by John Domini
Zia’s father explained that, at the Surinam plant, the labor varied from job to job. “Sometimes it takes a hundred women, punching them out round the clock, and then sometimes the place is practically empty.”
“I hear you, Leo.” Texas Monthly probably had cocaine money behind it. Maybe Mexican babies-for-sale money.
“So whenever I go down there, Kit, I got to have cash. Cash in hand, for the boy. That’s where you come in.
“Kit, kid,” Leo went on. “I wonder if you know how bad it looks, a businessman writing out all these checks to cash.”
“Cash,” Kit said.
“Kit, lemme tell you. Writing checks to cash, a businessman might as well just drop trou and bend over.” Leo had swung closer, his bulk on his forearms. He complained a while about audits, the IRS. “Someone like you, Kit, I mean. You probably never had to go through an audit.”
Aw, why hadn’t Kit spent more time in Boston? Why didn’t he know better the scams a guy in Leo’s line of work might pull? “Well Leo,” he tried, “I would think that’s what you’ve got accountants for.”
“Kit, madonn’. I’ve got accountants. Fucking con artists, the things they try to talk you into.” The old man went into another brief round of complaints. Another set of terms Kit had never heard of: general ledger, discounted cash flow.
“So Kit,” Leo said. “So what I’m thinking is, I’ll give you some more money.”
“What?”
“Oh, now he lightens up. Oh-ho, hey-yey. I’m offering you extra cash, Kit. That’s what we’re talking about here. Could you use an extra grand for January?”
“A, a grand? A thousand dollars?”
The old man’s smile showed some tongue.
Latch it up, Viddich. “Leo,” Kit said, “you know what my budget is.”
“I know it’s only two weeks till the next issue. And I know your budget, yeah.”
“Leo, what’s the deal? What do you want?”
“It might sound a little rough.”
Kit had come up here, after all. He’d come and he’d asked.
“Here’s how it works. Kit, say I give you a check for twenty-five hundred. I mean, your first one, I can give you that next week. You could be taking twenty-five hundred dollars to the bank Monday morning.” Leo had brought his smile so close that Kit could smell his coffee. “But then, Kit, every time I do this for you, you do something for me. You get me back fifteen hundred. Cash.”
It was like the weight of Kit’s eyes had increased. “What? I give you something back?”
“Only fifteen hundred, Kit. Fifteen hundred to me in cash. You do what you want with the other grand.”
Kit couldn’t trust any response more complicated than a stare. He dropped his hands but kept them fisted around his paper. Leo took advantage of the silence, shoveling on the rationale. ‘S just business. Your friends at the Globe, hey, they do this kind of business all the time. Your friends at fucking Harvard … Kit got up from the desk. He put a long stride between him and Leo’s espresso-breath, between him and that smutty gesture every time the man said “cash.” He noticed that the idea of laundering money didn’t impress the figures from Pompeii. In one fresco, a wrestling scene, two grapplers had robes over their shoulders but their genitals swung naked.
Leo swiveled left-right, following Kit. “Listen,” he said, “you told me yourself the Globe wanted to get into Monsod. You think they’re not looking for some shit to trade?”
Casting around for help, Kit recalled other times he’d been faced with shady deals. In the Midwest once, a hops vendor had dropped six hundred dollars on his desk. Just spread the bills on his desk and walked out of the office. In North Carolina there’d been talk of a lot more.
But none of those people had been paying Kit’s salary.
“Leo,” he tried, “let’s set aside the money a minute. This cash deal, let’s leave it alone for a minute.” He faced the desk. “Didn’t you say you could help me with the BBC?”
It took more than that to break the old man’s momentum. Even changing the subject, Leo kept his chest up. “Yeah, well the Building Commission, I mean. Yeah. I know some guys. Tomorrow, see, there’s this thing at Parker House. Tomorrow lunch. They want Mirinex at Parker House.”
Parker House was possibly the most prestigious hotel in the city, just across the street from the State House.
“There’s going to be the governor,” Leo said. “Ed King.”
“The governor.” Kit, laying mortar over his vocal cords, managed to match Leo’s tone. Ho hum, just another lunch with the governor.
