The Scared Stiff

by Donald E. Westlake

  Ifigenia’s cousin Carlita Carnal worked for RIG, as an interviewer, news reader, researcher, and general utility infielder. Arturo had decided we needed somebody who maybe knew something about the Hall of Records and how the records were maintained, and how we might possibly get at them, so when he had Ifigenia penitent he got her to phone her cousin Carlita and beg her to help us.

  So where we went now was a café across the street from the art-deco headquarters of RIG — a twenties television station only looks really weird when you remember there were no television stations in the twenties — where Carlita Carnal had promised to meet us as soon after eleven o’clock as possible. We got there at five to eleven and ordered coffee, and I tried to take this opportunity to learn patience.

  It isn’t that I was panicking, not quite yet, but we did have only today in which to pull this particular chestnut out of the fire. I did not want Lola to go to jail, not for a minute.

  Arturo and I had worked out our story on the drive into town from Ifigenia’s. We couldn’t exactly tell Carlita Carnal the whole truth, but we had to tell her something fairly close to the truth in order for her to be able to advise us on our next move.

  To begin with, we couldn’t tell her we were engaged in a life insurance scam, or in anything else illegal that might turn her against us. In addition, I couldn’t tell her I was Barry Lee, because Barry Lee’s spectacular death had been covered by local television, both channels. Carlita Carnal had probably even been the one to report it on RIG.

  So what could we say? I’m Garry Brine again, and I’m the movie producer, only based in New York, not LA. Lola Lee, the widow of Barry Lee, is my secretary, and I’ve just found out that, in her grief over the sudden horrible loss of her husband, she did a very dangerous and foolish thing, with her brother Arturo’s help. I’m fond of Lola, and I want to keep her as my secretary, so I’ve come down to undo the damage, if possible.

  It seems that Lola and Arturo have another brother, Martin, younger than them, and Lola wanted Martin to come live with her in the States until she got over her bereavement. Martin was willing to go, but he unfortunately had a drug-transporting conviction in his irresponsible youth — he’s perfectly legitimate now, scared straight by that one fall — and he’s banned from the United States.

  So what Arturo did, to help Lola out, was go get a copy of the birth certificate of another of their brothers, Felicio, who’d died young. They meant to get Martin new identification as Felicio, who of course had no bad record. But now it turns out the American immigration service found out about the scheme somehow, and they’ve sent an investigator down, and tomorrow he’s going to the Hall of Records to compare death certificates in the Tobón family with recent applications for birth certificates. If he finds the request for Felicio’s birth certificate, and the death certificate, he’ll have the proof he needs.

  Arturo is safe, because he’s here in Guerrera and doesn’t plan to go anywhere, but Lola’s in custody in New York. If one or another of those documents isn’t removed from the files, they’ll charge her with a crime and put her in prison. So — to save a poor grieving widow, who didn’t mean to do anything wrong, from a life behind bars — we need to know what the physical situation is at the Hall of Records and how to get our hands on one of those papers and make it disappear.

  I could hardly wait for Carlita Carnal to get here, so we could try the story on her and see how it would fly. Well, I could hardly wait anyway.

  But I had to wait anyway, because it was twenty after eleven before she walked in the cafe door. When she did, I knew immediately that’s who she must be. Her hair was blond and nailed in place, her face was clear and attractive and generic, and she strode with great self-confidence. Her matching skirt and jacket were peach and very tailored, her blouse was white, her jewelry was small gold earrings, a slim gold watch, and one string of pearls. Her shoulder bag was a huge bulging leather briefcase that bounced on her hip and looked as though it must weight a hundred pounds, more filing cabinet than purse.

  She paused just inside the door to look around the room, and everybody in the room looked back at her. Arturo stood at our table, so I stood too. She nodded and crossed the room to us, and everybody else went back to their food and drink and conversations.

  “Artie,” she said, when she arrived, and offered a smile and her cheek for an air kiss. This was someone else Arturo was not going to bear hug: not twice, anyway.

  Arturo gestured to me and said, “This is Gary Brine from New York.”

