Even the Wicked

"Hard Copy." Harlan Phillips had died in a hospice in the Mission District,

two years and eight months after having been diagnosed with AIDS, and just short of a year after assigning his Mass Mutual policy to William Havemeyer. John Wilbur Settle, treating himself to a trip abroad, no doubt with the windfall that blew his way when Havemeyer bought his policy, was one of eighty-four people drowned when a Norwegian passenger ferry caught fire, burned, capsized, and sank in the Baltic Sea.

I remembered the incident, though I hadn't paid a great deal of attention to it at the time. I went to the library and determined that the fire had broken out as a result of a failure of the ship's electrical system, that the ship had been carrying a load of passengers slightly in excess of its legal capacity, and that many of them were described as holiday revelers, which is often a nonjudgmental way of saying everybody was drunk. Rescue efforts were delayed as a result of a communications snafu, but were nevertheless reasonably successful, with over nine hundred passengers and crew members surviving. Of an even dozen Americans aboard, three were casualties, and the paper of record dutifully supplied their names.

They were Mr. and Mrs. D. Carpenter, of Lafayette, Louisiana, and Mr. J. Settle, of Eugene, Oregon.

Somehow I couldn't see Bad Billy Havemeyer flying off to Oslo, then sneaking aboard the SS Magnar Syversen and crossing a couple of wires in the engine room. Nor could I picture him at Phillips's bedside in San Francisco, ripping out IVs, say, or pressing a pillow over a ravaged face.

* * *

I left the library and just walked for a while, not really paying much attention to where I was going. It was cold out and the wind had a nasty edge to it, but the air was fresh and clean the way it gets when there's a north wind blowing.

When I got home there was a message on the machine. Marty McGraw had called and left a number. I called him back and he said he just wanted to keep in touch. What was I working on these days?

Just going around in circles, I said, and winding up back at square one.

"Be a good name for a restaurant," he said.

"How's that?"

"Square One. A restaurant, a saloon, place on the order of the old Toots Shor's. Kind of joint where you can have a few pops and get a decent steak without worrying what kind of wine goes with it. Call it Square One because you know you're always going to wind up back at it. You getting anywhere with Will?"

"You must mean Will Number Two."

"I mean the son of a bitch who wrote me a letter threatening three prominent New Yorkers, and nobody seems to give a shit. I don't suppose you've been looking into it by any chance."

"I don't figure it's any business of mine."

"Hey, when did that ever stop you in the past?" I didn't say anything right away, and he said, "That sounded wrong, the way it came out. Don't take it the wrong way, will you, Matt?"

"Don't worry about it."

"You read that crap in the competition this morning?"

"The competition?"

"The New York Fucking Post. That's close to the original name of that rag, as a matter of fact. The New York Evening Post, that's what used to grace that masthead."

"Like the Saturday Evening Post?"

"That was a magazine, for Christ's sake."

"I know that, I just—"

"Slight difference, one's a magazine, the other's a newspaper." I could hear the drink in his voice now. I suppose it had been there all along, but I hadn't been aware of it before. "There's a story about the Post,"

he said. "Years ago, before you were born or your father before you, they were in an ass-kicking and hair-pulling contest with the old New York World. The Post had the rag on one day and ran an editorial calling the World a yellow dog. Now this was considered quite the insult. You know, yellow journalism?

You familiar with the term?"

"Not as well as you are."

"What's that? Oh, a wiseass. You want to hear this or not?"

"I'd love to hear it."

"So everybody was waiting to see what the World was going to come back with. And next day there's an editorial in the World. 'The New York Evening Post calls us a yellow dog. Our reply is the reply of any dog to any post.' You get it, or is the subtlety of a bygone age lost on you?"

"I get it."

"In other words, piss on you."

"When was this?"

"I dunno, eighty years ago? Maybe more. Nowadays a newspaper could come right out and say, 'Piss on you,' and nobody'd turn a hair, the way standards have fucking crumbled. How the hell did I get on this?"

"The Post."

"Right, the New York Fucking Post. They've got an analysis of the latest letter, supposedly proves the guy's a phony, a talker and not a doer.

Some expert, some college professor, needs to read the instructions on the roll of Charmin before he can figure out how to wipe his ass. What do you think of that?"

"What do I think of what?"

"Wouldn't you say it's irresponsible? They're calling the guy a liar to his face."

"Only if he reads the Post."