“Sure do, Major Sutton!… I just field-commissioned you up a couple of grades—command prerogative, of course.”
“I accept the rank, sir.” Sir Henry turned and saluted as the Hawk got out of his chair and did the same. “Bring on the bastards! Once more unto the breach and close the walls up with our Equity dead—Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA, too, of course. We fear no one—gets the blood boiling, doesn’t it, General?”
“You boys really were the best in the big Sahara. You had all the guts in the world, soldier.”
“Guts, be damned, it was the proper synthesis of classical technique and the best of Stanislavski, not that Method nonsense prescribed by fifth-rate gurus who teach that picking your nose is more acceptable than blowing it.”
“Whatever it was, Major, you survived. Do you recall outside Benghazi when the brigade—”
“They’re nuts!” whispered Sam to Jennifer. “They’re in a typhoon paddling a canoe that’s leaking.”
“Get hold of yourself, Sam! They’re both … well, larger than life, and it’s rather refreshing.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, in a world of pin-striped legalizing wimps, it’s nice to know there are men who can still hunt the killer tigers.”
“That’s sophomoric, antediluvian bullshit!”
“Yes, I know,” said Redwing, smiling. “Isn’t it nice to see it’s still around?”
“And you call yourself a liberated woman—”
“Although I am, I don’t think I ever said it—that’s antediluvian. These old men aren’t, they’re simply reliving a world as they knew it. I acknowledge that world and what they did to make it better. Who wouldn’t?”
“You’re just brimming with Sunnybrook kindness, Rebecca!”
“Why not? The Court itself aside, I’ve won every point I raised. In fact, I won too damned much, which means I’m acknowledged.”
“With a little ‘mirrors and smoke,’ as our general called it. ‘Best efforts’ is still euphemism for ‘Okay, I’ll try, but if I don’t get anywhere, I’ll retreat. Fast.’ ”
“You mention that and you’ll find out how liberated I am, Counselor,” said Jennifer quietly, again smiling. “You won’t have anything left to soil your trousers with.… Let’s break up the war stories, shall we?”
“Mac!” shouted Devereaux, causing both veterans of the North African campaign to look at him as though he were an ugly black worm emerging from a plate of red spaghetti. “How do you really know this Little Joseph will do as you say? You’ve described a slime—maybe one who won’t frag you—but still a slime. Suppose he tells you anything he figures you want to hear?”
“He couldn’t do that, Sam. You see, I talked with his superior officer, who I can tell you is very superior, on a par with Commander Pinkus and myself—with maybe a mite more influence where it counts.”
“So what?”
“So this very important person has strong personal reasons for wanting us to complete our mission, which we can’t do if we don’t get to the Supreme Court in one piece eight-seven hours from now and counting.”
“Eighty-seven what and what?” asked a confused Aaron.
“We’re in the countdown, Commander. Ground zero in roughly eighty-seven hours minus.”
“Is that anything like ‘zero target’?” the elderly lawyer persisted.
“Can you imagine, Major Sutton, this fella was on Omaha Beach?”
“Probably an enlisted man, General—”
“Yes, I was, and I carried a rifle, not a code book.”
“Zero target, dear Aaron, is the immediate objective,” explained the actor. “Ground zero, the zero not preceding, is the final objective. For instance, in the march to El Alamein we first had to take Tobruk, thus it was the zero target, Alamein ground zero. Actually, in the chronicles of Froissait—upon which Shakespeare based his Histories, along with Holinshed—mention is made of the terms—”
“Okay, okay!” cried an exasperated Devereaux. “What the hell has all this crap got to do with some slime called Little Joseph at the Four Seasons? To repeat, Mac, what makes you think he’ll do what you tell him to do? He’s lied to you before.”
“Obviously different circumstances,” said Jennifer before the Hawk could reply. “I gather he’s beholden to his very important superior officer.”
“Bull’s-eye, Miss Red. Like in whether Joseph goes on breathing or not.”
“Well, if that’s the case—”
“It’s the case, Sam,” confirmed Hawkins. “As you well know, I don’t make mistakes in that area. Outside of Belgrave Square in London, do I have to remind you of that country club on Long Island, or the chicken farm in Berlin, or that crazy sheik in Tizi Ouzou who wanted to buy my third wife for two camels and a small palace?”
