The Adjustment

SIX



THE FRIENDS OF TOM PENDERGAST



SINCE THE VISIT was a surprise anyway I decided to grab a taxi and go straight to Vickie’s place in Westport. It was a hell of a lot colder than it had been in Wichita, and the cabbie laughed when I mentioned it. “Yeah, yesterday fooled you. You thought it was really springtime, didn’t you? Big arctic front coming down from Canada. Snowing in Chicago right now, is what it says on the radio.”

“You don’t say.”

“Could have some here tonight. And yesterday it got up into the high sixties.”

He was about my age and looked to be in sound health. “Let me ask you something, buddy. You in the war?”

“Sure was,” he said. “You?”

“Yeah. Miss it?”

He looked at me in the rear view mirror like I was either kidding or crazy. “Hell, no. I never had a worse time in my damn life than in the lousy goddamn Navy. There’s a petty officer I came damn close to killing. If I thought there was any chance of getting away with a murder on a United States aircraft carrier I by God would have done it, too, no regrets.”

I almost laughed; there was the Navy for you. An Army man would have figured out a way, and a Marine would have just killed the son of a bitch and damn the consequences.





IT HADN’T OCCURRED to me in the slightest that Vickie might be less than thrilled to find me standing there all chipper and horny on her welcome mat.

“Jesus, Wayne, don’t you ever send a telegram or anything?” She looked worse than I’d ever seen her look, which was still a cut above most women. Puffy-eyed, her hair a wreck, no makeup, and wearing just a tattered bathrobe, she gave me an up and down that, while still disapproving, was moving into the realm of the friendly. “You know perfectly goddamn well I work nights.”

“I could use some shuteye myself,” I said. “I only slept an hour or two on the train.”

“No, huh-uh. I need to sleep, and I mean sleep and nothing else.”

“How about I crash on the couch?”

“Nuh-uh. You be on your way. You’re lucky ’cause I’m off tonight, but right now I’m going to sleep. Come back at four or five and you can take me out on a proper date and then maybe we’ll see what happens.”

When she shut the door on me she had a look on her face that was almost affectionate.





FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER a cab was dropping me off outside a dingy office building on Troost. The building directory led me to a suite on the top floor, and when I rang the buzzer no one answered at first. After a third and a fourth buzz, a baldheaded man with a painfully annoyed look on his face answered.

“Whatever it is I don’t need it. Scram,” he said. He was in his shirtsleeves and his suspenders were frayed. One lens of his black-framed eyeglasses was cracked.

“Hold on,” I said, and stuck my foot in the door.

“Scram,” he said again.

“Used to be a customer. United States Army Quartermaster Corps in Rome. Wayne Ogden’s the name, if that means anything to you.”

He cocked his head. “Ogden. The hell you say. I’m Merle Tessler.”

“I used to order quite a lot of material from you. I was in town, thought I’d look you up.”

“Huh,” he said. “Never ever had a customer visit in the flesh before.”

“Glad to see you’re still in business. I have a buddy stationed in Japan right now, running the same type operation I used to. Thought maybe you could send him a set on approval.”

“Hell, come on in. We could sure set something up like that.”





IT WAS LIKE any other photographic studio, with a skylight above and a portrait lighting kit. A corner of the room was used as a set, with various pieces of furniture. There was a darkroom in the corner, and a number of cameras in different formats, including one I hadn’t expected to see.

“Is that a Bolex, there? Swiss?”

“You know your gear, don’t you?”

“My grandfather was a photographer, and my dad was an amateur. So you’re making movies.”

“Yep. Sixteen millimeter. Started making stags right about six months back.”

“No fooling. I bet my buddy in Japan would like to get his hands on some of those.”

From a file cabinet he extracted a folder and handed it to me. Inside were pictures of girls, most of them better-than-average looking, getting f*cked by an assortment of disreputable-looking men. Most of the men had the haggard, hopeless look of dope fiends, skinny degenerates with well-defined ribcages and jutting Adam’s apples.

“That’s the regular sex stuff. Shot those last month.”

“I don’t recognize any of the girls from the sets I was selling.”

“No, the turnover’s pretty high. Plus which the customers like to see new girls every once in a while.” He handed me another folder. In this one, girls in lingerie and black stockings abused one another. One of them showed a blonde in a girdle using a cat-o’-nine-tails to torment a sallow brunette tied face-forward to a painter’s ladder. The brunette was no actress, the expression of horror on her face laughably false. “These here are real popular too.”

“I know the genre. I remember one, had a gal in a French maid’s costume with a feather duster sticking out her ass.”

