  “He’s on the list under adversaries,” Orcutt said.

  “I only skimmed it.”

  “His name is Ramsey Lynch.”

  I leaned back into the couch and rested my head against its rich green upholstery. For several moments, long ones, I inspected the ceiling, which was painted the color of vanilla ice cream. Finally, I said, “Middle name Montgomery?”

  “Lynch’s?” Orcutt said.

  “Yes.”

  “I really couldn’t say. Homer dug up most of the information on him.”

  “Then he didn’t dig far enough,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “You should. Ramsey Lynch. That isn’t his real name.”

  Necessary snorted. “He did eighteen months in Atlanta under it and that was a Federal rap.”

  “I know,” I said. “But that still doesn’t make it his real name.”

  “Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said, “I’m really not overly fond of melodrama. If you have something to say…” He let the sentence die as if it had bored itself to death.

  I looked at him. His dark blue eyes were chillier than usual. So was his expression. I examined him carefully for a few moments and could find nothing that I really liked.

  “Well?” he said in his own private brand of frozen italics.

  “Well,” I said, mimicking him for no special reason other than I felt he was being a little pompous for twenty-six. “His name isn’t Ramsey Lynch. His name is Montgomery Vicker. He’s the brother of Gerald Vicker. You remember Gerald. He’s the one you retained in Hong Kong who recommended me. He’s the one I got fired because he killed the wrong man.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I inherited Gerald Vicker. He came with the desk and the filing cabinets and the stationery and the thirty-six-year-old Memphis secretary (my first one) who finally found romance in the Far East and married a pink ginfaced Volkswagen dealer from Malaysia. He was a widower who, after a few drinks, had once confided that my former secretary was a terrific old girl in the sack. She was the one who taught me how to write up an insurance policy.

  It was Carmingler, of course, who finally told me about Vicker only three or four hours before I was to catch a plane to San Francisco and there make a connecting flight to Hong Kong. Carmingler brought up Vicker’s name casually, as if he were mentioning a mutual friend who had just changed jobs, got married, or gone to jail. We were sitting in one of those bare offices that Carmingler always seemed to prefer. This one was in the Kansas City Post Office and although I’ve tried often enough, I still can’t remember why we met in Kansas City.

  The room was small, with only one window. It held a Federal-green desk and two matching chairs, a black telephone, and a picture of the President. It was during the last days of Eisenhower’s administration and the photograph was the one that made him look as if he had actually enjoyed the job.

  “You’ll be in full control, of course,” Carmingler said.

  “Vicker was number two under Grimes, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, he was. Did a good job of it, too.”

  “And he’ll be number two under me, the new boy?”

  “I can see what you’re driving at, but there’s no need to worry. None at all.”

  “Then he’s not human,” I said. Carmingler puffed on his pipe two or three times and then waved it at me for either emphasis or reassurance. “Vicker is all right,” he said. “He’s one of the old crowd who came with us during the big war, drifted away, and then came back. He’s solid.”

  Carmingler had been either fourteen or fifteen when World War II ended, but he always referred to the OSS as the “old crowd” or “us” or “we.” It was one of his minor foibles that I eventually found time to forgive.

  “Does Vicker know anything about insurance?” I said.

  “No more than you, but your secretary does. Her name’s Klett, I believe.” He took out a small Leathersmith notebook to make sure. “Francine Klett. Miss.”

  “Any more surprises?” I said.

  Carmingler looked around for an ashtray to knock his pipe out in, but finding none, settled on a metal wastebasket that was filled with paper. For a moment I thought that he wanted to burn down the post office.

  “This is quite a leg up for you,” he said.

  “That’s been impressed on me often enough.”

  “Vicker should prove quite useful. He’s been out there a long time, knows everyone, and has a quick mind.”

  “Then why doesn’t he have my job?”

  Carmingler rubbed the bowl of his pipe against some of the freckles that were sprinkled over his large pink nose which some kindly person had once described to me as distinguished. If that meant it was a nose that you wouldn’t soon forget, the kindly person was right. “We thought about that,” he finally said when he finished his internal debate about how much to tell me.

  “And?”

  “We decided that you were the better man for the job.”

  “That still doesn’t tell me anything,” I said. “What’s the matter with Vicker? Does he drink, gamble, whore around, and talk too much? Or does he just diddle the expense account and stay out late at night?”

  Carmingler smiled, displaying his long, wide, strong teeth that helped him to resemble a horse. “No, it’s none of that. It’s simply that we find him—well—a bit overly ambitious.”

  “Christ,” I said. “I bet he has a lean and hungry look, too.”

  Despite the Phi Beta Kappa key there were some gaping holes in Carmingler’s education. He looked surprised for a second and then nodded thoughtfully. “Why, yes, now that you mention it. He does look a bit that way.”

