Word: fixer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...FIXER by Bernard Malamud. 335 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...race is not his reason for being on the outside looking in. Mack Davis is a onetime All-America basketball star who got caught fixing games for the gamblers. Kicked off the court, Mack takes a job in a car wash ("I got the cleanest hands of any fixer around") and wears his cool like a man who couldn't care less. But he's crying on the inside, warming a cold old hope of playing with the pros. What happens to his hope is fast, funny, touching and, as Mack's life dribbles aimlessly toward...
Fatal Humiliation. Among half a dozen other gangland obituaries in the past year, the boys also recall the somber fate of Murray ("The Camel") Humphreys, a gangland fixer who could smooth out any legal or political hump-and leave no tracks at all in the underworld sand. When he also was called before a grand jury, The Camel lost his cool. Rather than land in jail for silence or six feet under for talking, he lied-so ineffectually that he was hauled in on a perjury charge. That night, out on bail and back in his Marina City Towers suite...
...well-fed little city, meat hunters sell rats to hungry housewives. Congolese, from children to Cabinet ministers, play the game of je souffre, their long faces proclaiming their suffering even while their hands reach out for matabich-the bribe. The bribe rarely works for long. Says one would-be fixer with frank wistfulness: "You can't buy these guys. All you can do is hire them for the afternoon...
...each room. If these gimmicks sound a little too mechanical, at the expense of human service, there will also be multilingual doormen and desk clerks, and, above all, that grand old European institution, the concierge. "The European concierge," one traveler has explained, "is a combination of all-round fixer and archangel, the man who sees and knows everything and can do almost anything. He must combine the talents of a living telephone directory, tourist guide, psychologist, businessman, detective, procurer, blackmailer and infinitely tolerant uncle...