The Porkchoppers (3 page)

Pettigrew handed Cubbin a slip of paper. “You call this man here. Tell him I recommended you.”

“Thanks, Mr. Pettigrew.”

Pettigrew shrugged. “I told 'em they could get a girl for ten bucks who'd put up with their dirty talking, but they said they wanted a man, but that they didn't want any nance. You know what a nance is, don't you?”

Cubbin nodded. “I've got a pretty good idea.”

He got the job, of course. The Good Old Man himself hired Cubbin in the shabby, one-room office that was located in the heart of what they later called Pittsburgh's golden triangle. “Let's see what you can do, son,” he said.

Cubbin nodded, sat down in a chair, and took out his pencil and a stenographer's notebook.

“Dear Sir and Brother,” the Good Old Man began. He was not so old then, not quite forty-five in 1932, but already he dictated his letter as if delivering a short speech to an audience of a thousand or more, reaching his roaring peroration in the next to last paragraph and ending each letter with a heartfelt and whispered “Fraternally yours.”

Cubbin took it all down in Pitman at around eighty words per minute and typed it up on the office L. C. Smith at a steady sixty-five words per minute. After the Good Old Man read it, he looked up at Cubbin and smiled, “I don't have much education, son, but I'm not stupid. I put a couple of little grammatical errors in on purpose. You took 'em out. Why?”

“They weren't bad enough to leave in,” Cubbin said.

The Good Old Man nodded. “That's a pretty fair answer,” he said after a while. “You say you can also keep a simple set of books?”

“Yes, I can do that.”

“All right, you're hired. Be here tomorrow at eight. You know anything about unions?”

“No.”

“Good. You can learn about 'em my way.”

When Cubbin got back to his boardinghouse to tell his mother that he had landed a job, he found a tall, thin young man waiting for him on the front porch. The tall, thin young man introduced himself as “Bernie Ling of Warner Brothers.”

Cubbin heard the Warner Brothers but discounted it as part of some kind of a sales pitch. “I'm sorry,” he said, starting to brush by Ling, “but I can't afford one right now.”

“I'm not selling,” Ling said. “I'm making you an offer.”

“Of what?”

“A screen test. In L.A.”

“Bullshit,” Cubbin said and started past Ling again.

“Here,” Ling said, taking a telegram from his pocket. “Read this.”

The telegram was from Ling's producer uncle, a man who enjoyed some partly manufactured notoriety for his unwillingness to squander words. The telegram read, “
BUS FARE ONLY LOVE FISHER
.”

“I don't get it,” Cubbin said.

“Fisher. That's Arnold Fisher, a producer. My uncle. At Warner Brothers. I'm with their publicity department. I saw you the other night in the play. I wired my uncle and they're willing to pay your bus fare to L.A, for a test. No shit.”

“You saw me?” Cubbin said, thinking a message to his father: Why did you have to go and die and be out of a job?

“I think you might make it out there,” Ling said. “I mean really make it.”

Cubbin slowly handed back the telegram. “Sorry, but it's just not possible right now.”

“Christ, all you have to do is get on a bus.”

There was a moment for Cubbin when it was all possible, better than possible, it had all happened, the bus ride, the screen test, the instant fame, and the gigantic salary. He had it all for one impossibly fine moment until he remembered his mother, the new widow, waiting alone upstairs, waiting for the only person she knew in Pittsburgh to come home and tell her how she was going to live for the rest of her life. I'll send for you, Mother, he thought, but told Bernie Ling, “My father's just died and I can't leave my mother.”

“Oh, well, that's tough. I'm sorry,”

“Maybe later when things get straightened out.”

“Sure,” Ling said. “Here's my card. When you get things settled drop me a line and we'll try to work something out.”

“You say you really think there's a chance?”

“I never wire my uncle unless I think there's a damn good one.”

“Well, I hardly know how to thank you—”

“Forget it. No, hell, don't forget it. Drop me a line instead.”

“Sure,” Cubbin said, “I'll do that. As soon as everything's settled.”