  It was no good from the beginning and both Vicker and I knew it. Age had something to do with it, but not all. He was forty and I was barely twenty-seven. He was patronizing and I was insufficiently deferential. He talked too much, sometimes even brilliantly, but I listened too little. His attention to detail was phenomenal and he resented my cavalier attitude. His Chinese had been painfully acquired and my easy fluency irritated him. He had an opinion about everything in God’s world and if I didn’t share them, he sulked. He would spend an hour telling me why a Patek Phillippe was better than a Rolex Oyster; or why a Nikon was better than a Leica and how a Canon was the match for both; or why the memory of Mao would be banished in less than a year after his death. He was shrewd, glib, and forgot nothing. He lied beautifully, fretted incessantly, and vaguely alluded to tragic experiences during his stretch with the OSS. He was a walking definition of overweening ambition that I found awful and which I got stuck with until one August day three years and eight months later.

  It was the middle of August, around the fifteenth, and Vicker was already at his desk when I arrived at the then fancy, new downtown island offices of Minneapolis Mutual on Pedder Street, which I’d leased just to shut him up. I did balk, however, when he wanted to issue a press release claiming that the reason for our move was a recordshattering jump in business.

  He walked into my office carrying his coffee cup, the one with “Vicker” carefully glazed on it in a Chinese ideograph. He liked having his name on things and his shirts, ties, lighter, and cigarette case were all monogrammed. He sat in one of the chairs and propped his feet on my desk, probably because he knew that it irritated me.

  “Lucky I was here this morning,” he said so that I would have to ask why. I think he sometimes sat up half the night figuring out his morning opener which would cause me to ask about something that I didn’t know.

  “I’m grateful.”

  “Might have missed him if I hadn’t arrived early.”

  “You’re always early and it’s earned you a head start in life’s great race.” It also gave him the chance to read the mail first, both his and mine.

  “He wants five thousand,” he said.

  “Sounds like a bargain.”

  Vicker lowered his feet, brush
ed some imaginary lint from the lapel of his burnt orange, raw-silk jacket, put his coffee cup on my desk where it was sure to make a ring, and reached for his silver lighter and cigarette case. He was about my height and about my weight, but I always thought of him as lean and of myself as skinny. He had a smooth, oval face, nicely tanned, and his black hair was thick and straight. He wore it long for the times and it looped down over his high forehead and then back in a style that would become popular years later. His eyes were deep-set and dark brown and he could hold them perfectly steady in the middle of an enormous lie. They also had that cool glow peculiar to persons who will never need glasses. Some commercial airline pilots in their fifties have eyes like that. Vicker’s nose was a right triangle and he sported a carefully clipped mustache above thin lips that he sometimes licked around lunch time. His chin was unremarkable in any respect.

  When Vicker finished lighting his cigarette and putting his case and lighter back where they belonged, he blew some smoke at his brown and green foulard tie and said, “He’s yours, you know.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “They’re on to him,” he said.

  “All right,” I said. “Who?”

  “Pai Chung-liang.”

  “He’s not worth five thousand.”

  “He meant Hong Kong, not U.S.”

  “He’s still not worth it.”

  “He wants to go to Singapore. He said he has relatives in Singapore.”

  Pai Chung-liang was a middle-aged man who worked in the Bank of China and occasionally passed us fresh snippets of information of varying authenticity. He swore, for example, that the bank, which serves as Peking’s financial arm as well as its Hong Kong diplomatic, espionage, and cultural headquarters, had a cache of 6,129 rifles and carbines, 100,000 rounds of ammunition, 197 cases of grenades, and enough food to withstand a four-month siege. Just who the siege-layers would be, he didn’t say. He didn’t even guess. But some of his information about Peking’s financial transactions had proved interesting, if not vital, and we paid him enough to make it worth his time.

  “What did he do, call?” I said.

  “Around eight-fifteen.”

  “How did he sound?”

  Vicker thought for a moment. “Desperate, I’d say. Panicky even.”

  “How does he know they’re on to him?”

  “He didn’t say. He just said that they are.”

  Pai was a shy, slight man, short by even Chinese standards, barely over five feet, who liked flowers and figures. We had needed someone inside the bank and Pai was the best I could do. I got to him when his wife became ill and needed the services of an expensive surgeon whom Pai couldn’t possibly afford. It was one of those things that you hear about when you’re standing around some cocktail party, halflistening to a doctor talk about his rare ones. Mrs. Pai had been one of the rare ones and when the expensive surgeon mentioned that her husband worked for the Bank of China I began to listen in earnest. I employed the usual flimflam to reach Pai. We made a deal. The life of his wife in exchange for whatever information he thought might prove interesting. I think Pai loved his wife very much, even more than he did figures and flowers. He was embarrassingly grateful, even after she died on the operating table under the skilled hands of the noted surgeon, and he wanted to know how he could demonstrate his gratitude. I told him and he readily agreed, partly because he was grateful, partly out of pique at the bank because it had done little about his wife’s illness, but mostly because of the 500 Hong Kong dollars that I agreed to pay him each month.

  Pai Chung-liang was another living testimony to my skill as a corruptor of civil servants. I wondered how his superiors had found out and even if they had. Perhaps Pai was just bored with Hong Kong and thought that Singapore would be pleasant in late August and if he could get an additional five thousand out of me, it might prove even more pleasant than he had anticipated.

  There was the chance, of course, that he was telling the truth and if he were, he would soon be telling them about us. Not that there wasn’t much they didn’t already know, but we still had to go through the motions of maintaining our tattered cover.

