Here Nick could be himself. Here he was among his own.
The Mod Squad met for lunch at Bert's every Wednesday, or Friday, or Tuesday, or whenever. In their line of work, things — disasters, generally — tended to come up at the last minute, so planning ahead presented a problem. But if they went much longer than a week without a lunch or dinner together, they would get nervous. They needed each other the way people in support groups do: between them there were no illusions. They could count on each other.
The name Mod Squad was not a reference to the 1960s TV show about a trio of hip, racially and sexually integrated undercover cops, but an acronym for "Merchants of Death." Since they consisted of the chief spokespeople for the tobacco, alcohol, and firearms industries, it seemed to fit. Nick said that they might as well call themselves that since it was surely the name the press would give them if they ever got wind of their little circle.
They were: Nick, Bobby Jay, and Polly. Besides having in common the fact that they all worked for despised organizations, they were also at that age in life — late thirties, early forties — where the thrill of having a high-profile job has worn off and the challenge of keeping it has set in.
Bobby Jay Bliss worked for SAFETY, the Society for the Advancement of Firearms and Effective Training of Youth, formerly NRBAC, the National Right to Bear Arms Committee.
Bobby Jay was a soft-speaking, curly-headed 220-pounder from
Loober, Mississippi, population 235, where his father had been sheriff, mayor, and the principal collector of tax revenue by virtue of arresting every third driver who went through Loober, regardless of how fast he was going. He kept a variety of speed-limit signs, which could be changed on the spot as required. Bobby Jay, whom he had first deputized at age eight, instilling in his son a lifelong regard for law enforcement (and handguns), would hide in the bushes and change the signs depending on how fast the person had been going while his father pulled him over and berated him for driving so recklessly through downtown, despite the fact that there really was no downtown, per se, in Loober, Mississippi.
Following the Kent State shootings, Bobby Jay, then seventeen, hitchhiked all the way into Meridian in order to sign up for the National Guard, in order that he too could shoot college students; but the National Guard recruiter was out to lunch and the Army recruiter next door, recognizing a good thing when he saw one, offered to pay for his college education. So Bobby Jay ended up shooting at Vietnamese instead, which was almost as good as college students except that they shot back. Still, he enjoyed his two tours in Southeast Asia and would have signed up for a third, only the tail-rotor of a helicopter blade got the better of his left arm up to the elbow during a hasty evacuation of a red-hot LZ. He was one of the few Vietnam-era soldiers to receive a welcoming parade on his return home, though the parade, attended by all the residents of Loober, could not truthfully be called a huge one. Still, parades being rare in those troubled times, it made the papers and caught the attention of Stockton Drum, the legendary head of SAFETY. Drum had taken a run-down gun-owners' organization and turned it into the equivalent of the world's largest standing army, thirty million strong and nothing if not vocal, as any senator and congressman could tell you. With his colorful Southerner's way and steely left hook, Bobby Jay was a natural spokesman for the cause of gun ownership in America, and he prospered, rising to become SAFETY'S chief spokesman. Along the way he repented of his sinful ways and became a born-again Christian, and not at an easy time, either, what with all the television evangelists going to jail for unevangelical behavior. He carpooled in from suburban Virginia with a group of fellow SAFETY born-agains, and on his way home to his wife and four children, they would stop at a firing range and discharge the tensions accumulated during the day by blasting away at paper-target silhouettes of vaguely ethnic attackers.
