My man Harriman was a real find in this crowd. He was good company, and he was obviously plugged in to the right people. He was brazenly weird, and I admired him for it. He was good at his work. It takes a magic kind of gall to aggressively impersonate a dead man on his own turf, especially a former governor of New York State eight years after his death. It was heavy.
My only problem with Harriman was his temper. I was still shaken by his behavior at the sight of the president on TV, and I felt I should speak with him about it. I was afraid he would get us arrested.
“You can’t do that anymore,” I told him. “We’re both on thin ice here. You can’t be threatening the president in public. We can’t get away with it.”
He nodded stiffly. “It’s none of your goddamn business,” he said. “He’s been fucking my wife for many years.”
“What?” I said. “Goddamn you! Stop saying that weird shit. People are watching us.”
He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Calm down, son,” he said. “You’re a little jumpy today.” He put an arm around me. “Don’t worry, old sport,” he said. “I own this place. These people work for me.”
I nodded wisely, as if I’d known it all along and didn’t want to embarrass him. But in truth, he was beginning to make me uneasy. He had too many irons in the fire. I had known from the start that he was a very suave hustler, but I had no problem with that . . . He was a decent sort, not without the odd moral blind spot, and I liked his morbid sense of humor. I was not entirely comfortable with his hair-trigger temper or his frequent jealous rages against the president for fucking his wife, but in my line of work, these things go with the territory. I have worked with the criminally insane all my life. These are my people, but I usually try to keep them at arm’s length. It is better that way.
Harriman, on the other hand, was a very valuable source of information no matter how crazy he was. He was my man on the Island.
My man Harriman had style. I could trust him, and I felt he trusted me.
He enjoyed his reputation as an aggressively eccentric personality, and he told bizarre stories about what the hotel was like in the good old days—when mysterious fires would engulf the lobby from time to time, and prominent social figures were beaten to death in the hallways with polo mallets or found at the bottom of wells with their heads cut off. “I remember one Sunday we played a whole chukker with a small human skull that Tommy Hitchcock found in the bushes behind his stables. We had a good laugh until somebody said it might be the Lindbergh baby,” he said wistfully. “But they were never able to identify it because we had bashed all its teeth out.”
“That’s rich,” I said, but neither one of us laughed. Harriman called for more whiskey and changed the subject. “You know, I got this hotel for almost nothing,” he said. “The previous owner, Mr. Hines, died horribly. The family sold out and moved to Hawaii because somebody told them there were no rats there.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Hawaii is overrun with rats.” I noticed the bartender staring at us, but Harriman continued.
“That was how he died,” he said. “The papers called it a drowning, but I knew better.” He paused and nodded darkly. “He was murdered—murdered by rats, huge pack rats, the kind with those long hairy arms and claws like a cat.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “How did it happen?”
“Rats lived in the rafters above the swimming pool,” he said. “Mr. Hines liked to swim laps at night for exercise.” He paused again, and I saw that his hands were shaking.
“The poor son of a bitch,” he said. “He never had a chance. A swarm of those filthy, hairy things fell out of the rafters and landed right on top of him in the water—he was covered with half-dead rats when they found him. They were clinging to every part of his body they could get their claws or their teeth into, just trying to stay alive.”
“Jesus!” I said. “No wonder you torched the hotel.”
He nodded, then stood up, and we parted. I went upstairs and took a long hot shower.
III
Polo people are very polite as a rule, and most of them seemed to like me. But they are wary of strangers, and most of our talk had to do with field conditions and horseshoes and other barnyard subjects that bored me into a stupor. I tried to get close to the horses, but when I went to the barns at night, I couldn’t get any closer than the bushes across from the stables at the old Hitchcock estate, where the Australian team was quartered. They were feverish brutes, drinking heavily, and their patron was Kerry Packer, the richest man in Australia.