The Adjustment

ELEVEN



FATHER FLANAGAN CONTRADICTS HIMSELF



THE NEXT LETTER was postmarked St. Louis and read:

What kind of man cheats the govement hes’ fighting for in the first place? You have got no shame or humility and you caused heartbeaks. Ill be heading your way soon and youll be none the wiser as to when.





This time he included a lock of black hair, one I assumed belonged to one of my Roman girls and not to the sender himself. I was momentarily at a loss as to how to proceed, and all this was irritating the hell out of me, given all the other grief I was being handed at the moment.





THE MATTER OF Mr. Huff was still on the agenda. Park was concerned about getting ourselves or the boss implicated if he or I did anything illegal or untoward, so I phoned Hiram Fish at his office and arranged to meet him for chop suey at the Bellflower Café downtown. He flinched a little when he saw me walk in the door but had mastered himself admirably by the time I sat down at his booth.

The chop suey tasted like shit, but at the Bellflower that was a tradition and I wouldn’t have wanted it any different. “How come you suppose they serve Chinese food in a place with nary a sole Chinaman on the premises?” he asked.

“Bellflower used to buy scraps from the butchers and fry it up every which way, and calling it chop suey kept people from wondering much what they were eating.”

“I had real Chinese food in San Francisco when I was in the Merchant Marines,” he said. “Wasn’t like this at all. San Francisco, there’s a wide open town, drunks and whores and hopheads all over the place. Hell, I may head out there again. Now that the war’s done there’s plenty of opportunity for a man like me.”

He was talking fast and nervous, one of those people who’s afraid in an awkward situation that a few moments’ silence will reveal something terrible, so I let him babble for a while until he let drop something that made me understand why he was so nervous: He thought we wanted him to spy on old Mrs. Collins.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me she gave a whole troop of Boy Scouts the clap.”

He looked blank for a second. “I don’t know what she did. Usually it’s wives want husbands watched or vicey-versey, so I thought Mr. Collins might want me to keep an eye on her.”

“Hell, let her go to her DAR meetings, Collins doesn’t give a damn what she does.”

“What, then?”

“I want you to get a picture of a guy with a dick in his mouth.”

Again the blank look, followed by a troubled squint. “You mean like via mail order?”

I almost got up and left right there; either he was playing at being obtuse or he was a genuinely stupid son of a bitch. “I need you to follow a particular fellow who means Mr. Collins harm. I have reason to believe this fellow gets his pleasure in Riverside Park late at night, and I want you to sneak up on him in flagrante delicto . . . ”

“In where?”

“In the middle of sucking a dick.”

“Who is this guy?”

I handed him a manila envelope, which he started to open right there, the dumb shit. “Open it later, damn it. His picture’s in there and his address and everything I have on him.”

“I’ll get on it this afternoon. It’ll take me a week or so to establish his habits, get to know his comings and goings, that’s at twenty a day, with a fifty dollar deposit.”

“Don’t hand me that crap, Hiram. This is worth five hundred, but only if you get us a crystal clear picture of the guy on his knees with a pair of balls bouncing off his chin. Until that picture’s in our hands you get doodly squat.”

“If that’s the way you feel . . . ” He started to rise, and when I didn’t try to stop him he sat down again. “Listen, I got expenses. How about twenty to tide me over?”

I handed him the ten I’d been planning to all along, and spent the rest of my lunch half-listening to the cascade of ill fortune he’d been subject to over the last few months.

“It’s because you’re a fink,” I said.

“What?”

“No offense. But you’re in a profession that calls for you to be a fink, and no good fortune is going to come your way until you repent.”

He nodded, expression blank again, and seemed to be reflecting on the surprising news that he was a professional rat. I was glad to have enlightened him, and when it was time to go I magnanimously paid the check and left a princely half dollar on the table for our stick insect of a waitress.





A WEEK LATER Hiram Fish left a message with Mrs. Caspian for me to meet him at his office on North Broadway. It was down a narrow, dark corridor above a camera shop, and he gave a start when I opened the door without knocking. His skittishness was understandable; both eyes were purple and black and his discolored nose was a few degrees off true. A grisly line of stitches ran horizontally beneath his mouth, and his left arm was in a sling. Two of the fingers on his right hand were in splints.

“Sweet Baby Jesus, Fish, what the hell happened to you?”

