“I’m glad you mentioned it,” he said. “I really am. It demonstrates your level of awareness. However, while we were negotiating our contract, we also investigated the personal background and history of the two gentlemen in question. We secured some most interesting information,”
“Okay,” I said. “You’ve answered my first question. The advocates, I take it, are Dr. Colfax and Phetwick the third and the people they can control through sympathy or blackmail or coercion. Right?”
“Right,” Orcutt said.
“My last question — for tonight, at least. The New Orleans adversaries or bunch or crowd. Who runs it?”
“He’s on the list under adversaries,” Orcutt said.
“I only skimmed it.”
“His name is Ramsey Lynch.”
I leaned back into the couch and rested my head against its rich green upholstery. For several moments, long ones, I inspected the ceiling, which was painted the color of vanilla ice cream. Finally, I said, “Middle name Montgomery?”
“Lynch’s?” Orcutt said.
“Yes.”
“I really couldn’t say. Homer dug up most of the information on him.”
“Then he didn’t dig far enough,” I said.
“I beg your pardon.”
“You should. Ramsey Lynch. That isn’t his real name.”
Necessary snorted. “He did eighteen months in Atlanta under it and that was a Federal rap.”
“I know,” I said. “But that still doesn’t make it his real name.”
“Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said, “I’m really not overly fond of melodrama. If you have something to say...” He let the sentence die as if it had bored itself to death.
I looked at him. His dark blue eyes were chillier than usual. So was his expression. I examined him carefully for a few moments and could find nothing that I really liked.
“Well?” he said in his own private brand of frozen italics.
“Well,” I said, mimicking him for no special reason other than I felt he was being a little pompous for twenty-six. “His name isn’t Ramsey Lynch. His name is Montgomery Vicker. He’s the brother of Gerald Vicker. You remember Gerald. He’s the one you retained in Hong Kong who recommended me. He’s the one I got fired because he killed the wrong man.”
Chapter 12
I inherited Gerald Vicker. He came with the desk and the filing cabinets and the stationery and the thirty-six-year-old Memphis secretary (my first one) who finally found romance in the Far East and married a pink ginfaced Volkswagen dealer from Malaysia. He was a widower who, after a few drinks, had once confided that my former secretary was a terrific old girl in the sack. She was the one who taught me how to write up an insurance policy.
It was Carmingler, of course, who finally told me about Vicker only three or four hours before I was to catch a plane to San Francisco and there make a connecting flight to Hong Kong. Carmingler brought up Vicker’s name casually, as if he were mentioning a mutual friend who had just changed jobs, got married, or gone to jail. We were sitting in one of those bare offices that Carmingler always seemed to prefer. This one was in the Kansas City Post Office and although I’ve tried often enough, I still can’t remember why we met in Kansas City.
The room was small, with only one window. It held a Federal-green desk and two matching chairs, a black telephone, and a picture of the President. It was during the last days of Eisenhower’s administration and the photograph was the one that made him look as if he had actually enjoyed the job.
“You’ll be in full control, of course,” Carmingler said.
“Vicker was number two under Grimes, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he was. Did a good job of it, too.”
“And he’ll be number two under me, the new boy?”
“I can see what you’re driving at, but there’s no need to worry. None at all.”
“Then he’s not human,” I said. Carmingler puffed on his pipe two or three times and then waved it at me for either emphasis or reassurance. “Vicker is all right,” he said. “He’s one of the old crowd who came with us during the big war, drifted away, and then came back. He’s solid.”
Carmingler had been either fourteen or fifteen when World War II ended, but he always referred to the OSS as the “old crowd” or “us” or “we.” It was one of his minor foibles that I eventually found time to forgive.
“Does Vicker know anything about insurance?” I said.
“No more than you, but your secretary does. Her name’s Klett, I believe.” He took out a small Leathersmith notebook to make sure. “Francine Klett. Miss.”
“Any more surprises?” I said.
Carmingler looked around for an ashtray to knock his pipe out in, but finding none, settled on a metal wastebasket that was filled with paper. For a moment I thought that he wanted to burn down the post office.
“This is quite a leg up for you,” he said.
“That’s been impressed on me often enough.”
“Vicker should prove quite useful. He’s been out there a long time, knows everyone, and has a quick mind.”
“Then why doesn’t he have my job?”
Carmingler rubbed the bowl of his pipe against some of the freckles that were sprinkled over his large pink nose which some kindly person had once described to me as distinguished. If that meant it was a nose that you wouldn’t soon forget, the kindly person was right. “We thought about that,” he finally said when he finished his internal debate about how much to tell me.
“And?”
“We decided that you were the better man for the job.”
“That still doesn’t tell me anything,” I said. “What’s the matter with Vicker? Does he drink, gamble, whore around, and talk too much? Or does he just diddle the expense account and stay out late at night?”
Carmingler smiled, displaying his long, wide, strong teeth that helped him to resemble a horse. “No, it’s none of that. It’s simply that we find him — well — a bit overly ambitious.”
“Christ,” I said. “I bet he has a lean and hungry look, too.”
Despite the Phi Beta Kappa key there were some gaping holes in Carmingler’s education. He looked surprised for a second and then nodded thoughtfully. “Why, yes, now that you mention it. He does look a bit that way.”
It was no good from the beginning and both Vicker and I knew it. Age had something to do with it, but not all. He was forty and I was barely twenty-seven. He was patronizing and I was insufficiently deferential. He talked too much, sometimes even brilliantly, but I listened too little. His attention to detail was phenomenal and he resented my cavalier attitude. His Chinese had been painfully acquired and my easy fluency irritated him. He had an opinion about everything in God’s world and if I didn’t share them, he sulked. He would spend an hour telling me why a Patek Phillippe was better than a Rolex Oyster; or why a Nikon was better than a Leica and how a Canon was the match for both; or why the memory of Mao would be banished in less than a year after his death. He was shrewd, glib, and forgot nothing. He lied beautifully, fretted incessantly, and vaguely alluded to tragic experiences during his stretch with the OSS. He was a walking definition of overweening ambition that I found awful and which I got stuck with until one August day three years and eight months later.
It was the middle of August, around the fifteenth, and Vicker was already at his desk when I arrived at the then fancy, new downtown island offices of Minneapolis Mutual on Pedder Street, which I’d leased just to shut him up. I did balk, however, when he wanted to issue a press release claiming that the reason for our move was a recordshattering jump in business.
He walked into my office carrying his coffee cup, the one with “Vicker” carefully glazed on it in a Chinese ideograph. He liked having his name on things and his shirts, ties, lighter, and cigarette case were all monogrammed. He sat in one of the chairs and propped his feet on my desk, probably because he knew that it irritated me.