The Porkchoppers

17

Donald Cubbin’s hands began to shake a little that Friday as he and Kelly rode the elevator up to Walter Penry’s suite in the Chicago Hilton. Cubbin jammed his hands deep into his coat pockets and when the elevator stopped on the fourteenth floor he said to his son, “Why don’t you wait here? I need to go back down and get a cigar.”

“Come on, chief,” Kelly said.

“Look, kid,” Cubbin said as he stepped from the elevator, “I’d really like a cigar.”

Kelly looked up and down the corridor and then produced a half-pint bottle of Ancient Age and handed it to his father. “Compliments of filthy Fred Mure,” he told him. “He said you’d be needing it.”

Cubbin took the half-pint, trying to conceal his eagerness, and glanced around. There was no one in sight. He looked at his son. “You know what this is?”

“It’s whiskey.”

“It’s goddamned embarrassing, that’s what.” He raised the bottle and drank three large gulps.

“That’ll put the bloom back in your cheeks,” Kelly said, reaching for the bottle.

“Now what kind of a father would do that in front of his own son?” Cubbin said.

“The kind who needs a drink.”

Walter Penry opened the door to Cubbin’s knock and beamed at both father and son. “How are you, Don?” he said, grasping Cubbin’s right hand in both of his.

“Fine, Walter. I don’t think you’ve met my son, Kelly.”

“No, but I’ve sure heard a lot about him — and all of it good.” Kelly and Penry shook hands and sized each other up. The kid looks brighter than his old man, Penry thought, which could mean trouble. I don’t like this slick sonofabitch, Kelly decided as he offered Penry a carefully selected smile, the kind that gave away nothing but a view of his teeth.

Cubbin shook hands with the boys, as Penry always referred to them, thirty-seven-year-old Peter Majury and forty-five-year-old Ted Lawson. Penry then introduced them to Kelly who decided that he didn’t like them any better than he liked Penry and thought: the old man’s got himself into speedy company. If that sneaky-looking one got a haircut, he could play the mad SS major in some World War Two movie. And that big one, who must wear that smile of his to sleep, could be the gunfighter who can’t get enough of his job. Kelly always cast people whom he met and didn’t like into film roles. For some reason it helped him to remember their faces and names. As for you, he thought as Penry handed him a drink, you look like that dolt on the FBI show who’s always talking over the phone to Junior Zimbalist and telling him that the director’s taking a personal interest in this one, Lewis.

“I think your dad told me that you’re on the force in Washington,” Penry said.

“He’s resigned,” Cubbin said quickly before his son could say anything. Kelly let it go.

He got bounced, you mean, and I’ll bet I know why, Penry thought, but said, “Well, Don, I guess that makes you the only one in the room who’s not an ex-cop of some kind. I spent eleven years with the FBI and the only thing I took with me when I left was a handshake from Mr. Hoover and a spotless record. Peter here did something or other for the CIA for above five years and Ted was with the Treasury. Seven years wasn’t it, Ted?”

“Eight,” Lawson said.

“How’d you like being a cop, Kelly?” Penry said.

“I liked it fine.”

“And you resigned to give your dad a hand, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, from what I hear, Don, you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

Cubbin bristled. “I don’t know where you get your information, but it sounds like you’re getting it from Sammy.”

“Come on, Don. You know we didn’t fly all the way up here just to kid around with each other. I understand Sammy’s put himself together a pretty good campaign.”

“That television program last night,” Peter Majury said and clucked his tongue a couple of times. “That was most unfortunate.”

“One TV program doesn’t make a campaign,” Cubbin said.

“Well, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about,” Penry said. “Your campaign and how we can help. But let’s have some lunch first.”

They had lunch in the room, but not before Kelly made sure that his father was fortified with another drink, this time a double bourbon that Cubbin sipped as he nibbled at his steak and salad. While they ate, Walter Penry delivered himself of a number of opinions concerning the state of the nation and the world which, Kelly decided, would have had Attila the Hun nodding agreement. Kelly was thinking of needling Penry, of pricking that bloated self-assurance to see what would ooze out, when Penry said to Cubbin, “Now you and I, Don, we’ve always thought alike and—”

“What?” Cubbin said, looking up from his drink that was now about three-fourths gone.