Tessler laughed fondly at the memory. “You never ought to have gotten the likes of that one. That was made to order for a customer in Marshall, Minnesota. Model was a hillbilly gal from Tennessee someplace, damned if I can remember her name. One of those who’d do just about anything, I used her when I got special requests. Stuff the other gals wouldn’t.”

“Like what?”

He reached into his file cabinet and pulled out a third folder, marked “MADE-To-OrdEr,” and handed it to me with an odd, crooked half-grin. Inside was a passport to a whole wide wonderful world of idiosyncratic sexual interests most of the world didn’t dream existed: amputee pin-ups, Tijuana-style bestiality, even crisply and artistically rendered coprophilia. “Crazy what gets people going, ain’t it?” Tessler said.

“Where do you get the stockings? My wife’d kill for a pair.”

“It ain’t easy. There’s a black market here in Kansas City, too, and brother I tell you I pay through the nose for the goddamn things. But for some reason you can’t sell the weird stuff without ’em.”

“There’s a gal I’m here to see, and she’s a little sore at me right now. Pair of nylons would really fix things up with her.”

“Huh. I can send you down to see a man about that. Can’t guarantee he’ll deliver, but you can try.”

We arranged for him to get a set of glossies from folders one and two to Lester on approval, and I left the studio with the address of the man with the hosiery. I’d turned down with some regret Tessler’s offer to watch the filming of a stag in the afternoon, but I didn’t know how long I’d be in town. Maybe I’d come back tomorrow and have a gander at the process.





I TOOK THE bus downtown. There was a very pretty redhead seated across the aisle from me, and she gave me such a warm and inviting smile that I nearly moved over to try and pick her up. But I reminded myself that I was here to see Vickie, not to accost strange women on public transportation. She crossed her bare legs and I chuckled inwardly at the thought that the stockings I was about to procure for Vickie were probably all it would take to separate the redhead’s pretty knees.

I rang the buzzer at the warehouse according to the code indicated: one, three, two. Presently an obese Negro wearing a banker’s pinstripes and a grey fedora to match opened the door.

“Merle Tessler sent me,” I said.

“That so. What makes you think I know who that is?”

“He said to tell you the soup is in the cans, whatever that means.”

He laughed, a genuine and hearty guffaw. “Come on in, tell me what it is I can set you up with. I’m Dewey.”

The warehouse was immense and only half full, but it contained rare treasures. There were stacks of tires, and to my left sat a half-dozen brand new adding machines. Above those was a shelf full of Smith Coronas, pre-war models that looked as though they’d never even been beribboned. There were stacks and stacks of shoeboxes on one wall reaching almost to the ceiling, with ladders mounted on rollers and rails to maneuver from one top shelf to another.

“Holy moley,” I said. “Take a look at that.”

“Yeah, we got a lot of merchandise. If Tessler says you okay we can do business. What you after, exactly?”

“Said you could sell me some nylons for my girl.”

“Nylons, sure. Would she like silk better?”

“I guess she would.”

“How many pair?”

I thought two pair for Vickie would about get me in the door, and another couple pair for Sally might get me out of the doghouse when I got back to Wichita. Dewey got me what I needed and I paid his exorbitant fee gladly in cash. “Thanks,” I said.

“That’s all right. You come on back any time. Merle says you okay, that’s good enough for me. You work with him on those f*ck movies?”

“No, but I used to sell his dirty pictures when I was in the army.”

“Yeah? You a supply sarge?”

“That’s right. Work for Collins Aircraft down in Wichita now. Or at least I did until last night.”

“Do a lot of business with quartermasters. Got a lot of shit to get overseas.”

“I know someone just getting started up.” I wrote down Lester’s information and handed it to Dewey. “He’s a good man, just got to Japan from the European theater.”

Looking around at all that illegitimate booty I started to get a warm, nostalgic feeling. Here was a man whose business was finding out what people wanted but couldn’t get, finding out how to get some of it, and peddling it to the delighted customer at an exorbitant markup. There was creativity in this, and adventure, even a sense of fun. If staying in Wichita as husband and father was my inevitable fate, how much sweeter would it be if I were running this type of operation? “I don’t suppose you could use a man down in Wichita?”

“No,” he said. “The whole black market’s winding down with the war over. Shit, next year there’ll be new cars rolling off the line in Detroit and nylons in the department stores and no one’ll even remember rationing. Anyway we never had too much luck down in Wichita. You know who Stan Gerard is?”

“I know the name,” I said, though in fact I’d met him once in my youth and had made, sorry to say, a bad impression.