“I was tailing your man Huff all week. Home, the plant, home, the plant, nothing. Then Friday night he leaves the car parked in the driveway instead of inside the garage. Around eleven-thirty he leaves the house, rolls the car down into the street without turning the engine over. Gets her a little momentum and turns it over real quiet, did a good job. You can bet he’d done that before.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“There’s hardly any traffic so I can’t just pull out and follow without him noticing. But I remember what you said about Riverside Park, so I waited until he was out of sight and headed on over there via Douglas instead of Central, which is the way he was headed.”

He was clearly proud of his initiative and creative thinking, but not wanting to give him a swelled head I said nothing.

“So I get to Riverside Park and I get out with the Speed Graphic and snuck around for a while trying to find him. Well, guess what? That goddamn park is chock full of queers, and one of ’em spots me and the camera. Says ‘What’s the big idea?’ And I didn’t even think this guy was queer, more like your linebacker type. I didn’t know what the hell he’d be doing there that time of night, but I told him I was there to get a picture. ‘Picture of what?’ the linebacker says. ‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ I tell him, ‘but all these guys walking around? They’re fairies. One of ’em’s gonna get his picture taken sucking a dick.’ Well what do you know, the guy calls over somebody else, and that guy calls over somebody else, and pretty soon there’s a whole bunch of fairies giving me shit about wanting to take the picture. Then one of ’em hits me, and then another one takes the Speed Graphic and smashes the shit out of it. Pretty soon the linebacker’s kicking the hell out of me, and about the third kick to my ribs I figure out he’s one of ’em. Can you beat that? Hell, half of ’em just looked like regular guys. And even the little ones were punching me pretty hard.”

I gave him my best deadpan stare and waited a long moment before responding. “Then I’m assuming you don’t have the picture.”

“I just told you they smashed the camera! That’s the second one I’ve lost this year, you might recall.”

My expression didn’t change, which was difficult because I really wanted to laugh at the poor dumb shit. “If you don’t have my picture, why did you call me down here?”

“Well, tell you the truth, I was kind of hoping you’d pay my expenses on this. Replace the camera, pay my medical bills.”

“You’re a moron. You stroll casually into a well-known queer hangout, full of guys with a big goddamn secret, carrying the camera under your arm? And without knowing exactly where the mark is, just looking around for him? Are you kidding me? What did you intend to do when you found him? Ask him if he can say ‘cheese’ with his mouth full?”

Fish cleared his throat and winced. I was pretty sure he had the idea by now that the interview wasn’t going well. “I’d sure like help with my doctor bill. I ended up driving over to St. Francis with one eye swollen clear shut and the other barely open. I still hurt something awful.”

“Not a chance.”

“If you’ll recall, I quit working for Mrs. Collins over a medical bill.”

“I recall, all right.”

“And I came to you offering to watch her for Mr. Collins.” Despite the attempt at a threat there was still a pleading overtone to his thin, nasal voice.

“If you’re implying that you’d ever go work for Huff against the old man I can tell you right now I’d gut you like a f*cking catfish. Then again, considering what a king f*ck-up you are, maybe I should call Huff and recommend you.”

“How about replacing the camera, at least? How can I take that picture without a camera?”

“I don’t want you to take it. You’re lucky I don’t take the ten spot back. For all we know Huff may be onto us now.”

“I never said his name, I just said I was looking for a guy.”

“Maybe not, but you can be sure the queer network has got the word around town you were looking to snap someone. They have to protect their own, you dumb shit.”

“So what’s the next move?”

“For you? There isn’t one. Wait around for the phone to ring.”

“I’m fired?”

“That’s right.”

“You mean all that and I’m out of pocket on this job?”

“That’s right. And quit looking at me like a whipped pup. Count yourself lucky no one decided to f*ck you, pretty boy that you were up’til Friday night.”





I WENT DOWNSTAIRS to the camera store and looked at what was available. The larger formats like Fish’s Speed Graphic were expensive and bulky, but there were a number of smaller cameras that might fit the bill. I settled on a German 35 millimeter model with a reasonably fast lens and bought four rolls of the fastest black and white film Kodak made. I added to the sale a used printer and the makings of a basic darkroom and hauled the crateful of equipment out to the Olds. In the morning I’d present Miss Grau with my receipts; in the meantime I was going home to set up a darkroom in the basement and take a few practice rolls.





“MY DONALD WANTS to meet you,” Millie Grau said the next morning while she was filling out the form for my reimbursement.

“He does?” I said, feeling some mild alarm.

“He thinks what you’re doing for Mr. Collins is wonderful. And I should add that I do too.”

“Oh,” I said. I wondered if they were thinking of my procuring whores for the boss, or getting him hooked on narcotics, or maybe it was the blackmailing business.