But he didn't and six months later Ling left Hollywood for a job with a newly formed New York advertising agency where after a time he grew rich enough to help back a few plays that had depressingly short runs.

As for Donald Cubbin, there wasn't a day in his life that he didn't remember his front-porch conversation with Bernie Ling and the decision that he had made. And there wasn't a day in his life that he didn't regret it.

The six-place, twin-jet Lear 24 bearing Donald Cubbin and his entourage of four had just left Hamilton, Ontario, and was pointing itself toward O'Hare International in Chicago when Fred Mure, having waited until his boss had finished reading the entertainment section of the newspaper, which was the first section he always read, leaned across to tap Cubbin on the shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“Chicago in an hour. Not bad, huh?”

God, he's an idiot, Cubbin thought. But he nodded and said, Not bad, before surrounding himself with the paper again. It was his second trip to Chicago in less than a month and he would make at least three more trips there before the month was over because he knew that they were going to try to steal it from him, and the best place for them to make their try was in Chicago. It was a town, Cubbin thought, where they were very good at stealing almost anything and where, over the years, they had made a fine craft out of stealing what they would try to steal from him, which was, of course, an election.

4

Not too many persons other than those who retained his services knew exactly what it was that Walter Penry did for a living. His wife had some notion, but she spent most of her time by their pool in Bel-Air while Penry spent most of his time traveling, or in Washington, where the headquarters for Walter Penry and Associates, Inc., was located.

Penry had about ten associates but his two principal ones were Peter Majury and Ted Lawson and they knew what he did. At least most of the time. Majury was a planner and manipulator and haunted the corridors of Washington dressed invariably, winter and summer, spring and fall, in a long, belted trench coat that looked as though it had been bought cheap at an Afrika Korps surplus sale. Majury spoke in a tone that was just louder than a whisper and spiced with a slight accent that somebody had once described as Slav Sinister, but which was actually German, the legacy of his parents, both Swabians, who emigrated to New Braunfels, Texas, in the thirties and never bothered to learn English. When he wanted to, Majury could also speak with a grating Texas twang.

Ted Lawson, the other principal associate, was a big, slab-sided man who seemed to gangle as he walked. He was usually all bluff heartiness and employed a loud bray for a laugh because he had decided that that was what people expected from a man of his size who had a bright, beefy complexion and a mouth that nature had turned up merrily at the corners. If one could make a choice about such things, Lawson would have chosen to be a loner, but there wasn't any money in that so he had become what he was, a man who could fix things for people who needed things fixed. It didn't matter much what needed doing, Lawson knew somebody who could do it.

What Walter Penry and Associates, Inc., actually specialized in was skulduggery, the kind that stayed just within the law. Walter Penry knew what the law was because he had been given a degree in the subject by the University of Iowa in 1943 although he had never practiced because he had joined the FBI instead, thus avoiding the discomfort of military service while honorably serving his country at a reasonable salary.

Penry had resigned amicably enough from the FBI in 1954 with what he always referred to as a spotless record. The reason that he resigned, at least the reason he gave the FBI, was to go into business for himself, but that was only partly true. The real reason was to conduct a bit of industrial espionage for a cosmetic firm that would, in two months' time, net him twice what his annual salary was as a special agent working out of Los Angeles.

Using the money that he made from his first industrial espionage assignment as capital, Penry founded his firm with headquarters in Washington and a branch office in Los Angeles, although the branch office at that time consisted of nothing more than his wife and his home telephone. His home now had an unlisted number but, his wife still answered it with, “Walter Penry and Associates.”

Penry knew what kind of business he was after from the first. There were many unpleasant tasks that various organizations needed done and Penry let it be known that he was willing to do them. He had once spent an entire February afternoon in Dallas firing the top management of an electronics firm while its president and founder and major stockholder, who was something of a coward, basked on Sapphire Beach in St. Thomas.

Penry also worked the periphery of politics, for hire to either party, specializing in deep background investigations that would produce information intended to have jolting political repercussions. Thus far his more noteworthy efforts had prevented three prospective cabinet members, two Democrats and a Republican, from being sworn in. Another time he had come up with information, twenty years old but still damaging, that had kept a Supreme Court justice off the bench.

