The Road To Ruin Page 13

  Stan said, “And if they check with him?”

  “They’ll get no further than his L.A. staff,” Jim told him, “and they never knew the New York staff.”

  John said, “And the point is, am I right, this stuff is all real.”

  “Those are real people,” Jim told him, “as real as the paperwork can make them. All four of them were those people at one time, though it isn’t who any of them were at birth, and now they’re off being somebody else, the original or another new one. But you’ve got to remember, they can always come back.”

  Andy said, “Not all four of them.”

  “No, but one could make trouble.”

  Stan laughed. “I can imagine some guy goes up to Tiny, and—What was your name?”

  “Judson Otto Swope.”

  “Right. Some guy shows up and says, Hey, I’m Judson Otto Swope.”

  Tiny nodded. “We could discuss it,” he said.

  Andy said, “We’re not gonna worry about that. We just been christened brand-new guys, so let’s relax and enjoy it.”

  “Christen!” said Anne Marie, leaping to her feet. “You’re right, Andy, it’s a christening. Wait right there, I’ll get the champagne.”

  26

  “TUESDAY,” HAL MELLON said, “a man walks into a bar with a carrot stuck in his ear. You make the next right.”

  Chester made the next right. A lot of these Pennsylvania towns straddled rivers, and so did this one, so now Chester was driving across a small bridge.

  “The bartender,” Mellon said, “thinks to himself, oh, a wise guy, I’m supposed to ask how come you got a carrot in your ear, and he’s got some smart-aleck answer. Okay, he thinks, I’m not gonna be his patsy, I’m not gonna ask. And he doesn’t. About two blocks down here, you’ll see the big sign, Astro Solutions, that’s where we’re headed.”

  “Right,” Chester said.

  “So Wednesday,” Mellon said, “the same guy comes in, with another carrot in his ear. The bartender thinks to himself, this guy doesn’t give up easy, but I am not gonna ask him about that damn carrot. And he doesn’t. Thursday, Friday, the guy comes back, always with a new carrot, the bartender’s going nuts, he refuses to ask the question. Finally, Saturday, the guy comes in, he’s got a stick of celery in his ear. The bartender’s thrown completely off. Without thinking, he says, ‘How come you got a stick of celery in your ear?’ and the guy says, ‘I couldn’t find a carrot.’ We turn in here, visitors’ parking.”

  So they turned in, Chester parked facing the low light-green aluminum-bodied building, and Mellon said, “I’ll be back with my shield or on it.” But that’s what he said every time he got out of the car, so Chester no longer made any response to the line. Mellon, who didn’t need a response, got his sample case from the backseat and bounced toward the building, loping along on the balls of his feet.

  Chester got out the book he was reading—The Road to Oxiana, by Robert Byron, a quirky recountal of a trip from England to Afghanistan in the early ‘30s, mostly by car, some of it by charcoal-burning car—and settled in for half an hour of peace.

  Basically, this was a good job. Mellon paid him well, did no backseat driving, and Chester had plenty of time, like right now, to read, a habit he’d developed in prison. If it weren’t for the jokes, it would be perfect.

  It was salesman’s jokes, that’s what it was, and it just poured out of Mellon like cold water out of a spring. He didn’t seem to have any control over it, and he didn’t require any reaction from Chester, not a laugh, not a groan, nothing.

  Chester did react, of course—he had to—but his reactions were silent. The jokes were tedious, and it hardly mattered if they contained any actual comedy or not. What Chester found himself concentrating on—unwillingly, but just as helplessly as Mellon himself telling the jokes—was the setups.

  Why were that priest, that rabbi, and that minister walking down that street? Where were they headed? How had they happened to come together? What odd chance had put ex-presidents Bush, Clinton, and Carter on that same plane? Why do so many talking animals have nowhere to go except some bar?

  The worst part of every day’s driving was immediately after Mellon’s return from an appointment. A salesman among office lugs, he would have sprayed his jokes on them like a male lion, and they would have sprayed a bunch of their jokes back at him. And when Mellon returned to the car, springs in his feet, sales in his salesbook, guess who’d get those jokes next?