Miss Grau was blushing, something she did with great charm, spontaneously and fairly often. “You know I would never say this to most people, but Mrs. Collins is really a nasty old . . . ” She groped for the right word for a moment and blushed a little deeper. “Old hag.”

“How’s that?”

“She calls me and says the most terrible lies about Mr. Collins. Horrible things.”

“What sorts of things?”

“She told me about that girl Emily, you know the one.”

“Sure.”

“Well I knew all about it, but I wasn’t going to acknowledge anything of the sort to her. And you know what? I think she got a great big kick out of telling me. Trying to shock me. Make me hate him.”

You should hate him, I thought, but one of her most appealing traits was that blind loyalty.

“And the things she said about the girl, the things she called her.” Millie was starting to break down, the blush covering her throat as well as her face, her eyes wet but not yet dripping. “You know that could happen to just about any girl,” she said, and grasped blindly for a Kleenex from the dispenser on her desk. I plucked one and applied it to her eyes. “Can I tell you something, Mr. Ogden?”

“Sure.”

“You can’t tell anyone, ever.”

“You have my word.”

“I really like you, in fact you’re the only person here besides Mr. Collins I think of as . . . as a friend, if you see what I mean.”

“Sure,” I said. We were both sitting now, my chair pulled close to her desk.

“Before I came here, I was engaged to a boy in Wisconsin.”

“I didn’t know you were from Wisconsin.”

“Uh-huh. Anyway, there was this boy, and we were engaged, and he . . . he took off one day. Said he was joining the army—this was in’42, everybody was joining up. Well, guess what I found out? I was . . . ” She looked me in the eye, as though second-guessing her previous judgment as to my trustworthiness. Apparently I passed, because the next thing she said bowled me over. “I found out I was pregnant.”

I’d assumed Miss Millie Grau’s hymen was intact and under lock and key; the news that she was a retread virgin, called back to righteousness by some misguided impulse, shook me. The poor kid, I thought.

“You think that’s terrible?”

“Not at all. That’s life. So what about the fiancé?”

“That’s the next thing I found out. I tried to contact him through the army, and they said there was no such recruit. I checked the navy, too, and finally I went to the recruiting office in Fond du Lac, and I found out he was 4-F. He’d just skipped out.”

“You poor kid.”

“So I went to one of those homes for unwed mothers, this place in Michigan where nobody knew me, and I had the baby there. He was adopted by some nice family and that was that. But you know, I think about him every day.

“Anyway, that’s how I ended up in Wichita. I couldn’t go back to my folks’. And you and Mr. Collins are the only people I’ve ever told it to since I got here. I guess one reason I got so upset just then was I haven’t told Donald.”

“You think he might react badly?”

“He’s a minister.”

“Then he’s heard a thousand times worse.”

“Sure, but not from the girl he’s going to marry. He thinks I’m a, you know.”

“Right. Well, don’t tell him.”

“But then it’s like a lie.”

“It’s an omission.”

She stood up. “What you must think of me, Mr. Ogden.”

“Same as always, Millie, the world.” I dared then to reach out and squeeze her shoulder pad and then, giving her a broad, friendly, avuncular smile, left her office.





THE NIGHT SHOTS I took were inadequate, even when I pushed the exposure by two stops, which ruined the contrast anyway. I was about to abandon the whole project when I realized that the tiny metal socket on the front of the camera’s body was intended for a flash attachment. Once I’d bought such a device plus a couple of dozen bulbs and bolted it to the side of the camera I found I had all I needed. The first night I got a shot of a hissing mother opossum in the back yard, its primeval marsupial fangs bared at the loping biped violating her territory. The picture came out so nicely I made an eight by ten enlargement and got a frame for it the next morning on the way in to work, then hung the thing on the wall behind my desk.

I had a tactical problem, though, now that I had solved the technical one. As far as I knew, all of Mr. Huff’s fellating was performed in the wee hours of the morning in the company of his fellows; the firing of flash gun would inevitably attract the unwelcome attention of the park’s other denizens, and in all likelihood I’d end up getting the same treatment as Fish, the camera wrecked and the film inside ruined.





IN THE CAFETERIA I was spotted by Mr. Rackey, who boldly joined me. I almost never ate lunch at the plant, but I’d arrived and hung my picture at eleven-thirty and it didn’t seem worth the trouble driving off the premises.

“Do you know what I did once?” he asked me.

“I sure don’t,” I said.

“Set a barn on fire when I was sixteen, this old son of a bitch was yelling at me and my buddies, saying I thought I told you kids to get off my goddamn property. You ever hear of Boy’s Town? Judge sent me there. Didn’t do me a lick of good. You know how old Father Flanagan’s supposed to have said ‘there’s no such thing as a bad boy?’ That was before the old bastard met me.”

