Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) (7 page)

“Thank you,” I said. “I guess now it will be everyone and me at the ball, as long as I get my chores done first.”

“Yes, well,” said the Congressman, suddenly standing with me. “I didn’t ask you up just to invite you to a party. I have further need of your services. You see, I’m in the middle of a situation.”

“With Ms. Duddleman?”

“No, thank God. You’ve taken care of her, for the time being at least. I’m going to have to break it off with her, if I could just figure out how.”

“In private,” I said. “And after the sex. But this doesn’t concern her, then?”

“No, it’s something else, something that might need your especial talents.”

“And what talents are those?”

“Discretion. Trustworthiness. I’ve been told I can trust you.”

“By whom?”

“Is it true, Victor?”

“Of course it’s true,” I said. “I’m a lawyer.”

“A sense of humor helps, too, I suppose.”

“And don’t forget avarice. I rate very highly on avarice.”

“What is your normal rate, Mr. Carl?”

“Lately it’s been two hundred and fifty an hour.”

“I’ll double it for this, plus expenses. And I’ll pay you in cash.”

“Cash is good,” I said. “Cash is handy.” I sat down again and leaned back. “Handy as a third hand. So what is your situation there, Congressman?”

He stared down at me for a moment before looking away. It’s a bad sign when a politician breaks off the stare. It either means the Apocalypse is nigh or he’s about to actually tell the truth.

“It seems,” he said, “I’m being blackmailed.”

CHAPTER 13

THE BAG

I
needed a bag for the job, and my usual briefcase wouldn’t do. An old battered black thing with hard sides, it wasn’t expandable enough to shovel in mountains of cash. Worse still, in a more optimistic time in my career I had paid to have my initials embossed between the locks, as if to announce my imminent arrival at the broad wooden doorway of success.
Knock knock. Who’s not there?

Now, for the position in which I had somehow found myself, I needed something new, something absolutely noninitialed; I needed a bag worthy of the work. And I knew exactly where to get it.

“Welcome to Boyds, sir. My name is Timothy. How may I help you?”

This was the very first time I met Timothy, a few days before I bought my tux and those horrid shoes. Boyds wasn’t far from my office and, with every intention of taking utter advantage of the Congressman’s offer to pay my expenses, I thought I’d just poke around on my own and discreetly see what they had available. But the moment I stepped through the wide glass doors under the blue canopy and into Philadelphia’s grand emporium of high taste and higher prices, Timothy appeared, conjured as if by magic. He took his place close by my side, making it easier, I suppose, to slip his hand into my pocket.

“I’m looking for a briefcase,” I said.

“Anything specific?”

“Something plain, no designer labels, nothing that stands out.”

“Sort of like yourself, I presume?”

“Is that an insult, Timothy?”

“I am only here to help you, sir.”

“My name’s Victor.”

“Good, so we’re friends already. Do you have a color in mind, Victor?”

“Brown.”

“Of course.”

“Something big and brown, with soft sides.”

“Are we thinking of a saddle-style bag, with all kinds of masculine belts and buckles? Are we planning to ride out on the range with our spiffy new case, Victor?”

“No buckles, no belts.”

“Good choice, sir. I’m going to like you. Tell me, is that tie a Dolcepunta?”

“No.”

“Somehow I didn’t think so. Follow me, Victor. We don’t specialize in the nondescript, but I’ll see what we can do.”

Timothy ushered me up the stairs to the Boyds luggage department and spread his arms wide to indicate the selection.

“Let’s talk about details now,” said Timothy, “because one thing I’ve found in this world is that the details oh so matter. How brown do you want it?”

“Brown as bark.”

“And you’re adamant about that.”

“It only seems proper.”

“Not black, which is ever more stylish in a professional setting? Not alligator, which has a predator’s aura? Not something with a splash of color?”

“Brown as mud.”

“Fine.”

“Brown as bourbon.”

“Yes, I get it. Brown as a june bug on a banyan tree. What about our other details? Do you want this to be a portfolio style with zipper top or do you want an overhang to protect the documents? Do you want it to be single or double clasp? Do you want your initials embossed or burned into the leather?”

