The Side of the Angels (10 page)

“I'll need an hour with you and Clare Murray,” I said to him, “and
a place to work, and a few other things like the name of a nearby union printer. You know the drill.”

“Clare's at a CLC meeting,” said Tony. “That means Central Labor Council, in case you don't remember. She's drumming up support from the other local unions. God knows we'll need it.”

When I first met Tony, I didn't know what a CLC was, or a work slowdown, or a blue flu, or countless other labor lore and trivia he'd clued me in on, including the legend that George Meany was buried with one of his favorite cigars in his coffin and that his ghost haunted the AFL-CIO office in D.C., smoking and wandering. Walking down an empty hallway in that cavernous building still gave me the willies.

“So when can Clare see me?”

“It's too bad you didn't get here in time to go with her.”

“Yes, it is, isn't it.”

I didn't say, “I got up at the crack of dawn to make the train,” or “Do you know how many other clients need me right now?” I had learned a long time ago that it never paid to defend yourself against implied accusations that you weren't a sufficient martyr to the cause.

“You're here now, anyway. How's everything going?”

He could not have spoken with a finer detachment.

“Great. Just great. And you?”

“I'm great. Going out to Snake River after this is over with. Whitewater rafting.”

“Exciting.”

To Tony, it wasn't a vacation if he didn't have a chance to get hurt. His idea of fun was flinging himself into raging rapids on a rubber boat, or throwing himself down a western peak on two planks of wood—and believe me, in Tony's case, skis remained just planks of wood, not graceful instruments of near flight. He wasn't supposed to ski because of the bum knee he'd gotten playing high school football, but he taped it up and skied anyway. He'd broken an arm twice and an ankle once, on slopes where he had no business being.

“Is Jimmy still in the same job?” I asked.

“He got promoted. He has the prime route now. All the big accounts.”

Tony was wearing a black T-shirt with “Milwaukee Gold Malted”
written across it in big yellow letters. This was a gift from his younger brother, Jimmy, a salesman for a liquor distributorship. Thanks to this brother, many of Tony's possessions were promotional items for beer, wine, and spirits. His travel alarm clock was in the shape of a green plastic martini olive. His winter hat was a knit cap with the words “Clive's Red Rum” running in a continuous horizontal stripe around his head. His key chain was in the shape of a beer keg, and the only two drinking glasses he owned were embossed with the fake royal arms of a bourbon company. A temperance worker would have wept at the sight of him.

“You have a place for me to set up?” I asked him.

“We're a little cramped, as you can see. The best I could do was to give you that spot in the back there, squeezed in next to my desk.”

I peered at the shadowy far corner that he indicated. “Is that a copying machine I'm almost sitting on top of? And the coffeepot's right behind me? How am I supposed to work that way, Tony?”

“No one else even has a desk. The rest of them are making do with card tables and folding chairs.”

“Aren't I lucky.”

“You want to sit at the end of the conference table and type while they're stuffing envelopes? Because that's the only alternative seating in the house.”

The desk Tony had chosen for me couldn't have looked more unwelcoming. It was constructed of thin, splintery plywood you could have put your fist through, and a childish hand had scrawled curses on it with an indelible marker.

“That was Eric,” Tony said, as I examined the varied inscriptions that decorated even the sorry blotter. “You'll meet him. He's one of our member's kids.”

“Must be a lovely child.”

But I said it under my breath. Already our little altercation had drawn a few looks. If I kicked up much more of a fuss, the people here would think I was some jumped-up, inside-the-Beltway brat who'd be no use whatsoever.

The office was humming quietly, but I knew from experience that the instant a strike was declared, it would be pandemonium. The
space was cluttered with derelict furniture obviously brought from members' basements: folding tables, rolling desk chairs with wobbly casters, tarnished steel standing lamps too unattractive to be labeled vintage, and a long saggy sectional sofa covered in royal-blue burlap with sinister dark stains here and there. Piles of poster board and two-by-fours for picket signs were stacked in every corner, including the corner directly behind my desk, where I would discover that they had a habit of crashing over during the middle of important press calls.