“I said we’ve always thought alike.”

“Walter, you’re a nice guy but you’re also full of shit.”

Penry decided to retreat. “Of course, everyone has differences, but usually we wind up on the same side.”

Cubbin was staring at Penry now. You don’t owe him anything, he told himself. He owes you. You don’t have to put up with any crap from him. “You know what I’ve been doing for the last fifteen minutes, Walter, I’ve been half listening to that line of bull you’ve been handing out and wondering how a grown-up man like you can bring himself to say such damn foolishness, let alone believe it.”

“Well, Don, we don’t have to agree on everything to be friends,” Penry said.

“Who said anything about friendship? Some of my best friends are damn fools.”

“Which of Walter’s points do you especially disagree with, Don?” Majury asked, always eager for details, especially when they promised conflict.

“All of ’em,” Cubbin said. “Now nobody’s ever accused me of being a liberal, not since fifty-two anyhow after I came out for Eisenhower instead of Stevenson. I doubt if I’d do it today, but I did it then because I thought Ike wanted to be President. It wasn’t my fault that he didn’t take to the job. Well, that didn’t make me popular. And I didn’t get any more invitations to the White House after sixty-four when I first started yelling about Vietnam. Now let me tell you why I did that. I’m no foreign-affairs or military expert, but I used to be a pretty fair bookkeeper. So I just looked at the books. Well, I’ve got a sort of simple philosophy that’s probably old hat nowadays. I believe everyone in this country should have enough to eat, plenty to wear, a good home to live in, an education, and a doctor to go to when they’re sick. Now this they deserve just like the air they breathe. That’s not too hard to understand, is it?”

“You’re doing fine, chief,” Kelly said.

“Yeah, well, like I said, I took a look at the books just like any bookkeeper would and I decided that we could either have ourselves a war over in Southeast Asia or we could have a fairly decent country, but we couldn’t have both. We just didn’t have the money. Well, I decided I’d rather have a decent country and I said so and kept saying so and George Meany got so mad he wouldn’t even speak to me for six months until he had to because he wanted something. So there I was for about two years all by myself except for the kooks and the nuts until it finally got respectable to be anti-Vietnam. But let me tell you something, Walter, it wasn’t any fun suddenly being the fifty-five-year-old darling of every left-wing, long-haired hippie in the country, but by God that’s what I was. Christ, I even got a letter from Norman Mailer.”

“Although I didn’t agree with you at the time, Don,” Penry said, “I believe I told you that it was a courageous stand.”

Cubbin grinned. “You told me I was making a damn-fool mistake.”

“Well, we’re all on the same side now,” Penry said. “At least about Vietnam.”

“Perhaps we had better talk about our own battle,” Majury said.

But Cubbin wasn’t through. “You know what Sammy Hanks is saying now? He’s saying that he was the one who talked me into coming out against Vietnam. Why in 1965 that dumb son of a bitch didn’t even know where it was. You know what I did when Old Man Phelps died? I reached way down in the bottom of the bag and picked out the most insignificant, obscure regional director we had and made him secretary-treasurer because I believed all of his talk about loyalty and dedication. Hell, I was the one who took Sammy out of that Schenectady plant and gave him his first union job as an organizer. Just twelve years ago Sammy Hanks was running a set press and making two seventy-six an hour and happy to get it because it was more’n he’d ever made in his life. He barely had a high school education and some kind of college night course and if it hadn’t been for me, he’d still be in that plant. I taught that ugly little prick everything he knows and gave him everything he’s got and now he wants my job and goes around telling everybody that’ve I lost touch with the rank and file.”

Kelly decided to interrupt before whiskey and anger drowned his father in a pool of self-pity. “You forgot to teach Sammy one thing, chief.”

“What?”

“Gratitude.”

You’re talking too much, Cubbin told himself. Let them talk awhile. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “That’s one thing he never learned. Gratitude.”