“Well, he runs this whole operation up here and a few things down in Wichita. The problem with Wichita is every time you get something good set up, the local competition drops a dime on it. We had a man there last year selling skag in a hotel downtown; first thing you know is some local pusherman called the cops. That’s a real low class of crook you got down there.”

“Mr. Gerard still doing okay after Boss Pendergast dropped?”

“Hell, yes. There’s always somebody to play ball with. Never be another Pendergast, though. You hear Harry Truman hisself went to the funeral? He was still vice president then and there was some people complained and he said ‘Tom Pendergast was a friend of mine and I was a friend of his.’ That’s class, in my book.”





VICKIE WAS IMPRESSED when I handed her the stockings that afternoon a little before five. “Jesus, Wayne, and here I was all set to read you the riot act for being an unpredictable son of a bitch.”

“Go put on a pair and we’ll go dancing.”

A light snow was coming down when we left the apartment. We danced to the Frankie Masters Orchestra at the Phillips hotel downtown, then got a table in the dining room. Over dinner she talked about hospital politics and a tentative plan she had about moving to Minneapolis for a job at a nursing school.

“What about the doctor?”

“Which?” she said.

“The one you’re married to.”

“Oh.” For just a second she looked uncomfortable, as if she’d been caught doing something wrong. “He doesn’t have any immediate plans to come home, so I’m not including him in my decisions.”

“Thinking about filing?”

She chewed the bite in her mouth very slowly before responding. “I don’t really believe in divorce.”

“You’re not Catholic, are you?”

“No. I just don’t believe in it.”

I watched her methodical dissection of her KC strip and wondered what it would be like being married to a really smart woman. Sally was a-one in the looks department but she’d come up a little short intellectually, raised in a house where no one ever read a book. Vickie was as intelligent and educated as I was, more so in some areas. She didn’t take any guff, either.

We talked for a while about the orchestra—neither one of us had thought much of it—and the state of the world, and then she asked me point blank why I was there without any advance notice.

“I got fired.”

“Fired? Jesus.”

“It’s nothing, the old souse doesn’t even remember he did it, probably. But this lets me put the fear of God into him. Might tell him I had some job offers up here.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I’ll bet you could find something here if you really wanted.”

“Maybe. I talked with a fellow today who runs a photo studio.”

“I didn’t know you were interested in photography.”

“Sure I am. Thinking about ways to make money at it.”

“Like open up a portrait studio, shoot weddings, things like that?”

“Things like that, yeah.”





SEVERAL HOURS LATER we were lying in her bed, exhausted. After the first time I lay there for twenty minutes and felt the urge again, and to my surprise, an hour or so after that the need arose again. After that one, in the dim lamplight of her bedroom, diffused through the sheets as if through a scrim, I took a good look at her and tried to figure out how she got to me the way she did. Her face was long enough to qualify as horsy, with a nose to proportion, ever so slightly bulbous and two or three degrees off-true to the left; her teeth were a little too prominent, her lower incisors an ivory jumble, and with her hair up her ears looked like saucers. There was no denying, though, that she got me going in a way few others ever had.

“Jesus, it’s still freezing in here,” she said.

She jumped out of bed stark naked and ran in short quick steps to the hall closet. After a moment’s clattering and the sound of something heavy tumbling to the hardwood she came back into the room with an electric space heater. Crouched down on the bedroom carpet, tits aquiver, she plugged it into the wall and closed the door to the hallway. Then she took a flying leap back onto the bed and dug under the covers, pulling herself close to me, shivering so hard I wondered if she was playacting.

“Holy shit it’s cold. Something’s wrong with that radiator.”

“You know those space heaters are a fire hazard.”

“I know.”

“You ever see what’s left of a human body after a housefire?” I said.

“I’m a nurse, Wayne. I’ve seen stuff that’d curl the hair on your balls. Wouldn’t it be romantic, though, going out together like that.” Her breasts were pressed against my chest, warm as buns from the oven.

“Sure, burned to a crisp, just bone and ash and suet. Just like in the movies.”

“Our skulls’d crack open from the heat,” she said, a note of real excitement entering her voice. “And they’d find us in the ruins, locked in an embrace, still smoldering. It’d take them a long time to figure out who you used to be, I bet,” she said.

“My wife’s having a baby,” I said without really planning to.

She nodded. “You didn’t tell me that before.”

“Thought you might not let me stay.”

“You’re right about that, but you’re forgiven this time,” she yawned, and she turned out the light and kissed me, and though we stayed quiet after that it was a long time before I managed to get to sleep.