The Moderation Council, formerly the National Association for Alcoholic Beverages, represented the nation's distilled spirits, wine, and beer industries, and it had made a smart choice when it promoted Polly Bailey as its chief spokesperson. Faced with a rising tide of neo-puritanism, neo-prohibitionism, and disastrous volumetric decline, they resolved that a new approach was needed. So as beer commercials switched from bikini blondes and bibulous dogs to oil-coated baby seals being heroically rescued, as wine promotions began to emphasize its cholesterol-reducing qualities, and as liquor ads turned from ice-cold, dry martinis to earnest pleas for responsible driving, their trade association turned not to the traditional tough-talking, middle-aged white guy in a business suit, but to a talking head that could turn heads. Pretty, dark, a petite size-six, with lively, challenging blue eyes and (naturally) long eyelashes, Polly would not have looked out of place in a soap commercial; so when you saw her on the TV screen challenging the latest government report on alcohol-related car crashes or fetal alcohol syndrome, instead of talking about how she only used Ivory soap, the effect was downright arresting. It was her genius, Nick had noted, to wear her hair long, well down over her shoulders, suggesting youth and vitality, instead of the usual dutifully professional style that women feel they must adopt in order to show that they are willing to suppress natural beauty for the sake of gender assimilation, if that's what it takes to make partner, senior VP, or cabinet secretary.
Polly smoked — chain-smoked, in fact — which gave her voice a nice husky rasp, so that her flawless equivocations on the subject of blood alcohol content, phenolics, and excise taxes sounded downright sexy, as if she were sharing them with you in bed, with the sheets rumpled, jazz on the stereo, the candle flickering, smoke curling toward the ceiling. She was a stylish dresser too — unusual in Washington, where stylishness in women is suspect — favoring Donna Karan black and white suits, especially the ones with the oversized collars that manage to impart a touch of the schoolgirl while also announcing that it would be very foolish to take this woman lightly. All in all, an effective voice in Washington for ethanol.
The liquor industry had been using women to sell its stuff since time began, rubbing them up against phallic bottles, displaying their gams while they cooed about how the new boyfriend drank their brand of scotch; why, Nick wondered, had it only recently occurred to them to use a good-looking lady while pitching public policy? Weren't congressmen and senators who decided on health warning labels and excise taxes as susceptible as anyone else to sex? Indeed, Nick himself was now in the midst of justifying his own traditional white-male self to his own boss, who seemed increasingly eager to replace him with the telegenic Jeannette.
Polly had come from southern California and gone to Georgetown University with thoughts of entering the foreign service, flunked the foreign service exam, gone to work on Capitol Hill, where she spent a good deal of time running from congressmen who had more than cloture on their minds.
She ended up as assistant staff director for the House Agricultural Committee, her member being the ranking majority member. He was from northern California, whose vineyards at the time were being virtually wiped out by the phylloxera parasite; it was Polly who brilliantly maneuvered an alliance of convenience between her member and the member from the citrus region, screwing the members from the avocado and artichoke regions out of their subsidies in the process, but all's fair in love and appropriations. Her member rewarded her hard work and diligence by passing her over and appointing someone else staff director, so when the genuinely grateful head of Wines at the Moderation Council called to congratulate her on her brilliant victory and mention in passing how he wished he had someone like her on his staff, she leapt.
While still in her twenties, Polly had married a fellow Hill rat named Hector, a smart, attractive, and ambitious young man who seemed destined for some kind of big role eventually in someone's presidential administration; but after attending a lecture by Paul Ehrlich, the overpopulation guru, he became a devotee to the cause, and quit his job on the Hill and went to work for a non-profit organization that distributed birth control — condoms, mainly: three hundred million a year — free throughout the Third World. He spent four-fifths of his time in the Third World. The remaining fifth he spent back home in Washington looking for cures for various exotic tropical and infectious diseases, some of which made it unpleasant to be around him. Hector was passionate about overpopulation, Nick gathered from Polly's accounts, to the point where it was pretty much all he talked about.
Returning from a long trip to West Africa, however, he announced to Polly, in rather an unromantic, businesslike way, that he wanted to start having children, lots of them, and right away. This took Polly by surprise. Whether it was guilt over all those billions and billions of thwarted Third World sperm, or simply the desire to populate his own little corner of the world, Polly could not say; at this point all she did know was that she had, in a moment of weakness brought on by being chased around desks by too many congressmen, married a total loser.