“That will do, General!” said Pinkus firmly. “I remind you that there’ll be no reminiscing on such past events. Now, you and Henry sit down and let’s continue with the business at hand.”
“Certainly, Commander.” The two veterans of El Alamein sat down and the Hawk continued. “But we can’t do a hell of a lot until Little Joseph makes his report.”
“How’s he going to do that?” asked Devereaux. “Sending a coded message by a carrier pigeon that flies from his hotel window directly to the sheikdom of Tizi Ouzou?”
“No, son, by telephone.” And, as Sir Henry might say, on cue the telephone rang. “I’ll get it,” said the Hawk, rising and walking rapidly to the white antique desk against the wall. “Base Camp Steaming Tepee,” he went on, the phone to his ear.
“Hey, fazool,” came the excited voice of Little Joey the Shroud over the line. “You ain’t gonna believe the fuckin’ pig shit you walked into! I swear on the grave of my Aunt Angelina, no shoe repair clown, including my uncle Guido, could scrape it off!”
“Calm down, Joseph, and speak clearly. Just give me the reconn ob-tech, on-scene factors.”
“What crazy language is that?”
“I’m surprised you don’t remember it from the Italian campaign—”
“I was lower than sediment. What the hell you talkin’ about?”
“The technical statistics as you observed them at the hotel—”
“No wonder you fazools are bleeding the taxpayers out of their corpuscals! No son of a bitch can understand you—you just scare the shit out of us!”
“What did you find out, Joseph?”
“For starters, if those jokers are Swedish, I never had a Norway meatball, which on occasion I have, ’cause this blond bomberinna I used to go with a couple of centuries ago made ’em so to prove the Guinea variety wasn’t so hotsytotsy—”
“Joseph, is this going to be a long story? What did you learn?”
“Awright, awright.… They got three suites, each with two bedrooms, and by spreading a little bread around with the maids and the waiters I found out they speak regular American, y’know, English. Also, they’re nuts, y’know real fruitcakes. They walk around lookin’ in mirrors and talkin’ funny to themselves, like they didn’t know who they were lookin’ at.”
“What about support troops, firepower?”
“They ain’t got nuthin’! I checked out every staircase, even the nearby rooms with some enchilada named Raul who cost me two hundred little ones to check out the register—nobody nowhere around ’em could even be related by coincidence. The only possibility was some fruitcakereno asshole named Brickford Aldershotty, who it turned out was on a one-night stand.”
“Escape routes?”
“The exit signs to the staircases, what can I tell you?”
“So you’re saying the beach is clear—”
“What beach?”
“Zero target, the hotel, Joseph!”
“Whoever you got can walk in like it was a church in Palermo on Easter Sunday.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, here are the room numbers.” The Shroud gave them, then added. “Also, whoever you got should have muscle, y??
?know what I mean?”
“Explain that, Joseph.”
“Well, like a sharp-eyed maid named Beulah told me, these jokers break bottles with icicle points of glass stickin’ up and do pushups over ’em, sometimes like two hundred. I mean they are fruitcakes!”
22
“Meat” D’Ambrosia walked through the swinging glass doors of the Axel-Burlap building on Wall Street, Manhattan, took the elevator up to the ninety-eighth floor, trudged his way through another pair of glass doors, and presented his card to a statuesque British receptionist.
Salvatore D’Ambrosia, Consultint. The card was printed by his cousin on a press at Rikers Island.
“I should like to have a meet with a certain Ivan Salamander,” said Salvatore.
“Is he expecting you, sir?”
“It don’t make no never mind, call it in, pussycat.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. D’Ambrosia, but one doesn’t call the president of Axel-Burlap without prior notification, and certainly not in person without a previously scheduled appointment.”
“Try me, sweetheart, or maybe I have to break your desk.”
“What?”
“Just call, capisce?”
Mr. D’Ambrosia was instantly admitted into the walnut-paneled sanctum sanctorum of one Ivan Salamander, president of Wall Street’s third largest brokerage house.
