"Business is business. The two matters are entirely separate."
Renaldi nodded. "A mature attitude. But I don't think you have anything to worry about."
Temple truly hoped so as she rose to shake hands with him and follow Kendall out of the office.
"That was good!" Kendall whispered as they went down the hallway. "You're a real con woman. Where's Louie?"
"He stayed behind to investigate," Temple said airily.
Victor Janos, feet on his cluttered desktop, was hurling darts at a board on the back of his office door when Kendall knocked. He stopped when they entered.
"Come in!"
They did, and faced a man with a raised dart in one hand, ready to arc it right toward one or the other of their eyes.
Janos was not a needlessly cordial man.
"What is it?"
"Urn. I brought Miss Barr to see you. About a possible Las Vegas commission for the firm."
"Las Vegas. Surface without substance. The perfect product for CJR show her in, Kendall, and then get thee to a nunnery, or wherever it is that young Carlo Renaldi would prefer you were, other than here."
Janos's crooked grin tried to be self-deprecating, but the attitude wasn't in him. Temple was suddenly aware that this was a man who had killed, and who could kill again, no matter how many decades had passed since Vietnam.
Kendall retreated without a farewell glance to Temple. She thought Janos was the murderer. She was leaving Temple to confront him alone.
Janos looked Temple up and down as if she were a commodity. "Sit."
Temple sat. "I was wondering," she began.
"Yes?" He expected a schoolgirl subject.
"Why you're number two in the firm name, and Tony Renaldi isn't."
He sailed a dart past her head. She heard it sink into the soft cork of the target.
"Good question." Victor Janos grabbed a fistful of shelled peanuts from a chrome bowl on his desk and began crunching. "Ever hear of a 'point man'?"
Temple shook her head. Damn Kendall! What had she gotten Temple into? Janos was a different man since the Santa Claus death: abstracted, bitter, mean.
"Point man. Guy who sticks his neck out. Goes first into a booby-trapped tunnel, a field of buried bombs. It takes guts. It takes stupidity. Sometimes, it takes a hero. But most of the time, it takes a shmuck. You know what they're gonna do?"
Temple shook her head.
"They're gonna leave me on point, and fade out. They forget where we came from. They forget where we were gonna get to. They forget everything but me, the guy on point. Perpetually on point."
"I guess I do know what a point man is," Temple said.
Janos's molasses-dark eyes dared her to be worthy of his time and attention.
"I guess I was on point when those two thugs jumped me in a parking garage, or when the guy who wanted to bring a whole neighborhood down had me trapped on the second floor of a burning house. Or when Savannah Ashleigh tried to have my cat falsely accused of impregnating her precious Persian."
"Come on." But the dart he held was poised, drawn back behind his head.
"I guess there are a lot of ways of being 'on point,' for a lot of different people," Temple said. "We all take risks. Maybe it's cigarettes. Or drugs. Or drink. Or AIDS. But you have the medals to prove it."
She nodded at the small wooden frames pocking his wall, each centered by a small metal object.
He swung his chair to face them. A regiment of medals from a war that many considered shameful and that was hardly dignified by the term.
"You know," Temple said, "when they keep referring to what happens in a war as an 'engagement,' you can hardly tell if it's a battle or a social event."
"Or a business arrangement." Janos spoke past the back of his chair, as the dart zinged home to a target halfway between two framed medals.
The chair spun around, and Janos dived into a desk drawer.
Temple stiffened, expecting to be confronted by a pearl-handled revolver at least, shades of Patton and World War II.
Janos pulled a bottle from the bottom drawer, and slammed it to the desktop.
"You don't know nothin' about war or medals or Vietnam, but I guess you got guts or you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be talking to me like you think you know me." His eyes blurred. "All the women we saw in Vietnam were whores or grandmas with grenades in their hands or little tiny kids with strategic parts missing. Which one are you?"
"I'm not in Vietnam. I'm in Manhattan, and it's Christmas and Santa is dead."
"God is dead. So what?"
"Mr. Janos." He glanced at her with those tormented eyes so capable of dishing out what they had gotten, and given, thirty years ago. "Why are you second on the company logo?"
"Because I always did the grunt work, and the worst work, the dirtiest and the deadliest work. I wasn't smooth, not like Mr. CIA Colby. I didn't have the imported-oil potential of Mr. Renaldi. I'm not any good at the advertising game, because it's a crooked game, and it takes a crooked man. I was a lot of things, but I was never that."
"I believe you."
"Why? Why does it matter? Too bad Colby didn't swing."
"Do you know anything about the man who died?"
Janos shook his head, tilting the bottle into a glass he pulled from behind a fake set of gilded leather-bound books.
"Rudy was a Vietnam veteran too," Temple said. "Not a very successful one. He couldn't even pass as a success, like you. I hear he was in and out of a lot of VA hospitals, and was a panhandler for a while. Friends from before the war got together and tried to keep him together, but they couldn't do much."
"Rudy?" Janos leaned forward as if he were deaf. "Did you say Rudy?" For the first time he was really listening to her.
"Yes. Does the name mean something to you?"
Janos was looking beyond her, maybe at the dart board, maybe at the ghost of Christmas past. He shrugged, taciturn again. All is calm, all is bright.
"Kinda ironic, I guess. With Christ mas so near. The dead man being named Rudy, like Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. Funny, huh?"
But Temple didn't believe for one jingle-bell moment that Victor Janos would know irony from an ironing board.
Her mind modified the carol's words to fit her suspicions as she left his office. All is calm, all is dark.
Chapter: Letter to Louise, Part 2
Bring the Meditations of Midnight Louie in New York City
"Well, here I am again, maybe-daughter-dearest, watching the snowflakes fizzle against the window glass while my mitts hit the old keyboard like it was a bottle of the best, heaviest cream eggnog, fresh from Elsie the cow herself and her good bovine buddy of clan Glenlivet
"Perhaps you would cut me a little slack if you could see how I have been wined, dined, and whisked around the Big Apple recently I have had so many uniformed chauffeurs in the past few days, many of foreign extraction, that I am inclined to salute rather than make condescending small talk with them.
"Miss Temple Barr will not let me out of her vicinity, perhaps acting under the mistaken impression that this mother of all cities might intimidate me. Anyway she keeps me in tender custody so I do not dirty my pads on any dog droppings that have been uncollected by rude parties when I pass from the curbed limousine to the solid gold revolving doors that lead to Madison Avenue office buildings. Miss Temple Barr is so impressed by what she calls the 'Art Deco ambience ' of the gilt elevator doors here that she pauses every time we enter to offer contemplation and worship. Did I mention that the streets are paved with solid granite?