A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror (9 page)

Sherm was a large man whose personality was defined by the force of his imagination and his willingness to lower all barriers to new experiences. He was a man capable of completely surrendering control just to find out what would happen without it. Such spontaneity couldn’t be farther from Lou’s ability to do these same things.

Sherm was a practical joker of massive dimensions. He was always at the center of some gargantuan plot—in which at least ten or twelve other friends played a part—to lead another of his many friends into a web of complexities. Like the time he printed up and delivered invitations, ostensibly from Mayor Ed Koch, to all his friends, inviting them to join the mayor and other prominent politicos at the
West Side Cafe
on Forty-second Street to celebrate the emergence of the city from financial bankruptcy. With everyone there properly bedecked and tuxedoed, Sherm led them all in a conga dance rendition of
I Ain’t Got Nobody
behind a Koch-like midget in a jumpsuit.

While Lou was at Dix—a temporary captive of the Army, minuscule paychecks, and a straitjacket of rules and regulations—he remained an integral part of Sherm’s circle and was included in all of these crazy shenanigans.

“Your time will come, Lou, when you decide to start living,” Sherm roared. “Friends are friends.”

But when Lou joined Pierson Browne, the relationship changed; not because Sherm had changed, but because the pauper’s veil that was so easy for Lou to wear while he was in the Army was impossible to wear as a stockbroker. It was his turn, but he couldn’t take his turn. Embarrassed, he’d slid further and further away; but now, he grabbed at the chance to make up for lost time. He was back.

Lou ordered a bottle of
Schwartze Katz Liebfraumilch
, a name from out of the past. It was the only name he could think of, but the Inn didn’t have it. For a moment, he began to hector the college-kid waiter.

Okay. Order something else, then. What was it again? Something French. Chateau...? Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Yeah.
“ “Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Uh… dix neuf cent soixante quatre.”
Oh, boy. Where did that come from?
But the waiter kid just blushed, and Lou saw that Maggie was smiling tolerantly from across the table, so he gave in and let the kid deliver an unnamed, white table wine.

“I think it was a great buy,” Mag said.

“It’s plain white wine, Mag. Just kidding. It’s a nice chair. We should have a bunch of them,” Lou said.

“They should’ve left the paint on, but people want natural wood,” she said.

“I kind of like the bare wood, myself.”

“I love the way the legs flare out from the seat,” she said.

“We could’ve gotten some more.”

“Lou, I didn’t mean that I thought we should go crazy.”

“Who’s going crazy? If they’re a good buy, let’s go for it.”

“Shush.”

“Don’t shush me. I’m feeling good. I’m feeling very good.”

“Relax.”

“I’m relaxed. I’m very relaxed.”

“Lou, can we salvage something lasting out of this? Can we save some part of it for the future and not suck every last ounce of honey from it just as fast as we can?”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s just our approach to things. I get something good and immediately begin to fret about when it will be taken away. Don’t ever surrender completely to happiness, lest some arbiter in the sky come down to even things up again with something bad.”

“So, what’s the bad part?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”

“Mag, I’m a mover again. Can’t you see? It kills me to have no shot at...”

“At what? Glory?”

“Now, that’s nasty.”

“Power?”

“Chances don’t come very often. When they do, you have to move. Fast.”

“I suppose.”

“I have to be a player, Mag. Now, I don’t know if I am one; but as they say, ‘if it looks like a duck...’ You know, I’m glad they couldn’t make it, Sherm and Virg.”

“Glad?”

“Yeah. This place...you know, isn’t all I thought it was going to be.”

“What? It’s perfect.”

“I still made some points.”

“Now, what are you talking about?”

“To just get up from whatever you’re doing and go; that’s the perfect thing.”

“I don’t get it.”

“That’s freedom, Mag… That’s power.”

They each stared into the other’s eyes for nearly a minute. Then, Lou raised his glass to drink and heard Mag singing softly to herself:

“Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars...”

They lingered a long while over dinner, and then went back to the room to get sweaters. Arm in arm, they stepped out of the screened veranda in front of the inn.. Lou noticed that the Audi was gone. He and Mag took a long walk, consciously matching strides and spontaneously tightening their hold whenever they felt the others’ eyes on their cheek. The chill air and the sandy ground beneath their feet recalled a time when their flesh was hard to the others’ touch and their stride was strong and purposeful. Coming back to the inn, they stopped just beyond the range of the front light and kissed long and full.

The bed in their room was high. Mag’s face held the chill of the night air, but the room was warm and the coolness across her cheeks was soon replaced with a ruddy glow. They didn’t speak as they peeled off each other’s clothes, slowly and with care. Lou led Mag to the shower where they soaped, rinsed, and dried each other. Then he went back to the bed and waited until Mag came out of the bathroom, snapped off the light, and walked to him in the moonlight, covered in two squirts of Redi-Whip and an oversized Chocolate Chiparoo on a string.

In the morning, Lou woke with the sun coming through the chintz curtains. The room was warm and bright. He rolled to his side. Mag was bent over the Windsor. She had placed it bottom up on a table and was running her fingers over the gently sculpted stretchers. With the sunlight behind her, the outline of her hip showed dark against the shimmering white of her robe.

“I can feel the difference in these turnings, Lou. Some old craftsman did them by hand.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Some old craftsman. Come on back to bed. I’ll see to your turnings.”

