and a hard round belly on him. In profile his nose was an exact right triangle with a bit of a point on it. He was only two years older than I but he looked badly used at thirty-five. He wore a beet-hued tie and a gray flannel business suit as if he had been born in them; there’d been a day when he wouldn’t have been caught dead in conventional attire. And his manner somehow suggested that the good education he’d once absorbed had gone stale through shiftless indifference.
At Fitzpatrick’s floor the elevator doors slid open with a soft scrape. The hallway was wide and carpeted, intersected at intervals by painted doors. MacIver said, “You going to the Fitzpatrick bash? You know the way?”
“I’ve been here before,” I admitted and led him along the corridor. I made conversation: “What have you been up to?”
“Oh hell, you know how it is. A little of this, a little of that. I did time at grad school after you left. Few years overseas-Kyoto and Darmstadt, mainly. Married a German girl while I was stationed over there, got my inactive papers, came back here.”
“Any kids?”
“I got my wife and she’s got me.” It was wry because, evidently, there was truth in it. “Other than that no, no children. How about you?”
“No ties at the moment.” I saw no point in going into detail. I rang the bell and a laughing girl let us in.
Among those who know, an invitation to a Fitzpatrick party is a privilege. There is always a White House crisis or a Capitol Hill scandal to fuel conversations and the guest list insures that a good number of animated and heated disputes will break out in the course of the bibulous evening.
You never see quite the same crowd there twice; you’re kept on your toes by the presence of strangers who throw lethal darts into your best set-piece opinion speeches. A bore never gets a second invitation. There’s a slight artificiality to it-Fitzpatrick’s principal aim is to recreate the Algonquin round table-but nobody minds. The best sarcasms are honed here. Tomorrow’s political-humor newspaper columns often have their geneses around George’s bar. I believe it was at one of his early parties that the phrase was coined, “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Or at least legend would have it so.
Evan MacIver and I were separated almost instantly on entry; I found myself marched into the center of the main room with George Fitzpatrick’s thick arm thrown across my shoulders. Around me vied the fumes of his Black Label Cologne and Cutty Sark whiskey. George stopped to introduce me to a trio of allegedly beautiful people and left me there to find my own way to the bar; I don’t recall speaking to him again at all that night.
I was in the wrong mood for it; I knew that right away. I’d been immersed in dry research too long; wit, like love, is something you have to keep working at-otherwise it withers. I constructed some sort of drink and found a neutral corner in which to swizzle it reflectively. Across the room I saw a glamorous woman, the wife of a young Senator who wasn’t here with her, take offense at something someone said to her; she took a reef in her floor- length dress and swept straight out the door. When it closed behind her the entire room burst into raucous laughter: there was no such thing as an embarrassed silence at one of these bashes. Manners were suspended; anything went; she had broken the house rules and nobody had sympathy for her: the room echoed with ridicule when she returned for her forgotten coat.
A columnist buttonholed me and tried out a funny idea he was thinking of using. Evidently he was speaking to me but he seemed to be aiming somewhere over the top of my head. I laughed in the right places.
Another drink, too fast. I saw MacIver drifting through the crowd, looking curiously like an eavesdropper: he was out of place here, the company was too fast for him. I wondered where Fitzpatrick could have come across him. What did MacIver do nowadays? He hadn’t said. I had thought he was taller than he seemed now; perhaps events had shrunk him. He was burning his cigarettes away in long drags.
I found a chair in the lee of conversations; someone had just vacated it to charge into the midst of a spirited argument nearby. Laughter hung in the room in waves that bounced from one end to the other; the various knots of joke-tellers seemed to have found synchronization. I settled into the chair and went through the time-consuming ritual of getting my pipe going.
For a little while I let things drift by me. Then my attention drifted toward a young woman who sat in the corner opposite me, beside the window. Her head was bowed so that her dark hair shielded her face; people went by and there was an undrunk glass of something in her hand but she paid nothing any notice.
“She’s Israeli. Separated from her husband, not divorced. Twenty-eight, I think.”
It was Evan MacIver, suddenly at my side, sitting down hipshot on the arm of my chair. “She’s got a son in some Swiss boarding school. She’s staying in a consulate apartment out in Georgetown.”
“Why tell me all that?”
“Because you wanted to know.” His smile was cynical: he had a salesman’s knowledge of human weaknesses. “She speaks five or six languages but as far as I know she doesn’t know how to say ‘yes’ in any of them.”
“I gather you don’t like her much.”
“I can’t stand argumentative women,” MacIver said. “Her name’s Nikki something, I forget exactly. Weinstein, Eisenstein, something like that.”
“Nikki?”
“She’s only half Jewish. French mother, I think. Probably short for Nicole. She’s over here with some kind of fund-raising group, trying to get shekels out of the New York Jews to help spring Jewish emigrants out of Russia.”
I drained my drink down to the ice cubes and set the glass down.
MacIver said, “You really ought to talk to her about that Russian stuff you’re always writing about.”
I could tell by the way the girl squinted at her newspaper that she was nearsighted. I looked at MacIver. “Why?”
“She’s hipped on it. Talk your ear off. You don’t know what depressed is until you’ve listened to her number on pogroms and atrocities. You’ve never met such a relentless memory for dismal facts and figures.”
“How’d you meet her?”
“On business. I should have left it there.”
The girl had opened her handbag. She took out a pair of large dark-rimmed glasses to read the news more closely. She was quite oblivious to her surroundings. She looked bright and quick; MacIver’s droll attempt to characterize her didn’t quite jibe with her appearance. Her eyes, magnified behind the glasses, seemed slanted with a somewhat rancorous irony-wary, suspicious, but the sort of face that would hide sooner behind clever mockery than behind heavy literal fact-mongering.
MacIver’s lip-hung cigarette bobbed up and down when he spoke. “What are you working on right now? Another spy book?”
“No. I’m doing a book on the Russian Civil War.”
“You already did one. Didn’t you?”
“This one’s on Kolchak. I passed him over lightly in the first one.”
“The admiral, I remember.” He beamed as if proud of his memory. “You do pick the grim ones, don’t you?”
I let it lie. “What kind of line are you in these days?”
“Cloaks.” He dragged avariciously on his cigarette and poured thick slow rivers of smoke from his nostrils, and gave me the familiar grin for the first time. “Cloak-and-dagger business. I’m in the cloak end of it. Civil service, you know. Years ago I decided I was the sort of bureaucratic hack the civilian world would eat alive, so I stayed with the government when I got out of the army. Now I’m just another fool exercising my petty authority around Langley.”
His candor surprised me. It was not
He seemed to feel he’d gone far enough. He changed the direction of the conversation: “Some of us at The Firm were reading your last book. We got a few yocks here and there, but you didn’t find half the jokes in that Haitian business. Not half.”
I grunted to encourage him and after he found a place to stub his cigarette he went on: “It was Lansky, you missed that part.”
“Meyer Lansky?”