“What … whaat?” shrieked the gaunt, bespectacled Salamander, wiping the perpetual sweat that oozed from his hairline. “You gotta scare the shit out of some lousy receptionist who’s got a ton of class for which I paid airfare, a Blackglama mink, and a salary my wife can no way find out?”
“We gotta talk, Mr. Salamander, and more important, you gotta listen. Also, your private secaterry wasn’t too perturbed.”
“Certainly, certainly, I told her to stay ice cold!” yelled Ivan the Terrible, as he was known on the Street. “You think I’m dumb?… Dumb I’m not, Mr. Musclebound, and I would much prefer that whatever you have to say to me should be said in some rotten spaghetti dump in Brooklyn!”
“My associates and me ain’t too partial to your smelly salami and your give-into-fish, either. Your delicatessens stink up the neighborhoods.”
“So our culinary differences are settled, what’ve you got that I should waste my valuable time on a street soldier? Hahn, hahn?”
“Because what I’ve got for you comes from the big man himself, and if you’ve got a tape job in here, he’ll rip your throat out. Capisce?”
“On my word, on my word, no such thing! You think I’m crazy?… What does the big man say?”
“Buy defense, especially aircraft and related—wait a minute, I gotta read this.” D’Ambrosia reached into his pocket and pulled out a slip of paper. “Yeah, here it is. Aircraft and every related supply component—that’s it, component, that’s the word I couldn’t remember.”
“And that’s crazy! Defense is going into the toilet, the budget’s cut everywhere!”
“Here’s the rest of it, and I repeat, if you gotta tape rollin’, you’re on a meat hook.”
“Never, are you meshuga?”
“Things have changed one whole hell of a lot.” Meat again looked at his instructions, for several moments reading silently with his lips. “Okay, here it is.… Alarming events have tooken place,” continued D’Ambrosia, his voice as flat as his eyes, a man recalling from quasi-rote, “which the country can’t know too much about because of which the panic that might sue—”
“Maybe you mean ensue?”
“I’m on your side. Whatever.”
“Go ahead.”
“There has been a lot of interference with the sub … substratisforic military sattelactic transmissions which concludes high altitudenal aircraft are … fuckin’ up the works.”
“High altitude—U-2 types? The Russkies are going back on their nice words?”
“ ‘The specific hostile equipment has not been firmly identified,’ ” replied Meat, now unfolding the paper and reading—as best he could. “… ‘however, as the incidents have increased in numbers and ferocosity, and the … Russian Kremlins … have secretly confirmed like events—’ ” Here, Salvatore D’Ambrosia, a.k.a. “Meat,” refolded the paper and continued on his own. “The whole fuckin’ Earth planet, especially the U.S. of A., is on secret emergency alert. It could be the Chinks or the Arabs or the Hebes launching all that bullshit—”
“That’s cockamamie!”
“Or…,” Salvatore D’Ambrosia lowered his voice and blessed himself, almost getting the sign of the cross correctly on his large chest, “things we know nothin’ about—from up there.” Meat raised his eyes to the ceiling, in his gaze a prayer, if not a plea for mercy.
“Whaaat?” shrieked Salamander. “That’s the biggest tube of Guinea cheese I ever heard of! It’s full of … hoo-hoo, wait a minute … it’s positively, absolutely brilliant. Like no junk bonder could ever come up with!… We got a whole new enemy we gotta arm the whole fuckin’ world for. UFOs!”
“You got the big man’s drift then?”
“Got it? I love it!… Hey, a sudden big thought. What big man? He’s with the fishes!”
It was the moment Meat had been primed for, rehearsed until he could handle it with his head soaked in Chianti. He reached into another pocket and withdrew a small, black-bordered envelope, in size and appearance similar to a funeral request. He handed it to the mesmerized Salamander with nine simple words, so ingrained by repetition Salvatore would no doubt say them on his deathbed. “You breathe a word of this … no more breath.”
