You May Well Wonder, Marty

The Bartender put his thick hand over the telephone.

"You have a guest at the desk, Mr. Braden," he said. "A Mr. Nichols."

"Have Tony bring him up," Arthur Braden said.

"Bring the gentleman up," the bartender said softly. He let the phone slip out of his hand into its cradle.

Arthur Braden stared into his martini. Floating on its crystal surface, oily, perfect, he counted, not counting, the globes of essence of lemon. He waited.

"So there you are," he heard Marty Nichols say, behind him.

"Here I am," he said. "Sit. Another of these, Peter, if you will," he said to the bartender.

"I might want something else," Nichols said.

"What you want, Marty," Braden said, "doesn't matter."

The bartender flailed the ice, gin and vermouth with his long silver spoon, pounding it. The stuff bubbled and clouded under his beating, frost built on the bar glass. He poured it.

"A twist?" he said.

"Please," Marty Nichols said. He tasted. "Very nice," he said.

"Nonsense," Arthur Braden said. "A martini is a martini. Cold gin." He took a bite of his own. "I am reminded of a story," he said. "It is nine-thirty in the morning, and a man comes running into Saks Fifth Avenue. He tears past the cosmetics, the gloves, the what-the-hell, an elevator is waiting, the starter sees him, holds it, he slides in. It's full, what else, of dames rushing to spend a dollar, they've got to hate him, making them wait; there they are, fat, loaded, eager, hell, desperate, to get rid of the stuff. They're all staring at him. The kid running the elevator slams the door and hits the button and it starts up. The guy is still standing there, facing the wrong way, looking at all these creepy dames, and they're looking at him. He speaks: 'You may well wonder,' he says, 'why I have called you together this morning.'"

"Funny," Marty Nichols said.

"You, too, may well wonder," Braden said. "You well may."

"All right," Nichols said. "I wonder."

"You've been here before?" Braden said.

"No," Nichols said. "This is not, if you'll forgive my saying so, a young man's club."

"True," Braden said. "The tone here is, I suppose, security, and luxury. You will note that we are on the third floor of the building when we are in this room, shielded from the noise, the debris, the hazards of the street; you will have marked the soothing gloom, the old leather, the old oak, old wool under our feet, old plaster on the ceiling. And, of course, the other thing: no one in the room, unless, like you, he's a guest, spent fewer than five years waiting for the right to sign a chit at this bar. All right, sometimes, as perhaps in my own case, it helps if one's father was a member."

"That's what I said," Nichols said. "It's not a young man's club."

"Yes," Braden said. "You said that."

He drank off his martini and slowly slid the glass to the bar's inner edge. "My other guests may be in the market, too, Peter," he said.

"Right, Mr. Braden," the bartender said. He looked toward the waiter, old, bored, at the elbow of the bar, and twitched his eyes, or nodded, or did something elliptic or telepathic, and the old man waddled to a table in the corner and waddled back with empty glasses on his little tray.

"Two bourbons," he said.

Nichols looked over his shoulder.

"You don't buy martinis for everybody?" he said.

"Not for everybody," Braden said.

"Do I get an opportunity to meet your other friends?" Nichols said.

"You may very well, indeed you may, Marty, lover," Braden said, "although to call them my friends is to use the term loosely. Better, perhaps, to call them my associates. Temporary associates, I should say. I don't know what term you young fellows use, but in my generation, years ago, you know, back there when Harding was taking the oath----"

"All right, Art, all right," Nichols said, "you can let me up now. I take it back. So, it's a young man's club, and I'm a creep, and not good enough to get put up for it, much less elected, and I was sticking it into you, and I take it back. You know there isn't all that much spread between us, I'm thirty-four, will be anyway next month, and you, you're forty-eight or so, and----"

"You know goddamn well I'm fifty," Braden said. "You told me so, three months ago, at ten-forty-five in the morning, in your own goddamn office. 'You're fifty, Art,' you told me, 'and, if you'll forgive my being so frank, you're too old, tired and beat-up to play on my team, and you're too old, tired and beat-up to hold down a hot eighteen-inch ass space on the bench, if it comes to that.' That is, I think, a reasonably accurate quotation of what you said, no?"

"All right," Nichols said. "That's what I said. And if you want me to say it again, all right, I'll say it again. That's just the way it is. It's got nothing to do with you and me, I mean, as friends or anything. It's just the way things are. That's business. That's life, if you want it that way."