  Chester wasn’t sure how much more of this he was going to be able to stand. He was dreaming some of those jokes, the stewardesses in the elevator, the astronaut in the men’s room. When would Andy Kelp and his friends make their move against Monroe Hall? They were still going to do it, weren’t they? But when? How much longer would they leave poor Chester all alone out here, at the mercy of Hal Mellon?

  And here he came. Sample case into backseat, Mellon into the front seat, pointing: “We keep on now the same direction, maybe twenty miles.”

  “Right.”

  “A Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew are on Mount Everest—”

  •

  It was twenty to six when he finally reached home in Shickshinny. He walked in, thinking a drink might be called for along about now, and Grace met him in the living room to say, “Your friend Andy called.”

  They decided not to do it! Heart in his throat, Chester said, “What did he say?”

  “Call him.”

  “That’s all?”

  “What more do you need?”

  “You’re right, you’re right.” He hurried across the room, picked up the phone, looked back at Grace. “You’re right,” he said.

  “I’ll get you a scotch,” she decided, and left the room. It was the girlfriend, Anne Marie, who answered, but when Chester identified himself she said, “Oh, Andy wants to talk to you. Hold on.”

  He held on. How could he convince them not to quit? Grace came in and stood with a short thick glass in her hand.

  “Chester?”

  “Listen, Andy—”

  “Looks to me, Chester,” Andy said, “we’re gonna need housing out around you. Just till we get hired, right? But it’s a hell of a commute from the city.”

  “You’re gonna do it?”

  “Sure, whadya think? It’s just we need billets.”

  “Stay here,” Chester told him, happier than he’d been in a long time. (No more missionaries and no more cannibals.) “We got plentya room.”

  He and Andy chatted a little longer, while Grace gave him a skeptical look, and when he got off the phone she handed him his drink and said, “We’ve got plenty of room? Where?”

  “It’ll work out,” Chester said. “They’re gonna do it, that’s all, that’s all that matters.” He lifted the glass in a toast. “Monroe Hall.”

  She looked aghast. “Monroe Hall?”

  “May he rot,” Chester said, “from the head down.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Right. Lemme get my own glass.”

  27

  FLIP WAS FURIOUS; he was beside himself. How could Monroe Hall, who just last week had called himself Flip’s “pal,” have done such a thing? There wasn’t even any profit in it for Hall; just loss, for poor Flip.

  Driving toward the estate for today’s session, he rehearsed in his mind just how he would tell the man off. “Everybody knows you’re the most selfish man in the world, I mean that’s what you’re famous for, but why do me like this? What did you get out of it? Was it just for fun?”

  Lips moving, mouthing the angry sentences, he turned in at the entrance and stopped at the guardshack. The sullen guard came out as usual, but today Flip didn’t give him a friendly greeting. Today he didn’t give him a greeting at all, or a word at all. Staring straight ahead, his telling-off of Monroe Hall still circling in his brain, he merely held his driver’s license up where the troglodyte could read it, if he could read. The man took a long time, unmoving, standing beside the open window of the Subaru, but Flip didn’t care. Take forever if you w
ant, you creep. Ban me from the estate, I’ll be just as happy to go home.

  Whether or not the guard could read Flip’s license, he could probably read Flip’s face, because he finally stopped waiting for Flip to do or say something, but just turned around to lumber back into his cave, presumably to make the call to the Big House.

  Flip put his license away, then glowered at the bar directly in front of him, waiting for it to lift. When it finally did start its upward arc, the guard came back out, leaned down close to the window, and said, “You wanna be more friendly.”

  Flip looked him up and down. “To you?” Then he drove through and onto the estate.

  Well, that made him feel a little better, for a minute anyway, until, as he approached the Big House, he saw the front door open and Hall step out into the sunlight to wave at him. Today’s sweat-set was Day-Glo orange, so that Hall looked less like a Mafia subcapo and more like a weather balloon, slightly deflated.

