Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel)
Read Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) Online
Authors: William Lashner
Also by William Lashner
The Barkeep
The Accounting
Blood and Bone
The Victor Carl novels:
A Killer’s Kiss
Marked Man
Falls the Shadow
Past Due
Fatal Flaw
Bitter Truth (Veritas)
Hostile Witness
Writing as Tyler Knox:
Kockroach
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 William Lashner
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
Cover and book design by Stewart A. Williams
ISBN-13: 9781477822838
ISBN-10: 1477822836
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013922352
For Barry, who, like an old stick shift with a rust-ridden chassis, always comes through in the clutch.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 8 WINNER, WINNER, CHICKEN DINNER
CHAPTER 17 THE POLITICS OF HATE
CHAPTER 27 THE BRIGGS MULRONEY RULES FOR ASPIRING BAGMEN
Every time I hear a political speech or read those of one of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing that sounded human.
—Albert Camus
August 1937
CHAPTER 1
PARTY SHOES
P
olitics, stripped of its masquerade of policy, is an exercise in pure personal ambition. Right up my stinking alley, you would think. But the shoes gave me pause.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
“I never kid, Victor, about five-hundred-dollar shoes.”
“Five hundred? For a pair of slippers? I’d sooner go barefoot.”
“You might as well, if you intend to wear those . . . those clodhoppers you came in with.”
“They’re my normal work shoes.”
“What kind of work, Victor, exterminating? Because I’ve no doubt they’re lethal on cockroaches, but they just won’t do with a tuxedo. Now this fine pair of Guccis would be just perfect.”
“They have bows on them, Timothy.”
“You’ll be the belle of the ball.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
I was seated in the shoe department of Boyds, the finest clothing store in Philadelphia if price is any indication, and isn’t price always an indication? Amidst the rustle of fine fabric and the whispered ejaculations of the staff—
Oh, yes, that’s perfect. Oh, no, that just won’t do
—I was buying myself a tuxedo with all the accoutrements, pronounced in the French manner because this was Boyds. In the past, on those rarest of occasions when I had needed a tux, I rented the thing, picked old prom tickets out of the inside pocket, and looked snazzy enough. But a political opportunity had fallen into my lap and I was running with it. Suddenly I had impressive people to impress and impressive places to go to, including a formal ball that would be packed with everyone who was anyone in Philadelphia politics. A rental tux would no longer do.
And, get this: I was on an expense account.
“Look at the lines, Victor,” said Timothy, now caressing the shoe as if it were some shiny body part sensitive to the touch. “Look at the taper of the toe. One could say, if one were being naughty, that it is quite louche.”
“It looks like it was made for a ballerina.”
“With that heel? No, this is a piece of pure masculine elegance. You will be noticed, I promise you.”
“I’m not sure I want to be noticed in a ballet slipper.”
Timothy looked down at me with lips pursed and shook his head in sad disapproval. Timothy was one of those people you meet in this world with a brilliant piece of specialized knowledge. Tall and emaciated, with pale skin and a wary, toothy smile, he knew how the upper crust dressed and how those of us in the soggy bottom layers might best pretend to fit in. I had let him pick my tuxedo, my ruffled shirt, my gold-and-onyx studs, but I was balking at the shoes.
“Tell me, Victor,” he said. “Where are you going?”
“To a black-tie ball with a bunch of political hyenas.”
“I don’t mean your little party. I mean in the big picture of your life. Where are you going?”
I thought for a bit. This was the second of three questions that Timothy, like the troll beneath a bridge, would posit during my political adventure, each more insoluble than the next. Where was I going?
“Anyplace,” I said, “so long as it’s not where I am now.”
“And that is why you are here at Boyds, correct?”
“I’m here because of a misguided notion as to a link between price and style.”
“And that is why you have asked for my help.”
“I didn’t quite ask; the moment I walked through the door, you glommed on to me like I was a walking sack of money.”
“Oh, Victor, you can buy a tuxedo anywhere. You can pick one up at Men’s Wearhouse, or even, and I shudder to think of it, on Craigslist. But you have come to me, at Boyds, because you want to go someplace new and bright and full of rakish promise.”
“I do?”
“I don’t believe clothes make the man, but they are a signifier of where that man intends to travel in his life. You can wear your lawyer shoes and look like every other lawyer at the party, and everyone will know exactly where you are going—to the island of pickpockets. Or you can wear the Guccis with the bows so that others, noticing the details of your dressage, will see you as a pirate, swashbuckling his way to virgin lands.”
“I always wanted to be a pirate.”
