Ransom Read online

  He finished shaving, showered, then dressed, putting on the clothes Lisa had laid out for him. He had no interest in clothes, but he was good-humouredly allowing himself to be groomed by Lisa, just so long as she appreciated that a cop was never meant to be a fashionplate, that the best detective was the one nobody could ever remember meeting. She had him in a grey suit today, with a blue button-down shirt and a dark blue tie that at first glance he thought was patterned with foetuses but which, when he looked closer, he was relieved to find were sea-horses. When he was dressed he didn’t look at himself again in the mirror: whatever

  failings he had, and he knew he had as many as the next man, vanity was not one of them. If Lisa thought he would look all right in this outfit today, that was good enough for him. From now on she was the only one he really wanted to please.

  He left the room, went out of the hotel, walked several blocks across town and caught the subway down to Police Headquarters, to make the courtesy call that Police Commissioner Venneker back in Sydney had asked him to make. He was glad he did not belong to the New York Police Department, not with their crime figures. The longer he was away from Sydney the more he appreciated it. So far that was something he had kept from Lisa.

  The phone rang in the office on the tenth floor of Cornwall Gardens on East 69th Street. Polly Nussbaum took the carton of sugar out of the filing cabinet and moved across to her desk. She had been promising herself for years to have the cabinet moved in back of her desk, but somehow she had never gotten around to it: Procrastinating Polly, her mother had always called her. But now her feet were about to force her into it; even the few short steps across the office were killing her. Maybe she should have gone to work for a chiropodist instead of a dentist. Never any trouble with the teeth - “You’re my best advertisement,” Dr Willey was always telling her. But the feet! …

  “Dr Willey’s office.”

  “This is Mrs Michael Forte’s private secretary.” The woman’s voice was soft and pleasant.

  Polly Nussbaum always admired nice voices, but at forty-nine she had left it too late to do anything about her own. In a Jewish apartment overcrowded with her quarrelling parents and her five loud-mouthed brothers and sisters, who got to speak like Claudette Colbert? Claudette Who? You’re

  dated, Polly, you live your life in the Late Late Show. “Yeah-yes?”

  “I am just double-checking Mrs Forte’s appointment for ten o’clock this morning.”

  “Yes, we are expecting her at ten.”

  “Thank you. Mrs Forte will be on time.”

  Polly Nussbaum hung up, sat back in her chair and eased her shoes off under the desk. She poured sugar into the cup of coffee she had made for herself and prepared to enjoy the only five minutes of leisure she would have from now till one o’clock. Dr Willey did not get in till nine-fifteen and the first patient was due at nine-thirty. She hoped she had done the right thing by trying to fit in that (she checked her book) Mrs Malone. Mrs Malone would never know it, but it had been her voice that had got her the appointment.

  Come to think of it, Mrs Forte had a nice voice too. But underneath it all, she suspected, Mrs Forte was holding back a screech just like Momma’s. I wouldn’t want to work for her, not even if some day she ends up as the President’s wife. She would be a bitch to work for, always making sure you never forgot the tiniest thing. That was probably why she had had her secretary check twice in the past week on this morning’s appointment.

  Polly spread out The Daily News on her desk, began to leaf slowly through it. Hurricanes, famine, murder, drugs: she didn’t know why she bothered to waste her money each morning. Misery even at ten cents was too expensive. Then she stopped. Michael Forte, handsome in that nice Italian way that always reminded her of Marcello Mastroianni, smiled up at her, inviting her vote. Okay, Mr Forte, you got my vote, especially if you can bring law and order back to this town. Your wife I can do without; but she’s your pain, not mine. I got rid of my pain, Irving Nussbaum, ten years ago. May God never send him back.

  She pulled on her shoes, got up, went into the small washroom and washed her cup, came back into the office and stood for a moment at the window, looking down at the ants

  in the street. Poor schlemels, even at this height none of you look happy. Toothache, aching feet, ache in the heart. When did I last see a smile on the face of someone my age on the street?

  Who’d want to be Mayor, trying to straighten out such a town?

  “I have to be at Dr Willey’s at ten,” said Sylvia Forte.

  “What?” said her husband abstractedly.

  He was a handsome man of just above middle height, with a broad, dark face in which bone and flesh would for the next ten years be fighting a battle; if the bone won he would remain handsome till he was an old man. He had a quick nervous energy to him, exemplified by his wide smile; though some people, mostly those who voted against him, thought the smile was prompted by St Voter’s Dance, the politicians’ endemic, and was not a natural characteristic. Which showed how little he was understood by almost half of the city’s population.

  He stood at the window gazing out at the East River that was dull as dirty pewter under the grey November sky. The trees in the grounds of Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the Mayor of New York City, had no shine to them in the dull light; the fall foliage was the colour of stained leather and bad wine, a dismal frame for what might be the eve of his dethronement. He looked up at the sky, hoping that Hurricane Myrtle would swing away east before it reached New York: not only would it strip the trees of their leaves and perhaps even their branches, it would also strip the polling booths of voters. New Yorkers did not think enough of their politicians to go out into wind and rain to register their approval or disapproval of them.