But of all Penry's clients his favorite was the immensely fat old man who sat across the table from him now, picking disconsolately at a dish of white chicken meat and cottage cheese. The fat old man was Penry's favorite client for several reasons, not the least of them being that he was the one who paid him his second largest retainer, but the principal one being that Penry considered the old man to be as smart and as realistic as he himself was. Had Penry but known it, the old man considered him to be a bit simple, but the old man thought of nearly everyone that way.

The old man had been born on January 1, 1900, and he often proclaimed that he would live to see her out, referring, of course, to the end of the century. He was enormously fat, carrying nearly three hundred pounds, all of it lard, on a five-foot-eleven-inch frame. The old man had been born on a hardscrabble wheat farm just outside of Hutchinson, Kansas, and his earliest memories were of talk about money, and its lack, its use, its purpose, and its nature. His father was not only a farmer, he was also a money nut, at various times a Greenbacker, a Populist, a single taxer, a free-silver partisan, and a devoted follower of “Coin” Harvey, an Arkansas economic prophet of doubtful merit who had died broke. Nevertheless, the father had give his son the name of the prophet and the fat old man had gone through life as Coin Kensington.

Although his formal education had ended with the eighth grade, Kensington still thought of himself as a student and listed that as his occupation whenever some form required it. His first job had been with a small co operative grain elevator where he had mastered double-entry bookkeeping in less than a week, going on at sixteen to become a teller in the Merchants and Farmers Bank in Hutchinson. The bank had had to wait until he was twenty-one before it could make him cashier.

By 1923 he was the bank's president, the youngest in the state, possibly the youngest in the country. After not quite a year of it he decided that he had learned all he could about Kansas banking so he resigned. Two months later he was in London, standing underneath the sign of three golden acorns on a grimy street in The City. He took a deep breath, pushed open a forbidding door, and announced to the first person he saw that, “I'm Coin Kensington from Kansas and I'm here to learn about money.”

After an hour's conversation and a close study of five letters of recommendation that Kensington had brought along from some Chicago and New York bankers that he had dealt with, the senior partner in the London merchant bank offered Kensington a job—at fifteen shillings a week.

“But that's only three-fifty a week.”

“It's something more than that, Mr. Kensington.”

“What?”

“It's your first lesson.”

Three years later the merchant bank sent Kensington to New York to look after its considerable investments. “The day before I left for New York,” Kensington liked to say when telling the story, “the three senior partners had me in. Well, one of them said, ‘It won't last, of course,' and I said, ‘No.' ‘Another two years,' another one of them said, ‘three possibly.' ‘Yes, three,' the first one said. Then they had one of their nice little silences and after a while one of them said, ‘Do keep a sharp eye on things, Kensington,' and another one of them said, ‘Mmmmm,' which really meant, ‘You'd goddam better,' so all I said was, ‘Of course,' and because that's all I said they seemed delighted.

“Well, I'd learned about money by then. I don't mean to brag, but I'd learned what it
is
—and there ain't maybe two dozen men in the world who know that. So for the next three years I made them money in the New York market, I mean a lot of money. Then in July of twenty-nine I sent 'em a coded cable that had just three words, ‘Get out now.' Well, they did and that made 'em a whole bunch more money. Then in late August I sent them another coded cable, this time four words: ‘Maximum short position advised.' Well, they wouldn't. Now those fellas were about as smart a bunch of moneymen as you're likely to run across, but when it comes to selling short you got to be just a little bit inhuman like a pirate, if you're going to make any real money, because you're betting on catastrophe and when you do that you're betting against the hopes of millions, which again ain't natural, and let me tell you it takes brassgutted nerve. Well, these fellas over in London didn't have that much nerve, although they had a right smart amount, so I sent them a nice little letter of resignation and used every dime I had to sell short on my own. Well, you know what happened. By December of twenty-nine I was a millionaire and not just on paper either and I still wasn't quite thirty years old.”