“Him and some guys in the trades, you know. Contractors, commissioners, the usual guys.”
This was the kick Leo got out of his charade, of course. One-upping the Harvard boy made his day.
“Myself,” Leo went on, “I can’t go, really. Just can’t, you know.”
Kit sighed. You could see how the man’s daughter was still struggling with this kind of thing, struggling to find a space that didn’t have her father’s fingerprints all over it. This morning, when Kit had told Corinna and Zia he was going upstairs, the writer had turned away with an angry flinch.
“Anyway,” Leo said, “over the years, you see what I’m saying. I know some guys.”
With that Kit’s publisher fell silent again, sitting management-style for once, his hands on his desk.
“Parker House,” Kit said. “That’s at noon?”
Leo snorted. “You got balls, Kit kid.” He shook his big head. “I’ll say that, you got some fucking balls.”
Aw, balls were beside the point. Kit had nothing to lose. Regardless of what Leo might do, Sea Level had a dozen likely ways of dying.
“Didn’t I tell you,” the old man said, “this could rip you open and pull you out from the inside?”
Kit had lowered his arms. The rolled newspaper, clutched in both hands, made a bar across his crotch. He couldn’t take the money, no. He hadn’t done what small good he had, for North Carolina or the Building Commission, just to end up laundering checks. He hadn’t come this far only to discover that the first issue was nothing more than a sack of cash. He didn’t want a paper if he couldn’t also have a conscience. “Leo,” he asked, “why’d you give Sea Level your money?”
No answer; Kit tried another tack. “Leo, think about it. If something went wrong, we’d end up in front of a Grand Jury.”
“He-ey.” Leo waved a limp hand. “This isn’t the movies, Kit. Isn’t the movies, and I’m not the Mafia.”
Not the Mafia, check. “Leo, I can’t do it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Leo.”
“Bullshit, I can’t I can’t I can’t. What’s that, the fucking Harvard fight song? Kit, don’t you want to go to Parker House?”
“Aw, come on. Parker House isn’t the issue here.”
“You mean you really think”—Leo’s rage, more than a little bogus to begin with, gave way to bewilderment—“I’d still get you in there when you won’t do nothing for me?”
“Leo. I can’t. And as for getting into Parker House, that’s the least of my worries.”
The old man went buttonmouthed again. He went thoughtful, eerily thoughtful, his shape slack. It occurred to Kit that the wrestlers in the fresco hadn’t laid a hand on each other yet. They were still maneuvering for position.
Chapter 2
And after Kit had gotten his lunch with the governor, the next day, it didn’t seem as if the wrestlers’ maneuvering had stopped. He didn’t have any more answers than before. Tuesday afternoon the same as Monday afternoon, Kit sat in his office, holding off on final decisions about his next issue.
On his desk lay two mockups. Two versions of Number Two. One was devoted exclusively to the penitentiary, with a banner block of 14- or 18-point type across the top half of the cover. The other offered the sort of front page editors pull off the Sale rack, three columns of news and follow-up. Clipped to the “Monsod Exclusive” mockup was a business card from the noo
ntime meeting at Parker House, from one of the suits who’d glided around that top-floor suite. The card looked impressive, Massachusetts State Senate and all that. But Kit doubted it brought him any closer to Monsod. To him, the Parker House gathering felt like a reenactment of the inconclusive little comedy he’d played out with Leo, the action a hair overripe.
Of course Kit’s visitors, Tuesday after lunch, wanted to hear about where he’d been and who he’d been with. His Circulation Manager stopped by with the first weekend’s sales figures, then stayed to examine the card.
“Forbes Croftall, State Senator,” he read. “M’tellin’ya. A major mover there, Kit.”
“His aide, Tad,” Kit said. He pointed to the card’s upper right corner. “I only met his aide.”
“So, still. Croftall runs a couple committees, right?”
“He’s majority whip.”
“So. What are you looking so down about?”
Kit cast his eyes up the whorled glass of his office walls. “Circulation Manager,” it occurred to him, was an awfully highfalutin title. But then, what else could you put on the masthead? “He Goes to the Newsstands and Grovels?” The man had an accent that, around Boston, left him at a handicap. Every time he opened his mouth, the city’s Anglo-Protestant nomenklatura heard white trash. M’tehhllinn’yaghh. And he had a disconcerting pun of a name, Tad Close.
