Dry Bones (24 page)

They greased the police to pick him up and ransacked the bungalow. They found a single copy of the film stashed in a duffel bag on the top shelf of the bedroom closet. The copy was badly degraded, grainy and faded. The sexual frolics were fuzzy but discernible, yet it was next to impossible to identify the individuals engaged in them.

He delivered the film to Steele, who was satisfied with the results. His wife reappeared in the office soon after. Arctic instead of volcanic, she waited for Miss O’Keefe to escort her from the reception area to his office, shook his hand, and offered a few words of thanks, concluding with a coldly whispered admonition: “If this ever reaches the papers, I’ll find who’s responsible and have his balls delivered on a platter.”

It struck Dunne as less a threat than a promise.

ISC voluntarily surrendered the Pepsi account at the end of that year. Dunne found himself increasingly engaged in a role like that of the oversized cardboard cutout of TV host Garry Moore in the Liggett’s across the street set up to plug cigarettes or shampoo or toothpaste (he couldn’t remember which).

He accompanied the associates and specialists to the lunches where they pitched clients on the “efficiency and effectiveness of electronic security.” He knew the prospects had been told ahead of
time about his OSS and NYPD background as well as his acquaintance with “the boys at the top.” Following a few words about the “depth of talent at ISC” and the “new science of security management,” he stuck to his cardboard cutout role, wordlessly nodding as the sales pitch proceeded.

When the deal was sealed and they came in to sign the papers, the clients were guided past Dunne’s office. He told them how much he looked forward to working with them and shook hands as they scanned the wall behind him filled with the photos and news features Ken Moss had taken care to have framed and hung. Their faces registered how impressed they were. (The fact that Joan Crawford was an ex-client and Mayor O’Dwyer and General William Donovan had never been clients went unmentioned.)

The last to arrive at the senior staff meeting, Dunne was surprised to find Ken Moss, junior associate, in attendance. Moss wasn’t at the table with the section heads but in a chair against the wall, behind Wynne Billings, senior specialist in the Strategic Planning and Marketing Section (SPAMS). Moss was writing in a notepad and didn’t look up.

After a round-the-table summary of present business by the section heads, the meeting was given over to Billings. A graduate of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, muscular and athletic, with a blond crew cut and a fresh, alert, narrow face, he resembled the Kansas City A’s up-and-coming outfielder Roger Maris. As with Maris, who was rumored to be a potential addition to the Yankee lineup, the scuttlebutt on Billings left no doubt he was headed for big things.

He stood at the end of the table, behind a Kodak projector. Ken Moss turned the lights off and pulled his chair next to him.

“Ken, let’s have slide one.”

Moss hit the button atop the projector.
Click.
A sleek,
propellerless airliner with swept-back wings flashed on the screen. “Take a good look, gentlemen.” Billings paused, lit a cigarette. The slight, insect-like whirr from the projector filled the room. He spoke with a slow-paced, deliberate emphasis, spacing the words distinctly: “This … is …
the future
.” Another pause.
Whirr.
“This … is …
the Seven-Oh-Seven
.”

In the fall, Billings said, Pan Am would put the 707, the world’s first commercial jetliner, into transatlantic service. Home and abroad, fast as they could, all the big carriers would follow suit. The new age heralded by the H-bomb, television, Sputnik—an age in which distance ceased to matter—would take another giant leap forward.

The wisps from Billings’s cigarette swirled like cinematic fog in the projector’s beam.
Click.
The Mercator map that came up reminded Dunne of the one mounted outside Donovan’s office in Paris. On this one, however, parabolic trajectories rose from New York, Los Angeles, London, Chicago, Tokyo, Paris, etc., crisscrossing continents and oceans and weaving a great global web.

Dunne momentarily mistook the arching lines for the ones newspapers used to illustrate articles on the likely delivery paths in an exchange of nuclear-headed missiles between the United States and the USSR; Billings made clear they were the commercial routes that within a few years fleets of jetliners would regularly travel.