  She gave me a metallic smile and her bright-eyed look and said, “How are you?” She had no accent at all, like Lola.

  “I’m fine,” I lied. “Sit down. Thank you for coming.”

  We all sat, and Carlita Carnal said, “When Ifigenia calls, it’s always some wonderful dramatic adventure.”

  “There, see?” Arturo said to me. “Dramatic. I told you.”

  Carlita leaned her bag against her chair leg and said, “Somebody’s in trouble, I take it. You, Artie?”

  “No, my sister,” Arturo said, and started the story, and I added a detail or two as he went along. She nodded, remembering the death of the American Barry Lee; she did remember there was a beautiful widow, Lola, but hadn’t realized she was Arturo’s sister.

  Arturo went through the rest of the story, and Carlita watched him, almost without blinking, smiling sometimes, nodding her head sometimes, never interrupting. Then he was finished, and she nodded and said, “Okay. You got an application for a birth certificate in the records, and you need it out.”

  I said, “Or the death certificate. Either one.”

  “Well, forget the death certificate,” she told me. “At that time, thirty years ago, the deaths were recorded in big ledger books, sixty-two lines, sixty-two deaths on a page. When you want a death certificate, they go look in the book, copy down what’s there, fill out a form for you. You can’t take one line out of sixty-two lines out of one page of a great big book.”

  “Then the birth certificate,” I said. “The application.”

  “That should be easier,” she said. “That’s just Artie’s written application, in the file.” She smiled at me and said, “Now, the story he told me doesn’t hold up. I hope you know that.”

  I looked at her. “It doesn’t?”

  “No. Things don’t work that way. We don’t have to go through the details, do we?”

  “Not on my account,” I said.

  She looked at Arturo. “Artie,” she said, “I know you’re not a bad guy, so let’s just say you need this piece of paper for whatever reason, and you’d like to know could I help.”

  “That’s it,” Arturo said. He acted humble before her, and I felt pretty much the same way myself.

  She looked back at me. “So it isn’t really bad,’’ she said, “but it’s illegal.”

  I cleared my throat. She raised a well-shaped eyebrow at me. Her eyes were large, hazel, with large clear whites. She had a very intense gaze. I decided not to speak.

  The eyebrow lowered. She said, “I’ll make you a deal. Okay?”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “I’ll see what I can do to help you,” she told me, “and then, if you get caught — not because of me, I won’t get in your way — but just in case, if you get caught, you don’t speak to any reporter from anywhere in the media, not American, nobody, until you talk to me. First interview. Okay?”

  “There’s nothing to get caught about, I—”

  “Is it okay?”

  Arturo said, “It’s okay.”

  I said, “Sure, it’s okay, ‘cause it can’t happen.”

  “That’s great,” she said. “So if you don’t get caught, once it’s all over and you’re safe, you’ll tell me all about it. Exclusive. Deal?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “No problem at all.”

  “And you buy me lunch today,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Here?”

  “No, it’s too early,” she said, looking
at her watch. “And not here anyway. And I’ve got appointments. Artie, I’ll meet you two at Carla Fong’s as close to twelve-thirty as I can make it.”

  “We’ll be there,” I said.

  Arturo said, “Thank you, Carlita.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” she said, gathering up her huge shoulder bag and getting to her feet. “But when it’s time to thank me, I’m gonna want enthusiasm. See ya, fellas.”

  And she marched on out of there.

  37

  There are Chinese restaurants all over the world, but in each part of the world they’re a little different, altered by local tastes. In Guerrera, the local taste runs heavily to jalapeño peppers, so in that country, when the Chinese menu describes a dish as “hot and spicy,” it means something even more dangerous than the same dish in the States.

  In Guerrera, it is generally agreed that the finest Chinese restaurant is Carla Fong’s, on Avenida de Doce de Julio in San Cristobal. Mrs. Fong is not herself Chinese; she is Guerreran, and she runs the front of the house from her seat at the cash register. Her husband, Fong Fang, is the chef, and a good one. The place is simple and clean, mostly Formica, with exotic travel posters on the walls, mainly not Chinese. There’s Mount Fuji over there, next to the Taj Mahal.

