A Voice of Baltimore Feature, an excerpt from

EPSTEIN’S PANCAKE, a political thriller
set at the end of the Reagan Administration

By Bjarne Rostaing

BEGIN on a warm September afternoon in a small old fashioned Manhattan tailor shop circa the ‘88 elections.  Me looking at an attaché case, about to buy it, not sure exactly why.  I knew some of the reasons, though.  I’d never seen anything like it, and I happened to have the money, and it was a quirky access to power.  At a lower price I might have bought it just because it was a really excellent case — black leather, solid and very well made.  A little oversized, so you could use it for an overnight bag, and heavy, with the classic hardwood frame.  Tan peccary interior, everything included — calculator, battery shaver, Pelikan writing set.  Security via large brass combination lock.  A tight ship.

It was the end of the Reagan years, a bad time for me.  My job was gone, followed by my second wife, and my money was running out.  I was investing in something different here.  New York is attitude, and this piece of luggage had it.  Not twelve hundred dollars worth, but that’s what I paid for it when I saw what it was.  In the false bottom of this banker-faced artifact was a small green pistol with a remote firing mechanism and suppressor.  It was set-in diagonally, corner-to-corner, just right if you decided to gut someone in the middle of a disagreement.  Not that I’d ever thought of doing anything like that, but in any case I knew half a dozen traders who’d love to own it for a higher price if I wasn’t comfortable with it.  And owning a gun didn’t bother me.  In Vietnam I’d seen that people kill each other and get used to it.  It’s a crowded world, and what with Darwin staring us in the eye and third world hordes threatening to overwhelm us, we find a way to feel all right about it.  Bottom line, I was used to guns.  In rural New England where I grew up, rifles and shotguns were part of life.  A solid, pious little world where the unspoken thought was “Kill not, that you may look down on those who do.”  I suppose my father thought that way too, until he met a French girl who’d been running around for the Resistance with a Sten gun while he was pushing paper on a troop ship.  He was the last of a long line of teachers and preachers from which I escaped somehow.  Checked out in his old Pontiac not long after she died.  One-car accident on an off-camber curve he’d been driving for years.

The pistol was small and thin, mostly green composite, made by a Swiss company, Michaud-Coubert.  There were two loads — a Teflon cop-killer and a mercury load that would turn into a big lead flower more deadly than the poppy.  In the false bottom with the gun were ammo, a recorder, and currency compartments.  Corner-to-corner metal braces aligned with the barrel to fudge x-rays.  Trigger and safety fore and aft in the handle, with a little plate to let you know which end was which.

  A $1200 attaché case, purchased from a tailor named Fred.

Where do you get such a thing?  I got it from my tailor, Fred, a graying retired Spanish anarchist I’d known for several years who beat me at chess in eleven moves the first time we played.  We weren’t close and never talked much, but we got along.  We met in Central Park, both of us on bikes, and he stayed with me for three laps on an old green Bianchi with steel components.  It gave me something to think about, because I’d done some racing and was much younger.  Born Federico in northern Spain, Fred had a long, lined face, eyes like olives, neat graying hair, and a very flat stomach for a man in his late fifties.  He was a quiet, civil man who respected good manners, one of those people who seem to take up no space.  After years in the same second-floor space, his shop still looked as if he’d just moved in with long pipes running along below the ceiling, and garments hanging from the pipes.  Little wood counter with an old cash register at the door, chess table with two chairs in a corner.  On a shelf next to the chess set were an old espresso machine and a bottle of brandy.  Everything exactly where it belonged, and his work was the same.  When Fred fitted a jacket, you looked rich and forgot you were wearing it.  Joanna, my second wife, snubbed him, then became wary of him.  Once she joked that he could probably make himself invisible and fly.  No fool, Joanna.
 
bfrostaing@voiceofbaltimore.org
 

Barney Rostaing is a “Red Diaper Baby” and journalist/author who had a role in Uma Thur- man’s debut film, “Kiss Daddy Goodnight.”

Bjarne (Barney) Rostaing was an editor at the SoHo Weekly News, won a First Place AFI Award for a sports video, and worked with Uma Thurman in her film debut in “Kiss Daddy Goodnight” (1987).  As a sports writer, he exposed — in Sports Illustrated — the 1984 U.S. Olympic blood doping scandal.

His earlier works include Breeders (St. Mark’s Press/2011), a crime novel set in the world of horse racing; Phantom of the Paradise (Dell), based on the 1974 horror film starring Brian De Palma; and Bill Walton’s Total Book of Bicycling (Bantam Books/1985).

Originally from Bantam, Conn., the “Red Diaper Baby” lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y.

—————

This is the initial excerpt from Epstein’s Pancake to appear on Voice of Baltimore.

To learn more about the book  click here.

Just out, it’s published by St. Mark’s Press and is available for purchase on Amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble — click here  and  here.