“I need a clasp that locks securely, I want no initials of any kind anywhere on the bag, and as for a closure—maybe I’ll leave that up to you.”

“Excellent,” said Timothy, his eyes brightening. “So tell me, Victor, just so we make the right choice: What do you intend to put into your new bag?” This was the first of Timothy’s three queries, and the only one for which I had a ready answer.

“Money,” I said. “Other people’s money, and lots of it.”

“Oh, very good. Other people’s money is always the best kind. I think you need a bag with jaws, Victor. Something with a mouth wide enough to swallow whatever you place into its gullet but then one that snaps closed with such force you inevitably fear for your fingers.”

“Sounds charming, Timothy.”

“Doesn’t it, though? A bag as hungry as a shark.”

“A brown shark.”

“Oh, yes. And it just so happens we have exactly such a bag in stock.”

And so it was that while I stood before the imposing front door of a grand old estate in the tony town of Devon, listening to a scrum of dogs howling on the other side, I gripped in my palm a lovely brown diplomatic bag from some Italian manufacturer whose name I couldn’t pronounce. The bag, handcrafted from the finest leathers in Florence, had broad, sloped shoulders and clean lines and well-tanned sides. Its skin was burnished with oak and chestnut tannins. It felt solid in my hand, personal and perfect. It felt like an extension of my very self, except with better breeding. And what Timothy had assured me as he described the bag’s features with loving detail had turned out to be true. With the bag in my possession I was stronger, swifter, more clever, more sly, my smile was wider, my cock was thicker, my possibilities had grown exponentially.

When the door opened, a pack of wild dogs, each the size of a hobbit’s foot, swarmed out of the entranceway and yelped with utter savagery at my ankles. And in the gap from where the dogs had rushed, a blond man in a tight double-breasted suit gave me an appraising look, taking in my scuffed wing tips, my tie, my sterling designer bag.

“I suppose you’re the one,” he said, his prim voice twisted to the east with just a hint of the British Isles, letting me know I might as well have been something left on the doorstep by the dogs themselves. The way his face scrunched at the sight of me, he looked like the wrong end of roast squab.

“I suppose I am,” I said. “I’m looking for Mrs. Devereaux. I believe I’m expected.”

“Oh, you’re expected, all right. But I’ll let you know right here and now that I don’t approve of any of this. And you should be warned that I’m a lawyer.”

“A real honest-to-God lawyer, with a certificate and everything? I haven’t been so frightened since I last visited the urologist.”

“Oh, Reginald, who is there?” came a scratch of a voice from the inside of the house. The dogs, at hearing the voice, jumped and yapped and rushed away from me, streaming past Reginald’s glossy black shoes like a mischief of rats. “Oh, hello, you darlings,” cooed the scratch. “You wonderful naughty darlings. Yes. Yes, you are. Yes.”

“It is a man with a briefcase,” said Reginald.

“Then let him in, dear. What are you waiting for?”

“You know how I feel about this,” said Reginald. “I have made my opinion clear.”

“Oh, clam up, Reginald,” I said, giving him an intended unintentional jab with the bag as I brushed by. “This is just a social visit, and I’ve been tested and cleared. By my urologist.”

Through the doorway I entered a huge center hall with an arched wooden ceiling and a black-and-white marble floor. It was a Gothic church of money, with paintings of fox hunts on the walls and a great wrought iron chandelier threatening from above. Presiding over the congregation of the leaping and yelping toys was the same old woman I had met at the cocktail reception after the Congressman’s speech. Her unnaturally brown hair covered her face as her bent back bent ever further so that she could reach down and scratch one after the other of her vile little dogs. Connie her name was, I recalled, and from that posture, she looked up at me and smiled mischievously.

“Oh, so it is you,” she said. “I was wondering who he would send, with Colin out of commission. It is so good to see that you have joined the cause. Victor, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, that was it. And it’s nice to see you again, Mrs. Devereaux.”

