“Just one thing that struck me,” he said.
“What?”
“When you were describing why you could not return the shield to us. It sounded as though your excuses were coming from the lips of one of your minor State Department officials.” He smiled broadly as I opened the door and got out. “Good-by,” he said. I merely nodded and watched the car as it drew away from the curb. Considering what Mbwato said he had just been through in Washington, he could probably think of no more cutting remark for a parting insult. And it may have been that there wasn’t one.
Chapter nine
The rational stranger took the elevator up to his ninth-floor de luxe efficiency, fetched a bottle of Scotch down from the cabinet above the Pullman sink, and poured himself a jumbo drink in the vain hope that it would help to erase the memory of the hopelessness and pain that seemed to have flickered in the eyes of Conception Mbwato.
It didn’t, of course. It merely transformed the Rational Stranger into the Sententious Slob who stood by the window and looked down at the street while mouthing to himself such pithy aphorisms as “the master of action oft becomes the servant of regret” and “the fool thinks with his heart; the wise man with his mind.” They weren’t very good aphorisms, and the Scotch didn’t help any, so I picked up the Manhattan directory and looked up the number and address of Frank Spellacy. There was only one Spellacy in the book and he had a Park Avenue address, which could mean something or nothing at all. I dialed the number and a man’s voice answered on the second ring with “Mesa Verde Estates.”
“Mr. Spellacy, please.”
“This is Mr. Spellacy,” the voice said, a pleasant, cheerful voice that seemed to be larded with great, fat streaks of sincerity. “My secretary’s just stepped out for the institutional coffee break.” He chuckled about that, as if he were gently tolerant of most of the world’s foibles. “Now how can I help you?”
“I’d like to talk to you,” I said. “This afternoon. My name’s St. Ives. Philip St. Ives.”
There was a moment’s silence; perhaps half a moment, only a beat really, and then Spellacy’s voice came over the phone again, still exuding its confidence, but tinged with a touch of regret. “I was just glancing at my appointment book, Mr. St. Ives, and it seems that I’m rather tied up this afternoon with a couple of important conferences. Perhaps we could make it later in the week — Friday would be good. Yes. Say Friday afternoon at three?”
“No. Friday at three’s no good. This afternoon at four is fine.”
“I just told you—”
“I know what you told me. A couple of important conferences. Postpone them.”
“Look, Mr. St. John—”
“Ives,” I said. “St. Ives.”
“Ives then. I’m not in the habit of having strangers call me up and tell me how to run my business.” He managed to get some real indignation into that.
“But I’m not exactly a stranger, am I? I believe we have some mutual friends. We have the art dealer, Mr. Albert Shippo, and that man about town, the noted sportsman, Mr. Johnny Parisi. In fact, I had dinner with Johnny just last night.”
“You mention my name?” Spellacy said, and all the cheerfulness and goodwill were gone.
“That’s something I thought we might talk about. This afternoon.”
There was another pause, this time a long one, and then Spellacy said, “All right. Four o’clock. Here.”
“At four,” I said, and hung up.
I was boiling some water for a cup of tea and slicing up some cucumbers for a sandwich when I heard the knock at the door. The tomato soup and crackers hadn’t been enough and I was hungry again. I had been half watching some English film on TV where the principals sat around drinking tea and eating cucumber sandwiches, which I happen to like, and it had provoked my appetite, but then I’m highly susceptible to fictional portrayals of food, whether written or filmed. In my youth the passages that Thomas Wolfe wrote about food had made me ravenous. And once, while reading Tom Lea’s The Brave Bulls, I had put the book down, left my apartment, and walked four miles to find a Spanish-American store that sold canned tortillas and frijoles. Now I found myself craving a cucumber sandwich. I laid the knife on the minuscule drainboard, went to the door, and opened it. Lieutenant Kenneth Ogden of vice stood there, wearing one of his three-hundred-dollar suits and a smile that only made him look a little less angry than usual.
“Would you like a cucumber sandwich?” I said.
“A what?”
“A cucumber sandwich. Come on in.”
He came in. “The trouble with you, St. Ives, is that you live alone. It’s not natural. It’s against nature and God.”
“If you don’t want a cucumber sandwich, would you like a drink? I’ve got Scotch, vodka, and bourbon.”
“Bourbon,” Ogden said. “And water.”
I mixed him a bourbon and water and then went back to my sandwich. I cut the crusts off the bread, spread butter on both pieces, placed the cucumbers carefully on one slice, covered it with the other, and then cut it diagonally both ways into four parts — just like an old maid expecting an afternoon call from the vicar.
Ogden stood to one side and watched me work. I glanced at him once and there didn’t seem to be any admiration in his gaze. I found the tea bags and placed one in a cup and poured it full of boiling water. When it had steeped enough I carried it and the cucumber sandwich over to my favorite chair and lowered myself into it carefully, holding the cup of tea in one hand, the cucumber sandwich in the other.
“You oughta get married again,” he said. “Or get a job. Cucumber sandwiches at half-past two in the afternoon and the goddamned TV set on along with it. Christ.” He moved over to the set and switched it off. “You’re coming apart, St. Ives. Your seams are splitting.”
“I like cucumbers,” I said. “I also like tea and cucumber sandwiches.” I took a bite and chewed it slowly. It didn’t taste as good as I’d thought it would. If I could have eaten it alone while watching the actors in the English film eat their sandwiches, it probably would have tasted all right.
“What’s on your mind?” I said.
Ogden took a small swallow of his drink. “That’s good bourbon,” he said.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I don’t drink bourbon. It’s another one of my idiosyncrasies probably brought about by a monklike existence.”
Ogden quit wandering around the room and sat in a chair opposite me. Although pushing fifty or five years past it, he wore his clothes well, but they did nothing to disguise the gray in his short-cropped hair or the lines in his face, all of which seemed to turn down, as if in constant disapproval. It was an oblong face, almost as wide at the chin as it was at the forehead. It was also a tough face, a hard one, which had heard all the lies and witnessed all the depravity that New York had to offer. His Captain Easy nose, a little red at the tip, snuffled every few minutes as if he had just smelled something rotten but couldn’t quite tell what it was. The eyes that looked at me over the rim of his glass were blue with all the color and warmth of a dreary day in February.
“How’s your daughter?” I said, and took a sip of my tea.
“Next month. She starts next month.”
“Where?”
“Ohio State. I’m going to drive her out.”
“It’s a good school.”
“Yeah. That’s what I hear. God knows, it costs enough.”
“Why didn’t she go closer to home?”
Ogden waved his left hand. “Ah, Christ, you know kids. They don’t wanta stay home and go to college. They wanta get away, out of the state somewhere, at least out of town. That’s half of it, I guess.”