“Never knew anyone who went to Boy’s Town before.”

“It wasn’t so bad. Beats any other kind of lockup I was ever in. Hey, Ogden, you been back to Red’s lately?”

“It’s been a little while.”

“I got eighty-sixed last week, forever.”

“What for?” I couldn’t remember too many people being eighty-sixed from Red’s, even temporarily, so Rackey’s transgression must have been serious.

“Broke that whore’s arm.”

“Which whore is that?”

“Hell, I don’t know all their names. Kind of flabby but not too hard to look at.”

“Barbara?”

“That’s it. Barbara.”

“That skinny bartender with the bushy eyebrows has it for her pretty bad. How’d you end up breaking her arm?”

“She wouldn’t dance with me, wouldn’t even get up off her moneymaker, so I yanked her out of the chair and bent her arm right back.”

He grinned, his mouth a spectacle of jagged, multicolored teeth, proud of himself and his prowess with the ladies.





THAT AFTERNOON I found Millie Grau a distracted wreck, pulling nervously at a loose strand of hair at her temple and looking like she’d missed a couple of nights’ worth of sleep.

“I told him, Mr. Ogden. He’s broken it off temporarily while he prays on it. He . . . he says he feels like he doesn’t really know me any more. Like . . . like I was lying to him all along.”

“Sorry, Millie,” I said.

“I was, wasn’t I? Lying?”

“No, you weren’t, and if he’s any kind of a man he’ll put this behind him.”

I left her feeling a little better, I thought. I didn’t know what the matter was with this two-bit tent preacher anyway, but if he let Millie Grau get away because he wasn’t the first one in, that made him a stupid shit in my book.

That night Sally fixed a casserole, the recipe for which she’d found in one of the numerous ladies’ magazines to which she now subscribed. It was awful, a grisly olio of mayonnaise, cheap canned tuna, and a variety of cheese I’d never encountered before that possessed an unsettling metallic undertaste. I ate a large portion and pretended to be pleased, and afterward when I suggested a detour to the bedroom before she washed the dishes she demurred.

“I’m just not feeling that way tonight,” she said.

“That’s fine,” I said.

A few months earlier I might have cursed Sally to her face and given her a hard time for her reluctance to perform her marital chore. Now was a different story; now I understood that a noxious potage of baby chemicals was making her temporarily crazy. I kissed her and said it was all right, and would she mind if I went out to meet some friends for a beer?

All my friends were in the army, though, so instead I headed for the Eaton hotel, got Herman Nester on the phone, and asked for a girl to be sent up.

“Any one in particular, or should I surprise you?” he said.

“Is Irma available?” I hadn’t ever requested a specific girl before, but the memory of her lingered pleasantly.

When Irma showed up she put her hands on her hips and said, “Well look who it is. The ass man.”

“Not tonight, I don’t think.”

“Good, ’cause the pounding you gave me last time kept me on my feet for a week.”

It was standard whore flattery, but she was nice to bother with it. “You want a drink?”

“Sure,” she said, “bourbon if you got it.”

I poured her a drink. She had her hair done differently, swept up instead of bangs the way she wore it last time, and though she was arguably prettier this way she no longer bore such a striking resemblance to Joan Blondell. I didn’t care much, as long as all of her parts functioned.

“So where’s the old guy tonight?”

“Don’t know. He doesn’t get around like as he used to.”

“He some kind of hypo? Was that the problem last time?”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah, that’s what I guessed. I was married to one for a while. After a while it’s fine with him if he can’t get it up, ’cause he doesn’t even want to. Why f*ck when you could be fixing?”

“He doesn’t fix. The old man’s hooked on pills.”

“Heroin pills? I never heard of that.”

“Not heroin. Something like it.”

“Huh.” She downed her drink and rattled the ice cubes, swirling them around faster and faster at the bottom of the glass. “What do you feel like tonight?” she asked.





HALF AN HOUR later she was taking a shower while I lay there on the bed, thinking I should have brought that little 35 millimeter camera with me. The thought triggered a snicker; what the hell would I do with naked arty farty pictures of Irma? Jerk off to them? Sell them through Merle Tessler’s outfit in KC? No, it wasn’t my kind of thing. I was no Edward Weston, no Albert Stieglitz. I was born to sell pornography, not create it.

When Irma came out of the bathroom, though, still toweling her torso dry, skin still pink from the hot water, a curious natural grace to the sway of her hips as she crossed the room from bathroom to bed and hopped on, I had second thoughts. I’d pay for pictures of that.

