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By Root 808 0

Doris, incidentally, did almost no business up there, and continue to do almost no business up there. I was proud, when I became a RAMJAC executive, that American Harp Company harps were the finest harps in the world. You would have thought that the best harps would come from Italy or Japan or West Germany by now, with American craftsmanship having become virtually extinct. But no—musicians even in those countries and even in the Soviet Union agreed: Only an American Harp Company harp can cut the mustard. But the harp business is not and can never be a volume business, except in heaven, perhaps. So the profit picture, the bottom line, was ridiculous. It is so ridiculous that I recently undertook an investigation of why RAMJAC had ever acquired American Harp. I learned that it was in order to capture the incredible lease on the top of the Chrysler Building. The lease ran until the year Two-thousand and Thirty-one, at a rent of two hundred dollars a month! Arpad Leen wanted to turn the place into a restaurant.

That the company also owned a factory in Chicago with sixty-five, employees was a mere detail. If it could not be made to show a substantial profit within a year or two, RAMJAC would close it down.

Peace.

16

MARY KATHLEEN O’LOONEY was, of course, the legendary Mrs. Jack Graham, the majority stockholder in The RAMJAC Corporation. She had her inkpad and pens and writing paper in her basketball shoes. Those shoes were her bank vaults. Nobody could take them off of her without waking her up.

She would claim later that she had told me who she really was on the elevator.

I could only reply, “If I had heard you say that, Mary Kathleen, I surely would have remembered it.”

If I had known who she really was, all her talk about people who wanted to cut off her hands would have made a lot more sense. Whoever got her hands could pickle them and throw away the rest of her, and control The RAMJAC Corporation with just her fingertips. No wonder she was on the run. No wonder she dared not reveal her true identity anywhere.

No wonder she dared not-trust anybody. On this particular planet, where money mattered more than anything, the nicest person imaginable might suddenly get the idea of wringing her neck so that their loved ones might live in comfort. It would be the work of the moment—and easily forgotten as the years went by. Time flies.

She was so tiny and weak. Killing her and cutting off her hands would have been little more horrifying than what went on ten thousand times a day at a mechanized chicken farm. RAMJAC owns Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken, of course. I have seen that operation as it looks backstage.

About my not having heard her say she was Mrs. Jack Graham on the elevator:

I do remember that I had trouble with my ears toward the top of the elevator ride, because of the sudden change in altitude. We shot up about a thousand feet, with no stops on the way. Also: Temporarily deaf or not, I had my conversational automatic pilot on. I was not thinking about what she was saying, or what I was saying, either. I thought that we were both so far outside the mainstream of human affairs that all we could do was comfort each other with animal sounds. I remember her saying at one point that she owned the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and I thought I had not heard her right.

“I’m glad,” I said.

So, as I sat beside her on the bench in the harp showroom, she thought I had a piece of key information about her, which I did not have. And Delmar Peale had meanwhile called the police and had also sent Doris Kramm out, supposedly for coffee, but really to find a policeman out on the street somewhere.

As it happened, there was a small riot going on in the park adjacent to the United Nations, only three blocks away. Every available policeman was over there. Out-of-work white youths armed with baseball bats were braining men they thought were homosexuals. They threw one of them into the East River, who turned out to be the finance minister of Sri Lanka.

I would meet some of those youths later at the police station, and