"Margarita? What is margarita?" Genc asked. From his time at Sue's he was familiar with whiskey and gin, but this was a new one. Whatever it was, however, it was bound to be better than the juniper-berry diesel fuel called raki he had been used to in Albania.
Scoop explained the concoction and ordered two from the waitress.
"Strawberry?" the waitress inquired.
"No. Just regular."
"But frosted, right?"
"Right."
"No problem."
He also explained, on the basis of his one summer trip to Europe, the invention of the pizza margherita in Sicily for a visit by the princess of Savoy. Genc looked politely perplexed at the disquisition.
Scoop wanted to bear in and inquire about Sue, but first he had to find out about DAYTONA BODY WORKS. "Have you been to Daytona?" he asked.
"Daytona?" Genc queried back. "Oh, Daytona. Florida, no?" He
looked down and stroked his pecs. "No, no. I buy this cheap down in Soho."
The pec stroking (and the 30'/35' label) led to a second query. "You go to the gym?'
"Ya. Three times a week. Mrs. Brandberg wants me to. I go to the Equinox around the corner."
Preliminaries over, Scoop mentioned Sue, asking how she was taking her loss.
"She's not very good. But tonight she went out for a change. That's why I could meet you here. Went to dinner with Mr. Walker."
"Mr. Walker, who's he?"
"Not just he, many he's."
"All called Mr. Walker?"
"That's what she calls them. She say to me, 'Tonight I go out with Mr. Walker.'"
"Oh, Genc, get with it. She goes out with
walkers."
"What I said, with Mr. Walker."
Scoop explained the concept of walkers. Charming and harmless gay men.
"So, there's no sex with Mr. Walkerâthe walkers?"
"Absolutely not. Against the rules. If not against the laws of nature."
Genc looked relieved, though Scoop missed the look by which he conveyed this.
"Mrs. Brandberg very moody," Genc went on. "She cry a lot. I try to tell her she must forget the dog, but this make her cry more."
"She going to get a new one?"
"She say not. Nobody can replace Wambli, she tell me. And she
talk, talk, talk about finding the gangsters. I would not like to be them."
"How's she going to do that?"
"That's what make her moody. She don't know. I think she hopes you and your boss, Boyd, will find them."
"God knows I'm trying. But I haven't a clue, as they say. The only thought I hadâsee what you think of thisâis that those men were drug dealers. I've done some research and it appears that dope sellers like Staffordshire terriers."
"I don't see that."
"Maybe it was a case of mistaken identityâthey thought Wambli belonged to a rival pusher and killed him as a warning to the other guy."
"Like
Godfather,
you mean?"
"What?"
"You know, the horse's head. I saw Sue's tape of that movie."
"Yeah! Maybe they took the body and dumped it at the other pusher's house."
"No, Scoop, I don't see that, like I said. They shoot dog because it bit the guy. It was not, what you call it? Assassinating."
Genc shared Scoop's pizza as they continued to chew over the crime. No new wisdom emerged, in part because there were no new facts, in part because of the cumulative effects of the margaritas. (By now each had downed three.)
While they were talking, Scoop noticed two girls sitting together at the bar. One was a redhead in a peasant skirt and sandals, the other was clad in black from top to bottom. Both had been staring intently in their direction. Or, as Scoop realistically told himself, probably staring at the gym-conditioned Genc, one of the
more striking males in the place with his Equinox body, copious black hair and angular, chiseled face. As an articulate and usually jolly Mr. Chubby, Scoop knew he had charms, but they did not telegraph themselves as strongly as Genc's to young women in singles bars.
Fortified by the margaritas, and seeing the girls' stares continuing, he suggested that they invite "the peasant and the poet" over to their tiny table.
"No, I think better not," Genc said.
"Oh, come on. Just for a drink," Scoop said. Without waiting for a reply, he went unsteadily to the bar and accosted the admiring ladies. They were coolly puffing at their cigarettes, Joan Crawford style, and needed little encouragement to accept his invitation.
Scoop expansively ordered a new round of drinks and introduced both himself and Genc. (Fortunately, given the first-name etiquette that prevailed at Squiggles, Genc did not have to use his last name, Serreqi, which could have led to a drunken spelling bee for the rest of the evening. "What do you mean, there's no 'u' after the 'q'?")
The black-clad lady (Gretchen by name) had long, tapering fingers, which, very soon, were playfully touching Genc's hard body. A joke would be told, and everyone laughed. Gretchen not only laughed louder than the rest, but simultaneously lightly stroked Genc's leg or pat-patted him on a bicep.
The peasant girl was the Gracie Mansion pantry person, Amber Sweetwater. Her Pre-Raphaelite reddish locks and not so discreetly revealed décolletage intrigued Scoop. He asked the time-honored New York question, "What do you do?" and Amber told him she worked at the mayor's house.
"Social secretary?"
"Not quite. I work for his chef."
"The mayor has a
chef
?
