“Tomorrow morning,” Orcutt said to her and turned once more to me, smiling as nastily as he could. I thought he did well at it. “Will that be satisfactory?”
“Perfectly.”
“After you count your money,” he said, “what do you do next?”
“What do we do,” I said, correcting him only because I knew that he didn’t like it.
“Very well. We.”
“We establish my bona fides.”
“How?”
“We give them something.”
“What?” Orcutt said.
“Not what, but who.”
“Ah!” he said. Orcutt was with me now. For a time there I thought he’d been slowing down. “A pawn,” he said.
“No. More of a knight or a bishop.”
“Who?”
“Someone on your list of advocates. Someone important. Preferably someone popular.”
“And what do they do with him?”
“They ruin him,” I said, “If your conscience bothers you, pick somebody who needs ruining.”
Orcutt’s eyes were glittering now as he stood before me, his hands jammed deep into the pockets of his yellow silk smoking jacket. “Then what?”
“We — or I — give them somebody else to ruin, again somebody who’s closely linked with our side. And again he’s got to be well known and well liked.”
“Of course,” Orcutt murmured. “Of course.”
“Lynch and his people will be suspicious the first time. They’ll suspect it’s a trap; that I’m lying. But the second victim I hand over should establish my reliability. I expect that they’ll begin feeding me phony information to feed to you. You’ll act on it. Or seem to, but you’ll also take countervailing measures. As far as Lynch and friends are concerned, you’ve swallowed it. I’ll be with them, on the inside, passing their spurious information to you and the real stuff from you to them.”
“It might work,” Orcutt said. “It just might.”
“It’ll get me inside,” I said. “That’s all. The Lynch people will never quite believe me, not even after I’ve helped them ruin a couple of persons. They’ll still suspect my — oh, hell, my loyalty, you might say. But they’ll play along because they think they’re smart enough to spot any cross I might try. I’m betting they’re not and all I’ve got to back that up is eleven years of nasty experience along similar lines.”
Orcutt tapped his lower lip with his right forefinger. “You would be, in effect, a double agent.”
“No,” I said. “I’d be a triple agent and that’s the trickiest kind. There aren’t many around. Not ones who’re pushing forty.”
“Triple agent,” Orcutt said in a soft low tone and then said it again. He almost seemed to run his tongue over it. “Oh, I like that! What do you think, Homer?”
Necessary nodded slowly. “It’s good,” he said. “Like Dye says, it’ll get him inside. What I want to know is who gets set up?”
“You mean whom do we ruin?” Orcutt asked.
Necessary nodded again, even more slowly. “Just so it’s not somebody in this room, I don’t care.”
“You wouldn’t care if it were, as long as it’s not you,” Carol Thackerty said.
Necessary smiled at her coldly. “You’re right, sweetheart, so long as it’s not me.”
Orcutt giggled. “Then whom shall we pick?”
“Not we,” I said. “You.”
“Ah,” Orcutt said and tapped his finger against his lower lip. “I see. They must be prominent, but not so prominent that it will ruin the reform slate’s chances, correct?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said patiently. “If you do it early enough, it’ll be forgotten by election day. It’ll be old news. People will be tired of it. They’ll want something else.”
“Something just as juicy, maybe more so,” Necessary said.
“You’re right,” I said. “And that’s why I have to get inside.”
“Do you think we can find something like that?” Orcutt said and started pacing again, silently this time. He straightened another picture, gave himself one more approving glance in the mirror, fiddled with the knot in his tie, and then turned toward me. “This — this — well, whatever it is that you’ll look for in the Lynch camp, or manufacture or whatever. Do you have any idea of what it might be?”
“It’ll be slimy,” Carol Thackerty said.
“The slimier the better,” Necessary said and smiled comfortably. It seemed to be his kind of meeting.
“I don’t know what shape it’ll take,” I said. “Not yet.”
“And my immediate task is to select two persons of this community to be ruined by Lynch and his associates? Two of our more prominent supporters?”
“That’s right.”
“What do you mean by ruined?”
“Scandal,” I said. “Public ridicule and scorn. Shattered reputations. Jesus, you know what ruined means.”
“Yes,” he said softly. “Yes, I do. And you want me to select these two persons or families or however it works out?”
“It’s your job.”
“There should be a number of choices,” he said.
“There always are.”
“They won’t be innocents, of course.”
“If they were, you couldn’t ruin them.”
“It’s really a little like playing God, isn’t it?”
“I’ve known some who’ve grown to like it,” I said.
“What is it — power?”
I nodded. “That’s part of it.”
“It should create quite a stir,” Orcutt said.
“You mean stink,” Necessary said.
“Yes,” Orcutt said and looked at me. “But not as great as the one that you’ll create.”
“No.”
“I trust, Mr. Dye, that you haven’t forgotten your ultimate role.”
“No,” I said. “When it’s all over I still get ridden out of town on a rail,”
“The citizenry will need a catharsis then — something that will purge them of their emotions. It’s all very much like a Greek tragedy, don’t you think? Everything is so inevitable.”
“Somebody’s got to play God, Victor,” Carol Thackerty said. “It may as well be you.”
Orcutt tugged at his lower lip, frowned, and then brightened. “You know something,” he said, “I really think that I’ll like it.”
“I thought that you might,” I said.
I bought Carol Thackerty and Homer Necessary a drink in the Sycamore Hotel’s Shadetree Lounge. We had left Victor Orcutt in his suite going over a list of names of persons to ruin. He seemed to enjoy his work.
“How’d you like the way he took the news that his hunch was right and those punks wanted to beat up on you?” Necessary said.
“Disinterested, if not bored,” I said and signed the check.
“That’s because it didn’t happen to him,” Carol Thackerty said. “He’s only interested in things that touch him personally. Or that inconvenience him.”
“If they’d put me in the hospital, he might have been inconvenienced.”
“But you weren’t, so he dismissed it,” she said.
Homer Necessary took a gulp of his Scotch and water, wiped his mouth as usual with the back of his hand, and grinned at me. “Tell me something,” he said.
“What?”
“You ever work for somebody that was younger than you before? I mean that much younger.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Me neither. Christ, I’m almost old enough to be his father and I sit there and he tells me what to do. It’s funny. I mean he’s smart as hell and all, but it’s still kind of funny.” He took another gulp of his drink and wiped his mouth again. “Listen,” he said and bent over the table toward me. “You know he and me are sitting there talking sometimes and I’ll mention something, I mean something that once happened, and suddenly he’ll get a blank look on his face like he hasn’t got the goddamnedest notion of what I’m talking about. And he doesn’t because I’m talking about something that everybody knows about, but something that happened maybe fifteen years ago when he was maybe eleven years old and he just doesn’t remember.”