Dmitri, a short wide man with thick Slavic features and hands like soup bowls, hoisted a boar’s carcass to the cutting block. With obvious pride, he waited for Marshal Dworshansky to inspect the provision. He was not disappointed.
‘Dmitri, in a desert you could find ice water, and-in Siberia, you could gather warm mushrooms, but in America you are even more magnificent. Where did you ever get a piece of real meat, hard meat without the heavy marbling of fat? Tell me how you did it, Dmitri. No. Don’t tell me, for then your magic would be lost.’
Dmitri dropped to one knee and kissed the marshal’s hands.
‘Up, up, Dmitri. None of that.’
‘I would die for you, Marshal.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ said Marshal Dworshansky lifting the man to his feet. ‘And leave me to starve among these savages without my beloved Dmitri?’
‘You will have boar in wine as none of your ancestors’ ancestors has ever had,’ said Dmitri, and despite protestations, insisted upon kissing the marshal’s hands again.
In the stateroom, Marshal Dworshansky saw his daughter and granddaughter reading fashion magazines, the mother scarcely older-looking than her college-senior daughter, both with the fine high Dworshansky cheekbones, both with stunningly clear-blue eyes, and both the joy and the light of his life.
‘Darlings,’ he called out, opening his arms. His granddaughter leaped into his arms as though she were still a toddler, laughing and showering kisses on his cheeks.
His daughter approached him with more mature steps, but the embrace was deeper and stronger, a mature woman’s love for her father.
‘Hello, papa,’ she said, and this would have surprised many people in Manhattan, who knew her as Dorothy Walker, president of Walker, Handleman and Daser, the queen of the cold bitches of Madison Avenue, the woman who had battled the giants and won.
One reason for Dorothy Walker’s success was not, as many rumoured, her ability to find the right bed at the right time, but her superior business sense, and another fact unknown to anyone outside this calm stateroom in a turbulent sea. Her little advertising agency was never little at all. It opened its doors with more than $25 million in assets, the personal dowry returned by her husband before he disappeared two decades before.
Unlike other little shops that begin with creative talents and hopes, Walker, Handleman and Daser began with the ability to go ten years without a client. Naturally, not needing business for survival, the agency found business ganging up at its front door.
‘Have you been a good boy, papa?’ asked Dorothy Walker, patting her father’s flat stomach.
‘I have not looked for trouble.’
‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ said Dorothy Walker.
‘Oh, grandpa. Are you doing exciting things again?’
‘Teri is under the impression that your life has been a romantic one, papa. I wish you had never told her those stories.’
‘Stories? They are all true, my dear.’
‘Which makes them worse, papa. Now, please.’
‘Oh, mommy. You’re so out of it. Grandpa is so cool, so with it, and you keep putting him down. Really, mommy.’
‘Cool and with it, I can buy for $25,000 a year, take your choice of weight, size and hair styling. Your grandfather is too old and too mature to be out adventuring around the world.’
‘Enough controversy,’ said Marshal Dworshansky. ‘Tell me the good things that are happening to you.’
Teri had a basketful of good things and she explained them in detail, each with a tense crisis and each of great import, from a new boyfriend to a professor who hated her.
‘Which professor?’ asked Marshal Dworshansky.
‘Never mind, papa—and Teri, don’t you tell him.’
‘Ah, my daughter is so fierce. Listen to your mother.’
After the late dinner was over and after the granddaughter had gone to bed, Dorothy Walker, nee Dworshansky, spoke seriously to her father.
‘All right. What is it this time?’
‘What is what?’ asked the marshal with great innocence.
‘Your happiness.’
‘I am happy to see my loved ones again.’
‘Papa, you can bullshit prime ministers and governors and generals and oil sheiks. But you can’t bullshit me. Now there is one happiness for seeing me and Teri, and another when you’ve been out in one of your street fights.’
Marshal Dworshansky stiffened. ‘The Spanish Civil War was not a street fight. World War II was not a street fight. South America was not a street fight, nor was the Yemeni campaign.’
‘Papa, this is Dorothy you’re talking to. I know, no matter how you plan things, you always wind up doing the dirty work yourself. And it makes you very happy. What is it this time? What is it that would make you break your promise to me?’
‘I didn’t break my promise. I did not seek this out. I was truthfully minding my own business,’ said Marshal Dworshansky, and then he told her about having cocktails with Mayor Cartwright in Miami Beach when he got some bad news. And all Marshal Dworshansky had said was a mere: ‘If I were in your shoes, I would not panic. I would…’
And like so many other campaigns, this one had begun like that. A bit of good advice, then a promise of reward from those he served. Unlike other soldiers of fortune however, Marshal Dworshansky was not a penniless beggar who would settle for jewels or money. Like his daughter, he always went for bigger game. Not needing money, he demanded and got much more than money.
‘I’ve never had a city before,’ he said. ‘And besides, the campaign is all over. Mayor Cartwright cannot lose.’
‘And how many ice picks have you left in how many ears?’
‘Some things, as you know, are necessary to do, even when we do not take pleasure in them. But it should be over now. The enemy is stumped.’
And when Marshal Dworshansky outlined who he thought the enemy was, his daughter looked away from him in anger.
‘You know, papa, I used to resent those Polish jokes. But now, after hearing this, after listening to you so incredibly happy about your wonderful new enemy, I’m beginning to wonder if those jokes did not make us look a bit too intelligent.’
Dworshansky was curious. He had never heard of a Polish joke.
‘If you’d leave this yacht other than to cause mayhem or stick an ice pick in someone’s ear, papa, you’d find out what the world is up to.’
Intrigued, the marshal demanded to hear Polish jokes and to his daughter’s reluctant good humour, he laughed uproariously at each.
‘I’ve heard them before,’ he said, slapping a knee gleefully. ‘We used to call them Ukranian jokes. Did you ever hear about the Ukranian who went to college?’
Dorothy shook her head.
‘Neither has anyone else,’ said Dworshansky and exploded in a booming laugh that reddened his face and brought him near helplessness every time he repeated: ‘Neither has anyone else.’
‘That’s a horrible joke, papa,’ laughed Dorothy Walker, not wanting to encourage her father, but his laughter was too contagious for her to resist.
For the rest of the night he told Ukranian jokes and would not stop even when his ship’s radio operator interrupted to tell him Mayor Cartwright was trying desperately to reach him.
‘An urgent problem, Marshal,’ said the radio operator. ‘Someone named Moskowitz is dead.’
"Dorothy" said Marshal Dworshansky, ‘Have you ever heard about the Ukranian who went to college?’
CHAPTER NINE
Hurricane warnings were sounded in the Miami Beach area, and a shaky Sheriff McAdow met with Mayor Cartwright in the mayor’s spacious one-story ranch house, as dark winds whipped through palm trees on the lawn.
Cartwright turned away from his shortwave radio, his face flushed. He wore Bermuda shorts and a white tee shirt. An open bottle of bourbon sat on top of the set.