"As I was saying, before you got off on your philosophy," Braden said, "about my associates in the corner, in my own time, back there decades before you were born, we used to call them torpedoes. I don't know what you young fellows call them, but in my time, as I recall it, the term was torpedo, and that's what I call them. Basically they are assassins, although they will undertake, for lower fees, lesser assignments, beatings, maimings, and so forth. What are they doing here, in this old men's club? Why have I called you all together this noon? You may well wonder. The facts are simple. I wish to talk with you about something. And while I am talking with you, I wish my associates to learn to know you, so to speak. The blond one has already made three or four profiles of you with his little black Minox. Also he has an excellent memory. Both my associates have excellent visual memories. It is a professional trait, one might say."

"I think you're stoned, Art," Nichols said.

"Stoned I am, somewhat, somewhat," Braden said, "but no more than some-what, and by no means to the point where I'm dreaming anything up. You are indeed looking at a pair of veritable torpedoes, and they are looking at you. At nobody else. Just you."

"I don't see what good this whole bit can do you," Nichols said. "So you get me bumped off--I believe that was the term, in your day?--because I fired you? And you tell me about it in advance, so I can be quite sure you go to the chair for it? This is bright? This is planning? I'm beginning to think you should have been dumped five years ago, not ninety days ago."

Braden laughed. "You are confused," he said. "You are under a strain, and your brain-box circuitry is reflecting it. You have jumped to a conclusion, and it is an erroneous one. The function of my associates over there in the corner is not to bump you off, as you say, because you fired me. No. Their function is merely what I said it was: to get to know you. Because after we have had our little chat, you are going to be sore at me. You might even be tempted to have me removed from the scene, although that would be unwise, because of certain documentations that would inevitably survive me. But, you see, Marty, pal, I want you to know that if I should be removed from the scene, you are as good as gone. As a matter of fact, from this moment on, you have a very strong interest in my health, in my well-being. Your position is, unhappily, hazardous. I mean, suppose I am walking along the street and a cornice falls off a building and dents me, fatally. This would be very bad for you, Marty, very bad, even though at the time you were on the ninth tee at Meadow Brook. However, as you said yourself a few minutes ago, there is nothing personal in it, it is just business. This may make it easier for you to bear, and it may not. I don't know."

Nichols took a big sip of his martini. He peered thoughtfully into the glass. "Well," he said, "since it's such a big day for announcing future plans, I'll tell you what my plans are. I'm going to walk out of here, and the first cab I see, I'm going to the Thirtieth Street station house, and I'm going to ask the cops kindly to come over here and pinch you and your out-of-date associates and put you in a bin somewhere." He said off the bar stool. "Thanks for the drinks, Art," he said.

"Marty," Braden said. "Marty, you faked the Collins proxies. Also, there was never an option from the Hitensile outfit in Sweden. Also, the Otardi proxies are as wrong as nine dollars Confederate, and I ought to know, because I fixed that batch myself." He smiled. "Sit down, Marty," he said. "You look pale. Kind of gray, like. Have another drink."

Nichols sat. "You're a goddamned liar, Arthur," he said.

"Don't you wish it, lover?" Braden said. "Don't you just wish it?"

"You're a dedicated, lifelong two-timer, Arthur," Nichols said. "I've watched you lie and heard you, fifty times before this, and you're doing it now. I know you've pulled some deals in your time that should have got you twenty years to life, but you didn't pull this one. All those proxies were checked and you know it. And the Hitensile deal, hell, that one----" His voice shut off abruptly.

Braden laughed. "You know what you remind me of, Marty, baby?" he said. "You reminded me just then of a TV commercial when somebody hits it with a cutoff button from across the room. Cut off dead in the middle, like a slice of baloney. Yes. That's very apt. Like a slice of baloney. Only you cut yourself off. And the reason you cut yourself off is that you just this minute thought who it was set up the Hitensile deal, didn't you?"

Nichols took what was left of his martini, too fast. He got the lemon with it.

"Sure you did," Braden said. "Jerry McAlpine set that one up. And that was when he had his coronary, remember? And three days later I had to go to London, remember? Why did I have to go to London just then? You may well wonder. It was long before you fired me, old buddy, but not before you'd had the idea of firing me. Right? Peter, please, another couple of servings of cold gin. And see what the boys in the back room will have."

"The other gentlemen left a couple minutes ago, Mr. Braden," the bartender said.

Braden looked around. "So they did," he said. "Well, never mind, their work was done."

"You son of a bitch!" Nichols said. "You crawling old creepy son of a bitch! You think you're going to run home with this one? You are like hell. Not this one, by God!"

"Life is studded, as it were, with uncertainties," Braden said. "One never really knows. But I will say this: I have every conviction that tomorrow will turn out to be a Wednesday, and I am equally convinced that I have you nailed to the wall like a picture. Like a picture, Marty, boy. Hung up like a picture."

