In Pursuit of Spenser (9 page)

On the other hand, his humorous quips often have layers of meaning. When Rachel’s editor expresses surprise that Spenser has read the feminist book
The Second Sex
, Spenser says: “Don’t tell the guys down the gym. They’ll think I’m a fairy.”

He is joking, yet the remark is absolutely true. The guys at the gym would find his choice of reading matter effeminate and subject for ridicule. And yet the remark is still facetious, because, while this might be true, it would not bother Spenser one bit. The opinion of ignorant louts who know no better does not concern him. He would think nothing of reading a book in the aforementioned locker room, and if some steroidal blockhead took it as a sign of weakness and decided to pick on him, he would be confident he could put the jerk in his place. Though he wouldn’t feel it necessary to demonstrate his physical superiority, he would be quite content in issuing a verbal slap-down, whether his taunter
could understand it or not. In either case, he would be calm, controlled, and comfortable in his own skin.

Through comments like these, too, we begin to see who Spenser is. His remarks embody a whole philosophy, a whole lifestyle, an attitude toward the world. We see here, for instance, that he doesn’t care what (most) people think of him. The same is true in a strip club in
Ceremony
, where Spenser is looking for a teenage prostitute named April Kyle and is menaced by three toughs: “Come on, smart ass . . . We going someplace and see how tough you are.”

Spenser replies, “You can find that out right now. I’m tough enough not to go.”

It doesn’t matter whether these toughs believe Spenser can take them. He knows he can hold his own. And that’s all he needs.

That Spenser can sit calmly and wisecrack while being threatened just emphasizes how tough he is. Even in danger, Spenser’s wit never leaves him. If anything, the worse the odds against him, the more he quips—and the more brazenly insulting those quips become. In
Early Autumn
, when he beards crime boss Harry Cotton and three goons in the man’s office, Harry says, “I don’t want you sticking your nose into my business, you unnerstand?”

Spenser replies, “Understand, Harry. With a
D
. Un-der-stand. Watch my lips.”

Harry’s voice gets shriller: “Shut your fucking mouth. And keep your fucking nose out of my fucking business or I’ll fucking bury you right here, right out front here in the fucking yard I’ll bury you.”

Spenser, to the boy, who he brought with him: “Five. Five
fucks
in one sentence, Paul. That’s colorful. You don’t see color like that much anymore.”

It’s actually two sentences, but the gangster doesn’t notice. He’s too busy failing miserably at intimidating Spenser.

Spenser frequently uses humor to deflect his own vulnerability—not just physically, but emotionally, too.

In
The Judas Goat
, Susan gets misty because Spenser is leaving for London on a dangerous case.

“I’ll come back,” I said. “I won’t die away from you.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said, and her voice filled.

My throat was very tight and my eyes burned. “I know the feeling,” I said. “If I weren’t such a manly bastard, I might come very close to sniffling myself.”

He won’t, but he feels that way. And he’s not afraid to express it, even if it does come veiled in a wisecrack. Humor is an important part of how Spenser expresses intimacy.

For instance, in a restaurant where he takes Rachel, Spenser encounters Susan sitting at the bar next to a young man who is trying to pick her up.

“This is Tom,” she said. And then with the laughing touch of evil in her eyes she said, “Tom was nice enough to buy me a glass of Chablis.”

I said to Tom, “That’s
one
.”

Susan gets it, but Tom is confused. Spenser tells him it’s the tag line to an old joke, but he doesn’t tell him the joke, which could practically be a parable from
The Taming of the Shrew
: A man and his new bride are riding home on a donkey. The donkey stumbles, the man says, “That’s one.” The donkey stumbles again, the man says, “That’s two.” The donkey stumbles a third time, and the man takes out a gun
and shoots him dead. The wife, horrified, berates her husband for his cruelty. He waits until she’s finished, then points at her and says, “That’s one.”