“M’tellin’ya, Kit. This is promising.”
“Tad. I only met his aide.”
A hickish type, the aide. A country preacher in wire-rims and a black suit. But Croftall’s man had read Kit’s piece on Monsod—the one surprise of the entire runaround lunchtime, and the single ray of hope. Kit and the aide had talked about the latest prison disturbance. Their discussion had become, in the end, just tangibly heated. While the aide’s looks had soured, their preacherly lines deepening, Kit had reminded him that a former Monsod guard was still in recovery over at Massachusetts General. Fractured skull, spinal damage. State revenues covered the costs of surgery, therapy, counseling, and job retraining. Easily more than a hundred thousand total. At last Croftall’s aide, just tangibly heated, had promised to put the story on the Senator’s desk.
A ray of hope. Tad might be right, glowing over the man’s card. But outside of this one case the Parker House event had proven utterly mundane. Croftall’s aide, in fact, had been one of few men on the scene with actual clout. Nearly everyone else worked, as Leo Mirini would say, in the trades. Some made a living contracting for construction, some sub-contracted for the roofing or the windows or the ganglia under kitchen sinks. They’d come to Parker House to ingratiate themselves with the Governor.
Not that the Governor was easy to find. Not that he was out glad-handing, goodtiming, talking the Bruins or the Celts. The Governor waited behind the closed door of the suite’s bedroom. He was in there over a room-service lunch. And simply being on the guest list, like Kit, didn’t get you a meeting. No. In order to get private time with Ed King a man needed to, as Croftall’s aide put it, “make a commitment.” A man needed to make a donation, that is; he needed to lay down some cash for King’s next campaign. The event was a fundraiser. The contractors came with checks, and in return the Governor gave them a lunch-greased handshake. Grease for grease.
“I didn’t meet King,” Kit told Corinna Nummold, his Administrative Assistant.
“Takes money to meet the head guy,” Corinna said. “Kit, I bet you don’t get any building contracts either.”
This was still later on Tuesday. Corinna had poked her head into Kit’s reliquary to remind him she had to pick up her son. Her much-photographed Arturito. Kit blinked up at the woman, then at his glass walls. Finally, out across the office halfwalls, he once more spotted the framed portrait of Arturo on the paper’s reception desk. And Kit thought he had problems. Here was a woman three years his junior with a boy in third grade and no idea where the father might be.
“Nope,” Corinna was saying. “I guess Kit Viddich won’t be getting any contracts from the governor this year.”
Her attempt at gringo conversational biplay. To Corinna, that’s what her position with Sea Level was about, learning the ways of the Norteamericano. Not for her the smoke-ringed ennui of a hipster like Zia Mirini.
“Maybe I shouldn’t make jokes,” she said more gently. “I just mean to tell you, I heard about stuff like this.”
Not for her was Zia’s gaunt punk anti-style, either. Corinna had a meaty Dominican face and frame, and she didn’t try to hide it. She wore big career-girl hair, thick career-girl shoulder pads. Kit hoped his smile looked encouraging.
“If it was me,” she said, “seeing that stuff right in front of my face—Kit, I would’ve lost it. That corruption, I mean. I would’ve started screaming at people.”
“Aw, Corinna. It wasn’t the place. Screaming would’ve done more harm than good.”
She nodded: The way of the Norteamericano.
“Well, it’s not like it was easy for me either, Corinna. I walked out.”
“I can see it wasn’t easy for you.”
The woman touched a pinkie to the corner of one eye, showing a trace of anger. God knows, she must be sick and tired of the skinny Anglo girls getting all the attention.
“Kit, I mean. It’s like you’re hardly here.”
“Corinna. It was just some men in a room.”
Kit had seen the whole show at Leo’s office, yeah. At the Parker House, the only way he’d been able to talk with anyone had been by mentioning Leo. Also the lunch came in one flavor only, Tangy Testosterone. Old-boy testosterone. The event had Leo’s crassness about cash, too. Since this was January, the squeakiest month in the fiscal year, the Governor’s people had brought along loan forms. They’d brought both 60-day and 90-day forms. They’d set the papers in two stacks on a table outside the Governor’s bedroom. Grease.