“Well, perhaps you can teach him another equally important lesson, Don,” Majury said in his usual hoarse whisper.

“What?”

“How to be graceful in defeat.”

Cubbin smiled. “I’d like to do that. Yeah, I’d like that very much.”

“I think we can be of some help to you, Don,” Penry said.

“It’s like I told you, Walter, we don’t have any money.”

“You let us worry about the money. In fact, I think we might be able to raise some for you.”

“Who from?”

“You’ve got a lot of friends, Don, who you wouldn’t want to go to but who’d be more than willing to help out if somebody’d just ask them. Well, that’s one of my jobs — asking them.”

“Who?” Cubbin said, because it was one of those days when his hangover was still so bad that he knew he didn’t have a friend in the world.

“Well, let’s just say they’re friends who want to keep on being friends. They don’t want you to know that you’re in their debt.”

“Just how much in debt do you think I could be to them?”

“Maybe three or four hundred thousand,” Penry said, thinking: at least that’s what you’ll get. The rest I’ll spend in my own way on your behalf.

“Jesus!” Cubbin said. “You sure it’s that much?”

“Positive.”

“Is it clean money?”

“It’s clean. But it’s anonymous.”

“What do I have to do? I don’t believe that shit you gave me about friends for one minute, Walter.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, because they are your friends. And they don’t want you to do anything — other than what you’d indently do.”

“No strings at all?”

“No.”

“What’s your angle, Walter? I’ve never known you to be without one.”

“Your friends will pay me for my services which will be placed entirely at your disposal. We’re in for the duration, Don, if you’ll have us.”

“I’ve already got a campaign manager and a PR director.”

“We know that,” Majury said. “We don’t want to involve ourselves at that level of your campaign.”

“What level are you gentlemen interested in?” Kelly said.

“Play the tape, Ted,” Majury told Lawson.

The big man nodded and rose, walking over to a tape-recording machine. “Now?” he said.

“In just a moment,” Penry said. “Kelly, you asked at what level we plan to involve ourselves and that’s really quite a good question. We’re not interested in the execution of the campaign’s general strategy. Don’s got competent people to do that. What we will do is to provide certain issues that can be exploited. We’ll also anticipate the opposition and try to make them commit tactical errors. This is going to be a brief, but dirty campaign. Our job is simply to make sure that our tricks are dirtier than theirs. Now you can play it, Ted.”

Ted Lawson pushed a button and for several moments there was only the sound of some kind of a mechanical noise.

“Recognize it?” Penry said.

Cubbin shook his head.

“You should, you’ve heard it often enough. That’s a mimeograph machine. When we first considered taking part in your campaign a few days ago, I told the boys to go out and see if they could dig up anything that would be both useful and, I might as well admit it, impressive. Peter used his talents and discovered that something interesting was going on in a couple of motel rooms just outside of Washington. Then Ted used his talents and managed to record these happenings on tape. I think you’re going to find it informative.”

For a while there was nothing on the tape but the sound of the mimeograph machine. Then it stopped and a man’s voice said, “Well, that’s the last thousand.”

Another man’s voice said, “How many’s that make now?”

“Fifty thousand on this batch.”

“God, I’d like to see old Don’s face when he reads this one.”

“Yeah, it’s a pretty good one, all right. You got any of that coffee left?”

“Yeah, I think there’s some left.”

“Well, I think I’ll have another cup before I run any more.”

“Yeah, I think it’s still hot.”

“You know what I can’t figure out?”

“What?”

“Why Barnett has such a hard on for Cubbin.”

“I hear it goes back a long ways. I hear that he tried it once before back in fifty-five or ’six.”

“Barnett?”

“Yeah. He tried to dump Cubbin once before.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t around then. But he must not have made it because Cubbin’s still president.”

“That Cubbin’s a funny guy. You ever meet him?”

“Yeah, I met him. He’s always about half in the bag.”

“He looks good though. On television I mean.”

“He wears a wig.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah, I hear he paid a thousand bucks for it out in Hollywood. He got his the same place all those movie stars get theirs.”

