“You should know my early life, Brenda, which I’m still obsessed. My mother, this is the God-honest truth, I swear to God, she spent thirty years of her life claiming there was a fishbone stuck in her throat. We listened to her constantly. Doctors, clinics, they searched for years with instruments. Finally she had an operation. There was nothing caught in her throat, absolutely, guaranteed. She comes home from the hospital. The fishbone is there.”
“Well this is just a woman and a mother.”
“So help me, thirty years, my brothers and sisters, never mind. And that’s the least of it. I’m just showing you some idea. My father was the drunk of all time. But I don’t care anymore what they did to each other or to me. I’m not a person who maintains a malice. I feel only love and respect for those people because they suffered in this world. So forget it, I don’t care, go away.”
“You never married, Jack, but how come.”
“I’m a sloven in my heart.”
“Personal-appearance-wise, you dress and groom.”
“In my heart, Brenda. There’s a chaos that’s enormous.”
They heard the MC telling jokes out on the stage. Jack leaned toward the radio and listened some more.
“I love the patriotic feeling I get, hearing this stuff. I am one hundred percent in my feeling for this country. What else do I trust? My own voice goes creepy at times. I can’t control the inner voice. There are pressures unbelievable.”
“Everybody gets pressure. We get pressure. You work us seven days a week.”
“I’m about halfway out of it in common terms.”
“Why don’t you marry your Randi Ryder? She’ll straighten out your life.”
“She’s a famous lay in New Orleans but she won’t do anything unnatural.”
Somebody shouted around the corner. Visitor for Jack. He touched Brenda on the shoulder and went out of the room. It was six paces to his office, where Jack Karlinsky was sitting on the sofa with one of the dogs.
“This is my dachshund Sheba,” Jack Ruby said. “Get down, baby.”
Jack Karlinsky was in his sixties, an investment counselor who had no office, no business phone, no employees and no clients. At his twenty-room house outside Dallas, a Coast Guard fog light played over the grounds all night long.
“I want to know did you hear. ”
“Be calm, Jack. That’s why I’m here. To discuss terms.”
“There are people who’ll speak for me out of long association. I talk to Tony Astorina on the phone.”
“I know you have connections,” Karlinsky said. “But this is not the same as so-and-so is
connected.”
“What is Cuba, nothing?”
“I understand full well you took some trips for people.”
“This is when Cuba was popular in the press.”
“You did some things for the Bureau too,” Karlinsky said.
“Where is this? Is this something I’m just hearing?”
“Please. You volunteered your services to the FBI in March 1959. They opened a file.”
“Jack, you know as well as I.”
“Potential criminal informant. You informed a little bit here, a little bit there.”
“This is for my own protection in case something is held against me, so I can say look.”
“Jack, it means nothing to me personally. I appreciate you are known in New Orleans, you are known in Dallas. You are a constant face in Dallas.”
“I have associations going back to the old Chicago days which I am prouder of than anything in my life, Newberry Street, Morgan Street, the pushcarts, the gangs.”
“We all love the old Chicago stories. What do you think I was born here? Nobody is born in Dallas. We all carry the old Chicago thing, and the street life, and the scrappy days. But we are speaking here about a very sizable loan and the boys are naturally picky who gets the use of their capital.”
Jack went through his desk drawers.
“Look, I can show you notices of tax liens, rejections of compromise offers. They’re all over me about excise taxes. I am getting killed, Jack. They have history sheets on me this thick. I keep running in to pay cash in trickles. Two hundred dollars, two hundred and fifty dollars. In other words to show them some concern. But it’s like a kid on an errand. I am in for over forty-four thousand dollars to the IRS alone and on top of that there is this union that wants me to ease up on the hours of the girls, there is this competition next door that is killing me with amateur nights and there is this girl from New Orleans that’s gonna close me down for popping her G-string.”
Jack Karlinsky had an invisible laugh. You heard it down in his throat but didn’t see anything in his face that resembled mirth. He wore a sport coat over a turtleneck shirt and smoked a panatela. Jack checked out the shoes and haircut. He admitted left and right he was still learning how to live.
“I am telling my lawyer to settle eight cents on the dollar.”
“Jack, they will tell you.”
“I know. ”
“This is not a proposal they are drooling to accept.”
“So I have to resolve in my own mind.”
“You have to resolve in your own mind who you want to owe this money to. It is not found money. I have structured a deal here that I am not looking to pull in five points a week like the neighborhood loanshark. We are talking about a forty-thousand-dollar loan. We are speaking in a range of one thousand dollars a week vigorish.”
“Which is ninety-two thousand total after one year.”
“Or you keep paying the vig.”
“Till my balls drop off.”
“This is correct, Jack.”
“Just to say. What if I can’t pay one week?”
“One week, they will let it ride. They don’t want to pop you on the head, Jack. They let it ride.”
“Two, three weeks.”
“The procedure you would do here is take out a second loan. This is not a good idea because you would pay the vig on one amount while they are actually giving you a lesser amount. Frankly, do you want my advice?”
“What?”
“Frankly, don’t take the loan. You can’t make a vig like that with your kind of operation that you’re running here. You will fall deep into the pit.”
“It’s my pit, Jack.”
“It’s your pit but it’s not your money.”
“What happens, just saying, if I miss five weeks, six weeks?”
“If you are bled totally dry and white, they will simply stop the clock. Which is, pay the principal, forget the interest. In other words this fellow is known to us and we will settle for a piece of his business plus the original sum. They don’t want to blow up the building.”
“But they will grab my business.”
“This is the ballfield you’re playing on.”
“What if I can’t pay the principal?”
“Jack, this is what I’m telling you. I’m saying explore other avenues.”
“A bank would make a credit check. They won’t give me ten cents.”