Hector, meanwhile, became more and more adamant. By this time his skin had turned greenish from some suspect malaria pills dispensed by the local apothecary in Brazzaville. This, combined with his monomaniacal procreative fervor, had a calamitous effect on Polly's libido. He presented her with an ultimatum, and when she refused, he announced that it was all over and he was taking his fertility stick elsewhere. The divorce would become final in the fall. He was now living in Lagos, Nigeria, organizing a massive airdrop of condoms on the crowds expected to attend the pope's mass on his upcoming visit.
Discreet as the Mod Squad was, from time to time they invited other spokespeople to lunch to promote camaraderie among the despised. Their guests had come from such groups as the Society for the Humane Treatment of Calves, representing the veal industry, the Friends of Dolphins, formerly the Pacific Tuna Fishermen's Association, the American Highway Safety Association, representing the triple-trailer truckers, the Land Enrichment Foundation, formerly the Coalition for the Responsible Disposal of Radioactive Waste; others. Sometimes they had foreign guests. The chief spokesman for the Brazilian Cattlemen's Association had come by recently to share with them his views on rainforest management, and had entertained them with his imitation of a flock of cockatiels fleeing from bulldozers.
Their regular table was in the smoking section of Bert's, next to a fireplace with a fake electric fire that gave off a cozy, if ersatz, glow. Nick ordered his usual Cobb salad, which at Bert's came with about a quart of gloppy blue cheese dressing on top of enough bacon and chopped egg to clog an artery the size of the Holland Tunnel, and iced black coffee to wash it down and zap the thalamus for an afternoon of jousting with the media.
Bobby Jay ordered his usual: batter-fried shrimp with tasso mayonnaise. Polly, after briefly contemplating calamari, went for a trimming tossed green salad, French dressing on the side, and a glass of the house chenin blanc, crisp with a nice finish and not overpriced at $3.75 a glass.
Polly noticed that Nick was staring morosely into his iced coffee.
"So," she said, "how're we doing?" This was the traditional Mod Squad gambit. The answer was always awful, for it was unlikely that medical science had discovered that smoking prolonged life, or that the handgun murder rate had declined, or that somewhere out there some promising young life had been saved, instead of tragically snuffed out by a teenager with a blood alcohol content of.24 percent.
"How did your Lungs thing go?" Polly said, dragging deeply on a long low-tar cigarette. Nick had told her not to bother with the low-tars, since research showed you only smoked more of them to get the same amount of nicotine, a point nowhere to be found in the voluminous literature of the Academy of Tobacco Studies.
"Oh," Nick said, "it was all right. She called for a total advertising ban. Big surprise."
"I caught a bit of you on C-SPAN. Liked the Murad bit."
"Uh-huh."
"You all right?"
Nick explained about his meeting with BR and how he had until six-thirty A.M. on Monday to come up with a plan that would reverse forty years of antismoking trends. Polly cut directly to the heart of the matter. "He wants to put Jeannette in. That's what this is about." She promised to try to think of something by Monday.
She changed the subject back to the surgeon general. "You know she's going after us next. Never met an excise tax she didn't love. It has nothing to do with financing national health. She just doesn't want anyone to drink. Period. I've got my beer wholesalers coming into town for their annual convention next week and they're ready to kill. They're threatening to drive all their trucks onto the Mall."
"That would be an interesting visual," Nick said, rallying slightly from his depression. "The Washington Monument, surrounded by Budweiser trucks."
"They're pissed off. Sixty-four cents on a six-pack? They're trying to erase the deficit on the backs of the beer industry, and they don't think that's exactly fair." The Mod Squad in ways resembled the gatherings of Hollywood comedy writers who met over coffee to bounce new jokes off one another. Only here it was sound bites de-emphasizing the lethality of their products.
