The Seersucker Whipsaw (2 page)

“He does have a plentiful reserve.”

“Mr. Upshaw, he's got the balls of a brass ape. I've seen high rollers in my time, but for plain green gall there's none that'll match Padraic Duffy, landed gentry.”

“He speaks well of you,” I said in game defense of my employer.

Shartelle dragged a chair close to mine, dropped into it, then leaned over and tapped me on the knee. “Why, he should, Mr. Upshaw. By God, he should! You don't know about old Pig Duffy and me and it's too long a story to tell right now, but I will say that he
should
speak well of me.”

“He said you'd worked together once or twice.”

“Did he tell you about the last time?”

“No.”

“I don't imagine he tells many people about that, but after it was over, I told him just like I'm talking to you that if he ever so much as mentioned my name in the same breath with his, I was going to clean his plow good.” He tapped me on the knee again. “Now I told him that as one Southern gentlemen to another.”

“Duffy's from Chicago,” I said.

“Not when he's in New Orleans, he's not. In New Orleans he tells folks he's from Breaux Bridge. Where're you from, Mr. Upshaw?”

“North Dakota, Fargo.”

“Why, if old Pig got up to Fargo, he'd tell folks up there he was from Mandan. Or Valley City.”

“You know North Dakota?”

“Boy,” he said, “there's damned few places in this country I don't know. And if I call you ‘boy', it's just my purposeful' plain way of speaking that seems to put folks at their ease and makes them think I'm not too bright which I probably ain't.”

“Just call me Pete.”

“I was fixing to.”

“I think I'll have another drink.”

“You do that. Now what's this about Africa?”

I tried the Virginia Gentleman again. “Duffy has been asked to handle the strategy, campaign management, and public relations for Chief Sunday Akomolo who wants to be premier of Albertia when it gets independence from the Crown come next Labor Day.” I needed a breath after that.

“Who's Chief Akomolo?”

“He's the head of the second largest political party in the country—the National Progressives.”

“How many in the race?”

“There're fourteen parties—but only three of them count.”

“How did Duffy get asked in?”

“Cocoa. He landed the Cocoa Marketing Board account and did his usual promotion job.”

Shartelle nodded. “I heard about it. The cocoa futures bounced around some as a result.”

“It was a volatile commodity for a while,” I said a bit pontifically. “Well, Chief Akomolo is on the Cocoa Board, met Duffy, and got the idea.”

Shartelle rose and walked over to the window again. “O.K., let's bring it all out nice and plain. Just what kind of stakes you playing for?”

“No limit. The country's got twenty million people, add or subtract a million or so. It's got one of the best harbors on the West Coast. It's got oil that hasn't been touched, mineral deposits, a solid agricultural economy, and a built-in civil service system that'll run for a hundred years and a day before it breaks down or someone forgets to minute a file. The British have seen to that.”

“Who'll count the votes?”

“The Crown.”

“So the boy who gets in this time will be counting the votes the next time.”

“Probably.”

“Then there's really going to be only one election, the first one, because the next time around the ins will have it wired.”

“You seem familiar with African politics.”

“No, I'm just familiar with all politics. It's been my life-study. And in some circles I'm considered a leading authority, and I say that with all modesty.”

“You've got the track record, I hear.”

“What's Duffy's end?”

“Not as much as you'd think. The entire package is five-hundred thousand pounds. Your cut would be thirty thousand, as I said.”

“And if the Chief wins?”

I looked up at the ceiling. “I don't know really. Let's just say that there's probably a tacit understanding that DDT would get the whole thing—advertising, promotion, consultation, marketing, feasibility studies—everything.”

“How much is all that, you reckon?”

I shrugged. “I'd guess twenty million annual billing.”

“Dollars?”

“Pounds.”

Shartelle chuckled and shook his head slowly from side to side. “Now ain't that something? Old Pig's got himself a fifty-six-million-dollar-a-year nigger candidate and he's calling for help. From me. Now that's really something.”

“He said you'd say that.”

“What?”

“Nigger candidate.”

“It bother you?”

“Nothing much bothers me, Mr. Shartelle.”

“Let me tell you one thing, boy.”

“What's that?”

“It wouldn't bother Pig.”

There was a silence that grew. I lighted a cigarette, an honest Lucky Strike, and smoked it without pleasure as Shartelle looked at me with a slight smile. It was the same smile he would have given a fifteen-year-old. That was all right; I felt like thirteen.

“Look, we can sit here all night and you can make snotty remarks about Duffy, but he's paying my salary, so don't get upset if I don't chime in.”

Shartelle grinned. “Now, Pete, you're just pissed off because of the nigger talk, aren't you?”

“No,” I said. “I'm not pissed off.”

“Now, boy, I could pull out my cards in the N-Double A-C-P and CORE and show them to you. Or I could put in your hands some kindly letters I got from some of my colored friends who've been right active in all this Civil Rights hoop-to-do. Or as a Southern gentleman I could tell you that I
know
colored folks because I was brought up with them, which I was, or that I had a fine old colored mammy who I loved better than anyone in this world, which I did. I could parade, right before your eyes, evidence—real evidence—that I am probably the world's biggest nigger lover, and to top it off I could describe in detail to you a high yellow I once courted in Chicago and would have married except she ran off with some smooth-talking firetruck salesman. He was of the Jewish persuasion, I believe. Now when I say nigger it's because I plain can't stand to hear some flannelmouth like me from Opelousas or Natchez trying to say Nee-gro and the word just sticking in his throat like a catfish bone. When I say nigger, it don't mean a goddamned thing because I go by the Shartelle theory of race relations, and the Shartelle theory was pounded and shaped out of a hell of a lot of experience with black and white alike and, boy, I'm gonna give you the benefit of long hours of serious thought and hard study, and I'm surely not one for much introspection. I am possessed, you may have noticed, of an outward-going personality.”

“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.