The Seersucker Whipsaw Read online

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “Well, now. The Shartelle theory of harmonious race relations is simple and straightforward. My theory is that we either ought to give the niggers their rights—not just lip service, but every blasted right there is from voting to fornicating, that we ought to make them have all these rights and enforce their right to them by law, and I mean tough, FBI-attracting law, until every man jack of them is just as equal as you middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. I said either and I mean it. Either we give them the right to marry your daughter, if you got one, and fix it so that they’ll not only have the same social and educational rights that you have, but the same economic rights—the same ways and means that you’ve got to the pursuit of happiness out there in one of those fine suburban developments instead of in a slum. And then they’ll be just like you white folks with all your sound moral values, your Christian virtue, and your treasured togetherness. ’Course, they might lose something along the way, something like a culture, but that ain’t nothing. Now I say either we do that for them—make ’em just like everybody else—or, by God, we ought to drive ’em down in the ground like tent pegs!” Shartelle slammed his fist down on a table to show me how tent pegs are driven.”

  “What do you mean ‘your’ social rights, Shartelle? You’re in just as deep.”

  “Why no I ain’t, boy. My great-grandmother was a pretty little octoroon thing from New Orleans. At least that’s what my daddy told me. And that makes me about one-sixty-fourth colored, which is more than enough in most Southern states. Now who has the better right to say nigger than us niggers?”

  “You’re putting me on, Shartelle.”

  “Now I may be, boy, but you’ll never know for sure, will you?” He paused and grinned wickedly. “And you don’t mean to tell me it would make any difference?”

  Chapter

  2

  We had breakfast the next morning. Shartelle had said he wished to study Duffy’s proposition during the night. “I want to give it my most careful consideration, just like a Congressman writing to a constituent who’s got a plan to build a bridge across the Grand Canyon.”

  At breakfast he was wearing a dark plaid suit pressed to perfection, a blue oxford shirt with a button-down collar, and a striped blue and black tie that he must have borrowed from another English regiment. We ordered sausage, eggs, toast, coffee, and milk for Shartelle. He had his eggs up; I asked for mine over.

  “I made a few calls last night, Pete,” Shartelle said as he buttered a piece of toast.

  “To whom?”

  “Couple of people in New York. Pig was doing some bragging there. That’s to be expected. But there’s something else you might be interested in—you’re going to have some opposition.”

  “What kind?”

  “Another agency.”

  I made the kind of face that Eisenhower did when they told him MacArthur was fired. “Who?”

  “Renesslaer.”

  “My. Or maybe I should say my, my.”

  “You echo my reaction,” Shartelle said. “The name Renesslaer does hit a responsive chord. Like a kid drawing his fingernail across a blackboard.”

  I thought a moment. “With offices in London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Frankfurt, Zurich, Rome, a dozen cities in the states, Hongkong, Bombay, Tokyo and Manila. What did I miss?”

  “Toronto, Sydney, and Johannesburg.”

  There are all kinds of advertising and public relations agencies. Some are desperate, one-man operations that exist from the commissions paid by equally desperate radio stations and trade publications. There are the swift-moving, hot-eyed agencies that skyrocket to success and then mellow into the pattern of the business world, much like a plumbing fixture manufacturer. And then there are the agencies like Duffy, Downer, and Theims, Ltd., multi-million dollar concerns running on charm, genius, exuberance, and the business morality of a bankrupt carnival. Finally, there are a dozen or so agencies whose size, financial power, and ruthlessness are equalled only by their stunning grasp of the mediocre. It is to these agencies, and the pilot fish which swarm about them, that the nation owes thanks for the present level of its television, radio, and the large chunk of American sub-culture that has been so profitably exported abroad.

  Of these dozen or so agencies, Renesslaer was the third or fourth largest, and while the majority of them were snaking their fortunes by following Menckenian law and betting their all on the bad taste of the American public, Renesslaer had developed a world conscience.

  “They’ve set up, in that agency, a world public affairs section,” Shartelle said gloomily. “And it combines all the worst features of Moral Rearmament, the Peace Corps, and International Rotary. They have a speakers’ bureau that will fly a speaker any place in the world on twelve hours notice for the guarantee of an audience of five hundred people. And he’ll make the speech in his audience’s language. They’ve got an Oceania desk, a Southwest Africa desk, an Italian desk, and an Icelandic desk. For all I know they’ve got an Antarctic desk.”

  “I’ve heard about it,” I said. “They send copies of the speeches around. They’re translated and arrive all over the world the same day that the speech is given. You’d be surprised how many of them get printed.”

  Shartelle poured us some more coffee from the pewter pot. He drank his black. I used sugar.

  “I remember they handled that special election in California last year,” he said.

  “Which side?”

  “They had the one who used to play the bad guy in the movies. The one who used to play the good guy lost by half-a-million votes.”

  “You in on that one?” I asked.

  “I could have been, but I sniffed around out there and decided it was too dicey. I can’t figure that nut vote. But apparently Renesslaer got enough of them switched over at the last second.”