“You’re paid up for another hour,” she said. “Just in case you might want another turn.”

“I will in a little bit.”

I lay there for a little while staring at the ceiling, thinking about nothing and content to do so. She startled me out of my trance by asking me if something was eating me.

“What makes you say that?”

“You look like something’s on your mind, that’s all. Sometimes guys’ll hire a gal just to talk about stuff they can’t tell wifey or their pals.”

This wasn’t news to me. In Italy, fully a quarter of our trade was guys who just wanted a sympathetic female ear, which was fine with me as long as the hour was paid up. On a whim I sketched out my difficulties with Huff, without naming any names, and she listened attentively.

“You ought to stake out one of the queer bars,” she said when I was finished.

“I didn’t know there were any.”

“Sure, they’re just like any other bars except full of homos.”

“I know what they are, I just meant I didn’t know there were any in Wichita.”

“Sure, where do you think they hang around?”

“You know a lot about queers,” I said.

“I know a few. I didn’t tell you this, but there’s two that work for Nester.”

“Nester’s pimping men?” I didn’t think I was easy to shock, but that one came clear out of left field.

“Keep that under your hat.” She propped up her right knee and picked at the bright red nail of her little toe.





“WHAT DO YOU think about baby names?” Sally asked me a couple of days hence over a breakfast of ruined grey eggs and carbonized bacon, washed down by coffee that was too strong, a welcome relief from her usual thin and transparent brew.

“I think they should all have one.”

“I’m perfectly serious.”

“All right, if it’s a boy we name it after my father or my grandfather. If it’s a girl I don’t care.”

“If it’s a girl I was thinking about either Linda or Loretta,” she said.

People were always telling Sally she looked like one movie star or another, and the two most frequently named were Linda Darnell and Loretta Young. I wasn’t kidding when I said I didn’t care what it was named, though. “Either one’s fine with me.”

I had a little break regarding that other pain in my ass at the moment, my pen pal, in the form of another envelope postmarked St. Louis. This letter consisted of only a single line:

The wages of sin is death and you are about big of one as I ever.





But this time he included a photograph of a certain Brunela, confirming my theory that he was a former GI client from Rome. I tried to remember her last name—Castelli? Cantelli?—but failed. It was a glum, head-on shot that might have been attached to an identification card. Maybe it was a mug shot, though that would have been trickier for my correspondent to get his hands on. Brunela was surly, chronically drunk, and she was one of three in my stable who’d died during my time in Italy. She swallowed poison, which could hardly be lain at my door, but who knows how the mind of a lunatic works. In any case this fellow blamed me for Brunela’s death, and my job now was to rack my brain and try to remember who, if any, her special devotees were.





IRMA HAD PROMISED me she’d talk to one of the male whores in Nester’s employ about getting a snap of Huff in a compromising position. I was turning over in my head ways that might work and coming up short every time. I would probably have to teach one of them to use the camera, but who knew if he’d be good enough to get the shot and make it printable? We couldn’t afford another mistake like Hiram Fish.

Nester set up a meet with one of them, and Park and I sat in a booth at the Bellflower and were joined by an unexceptional looking man of about thirty.

“Brad Wageknecht. Something about some pictures you needed taken?”

Park was giving him the once-over, deep curiosity in his face. I filled Wageknecht in on our progress so far and he nodded, his eyes closed.

“First of all, a four-by-five’s too big for that kind of work,” he said. “Even 35 millimeter’s going to be spotted. What you want is a spy camera. Ever hear of a thing called a Minox?”

“No.”

“Brought one back from Germany. Spy camera, uses a tiny little film cartridge. Great pictures, you know, Swiss lenses. It would have to be indoors, at a party or a bar, though, since I don’t have any way to attach a bulb to it.”

Park was practically dancing in his chair. “You were in the war? Germany?”

“The Big Red One,” Wageknecht said.

“F*ck you, that’s not true.”

He opened his shirt, an action that drew a flinch from Park, and revealed a scar twice as long and thick as the one on my own chest. “Doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “I got nothing left to prove.”

I gave him a hundred dollar advance and the promise of four hundred more for a picture that met our requirements, and he left.

As we prepared to leave Park was very quiet, and he didn’t speak until we were in the parking lot.

“Not a chance in hell he’s queer. Hell, he’s a goddamn war hero.”

“I imagine a few of them were, Herman.”

“The hell you say.” He shook his head, a little angrily, as though he was going to have to go through his whole company in his head now and wonder which ones were and which weren’t.