“The nice young man says it’s nice to see me again,” she said to her dogs. “Isn’t it funny, my darlings, that whenever anyone is pumping me for money, they are ever so happy to see me?” She looked up again, straightening her spine as much as she was able. “And how is our dear friend Peter?”

“Grateful that you can help him in a time of need.”

“I find him so invigorating. He understands our travails and our value to this country, and he is quite good-looking, too, don’t you think? Did he say wonderful things about me?”

“Only the most wonderful.”

“That jaw of his, I just want to devour it with my teeth. Don’t you just want to devour it with your teeth?”

“Let me send him away,” said Reginald, still standing by the still-open door. “There are ways to do this properly and legally, and filling this man’s bag is not one of them.”

“Quiet down, dear, and shut the door. The draft is not healthy for the dogs. Victor and I have ever so much to discuss. Be a darling and call in Heywood, please.”

“It is a mistake.”

“But it is my mistake to make, Reginald, and my money, and you are in my employ, so fetch Heywood before I grow impatient.”

Reginald held his ground for a moment, staring at me with something pinched on his arrogant face, before he slammed the front door shut and stalked out of the center hall in an officially snitty huff.

“Friendly guy, that Reginald,” I said.

“He’s a bit territorial for a lawyer,” said Mrs. Devereaux, reaching out and taking hold of my arm. “But Peter knows he can always depend on me. We have so few champions, we must take care of those who step up for us. It is not easy being envied so.”

“Yes, it must be difficult.”

“You can only imagine our burdens, Victor. The backbone of the country, and still subjected to so much scorn. Everyone needs their protectors, even us. But enough politics. Come and talk.”

Slowly she turned and slowly she led me toward a room off the back of the hall. “So what is the problem this time? I was told you needed a substantial sum of money, and in cash. Is that right?”

“That is correct, Mrs. Devereaux.”

“Oh, Victor, call me Connie—all the best people do.”

“Connie.”

“Lovely. So tell me, Victor darling. What is this cash for?”

“You don’t really want to know, do you, Connie?”

“Dear, you must have me confused with someone else, someone older, with fairer sensibilities and far more tact. I have no tact, and my sensibilities have been hardened over the years. Did you know my husband?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Charles Devereaux the Third. An absolute brute. The things he made me do. My God, Victor, whatever squeamishness I had was burned out of me quite quickly, and without preliminaries, I must add. I could tell you stories, but I won’t, because even if I have no tact, I do have discretion.”

Just then a tall slab of a man wearing nothing but a short silk robe approached, his exposed chest hairless and gleaming, his long dark hair shining, his jaw like a fist. Mrs. Devereaux reached out a hand until it cupped a mighty pectoral.

“Heywood dear, I am having a business meeting. Please fill the crystal bowl in the drawing room with the usual.”

“As you wish, Connie.”

“Maybe twice the usual. And give me a kiss, dear.”

Heywood leaned over and slobbered into Mrs. Devereaux’s mouth.

“Now be gone, you savage. I’ll take care of you later.”

Heywood gave me a look much like Reginald’s look before taking off. I felt like the new member of a harem.

“Now come, Victor,” said Mrs. Devereaux, patting my hand. “Spill the messy details. I just adore messy details. It is a matter, I assume, that our congressman wants to keep under wraps, is that it?”

“Actually, yes.”

“He is such a naughty, naughty boy. I should spank him, don’t you think, Victor? I should put him over my knee and spank him until he cries.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“I think I’m going to like you, Victor. Come along, dear. Perhaps I can get you something to drink. How do you like your liquor?”

“Strong.”

“Oh, I am going to like you,” she said.

CHAPTER 14

THE PAYOFF

M
y job was to keep the dirty little blackmailer on a string, to keep him waiting for the next payment and the next, all the while keeping his mouth shut. My job was to hide his truth under a pile of the Devereaux fortune. Not so hard, actually. Give me enough cash and I could bury the
Encyclopædia Britannica
.

“I have a package from Washington,” I said into the pay phone when I had dialed the number with a 717 area code.

“Who? Oh, yes. Right. Yes.” A woman’s voice, quick and nervous. So that’s what it was about, simple and tawdry. And right away I could feel the weakness in her. Good, that would make everything easier.