“The 707 is the embodiment of the forces that will shape the decade ahead and, in so doing, decide the fate of our country and of the free world. We’re facing a sea change, gentlemen. I mean that literally.”

Click
—the next slide, a single word in capital letters:
SEA.
“The essence is in these three letters:
S
…
E
…
A
.” Billings walked the length of the table and stood next to the screen: “Synthetics, electronics, avionics.” The rehearsing he’d obviously done with Moss was paying off. He had everyone’s attention. “Let’s take them one by one. First,
S
.”

Click.
The caption
S IS FOR SYNTHETICS
appeared on the screen. “Chemistry is key, gentlemen. The economy now rests not on rubber or cotton or gold but on polymers, synthetic compounds, the man-made ingredients out of which everything from
A
to
Z
, from acrylic paints to space suits, Christmas trees, and zithers, is being made.”

One by one everyone at the table had lit a cigarette. The glowing tips flared like fireflies in summer twilight. They stared in silence at the slide. Smoke and specks of dust churned and swarmed through the shaft of light connecting screen to projector.

Dunne closed his eyes and stopped listening.

Moss shut off the projector and flipped on the lights. Dunne opened his eyes. He wasn’t sure how much of Billings’s presentation he’d tuned out.

“Aviation plus electronics equals avionics. We all know it: Whoever wins control of space will win the Cold War.” Billings tossed his red-and-gold regimental striped tie over his shoulder. He moved in front of the screen, white shirt blending into white background. “The trajectory of change is now clear, constant, and certain. Forget about the doldrums the economy is now experiencing. The country’s greatest period of growth is still ahead. These are the industries that will drive it—of that there can be no doubt.

“Domestically, thanks to the Interstate Highway Act passed two years ago, we have in place the largest public works program in … the history … of … the
world
, a
twenty-six-billion-dollar
construction project that will result in forty-one thousand miles of unobstructed roadways. Along with fulfilling its primary purpose of allowing the quick evacuation of our cities in case of atomic attack, the interstate system will have lasting and beneficial effects on commerce and communication.

“The future, however, no longer depends on Bismarck’s famous formula of ‘blood and iron’ or, for that matter, on concrete
and steel. They have their place. But it’s above, not below, in the celestial rather than terrestrial, where our nation’s and the world’s destinies intersect, where military and commercial investments merge, and present and future converge. The same ingredients that will decide who controls the skies above and space beyond will distinguish winner from loser.

“What will change, what is changing as I speak, what is being ramped up by the revived economies of Europe and Asia, especially the surging performance of our former enemies in Japan and Germany, is the
velocity … of … change
.

“The past is past, over and done, good-bye,
sayonara
,
auf wiedersehen
. The future is on the runway. The choice for us at ISC is clear: stay behind … or … get …
aboard
.

“Which will it be?”

A spontaneous round of applause accompanied Billings as he walked back to his seat. He collected his papers. The section heads crowded around as if greeting a teammate at home plate after he’d scored the winning run.

Ken Moss unplugged the projector and returned it to its plastic case. Dunne avoided the huddle and went over to him.

“Wynne hit it out of the park, don’t you think?” Moss’s round, beaming face reflected the supporting role he’d just played, moon to Billings’s sun.

“Babe Ruth couldn’t have done it better.”

“The Babe is history. Wynne is the new breed. A regular Mickey Mantle, or Roger Maris, that kid out in Kansas City, the kind destined to topple the old records.”

“Or Willie Mays.”

Moss’s confused expression indicated his uncertain reaction to adding a Negro to the lineup of Mantle, Maris, and Billings.

“Ken, I’d like you in my office at eleven.” The more effective way to remind Moss of his lower status in the ISC hierarchy would have been to have Miss O’Keefe summon him. But though
it hadn’t entirely disappeared, the rage he’d felt toward Moss had dissipated.

“Sure, that shouldn’t be a problem.”

Miss O’Keefe was at her desk scribbling with a mechanical pencil in a composition book. She closed it as soon as he came in. “There were no calls, Mr. Dunne.”

“Ken Moss will be by at eleven. Have him wait five minutes, then send him in.”