  I’ll show you some weather, Flip mouthed, as he parked the Subaru in its usual place, got out, and threw his canvas bag over his shoulder with such force he hurt his back. Smarting even more, blaming Hall for this as well, he marched around to the front door, where Hall greeted him with his usual smarmy smile, saying, “Right on time, Flip. As ever. Come in, come in. I did ask you one time if you rode horses, didn’t I?”

  Thrown off stride, Flip tried to work out that question and its answer while Hall shut the door and they started toward the central staircase. “I don’t,” he decided was the clearest response, then expanded on it: “Ride horses.”

  “Right, I remember,” Hall said. They moved up the stairs. “You remember that, I told you I have these horses, beautiful beasts, but I can’t find an instructor. This is a perfect time of year, Flip, perfect time of year. Up on that horse, ride over hill and dale, get an entirely new perspective.”

  “I’ve never done it,” Flip said. Now I’ll tell him off, he assured himself, but the instant didn’t seem just right somehow.

  Moving down the wide upstairs corridor, Hall said, “I know you told me I shouldn’t weigh myself every minute, but I did weigh myself this morning, and Flip, I’m down three pounds! From a month ago.”

  “Very good,” Flip said, and somewhere a cuckoo commented threefold.

  “Oh, there’s that damn thing again,” Hall complained. “Sometimes, Flip, I think I should just let it run down, not have it wound any more, not have to listen to it get things wrong all the time, but I don’t know, I just can’t do it. It would be like killing the poor little thing. I know, I know, you’ll say I’m just a sentimental boob, but there it is. I’ve gotta let that clock do its thing.”

  Sentimental! Following Hall into the gym, Flip gnashed his teeth, and made a dozen brutal crushing remarks that somehow never quite passed his lips.

  It went on like that, an hour of fuming silence. He got minor revenges by pushing the treadmill beyond Hall’s capacity, by overloading the weight machines, by being a bit more snappish and imperious than usual, so that by the end of the hour Hall was a sodden orange orange with all the juice on the outside. But the challenging of the man, the confronting him, the direct accusation, somehow that just never emerged. Flip boiled with it, he seethed with it, if he were a kettle his lid would be doing a polka, but it was just not possible for him to pour his fury all over Monroe Hall.

  At the end, though, he did manage, though obliquely, to get to the subject of his distress: “I won’t be able to make our session Wednesday.”

  Hall looked stricken; good. “Oh, Flip,” he said. “You have to.”

  “No, what I have to do,” Flip told him, “is go to Harrisburg to meet with somebody at the Internal Revenue office.”

  “Oh, dear, Flip,” Hall said, looking as concerned as though he were an actual human being with actual human emotions, “I hope you aren’t in any trouble.”

  “Turns out,” Flip said, packing his canvas bag, not looking at the rat, “I am. Turns out, some cash income I received was reported to the IRS.”

  “But, Flip, naturally,” Hall said.

  Now Flip had to look at him, and the man was as innocent as a newborn. Into that perspiring baby face, Flip said, “Do people report their cash income to the IRS?”

  “Well, I certainly hope so,” Hall said. He paused briefly to wipe that face with a towel and pant a bit, then said, “It would be unpatriotic not to report your income, pay your taxes.”

  “Unpa—Unpa—” Flip could only sputter at the outrageousness of this felon, this world-class cheat, this despicable rotter, telling Flip Morriscone he was unpatriotic! Unpatriotic!

  “I certainly hope,” Hall was going on, as though Flip were not doing a meltdown directly in front of him, “you declare what I pay you, because of course I report all my expenses. All my expenses, Flip, whether they’re deductible or not. I believe in transparency, and you should, too.”

  Flip slowly shook his head, unable to speak.

  Hall lifted a chiding finger. “Now, Flip,” he said, “take it from one who knows, one who’s been there. The best thing for you to do at this hearing is just come clean, pay whatever they want you to pay, and put it behind you.” The chiding finger waggled. “And don’t play fast and loose again, Flip, that’s my advice.”

