The process and the price of conducting ‘business as normal’ had got to be a somewhat dirtier affair in recent months. Everybody wanted a piece of the action, and fat ‘commissions’ for just doing their jobs. It was getting more expensive to keep city and county officials on the payroll, and a lot harder to maintain the fiction of seeming visibly ‘clean’. Anybody who did business on the West Coast accepted that things were different; that folks out West did things differently to folks back East. California was a long way from DC, in many ways it really was another country.
Nothing good had happened in California in the last year. The graft was getting out of control; it was so bad that most ‘businessmen’ like Ben Sullivan and Harvey Fleischer took it for granted that nothing got done without the right palm getting greased. It did not matter that the Governor ran a fairly clean Administration out of Sacramento, or that the Mayors of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego had all mounted determined crack downs on corruption in the last six months, things just kept getting worse.
Within the last month the Sequoyah Country Club had had to employ armed ‘wardens’ to patrol the golf course and surrounding woods to deter grafters and hobos from bothering players out on the course!
It was outrageous!
“Miranda said she might be passing through tomorrow night,” Molly Fleischer announced, deciding that the woes of the World ought to be banished for a couple of hours. “We haven’t seen much of her since she went up to Sacramento.”
“She tells us nothing,” Margaret Sullivan smiled. “The boys are just as bad.” By the time she had stopped having babies Margaret Sullivan’s movie career was over. She had produced four babies in just under six years because in those days that was what you did when you got married; it was not a thing she had agonised over, and besides, she had actually wanted to have Ben Sullivan’s babies but if she had her time again she would probably have stopped after she had David, her second child. She used to worry that something of her angst; her ambivalence must have communicated itself to her youngest offspring. David, the most brilliant of her children had put his siblings to shame from a young age, setting the bar intolerably high for his younger brother Gregory, and for Miranda, who would forever be her baby daughter. David’s elder brother, Ben junior — whom everybody in the family always called Benjamin because ‘Ben’ was confusing when there were two ‘Bens’ in the house, and Benjamin loathed the soubriquet ‘junior’ — was an associate at a downtown LA law firm. Gregory was high school teacher in Marin County, Sausalito. David wanted to be a ‘rocket scientist’ and for all his parents knew, he already was even if his day job was as a post doctoral associate in the Applied Aeronautics Department of Rice University in Houston. The kids were all still in their twenties so the fact none of them had married had only lately started to give her cause for concern. As for Miranda, well, Margaret would have despaired of her beautiful headstrong maddening daughter years ago but for Molly Fleischer. A better mother would have resented another woman supplanting — in some respects — her maternal rights. The truth was that she was wise enough to know that without Molly she would have lost Miranda long ago.
“Miranda said David was in Texas,” the other woman remarked.
“That’s the place to be if the President is serious about this Moon nonsense!” Harvey Fleischer added sarcastically.
There were smiles and guffaws around the table as the first drinks arrived.
It was odd how quickly the friends completely forgot about the shooting less than a mile from where they sat. Sipping Mojitos and Cuban highballs they relaxed, watching the players hacking their way up the eighteenth fairway in the middle distance. It was not from any particular callousness that they so quickly switched their thoughts to other matters; simply that dreadful things had become so commonplace in the brave new post-October War World that there was an unspoken recognition between them that dwelling on the bad things was futile. No amount of worrying was going to make those bad things go away.
It was better by far to carry on as best as possible and to make the most of one’s personal good fortune for so long as it lasted.
Chapter 11
They stepped out of their cabs within moments of each other, exchanged platonic, pecking kisses and stood back one from the other on the pavement outside the Ristorante La Maria.
“I didn’t think you’d take my call,” Dan Brenckmann confessed, grinning in that little boy lost, no hard feelings way of his that despite herself, Gretchen Betancourt half fell for every time.
“I said for you to call if ever you were in DC, didn’t I?”
“Oh, yes,” the man agreed. He was twenty-seven years old and he had been infatuated with Gretchen Betancourt for most of the last two years. This despite the fact that he had known from the start that the youngest daughter of the great Claude Betancourt, the long time lieutenant of old Joe Kennedy and the one man any East Coast Democrat had to keep sweet, was way out of his league. Nevertheless, he was in Gretchen’s thrall and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He had dated a lot of girls before he met her; but none since. Nobody compared to Gretchen and he was not about to pretend that he was anything other than delighted to be escorting her into a plush DC restaurant. “You definitely said that! Actually, you sounded it a little distracted when we spoke?”
“No, it is nothing,” Gretchen assured him quickly. For her part she knew Dan Brenckmann was a lot more than just attracted to her; if she was not careful he would probably follow her around Washington like a faithful puppy dog. Despite her coolness towards him in the past she did actually like Dan. They had, after all, spent that awful night of the war together and those sort of shared memories stayed with one forever. But there was liking a man, and really liking a man and she just did not like Dan like that. Dan was a friend and that was all. “It was just something that came up at work this morning.”
“Ah, working for the United States Deputy Attorney General!” Dan chuckled. “Now isn’t that a thing!”
It was Gretchen’s turn to be wry.
“Yes, it is,” she agreed. She looked over her shoulder at the front of the Ristorante La Maria, brightly illuminated in the cold early evening darkness of the city. “This place is very expensive, if you…”
“I’m in DC running an errand for one of your father’s old clients,” Dan Brenckmann shot back. “When I found out how much he was going to pay me for a week’s work I felt like a gangster!”
“Which one?” She asked.
“Al Capone, Jimmy Hoffa,” the man smiled. “Take your pick.”
Gretchen had been caught unawares by Dan’s phone call early that afternoon. It was not until she had put the phone down that she realised how nice it was going to be to see him again. There was nothing between them, they had held hands for a while when it had seemed like the World might end thirteen months ago, otherwise they had never laid so much as a finger on each other; and yet the thought of meeting Dan face to face had brightened her whole afternoon. Obviously, she was still going to have to get herself out to Andrews Air Force Base in the middle of the night if she wanted five minutes of her boss’s time but she would worry about that later, and it was not as if she was going to have sex with Dan. One night stands seemed to be all the rage for a lot of women of her age, and older, in this city; but she was not about to become a creature of every passing fad or fashion. No, the trick was to keep one’s head above the water, resist going with the flow unless it was one, inevitable; or two, extremely profitable. No attachments; that was the ticket. Nevertheless, a nice evening spent with a nice man was a pleasantly agreeable interlude in her somewhat drab social diary in the District of Columbia.