“I wonder if my father ever gave him money.”
“Let’s hope not,” we heard, immediately behind us.
It was Dennis Hoagland. The grand never-knocker. He was wearing a red rain slicker and a canvas fishing hat pinned with wet flies and nymphs. As usual, Hoagland had waited to come at us from an unseeable angle. His dog, Spiro, unleashed, heeled behind him and yelped once in pain as he lowered himself to the floor.
“It’s nice to see someone working around here,” Hoagland said, rubbing warmth into his hands. He never seemed to address anyone in particular. “I can’t do any work myself. February is the gloomiest month. It’s never been this cloudy, never. The fucking sun must have died. Do you remember a time as dark and damp as this, Jack?”
“It’s always sunny where I live.”
“Damn, Jack.” He stepped forward uneasily, then held his position on the threshold. “That sounds right. You live upstate. I live down here near the city, too close to the harbor. The water. It’s like a lake effect.”
“I know nothing about it, boss.”
“Ha! Young Harry of the City knows. Did I tell you where we’ve got you placed?”
“I thought it was public relations.”
“That too. We’ve gotten lucky. They’re opening a new office in Flushing next week and they need volunteers. Everyone’s talking about taking on the mayor. My opinion — Kwang will get squashed. Old man De Roos is too slick. Anyway, you’ll do some phone work for John Kwang’s second.”
“How did you hook me?”
“Temp agency. Totally legit.”
Jack said, “This is cake, Parky.”
“No problemo,” Hoagland pitched in. “Anyway, she handles the PR and media. Her name is Sherrie Chin-Watt.”
Jack snorted. Sitting up straight in the chair with his thick legs bowed, he looked like a Cossack dancer. He was mincing the floor with his feet. “Even a councilman has a PR man. Or woman.”
“We all need one,” Hoagland said. “My wife, Martha, is mine. She sends out weekly flyers to the neighbors that remind them that I’m a quantity. She includes the slightest hints that I’m an unstable personality. How I am an insomniac. That I still sometimes wet the bed.”
“Is it working?” Jack asked.
“Damn right. No more dog shit on my lawn. It’s clean. No more Girl Scouts at the door, either. No more Scientologists. We live in peace.”
“Who is the woman?” I asked Hoagland, half-recognizing her name.
Hoagland did the drill on her, calling it out with a straight voice.
“Sherrie Chin-Watt. Chinese American, born in San Francisco. Berkeley B.A. Did her law degree at Boalt. Law Review. Her parents run a small wig shop. Nothing special. She’s around your age, Harry, thirty-three or thirty-four. Was married last year to your garden-variety investment banker, corporate finance. Her first marriage, his second. He works too much, sixty, sixty-five hours a week. Headed for the grave. Again nothing special, no real angle there for us. They own a co-op on Central Park West and a bungalow out in East Hampton. No children as yet. She suffers from endometriosis.”
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“I’m friendly with a prominent gynecologist. Coincidence.”
“Jesus.”
“She had a successful laser surgery last year, though she’s not pregnant yet. They sleep in separate rooms because he snores. Other items. They went to Morocco for their honeymoon. They usually eat out, though not together. She lettered in volleyball in high school. Solid setter. She still calls home twice a week. What else? Before signing on with Kwang last year, she was an attorney for the ACLU office in Los Angeles. She made a name for herself then. If you’ll recall, she defended that Indonesian crank in Santa Monica who trained his goat to fart into a portable mike at political rallies.”
“Free speech,” Jack said.
“Sure, sure. The guy was saying they were only being silenced at Republican events.”
“Republicans have the technology,” Jack said.
Hoagland sneered at him. “But Kwang knew her even before that. Apparently she met him while she was in law school, after some talk he’d given there. She’s been with him less than a year now, but things are heating up fast. What, the election’s in two years? They’re not involved yet. Big yet.”
“I’m sure you would know,” I said.
“Oh, I do,” Hoagland belched out. He grimaced, knuckling the back of his thumb into his upper stomach. The doorway held him up. He quickly peeled away the foil wrapping from a roll of antacids.
“I know every rotten shit fucking thing going down in this hemisphere,” he said.
“I keep forgetting.”
“Ha!” He coughed. “You don’t forget anything. That’s why I love you so much, remember? Anyway, you’re going to do Kwang right. Jack will be with you all the way. Do the full workup, certainly. We don’t need anything unusual. Most of it you can do from here. Have you done any prep this week?”
Jack told him, “You’re looking at it, boss.”
“Fine.”
Hoagland then motioned to me to walk with him back to his office. His way of telling you something was to stare at you for three seconds and then grin nervously like you’ve misunderstood each other. Spiro was trying to raise himself. When we got inside Hoagland’s office he closed the glass door. Outside on the floor I saw Jack leave the microfiche room and walk back to his desk. Hoagland shed his slicker and hat. Spiro was waiting outside, whimpering. I sat down in the only other seat, a high metal stool on the other side of his desk.
“I take it you’ve been working things through with your wife. She’s still your wife, right?”
“I think so,” I said. I didn’t want to give him anything. “We’re still legal.”
“Sure thing. We all love that girl, Harry. I know Jack does. Don’t lose her. Martha, she’s been nursing me toward sanity for a million years now. She’s saved my sorry life more than a few times.”
I said, “I guess that’s their job.”
“Damn right,” he replied, pouring a carafe of cloudy water into the top of his coffeemaker. “That’s job one.”
He switched on the coffeemaker and lighted the butt of an old cigarette as he sat down. “Listen. I need you to work carefully through your legend with Jack before you come back to me with it. I’ve told him what I thought your angle might be. It’s just a recommendation, you can take it or leave it. In fact, I want this to be left to you as much as possible. You’re coming off a tough loss with that shrink and we’re all pulling for you.”
I told him I was hearing the cheers.
“You should. No one’s sleeping at night because of you.” He quickly finished the butt and was tapping out a fresh one. He was ignoring Jack’s half tub of olives. Instead his fingers were jittering on the lighter. He was getting himself worked up, wanting to say something inspirational. He was the kind driven by the visions of certain men who’d come to occupy mythic sites in his life, scratchy visions of Rockne, Lombardi, visions of LBJ, Nixon. Then, the darker visions of Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover. Our American Hitlers.
“What happened to you has happened to all of us once. That shrink only got to you because he believed in you so fully. You were giving a fantastic performance. You were never better than in those sessions. You were a genius, Harry, you had that fat fuck squirming on his own couch. He was ready to ooze. You were in perfect position to stick him. He would have told you everything.”
“If he had had anything.”
“Immaterial. Anyway, we couldn’t have known that.”
“So I stuck myself.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he growled. “You were there, in position. That’s what counts. I listened to those tapes, Harry. You were fucking magnificent! I always knew you had it. Christ, I even wanted to help you with your problems. I kept forgetting why you were there. You were brilliant. Tony, Emmy, Academy-fucking-Award.”