Until now Bobby Jay had not joined in on the conversation, as his cellular telephone was pressed to his ear. He was in the midst of a "developing news story," which for people in their business tended to be a bad news story. Another "disgruntled postal worker," those Bad News Bears of the gun industry, had been up to the usual shenanigans again. This one had gone as usual to Sunday church in Carburetor City, Texas, and halfway through a sermon on the theme of "The Almighty's Far-Reaching Tentacles of Love" had stood up and blasted the minister clear out of the pulpit, and then trained withering fire on the choir. Here he had departed from the usual text, for he did not then, as the newspapers put it, "turn the gun on himself." He was disgruntled, but not so disgruntled as to part with his own life. He was now the object of the most massive manhunt in Texas history. Bobby Jay told them that SAFETY was logging over two thousand calls a day.
"Pro or con?" Nick said. Bobby Jay did not rise to the bait.
"Do you know how many 'disgruntled postal workers' have pulled this sort of stunt in the last twenty years?" Bobby Jay said through a large forkful of shrimp. "Seven. Do you know what I want to know? I want to know what are they so disgruntled about? We're the ones whose mail never comes."
"Assault rifle?" Polly asked professionally.
Bobby Jay ripped off a shrimp tail with his front teeth. "Under the circumstances I'm tempted to say, probably, yeah. 'Course, nine times out of ten what they call an 'assault rifle' isn't. But try explaining that to our friends" — he hooked a greasy thumb in the direction of the Washington Sun building—"over there. To them, my ten-year-old's BB gun is an 'assault rifle.' " He held up his fork. "To them, this could be an 'assault' weapon. What are we going to do, start outlawing forks?"
"Forks?" Nick said.
"Forks Don't Kill People, People Kill People," Polly said. "I don't know. Needs work."
"It was a Commando Mark forty-five. You could, technically, consider it a semiautomatic assault rifle."
"With a name like that, yeah," Polly said. "Maybe you should ask the manufacturers to give them less awful names? Like, 'Gentle Persuader,' or 'Housewife's Companion'?"
"What I don't get is, the son of a gun was using hollow-point Hydra-Shok loads."
"Ouch," Nick said.
"That's a military load. They use those on, on terrorists. They blow up inside you." Bobby demonstrated with his hand the action of a Hydra-Shok bullet inside the human body.
"Please," Polly said.
"What was he expecting?" asked Bobby Jay rhetorically. "That the minister and the choir were wearing Kevlar bulletproof vests underneath their robes? What gets into people?"
"Good question," Nick said.
"So, what are you doing?" Polly asked.
"And why is it every time some. nutcase postal worker shoots up a church, they come rope in hand, to hang us? Did we give him the piece and tell him, 'Go forth, massacre a whole congregation'? Redekamp" — a reporter for the Sun—"calls me up and I can hear him gloating. He loves massacres. Thrives on massacres, Godless swine. I said to him, 'When a plane crashes on account of pilot error do you blame the Boeing Corporation?' "
"That's good," Nick said.
"When some booze-besotten drunk goes and runs someone down, do you go banging on the door of General Motors and shout, 'J'accuse!' "
"You didn't tell him that?" Polly winced.
"Okay," Nick said, "but how are you handling the situation?"
Bobby Jay wiped a gob of tasso mayonnaise from his lips. A glint came into his eye. "The Lord is handling it."
Nick knew Bobby Jay to be an upright, car-prayer-pooling citizen, who occasionally salted his language with biblical phrases like so-and-so had "sold himself for a mess of porridge, like Esau's brother," but he was not a nut. You could have a normal, secular conversation with him. But this suggestion that the Lord himself was engaged in spin control made Nick wonder if Bobby Jay was crossing the line over into the Casualties column. He stared. "What?"
Bobby Jay looked over his shoulder and leaned in toward them. He said, "It had to be. Opportunities like this can only come from above. And they happen only to the righteous."
"Bobby Jay," Polly said, looking alarmed, "are you all right?"
"Listen, O ye of little faith, then tell me if you don't think the Lord was looking out for old Bobby Jay. I'm in the car driving to work—"
"With Commuters for Christ?"
"No, Polly, and I don't see the humor in that. It was just me. I'm listening to Gordon Liddy's call-in show—" "Figures," Polly said.
