Mystery

“You’re pretty quiet,” Victor Pasmore said. “Excuse me, did somebody say something? Did I say ‘you’re pretty quiet’ just now? Nobody said anything back, so maybe I was just dreaming.” They were eating a dinner Victor had prepared with many grumbles and complaints, and though Tom’s mother had not emerged from her bedroom since he had returned home, a plate of unidentifiable meat and overcooked vegetables had been set for her. Booming noises from the television mingled with the dim sound of music that drifted down the stairs.

“What the hell, you’re always quiet,” Victor said. “This is nothing new. I oughta be used to this act by now. You say something, and your kid plays with his food.”

“I’m sorry,” Tom said.

“Jesus Christ, a sign of life!” Victor shook his head sourly. “I must be dreaming. You think next your mother will come downstairs and eat this food? Or will she just stay up there listening to Blue Rose over and over?”

“Blue Rose?”

“Yeah, you mean you never heard of it? Your old lady plays the damn thing over and over, I don’t think she hears it anymore, she just—”

“Blue Rose is the name of a record?”

“ ‘Blue Rose is the name of a record?’ ” His father’s voice was a mincing drawl. “Yeah, it’s the name of a record. Glenroy Breakstone’s famous all-ballad record, which your mother would rather listen to than come down here and eat the dinner I made. Which is par for the course, I suppose, like you sitting there looking goofy when I ask you what you did all day.”

“I went for a ride with Sarah Spence.”

“Big man, aren’t you?”

Tom looked across the table at his father. A smear of grease shone on his chin. Sweat stains darkened the armpits of the shirt he had worn to the office. Broken veins and black pores covered his nose. Dark, wet-looking hair stuck to his forehead. His father was hunched over his plate, holding on to a glass of bourbon and water with both hands. His black eyes glittered. Hostility seemed to come from him in an icy stream. He was much drunker than Tom had realized.

“What did you do all day?” he asked.

Tom saw his father considering saying something he thought astounding—he really wanted to say this astounding thing, alcohol and anger pushed it up into his throat, and he lifted the glass and swallowed whiskey to keep it down. He grinned like an evil dwarf. His eyes had absolutely no depth at all, and the pupils were invisible—light bounced right off them.

“Ralph Redwing came to my office today. The big man himself. To talk to me.”

His father could not reveal what to him was surpassingly good news without gloating—his news was an insuperable advantage over the person to whom he presented it. He took another swallow of his drink, and grinned absolutely mirthlessly. “The Redwing building is a block away from my building—but do you think Ralph Redwing walks anywhere? Like hell he does. His driver brought him over in his Bentley—that’s serious business, when Ralph uses a car. He bought two five-dollar cigars at the stand in the lobby. ‘What floor is Pasmore Trading on?’ he asks—like he doesn’t know, see? He just wants ’em to know that Ralph Redwing respects Vic Pasmore.”

“That’s great,” Tom said. “What did he want?”

“What’s the only reason Ralph Redwing pays a call on Vic Pasmore? You don’t know me, Tom—you think you know me, but you’re fooling yourself. You don’t. Nobody knows Vic Pasmore.” He leaned over his plate and showed two rows of small peglike teeth in what was less a smile than the gesture of a disagreeable dog guarding some nasty treasure. Then he straightened up, looked at Tom as if from far above him, and cut a bit of meat. He began chewing. “You still don’t get it, do you? You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you? Who do you think Ralph Redwing visits? Who do you think he gives five-dollar cigars to?”

Whoever he wants to bamboozle

, Tom thought, but said, “Not too many people, I guess.”

“NOBODY! You know what your problem is? You don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on. The older you get, the more I think you’re one of those guys who never gets anywhere. There’s too much of your mother in you, kid.”

“Did he offer you a job?” Tom said. His father had no awareness that what he was saying might be insulting; he had the air of offering great impartial truths.

“You think a man like that comes waltzing into an office and says, hey, how about a new job, Vic? If that’s what you think, you got another think coming.”

This was what his father was like when he was really happy.

“He says he’s been noticing how well I run my little business—maybe not the past few years, when things haven’t been so good, but right up to that. He hints. Maybe he needs what he calls a good general businessman—someone who isn’t wearing blinders, like most of the assholes on Mill Walk. Maybe he was thinking of buying my business and letting someone else run it, so I can handle bigger things for him.”

“Is that what he said?”