His eyes shifting warily between Meat’s face and the ominous-looking envelope, Ivan the Terrible picked up his glistening brass letter-opener, inserted it beneath a sealed edge, slit the paper, and extracted the message. The broker’s gaze instantly dropped to the bottom of the page, to the scrawled familiar initials he knew so well. He gasped, his head snapping up, his wide eyes riveted on Salvatore D’Ambrosia. “This is beyond impossible!” he whispered.
“Be careful,” said Meat, no louder than Salamander, as he drew his index finger slowly across his throat. “Remember, no more breath. Read it.”
Fear paramount, a tremble developing in his hands, Ivan began at the top of the page. Follow the instructions as delivered verbally to you by the courier. Don’t even think about disobeying any aspect of them. We are in the midst of a maximum-classified, eyes-only, top-secret, black-drape, need-to-know basis operation. Everything will be explained to you within a reasonable period of time. Now, in front of the courier, burn this message as well as the envelope, or, with love in his heart, he’ll be forced to burn you. I shall return. VM
“Gotta match?” asked the petrified Salamander quietly. “I gave up cigarettes for my health. It’d be kinda dumb if I got burned because I don’t smoke.”
“Sure,” said Meat, throwing a pack of matches on the desk. “After you finish torching the paper, you got one other thing to do before I go.”
“Name it. When I get messages from beyond the grave, I don’t quibble.”
“Pick up the phone and place an order for fifty thousand shares of Petrotoxic Amalgamated.”
“Whaaat?” shrieked Ivan the Terrible, his forehead drenched with beads of sweat. Then he watched in terror as D’Ambrosia’s huge right hand reached under his jacket. “So certainly, of course! So why not? Let’s make it seventy-five, I mean, why not?”
• • •
Five other such courtesy calls were made by Meat the Courier, all with similar results—give or take a shriek or two—resulting in a buy, buy, buy! binge not seen since the Dow creased three thousand and was still climbing. As a natural consequence, in executive suites across the nation, the carrots led the asses (horses may not be bright, but they’re smarter than mules). Wild diversification and consummate oversupply were the orders of the day, and the orders went out by the billions. Something really big was going down, and the smart money boys and the conglomerate fraternity were going to go up on that fantastical seesaw of ec
onomic balances.
Buy out those computer firms, screw the price!
Get control of all the subcontracting parts divisions in Georgia and don’t bore me with figures!
We’re dealing from strength, you idiot! I want the majority interest in McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, and Rolls-Royce Aeroengines, and for Christ’s sake, don’t stop bidding until you get them all!
Buy California!
On the basis of an inflated fiction, shrouded in a mystery that would impress Little Joey, to say nothing of Houdini and Rasputin, billions in debt were accrued by the enemies of Vincent Francis Assisi Mangecavallo, who sat under an umbrella in Miami Beach, Florida, a Monte Cristo cigar in his mouth, a cellular telephone at his side, as well as a portable radio, a margarita on the plastic tray in front of him, and a wide grin on his face. “Go with the big wave, you fancy country club cannolis,” he said to himself, reaching for his glass, his free hand adjusting his red toupee. “Wait’ll the ocean dries up like that Moses made it do, may he rest in peace. You’ll be sucked down into the sand, you bastards! Put out a contract on me, better you should read the small print. Cleaning urinals in Cairo, that’s where all of you belong!”
Sir Henry Irving Sutton sat rigidly, angrily, in the kitchen chair while Erin Lafferty snipped away at his flowing crown of gray glory. “Trim, wench, merely a trim, or you’ll spend the rest of your miserable life in the scullery!”
“Y’ don’t scare me, y’ old fart,” said Erin. “I seen ya in that afternoon program Forever All Our Forevers fer—what was it? Ten years?—so I know all about you, boyo.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You was always yellin’ and caterwaulin’ on those young kids until you was drivin’ ’em nuts. Then you’d go into that big liberry and cry, sayin’ to yerself that they had life too easy, and had to be brought up to snuff so they could face the terrible misfortunes that faced ’em—and by Jesus, Mary and Joseph, yer words were gospel! Such lousy times they had! I mean you was actually cryin’, sorry for all the bad things you had to say to them, wishin’ you didn’t have to.… Nah, underneath you’re a softie, Grandfather Weatherall!”