“Fine.”
We rose and she was as tall as I expected, nearly five-eight or — nine. The loosely cut brown dress failed to disguise her figure, but she probably knew that and used it for business purposes. I followed her across the room to the door and admired the sway of her hips and the curve of her calves which, I was pleased to note, were encased in nylon and not in cotton webbing or linsey-woolsey. When it comes to women’s clothes I seem to have decidedly reactionary tendencies, but it’s something I’ve been told that I may grow out of.
Frances Wingo paused at the door and looked at me with a kind of flickering interest, as if I were a slightly audacious water color that, while amusing perhaps, was not something one would purchase.
“Tell me something, Mr. St. Ives,” she said.
“What?”
“When you fill in that blank on your income-tax form which asks for occupation, what do you put down?”
“Go-between.”
“And that’s really what you are?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s really what I am.”
It had all started casually enough four years back, just before the newspaper that I worked for folded, the victim of a prolonged strike, an unworkable merger, a forgettable new name, and rotten management. I wrote a feature five days a week about those New Yorkers of high, middle, and low estate who caught my fancy, and because I have a fairly good ear, a high-school course in shorthand, and a careless personality (my ex-wife called it permissive, but then she was always up on the latest clichés), the stories were usually well received. It also caused me to become acquainted with a large collection of oddballs and once there was even talk of syndication, but nothing ever came of it.
My new career began when a client of Myron Greene’s was robbed of $196,000 worth of jewelry (the insurance company’s reluctant estimate) and the thief let it be known that he was willing to sell it all back for a mere $40,000 provided that I served as the intermediary, or go-between. “I read his colyum,” the thief had told Myron Greene over the phone. “The guy don’t give a shit about nothing.”
Myron Greene and a representative of the insurance company approached me, and I agreed to serve as go-between provided that I could write about it once the negotiations were concluded. The man from the insurance company balked at that because he seemed to feel that a dose of clap was preferable to publicity. “After all, St. Ives,” he had said, “we certainly don’t want you to write a primer on extortion.”
Eventually he agreed because he didn’t have much choice, and on the day of the transaction I hung around nine different public phone booths where I received instructions from the thief. The exchange was finally made at 3 A.M. on a subway headed for Coney Island. The thief got his money; I got the jewelry. The affair provided me with a couple of good features and it even got mentioned in the press section of Newsweek. I was just about to suggest a raise when the notice went up on the city room’s bulletin board that as of 6 P.M. that very day, the newspaper no longer existed.
They caught the thief, a small-timer named Albert Fontaine, three weeks later in Miami Beach where he was spending too much money on the wrong people. I visited him in the Tombs once after extradition because I had nothing better to do. He wanted to know if I was going to write him up in my “colyum.”
“The paper folded, Al,” I said.
“That’s a goddamned shame,” Fontaine said, and then, because he wanted to say something else, something nice, I suppose, he said, “You know something, I thought you wrote real good.” They finally gave Albert Fontaine six years.
My wife and I, perfectly mismatched as if by computer, parted shortly thereafter on a pleasantly acrimonious note and just as the severance pay was running out, I received another call from Myron Greene, the lawyer. He wanted me to serve as a go-between again.
“Your clients seem to have a lot of trouble,” I said.
“Well, it’s not really my client. It’s the client of a friend of mine who remembers how you handled the other thing.”
“What is it?” I said. “More jewelry?”
“Not exactly. It’s a little more serious than that.”
“How much more?”
“Well, it’s a kidnaping.”
“No thanks.”
Myron Greene’s asthma got worse. I could hear him wheeze over the phone. “Uh — there may be a slight risk involved.”
“That’s why I said no.”
“My friend’s client is perfectly willing to compensate you, of course.”
“How much is a slight risk worth to him?”
“Say ten thousand dollars?”
“Nobody pays that much for a slight risk.”
“Well, there’s—”
“Hold on,” I said. I thought a moment and then asked: “How much do you charge for divorces?”
“I’ve never handled a divorce,” Myron Greene said, a little stiffly, I thought.
“Well, if you did, how much would you charge?”
“I don’t really know, there’s—”
“Get me a divorce and the ten thousand and I’ll do it.”
It was Myron Greene’s turn to think. “All right,” he said after a few moments. “Can you be at my office at five?”
Despite the high-priced and perfectly sound advice of the attorney who was Myron Greene’s friend, the family of the kidnap victim refused to call in either the New York police or the FBI. Instead, they insisted on following the kidnapers’ instructions exactly. The instructions weren’t very innovative. They had me drop a satchel stuffed with $100,000 in used ten- and twenty-dollar bills along a lonely stretch of New Jersey farm road at 3:30 in the morning. I then drove for three minutes at exactly 20 miles an hour until my headlights picked up the family’s heir, a 20-year-old youth who was staggering down the center of the road, his hands tied behind him. He was also completely hysterical.
The story never made the papers, but it got around, and the police and even the FBI started to drop in on me at odd hours. When they began to mention the penalty for neglecting to report a felony, I called Myron Greene who called his friend who called his wealthy client. The client presumably called the mayor or the governor or God, and the visits from the FBI and the police stopped.
The third time that I heard from Myron Greene was four months later just as the ten thousand dollars was nearing its end, the victim of my profligate ways and a visit from a polite but firm representative of the Internal Revenue Service. This time Myron Greene suggested that we enter into an agreement whereby he would negotiate my fee in exchange for ten percent of whatever it was.
“In other words you want ten percent of my ten percent,” I said.
“It would be decidedly advantageous to you,” Myron Greene said.
“I didn’t think you would walk across the street for a thousand-dollar fee.”
He paused and I listened to his asthma for a while. “It’s not the fee really,” he said. “It’s not that at all. It’s simply that I find such proceedings fascinating.” He sighed a little, a wheezy sort of a sigh. “I really should have been a criminal lawyer.”
“It would just make your asthma worse.”
I decided that Myron Greene could throw in a few more services if he wanted to be a go-between’s agent, so we negotiated at length in his Madison Avenue offices. Finally, he agreed to accept my power of attorney and to perform such onerous chores as filing my quarterly income-tax statements on time, paying my bills, keeping my alimony payments current, and even maintaining my checkbook in some kind of order. His secretary, a forty-five-year-old dynamo whom Myron Greene called Spivack, would do the work and the lawyer would get ten percent of whatever fees came my way and the pleasure of being, vicariously at least, in the company of thieves.