“Well, Barnett’s sure got it in for him. He’s spending money too. He’s got me and you here and Hepple and Karpinski out in L.A. and Joe James and Murray Fletcher in Chicago and what’s his name in Cleveland... uh—”

“Fields. Stan Fields.”

“Yeah. Fields. Is he Jewish?”

“How should I know?”

“Well, what is that, seven guys living like we’re living? Hell, it must be costing a thousand bucks a day.”

“More.”

“Yeah, more. More like two thousand when we start traveling.”

“Well, I don’t guess there’s any law against it.”

“Against what?”

“Against one labor-union president trying to knock off another one.”

“Even if they ain’t in the same union?”

“I don’t know of any law against it.”

“Yeah. Any more coffee?”

“There’s a little bit left. Here.”

“Thanks. Well, it’s warm anyway. What about this guy Hanks?”

“What about him?”

“He any better than Cubbin?”

“Barnett thinks so, I guess, but shit, you get up there and start making forty and fifty thou a year and you don’t give a good goddamn about the members. You just wanna look good. I don’t know anything about this guy Hanks except that he must have some kinda deal with Barnett. They gotta have something fixed up or we wouldn’t be working for Hanks.”

“Well, when they get up that high they all get big-shotitis.”

“That’s for sure.”

“I guess we’d better start on this new batch. You wanna run the machine or stack ’em in the boxes?”

“I’ll run the machine awhile.”

“Okay.”

There was the sound of movement and then the sound of the mimeograph machine and then the tape came to an end. Lawson switched it to rewind as the others in the room turned to look at Cubbin. His face was pale and his lips were tightly compressed. “That son of a bitch,” he said.

“Barnett tried it once before, didn’t he, Don?” Penry said.

“In fifty-five,” Cubbin said.

“That’s a highly edited tape that you heard, Don,” Lawson said. “Most of the rest of the time they were talking about women.”

“You got their names?”

Lawson nodded. “I got their names and I also got a sample of what they were running off on that mimeograph machine. And I’ve got pictures of the interior of the two motel rooms and of them entering and leaving it. You’ve got all the proof you need.”

Cubbin turned to look at his son. “Kelly, get on the phone to Audrey over at the hotel and tell her to call Barnett down in Washington. Tell her that I want an appointment with him Tuesday at eleven A.M. Tell her that I won’t accept any excuses and that she can lean on Bar nett’s secretary or whoever she talks to as hard as she wants. She’ll know how to do it.”

“What if Barnett’s going to be out of town Tuesday?” Kelly said.

“Tell Audrey that I said that he’d better have his ass back in town. Don’t worry, she’ll fix it up.”

When Kelly went over to the phone to make the call, Cubbin turned to Penry. “Have you got some kind of a small portable machine that I can carry in a briefcase and just push the button to play that tape? I’m going to make a little speech to Mr. Howard Barnett on Tuesday and I don’t want to ruin its effect by having to fumble around with a tape.”

Forever the actor, Penry thought, but replied, “We’ll send a small one over to your hotel this afternoon, Don, all threaded and ready to go.”

“What do you plan to say to Barnett?” asked Majury whose craving to know was almost physical.

“Say to him?”

“Yes.”

Cubbin stood up. “Well, I guess I’ll call him a few names first and then I’m going to tell him that if he so much as looks in my direction again I’m going to kick his ass right up to his shoulders.”

Kelly came back from the phone. “Audrey’s making the call now,” he said.

Cubbin nodded and looked at Penry and his associates. “Well, I guess you guys have dealt yourself in. Thanks.”

“We’re looking forward to it, Don,” Penry said.

Cubbin nodded. “I appreciate it. You know while you’re snooping around there’s something else that you might look into for me.”

“What?” Penry said.

“It’s just a feeling I’ve got. A hunch.”

“What?”

“Here in Chicago.”

“What about Chicago?”

“That’s where they’re going to try to steal it. Wouldn’t you if you were Sammy?”

“Yes,” said Walter Penry, nodding slowly, “as a matter of fact, I would.”