  I drew some patterns on the tablecloth with my spoon. Shartelle was silent and remote.

  “Who’s Renesslaer’s client?” I asked.

  Shartelle fished in his coat pocket and produced a scrap of paper. “I wrote his name down. I wanted to ask you about him. Renesslaer’s client is Alhaji Sir Alakada Mejara Fulawa. He’s a northern Albertian, I understand. What’s the Alhaji mean?”

  “It means he’s been to Mecca.”

  “You mean to say Renesslaer’s got themselves a non-Christian for a candidate? What else you know about him?”

  “He was educated in England, speaks with a perfect Oxford accent, if there is such a thing. He’s rich—I mean the private-Comet, fleet-of-Rolls-type rich. He’s the natural ruler of about seven million Albertians and he lives in a palace just south of the Sahara that’s something out of Arabian Nights. The British love him because he’s kept the troublemakers quiet.”

  “And Pig Duffy wants me to go to Albertia and run old Chief what’s his name … Akomolo—Sunday Akomolo at that—against this A-rab Alhaji Sir Alakada Mejara Fulawa. Oh, ain’t he got a name that just rolls pretty off the tongue!”

  “From what I’ve heard he’s had a few cut out.”

  Shartelle shook his head slowly from side to side, a broad crooked grin on his face, sheer delight in his eyes. “I tell you, Petey, it’s Richard Halliburton and Rudolph Valentino and Tarzan all rolled into one big package and snuffed up tight with a pretty blue ribbon. Man, it’s foreign intrigue and Madison Avenue and Trader Horn and Africa! And Pig Duffy’s caught smack in the middle of it, wallowing around and squealing for help, and here comes old Clint Shartelle, all decked out in his pith helmet and bush jacket just a-rushing to the rescue. My, it’s fine!”

  “Call me Peter,” I said. “Call me Pete, call me Mr. Upsham, or hey you, but for God’s sake don’t call me Petey.”

  “Why, boy, you’re getting touchous again about my language.”

  “Oh, hell, call me anything.”

  “Now I take it that you are going to be working this cam. paign for Chief Akomolo?”

  I nodded. “I drew the short
straw.”

  “Just what will your duties be?”

  “I’ll be the writer. If there’s anybody to read it.”

  “Well, now, that’s fine. What kind of writer are you, Pete?”

  “A fast one. Not good, just fast. When I’m not writing sharpen the pencils and mix the drinks.”

  “And just what does Pig want me to do?”

  I looked at him and grinned. It was the first time I had smiled all morning. “Mr. Duffy said that he would like you—and I quote—‘to inject a little American razzmatazz into the campaign.’”

  Shartelle leaned back in his chair and smiled up at the ceiling. “Did he now? What do you think I’ll be doing?”

  “You have the reputation as the best rough-and-tumble campaign manager in the United States. You have six metropolitan mayors, five governors, three U. S. Senators, and nine Congressmen that you can honestly claim credit for. You’ve defeated the sales tax in four states, and got it passed in one. You got an oil severance tax passed in two states and got the resulting revenue earmarked for schools in one of them. In other words, you’re the best that’s available and Padraic Duffy told me to tell you he said that. You’re to do whatever has to be done to get Chief Akomolo elected.”

  “I tell you, Pete, I’m just about at the end of what might be called a sentimental journey.”

  “How’s that?”

  Shartelle reached for the check, signed it, and rose. “Let’s go take a little walk.” We left the hotel and headed up Broadway towards Colfax. Shartelle puffed away on one of his Picayunes.

  “I happened to drop by that baseball game last night just after I’d bought a house,” he said. “I didn’t do too bad for an old fellow.”

  “You’re forty-three. When Kennedy was forty-three he was playing touch football with a bad back.”

  “I admit I’m a bit spry, but I owe it all to the wisdom of youth and my precocious reading habits.”

  “You mentioned something about a sentimental journey back there,” I said. “About a block back.”

  “The sentimental journey is associated with my youth. I used to live in this town, you know.”

  We turned up Colfax towards the golddomed capitol where there is a marker that reads that at this exact spot the city of Denver is 5,280 feet above sea level. A mile high and a mile ahead.

  “I lived here in a house with my daddy and a lady friend from 1938 to 1939. Not too far from that ball park which is—you might have noticed—in a somewhat blighted area. It was a plumb miserable neighborhood even then. I was sixteen-seventeen years old. My daddy and I had come out here from Oklahoma City in the fall driving a big, black 1939 LaSalle convertible sedan. We checked in at the Brown Palace and my daddy got himself a lease on a section of land near Walsenburg, found him a rig and crew, and drilled three of the deepest dry holes you ever saw.”

  Shartelle touched my arm and steered us into a drugstore. We sat in a booth, and ordered some more coffee.