“The men will beckon to know your investment strategies. The serving persons will hand you goblets of champagne without your having to ask. The women will have the urge to take you into the broom closet and bite your chest. You will end up in places you never before imagined, and only you will know the reason why.”
“The shoes.”
“Precisely.”
“Wrap them up, Timothy.”
He bowed his head submissively. “If you insist.”
“I’m lucky you don’t sell insurance.”
“I did. This pays better. Now, may I show you something you simply must have in hosiery?”
All of which serves to explain why two days later I was wearing a pair of the daintiest little patent-leather slippers with neat black bows in the crowded ballroom of the Bellevue in Philadelphia, and why, surprisingly, they instilled in me a strange and wondrous confidence. As I made my way through the dollops of influence floating across the ballroom floor, as I was jostled by this congressman and that councilwoman, as I smiled at the pretty young aides and watched with surprise as they smiled back, I was certain I was headed someplace splendiferous. The world of politics and power was a tasty little oyster, and these ludicrous shoes would be my shucking knife.
Just the tools I needed to survive the horror of the Governor’s Ball.
CHAPTER 2
STATE FLOWERS
O
h, the ball, the Governor’s Ball, mounted by some political action committee in honor of our governor, as if being governor wasn’t honor enough for a hack from Allegheny County. How to describe its exquisite awfulness?
The band on the stage was swinging brassy and manic; vodka from some second-rate Scandinavian country was flowing out of a fountain made of ice; there were rivers of balloons, and clouds of sequins, and, scattered across the scattered tables, meadows of mountain laurels, our lovely state flower, each beautiful branch slaughtered in midbloom just for this event. Men were dressed like waiters, and waiters were dressed like concert pianists, and spilling out of the designer frocks of emaciated wives were great sets of bountiful breasts, seemingly there to be sampled like the hot hors d’oeuvres wending through the crowd on silver salvers.
Can I tempt you with a little something? Oh, yes, absolutely.
And all about the room were little electromagnetic fields of power and money, for that was what kept this whole intricate dance spinning, the sparks that tingled your flesh as the chosen, with their snapping auras, brushed you by. That billionaire options trader, that cut-rate city councilman, that blonde aide who was nightly flinging her long tan legs over the shoulders of that gouty state senator, all of them trailing licks of power that could be felt in the bone.
And there I was, humble little Victor Carl—legal lemur, low man on anyone’s totem pole, the pride of, well, nothing and no one—sipping champagne amidst this gaudy display, wearing my ruby slippers painted black, with an inexplicable force field of my very own.
“The mayor just toddled in,” said Melanie Brooks, leaning close and speaking right into my ear so that I could hear her over the horn section that sounded like a murder of crows. “I’ve been told he wants to meet you.”
“Me?” I said. “Why would he want to meet me?”
“All the good things he’s heard.”
“Have you been pimping me out again, Melanie?”
“That’s what I do, dearheart. Oh, look, there’s Simpson,” she said, indicating a squat, jowly man with a shining pate. “He wanted to meet you, too.”
“I’m suddenly so popular.”
“You’re now a man with skills. Come along, hip hop. We mustn’t leave the senior partner waiting.”
Melanie was dressed to kill in something tight and red. That was her color, fingernail red, from her delicious lips to her shiny spiked heels. I’ll tell you about Melanie’s stunning transformation later, but for now it is enough to know she was strikingly beautiful without exuding any sexual heat whatsoever. It was Melanie who had snagged my invite to the ball, who had handed me an American Express card to purchase my tuxedo, and who now clucked in my ear like a mother hen as she clutched my arm and steered me about the room.
“Victor Carl, let me introduce you to our senior partner, Simpson McCall,” said Melanie.
“The McCall of Ronin and McCall,” I said.
“Someone has to balance out Ronin’s sharp edges,” said Simpson McCall, a Pillsbury Doughboy in a bespoke blue suit. “I used to be on the front lines, like you and Melanie, and I loved every minute of it, but those days are past. Now I just have lunch with rich people.”
“Client development,” said Melanie.
“It must be done. I think I single-handedly keep the Union League in business. But I miss the excitement.”
“No, you don’t, you old fraud,” said Melanie.
“Oh, yes, I do. The intrigue, the battle of wits with everything on the line. Those were the days.”
“You like your lunches too much, Simpson.”
“True. And the Union League makes a wonderful salad.”
“You should try it sometime,” said Melanie.
“Part of my job is appearing well fed. Are you a member of the club, Victor?”
“My gosh, no,” I said. “Even the Union League has standards.”
“Is that Norton Grosset over there?” said Melanie.
