The Porkchoppers Read online

Penry knew what kind of business he was after from the first. There were many unpleasant tasks that various organizations needed done and Penry let it be known that he was willing to do them. He had once spent an entire February afternoon in Dallas firing the top management of an electronics firm while its president and founder and major stockholder, who was something of a coward, basked on Sapphire Beach in St. Thomas.

  Penry also worked the periphery of politics, for hire to either party, specializing in deep background investigations that would produce information intended to have jolting political repercussions. Thus far his more noteworthy efforts had prevented three prospective cabinet members, two Democrats and a Republican, from being sworn in. Another time he had come up with information, twenty years old but still damaging, that had kept a Supreme Court justice off the bench.

  But of all Penry’s clients his favorite was the immensely fat old man who sat across the table from him now, picking disconsolately at a dish of white chicken meat and cottage cheese. The fat old man was Penry’s favorite client for several reasons, not the least of them being that he was the one who paid him his second largest retainer, but the principal one being that Penry considered the old man to be as smart and as realistic as he himself was. Had Penry but known it, the old man considered him to be a bit simple, but the old man thought of nearly everyone that way.

  The old man had been born on January 1, 1900, and he often proclaimed that he would live to see her out, referring, of course, to the end of the century. He was enormously fat, carrying nearly three hundred pounds, all of it lard, on a five-foot-eleven-inch frame. The old man had been born on a hardscrabble wheat farm just outside of Hutchinson, Kansas, and his earliest memories were of talk about money, and its lack, its use, its purpose, and its nature. His father was not only a farmer, he was also a money nut, at various times a Greenbacker, a Populist, a single taxer, a free-silver partisan, and a devoted follower of “Coin” Harvey, an Arkansas economic prophet of doubtful merit who had died broke. Nevertheless, the father had give his son the name of the prophet and the fat old man had gone through life as Coin Kensington.

  Although his formal education had ended with the eighth grade, Kensington still thought of himself as a student and listed that as his occupation whenever some form required it. His first job had been with a small co operative grain elevator where he had mastered double-entry bookkeeping in less than a week, going on at sixteen to become a teller in the Merchants and Farmers Bank in Hutchinson. The bank had had to wait until he was twenty-one before it could make him cashier.

  By 1923 he was the bank’s president, the youngest in the state, possibly the youngest in the country. After not quite a year of it he decided that he had learned all he could about Kansas banking so he resigned. Two months later he was in London, standing underneath the sign of three golden acorns on a grimy street in The City. He took a deep breath, pushed open a forbidding door, and announced to the first person he saw that, “I’m Coin Kensington from Kansas and I’m here to learn about money.”

  After an hour’s conversation and a close study of five letters of recommendation that Kensington had brought along from some Chicago and New York bankers that he had dealt with, the senior partner in the London merchant bank offered Kensington a job—at fifteen shillings a week.

  “But that’s only three-fifty a week.”

  “It’s something more than that, Mr. Kensington.”

  “What?”

  “It’s your first lesson.”

  Three years later the merchant bank sent Kensington to New York to look after its considerable investments. “The day before I left for New York,” Kensington liked to say when telling the story, “the three senior partners had me in. Well, one of them said, ‘It won’t last, of course,’ and I said, ‘No.’ ‘Another two years,’ another one of them said, ‘three possibly.’ ‘Yes, three,’ the first one said. Then they had one of their nice little silences and after a while one of them said, ‘Do keep a sharp eye on things, Kensington,’ and another one of them said, ‘Mmmmm,’ which really meant, ‘You’d goddam better,’ so all I said was, ‘Of course,’ and because that’s all I said they seemed delighted.

  “Well, I’d learned about money by then. I don’t mean to brag, but I’d learned what it is—and there ain’t maybe two dozen men in the world who know that. So for the next three years I made them money in the New York market, I mean a lot of money. Then in July of twenty-nine I sent ’em a coded cable that had just three words, ‘Get out now.’ Well, they did and that made ’em a whole bunch more money. Then in late August I sent them another coded cable, this time four words: ‘Maximum short position advised.’ Well, they wouldn’t. Now those fellas were about as smart a bunch of moneymen as you’re likely to run across, but when it comes to selling short you got to be just a little bit inhuman like a pirate, if you’re going to make any real money, because you’re betting on catastrophe and when you do that you’re betting against the hopes of millions, which again ain’t natural, and let me tell you it takes brassgutted nerve. Well, these fellas over in London didn’t have that much nerve, although they had a right smart amount, so I sent them a nice little letter of resignation and used every dime I had to sell short on my own. Well, you know what happened. By December of twenty-nine I was a millionaire and not just on paper either and I still wasn’t quite thirty years old.”

  Kensington went on prospering through the next four decades, becoming enormously rich. He contributed sporadically and almost indiscriminately to various Democratic and Republican candidates who caught his fancy, set up a foundation “to ease my conscience,” he told the press, and, in an unofficial capacity, he ran various errands for half a dozen Presidents.

  Now Kensington had taken on yet another Presidential chore, not because he relished it, but to pay off some old political debts and, as he put it, “to sort of help keep a lid on things, at least for a while yet.”