  “Well, sir, my daddy went busted again. He had wildcatted in Oklahoma City and brought in ten producers in the eastside field there and he had a potful of money, even if he did have to spend a spell in jail for running hot oil. He swore up and down that there was oil in Colorado. And, of course, he was right. He just drilled in the wrong place.”

  The waitress brought us coffee. Shartelle stirred his. “We moved out of the Brown Palace and rented that house I bought yesterday. Me and my daddy and his lady friend. Her name was Golda Mae, a nice looking little thing. It was surely hard times, but I just went on with my lessons and let my daddy worry about the finances.”

  “What lessons?” I asked.

  “My Charles Atlas lessons, boy. I went through the whole course of Dynamic Tension. Clipped an ad out of The Spider and sent off for it. That’s when my Daddy was in the money in Oklahoma City. Hell, it wasn’t anything but isometrics, the same thing that everybody is doing now. But I followed the instructions like they were the gospel—and that’s why I’m so spry today.”

  “So what are you going to do with the house you bought?”

  Shartelle put a hand out in front of him and made an abrupt shoving motion. “Now don’t push me. When I’m telling, I like to tell my way. Not too long after the money ran out, Golda Mae moved on and it was just my daddy and me. I was sorry to see her go, because she was a mighty pleasant person. So one day my daddy calls me in and he says, ‘Son, I’m not making enough to support us both so I guess you’re going to have to be out on your own for a while. But I tell you what, you can have the LaSalle.’

  “That offer of his was generous, even if it was worthless. You see it was winter and we didn’t have enough money for alcohol so the block froze on the LaSalle and it busted wide open. But it was the only thing he had to offer and he made the offer and we didn’t talk about the fact that the LaSalle wasn’t worth a dime. I just thanked him and declined politely, the way he’d taught me.” Shartelle paused and stirred his coffee some more. “So yesterday I bought the house in Denver, and I bought three others in New Orleans, Birmingham and Oklahoma City. They are the four my daddy and I lived in longest. I own them now and whenever I want to I can walk in and look around at the rooms and remember, or not remember.”

  “You’re going to live in them?” I asked.

  “No, I’m going to be landlord. I’m going to rent them for one dollar a year to poor colored folks. The only condition is that I can come in and look around when I want to. That’s not too much to ask, is it?”

  “Not for a dollar a year.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  We got up. I paid the cashier and we walked back down Colfax to Broadway. It was a bright cool July morning in Denver and I looked around trying to project how it was almost twenty-seven years before when a seventeen-year-old was admonished to drive off in his legacy except that the legacy had a broken block.

  “What happened to your father?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We lost touch after a while. I haven’t heard from him in twenty-five years.”

  “Ever try to locate him?”

  Shartelle looked at me and smiled. “I can’t say that I did. Do you think I should’ve?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  We walked on in silence. Then Shartelle asked, “How soon does Pig want me in London?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  He nodded. “Then we’d better leave today.”

  Chapter

  3

  At 10 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time the next day, or 4 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, or 2 a.m., Mountain Standard Time, I picked up Shartelle at the Dorchester in London. We had flown all night after making a close connection in New York. Shartelle was wearing a sleepy look, a light-weight gray suit, a white shirt, and a black knit tie. His white hair was brushed and his gray eyes flickered just slightly as he took in my bowler and carefully furled umbrella.

  “I let Duffy wear the Stetson,” I told him. “I try to blend with the background.”

  We talked a little at breakfast and then walked the several blocks to the office. Jimmy, the porter, wearing all of his World War II campaign ribbons and then some, welcomed me back. I introduced Shartelle. “Always glad to have an American gentleman with us, sir,” Jimmy said.

  “Has Mr. Duffy arrived yet?” I asked.

  “Just come in, sir. Been here not more than a quarter-hour.”

  Shartelle followed me up the stairs to my office. I introduced him to my secretary who said she was glad to see me back. There were two notes on my desk to return Mr. Duffy’s call. Shartelle glanced around the room. “Either this place is on the verge of bankruptcy or it’s making too much money,” he said.

  “Wait’ll you see Duffy’s layout.”

  “The only discordant note you got in here, boy, is that machine,” Shartelle said, pointing to my typewriter. It was an L.C. Smith, about 35 years old.

  “That’s the touch of class, Duffy figures. It cost the firm ten pounds just to have the damned thin
g renovated. When he shows clients through the office, he tells them that I wrote my first byline story on it and that I can’t write a word on anything else.”

  “You ever use it?”

  I sat down behind my U-shaped desk and swung out a Smith-Corona electric portable. “I use this. It’s faster. As I said, I’m a fast writer.”

  Shartelle lowered himself into one of the three winged- back black leather chairs that clustered around my desk. Each had beside it a slate-topped cube of solid oiled teak and on those were large, brightly-colored ceramic ashtrays.

  “Like that good old man said, you got a carpet on the floor and pictures on the wall. All you need is a little music in the air.”

  I pushed a button on the desk. Muzak gave forth softly with something from Camelot. I pushed the button again and it stopped.