When he finished playing the tape, the FBI agent turned to Augustine and said, “I’ve read it somewhere. That ‘creaking machinery of humanity.'”
“Me, too. I’ve been racking my brain.”
“God, I can just see ’em up in Washington, giving it to a crack team of shrinks-”
“Or cryptographers,” Augustine said.
The FBI man smiled. “Exactly.” He accepted a hot slice of pepperoni for the road, and said good night.
Augustine asked Bonnie a question at which the agent had only hinted: Was it conceivable that Max Lamb could have written something like that himself?
“Never,” she said. Her husband was into ditties and jingles, not metaphysics. “And he doesn’t read much,” she added. “The last book he finished was one of Trump’s autobiographies.”
It was enough to convince Augustine that Max Lamb
wasn’t being coy on the phone; the mystery man was feeding him lines. Augustine didn’t know why. The situation was exceedingly strange.
Bonnie took a shower. She came out wearing a baby-blue flannel nightshirt that Augustine recognized from a long-ago relationship. Bonnie had found it hanging in a closet.
“Is there a story to go with it?” she asked.
“A torrid one.”
“Really?” Bonnie sat beside him on the sofa, at a purely friendly distance. “Let me guess: Flight attendant?”
Augustine said, “Letterman’s a rerun.”
“Cocktail waitress? Fashion model?”
“I’m beat.” Augustine picked up a book, a biography of Lech Walesa, and flipped it open to the middle.
“Aerobics instructor? Legal secretary?”
“Surgical intern,” Augustine said. “She tried to cut out my kidneys one night in the shower.”
“That’s the scar on your back? The Y.”
“At least she wasn’t a urologist.” He closed the book and picked up the channel changer for the television.
Bonnie said, “You cheated on her.”
“Nope, but she thought I did. She also thought the bathtub was full of centipedes, Cuban spies were spiking her lemonade, and Richard Nixon was working the night shift at the Farm Store on Bird Road.”
” Drug problem ?”
“Evidently.” Augustine found a Dodgers game on ESPN and tried to appear engrossed.
Bonnie Lamb asked to see the scar closely, but he declined. “The lady had poor technique,” he said.
“She use a real scalpel?”
“No, a corkscrew.”
“My God.”
“What is it with women and scars?”
Bonnie said, “I knew it. You’ve been asked before.”
Was she flirting? Augustine wasn’t sure. He had no point of reference when it came to married women whose husbands recently had disappeared.
“How’s this,” he said. “You tell me all about your husband, and maybe I’ll show you the damn scar.”
“Deal,” said Bonnie Lamb, tugging the nightshirt down to cover her knees.
Max Lamb met and fell in love with Bonnie Brooks when she was an assistant publicist for Crespo Mills Internationale, a leading producer of snack and breakfast foods. Rodale & Burns had won the lucrative Crespo advertising account, and assigned Max Lamb to develop the print and radio campaign for a new cereal called Plum Crunchies. Bonnie Brooks flew in from Crespo’s Chicago headquarters to consult.
Basically, Plum Crunchies were ordinary sugar-coated cornflakes mixed with rock-hard fragments of dried plums-that is to say, prunes. The word “prune” was not to appear in any Plum Crunchies publicity or advertising, a corporate edict with which both Max Lamb and Bonnie Brooks wholeheartedly agreed. The target demographic was sweet-toothed youngsters aged fourteen and under, not constipated senior citizens.
On only their second date, at a Pakistani restaurant in Greenwich Village, Max sprung upon Bonnie his slogan for Crespo’s new cereal: You’ll go plum loco for Plum Crunchies!
“With p-l-u-m instead of p-1-u-m-b on the first reference,” he was quick to explain.
Though she personally avoided the use of lame homonyms, Bonnie told Max the slogan had possibilities. She was trying not to dampen his enthusiasm; besides, he was the expert, the creative talent. All she did was bang out press releases.
On a napkin Max Lamb crudely sketched a jaunty, cockeyed mynah bird that was to be the cereal-box mascot for Plum Crunchies. Max said the bird would be colored purple (“like a plum!”) and would be named Dinah the Mynah. Here Bonnie Brooks felt she should speak up, as a colleague, to remind Max Lamb of the many other cereals that already used bird logos (Froot Loops, Cocoa Puffs, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and so on). In addition, she gently questioned the wisdom of naming the mynah bird after an aging, though much-beloved, \ TV singer.