This is typical Spenser, not sharing the joke with Tom but enjoying it as an in-joke with Susan. In two words, their relationship is succinctly defined. They have a companionable intimacy that allows each of them to understand what the other is thinking. Spenser would not have taken the guy out and shot him, and they both know it. Still, he is Susan’s protector, and she is comfortable with that and loves him for it, in spite of the violence within him and the violent lifestyle that being with him exposes her to. She’s also comfortable and conversant with his sense of humor.

When Susan Silverman catches him watching a girl in a white T-shirt and no bra walking away, she says, “That a suspect?”

Despite the implication that he is a sexist pig, his response is not the least defensive. He quips: “Remember I’m a licensed law officer. I was checking whether those cut-off jeans were of legal length.”

And Susan is not offended by the remark, because she knows for all his macho joking, he is actually a feminist at heart.

Humor is also a key part of Spenser’s relationship with the other most important person in his life: Hawk.

Hawk wasn’t always Spenser’s friend, of course. They started out as respected adversaries, back in the days when Hawk was an enforcer for mob boss King Powers. In
Promised Land
, Spenser warns Hawk of a police setup. Later, Hawk refuses his boss’s order to kill Spenser.

After it all goes down, Susan asks him, “Why not, Hawk? I knew you wouldn’t but I don’t know why.”

Hawk shrugs: “Me and your old man there are a lot alike.
I told you that already. There ain’t too many of us left, guys like old Spenser and me. He was gone there’d be one less. I’d have missed him. And I owed him one from this morning.”

The wry end of his explanation only underscores their similarity.

Once Hawk becomes Spenser’s best friend, his former mob connections sometimes prove humorous; it is a joke shared between them. In
Early Autumn
, when they are working out on the speed bags at the Harbor Health club, Hawk gets a phone call from Harry Cotton, the mob boss Spenser taunted, who has just put out a contract on Spenser’s life. Hawk comes back rather amused. Spenser asks:

“That him on the phone?”

“Yeah. He want me to whack you.” Hawk’s smile got wider. “He ask me if I know who you are. I say, yeah, I think so.”

I did a left jab and an overhead right.

“How much he offering,” I said.

“Five Gs.”

“That’s insulting,” I said.

“You’d have been proud of me,” Hawk said. “I told him that. I said I wouldn’t do it for less than ten.”

That isn’t the only subject that should be sensitive between them but isn’t. Hawk often falls into parodies of racial stereotypes when talking to Spenser, who gives it right back. In
The Judas Goat
, Spenser picks up Hawk in the airport:

I saw him leaning back in a chair with his feet on a suitcase and a white straw hat with a lavender band and a broad brim tipped forward over his face. He had on a dark blue three-piece suit, with a fine pinstripe of light gray, and a
white shirt with a collar pin underneath the small tight four-in-hand knot of a lavender silk tie. The points of a lavender handkerchief showed in his breast pocket. His black over-the-ankle boots gleamed with wax. The suitcase on which they rested must have cost half a grand. Hawk was stylish.

I said, “Excuse me, Mr. Fetchit, I’ve seen all your movies and was wondering if you’d care to join me for a bite of watermelon.”

Hawk didn’t move. His voice came from under the hat. “Y’all can call me Stepin, bawse.”

But where Spenser and Hawk often kid like that, Spenser is sensitive to racial slurs from other people, and even before he and Hawk are friends, he is ready rush to his defense. In
Promised Land
, he tells Susan,

“I got no special interest in playing Russian roulette with Hawk. Shepard called him a nigger.”

Susan shrugged. “What’s that got to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I wish he hadn’t done that. It’s insulting.”

“My God, Spenser, Hawk has threatened this man’s life, beaten him up, abused his children, and you’re worried about a racial slur?”

Spenser has his own code of honor—even though others don’t always understand it, and even though he frequently sounds as if he doesn’t take it seriously. At one point in
Early Autumn
, Spenser beats up the thugs trying to kidnap Paul. As they slink away, one taunts Spenser for not killing them, as if it is a fault: “You never were a shooter . . . It’s what’s wrong with you.”

