After Kit’s father had been killed, Kit had been raised by ranchers. By his uncles, his mother’s two brothers, men without children of their own. One preferred life as a cowboy bachelor and the other — this was supposed to be a secret — preferred men. The brothers raised beef cattle on a spread of nearly three hundred acres in central Minnesota. And while Kit was growing up, again and again they’d taken him through the same style of talk as Leo liked to use. A style with a built-in contradiction. The body language came across crystal-clear, impossible to misunderstand, while the words spoken remained fuzzy and elliptical. Kit’s uncles had always kept him guessing. They’d mention something Kit had never seen, some place he’d never been to, and expect him to understand a whole range of implied meaning. “Hibbing,” an uncle would say, or “Mesabi red.” From that alone Kit was supposed to deduce an entire way of life. Plus out of nowhere these ranchers could come up with intensely personal questions he shouldn’t have had to answer in the first place.
“What about your wife?” Leo Mirini asked, still fingering the stone on his desktop. “Can’t she help you?”
Kit touched his neck.
“Your wife,” Leo said, “she’s old Boston, right? Old Boston, an old family. They gotta have somebody over at the State House.”
“I can’t do that,” Kit said.
“You can’t? A reporter can’t ask his wife?”
Kit took a crack at silence himself. Trying to relax, he stared from under his eyebrows. Leo changed the angle of his chin.
“You’re sure they’re going in there?”
Kit waited out the black thought that neither the Saturday call nor this morning’s confirmation had got it right.
“Of course I’m sure,” he said.
The old man left off stroking the desktop rock. He refolded his hands under his belly. Kit remembered his misguided attempt with Bette and wondered if, in coming to Leo, he was again out of line. What was the protocol here? He tried to reckon meaning from the bulge of Leo’s paunch, the shrunkenness of the neck. He’d never seen the father so still, so thoughtful.
“Well, Kit, hey,” Leo said finally. “It’s good news, yeah. Very good news. Hey!”
Surprised him. Something like ten minutes late, the old man at last got around to congratulations. His hands came back up and his satchelmouth showed teeth. Kit worried for a moment that there might be another round of neck massage. The CEO’s office was small enough that with his “hey” and “how ‘bout that,” the man may have made the pictures on the walls shiver. Kit may have seen it happen. He tried to keep up, grinning.
“Thanks,” Kit said, “thanks.”
“And I think I got an idea here, Kit. I think I can help.”
“You can?”
Surprised him, surprised him. One of Leo’s brown hands remained in mid-air between them, but its message had changed. A moment ago that hand had been a celebration, gimme five, but now it was a warning: Hush. With that one statement the old man’s voice had dropped. Kit latched up the jack-in-the-box in his chest—he can help! — and checked the window, the doorway. The view was of blind waterfront warehouses, and the office remained closed.
“You remember my business down in Surinam?” Leo asked.
Surinam?
“Sure Leo,” Kit said, “I remember. Your bauxite.” Raw material for the Mirinex product line. Leo had set up one of his sons down there, along with a Caribbean bank account.
“Right,” Leo said. “Cheap labor, cheap product.”
Kit nodded. The Texas Observer, he figured, probably had a little dirty money behind it too. Baptist sleazeball oil money or something.
“Right. I mean, I been thinking about Surinam, Kit. You help me out down there, I’ll help you out up here. I been trying to figure a way I could get some more cash to my boy.”
“Cash?”
“Kit, kid. Cash, I mean, that’s how you do business down there. You don’t pay much like I told you, you don’t hardly pay anything, not real money. But you have to be down there with like three thousand, maybe five thousand dollars. Cash. You have to be ready, see what I mean?”
Kit fitted his paper stick upright beneath his chin.
“Lately, whenever my boy tries to do business,” Leo went on, “it seems like somebody else’s got the cash. Somebody else’s trying to cut in.”
Kit’s stick was straight up, his spine likewise. Not only did Leo’s problem seem a long way from the Building Commission, but also the whole subject left Kit feeling unready. In the newspaper network people rarely talked about cash. Whether a writer was at the East End News, the Phoenix, or even the lower rungs of the Globe, everyone understood that there simply wasn’t much money involved. Kit’s friends tended to mention specific figures only when they’d worked up a good head of contempt — contempt being, of course, the best camouflage for envy. Can you believe, someone might say, they paid twelve hundred dollars for that piece of shit? The sort of steeply pitched attitude that made Zia Mirini a natural for the job.
Zia’s father explained that, at the Surinam plant, the labor varied from job to job. “Sometimes it takes a hundred women, punching them out round the clock, and then sometimes the place is practically empty.”
“I hear you, Leo.” Texas Monthly probably had cocaine money behind it. Maybe Mexican babies-for-sale money.
“So whenever I go down there, Kit, I got to have cash. Cash in hand, for the boy. That’s where you come in.
“Kit, kid,” Leo went on. “I wonder if you know how bad it looks, a businessman writing out all these checks to cash.”
“Cash,” Kit said.
“Kit, lemme tell you. Writing checks to cash, a businessman might as well just drop trou and bend over.” Leo had swung closer, his bulk on his forearms. He complained a while about audits, the IRS. “Someone like you, Kit, I mean. You probably never had to go through an audit.”
Aw, why hadn’t Kit spent more time in Boston? Why didn’t he know better the scams a guy in Leo’s line of work might pull? “Well Leo,” he tried, “I would think that’s what you’ve got accountants for.”
“Kit, madonn’. I’ve got accountants. Fucking con artists, the things they try to talk you into.” The old man went into another brief round of complaints. Another set of terms Kit had never heard of: general ledger, discounted cash flow.
“So Kit,” Leo said. “So what I’m thinking is, I’ll give you some more money.”
“What?”
“Oh, now he lightens up. Oh-ho, hey-yey. I’m offering you extra cash, Kit. That’s what we’re talking about here. Could you use an extra grand for January?”
“A, a grand? A thousand dollars?”
The old man’s smile showed some tongue.
Latch it up, Viddich. “Leo,” Kit said, “you know what my budget is.”
“I know it’s only two weeks till the next issue. And I know your budget, yeah.”
“Leo, what’s the deal? What do you want?”
“It might sound a little rough.”
Kit had come up here, after all. He’d come and he’d asked.
“Here’s how it works. Kit, say I give you a check for twenty-five hundred. I mean, your first one, I can give you that next week. You could be taking twenty-five hundred dollars to the bank Monday morning.” Leo had brought his smile so close that Kit could smell his coffee. “But then, Kit, every time I do this for you, you do something for me. You get me back fifteen hundred. Cash.”