Some of the picket signs were already finished. As I watched, a brisk-looking woman began to ink in the same slogans on sign after sign: “Local 507 nurses speak out for patients!” and “Keep St. Francis safe. Support striking nurses.” I had no problem with those, but other stacks, already completed, seemed to have been lettered by a Bolshevik with heartburn. They read “St. Francis: bad for nurses, deadly for patients,” and “Stop killer overtime before people get killed.”

“Tony,” I said, pointing. “You can't use those.”

“You're here five minutes and you're telling me what slogans we can use?”

“Tony, people like nurses. They trust nurses. But they don't want to see nurses with their fists in the air like some bad imitation of Che Guevara.”

“What are they supposed to do, sit in a circle singing Peter, Paul and Mary songs? Lie down in front of the Coventry lawyers' limo to make the ride softer for the fat cats?” said Tony. “We need to show some righteous anger here.”

“Anger is okay, but it has to be
grieved
anger, principled anger, like the image people have of Florence Nightingale fighting for medical supplies for wounded soldiers in the Crimea. Motherly. Steadfast, calm, and caring. That's the way to go, don't you think?”

Tony made a gagging motion with his finger.

“Cut it out. I told you I was right, Tony,” said the woman who was inking in signs. She had a funny little face, a strangely archetypal face that seemed oddly familiar. When I thought about it later, I realized it was the sort of face you see in a Colonial portrait. It was oblong with clearly delineated but sized-down features, and the small constant hint of a smile, severely restrained. She had light brown hair cut in a
straight bob, capable hands with short nails, and a firm jaw and chin. I guessed her age at thirty-eight or so.

“This is Kate Kenney,” said Tony. “Kate, this is Nicky, our PR flack.”

“Hello. Good call about the signs. We've been fighting about this. And don't get all prissy and displeased with me, Tony,” said Kate, shaking my hand in a parenthetical way. “Those slogans are way too inflammatory. We should get rid of them. There's plenty of cardboard.”

“I wrote them out myself,” said Tony. “It took me two hours.”

“You get an A-plus for printing well and staying in the lines,” said Kate. “I'll bring you in a gold foil star tomorrow.”

“Fine,” said Tony. “Fine. We'll be up until two
A.M.
the next three nights making more, but fine.”

“We'll be up until two anyway,” she said, turning back to her work.

“This is my desk,” said Tony. He gestured toward a beat-up oak battleship from the 1940s. It looked like a stage prop from
His Girl Friday,
and it was inches from mine. I wouldn't be able to cough or whisper without him hearing me.

Do not react,
I said to myself. He's trying to spook you. He wants you to bolt for Providence and hop on the next train you can find with a name like The Carolina Mockingbird, and not get off until you're well over the Mason-Dixon line.

He made a show of moving a stack of
Inside Labor
magazines off the top of my desk so that I could set down my portable computer.

“I've been writing the strike newsletter myself,” he said. “I'm sure you'll come up with some improvements.”

“That's what you pay me for. But it doesn't look half bad.”

Weingould had given me copies.

“Who's doing layout for you on the newsletter right now? Did you learn a desktop program?”

“Margaret. You'll meet her. She does a lot around here.”

Oh God. I knew the type.

“And how's Ron?” said Tony. “Still profiting off the suffering of others?”

“Someone has to,” I said. “This strike alone should buy him a new dining room set.”

“I'm glad we could be of use to you two,” Tony said in a flat, phony business voice. His voice—his real, relaxed voice—was one of the things I'd always found most attractive about him. There's no way to describe it except that it was a “light” voice. Not a tenor, because that conjures up images of musical comedy. Just a grainy, scratchy voice, a voice that lay lightly on the ears. It was infinitely persuasive and casual, with that odd Pennsylvania inflection at the ends of his sentences that made his questions sound like statements.

“Ron likes to say, ‘Causes pay bills.' Who knows, he may find some time to come up here and help us out, how about that?”