I turned to spot a hunched, fleshy-faced man laughing, his arm around a girl young enough to be his daughter’s daughter. “Yes, I think that’s his name,” I said. “I met him at one of the Congressman’s fund-raisers.”
“Look at the beady eyes set in that fat face,” said McCall. “They give me such a shiver. He’s a vicious animal, absolutely heartless, but he’s richer than Croesus and he pays his bills on time. The perfect client. Grosset has plans to privatize the state’s prison system. He says it’s finally time to put the profit back in crime. We can make it work for him, if only we can get the right people on board.”
“Which means you’re looking to buy a politician or two.”
“Do you know anyone in this room who isn’t?” said Melanie.
The three of us laughed and laughed.
“I like you, Victor,” said McCall. “Your future in the business is undoubtedly bright. You know what you’ve got? The common touch.”
“I come by it honestly.”
“Just the kind of man we’re looking for at Ronin and McCall. Phone my secretary and we’ll nail down a luncheon date. Now I must be off. There is always work.” And then he was gone, waddling after his client, ever ready to glad-hand.
Melanie leaned close. “You impressed him,” she said.
“He liked my common touch.”
“Grew up in a log cabin, did you?”
“I was jealous of the kids in log cabins. They had dirt floors, all we had was dirt.”
As the band played on, exhibitionist couples flashing dentures made spectacles of themselves cheek to cheek on the dance floor. Kisses were airmailed and hands were enthusiastically shaken and sly smiles were flashed and false laughter fell like tinsel from an aluminum Christmas tree. And above us all, presiding over everything, were two great chandeliers, perfectly round, with thick aureoles of light surrounding protruding crystal nipples, the fixtures like symbols of the great public teats that financed all the strut and merriment.
“Oh, there you are, Victor,” said still another woman, taking hold of my other arm, so that I was flanked now by beautiful politically connected women. This second woman was Ossana DeMathis, sister to Congressman DeMathis of the Thirteenth Congressional District. “Our new miracle worker. Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Does anyone enjoy these things?” I said.
“That’s not what they’re for,” said Melanie.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Ossana. “Sometimes they have a little spark to them.” She gave my arm a slight squeeze. “Like now. I’ve been looking for you.”
“Me?”
“Do you dance?”
“God, no. And I’m not sure this is the place for it anyway.”
“There’s a band,” she said. “There’s a dance floor.”
“That’s what I mean.”
Ossana DeMathis was tall and whippet-thin, with eyes so wide apart they gave her features a fetching hint of derangement. Derangement, I have found, is a deceptively attractive quality in women. We say we want soft and sweet, we say we want grounded, and then derangement walks in the door. Normally, Ossana was as washed-out and cold as a ghost, yet now here she was holding on tight to my arm with a flush to her cheek, a rising of temperature—I could feel the heat of her through the woolen fabric of my tuxedo—and was I crazy to think I knew why? I tapped my toe, and the skin on my chest twitched.
“May I interrupt?” said a tall, drawn man, who looked like a mortician in his tuxedo. Ossana and Melanie each let go of an arm.
“The mayor wanted to meet Victor,” said Melanie.
“That can wait,” said the man. “I need a moment, Victor.”
“Go on,” said Ossana. “The master calls.”
I gave a wink for only her to see before I walked away with the mortician to find a more private spot to talk. Tom Mitchum was Congressman DeMathis’s chief of staff. DeMathis had a seat on the House Ways and Means Committee; if you wanted to talk to DeMathis—and what lobbyist didn’t?—you had to first talk with Mitchum. He was one of the most powerful gatekeepers in the capital. Somehow I had been taken up by these people.
“Apparently, the decision has been made,” said Mitchum.
“Decision?”
“About who we’re going to face in the fall.”
“Isn’t there a primary for that?”
“In our district, the primary’s for show. The committee came to a decision a while ago, they just wanted word from their candidate of choice. Someone overheard them getting that word tonight.”
“Who were they waiting on?”
“Bettenhauser,” he said, as if expectorating a gristly piece of veal.
“Bettenhauser?”
“Tommy Bettenhauser.” Mitchum indicated a man standing on the balcony above us. Broad-shouldered and handsome in his white dinner jacket, he leaned on the balcony’s railing with his hands clasped, staring down at the crowd with a cold, appraising look. “He’s a former Marine. He won a Bronze Star in Iraq and then came back to teach public school. Eleventh-grade civics, imagine that. He’s an upstanding community leader, a good family man, has three of the cutest kids.”
“That son of a bitch,” I said.
“He’s been grooming himself for this run from the start. It’s why he joined the Marines after he graduated from Penn. I mean, who does that? He’s just been waiting to sense weakness before making his move.”