  How he got out of that building without strangling Monroe Hall then and there Flip would never know. How he got out of there at all he couldn’t understand, and had no memory of the corridor, the stairs, the front door or anything else until he found himself driving the Subaru past the sullen guard—whose look toward Flip was now reproachful, if you please—and out of the estate.

  He made the turn. He drove away, toward his next appointment. At last, he spoke, through gritted teeth. “Revenge,” he growled. “Revenge.”

  28

  IN A WAY, Marcie felt sorry for Monroe Hall. In the seventeen years she’d worked as an interviewer for Cooper Placement Service, she’d never seen an employer who was so thoroughly disliked. How bad could the man be?

  Mostly, particularly in a rural area like this one, people just sucked it up and got on with it. “What the heck, it’s a job,” was the general opinion about almost anything. In her time, she’d placed personal maids with Iranian ex-wives, chauffeurs who were required to wear bulletproof vests when on the job for notorious drug dealers, gardeners for the weekend houses of top-level fashionistas out of New York, cooks for Ecuadorian aristocrats, dressers for rock stars, secretaries to disgraced politicians writing their truthless memoirs, and not one of those people had ever produced as negative a reaction in a prospective employee as almost everybody gave to the name Monroe Hall.

  “Oh, no, not there, I don’t need a job that bad.”

  “But what’s wrong with—”

  “Let me put it this way, miss. I wouldn’t go to work for that bastard if he paid me.”

  “He will pay you, it’s a job, you can—”

  “Not for me. What else chu got?”

  “Archivist for a professional wrestler called UltraMud.”

  “Oh, I heard a him! Sure! What the heck, it’s a job.”

  How many vacancies were there out to Monroe Hall’s place by now? Attrition was just steadily eating into the workforce out there. Marcie believed, as of this morning, Tuesday, June 14, there were seventeen job slots unfilled out at the estate. Even two openings in security, and you were never supposed to run short on security applicants, particularly if you didn’t worry too much about the prior-convictions check.

  What it added up to, a girl could find herself feeling sorry for Monroe Hall. Oh, of course, only theoretically. She herself wouldn’t work for the son of a bitch on a bet, the way he rode roughshod over family, friend, employee, and the government alike. She was perfectly happy right where she was at Cooper Placement Service, and even if she weren’t, she’d rather work at the Last Call coal mine over in Golgotha City, where filling out your last will and testament was part of the job application, than work for that—

  “D
on’tcha have anything else?”

  The applicant’s question snapped Marcie out of her woolgathering. She shouldn’t be thinking about the dreadful if pathetic Monroe Hall; she should be thinking about a job for the gentleman across the desk from her in her cubicle, uh… Fred Blanchard, most recently a private secretary for a foreign diplomat down in Washington, D.C., now returning to her desk the list of current job availabilities she’d shown him.

  Time to get down to business. “Well, I’m surprised, Mr. Blanchard,” she said, “you haven’t pursued your job search in the greater Washington area. We have fine people in this part of Pennsylvania, but not many international diplomats.”

  “That’s good,” Blanchard told her. He was a cheerful, sharp-featured guy with an easygoing manner. “I’ve had enough of international intrigue for a while,” he told her. “I got family up around here, I thought I’d like a little more laid-back a setting. You’ve gotta have some rich people around here, need a private secretary, somebody to field the phone calls and the correspondence, deal with the press, take care of the archives.”

  “Well, yes, but someone just at the moment in need—”

  He watched her, bright-eyed as a bird. “You thought of something?”

  She leaned closer to him. As neutrally as she possibly could, she spoke the name: “Monroe Hall.”

  He didn’t even blink. Still smiling, he said, “Is that the kind of guy I’m talking about?”

  “Oh, yes, he is,” she said, but then doubt scudded like a cloud across her features. “Have you never heard of him? Monroe Hall?”

  He thought, his smile turning quizzical, “Should I?”

  “His name was in the paper for a while.”

  “Oh, the paper.” Blanchard brushed the fourth estate to one side. “At the embassy,” he said, “we only watched International CNN.”

  “Would you—would you like me to set up an appointment?”

  “Why not?” he said.