“Think of friends, relatives. Take a partner into the business.”
“I can’t work with other people. I already have backers. My sister manages the Vegas for me. We fight all the time.”
“You strike me a little unreasonable. You have to grasp a major point. You are not outfit, Jack. Understand
connected.”
The drums were going out front.
“All right. Say this. I am willing to go for five hundred a week interest over one year when the convention business will pick up by then.”
“I structured a serious deal here.”
“Jack, take it to them and tell them. Mention I talk to Tony Push all the time. He has the reputation he’s very close to Carmine Latta. ”
“Carmine is not in loanshark in a big way.”
“I am only saying make a statement that I am known to Tony Astorina. ”
Karlinsky looked at him. A silent countdown. Then he said he would do whatever Jack asked. He had a deep, smooth and reasonable voice, gone hollow now, and a house with a giant searchlight, and a perfect turquoise pool, and four daughters and a son, and Jack Ruby wondered if this is what it takes to look invincible.
They shook hands in the doorway and then the older man stepped back into the office, briefly, as if he had a happy secret to reveal.
“The jacket is mohair. Look.”
Then they walked to the head of the narrow stairway that led down to the street. They shook hands again. The saxophone was blatting. Jack took a Preludin with a glass of water at the bar for a favorable future outlook. Then he walked among the tables to mingle with the crowd. What is the point of running a club if you can’t do that?
Dinner at home was a quiet affair with harpsichord concertos on the stereo and conversation coming in small runs. Beryl watched her husband raise the wineglass to his lips. Larry didn’t drink his wine. He chewed it. To savor the tonality—the dryness, or the wetness. This is how we build a civilization, he liked to say. We chew our wine.
“You don’t look happy,” she said. “You haven’t looked happy in a while. I want you to feel good again. Say something funny.”
“You’re the funny one.”
“I am always the funny one, the strange one, the tiny one. I want you to assume one of these thankless roles.”
They ate in silence for some moments.
“Remember the missile flap?” he said. “It’s about ten months now since U-2 planes photographed offensive missiles in Cuba. Guess what? They’ve come up with something new. ”,
“Do I want to know what it is?”
“A Soviet surveying team has found a major oil field. And it’s precisely the area where I’d arranged drilling contracts. I saw the photos last week and they were so detailed I could recognize the terrain. I was there. I stood right there. I visited the fields. We did mineral surveys. There was serious money behind us.”
“Your oil. Your field.”
“Ours. And better ours than the goddamn Russians. You know what they’ll do to that island. Drain the living blood out of it.”
“I don’t doubt it. But it’s hard sometimes to live with a man who never, never, never lets go.”
“This is damn right I don’t let go.”
They let it drop for a while. She got up and turned over the record. It was raining hard and she caught a glimpse of someone running in the street.
“Let me explain about obsessions,” he said.
“Oh yes please.”
“I take a sweeping view of the subject.”
“God yes.”
“It’s the job of an intelligence service to resolve a nation’s obsessions. Cuba is a fixed idea. It is prickly in a way Russia is not. More unresolved. More damaging to the psyche. And this is our job, to remove the psychic threat, to learn so much about Castro, decipher his intentions, undermine his institutions to such a degree that he loses the power to shape the way we think, to shape the way we sleep at night.”
“Maybe what I don’t understand is why Cuba. Do I know the first thing about this island? Is it West Indian, is it Spanish, is it white, is it black, is it mulatto, is it Latin American, is it Creole, is it Chinese? Why do we think it belongs to us?”
“It’s not a question of belongs to us. It’s a question of something working beautifully, of private investment being given the chance to help a country rise in the world, and Cuba was rising in distribution, manufacturing, literacy, social services, and any high-school student can make a solid case that the flaws and excesses of the Batista regime could have been contained without a revolution and certainly without a march into the communist camp.”
They fell silent again. The power of his feelings made her want to pause. There weren’t many things he believed in strongly. She felt a shrinking in herself, the old pathetic readiness to give in quietly. But what was there to fight about? She didn’t know the subject. She saw the world in news clippings and picture captions, the world becoming bizarre, the world it is best to see in one-column strips that you send to friends. Refuge only in irony. If her aim was to go unnoticed, then why fight?
“Things are looking better in some areas,” he said. “There are things I’m not unhappy about at all. I am making something of a professional comeback. There is talk of moving me to the Office of Finance. There is a field unit in Buenos Aires. This is not to be discussed, of course. I’ll work in money markets, making sure we have foreign currencies on hand for certain operations.”
“Is this a plum, Buenos Aires?”
“I don’t know where it stands in the fruit-and-vegetable kingdom. It is just goddamn good of them to give me this chance. The Agency understands. It’s amazing really how deeply they understand. This is why some of us see the Agency in a way that has nothing to do with jobs or institutions or governments. We are goddamn grateful for their understanding and trust. The Agency is always willing to consider a man in a new light. This is the nature of the business. There are shadows, there are new lights. The deeper the ambiguity, the more we believe, the more we trust, the more we band together.”
It was remarkable how often he talked to her about these things. The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God. She needed to live in small dusty rooms, layered safely in, out of the reach of dizzying things, of heat and light and strange spaces, and Larry needed the great sheltering nave of the Agency. He believed that nothing can be finally known that involves human motive and need. There is always another level, another secret, a way in which the heart breeds a deception so mysterious and complex it can only be taken for a deeper kind of truth.
There were anemones in a bud vase on the table. The phone rang and Beryl went to her desk in the living room to answer. It was a man named Thomas Stainback. She knew from the tone of voice that it was a call Larry would take upstairs. She simply stood in the doorway. When he saw her, he got up from the table. She waited for him to climb the stairs to the guest room and pick up the phone and then she put the receiver down softly and went in to drink her coffee.