"I'll let you know what finally gets decided on that. But meanwhile on the other thing you had me reach out for —?"
"Yeah?"
"No problem. He's very understanding to our situation. I can absolutely fuckin' guarantee you we reach him when we want him. The only thing is it has to be handled with kid gloves. I don't want to do it myself."
"Just take care of it whatever ya' think."
"Yeah. I'll have somebody here in the office drop around and give him the envelope. That's no problem. And he's quite understanding and sympathetic. The thing is you know he says there has to be something for show. My feeling is we can expect a very smooth thing there, though."
"When we come up? What is it — three weeks?"
"Yeah, right. Jim, another thing good for us there is that he's got his friend wants that political thing. That appointment is like a fucking lifetime annuity, ya know?"
"Ya better fucking believe it. Those cocksucks don't do shit and the fucking thing pays seventy large while they sit on their asses, and they don't gotta run every couple years like them other assholes. Shit. They gotta fuckin' bird's nest on the ground."
"Abso-fuckin'-lutely. Shit, I'd take a fuckin' judgeship over there. And of course he knows you got the fix in with the Committee too, so we got no problem there whatsoever. So his friend has done all that work for the ticket, see, and we just ease him into that, we got two out of three bases covered over there."
"Goddamn right."
"Well, I'm sorry about the other but I wanted to let you know about our friend over there. I think he'll bang us for ten dollars and that'll be that, so hang tough, and I'll get back to ya when I have something concrete."
"I got something concrete for the cocksuck."
(They laugh.)
"Take care — talk to ya later."
"Awright, Jake, lemme know."
"Will do, my friend. Talk to ya soon."
"Okay. Now listen," as the voice-activated Norelco kicked back on again and Eichord heard a soft, extremely precise voice ask the secretary if Mr. Rozitsky was in.
"Who shall I say is calling, please?"
"Tell him it's Roy Cohn," the man said.
"Yes, sir, Mr. Cohen, one moment please," the woman said, missing the man's joke.
A few seconds later a laughing voice came on the line: "Jake Rozitsky."
"Hello, Mr. Rozitsky. You don't know me and my name won't be important to you, but I have some information that you're going to find very valuable with respect to a criminal case you're going to be involved in within a couple of weeks."
"Who am I talking with, please?"
"Oh, just think of me as a friend of the court. Listen, I don't want money. I just want justice. And I happen to be in a position to tell you something about a certain person that will be of great help to you in the upcoming situation."
"If you're talking about the hearing, I really can't discuss something like this over the phone and I —"
"Cut the bullshit," the voice said quietly. "I'm a friend. All you have to do is listen and judge for yourself. I don't trust this line of yours at all, for starters, and if you have half a brain you'll know what I'm talking about. If you want to hear the information I have for you, no strings attached, go downstairs to the pay telephone in your lobby. Do you know the phone I'm talking about?"
"Yeah, but that —"
"This is important. I don't have time to bullshit with you, I'm phoning that pay telephone in three minutes. If you're there to answer it, fine. If the doorman or somebody answers it, I hang up and you won't hear from me again. If I get a busy I'll dial it again in three minutes, but that's it. You've got three minutes to get downstairs." The line clicked dead before the lawyer had a chance to argue about it.
"He told his secretary he'd be back in a few minutes," the cop said to Eichord, "and that was the last thing he ever said to anybody as far as we know.
"There was about a half a pound of plastique under the pay phone. It went off approximately three minutes following this last call. Blew him right in half, took out the front windows, glass fucking everywhere, killed an innocent man —"
"Adios, Jake." another cop said.
Eichord thought about the line in Shakespeare's Henry VI. The one about "Kill all the lawyers." He rewound the tape back a little ways, listening to the cool, well-modulated, soft tones say, "Tell him it's Roy Cohn." It was a distinctive voice. The man speaking barely above a whisper, enunciating with the greatest precision, accentless and bland like an announcer but without the professional smoothness, each syllable distinct from the next. Overprecise. Confident.
"You don't know me and my name won't be important to you," the soft voice said, pronouncing each vowel so precisely.
Jack Eichord reached over and rewound it back again and tried to imagine the man's mouth as it formed the o sounds, "You don't know me and my name won't be important to you —"
"Wrong," said Eichord to the tape.
"Hey, I can tell ya one thing about that voice for sure."
"Yeah?" They looked at the cop who had spoken.
"Jackie Nails it ain't."
The thing about Rita was. Yes, you dirty old man. That WAS the thing about her. And there were other things he liked too. He liked her. He liked — hell, he LOVED the idea of liking a woman. One woman. He was nuts about liking.
It was good to be, as the previous generation had put it, "of an age." He guessed they were of an age, okay. It was an interesting age, too. No doubt about it. Even with the anxieties and the doldrums and the infrequent paranoia, there was that wonderful feeling of being comfortable in your skin that so rarely is gifted on the young. They have other things going for them, sure. But he wouldn't trade places.
Take Rita, and he certainly would. Every chance he got, thanks. She had that class you can't acquire by any shortcut. Money will definitely not buy it. It's more than style, or flair, or good breeding. It's class. Even in her wildest, hottest moments of abandon, he thought her touchingly decorous.
He knew he could talk to her of Casablanca, Sibelius' Valse Triste, Dostoyevski and Diaghilev and Della Street and Vivian Delia Chiesa, and she might know and remember. He could whisper to her of Madame de Beauvoir and Ted de Corsia and Vaughn de Leath and Demosthenes and she'd not lose her marbles. But would she remember Les Damon and Les Tremayne, Brad Runyon and Margot Lane, Olan Soule and Omar the Mystic, Jack Packard and Michael Axford, George W. Trendle and Phillips H. Lord? Would she recall the pussycat on Kilimanjaro, Moxie and Chox,
Chickory-Chick, Stan Getz' Stella? Stella Dallas? Or only Dallas . . . ? He knew, and the flood of knowing engulfed the hard consonants in a stream-of-consciousness distant sharing.
She was his salvation, first of all. The one thing that could elevate him out of the dour, drab, sordid milieu that held him in its more or less permanent grip. Rita could take him out of there in an eye blink. Just the thought of being with her, that long, flashy, red mane of silky-soft hair that framed her pale and angelic beauty, the look of her striding across a room on those killer legs of hers, it was enough to turn him completely around in a New York second. The lady made him crazy. What a fox. He especially liked her mouth and told her so as they moved forward in the moderately long line waiting to see Asphalt Jungle.
"You've got some mouth on you," he whispered to her, "you know that?"
"Yes. A lot of people I know say I've got a real mouth on me."
"Well, that too. But even that turns me on."
"Laundry lists turn you on, Binaca breath, so what else is new?"