"
"Of sorts."
"Cool."
Amber asked the reciprocal question and Scoop replied that he was an investigative reporter for
The Surveyor.
"What's that?"
Jesus Christ, doesn't anybody read my paper? he thought, but explained its status as a hip, jazzy and crusading weekly.
"What do you investigate?"
"Oh, most anything. Corruption, crime. Right now I'm working on a murder case."
"Wow. Whose?"
"Can't say, I'm afraid. You'll see the headlines when I'm done."
"I've never met a reporter."
"You haven't lived, baby. We're the Fourth Estate, remember?"
Genc, who had been half listening, asked what the Fourth Estate was.
"Just a phrase, Genc. Doesn't mean anything." It was too late at night to explain the structure of Louis XIV's government.
By now Gretchen's rubbings and pit-pats had intensified. Genc, and the obbligato of the drumming music, which had been turned up louder, had excited her.
"Why don't we go to my place? It's only six blocks."
Amber was enthusiasticâto Scoop's surprise and delightâbut Genc was not.
"Thank you. I must go."
"Why?" Scoop demanded.
"I will be expected. Mrs. Brandberg will be coming home." Then he quickly added, "She will probably want to tell me what I'm supposed to do tomorrow."
"You think about it," Gretchen said, pinching him. She got up to go to the loo, taking Amber with her.
"You jerk!" Scoop told his friend. "Can't you see these girls are asking for it?" He anticipated a sexual triumph, with a girl thrilled to be making it with an investigative journalist. (It was rumored that Woodward and Bernstein had had girls chasing them. Why shouldn't he?)
The prospective conquests returned, but Genc was still adamant.
"I'm very tired. I must leave," he said.
He had put a damper on the
après-
margarita fun, and the others reluctantly agreed to end it.
"Okay, let's go," Scoop said. "My treat, by the way." He would justify the payment out of the Boyd slush fund.
The group departed in different directions, but not before Scoop had learned that he could reach Amber by calling the number at Gracie she gave him.
Walking back to his apartment, Scoop was puzzled at Genc's behavior. Here was an attractive, sexy girl eager for him and he had resisted. Was he gay? No prior evidence of that. Albanian. A Muslim, maybe? But they didn't have anything against sex, did they? He was reasonably sure the contrary was true. A born-again Christian? Unlikely.
All the possibilities occurred to him except that it was bedtime at 62nd Street. King-size-bed time with Miszu.
L
ingering concern over the Incident was not Eldon's only worry. There was another thorn in his side: Governor Randilynn Foote. The public assumed that the evident animosity between them was simply partisan Democratic-Republican sparring, but the roots of the ill feeling went back a number of years.
The fiftyish governor had grown up in Elkhart, Indiana, where her mother, long since deserted by her husband, had been the proprietress of a rough, working-class saloon, the Rat's Tail.
As a youngster, Randilynn had spent almost every night at the bar; there was not enough money to provide her with a sitter. Usually found doing her homework at a back table, she was subjected to much teasing from her mother's clientele.
The experience had two effects on the future politician: she developed a very tough skin and a rough, obscenity-laced vocabulary. Four-letter and even double-digit indecencies became a natural part of her word stock, much as "thee's" and "thou's" might have colored her speech had she been reared at a devout Quaker hearth. Small in stature (she was five feet five in heels), her outbursts were all the more surprising to others, coming as they did from such a diminutive source.
Randilynn was both smart and energetic and had been right at home at Oregon's Reed College, where she did honors work as a politics major. Graduate study at Columbia followed; she was going to save the world, and shrewdly realized that respectable credentials, of the sort conferred by Columbia, were necessary to achieve her goal.
She arrived at Columbia just in time to join the late-sixties protests that rocked that institution. She became an activist in the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. Older than most of the undergraduate protesters, she was a sort of den mother to the budding anarchists.
It was at Columbia that she first met Eldon Hoagland, the new associate professor in the Political Science Department, freshly recruited from the University of Minnesota.
Randilynn had enrolled in Eldon's graduate seminar on government budgetary techniques, a dull subject he made come alive through his wit, intelligence and fresh-faced enthusiasm. But she was not listening, being more sensitive to the drumrolls of her fellow SDS agitators. She performed badly in the seminarâoften absent and delinquent in meeting Professor Hoagland's requirements for papers.
Eldon, still feeling his way, had a traditional view of grading, based on his own experience at Princeton, Harvard (where he had earned his doctorate) and Minnesota. So he gave her a B minus, oblivious to the trend toward grade inflation that made such a graduate school grade the equivalent of failure. Randilynn protested loudly, but Eldon held his ground. She never forgave him and became quite bitter about the issue, even more so when she was turned down for a position as a program officer at the Ford Foundation. It never occurred to her that her Tugboat Annie persona might have had something to do with the rejection; in her mind the B minus blot Professor Hoagland had placed on her record had been the decisive factor.