  Despite the dull light he could see up beyond the Tri-borough Bridge to the northern tip of Astoria on Long

  Island; on such days he imagined he could see clear into the past, the family history that he had never experienced. Old Michele Forte, his grandfather, had settled over there in Astoria when he had arrived in America from Lerici in Italy in 1895, getting off the ship with a wife, three small children, forty dollars, a strong back and a driving ambition that had almost consumed him like a cancer. The family construction business had begun there and the Triborough was one of the monuments to it: M. Forte and Sons had been one of the contractors on the bridge. Michael knew that Sam, his father, the last surviving son of old Michele, never looked back at Astoria, but maybe that was understandable. America was full of first-generation sons trying to escape from their background. But then Sam Forte had never run for political office, had never had to convince the voters that, though rich, he was as good and humble as they were.

  “I hope you listen to your ward bosses more than you do to me,” said Sylvia.

  Michael smiled at her, his husband’s smile, not his politician’s. “Sorry. I’ll be able to give you my undivided attention after tomorrow - I hope. What are you doing this morning?”

  She sighed, a little impatiently. “I’m going to Dr Willey’s at ten, I’m blessing children or something at St Mary’s School at eleven - ” She was not a Catholic, but there had never been any religious arguments between them and they felt secure enough to make small jokes about each other’s faith. “I’ll remind the nuns to vote for you.”

  “They’ll vote for me anyway. I donated all the rosary beads for the last First Communion class.”

  She shook her head in mock wonder. “It’s just like dealing with the Indians - you’re buying Manhattan again. What order do you think Mother Teresa and the nuns belong to -the Algonquins or the Delawares?”

  “I’ve never seen the Pope as Sitting Bull, but it’s a thought.”

  “Then I’m due at a luncheon at the Colony Club - ” She used the word luncheon instead of lunch, but then she would not have been a member of the Colony Club had she done otherwise. She would also have not been a member had she been only Michael Forte’s wife and no more; but be
ing the daughter of Henry and Clara Veerkamp was another matter. It might take Michael to get her into the White House, but the Veerkamp name had got her admitted to everything that counted in the State of New York.

  “Why there? They’re not the sort who’ll vote for me.”

  “They may - perhaps I can persuade them to. According to Scotty Reston this morning - ” she tapped the copy of The New York Times that lay on the breakfast table - “you’ll need every vote you can get tomorrow.”

  He looked at her admiringly; and with some sympathy that he hoped she would not detect. She was the perfect political wife: beautiful, with that red-gold hair that was a sensation on colour television, hard-working, always polite to the right people, never wasting her time on the wrong ones: if I don’t make it tomorrow, he thought, she is the one who is going to be disappointed. She and Old Sam.

  As if on# cue, Nathan, the black butler, came to the door of the small dining-room where the Fortes usually breakfasted. “Mr Samuel is here, sir.”

  Michael smiled to himself at his father’s punctilious formality. Ever since Michael could remember, his life had been run by his father, but once he had reached political office, first as a Congressman in Washington and then as Mayor here in New York, his father had always had himself announced when he called. Preparing for bigger things, Michael thought with slightly sour amusement: Sam would never expect to enter the White House without being announced. To Sylvia and Old Sam, Gracie Mansion was just a wayside stop on the road to the ultimate destination.

  Sylvia got up from the table, moving with the graceful fluidity of a woman who had never been awkward even as a child and which had been improved by ballet lessons and the

  watchful eye of a vigilant mother. She went forward to kiss her father-in-law as he came in the door. There was warm affection between the two of them; they were related by ambition as well as by marriage. Michael, standing off, had to admit they made a fine-looking pair: the lovely red-haired woman and the stiff-backed, white-haired old man. A pity that these days Americans would not vote a June-December couple into the White House. They had accepted the marriage of the middle-aged Cleveland and his 21-year-old bride, but that had been almost ninety years ago, when Americans had been less respectful of the office of President.

  “You’re breakfasting late. Sorry if I’m too early-” Samuel Forte had not quite managed to eliminate the roughness of his early years from his voice. He had gone to work for his father at eighteen and it had been ten years before he had been able to escape from the shouting above the job noises and the yelling at the immigrant construction workers in the dialect that they understood. He had a town house in the East Sixties, an estate an hour out of town that overlooked the Hudson and a small mansion at Palm Beach in Florida; but Astoria was still there on his tongue. You may never look back at the past, Michael thought, but you’ll always hear the echoes of it.

  “No, we’re finished. We had a late night and we’re going to be late again tonight. We gave ourselves the luxury of an extra hour in bed this morning.”

  They had made love that morning, she stifling her cries against the possibility of being overheard by the servants. They had always enjoyed each other in bed, but the demands of public life too often tired them out; and the privacy of their bedroom was always subject to the urgent phone call or the knock on the door by Nathan or one of the other servants to say there was an unexpected visitor downstairs. Michael sometimes wondered if hernia, as well as a heart-attack, was a health hazard with those in power.