The boy asks Spenser why he doesn’t kill people. Spenser says, “Something to do with the sanctity of life. That kind of stuff.”

Except Spenser actually believes what he’s saying. He’s expressing a moral code he actually agrees with, while at the same time scoffing at it as a silly idea. Which, of course, is actually ridiculing the notion that the sanctity of life
is
a silly idea.

Spenser is always complicated. In
Pastime
, he finds himself confronted with Jerry Broz, a small-time mobster determined to kill him. Ordinarily, this would be no problem, because Jerry isn’t good enough to do it. Spenser could easily take him out. But Jerry is the only son of Joe Broz, a crime boss who in the past has ordered Spenser killed himself. Joe feels Jerry is honor bound to kill Spenser and will not let his son back down, even though he knows Jerry isn’t tough enough. Spenser doesn’t want to kill Jerry, not because he’s afraid of what Joe might do, but because he feels sorry for him and doesn’t want to have to kill his son.

Susan says,

“You are the oddest combination.”

“Physical beauty matched with deep humility?”

“Aside from that,” said Susan. “Except maybe for Hawk, you look at the world with fewer illusions than anyone I’ve ever known. And yet you are as sentimental as you would be if the world were pretty-pretty.”

Spenser sees himself as a protector, a knight errant. As Susan explains to Rachel in
Looking for Rachel Wallace
:

“What he [Spenser] won’t say, and what he may not even admit to himself, is that he’d like to be Sir Gawain. He was
born five hundred years too late. If you understand that, you understand most of what you are asking.”

“Six hundred years,” I said.

Spenser makes a joke, but tellingly, he doesn’t disagree with her.

Despite his often contentious relationship with Rachel, once hired, Spenser considers himself to be responsible for her. He never backs down defending her person and her honor against all comers, often against her will, until, finally fed up (with his actions, not his words), she fires him. Needless to say, he does not take firing personally, or at all, really, and when Rachel is kidnapped because she has no bodyguard, he still feels morally obliged to find her.

Spenser’s role as the knight errant takes an unusual turn in
Promised Land
, in which Spenser is hired by Harvey Shepard to find his wife, Pam, who has run away. He finds her, talks to her, ascertains that she is healthy, happy, and not being held against her will, and then refuses to tell Harvey where she is. Spenser has decided Pam is better off where she is and the husband will only make her life miserable. On the other hand, he is willing to defend Harvey from the mob’s chief enforcer, Hawk, who is, at the time, if not a personal friend, at least a respected adversary. This is not the action of the ordinary PI, but Spenser has his own code of ethics that he will not violate.

In not betraying Pam to her husband, Spenser is confident he made the right choice but he isn’t happy about it. He feels he’s failed them both. As he tells Susan, “I’ve been with two people whose lives are screwed up to hell and I just can’t seem to get them out of it at all.”

Susan, who understands him perfectly, has no problem putting it in perspective, with a humorous edge: “Of course
you can’t . . . You also can’t do a great deal about famine, war, pestilence, and death.”

Spenser immediately counters with a quip: “A great backfield.”

Why does he care? It’s not his problem. Is it because he took the job for the husband and failed to do it? Because his duty is to his client, but he can’t bring himself to betray his client’s wife?

He’s hard on others who don’t share his same sense of honor. Later in
Promised Land
, Spenser meets up with Pam, who has gotten involved with militant feminists who robbed a bank and shot and killed the guard. She is wearing large sunglasses, which she also wore for the robbery. Spenser tells her to ditch them, because they are no longer a disguise, they are a means of identification. The woman, feeling stupid about not having realized that, says, “I never thought—”

Spenser isn’t about to let her off the hook.

“No, probably you don’t have all that much experience at robbery and murder. You’ll get better as you go along.”

His scathing irony is doubtless due to the fact that she deserves it, but probably also out of the frustration he feels from realizing if he had told the husband where she was, he would have come and gotten her and she wouldn’t have been involved in the robbery.