  Arturo and I got to Carla Fong’s a few minutes early, having phoned for a reservation, and the place was quite full. I would guess most of them were lawyers and a few were shoppers. There were no tourists. Tourists don’t go to South America to eat in Chinese restaurants, no matter how good they are.

  Arturo had explained, when he’d made the reservation, that we would be lunching with Carlita Carnal, a local celebrity, so he’d asked for a quiet corner table, and our hostess, Mrs. Fong’s daughter, who looked Chinese but was named Tiffany, smilingly showed us to a table near the back that was partly shielded from the rest of the diners by a Chinese screen crawling with ferocious dragons.

  Carla Fong’s was the only place I knew of in Guerrera where you could drink Tsingdao, the very good Chinese beer. We ordered two from Tiffany, she went away, and I said again, as I’d been saying for the last hour, “I’m still worried.”

  Arturo, as he’d been doing for the last hour, tried to reassure me, saying, “You can trust Carlita. She won’t turn us in.”

  But that wasn’t what I was worried about. I had thought Arturo and I had been very clever in our cover story, yet Carlita Carnal had seen through it as though it were plate glass. Were all our cover stories that stupid and obvious? Had nobody in Rancio believed I was a deaf mute? Had the good folk of Sabanon snickered behind their hands at the idea of my vow of silence?

  To put it in a nutshell, which I was afraid to voice out loud, was I not good enough for the whole original scheme? Was insurance fraud, after all, beyond my capabilities? I was suffering from massive doubt and a deeply lowered self-esteem. When I contemplated myself, all I could see were inadequacies and failings. He isn’t up to it, a tiny voice kept whispering at my inner ear.

  I sighed. Arturo looked concerned. He said, “Hermano, what we got to do is not worry. What we got to do is plan.”

  “I know. You’re right.”

  “Carlita’s gonna come through for us,” he said. “So I been thinkin’, you know? And I think what we do, we go in there, in the building, late this afternoon.”

  “We let it go that long?”

  “No, wait now,” he said, and Tiffany brought our beers and three menus and went away. We drank beer from the bottle and Arturo said, “What I think we do, we get like a map from Carlita, like what hall we go down, what door, where the file cabinets are, that kinda thing.”

  “Probably,” I said. “She’ll probably be able to do that.”

  “So we go in late this afternoon,” he said. “With sandwiches.”

  I put my bottle on the table. “Sandwiches?”

  “Because what we gonna do, we’re gonna hide in the men’s room, see?” he said. “When they shut down for the night. Then, real late, we go there, to the files, and we get the paper, and then we find someplace we can sleep awhile, and then we go back in the men’s room, and come out when they open the place in the morning.”

  “So there’s no break-in,” I said.

  “You got it,” he told me. “No break-in, so nobody’s suspicious.”

  “What if we oversleep?”

  “We’ll buy a little alarm clock,” he said. “And the sandwiches.”

  I said, “And the quesillo.”

  He gaped at me. “What? That Ifigenia give you? How you gonna carry that, man?”

  “We’ll get a little box,” I said.

  “Naw, forget about it, forget the quesillo.”

  I said, “I’m not forgetting it, Arturo, and you’re not getting it from me. I’ll get a little box, and we’ll carry it in with us, with the sandwiches and the alarm clock.”

  “But no beer,” he said, and drank some beer. “They got water fountains there, we’ll just do water.”

  “That sounds good,” I agreed, and Tiffany came around the screen again, this time escorting Carlita Carnal.

  “Hi, guys,” she said. She took her seat, thudded her shoulder bag onto the floor beside her chair, and looked at our beer bottles. “I love that stuff,” she said, “but I can’t drink it. I’ve got to watch my figure.”

  “Everybody watches your figure, Carlita,” Arturo said.

  “Right,” Carlita said, dismissing that pleasantry. Reaching for her menu, she said, “Have you two picked yet?”