  The fat old man scraped up the last of the cottage cheese and poked it into his mouth. He spotted a few morsels that he had missed and mashed them up through the tines of his fork and licked them off. He put the fork down a little sadly and looked across the table at Walter Penry, whom he considered to be a bit simple.

  “So it doesn’t look too good for Cubbin?”

  “No. Not too good.”

  “Drinking too much?”

  “Not so much that. They’ve got a couple of guys who keep him on pretty short rations. Or try to.”

  “Been too long in his job, huh?”

  “Partly. The big pitch is that he’s lost touch with the rank and file.”

  Kensington snorted. “That all?”

  “There’s more, but they’re saving it, at least that’s what Peter tells me.”

  “He’s that funny little fella of yours, ain’t he? The one with the accent?”

  “Yes.”

  “He any good?”

  “I think so.”

  The old man looked down at his scraped plate. He abruptly shoved his chair back, muttered “to hell with it” as though to himself, and waddled across the living room of the hotel suite to its small kitchen. He opened the refrigerator, took out a container of Sara Lee Brownies, and carried it back to the table where he ripped off the top, carved out a four-inch-square chunk, and crammed it into his mouth, smiling at the comfort it gave him.

  “That’s not on your diet, is it?” Penry said.

  “No, it ain’t,” the old man said in a defensive tone. “You want some?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Kensington looked relieved. “About the only pleasure a mean old man like me has left, eating. Can’t drink because of my heart. Stopped smoking when I was twenty-four because it was a damn-fool habit. As for women, well, I just don’t think about that much anymore. Tell a damn lie, I just don’t do anything about it.”

  Penry watched while the old man ate the rest of the cake and then carefully scraped up the crumbs and icing and ate that, too. The foil container looked as if it had
been washed. He won’t last another year, Penry thought.

  When Kensington was through with the cake, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the window of the hotel suite. “They claim to be pretty worried over there.”

  “I can imagine,” Penry said. If he had gone to the window, he could have looked out over Lafayette Park and beyond it to the White House.

  “It’s not because they love old Don Cubbin either.”

  “No.”

  “They’re worried about that other guy, Hanks.”

  “Samuel Morse Hanks. Sammy Hanks.”

  “Yeah, Sammy Hanks. He’s the dingdong daddy from Dumas or tries to be, don’t he?” Kensington said.

  “It’s the image he’s cultivated over the years.”

  “You still say that?”

  “What?”

  “Image.”

  “Why, yes, I suppose I do.”

  “Didn’t think anybody said that anymore.”

  Penry made a note in what he thought of as his mental tickler file to make sure that he never used “image” again, at least not around Old Man Kensington.

  “Well, what’s wrong with Hanks, don’t they pay him enough?”

  “As secretary-treasurer he makes fifty-five a year, ten less than Cubbin. His expense account is just as good or better.”

  “So it’s not money then?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad,” the old man said and began nodding his big head that was almost completely bald except for a fringe of cropped white hair around his ears and neck. He looks like a new baby, Penry thought for the fourth or fifth time that day. Like a new, smart, fat, sassy, red-faced baby.

  The old man went on nodding for several moments, not conscious that he was doing it, but only of the thoughts that streaked through his mind. He could hold several thoughts in his mind at once and sometimes he wondered whether others could. Just now he was thinking about Sammy Hanks and what kind of a man he was and about whether Walter Penry was capable of successfully carrying out the assignment that he was about to be given, and just how long it would be before he could get rid of Penry so that he could get the remaining container of Sara Lee Golden Cake with the fudge icing out of the refrigerator.

  “How old a man is Hanks, forty-three, forty-four?” Kensington said.

  “Thirty-nine.”

  “Ah.”

  “How ‘ah’?”

  “Well, he’s young enough to get his personal concern for the future of the union so mixed up with his personal ambition that he can’t tell ’em apart. He’s a pisscutter, huh?”

  “He tries to be.”

  “Well, Cubbin does that pretty well with that voice of his when he’s a mind to.”

  “It goes over better when you’re on the attack.”

  “How long’s Hanks been secretary-treasurer?”

  “Six years.”

  “Wasn’t he sort of a protege of Cubbin’s at one time?”

  “Yes.”

  The old man nodded. “At least we got us a familiar pattern. The president’s out acting big shot and shooting his mouth off on ‘Meet the Press’ while the secretary-treasurer’s out meeting with the locals, doing favors, building up his political capital until wham, the president’s out of a job and the secretary-treasurer’s got it. It’s happened before often enough.”

  “I know.”

  “Their contract runs out when, October thirty-first?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the election’s October fifteenth?”

  “Yes.”

  “So whoever’s president is going to be doing the final negotiating when it comes to nutcracking time. What’s Cubbin got his mind set on?”

  “Well, he already got thirty percent over the next three years from fabricating and processing.”

  “That’s fabricating and processing. What about the basics?”

  “He figures he can get twenty-one percent from the basics without a strike. Maybe twenty-four percent with one.”

  “It ain’t worth it then.”

  “No.”

  “And Hanks wants to go for thirty percent?”

  “More.”

