“She’s called three times,” Lydia Mott said.
“What for?”
“Because she made this tentative dinner date for you. It’s about a job and he wants you to have dinner with him around seven-thirty at the Montpelier Room in the Madison and, Jesus, that’ll set him back a few bucks, won’t it?”
“Lydia,” a patient Stallings said. “Who’s he?”
“Right. That is kind of pertinent. Well, it’s one Harry Crites.”
“The poet.”
“Poet?”
“He gets published.”
“Yeah, but what does he do?”
Stallings hesitated. “I’m not quite sure. Anymore.”
“I see. One of those. Well, you want me to call Joanna and have her say when he calls back that you’ll meet him there at seven-thirty?”
Stallings again hesitated, debating the rewards of a Saturday night in the company of Harry Crites. The internal debate went on until his daughter grew impatient and said, “Well?”
“Sorry,” Stallings said. “I was just trying to parse that last sentence of yours. But okay. Call Joanna and tell her yes.”
There was a brief silence until his daughter said, “Look, Pappy. If you don’t want to eat with the poet, why don’t you come out and have lamb stew with us and listen to some of Howie’s real-life dirty stories?”
“What a solace and comfort you are in these pre-Alzheimer years.”
“No thanks, huh? Okay. How come they fired you?”
Stallings started to shrug, but stopped when he realized she couldn’t see it. “Budgetary restrictions, they said.”
“Budgetary? With all those millions?”
“I’ll call you,” Stallings said.
“Tomorrow.”
“Okay. Tomorrow.”
Booth Stallings hung up the pay phone, crossed to one of the drugstore’s lighted windows, and used its reflection to examine what he was wearing: the old suede Istanbul jacket; the too wide black and brown tie he remembered buying in Bologna; a tan shirt from Marks and Spencer in London that he thought of as his thousand-miler, having once heard an old-time traveling salesman describe a similar shirt as such; and the gray flannel pants he couldn’t remember buying at all, but whose deep pleats suggested they hadn’t been bought in the States. As for shoes, Stallings knew without looking that he was wearing what he always wore: cheap brown loafers that he bought by the half-dozen, discarding each pair as it wore out.
Still, it was an outfit that would get him into the Madison. And it was certainly adequate for dining with Harry Crites who had worn an aging blue suit with shiny elbows and a glistening seat when Stallings had first met him 25 years ago. Thirty minutes after they met, Crites had borrowed $35 to make an HFC payment that was a month overdue.
As he turned in search of a cruising taxi, Stallings tried to remember if Harry Crites had ever repaid the $35, and finally decided that he hadn’t.
Chapter Two
Booth Stallings sat in the lobby of the Madison Hotel near a couple of bored-looking Saudis and waited for Harry Crites who was already 19 minutes late. But Crites had always been late, even back in the early sixties when he would burst into a meeting a quarter hour after it had started, wearing a big merry smile, an inevitable King Edward cigar, and clutching a file of hopelessly jumbled documents. He would then disarm everyone, even the punctuality sticklers, with a wry, self-deprecating crack that had them all chuckling.
After Kennedy’s death in 1963, Harry Crites had resigned from what he later always referred to not quite accurately as “my White House stint” and moved over to Defense, where he wasn’t at all happy, and from there to State where he landed a slot in the suspect Public Safety Program of the Agency for International Development. AID dispatched Crites to seven or eight lesser developed countries from which came mutterings about some of the deals he had cut with their premiers, presidents-for-life and prime ministers. But Stallings had never paid much attention.
Besides, it was around in there — 1965 — that Stallings, his wife and two young daughters, cushioned by a $20,000 foundation grant, had left Washington for Rome where he would continue his research on terrorism.
In the seven or eight years that followed, Booth Stallings only returned to Washington and sometimes New York when forced to wheedle additional funds out of mostly unsympathetic foundations. And occasionally he would bump into Harry Crites at some unavoidable cocktail party or embassy reception.
By then Harry Crites’ shiny blue suit and King Edward cigar and the old Ford Fairlane with its rusted-out rocker panels were long gone. Instead, the suits were from J. Press and the cigars smelled of Havana and the car was a beige Mercedes sedan, not the most expensive model, but not the diesel either.
At these infrequent encounters Harry Crites and Booth Stallings never said much more than hello and how’ve you been, although Crites almost never gave an answer, or waited for one, because there were always others he wanted to talk to far more than he did to Stallings, and usually he was already waving and smiling at them.
But once there had been nobody — nobody worthwhile anyway — and Harry Crites said he had left government and was now doing liaison work, which meant he was peddling what back then was still called influence but in later years was softened to access. Stallings had sometimes speculated about who might be retaining Crites and his conclusions had left him as depressed as he ever got.
Harry Crites was 22 minutes late when the muscle walked into the Madison and read the lobby with the standard quick not quite bored glance that flitted over Booth Stallings, lingered for a moment on the two Saudis, counted the help and marked the spare exits. After that the muscle gave her left earlobe a slight tug, as if checking the small gold earring.
Booth Stallings immediately nominated her for one of the three most striking women he had ever seen. Her immense poise made him peg her age at 32 or 33. But he knew he could be five years off either way because of the way she moved, which was like a young athlete with eight prime years still ahead of her.
She was at least five-ten and not really as slender as her height made her out to be. She carried no purse and wore cream gabardine slacks with a black jacket of some nubby material that was short enough to make her seem even taller, but loose enough to hide the pistol Stallings somehow knew she was wearing.
Her hair was a thick reddish brown with the red providing the highlights. Worn carelessly short, it looked perfect. It also looked as if all she had to do to make it look like that was run her fingers through it. Stallings suspected that nothing perfect was that easy. The red-brown hair framed a more or less oval face whose features seemed to have been placed precisely where they should be — except her forehead, which was a little high. Her eyes were green, although Stallings couldn’t decide whether they were sea green or emerald green. But since she looked expensive, he finally settled on dollar green.
A few seconds after she tugged at her left earlobe, Harry Crites made his entrance, wearing a nine-dollar cigar and a thousand-dollar camel’s hair topcoat. The coat was worn like a cape, much as a rich poet might have worn it, if there were such a thing, which Stallings doubted.
The woman nodded at Crites. It was a noncommittal nod that could have meant either have fun or all clear. Crites paused. The woman removed the coat from his shoulders with no trace of subservience. Stallings wondered how much her services cost and what they included. With the camel’s hair coat over her left arm, the woman turned and left the hotel through the 15th Street entrance.
When Harry Crites caught sight of his dinner guest he narrowed his blue eyes and twinkled them behind what Stallings suspected were contact lenses. The wide joke-prone mouth, a shade or two paler than a red rubber band, stretched itself into a delighted smile, revealing some remarkably white teeth that Stallings knew were capped. After remembering that Crites had been 27 when he had borrowed that still unpaid $35 back in 1961, Stallings put his present age at 52.