  “Not yet,” I said, and opened my own menu.

  Arturo said, “Carlita, how’d it go?”

  “Oh, fine, fine,” she said, airy as an éclair. “Lunch first, I’m starved.”

  I said, “You know this place, do you?” Because, though I’d been there several times, I thought it best to pretend I didn’t know it.

  She said, “Do you want me to order for you?”

  “I’d love it.”

  “Smart man. How about you, Artie?”

  “Sure,” Arturo said.

  Tiffany reappeared then, with a bottle of local seltzer for Carlita, complete with glass. She put them down and took out her little pad and pen, and Carlita walked Arturo and me through the menu, helping us choose. She was clearly very knowledgeable, much more than me.

  Tiffany went away, and Arturo said, “Just tell us, Carlita. Do you know how we can get it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I really can’t talk all that stuff on an empty stomach. Is Ifigenia still suing that publisher in Venezuela?”

  Arturo grinned. “You know I can’t talk about that,” he said.

  “It was worth a try,” she said, and looked at me. “Your first time in Guerrera?”

  “Yes,” I said. Unfortunately, at the same moment, Arturo said, “No, he—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, into her grin. “I was thinking about the restaurant, first time in the restaurant. No, I’ve been in Guerrera several times. I was at Lola’s wedding.” Looking at the abashed Arturo, I said, “How long ago was that, Arturo?”

  “Fourteen years,” he said. “I remember you there.”

  “Before my time,” Carlita said, and Tiffany arrived with a pot of tea and little handleless cups. Now all I need, I thought, is for Tiffany to recognize me as an old customer, though she’s never recognized me before.

  Nor this time. She went away and came back with food, and then she came back with more food. It was all very good, as expected, and we didn’t talk again until we’d finished every last bit of it.

  My fortune cookie was in Spanish. I handed it to Carlita, saying, “How’m I doing?”

  She looked at the fortune, then smiled at me. “It says, ‘You will be rescued by a beautiful woman.’”

  “Good,” I said, thinking of Luz but knowing that isn’t what she meant. In fact, knowing that wasn’t what the fortune had said. “I’ve been wanting to be rescued by a beautiful woman,” I said.

  Arturo said, “Carlita, now will you tell us? And
maybe draw a map, where we go?”

  “I’ll tell you about it,” she said, and finished her tea. “I know the clerks there, naturally,” she said. “So I went in and told them a story, some research I was doing, not about those records but property records I know are kept nearby. I said I just wanted to look through them for a while, and they’re used to me there, so they left me alone.”

  She bent down to her shoulder bag, found what she wanted in it immediately, and pulled out a letter-size envelope, which she tossed on the table in front of Arturo. “So I got it,” she said.

  I gaped at the envelope, and so did Arturo. Then he picked it up and opened it, while I said, “That’s it? You already got it?”

  “Well, I was there,” she said, “and it was easy. Easier for me than for you.”

  Arturo had taken the form out of the envelope. He looked at it, wide-eyed, then folded it and put it back in the envelope. He folded the envelope and put it in his pants pocket. Then he looked at me and started to laugh.

  So I started to laugh. Then Carlita started to laugh. Then Arturo lunged toward her, as though he were going to give her that bear hug after all, and she pulled back, still laughing, hands up defensively as she said the Spanish equivalent of Down, boy, down.

  We gradually stopped laughing. I said, “And it was going to be so hard.”

  Arturo said, “We had it all plotted out.”

  “The whole caper,” I said. “Carlita, I feel like hugging you myself, and you know us cold Northerners.”

  “I know all about you cold Northerners,” she said, with amused skepticism.

  Arturo said, “Why you didn’t tell us?”

  “I thought it would be more fun,” she explained, “if we ate first, so I could have my scoop a little longer.”

  “I don’t even mind,” I said. “This is wonderful.”

  “Good. And thanks for lunch.” She reached for the strap of her shoulder bag. “I’m off.” She stood, shrugging the shoulder bag into place, and pointed at me to say, “And remember the deal. If they get you, I’m the exclusive.”