22
BY THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER, I HAD SUBLET AN APARTMENT, AND MOdene and I entered our first crisis.
It began with a change in her schedule. Due to a temporary shortage of stewardesses in the Southwest, her base, she informed me, was to be shifted to Dallas for a few days, and she would have to absent herself from Miami for four nights in a row.
If I sensed she was lying, I kept such bad news away from myself. She would call me at my new lodgings every evening with detailed accounts of the day’s trip: Once she telephoned from New York; on the following night from Dallas; once she went to Memphis and back to Dallas on the same day. She underwrote these trips with tales of passengers who had been particularly good or horrendous.
By the fourth day, I could believe her no longer, and checked her story. Given the number of exiles who flew on Company business to New York, Washington, New Orleans, Mexico City, and points south, not to speak of the alert that was always on in Miami for Castro agents coming into southern Florida, we had a number of Agency contacts at the airport. It took our pool secretary no more than fifteen minutes and two phone calls to bring me the information that Eastern Airlines stewardess M. Murphy had been on four-day leave and would be returning to town this evening, September 14.
Jealousy lives for the facts. Meeting Modene in downtown Miami, I felt purposeful. It was late, and we went at once to my new apartment in Coconut Grove on the second floor of a small made-over Spanish Colonial house, and I made love to her before we had done any talking, a military matter; if our bridges were blown, it was crucial to get new pontoons across. So I knew what it was to be desperate with love. I fucked in hate. There, in my own modern, furnished apartment which I could desperately not afford, I was desperately in love with half of me, and that half could find but half of Modene. Speak of being drawn and quartered by love, I remember looking with hatred at her long fingernails. They had ruined pieces and parts of many evenings for us, those fingernails lacquered, even elegant on the upside, patched and splinted beneath. The fingernails belonged to her vision of an exotic (if still unrealized) dragon lady who shared very little of her existence with that other girl who lost her temper when she could not beat me at tennis, poor Alpha-girl with her handicap. Alphie had to wear gloves to protect her nails, and what with adhesive tape and putty fillets on the fingertips for underpinning, paid for it at a rate of about two lost games a set, and still ripped her nails. She wept over that, more, I suspected, than she would ever cry for me, furious tears at the wasted hours and contradictory purposes of those mandarin nails, but how well she could use them at night by the light of a candle in a restaurant, how perfect was the poise of her cigarette in its holder, yes, her spiritual roots, I decided, were as far from one another as the orchid and the weed.
On this night when she came home, I did not speak of what I knew. If I was not incapable of killing her, all the same, I never could. Was that what it meant to be desperately in love? She made no effort to explain why after four days and nights of the hardest dislocations of her former flight schedule, she had no time off, but, to the contrary, would be out again tomorrow on a Miami-to-Washington-and-back-to-Miami in the same day, only to be booked like that for the next two days as well (an unheard of gymkhana—seven working days in a row!), no, she must have known I was bright enough to calculate that she had been on some species of vacation, yet I learned no more until a week later when a BLUEBEARD–AURAL transcript was delivered to me at Zenith by GHOUL’s resident baboon. Modene had spent the four days in Chicago with Sam Giancana. Polishing the transcript, I could see that Willie’s curiosity was at least equal to mine. Had Modene slept with Giancana?
No, Modene insisted, she had not gone to bed with Sam. She had come to like him. “Frankly, Willie, he is all too human.”
“Do you feel sorry for him?”
“No. He is too strong for that. But there is sorrow in his life.”
“Such as?”
“Stop cross-examining me.”
Their exchanges became repetitive. I compressed their conversation to manageable length and offered Harlot a portrait of Giancana.
WILLIE: Did he take you to his home?
MODENE: Absolutely.
WILLIE: Is it a palatial mansion?
MODENE: No, but it’s elegant on the outside and very well built. Like a fort. Lots of careful stonework. And it’s way out in Oak Park.
WILLIE: North of Chicago?
MODENE: Yes. Oak Park. I impressed Sam when I said to him, “This is the small town where Ernest Hemingway grew up.” “Who is this guy Hemingway,” asked Sam, “one of your boyfriends?” and of course I said, “Wouldn’t you like to know.” And Sam said, “You think I’m an ignoramus, don’t you? Well, we got newspapers out here. I see this man’s name, Hemingway; Hemingway and me, we’re the two most famous people in Oak Park,” and he started to laugh. He always laughs the loudest at his own jokes. I guess he’s been living alone with himself for a long time.
WILLIE: The house. What’s the story on the house?
MODENE: Will you wait? Inside, it’s nothing fabulous. Small rooms, heavy Italian furniture. Down in the basement there’s one room without windows that is his office. It has a long table for meetings, I guess. But he also keeps a breakfront cabinet down there with some amazing glass pieces. He is a collector. You see another side of him altogether when he reaches in and takes out a piece. His finger movements are so delicate. Willie, if I were ever going to have sex with Sam, this is exactly what would initiate such impulses.