“And that’s now?”
“With the hints that bastard Sloane’s been putting in his columns about the Congressman, yes, of course. We’re going to have a fight on our hands with Bettenhauser.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Whip him.”
“With what?”
“With whatever we can find. That’s where you come in, Victor.”
By the time I rejoined Melanie, she was talking to some slick-haired business type. She leaned forward and whispered in his ear, and they both burst out in conspiratorial laughter. Once again I was amazed at how changed she was. When she disengaged, she turned to me.
“What did Mitchum want?” she said while coolly looking about the room.
“He had an errand for me.”
“Be careful, dearheart. Don’t ever forget they’re all a bunch of vipers.”
“And you, Melanie, are you one too?”
“That’s for you to find out,” she said, a sweet smile on her hard face. “But don’t doubt the pit is deeper than you can imagine.”
“In deep is where I want to go. What happened to Ossana?”
“Whatever happens to Ossana. She has—how should I say it—her own sense of priorities. You and she were mighty chummy.”
“Weren’t we, though?”
“Be careful with that one, especially.”
“I think, dear Melanie, the one I need to be careful with is you.”
“At least you’re learning.”
A woman with a tray full of champagne goblets swerved my way without my having to call her over. I took two, handing one to Melanie.
“There’s just something about me tonight,” I said. “Do you like my shoes?”
Melanie looked down and stared for a moment. “Won’t your sister miss them?”
“I don’t have a sister.”
“Let’s go find the mayor.”
We made our way toward the mayor and his entourage, trying not to spill our drinks as we edged through the glittery, clattery crowd, bright-eyed, working and whirling, washing down skewers of meat with gouts of champagne. Above us were those great chandeliers, each a glistening galaxy of evening stars, and around us spun the orbits of the city’s political and financial elite, making deals, dealing revenge, drinking and spluttering, slipping surreptitious passes at the sunny young things looking to rise.
Which only begs the question: What the hell was I doing there?
I’ll tell it all later. For now I’ll just say it was like anything else in this world: part luck, part desperate scheming. But when I think back on my soaring career in politics—when law firm partners sought to buy me lunch, and mayors clamored to meet me, and congressional sisters with pale-green eyes laid hands on me—the absolute zenith must have been that very moment, at that dreadful ball. I was being introduced, my services were in demand, my arms were being grasped by beautiful women; I was finally a man on the make. Well, to be truthful, I’ve always been a man on the make, but just then I was feeling almost made. And I thought—God spare my innocence—that I had finally found my place in the world, a place among these wonderfully appalling people, in a role that fit my talents and proclivities and would give me the exact rewards I had always sought. I was heading toward the heights, and I had the shoes to take me there.
What could go wrong?
It was at first just a rise in the hubbub surrounding us and I thought, for a moment, that maybe somebody truly important had entered the ballroom. The governor? The vice president, who was rumored to be making a quick stop to give his regards? Or could it be, oh my God, one of the “Housewives of Philadelphia”? Maybe that saucy number with all the work done to her face? We all craned our necks to see what brilliant personage had entered our midst, and then the hubbub quieted, and the music died, and the crowd pressed back and parted like the Red Sea before Moses’s staff. And that’s when I saw them.
Two uniformed police officers, a tall man and a squat woman, made their way through the crowd, followed by a plainclothes detective in a snappy blue suit.
You want to see a school of puffed-up blowfish turn into a mass of spineless jellies, send a couple of uniformed cops and a detective into a sea of politicians and their spouses. As the cops made their way into the middle of the room, the only movement in the crowd was of men and women turning away, pulling out their cell phones, speed-dialing their lawyers. It was like a game of politician roulette: spin the wheel, ladies and gentlemen, and see where the indictment will land.
I was in the process of wondering what poor sap they had come for when I realized that everyone around me, Melanie Brooks included, had shrunken away, leaving me alone in the center of the once-crowded dance floor. And the three police officers were aiming my way.
Could I have ever expected anything different? The poor sap they were coming for was me.
“Victor Carl?” said the detective.
“That’s right.”
“The name’s Armbruster, Detective Armbruster. Would you mind coming with us, please?”
I lifted my drink. “I’m in the middle of something,” I said as the uniformed officers slipped behind me, just in case I had the notion to bolt, which I admit had crossed my mind. I looked to my right, and the mayor, who just a moment before had wanted to meet me, stared at the scene with the frozen expression of a figurine on a Grecian frieze. To my left, Simpson McCall was pretending not to know who I was. I suppose I had suddenly become a bit too common even for him.