"Gordon happens to be a friend of mine. Anyway, he's yakkety-yak-yakking about the shooting, his lines are lit up, and suddenly he says, 'Carburetor City, you're on the air,' and there's this woman's voice saying, 'I was in that church and I want to tell that last person you had on that he is just wrong.' I practically drove right off the road. She was saying, 'I own a pistol, but because the law in Texas says you cannot carry it on your person, you can only keep it in your car, I left it in the glove compartment. And if I had had that handgun with me there inside the church, that choir would still be singing 'Walk with Me, Jesus.' "
Nick felt a pang of jealousy. No one had ever called while he was being flayed alive on a radio talk show to say, If I hadn't smoked five packs of cigarettes every day for forty years, I'd be dead by now.
Bobby Jay, eyes bulging, went on. "Gordon was in seventh heaven. He kept her on the line for must have been fifteen minutes. She went on and on about how what a tragedy it was she didn't have her little S & W.38 airweight with her in that pew, how the whole misery could have been avoided. She was this far away from him! She couldn't have missed him! A clean head shot." Bobby held out his arm in combat shooting stance and aimed at a person at the next table. "Bam!"
"You're scaring the other patrons." "So what did you do?" Nick asked.
"What did I do?" Bobby Jay bubbled. "What did I do? I'll tell you what I did. I put the pedal to the metal and went straight to National Airport and got on the next plane to Carburetor City. There is no 'next plane to Carburetor City.' You got to go through Dallas. But I was in that little lady's living room before six o'clock that afternoon."
" 'Little lady's'?" Polly said. "You're such a trog."
"Five-foot-four," Bobby Jay shot back. "In heels. And every inch a lady. A simple descriptive sentence, so may I continue, Ms. Sty-nem? I had our camera crew there by noon the next day. It is as we speak being edited into the sweetest little old video you ever saw." He spread his hands apart like a director framing the scene. "We open with. 'Carburetor City, Texas. A mentally unbalanced federal bureaucrat—' "
"Nice," Nick said.
"Gets better: '. attacks a church minister and choir. ' Footage of ambulances, people on stretchers, people gnashing their teeth and rending their hair—"
"How," Polly said, "do people rend their hair?"
"Everywhere a scene of carnage," Bobby Jay continued, "a scene of devastation. Red chaos!"
"Red chaos?" Polly said.
"Shut up, Polly," Nick said.
"Voice-over. And guess whose?" Bobby Jay asked coyly. "Charlton Heston?"
"No sir," Bobby said, all tickly and beaming. "Guess again."
"David Duke," Polly said.
"Jack Taggardy," Bobby Jay said triumphantly.
"Nice," Nick said.
"Didn't he have his hips replaced? I read that in People."
"What do his hips have to do with anything?" Bobby Jay said.
"Is he in a walker, or what?"
"No he's not in a any damn walker!"
"Go on," Nick said.
Bobby reframed the scene. "So Taggardy's voice-over: 'Could this awful human tragedy have been avoided?' " "Question," Nick said. "Why 'human'?" "Why not 'human'? They're humans." "I would have thought, 'inhuman tragedy'?" "He's got a point," Polly said.
"Look, we can edit. Do you want to hear this?" "Yes," Nick said, "very much."
"Now we cut to my little lady. She's sitting in a chair, all prim and pretty. Darling girl. I had her hairdresser come over. She wanted to do her makeup but I wouldn't hear of it. I wanted her eyes red from crying. We dabbed a little onion under the eyelids, nothing wrong with that, just to get her in the mood, get those ducts opened up."
"Onion?"