  “I’m going to pay him,” I said to Vicker.

  “You just said he wasn’t worth it.”

  “He’s not, but I’m still going to pay him.”

  “Of course,” Vicker said thoughtfully, “it could be a setup.”

  “I know.”

  “I never did trust the little bastard.”

  “That puts him at the bottom of a long list,” I said.

  The telephone rang then and it was Pai. “Mr. Dye?” he said in his soft, shy voice and I said yes.

  “I called earlier this morning.”

  “Are you on a safe phone?”

  “Yes. Very safe. I did not go to my employment this morning.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I have some vital information.”

  “About the bank?”

  “Yes and no. But they have become suspicious and the information I have is vital to you. Personally.”

  “And you’re asking five thousand dollars?”

  “Yes. I would not do so unless I needed it desperately. I must go to Singapore. I have relatives in Singapore.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Oh, yes. My conversation with Mr. Vicker this morning. He is your trusted colleague, is he not?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  “All right, Mr. Pai, where and when do you want to meet?”

  He suggested a number on Upper Lascar or Cat Street. We had met there twice before in a gewgaw shop stuffed with carvings, lacquered ware, ceramics of doubtful merit, very bad Ming-type copies of Chinese mustangs, gongs of various sizes, and the inevitable scrolls. The old man who owned the place locked the doors and left whenever we appeared. His hour’s absence cost another HK $100.

  “Anything else?” I said.

  “Only one thing, Mr. Dye. I strongly urge that you come alone.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  I hung up and looked at Vicker. “He suggests that I come alone,” I said.

  Vicker smiled a little, but not very much. “Then I’d better go with you.

  “Maybe you’d better.”

  “How’d he sound to you?” he said.

  “Just as you described him: desperate and panicked.”

  We arrived at the shop a little before ten, which was the agreed-upon time for the meeting. I paid the old man his $100 and he left, leaving the door unlocked on the promise that I would snap it shut after Pai arrived.

  “If he’s skittish, maybe I’d better get in the back,” Vicker said.

  There was a rear room, small and stuffy, which the old man used for an occasional nap. It had a six-inch peephole that was shielded by a flimsy see-through of split bamboo.

  I stood near the six-hundred-year-old table that the shop owner used for a desk and looked out into Cat Street, which was as packed as usual. I sniffed and thought I could smell opium, but it may have been my imagination, although on Cat Street that wasn’t necessarily true. I saw Pai Chung-liang burrowing his way through the crowd. He wore a white linen suit and clutched a plastic briefcase under his arm. He paused at the door of the shop, looked carefully both ways, and then slipped in looking for all the world as if he’d just made off with the factory’s weekly payroll. He hadn’t been born to the business.

  “Mr. Dye,” he said. “You are in good health?”

  “Excellent.”

  “It is kind of you to meet at such short notice.”

  “Time is most valuable to those who suddenly are in short supply,” I said, making it all up as I went along.

  He nodded, looked around shyly, and then started to say something, probably about the money. Before he had to embarrass himself I handed him an envelope. He didn’t even look inside, but instead quickly stuffed it into his briefcase which, I thought, demonstrated a pleasant degree of mutual trust.

  “I have some inf
ormation of a most delicate nature,” he said. “I scarcely know how to begin—”

  He never got the chance really. The door that I’d forgotten to lock burst open and two chunky Chinese were suddenly in the room. They were mumbling something that I didn’t catch. I’m sure Pai Chung-liang never really heard what it was either because Vicker shot him right through the briefcase that he had clutched to his chest. The two chunky types looked at me, saw that I didn’t have a gun, and then at Pai who was now sprawled on the floor, his briefcase still tight against his chest. They both produced short-barreled revolvers. One of them waved his gun at me, nudged Pai with his foot, and said finished to his partner. The partner nodded, bent down, and took the briefcase. Neither of them seemed to care much about who’d shot Pai as long as he was dead. They backed to the door and disappeared into the crowd.

  I bent over Pai. He wasn’t quite dead. He opened his eyes and coughed once. It seemed to hurt him terribly to do so. Then he said in a faint voice, “Mr. Dye, they couldn’t have known … I’m afraid your Mr. Vicker—” He never did finish what he thought Vicker might have said or done. He coughed and died instead.

  Vicker came into the room as I rose. I looked at him. He was nodding a little in that self-satisfied way that he did when things went as he predicted. “A setup,” he said. “Just like I—”

  “You didn’t have to shoot him,” I said.

  “Christ, he set you up. He was about to finger you. If I hadn’t shot him, you’d be on your way to Canton.”

  “They weren’t after me.”

  “Not after he was dead, they weren’t. Not after he couldn’t finger you.”

  It was a poor lie, but Vicker was magnificent. His dark brown eyes didn’t flicker and his voice dripped oily gobs of sincerity. “Good God, Dye, even a child could see what he was up to.”

  “You didn’t hear what he said. Just before he died.”

  “What?”

  “He said three things.” I decided to do some lying myself. “First, he said that you’ve sold out. Second, he said that you tipped off the meeting to the opposition. And third, he said that you’re through. I agree with him on everything.”