“I’ll bring it to you,” I said.

“No, I don’t want that. Please, you can’t. Not here. Where are you?”

“Philadelphia.”

“I’ll come to the city, then. Do you have an office?”

“All I have is a bag. But there’s a bar on Eighteenth off Chestnut. It’s quiet in the early evening. A basement joint called the Franklin. Tomorrow.”

“I have to work tomorrow. But I can get off Friday afternoon.”

“Friday will do. Five o’clock.”

“Thank you. Who am I looking for?”

“The name’s Herbert, Jack Herbert,” I said, picking out a false two-first-names name to stay as anonymous as possible. “You’ll recognize me. I’ll be the guy in a navy-blue suit with the bright-brown bag.”

In the Devereaux drawing room I had picked up the money cleanly enough, stacks of bound hundreds laid out in a crystal bowl like after-dinner mints. But no matter how much Connie plied me with drinks and compliments, no matter how cruelly she rubbed my thigh with her bejeweled claw, I didn’t reveal the root reality the Congressman was trying to smother in its crib. You could say it was just another example of my sweet discretion, but I simply didn’t know. Congressman DeMathis had enough discretion of his own not to tell me his most shameful truths. All I had was an address from which I was to pick up the money, and a phone number with which I was to make arrangements for the payoff.

I didn’t recognize her right away when she entered the bar. I was sitting at a small table in the middle of the room, my bag on the seat next to me. I nursed a Scotch, neat; my usual Sea Breeze didn’t fit the role I was playing. The Franklin was a long, low-ceilinged joint with leather banquettes and the bar at the back. It was a dimly lit place to conduct adulterous affairs over handcrafted drinks. When she came through the door, hesitantly, clutching her own big brown bag and looking around, lost and nervous, I thought she was stumbling into something wrong with a senior partner at the firm where she typed. But when she saw me in my suit, the only suit in the bar at that hour, she gave a nervous smile.

I was expecting someone hard and venal, I was expecting a corrupt little blackmailer. What I got was Jessica Barnes.

“What are you drinking?” I said.

“Nothing, thank you.”

“It’s a bar. We’re trying to look convivial. Order a drink.”

“Okay, yes. Just a little something. A white wine spritzer?”

“I said a drink.”

“Anything then.”

“Let’s go mai tai,” I said. “Everything’s cheerier with a mai tai.”

Jessica Barnes sat stiffly in the chair across from me as I gave the order to the waitress. Whatever I thought about the Congressman personally, I was impressed as hell with his taste: first Duddleman and now this. Jessica was a sturdy woman in her late twenties, wearing a pressed print dress with a flat white collar, and a pair of stolid low pumps. Her shoulders were broad, her hair was fair, her face was round and pretty, her eyes were narrowed as if she were peering at me not across a small marble tabletop but instead across a wide-open plain of dust. Arrange a pea sack around her head like a bonnet and she would have been a Dorothea Lange photograph. I liked her right off.

What would I have said to poor doomed Jessica Barnes if I could go back in time to that moment in that bar? What would my advice have been?

Run.

“You’re not what I expected,” I said.

“What did you expect?”

“Someone harder, someone proud of her own slick cleverness.”

“I’m not proud of myself for this, Mr. Herbert.”

“Okay.”

“This is not anything that I ever wanted to be doing,” she said, twisting one rough red hand in the other. “But when the agency called and gave me the number, and then I found out whose number it was, the idea just came. Desperation, it does things to a person. It’s like a disease. It spins you around until you can’t tell right from wrong, and even if you could, you don’t much care.”

“And here we are.”

“Yes.” She looked around nervously and spotted the waitress bringing her drink, bright and fruity and totally out of place in that hard joint. When it was placed before her, she spun it on its coaster before she took a sip. She tried to fight a smile and failed. She hadn’t had enough mai tais in her life, that was clear.

“Tell me about yourself,” I said.

“Is this part of it? Is this the way it works?”

“It’s the way it works with me.”