"Didn't even need it. Soon as she saw those color police photos i was holding up for her off camera she started bawlin' like a baby. She's going on about how awful it was, and then she gets to the part about how she had to leave her pistol in the glove compartment. Then she looks right into the camera, right in your face, and dabs the corner of her eye — and that was not in the script — and says, 'Why won't our elected lawmakers just let us protect ourselves? Is that too much to ask?' Fade to black. Then Taggardy's voice comes back on and there's no mistaking that voice, like bourbon over sandpaper: 'The Second Amendment says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Does your elected lawmaker support the Bill of Rights? Or are they selling you a Bill of Goods?' " Bobby Jay leaned back in his chair. "What do you think?"
"Transcendent," Nick said. "A deft manipulation of post-traumatic stress."
Bobby Jay grinned. "Sweeter than honeysuckle in moonlight."
"Congratulations," Polly said. "Really masterful."
"By this afternoon, every member of the Texas congressional delegation and the state legislature will have a copy. By tomorrow, every sinner in the Congress will have one. We may even air it nationally. Mr. Drum hasn't signed off on that yet, but I am most strongly recommending that we do."
Bobby Jay's boss was one of the few in Washington who insisted on the mister. It was part of his aura, and he did cast a large aura. When he had taken over the leadership of the troubled SAFETY years back, there had been only fifty million guns circulating in America. There were now over 200 million. He was a physically imposing man with a trademark bald head. Redekamp of the Sun had dug up the fact that at the age of sixteen he had shot to death a seventeen-year-old in a dispute over the ownership of a box turtle. The conviction was later overturned on the grounds that the box turtle, having subsequently died, probably of stress, had never been introduced as evidence. Ever since, the anti-SAFETY Washington press, comprising all of the press except for the conservative Washington Moon, included a reference to this unfortunate incident in every mention of him.
Coffee arrived. Nick asked Polly, "What's happening at Moderation?"
"We actually got some great news yesterday." This was a stunner. Nick could not recall such words ever having been spoken over one of their lunches. "The Michigan Supreme Court ruled that sobriety roadblocks were unconstitutional," she said.
"Party down," Nick said.
"The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that they are constitutional, so for now they're constitutional everywhere except Michigan." Bobby Jay said, "Don't you see?" "See what?" Nick asked.
"The pattern. First they disarm us, then they start throwing up roadblocks. It's all happening on schedule." "Whose schedule?"
"Do you know how to beat a Breathalyzer?" Bobby Jay said. "Activated charcoal tablets."
"Maybe we could use that in our new Designated Driver campaign," Polly said. " 'If You Must Drive Drunk, Please, Suck Charcoal.' "
"You get them in pet stores. They purify the air that goes through the little pump. I don't know why they bother, all my kids' fish went belly-up within a day. You keep it under your tongue. Breaks down the ethanol molecules."
"Don't the police wonder how come you've got a charcoal briquet in your mouth?"
"There's no law against charcoal," Bobby Jay said.
"Yet," they chimed in unison. It was understood among them that at any given moment, somewhere, someone in the "vast federal bureaucracy" was issuing regulations against them. They were the Cavaliers of Consumption aligned on the field of battle against the Roundheads of Neo-Puritanism.
Polly said, "My beer wholesalers convention next week. I'm worried."
"Why?" Nick asked.
"I'm scheduled to debate with Craighead in front of two thousand of them." Gordon R. Craighead was the chief "unelected bureaucrat" in charge of the Office of Substance Abuse Prevention at the Department of Health and Human Services, "Helpless, Hopeless, and Stupid" to those in the alcohol and tobacco industries. Craighead's office dispensed about $300 million a year to anti-smoking and anti— drunk-driving groups. Though it had been calculated that the tobacco industry spends $2.5 billion a year, or $4,000 per second, promoting smoking, Nick nonetheless railed against OSAP's "runaway budgets."
"Oh, you can handle Craighead."
"I'm not worried about that. It's my beer wholesalers. These are not subtle people. Most of them started out driving their own trucks. I'm worried that if Craighead starts talking about raising their excise taxes again, or if he gets into the recycling deposit, they'll start throwing things at him. They'll get abusive. That's not going to help anyone."
"Are you doing Q and A?" Polly said yes, there would be a question and answer after the debate.
