During the four years that followed I found that it was not a vocation or profession that needed advertising. The lawyers and the thieves and the insurance companies and even the cops spread the word that I could be trusted to follow instructions and that I was as honest as could be reasonably expected. Nearly all of the assignments came through Myron Greene, four or five or six a year, and they netted me a satisfactory if not gaudy living, even after the alimony payments were dispatched once a month.
Most of the thieves eventually got caught, but some never did — the kidnapers, for example — and those who did wind up in jail always gave me a warm recommendation to anyone who cared to listen. Sometimes I visited them or sent cigarettes and magazines. I felt that it was the least I could do to encourage the source of my income.
“Yours must be a curious sort of life, Mr. St. Ives,” Frances Wingo said as we walked down the hall to the museum’s executive dining room. “I don’t believe I’ve ever met a professional go-between before.”
“Few people do until they need one.”
“Do you have much competition?” she said.
“No,” I said. “Only my better judgment.”
Chapter three
I knew two of the three men who stood at the small bar at the far end of the dining room. The tall, fragile one with the salt and pepper forelock that kept flopping down into his melancholy eyes was Senator Augustus Kehoel (pronounced “curl” for some reason) of Ohio, who was the delight of the political cartoonists. They always made him look like a grief-stricken sheep dog. At twenty-four and just out of the World War II army with something of a hero’s record, he had married into a car-wax fortune and over the years had spent goodly chunks of it getting himself elected to the state legislature, the U.S. House of Representatives, and finally to the Senate. It was as high as he would ever go although he once had hinted to me of some yearning to be vice-president, which only demonstrated that he was a reasonable man of limited ambition.
Next to him, with a carefully manicured hand in firm control of a double martini, was Lawrence Ignatius Teague, president of the million-member Aluminum Workers of America (AFL–CIO), and pink of cheek and white of hair. I wondered if he still used a blue rinse. During an internal union scrap five or six years before, one of his dissident staff members had sneaked us both into Teague’s suite at the Waldorf, ushered me into a bathroom, and grimly displayed a bottle of blue rinse that he swore the labor leader used faithfully, but I didn’t think it was anything to hang a man for.
“You know Senator Kehoel,” Mrs. Wingo said.
“Senator.”
“Good to see you, Phil,” he said, and we shook hands.
“And Lawrence Teague.”
“Hello, Larry.”
“Wonderful to see you, Phil,” he said, putting his glass down and grabbing my right hand with both of his. “Wonderful.” It really wasn’t, but this was called the Teague touch and I suppose it had helped him to stay in office for more than two decades at sixty thousand a year plus an unlimited expense account. For all I knew, he was worth it.
I told him that I thought it was wonderful, too, and then turned to the third man at the bar who stood quietly, a seemingly untouched drink at his elbow, and separated by far more than space from the senator and the union president. Only his green eyes moved as I turned to him. They settled first on my face, then traveled down to take in and assess my tie, jacket, trousers, and shoes, and finally rose again to fix themselves on a spot an inch or so above my left eyebrow. Somehow I resisted the impulse to finger the spot to find out how deep the hole went.
“And the chairman of our executive committee,” Frances Wingo was saying, “Winfield Spencer. Mr. Spencer, Mr. St. Ives.”
When Spencer moved, he seemed to do so reluctantly, as if it cost him a great deal of effort. He extended his right hand and I accepted it. Although not at all keen on meaty handshakes, I did expect something more than I got from Winfield Spencer, who held his own hand perfectly still while I either pressed or massaged or fondled it, I’m still not quite sure which, but he didn’t seem to care much for whatever I was doing and neither did I, so I dropped it as soon as I could.
“Mr. Spencer,” I said.
“St. Ives,” he murmured, lowered his gaze, turned quickly, rested his elbows on the bar, and began a careful study of the labels on the bottles behind it.
Only Winfield Spencer’s name would cause you to look at him twice if you were interested in money and three times if you were concerned with power. Even in August he wore a three-piece gray worsted suit that could have been tailored this year or in 1939; it was that kind of material and that kind of cut. His hair was pewter gray and it looked as if he trimmed it himself, but had botched the job. He had no sideburns and the back of his neck was irregularly shaved an inch or so above a frayed white collar displaying a few threads that the manicure scissors had missed.
Over the years Spencer seemed to have created a face for himself that was at once both shy and forbidding. It was an ugly face, purposely ugly, I thought, because the mouth was always pursed, the forehead was always frowned, and the chin, a little small by some standards, was always thrust out in an aggressively unpleasant manner. The clip-on maroon bow tie that he wore beneath it didn’t help things any either.
I found it difficult to believe that Winfield Spencer had once shot down nine Messerschmitts for the Royal Canadian Air Force. I found it even more difficult to believe that he was either the fifth- or sixth-richest man in the nation.
The Spencer fortune had been founded in the 1850’s on Pennsylvania coal. It was augmented by Colorado gold and silver, Montana copper, some short-line railroads, and later by Texas, Oklahoma, and California oil, and much later by Utah uranium. It was now buttressed by refineries, a fleet of tankers, and a Washington bank whose deposits, including the considerable pension funds from Teague’s aluminum workers, had been used to buy into some of the nation’s most profitable businesses; and Spencer’s bank made sure that these businesses continued to be profitable by a complicated, almost unravelable tangle of interlocking directorates.
Just out of Princeton in 1939, Spencer had joined the Canadian air force in September and got nine of his own before he was shot down over the Channel in the late summer of 1942. He was invalided back to the States that fall because of injuries, some said, while others claimed that he was eased out because of psychological reasons.
Since then Spencer had devoted himself to anonymity, the family fortune, and art. It was art that had brought him and Amos Coulter together. In the early 1950’s a Matisse had been auctioned in London by Sotheby’s. Spencer’s agents had been instructed to buy it; Amos Coulter was on hand to do his own bidding. But Coulter’s new fortune proved no match for Spencer’s older and considerably larger bankroll. Spencer got the Matisse and when informed how high Amos Coulter had bid for it, he had had the picture crated and sent to Coulter without any notice, not even a card.
The two men subsequently became friends, or close acquaintances at any rate, since Spencer was said to have no friends. Coulter was one of the three dozen or so persons who had been invited to view the Spencer collection that was carefully housed and guarded in a private gallery built on his plantation near Warrenton, Virginia, and which supposedly contained the world’s finest collection of postimpressionists. But despite the fact that he had been as close to Amos Coulter as he had ever been to anyone, it still took three personal phone calls from the President himself before Winfield Spencer agreed to serve as chairman of the Coulter Museum’s executive committee.