"All right, creep," Nichols said. "We'll see. We'll see."

"Please check it fully," Braden said. "I will be disappointed if you don't. But may I make a suggestion? Do it quietly, Marty, sweetheart, because at the moment only you and I and dear Jerry McAlpine, up there in The Big Broker's Office In The Sky, know that you're hung on the wall like a picture--a portrait, I think, titled, let us say, 'The Chump.' Just us three old associates, Marty. And should any more old associates find out, you will be, to put the kindest face on it, unemployed. I mean, you will be unemployed, and unemployable, forever. Oh, I'm not saying every door will be closed to you. Some companies are less discriminating than others. I understand that there are filling stations in the Deep South, for example, where a man can walk in off the street and catch a job pumping gas, and cleaning up the johns on the side, without so much as a reference. But anything on a grander scale than that, well, Marty, I would say you wouldn't make it. You would be thought unsuitable. Not because of your age, as I have been unsuitable since you threw me into the middle of Nassau Street on my head, but unsuitable because you would be reputed to be a crook, an embezzler, a looter of orphans' piggy banks, a fast man with a poor box, and in general, a specimen given to crawling into the till. And also because you would have done a little time, like five years. A terrible picture. I am almost not happy when I think of it. I would feel sorry for you, Marty, lover. Be on your guard. Don't let it come to that."

"Don't worry," Nichols said. "I won't."

"Good," Braden said. "You give me heart. An apt expression. Because you, yourself, you are all heart, as we know."

"Could we turn off the crap now, Arthur?" Nichols said.

"Marty, lover!" Braden said. "You are choking up? I wouldn't have believed it. Why, when I went home the other night and told Charlotte that my sixteen fruitful and rewarding years of association with Devlin, Dolan and MacLean had come to an end, I really couldn't restrain my enthusiasm, telling her with what force, and yet what warmth and fervor you had rewarded me for making a rich son of a bitch out of you, when all your life you had been just a medium-well-off son of a bitch. "There is greatness in Marty Nichols,' I told her. And here you are folding up in the clutch. I'm shocked. I think maybe I should have stuck the fork into you five years ago, instead of this noon."

"I'll say one thing for you, Arthur," Nichols said. "You have a great line of crap."

"For an old man, you mean, Marty," Braden said. "For an old, out-of-date crock, I have a great line of crap."

"That's right."

"I'm glad you agree with me, finally," Braden said. "Have another cold gin, and brace yourself, because I am about to get down to the short strokes."

"Gee, how exciting," Nichols said.

"Yes, we come now to what we used to call, in the good dead old days, the payola, an archaic expression deriving, as you might suspect, from the word 'pay' or 'payment.' It involves, as a rule, money."

"I thought it might. The universal solvent," Nichols said.

"No. Cold gin is the universal solvent, Marty," Braden said. "But in some cases, money does solve certain problems, and it can, I think, solve yours. Of course, you may well wonder, at this point, how much solvent I have in mind. You do wonder, I imagine?"

"I wonder, Arthur," Nichols said.

"Well, it's like this," Braden said.

"The other day, when I left, for the last sad time, the memory-freighted premises of old DD and M, I took with me, as you know, and with your blessing, one thousand shares of common and five hundred of preferred. Right? And credit options and bonuses and retirements and crud like that in the amount, all together, of $265,618. 14, right? Right. And figuring in the stock, it comes to $506,799. 87. Right. You may well wonder at my facility for recollecting figures. It is something on which I have always prided myself. You should cultivate it, if you will forgive advice from an old has-been to a youth still striving for his first fifty merit badges. Now, $506,799. 87 is a nice sum, but it falls short of complete satisfaction to me, in two particulars. One. It is the least amount of money you could possibly have got away with giving me. The least. This bothers me. Second, it fails, by exactly $493,200. 13, of amounting to a million dollars. Marty, I know you will find this hard to believe, but all my life I have been convinced--absolutely convinced--that I would retire with a million dollars. And I'm short. By this much." He tore a bar chit off the pad in front of him, turned it over and wrote carefully on it, $493,200.13. "Here, Marty, old buddy," he said. "I know you don't have my head for figures, so take this to remind you. That is, as we used to say, the old payola. The price."

Nichols took the slip involuntarily, held it for a couple of seconds, and dropped it to the bar.

"Marty, your hand was shaking!" Braden said. "What you need, boy, is more cold gin. Dutch courage, we used to call it, back there in McKinley's time. That's what----"

"Goddamn you!" Nichols said. "Will you get off my back on that old man bit! Will you, for Christ's sake?"