Kit had found himself getting nowhere, and more than a little disgusted. He’d taken Croftall’s card and walked out. He knew enough about Boston to understand that this sort of thing went on all the time. Patronage, sure. He even knew how someone like Forbes Croftall would defend the system, using words like “commitment,” expressions like “tell the men from the boys.” Kit wasn’t such a saint that he didn’t know. Nonetheless, the experience left him unable to touch his lunch. The arson wave across the city, the rot in Monsod—these must have begun with the sort of deals men were making today up in Parker House. Kit took the aide’s card and walked.
Aw, Leo. What had the old man been up to, arranging Kit’s entré?
Tuesday afternoon, it had reached the point where Kit didn’t know what to tell freelancers. The paper’s assignments had to remain open-ended. And with the Art Director, things got still more complicated. The Director was a friend of Zia’s, another clubgoer, an almost weightless woman named Topsy Otaka. She and Kit huddled over the drafting table in Sea Level’s back room. When he asked for two different front-page mockups, Kit felt sheepish and without a clue. This, in turn, led him into a thoughtless gaffe. He described his source on Monsod—mentioning no names, at least—as a “junkie murderer.” A bad gaffe, since Zia’s friend was herself in a methadone program.
Apologizing, a white knight with egg on his face, Kit made an effort to clear his head. He asked:
“Why would Zia’s father put his money into my paper?”
Topsy, already uncomfortable, started to look even worse. She massaged the inside of one elbow.
“He knows the kind of story I go for,” Kit said. “He knows what his own business is, let’s face it. Mirinex does deals that are borderline, sometimes.”
“Well,” Topsy said, “he wants to help Zia.”
Getting nowhere. What Kit went through Tuesday afternoon had always been the hardest part of his chosen work. Loose ends taking so long to come together—it always put him into a distracted funk. He whispered prayer after prayer for a phone call. He wasted minute after minute with his head back and his boots up, lost in the reflections along his high of
fice glass.
*
SEE SEA LEVEL RUN
Dick and Jane need not apply
As I’m sure everyone on the Pulitzer committee knows by now, Boston has a new newspaper. Or a sort of newspaper, anyway, rather a mongrel, part Rolling Stone, part I.F. Stone. At all events, its name is Sea Level and it does look … interesting.
The editor is Christopher “Kit” Viddich, the husband of the former Elizabeth Steyes (yes, that’s Stye, of the the Brattle Street Sties). Your peripatetic Society gal was lucky enough to attend the party for the first issue, held last Saturday evening at a private address in the Back Bay.
The occasion proved … interesting.
Consider the Belle of the Ball, at Mr. Vidditch’s affair. Belle of the Ball, sans doute, was Zia Mirini, a comely young sylph despite her best efforts to appear otherwise. Her shirt—do my eyes deceive me?—was the upper half from a set of long johns. No ordinary white long johns either; but, well, what would you call that color? Pompeiian red? And then there was the “news” she was “investigating.”
The woman’s writing a piece on a disc jockey. A “radio personality,” as they say. Someone named Oedipus.
Kit got a kick out of Zia’s desktop decorations. Leo’s daughter liked tacky Italian postcards, retouched within an inch of their lives. She had a good half-dozen of these, their pop pastels a shock under the dim plastic desk cover. She had—let’s see. A shot of Naples and the Bay, Vesuvius trailing smoke in the distance. The blue was like heaven, the gray like sin. And she had the Bread and Wine, flesh and blood.
“Kit? Are you there?”
He looked up from Zia’s desktop, blinking, abashed, then lapsed back into silence.
The man across the desk laughed, not unkindly. “I know, I know,” he said. “One of those Parker House wingdings’ll make you feel like starting a commune in Canada.”
This was Rick DeMirris, Kit’s favorite freelancer. A thinker, an agitator, Rick had stopped by as Tuesday wound down. He’d perched on one the halfwalls surrounding Zia’s workspace, talking shop while Zia pretzel’d this way and that behind her desk and Kit leaned against the facing partition. No top-of-the-masthead pretensions in this office.