"Make them write down the questions. We did a panel once with Mothers Against Smoking at a vending-machine owners' convention. We took spoken questions. A nightmare. The vendors were wrestling the microphone away from each other, shouting at the mothers, 'You're stealing bread outa my kid's mouth and you call yourself a mother!' I was a little surprised. I always thought the mafia was traditionally more respectful of mothers. Now I can't get Mothers Against Smoking even to return my calls. After that I made it a policy, only written questions. Have you got a slogan for the meeting?"
" 'We're Part of the Solution,' " she said. "What do you think?"
Nick considered. "I like it."
"We had a hard time with it," Polly said. "They wanted something more aggressive. They're very feisty, the wholesalers."
"I've got a slogan for you," Bobby Jay said. "I saw it on a T-shirt. 'A Day Without a Buzz Is a Day That Never Wuz.' "
"Our first choice," Polly continued, ignoring him, "was 'In the Spirit of Cooperation,' but they said it sounded too much like 'spirits.' I spend half my time keeping my beer people from killing my spirits people, and my wine people from trying to kill the other two. The whole idea behind the Moderation Council was strength through unity at a time of volumetric decline, but it's like trying to unify Yugoslavia." She sipped her iced cappuccino. "It's tribal."
Polly lit a cigarette. Nick appreciated a woman who smoked sexily. She leaned back and tucked her left arm under her breasts to support her right elbow, the arm going straight up, cigarette pointing at the ceiling. She took long, deep drags, tilted her head back, and let the smoke out in long, slow, elegant exhalations, with a little lung-clearing shot at the end. A beautiful smoker. Nick's own mother, in her day, had been a beautiful smoker. He remembered her by the pool, summers in the fifties, all long legs and short pants, pointy sunglasses and broad straw hats and lipstick that left bright, sticky smudges on the butts that he filched and coughingly relit behind the garage.
Nick was rousted from the reverie by the shrill cricketing of Bobby Jay's cellular phone. Bobby Jay flipped it open with practiced cool, like it was a switchblade. "Bliss. Yeah?" Bobby said. "Great." He said to Nick and Polly, "The postal worker. They got him. Uh-huh. uh-huh. Missouri. uh-huh. uh-huh. what?" His brow beetled. "Well how the hell does CNN know? It was on him? FBI. what did, you didn't say anything to them, did you? Look, did you check with Membership?" Nick watched Bobby's face sag and thought, This face is infreefall. "Sustaining? Was he paid up? Well, yes, check, right away, before you do anything. No, don't call CNN or the FBI back. I don't care. I'll be there in three minutes."
Bobby Jay folded up his phone. Nick and Polly stared, awaiting explication.
"I got to go," Bobby Jay said, tossing a twenty onto the table. It landed like a fall leaf in a little puddle of melting ice.
"Do we have to find out what happened from CNN?"
Bobby Jay looked like he was about to break a sweat. "Take deep breaths," Nick suggested.
"The son of a bitch was a member," Bobby Jay said. "Not just a member, but a sustaining life member."
"How did CNN find out?"
"He had his membership card with him. CNN got a shot of it lying with the rest of his wallet. In a pool of blood."
"Hm," Nick said, no longer jealous about Bobby Jay's incredible
good luck. At least with tobacco the casualties were tucked away in hospital wards.
"I'm on SAFETY!" Polly said, doing a take on the famous SAFETY ads showing macho, if slightly fading, actors standing on skeet ranges, holding expensive, engraved shotguns.
"Polly," Nick rebuked her. She was so cynical, Polly. Sometimes Nick wanted to spank her. She made a big-deal gesture. Bobby Jay was oblivious, staring at the center of the table. Polly waved a hand back and forth in front of his face and said to Nick, "I think he's going into shock."
"Oh my Lord," Bobby Jay said quietly, "the video."
"You probably want to recall it," Nick said, but Bobby Jay was already out the door, on his way, it appeared, to a long afternoon of certain buttlock.