Talking Heads (4 page)

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.

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 noontime 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 office glass.

*

SEE
SEA LEVEL
RUN

Dick and Jane need not apply

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.”