"Lower the voice, Marty," Braden said. "In these precincts, the hushed tone, the discreet mumble, prevail. Control yourself. And pick up the nice piece of paper and stuff it nicely into your nice little wallet, so that you won't lose it. Because you lose sight of that figure, Marty, baby, you lose sight of something very important in your life."

Nichols picked it up. His hand shook and he let it shake. He stared at the absurd piece of paper, the printing on the other side of it striking through, and the eight figures in Braden's scrawl.

"You look at it like it was your death warrant," Braden said. "Take the long view."

"It could be," Nichols said.

"Nonsense," Braden said. "It's just a piece of commercial paper like any other. The world of business and finance floats, as you well know, on a sea of commercial paper: stock certificates, options, invoices, bills of lading, payolas, receipts, bribes, all that kind of thing. That one in your hand isn't even a big piece of commercial paper. You have seen far bigger ones, haven't you, Marty, baby, far bigger ones, and lately, too, right?"

"Yes, Arthur. Bigger."

"Of course you have. And Marty, I want to say right now, I'm glad, it makes me feel warm all over, that you haven't said to me, 'Arthur, I can't do this.' Because if you said that, if you tried to hand me a boy-scout con like that, Marty, old associate, I would ask Peter here for a bottle of cold gin and I would brain you with it. Because if there's one thing you can do, you can declare me in on a few more shares of stock and some odds and ends that will amount to $493,200. 13. That you can do. In recognition of my invaluable services, somehow previously overlooked, to the house of Devlin, Dolan and MacLean, or, as I believe I heard the other day it would shortly be called, the house of Nichols, Dolan and MacLean, Horace Devlin being scheduled for a plank-walking in the immediate future."

"I'll shove off now, Arthur," Nichols said.

"It was a pleasure seeing you again, Marty, lover," Braden said. "Don't forget the little slip of paper."

"I won't need it," Nichols said. "I can add and subtract, if I have to."

"That's good, because you'll have to, all right," Braden said. "'Bye, now. And Marty--don't be a long time about it, because there's that matter of my health, you know. I don't want that hanging over your head. The way I see it, you'll have those proxies checked by four this afternoon, and the Swedes by noon tomorrow, and then you rear back and call a quick picnic for your stooges on the board, that's Thursday noon, and you sign the checks and stuff about three hours later and I've got it Friday. Right? And by Friday noon I'll have spoken to my associates, paid them the rest of their modest retainer, and released them for other opportunities."

Nichols walked out of the bar.

"I'll have one more, Peter," Braden said. "They seem to be doing me some good."

"You haven't been feeling too well lately, I gather, Mr. Braden?" the bartender said.

"Not too well," Braden said. "But it was a temporary thing. I feel OK now. I feel a lot better."

"Glad to hear it," the bartender said. He poured the drink.

"Let me have the phone, please, Peter," Braden said. He gave the switchboard a number. He braced the phone loosely on his shoulder and opened his cigarette case. A match flared in the bartender's hand. He nodded his thanks. "Mr. Horace Devlin, please," he said. "He's in the Pine Room." He smiled. What a pleasure, he thought, to be the bearer of glad tidings. "Dev," he said. "He bought it, of course. He's running downtown like a thief this minute, to check it out. That's right. Me, too, Dev. I tell you, I'm falling off the chair. I'm on the floor, laughing. I gave him to Friday morning to deliver, and don't worry, he will. Marty knows the real iron when he feels it in his belly. He knows when you're kidding, and when you're not. Yes. Beautiful. Bulletproof. A real work of art. We can congratulate each other. Thank you. And I you, Dev. All right, now take this down: $493,200.13. That's right. And half of that is--that's right. You're quick, Dev, for an old man. And I want you to know that in gratitude for your invaluable role in this little deal, I am going to take the six cents, and you are going to have the seven cents. No, I insist, Dev. I absolutely insist. I am a generous man. You know that. Sure. You, too. 'Bye."

He motioned away the phone. He sighed. There is no satisfaction in life, he told himself, like the skilled exercise of one's God-given talents. Accomplishment, work, after all, only that way lies contentment.

He reached for the chit and automatically totaled it. "My friends in the corner had only two bourbons, Peter?" he said.

"That's right, Mr. Braden. Two apiece. The gentlemen haven't been in the club before, have they? I thought I recognized the dark-haired gentleman."

"You might have," Braden said, "your memory for faces being what it is. They're both on TV now and then."

"I see," the bartender said.

"They get around," Braden said. "No big parts, but they make a living. You know, cowboys, cops, hoods, that kind of thing."

He stood. He looked at himself in the bar mirror. He liked what he saw. He left the room, steady on the soft carpet, a man deep in thought. He was thinking that he would have cold salmon for lunch.