“That'll be the day,” said Tony. “Can he even travel without a special suitcase for his mousse and manicure kit and cosmetics?”

“Face lotion is not a cosmetic, Tony. His skin gets dry in the winter.”

“How does his skin get dry? Washington is a frigging swamp.”

The outside door opened. There was a string of bells attached to it, and when the door was pushed the bells jangled like beauty shop bells.

“Margaret put those up,” said Tony.

“What for?”

“To make the place homey, she said. She does a lot of that.”

Through the door stepped one of the last people I expected to see here, and he was sauntering toward us with an air of welcome that did not deceive me.

“You've got to be kidding,” I said to Tony under my breath.

“Goreman sent him.”

If Doug Hamner had stepped foot within a hundred miles of one of Tony's campaigns, it could only be in the empty title of second in command. Had Hamner been forced on Tony in any other capacity, Tony would have quit. The antagonism between them was long-standing. The antagonism between Doug and me was pretty venerable too.

I unwillingly shook Doug's offered hand, which was moist, no larger than mine, and far too soft. I noticed that he was wearing his fanny pack, a zippered pouch that hung from his belt and held God knew what. He always wore it in front—like a colostomy bag, Tony had once said. It went oddly with his suit and tie.

“Are you ready to be put to work?” said Hamner. “I have a lot for you to do.”

“Oh? You're helping Tony out, then?” I knew that would irritate him.

Hamner was nicknamed “the Hamster” by his fellow organizers, due to his slight overbite and his small, quickly gesturing hands. He'd hurriedly been brought on board at the national by the Toilers' new president, Jerry Goreman, when that old warhorse Frank De Rosa died. Doug was only one of the many yes-men from Goreman's Chicago local who rushed off to buy standby seats from O'Hare to Dulles while the last strains of “Solidarity Forever” were still echoing down K Street from De Rosa's funeral extravaganza at St. Matthew's Cathedral.

Doug was shoehorned into the organizing department, not because he had the faintest idea of how to run an organizing campaign, but because Goreman needed a spy on the ground in Weingould's territory. Weingould tried to neutralize Doug by assigning him to small races that were already in the bag, where he couldn't do much damage. Doug got very puffed up at these illusory successes, speaking frequently of his “win record” at Toilers staff meetings. One of the more venerable reps had commented to Doug once, on extreme provocation, “You know, sonny, it's easy to hit a home run when the pitcher hangs one over the plate.” But since the only sport Doug followed was bicycle racing, it was feared that he had missed the point.

He'd gotten puffed up in other ways, I saw now. He'd gained about twenty pounds since I'd last seen him, and it wasn't flattering to his Germanic countenance or his age, which must be close to forty-five now. You wouldn't call him heavy yet, but the extra weight transformed what had once been a pretty-boy handsomeness to a curdled attractiveness on the verge of running to fat. So rosy-cheeked was he, so yellow-brown of hair and droopy mustache, that if you'd put a beer stein in his hand and stuffed him into a pair of lederhosen, he could have walked into any Oktoberfest in Bavaria and been taken for a native.

“Now that you're here,” said Doug, “there are a few meeting notices Margaret hasn't been able to get to, and some ad copy for the Knights of Columbus banquet program which is due tomorrow. I think
you'd better do the meeting notices first; we can hit the night shift with those.”

“Actually, Weingould's hired me for some pretty specific writing and PR assistance, Doug, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to limit ad hoc favors like that. But if you like, I can look over anything
you've
written and give you some ideas.”

His florid complexion, so unbecoming in a man, grew a shade redder. You can't win with a guy like Doug. Assertive females threaten him, and docile women earn only contempt for their pains.

I gazed at him blandly. He looked from me to Tony, but Tony's face was wooden. Doug laughed. He gave Tony a playful punch on the arm.

“Tell her to give me a hand, since she says you're the boss.”

“I'm my own boss,” I said. “And I don't want to promise away my time on insignificant tasks until I get a sense of what's on the front burner. In fact, Tony, I need to be brought up to speed, which means I need to meet with Clare. Any idea when that can be arranged?”