  Sylvia brought her father-in-law to the table and poured him a cup of coffee. The old man sat down, carefully

  arranging the creases in his trousers, and looked up at his son. “The day after tomorrow you may not need to get up at all. I’ve been talking to Ed Horan - he says things are going against us up in the Bronx. He thinks you have been too complacent, Michael.”

  Michael held in his temper; it was too early in the day to start expending his energy that way. “Ed Horan is an uneducated horse’s ass. He wouldn’t know the meaning of complacency.”

  “The word was mine. Ed actually said you had left it too late to get off your butt and take your finger out. Excuse me, Sylvia.”

  “Think nothing of it. I gather the Duke of Edinburgh uses the same expression.” Sylvia looked at her husband. Lately she had noticed that after they had made love she often became impatient with him, almost as if he had left her unsatisfied; she sometimes wondered if other couples went through this post-coital reaction, as if hurt had to be added to love. “It seems rather apt, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t.” Michael kept his voice down, though he was tempted to shout at them both. “It’s easy for Horan to sit up there in the Bronx telling me what I should have done. When anyone criticizes him, he can brush it aside - he’s not running for office, never has.” He paused, looking at his father; but Sam Forte, impervious to barbs from his son, was carefully measuring sugar into his coffee. “When Tom Kirkbride came out with his campaign for law and order, what was I supposed to do? Tell Des Hungerford that the police force had to go out and double its daily quota? Already we’re arresting more law-breakers than we have room for - the bail bondsmen are making more money than they’ve ever made in their lives before. They will vote for me,” he said bitterly. “One of them told me so last week.”

  He turned away from them and went back to the window. A uniformed patrolman stood leaning against a tree in the grounds, idly watching a squirrel as it shopped among the

  leaves for its winter larder. Out on the river a Fire Department tender, all fresh red and white paint, moved up towards Hell Gate, fastidiously skirting a garbage scow as the latter came downstream heading for the open Bay. Who will they vote for tomorrow, the fire tender crew and the cop ? He recognized the squirrel and felt surer of its vote. At least when he went out into the grounds occasionally and fed it, it didn’t put one paw behind its back and cross its toes.

  “I’ve done everything I can,” he said, still gazing out the window. “From now on it’s a question of luck.”

  “Luck should never come into an election. It suggests a poor campaign or a poor candidate.”

  He turned round slowly and faced his father. “And what do you reckon you’ve had of those two?”

  Sam Forte tasted his coffee, nodded approvingly at Sylvia. “Excellent coffee - but then it always is. How do you do it?”

  “Never trust to luck,” said Sylvia. “I make it myself and time the percolation exactly.”

  “One second for every granule,” said Michael, “sucked dry like a voter. But you haven’t answered my question.”

  Sam Forte took his time, as he always had with his son. When his boy had been born he had taken the long view: it took years, decades, to put a man into the White House, especially when you decided, when he was one day old, that that was his destination.

  “You have been a good candidate, Michael. You have been a good mayor too, even though you have had a lot of critics. But the Holy Spirit himself couldn’t make a success of running New York.”

  “And, no reflection on you, I never had the Holy Spirit’s family behind me. But you don’t think I’ve run a good campaign this time?”

  “No.” Sam Forte finished his coffee, wiped his mouth deliberately with the napkin Sylvia gave him; she knew his fastidiousness, as if he were afraid of finding himself flecked with some grit from the past. “You let Kirkbride

  get away too soon with his claim that he can bring back law and order if he is elected. You should have hit him right at the start.”

  “How?”

  “By giving him the same argument you’ve given me. Ask him where the money is coming from for more police, for more prisons - “

  “Do you really think people listen to that sort of argument? When they’re scared to walk down the street after dark, scared to open their front door for fear they’re going to be mugged, do you really think they’re going to listen to logical argument?”
/>   “It would have been worth a try - “

  “Jesus!” Michael gestured in exasperation. “Look, I believe in law and order - I believe in it so much, as a - a way of life, if you like, that I find it hard to accept it as an election issue. But how do I convince the ordinary guy in the street that I’m even more concerned than he is, because it’s my responsibility? He’s a Monday morning quarterback when it comes to politics, knows all the answers - but when the issues get right down to the street he lives on, he’s a knuckle-head, he knows nothing and he doesn’t want to know. He just expects miracles and he votes you out if you don’t produce them.”

  “You could have made some sort of gesture - “

  “A gesture at a miracle? I’d need the Holy Spirit for that one.” He looked out the window again. A bald-headed jogger in a track-suit went past on the path outside the mansion grounds, head bobbing up and down as if it had come loose on his neck; he had the despairing look of a man tempted to catch the first cab he saw back home, someone who saw no logic at all in what he was doing. “When we had the British Prime Minister to dinner here last year, I remember something he told me - if you wanted to stay in politics and enjoy it, always remain in Opposition. That way no one can ever blame you for anything, but you always get marks for trying.”