Everyone has a lesson to teach if you just listen, and Jessica Barnes was trying to teach me the last lesson of her life. But as usual, I was too wrapped up in my own damn self to catch it full. And what was I thinking about, just then, as she hesitated and meandered before getting to the spoiled meat of her sad story? What emotion had suddenly wrapped itself around my shriveled little heart? A strange and perverse sense of possibility.

“It wasn’t pancakes and roses even before Matthew lost his job,” she said, eyes focused on her drink, “but at least we could keep her fed and pay for the medicine. But when they closed out Matthew’s shop, the unemployment wasn’t enough to make a go of it, and when that ran out, what with them cutting back on my factory job, we were good as dead.”

“What kind of medicine are we talking about?”

“My daughter has a liver thing, something about too much copper. Dr. Patusan says she can’t eat mushrooms or dried fruit, chocolate, shrimp. She’s covered by the state, but the insurance only pays for a piece of the medicine even when we cut back. I don’t get benefits, and the COBRA for Matthew was too high.”

“Has your husband found any work?” I asked.

“It’s not like he hasn’t tried. They just aren’t hiring men who can do what he can do.”

“Has he tried retraining? Has he looked into programs at the community college?”

“Matthew is a good man, Mr. Herbert, and he wants to do right. But it gets hard even getting up every day with that knot in your gut. And then you drink to ease it just for a bit, until the only thing that gets you out of bed is the easing you’re going to get with that first drink. So you can ask the questions everyone asks and blame him if you want, but I don’t. I see the hurt in him. It’s these times. It drives us to things. Which is why we’re here, I suppose.”

“Yes, it’s why we are here,” I said.

“I brought the proof like I said I would.” She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a sealed dull-brown envelope the size of a greeting card. She looked both ways, like a kid about to cross a street, before she handed it to me. It was light but not empty; there was something thin inside, a photograph maybe. I could imagine all the twisting of phallus and limbs that the picture would show. It hurt her to pass it on, and I decided I didn’t need to look.

“Does anyone else have a copy?” I said.

“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Herbert.”

“An honest blackmailer.”

“Please don’t.”

“Okay. You’re right.”

“I don’t really want to say anything.”

“I can tell that.”

“And I’ve got nothing against him. You can let him know that, the Congressman. He gave me a gift and I’m ever grateful. But the times, they force you to do what you need to do. Maybe you’re too lucky to ever know about that, Mr. Herbert, and then good for you. But here I am, trading on the one thing I have left, feeling ashamed and relieved at the same time. I guess I’ll learn the price of it after all’s said and done.”

I tapped the envelope on the tabletop. “How much do you want, Mrs. Barnes, to keep your secret?”

“It’s hard to say. Just enough to get by.” Her mouth tightened, her jaw jutted slightly. “Ten. Ten for now, maybe.”

This was the moment I had trained for, in school and in my practice. You can sense weakness in a person, sense the way a tiny bit of pressure here or there can change the contours of an entire deal. One thing lawyers can spot a mile away, in addition to an ambulance or a hundred-dollar bill on the ground, is weakness. I had the proof in my hand and the money in my bag. This was my moment, why the Congressman had called on my talents in the first place. Jump the weakness, win the day.

“Ten?” I said.

“Ten would get us through to the next year.”

“And after that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then you’d be coming back for more, I assume.”

“I don’t want to, Mr. Herbert. Maybe things will turn around.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but that’s a hard word to use when planning the future. Maybe the lottery will hit, or maybe a meteor, or maybe life will just go on like it’s been going on. Let me ask you, Jessica, and think carefully now. Would twenty be better than ten?”

Her head tilted in confusion. “I guess.”

“Then maybe you should ask for thirty. How long would thirty last you and your family?”

“I don’t know. I do earn some. And we could take out another loan if property values rise.”

“And maybe with thirty, your husband could find it in himself to get to a school. Learn something technical.”

“He’s always talking about HVAC.”

“He could find a place to get a certificate in HVAC. Use some for tuition and take out a loan for the rest. One thing we always need is air-conditioning.”

“I don’t know.”