  “So he’ll pull ’em out.”

  “It looks that way. He says there’s no reason why they shouldn’t beat or match the auto workers.”

  Kensington sighed. “Well, Hanks has got a point, but those people over in the White House ain’t interested in it. They don’t want any strike and they sure as hell don’t want any thirty-percent wage increase because they think it’ll hurt the economy which, translated, means it’ll hurt their own chances of getting reelected.”

  “So?”

  “So over there in the White House they’ve decided that they’d like to see Don Cubbin reelected president of his union. Can you fix that?”

  “It’ll cost.”

  “Yeah, well, anticipating just that we had a little meeting in Philadelphia last week. Some of the boys were there from Chicago and Gary and Los Angeles and New York and. Denver and all and they agreed to get up a little kitty to help Cubbin out, although it’d be best if he don’t find out too much about it.”

  “He won’t.”

  “So how much you gonna need to get him reelected? Just roughly.”

  “Three quarters of a million.”

  “That all?”

  “His own people will come up with another quarter of a million.”

  “So that’s how much it takes nowadays, huh, about a million?”

  “About that. We’ve heard that Hanks is going to try to get by on five hundred thousand.”

  The old man grew interested. “Where’s he getting his?”

  “From banks, the ones that he’s kept those big, low-interest union deposits in. They’re grateful. So are the outfits that he’s loaned money to from the pension fund. He’s tapping them hard, too, we hear.”

  “What’s he call that committee of his?”

  “Hanks?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Rank and File Committee.”

  “Well, just how much can he count on from the rank and file? In other words, how much will the membership cough up to get themselves a new president?”

  “Not much. Maybe fifty thousand.”

  Kensington shook his head slowly. “Trade-union democracy will never cease to amaze me. Or amuse me, maybe I should say. How much you want for your fee?”

  “A hundred thousand.”

  “Including expenses?”

  “It’s going to be a short campaign and they’ll be low so I’ll donate them to the cause.”

  “And you won’t have any trouble working yourself into the thing?”

  Penry smiled for the first time and Kensington wished that he hadn’t. It was an animal’s smile, the rogue kind who has left the pack and gone off on his own. “I owe Cubbin a few favors. I’ll just let him know that I’d like to pay them back.”

  “What do you think his chances are?”

  “Without our help?”

  “That way first.”

  “Six-to-four against.”

  “And with?”

  “Better than even for reelection, but it’ll be close.”

  Old Man Kensington rose slowly and with effort, wheezing a little. “Well, I’ll take care of the money; you take care of the election.”

  “All right.”

  “About this fellow Hanks.”

  “What about him?”

  “What’s his problem?”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  The old man made an impatient gesture, flicking his left hand down and out. The fellow was simple, after all. “Cubbin’s a drunk. What’s wrong with Hanks?”

  “I see. Well, not much really, although there is one thing.”

  “What?”

  “They say he’s just a bit crazy,” Penry said, smiling again, but the old man didn’t see it because he had already turned away, heading for the refrigerator.

  5

  A little over five blocks away that September aftern
oon in Washington, in another hotel, a cheaper one at the corner of Fourteenth and K, Samuel Morse Hanks was having a fit.

  It was really more of a tantrum than a fit, but he was lying on the floor, face down, pounding his fists into the carpet and screaming something that sounded like “cawg.” He screamed it over and over while the spit trickled down his chin. Four men sat around in chairs and watched him with expressions that registered a little interest, if not much concern.

  The bed and bureau had been removed from the hotel room and now it contained a scarred wooden desk that looked rented and was, a couch, eight or nine folding gray metal chairs with padded seats, two telephones, one of them with an outside line, and a green metal filing cabinet whose drawers were doubly secured by a built-in combination lock and a metal bar that ran through their handles and that was fastened at the top with a padlock that looked tricky.

  The room was one of twelve on the hotel’s third floor that had been rented as its campaign headquarters by the Rank and File Committee whose candidate for union president now lay on the floor, pounding the carpet with his fists, and screeching the word that sounded like “cawg” again and again.

  Finally, one of the four men stubbed out his cigarette, rose, and walked over to where Sammy Hanks lay screaming. He nudged Hanks in the shoulder with the toe of his shoe. “All right, Sammy,” he said, “you’ve had your fun.”

  The screams stopped. “For Christ’s sake, get up and go wash your face,” the man said. “You’ve slobbered all over it.”

  Sammy Hanks pushed himself up to a kneeling position, hiccupped once, and then rose to his feet. Saliva glistened on his jutting chin that at one in the afternoon already looked as though it needed a shave. Hanks glared at the four men, three of them white and one black. “You know what you bastards are?” he said.

  The black man, the one who had shown the least concern while Hanks lay screaming on the floor, smiled lazily and said, “What are we, Sammy?”

  “You’re fuckin pathetic, that’s what,” he said, snarling the words so that their tone nicely matched his scowl. Before any of the men could reply, he turned quickly and darted into the bathroom, making sure to slam the door.

  The four men looked at each other, exchanging glances of exasperated commiseration. The one who had nudged Hanks with a toe sat back down and lit another cigarette.