“They.”
“And if
“I’ll tell them I’ve since been offered seven hundred and fifty thousand,” said Haynes with the charming smile that made him so resemble his dead father. “I have been offered seven fifty, haven’t I, Mr. Keyes?”
“Yes. Providing I have last refusal.”
“The right to top any bid, whatever it is?”
Keyes nodded.
“Okay,” Haynes said. “You have it.”
“What precisely am I buying?” Keyes asked. “And please be specific.”
“World rights to everything. No exclusions. Full copyright. Which means nobody can legally use a word of it without your permission.”
“How many Xerox copies are floating around?”
“No idea.”
“Who’ll conduct the bidding?”
“Howard Mott, Steady’s lawyer and now mine.”
“How?”
“By phone, I suppose.”
“Oh,” Keyes said, sounding less than pleased.
“You want everybody in the same room?”
“I’d have no objection.”
“They might.”
“Very well, by phone then,” Keyes said. “What about payment?”
“What d’you suggest?”
“It can be deposited in any currency you choose in virtually any bank in the world.”
“The IRS wouldn’t like that, so make it a certified U.S. dollars check.”
“Then you intend to pay taxes on it,” Keyes said.
“Disappointed?”
“Not in the least. It means we’ll be getting some of it back.” Keyes rose and handed Haynes a card. “Please ask Mr. Mott to call me at my home number once the bidding arrangements are completed.”
“Okay.”
Keyes went to the door, turned back and, nodding farewell to each in turn, said, “Mr. Haynes. Miss McCorkle.”
Erika McCorkle looked up from her crossword puzzle. “What’s a five-letter word for blackguard that begins with a
“I tried ‘knave’ this morning,” said Hamilton Keyes. “And it worked quite nicely.” He opened the door and left, closing it softly behind him.
Chapter 30
Rumor insisted that it all began on a gloomy Bay of Pigs Sunday afternoon in 1961 when two depressed mid-level CIA careerists left the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House and, desperate for drink, wandered by chance into a dingy bar-cafe hard by the now demolished Roger Smith Hotel at Eighteenth and Pennsylvania.
Once inside, the careerists were pleasantly surprised to discover they could buy coffee cups of Scotch whisky in direct violation of the District of Columbia’s since-repealed Sunday prohibition law. It was shortly after this discovery that members of the capital’s intelligence and freebooter community made the scofflaw bar their unofficial rendezvous. They continued to drink, if not eat, there for nearly fourteen years until that day in 1975 when the last helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.
The next day, as if compelled by some migratory instinct, they abandoned the bar back of the Roger Smith and trekked a few blocks farther west out Pennsylvania Avenue to another gin mill not quite opposite the now vanished Circle Theatre. And it was here, in what was always called “the new joint,” that five years later they held their notorious eighteen-hour-long postmortem on the botched U.S. hostage rescue mission that had ended with death and, some claimed, dishonor in a Persian desert.
It turned out to be less of a postmortem than a verbal brawl that began around noon and was still raging at 5:57 the next morning when Metropolitan Police, summoned by shouts, yells, oaths and the sound of breaking glass, arrived, closed the new joint down and sent everyone home in taxis.
A week after the disastrous postmortem session, they migrated yet again, this time far, far out Wisconsin Avenue, almost to the Maryland state line, where scouts had discovered a nearly bankrupt Thai restaurant called Pong’s Palace that was located in a strip mall and offered the four prime requisites: a valid liquor license, few customers, bad food and ample parking. Two weeks later, by silent acclamation, Pong’s Palace was elected to serve as the third unofficial sub-rosa watering hole.
The dark green seventeen-year-old Mercedes 280 SL turned into a parking space three doors up from Pong’s