Chapter Eight

Euphoria filled Lou on the ride back from Candlewood Lake, something like the feeling induced in him five years before on the banks of the Donau River in Germany, when he saw brigadier general stars coming his way. Nothing could deflate him, and all the constants in his life became subject to review.

Start with the car. Halfway home, the mileage on the odometer rolled to zeros all the way across. Imagine: 100,000 miles and only three exhaust pipe replacements, two new water pumps, and a rebuilt alternator. It was a noisy car, the Subaru; not only the tires on the road, but also the rubbing sound from the left front that had begun about two years before. He wasn’t sure, but it seemed that at some point during the trip, a new sound, a
ticka-tick-tick
, began scolding like an angry squirrel beneath the floorboards on the
right
front.

* * *

This one was like all their springs. At the first hint of warmer days, Mag was at him to go to the garden center. Only this year, somewhere between the sphagnum moss and the wood chips, he met Donald Klink and hatched what he called “Klink’s Amazing Pink day lily experiment.”

Klink ran the greenhouse, raising everything from cactus to orchids, but day lilies were his specialty.

“I learned hybridizing at my father’s knee,” he told Lou, lovingly aspirating a flowering orchid hanging at head height from a piece of bark in Row B. “Dad actually bred several new flowers, but the crowning glory is Klink’s Amazing Pink.”

“A thoroughbred,” Lou said.

“Yes, a cultivar, actually. You know, day lilies are one of your lowest-maintenance, most drought tolerant perennials, and they offer a long season of bloom.”

“Really?” Lou said.

“They’re nothing but a bulb at this time of the year. You plant them about this time and forget about them, and through the summer months they sprout a nice green stem that stands up about two feet. Then the bud starts developing, and before you know it, a flower appears. It only stays open for a day, maybe two at most, then it’s gone for another year and another bud blooms. It’s extraordinary.”

“A lot of trouble for one day.”

“What you do is plant yourself a dozen bulbs of different lilies, and all the way to October, you have another flower coming to bloom. The Amazing Pink is a late season bloomer. You might prefer a round flower with pleated ruffles, such as Lachman’s Golden Cameo over here, or the simple, graceful Hanna Jane by Barth, here.

“I just pop the bulb in the ground?”

“Just pop it in the ground, and sometime late September, for the Amazing Pink, you’ll have your first bloom.”

“What if I got two and raced them; planted them side by side; one gets Vigaro, the other fends for itself?”

“Dunno,” Klink said. “Never tried racing bulbs. It’s an interesting experiment.”

* * *

He began thinking of ways to help out Pete and Oliver beyond their tuition bills. He was drawn to the ads in the last few pages of the
New Yorker
; the ones pitching summer camps. In Monroe, just across the border in New York, there was a traditional camping, canoeing, exploring kind of deal. Jory would get a kick out of it, and it would undoubtedly yield some very cute letters home. But then Lou spotted the ad for Chewonki, up in Maine.

“Never mind. I’ll pay for it. You’re only a kid once,” he told Peter, after a long, involved discussion.

“Dad, we appreciate it. We do. But... well, maybe in a couple of years. Jory is only five.”

* * *

“If you ask me, darling, you need to get busy on something,” Mag said. “You’re thinking too much.”

Leonard Motors advertised a Lexus for $450 a month on lease; and after a very rigorous test drive along Route Eighty all the way to Sparta and back, Lou was itchy. Mag preferred a more cautious approach: a thorough analysis of safety, reliability, and economy statistics from the latest
Consumer Reports New Car Issue
which recommended a Camry station wagon.

Lou walked all around the Camry, even tried out the keyless entry system, but his Lexus fever never cooled. Mag backed off and only insisted that they at least hang on to the old car. That night, the Lexus occupied the garage.

* * *

In the third week of July, first thing in the morning, Calvin Swisher met Lou at his desk in the bullpen and personally escorted him into the third glass office from the left.

“It’s yours,” Swish said. “I’m sorry it couldn’t have been sooner. You deserve it. You’ll need the extra privacy for your duties as planner of this year’s Big Tuna Bash. Have fun, rookie.”

Every year, the firm treated the ten top producers in the office to a sumptuous beach party in Mantoloking.

Patricia Buck called around Labor Day.

“Louis, I wonder if you could free yourself up to take my place with a couple of clients out at Westchester Country Club this weekend. Bring Barry Westover along.”

Pierson Browne, in a piggyback deal with Manufacturers Hanover, used the Westchester Golf Classic as a drawing card for many of their biggest institutional clients. The drill was to meet them at the first tee, supply them with some goodies—maybe a T-shirt, a sleeve of golf balls, and an umbrella—and then follow some of the pros around the holes nearest the clubhouse and cap it all off by sauntering over to a big yellow and white striped tent for lunch.

Barry Westover couldn’t care less about golf, so they wound up wandering with the crowd between holes, catching a glimpse of Johnny Miller driving into the rough on thirteen, then lounging under the tent drinking Bloody Marys.

Dolly, the party facilitator from Executive Privilege, the hospitality outfit Pierson Browne used for all its “schmooz-fests”, was a middle-aged woman doing her best not to look it. The morning after Patricia’s call, she was already in Lou’s office to talk Mantoloking when he arrived.