“If he can wake up in the morning with possibilities, he might be able to do something more than drink.”

“Maybe, Mr. Herbert, maybe. Thirty would do it, yes.”

I told you she was pretty, and young, and I admit to being a sucker for the young and the pretty. And there was something about that dress, the primness of it, and those shoes, that struck a chord, like she had dressed for church. And, yes, there was an attractive weakness in her, a softness at the core, that made me want to take raw advantage. But not advantage of her.

“Then let’s say fifty,” I said. “Will that do it?”

“Mr. Herbert?”

“Fifty it is.”

I opened the bag, tossed in the proof, and then reached an arm into the bag’s now-gaping jaw. Within the protection of the leather, I picked up one, two, five stacks of hundreds and put them one by one into a plain manila envelope. I folded the envelope around the stacks, pulled off the strip, and sealed the envelope into one sharp, compact package that I placed gently on the marble tabletop.

She leaned back, her arms crossed now, her wary eyes ever warier. “And what do I have to do to get all this, Mr. Herbert? What are you going to demand of me?”

“Only this,” I said, leaning forward, smiling like a shark as I pushed the envelope toward her. “Go home and take care of your family. Buy your daughter her medicine, get your husband back to school, find yourself a job with benefits.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“And the Congressman?”

“Don’t call him again, and don’t spill the beans you were about to spill. Not even to me. This blackmail thing is not the racket for you, Jessica. What would happen to your family if I was wearing a wire? What would happen to your daughter if you ended up in jail? This time you ran into me; next time who knows. I’ll keep the proof to keep you safe. You take the money and go home and make your life better. You’re too damn good for this.”

“Mr. Herbert, I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything, to anybody,” I said. “Ever.”

She reached out one of those worked-to-the-bone hands and placed it atop mine, and for a moment there was something in her eye other than wariness. Then the envelope disappeared into her own big brown bag and she was gone. And I sipped my Scotch in satisfaction.

And that was what the sense of possibility I had felt before was all about. Here I was taking cash from a perverted old biddy who thought the world owed her its adulation because she had married some loaded bastard who liked his stuff rough. And here I was giving it to pretty Jessica Barnes, with the scaly red hands and the sick daughter. This wasn’t any longer a blackmailing payoff to save DeMathis’s career; this was a simple redistribution of wealth from the rich to the needy, and I was Robin Hood. Here I was, finally on the side of the angels. Who could ever have imagined such an improbable thing?

With a bag full of money, what couldn’t I achieve?

The satisfaction was destined to drown in my throat a few hours later, but it lived in that young moment. I finished my drink, and left a tip, and left the bar, and took a shower, and put on the tuxedo Timothy had sold me a few days before, and slipped on my patent-leather slippers. And with a whistle on my lips and a song in my heart I headed out to find my rightful place in the political world at the Governor’s Ball.

And all the while Jessica Barnes was headed for . . . Yeah, right. So much for my pallid dreams of Robin Hood.
“What exactly are you?”
Sloane would ask me at Jessica’s murder scene that very night. I could imagine myself a hundred ways of noble, but the answer was there for anyone willing to see it plain.

You know what a bagman is. He’s the scurvy errand boy for some corrupt fat-faced pol. Quiet as a cat, he lugs his bag full of black cash and dirty tricks through the city night, bringing in teetering stacks of crisp bills from those lusting to do business with power, and later passing out those same crisp bills as street money to grease the electoral wheel. He is a dark, malevolent figure in a shady fedora and long leather jacket, and when he whispers in your ear you shiver, because he holds the shiv of his boss’s clout at your throat.

I was a bareheaded lawyer, a credentialed member of the bar, lank and weedy and as threatening as a chipmunk. I was nothing like I imagined a bagman to be. But hadn’t I become an errand boy for some power-mad congressman? And hadn’t I agreed to get the goods on that congressman’s next opponent? And hadn’t I indeed carried illicit cash through the city streets in a brown leather satchel? I could frame it any way I chose, pretty it up with flowers and bows, deny it to an army of reporters, but that didn’t change the truth of things. I had fallen face-first into the worst of all rackets.