WILLIE: So one thing did lead to another?
MODENE: Stop.
WILLIE: Why won’t you tell me?
MODENE: Nothing to tell.
WILLIE: What did you do at night?
MODENE: He loves piano bars. The smokier, the better. He calls for a number and then he sings along with the pianist. Only, Sam keeps changing the words. You know: “Why won’t you take all of me? Me and you and all of me. Just put out the lights and go to sleep.” The poor pianist. Sam has a voice like a broken foghorn. I couldn’t believe it—I was having fun.
WILLIE: Did he get serious?
MODENE: Yes. He told me about his mother’s death. I found that heartbreaking. She saved his life, you know. When he was about five and growing up in the Italian slums of Chicago, she heard a car come whipping around the corner, and there was Sam playing in the gutter. His mother leaped out to get her child back on the sidewalk and so she got hit by the car. She died. I felt so sorry for Sam. Then he told me about his wife. She was very delicate. She was born with a weak heart, and her family, although an immigrant Italian family, must have been a cut or two above his because all her folks looked down on him. And then, to top it off, he had been in jail for car theft. When he came out, he and his wife were so poor that they lived in a cold-water flat and sat around the stove and held their two little girls and toasted orange peels for candy. And one of the little girls had a weak heart too. It was all kind of touching. You see, before she knew Sam, his wife had a fiancé but he died early. So, she was always mourning the dead fiancé. It took a long time for Sam to feel like the true husband.
WILLIE: That’s so clever of him.
MODENE: Why?
WILLIE: He’s letting you know that he can put up with the idea of Jack Kennedy.
MODENE: He keeps calling me Miss Classy.
WILLIE: I wonder if he’s afraid to go near you. Because of Frank Sinatra. What if he doesn’t stack up by comparison?
MODENE: Willie, you are so inaccurate. In the first place, Sam knows I would never tell Frank. And in the second, Sam would be a different kind of lover. Much more emotional.
WILLIE: I am sorry, but Sam sounds lugubrious to me.
MODENE: Well, he’s not. He can make you laugh till you don’t stop. He told me a story about Bobby Kennedy, when Bobby was getting ready a couple of years ago to have Sam called up before the McClellan Committee. Do you remember the McClellan Committee?
WILLIE: Yes. They investigated crime.
MODENE: Well, Sam made a point of getting himself decked out like the cheapest kind of gangster, you know, suit and shirt all black, with a silver tie, and the moment he came into Kennedy’s office, he knelt and fingered the wall-to-wall carpet and said, “This would be great for a crap game.” Just then a lawyer came into the room and Sam grabbed him, patted his back and thighs and yelled out, “Don’t get near Mr. Kennedy. If Bobby gets killed, they’ll all blame me.”
WILLIE: I guess it is kind of funny.
MODENE: Absolutely. I needed a break in the mood.
WILLIE: Pardon me for asking, but what’s wrong with Tom?
MODENE: Nothing. I don’t want to talk about Tom.
WILLIE: Will you tell him you saw Sam?
MODENE: Certainly not.
WILLIE: Are you sure you won’t? You said the more jealous Tom became, the better he was as a lover.
MODENE: This topic is, as of now, exhausted.
On open circuit next day came a message from GLAUCOMA inviting me to use the secure phone.
“Those girls, Harry,” were Harlot’s first words, “do go all over the place, but it proves useful. I’ve had a little research done, and now can assure myself that Mr. Giancana is one hell of a liar. He was never saved by his mother. It was his stepmother who was killed in the car accident, but she was saving Sam’s little stepbrother, Charles. Giancana’s real mother had died years before on a somewhat less heroic note. Infection of the uterus.”
“Yes, he is a liar.” In fact, I could not believe the intimacy of his lies. A man who was ready to break your legs should not have to lie about his mother.
“Moreover,” said Harlot, “Giancana did not go through any shenanigans in Bobby Kennedy’s office. One of my people checked with a former McClellan staff member, and it develops that a gentleman named Joey Gallo was the comedian on that occasion. Sam merely appropriated the story.”
“Yes, a total thief.”
“Now, who is this Tom that little Miss Bluebeard refers to? Have Tom and Harry formed a fratry known as Field?”
“Yessir. It was my way of telling you.”
“You are telling me that you have hooked the mermaid?”
“It happened most recently.”
“Why is there no material resulting from this?”
“Because our lady is not at all forthcoming, sir, and I don’t wish to rouse her suspicions.”
“Well, get started, boy. Giancana may be using her as a courier to Kennedy. Be a good Tom and try to find out if the girl is carrying any messages.”
“I’ll try,” I said.
“Do better than that.”
“I’ll try,” I said. “It’s going to take time and luck.”
“Plus a cold tit,” he said, and hung up.