Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [88]
“Watergate!” he exclaimed. “I thought I knew the names of almost all the Watergate people.” As I would find out later, he not only knew their names: He knew many of them well enough to have bribed them with illegal campaign contributions, and to have chipped in for their defenses afterward. “Why is it that I have never heard the name Starbuck associated with Watergate before?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my head still down. “It was like being in a wonderful musical comedy where the critics mentioned everybody but me. If you can find an old program, I’ll show you my name.”
“The prison was in Georgia, I take it,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. I supposed that he knew that because Roy M. Cohn had looked up my record when he had to get me out of jail.
“That explains Georgia,” he said.
I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want Georgia explained.
“So that’s how you know Clyde Carter and Cleveland Lawes and Dr. Robert Fender,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. Now I started to be afraid. Why would this man, one of the most powerful corporate executives on the planet, bother to find out so much about a pathetic little jailbird like me? Was there a suspicion somewhere that I knew some spectacular secret that could still be revealed about Watergate? Might he be playing cat-and-mouse with me before having me killed some way?
“And Doris Kramm,” he said, “I’m sure you know her, too.”
I was so relieved not to know her! I was innocent after all! His whole case against me would collapse now. He had the wrong man, and I could prove it! I did not know Doris Kramm! “No, no, no,” I said. “I don’t know Doris Kramm.”
“The lady you asked me not to retire from The American Harp Company,” he said.
“I never asked you anything,” I said.
“A slip of the tongue,” he said.
And then horror grew in me as I realized that I really did know Doris Kramm. She was the old secretary who had been sobbing and cleaning out her desk at the harp showroom. I wasn’t about to tell him that I knew her, though.
But he knew I knew her, anyway! He knew everything! “You will be happy to learn that I telephoned her personally and assured her that she did not have to retire, after all. She can stay on as long as she likes. Isn’t that lovely?”
“No,” I said. It was as good an answer as any. But now I was remembering the harp showroom. I felt as though I had been there a thousand years ago, perhaps, in some other Ufe, before I was born. Mary Kathleen O’Looney had been there. Arpad Leen, in his omniscience, would surely mention her next.
And then the nightmare of the past hour suddenly revealed itself as having been logical all along. I knew something that Leen himself did not know, that probably nobody in the world but me knew. It was impossible, but it had to be true: Mary Kathleen O’Looney and Mrs. Jack Graham were the same.
It was then that Arpad Leen raised my hand to his lips and kissed it. “Forgive me for penetrating your disguise, madam,” he said, “but I assume you made it so easy to penetrate on purpose. Your secret is safe with me. I am honored at last to meet you face to face.”
He kissed my hand again, the same hand Mary Kathleen’s dirty little claw had grasped that morning. “High time, madam,” he said. “We have worked together so well so long. High time.”
My revulsion at being kissed by a man was so fully automatic that I became a veritable Queen Victoria! My rage was imperial, although my language came straight from the playgrounds of my Cleveland adolescence. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded to know. “I’m no God damn woman!” I said.
I have spoken of losing my self-respect over the years. Arpad Leen had now lost his in a matter of seconds, with this preposterous misapprehension of his.
He was speechless and white.
When he tried to recover, he did not recover much. He was beyond apologizing, too shattered to exhibit charm or cleverness of any kind. He could only grope for where the truth might lie.
“But you know her,” he said at last. There was resignation in his voice, for he was acknowledging what was becoming clear to me, too: that I was more