“Yes, Mr. Dunne.” She returned to her composition book.

Ken Moss had pestered him the previous October to sit down with Alvin Capshaw to do an interview for an upcoming issue of some magazine he’d never heard of. He refused. Moss came to his office and handed him several back copies. “It’s an industry-sponsored publication. ISC and a consortium of other companies finance it. All the pieces are positive. There are no newsstand sales, but it’s sent to all the major corporations, banks, brokerages, and law firms.”

“Sounds like malarkey.”

“It’s public relations.”

“Stunt?”

“Tool.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I wish you’d reconsider.”

“The business of this business is keeping the business to yourself.”

“Nice line.” Moss wrote it down in his notepad. He stayed around, asked a few more questions.

Didn’t give it another thought until that morning, parked on a stool at the counter in Chock Full o’Nuts for his regular breakfast of coffee and powdered doughnut, he remembered he’d stuck an envelope from Ken Moss in his case when he’d hurried out of the office the previous Friday.

He snapped open the case, slapped the envelope on the counter, and extracted a copy of
Modern Detection
with paper-clipped note:
Fin, Enjoy! Ken.
He almost spit out a mouthful of coffee and doughnut when he flipped to the table of contents and saw listed, under
Profiles
,
Fintan Dunne: A Soldier’s Soldier
. Shock turned to fury at the photo of General Donovan and himself accompanying the piece—the same one Ken Moss had talked him into hanging outside his office.

He was glad he’d decided against subjecting Moss to a verbal blitz that would have embarrassed them both. Though he was still fuming when he saw Moss in the conference room, Billings’s pep talk/lecture/pronouncement had a smothering effect. The handwriting on the wall, up to now as indistinct as the faces in that Joan Crawford stag film, was now as unmistakable as the gigantic neon Pepsi-Cola sign across the East River.

True, Billings had skated as skillfully as Dick Button across the thin ice of lofty generalities, but it didn’t take an Ivy League degree to figure out that ISC’s new trajectory meant concentrating on a narrow spectrum of interests and investments.

Maybe, if Louie Pohl were still alive, there’d be a chance of getting a contract renewal for another four years. But Louie’s mortal remains were on his mother’s mantel in Forest Hills. Dunne had little doubt that when New Year’s rolled around, odds were his office would have a new carpet, a fresh coat of paint, and a younger occupant.

Maybe he’d go back to running his own agency. But those days were over and done. Small agencies had gone the way of rumble seats and big bands. Even if he were pigheaded enough to try, it couldn’t be done on a part-time basis. Roberta and he would have to spend all year in New York, which neither was prepared to do.

He thought back to Billings’s phrase, “the velocity of change.” Time had its own momentum, backward as well as forward, the
present rises, the past sinks, vice versa. The week before, he’d passed the same playground he passed every day on his way to work. A boy and girl rode the seesaw up and down, chorusing, “Seesaw Marjorie Daw.” He stopped and watched. Suddenly, he remembered his father watching him and his sister, Maura, on a seesaw in the playground in Tompkins Square Park, the day that Mayor Gaynor cut the ribbon to open it—the only time his father had taken them there.

The boy was bigger than the girl. Without any warning, he stopped the up-and-down motion, squatted on his end, and left the girl suspended in the air.

“No fair!” she squealed. “Let me down!”

The boy stayed where he was. The girl kept crying, “Let me down!”

Dunne hollered, “You heard her! Play fair! Let her down!”

The identical words his father had used when he played the same trick on Maura.

The boy looked over. His face was red. He pushed off the ground with a frog-like spring of his legs. Up he went, down she came. They resumed their chorus:

Roberta smiled at him from the silver-framed photo beside the phone. Her hat was shaped like a ball of dandelion florets. Already out of date. She’d be irate to know this was the photo he kept on his desk. But she didn’t know, and he didn’t care. Her face
was radiant and expectant. The Versailles on East 50th Street, his first week home.

She’d met him at the dock as soon as he disembarked. She’d rented a room at the Plaza. A lot of lost time to make up for.
The passion they shared was fiery, unquenchable.