The newly minted Ph.D. did land a job with the Agency for International Development and spent three productive years helping
to get a housing project started in Ankara, Turkey, bulldozing bureaucrats and contractors as she went.
Returning from her foreign experience, Randilynn began her New York career as a civil servant in the State Housing Authority. She soon acquired a reputation for getting things done, and the governor at the time, a Republican, lifted her out of the civil service and gave her a political appointment as the deputy chairman of the Authority. He was intrigued by this small dynamo with a garbage mouth and, when he stood for reelection, asked her to run with him as lieutenant governor. (His first LG, a dim party hack from Buffalo, had been such an embarrassment that he was dropped after his first term.)
Randilynn was torn about accepting the offer. Her housing job was engrossing. The lieutenant governorship, by contrast, was generally thought (correctly) to be one of the most useless jobs in politics. Running as a Republican didn't bother herâthe SDS days were ancient history by then and she was not without political ambitionâso when the governor persisted, she agreed to accept the nomination, and they won in a landslide.
The press corps took to Randilynn, with her tough attitude and blue vocabulary. At her insistence, she was always called by her full given name, though the reporters uniformly called her "Randy Randy" behind her back. Receiving more attention than usual as the lieutenant governor (to the annoyance of the man who had brought her into politics), she was the logical candidate to run for her boss's job when he retired at the end of his second term. She did so, and by the narrowest of margins became the Empire State's first woman governor.
The election that Eldon won was deeply frustrating to her. She
wanted to see him beaten, but she simply could not bring herself to endorse his rabble-rousing opponent.
One day, while wandering around the second floor of City Hall prior to a hearing in the council chamber, she made an amazing discoveryâthe building contained an elaborate three-room suite that had originally been set aside for use of the governor when in New York City.
The very next morning she set her executive assistant, Pedro Raifeartaigh, to work finding out about the suite.
(Raifeartaigh was the governor's ever-patient sounding board as well as trusted adviser. Born Peter Rafferty, he had decided in midlife, at roughly the time he had given up drinking, to honor the heritage of his Hispanic mother and Irish father by changing his name. A political operative who had first worked for the governor when she was at the Housing Authority, he had moved with her as she successively became lieutenant governor and then governor, to the chagrin of copy editors at newspapers throughout the state.)
After a few hours of research and inquiries, he confirmed that the rooms had indeed been intended for the governor's use when City Hall was completed in 1811. The privilege had never been exercised and there did not appear to have been any agreement between the city and state concerning the space.
This did not deter Governor Foote, who hatched a plan that she told Raifeartaigh would drive Mayor Hoagland "apeshit." She would simply request that the suite now be put at her disposal for use as her personal city office.
How could Eldon refuse? she asked her assistant. The new mayor had promised economy in government, and what more visible example could there be than converting the Governor's Suite,
now a museum that was seldom visited due to antiterrorist security precautions, to office use?
She asked Raifeartaigh to set up an appointment with Hoagland. She would come down to see him (the better to show him the hidden treasure upstairs from his own quarters).
Eldon was puzzled. Why was the mountain coming to Muhammad? He found out when the governor, looking like a miniature Michelin Man in her unfashionable alpaca parka, arrived at the scheduled time the next afternoon. She wasted no time on small talk but quoted Eldon's inaugural address on the subject of saving the people's money and then made her bid for the Governor's Rooms.
"We should carry out the original intention," she told him. "If I use this space, we can cut back on the rent we pay uptown. A win-win game."
Eldon was more than a little confused. He had been vaguely aware that the suite in question was called the Governor's Rooms, but he had never been inside it. And certainly no governor he remembered had used it. Now he was confronted with the prospect of having a politician who loathed him sitting practically on his lap.
"Randilynn, I don't think this is such a great idea. You have your offices uptown and in Albany, I have mine here. Why make confusion? And if there's any formal agreement to make the space upstairs available to you, I'm unaware of it. No, Randilynn, the more I think about it, no. I don't have to do it, and I won't."
"Okay, Mr. Mayor. Have it your way. But when I walk out of here, I'm going straight to Room Nine, to the reporters. I'm going to tell them that all your talk about economy and saving money is bullshit. Presented with a practical suggestion for saving a few
thousandâin state money, not city, I grant youâyou turned it down. Instead you declared war on the governor. That what you want?"
Eldon needed time, which he now asked for.
"Can I get back to you? I really have to think this through."
"Twenty-four hours. Then I go to the mattresses."
"Randilynn, I'll call you tomorrow."
In a hurried conference with Jack Gullighy after the governor had left, the two men agreed that she had them "by the balls," as she would have put it. If he persisted in turning her down, the two men knew
The Post-News
would fan the flames and turn the petty dispute into a civil war, a blood feud. And she would yap interminably about the money Eldon refused to save.
"Let Randy Randy use the goddam rooms," Eldon concluded. "It's not worth putting up a fight. Just one conditionâher people have to call us whenever she leaves the building, so that I never have to run into her."