Backup Men mm-3

by Ross Thomas

  “What?” the taller of the two said.

  “What happens after forty-eight hours if they’re not out of the way?”

  They rose together as if they had practiced it. Maybe they had. The one with the snub nose looked down at me and his blue eyes seemed to drop far below freezing. “What happens?” he said. “Anything that’s necessary. Tell him that. Anything that’s necessary.”

  I watched them leave while I finished my Scotch. The cocktail waitress came over and let me pay for the drinks. Back in the waiting room I found Padillo standing with his back to the wall about ten feet from the king and Scales.

  “What did they want?” he said.

  “They want Kragstein and Gitner dead within forty-eight hours,” I said. “Especially Gitner.”

  Padillo looked at me and then past me, through the glass windows that faced west toward the mountains which the smog seemed to have soiled. “It’s not going to take that long,” he said either to himself or to the mountains. From the way he said it, I was almost glad that he wasn’t talking to me.

  16

  WE DROVE all night and the king didn’t get to see much of California until we got to San Jose at dawn. But he had had a good look at the Grand Canyon on our way to Los Angeles from Denver because the United Airlines pilot had circled it once and had even given a brief little lecture on its geological formation which the king seemed to find fascinating. As for the canyon itself, the king went along with everybody else and called it magnificent.

  We rented a Ford Galaxie at the Los Angeles airport and Padillo drove, claiming that he knew the town better than I. But it was still nearly dark before we got to Ventura because he read a sign wrong and landed us on the Santa Monica freeway which forced us to take Alternate 101 through Malibu and Topanga Beach. Southern California to me had always been lollipop land but the route made the king happy since it let him look at the ocean.

  We had a sandwich on the other side of Santa Barbara along with a flat left front tire and together they killed an hour and a half. After that Padillo and I switched off on the driving, stopping for coffee every hour or so, not going much over sixty, and talking hardly at all. After Santa Barbara the king and Scales slept most of the way.

  I suppose everybody has to have a home town and San Francisco was mine although I don’t think that we cared too much for each other anymore. I had been born there in the old French Hospital at Sixth and Geary and I had grown up in the Richmond District in a middle-class neighborhood which then had a large number of Russian families. I assume that it still does. We had lived on Twenty-sixth Avenue about two blocks north of Golden Gate Park. Fredl and I had once spent a week in the Bay area and I had shown her the house and the neighborhood where I had lived until I got out of George Washington High School and went into the Army, but all she had said was, “It doesn’t look much like you, does it?”

  I decided that over the years both the city and I have changed, perhaps neither of us for the better. San Francisco reminds me of nothing so much as a middle-aged hooker relying solely on technique now that her looks have gone. But I suspect that my real antagonism stems from being taken for a tourist in my own home town. There’s nothing much worse than that.

  Padillo was awake now as were the king and Scales. The Freeway isn’t the most scenic approach to San Francisco, but when we neared the Ninth Street Civic Center exit, the two in the back seat got their first glimpse of the Bay Bridge on their right and later they got a look at Golden Gate Bridge, neither of which led anywhere that I wanted to go.

  “I used to come up here from L.A. on weekends sometimes,” Padillo said. “I knew a girl who lived on Russian Hill. She got mad when I called it Frisco.”

  “The natives have a lot of civic pride,” I said.

  “She was from New Orleans.”

  Padillo wanted a motel so we checked into one called the Bay View Lodge at Van Ness and Washington which, because of its in-town location, offered as expensive lodgings as we could hope to find. We got two double rooms and after Padillo made sure that the king and Scales were safely tucked away in theirs and that room service would bring them some breakfast he joined me in our room where I lay on the bed, the telephone to my ear, ordering our own breakfast which consisted of scrambled eggs, ham, rye toast, a quart or so of coffee, and two double Bloody Marys which the young lady on the other end of the telephone didn’t seem to think that I really wanted at seven fifteen in the morning. I eventually won her consent, if not her approval.

  Padillo took the automatic from his waistband and slipped it under the pillow before lying down on the other bed. He folded his arms beneath his head and stared at the ceiling. I lit a cigarette, which tasted foul, and blew some smoke at the spot on the ceiling that Padillo stared at.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “First we get some sleep.”

  “Have we got time for that?”

  “We’ll take it.”

  “And then.”

  “Then I locate Wanda and find out where she wants those two delivered and when.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “What’s the most fashionable hotel in town, the Fairmont?”

  I thought a moment. “I think it’s a toss-up between that and the St. Francis.”

  “Then I won’t have any trouble finding Wanda.”

  “Neither will Kragstein and Gitner.”

  “I’m counting on it,” Padillo said.

  It was Rhododendron Week in Union Square across from the St. Francis and the bronze figure of Victory, perched on its ten-story granite shaft, rose out of a calm sea of showy blooms that were purple and pink and white. I remembered that the city always tried to keep Union Square full of flowers, but during Rhododendron Week in April they carted in tubs of them until the whole thing looked as if it were drenched with blossoms. The figure of Victory commemorates a win for our side in Southeast Asia, but it’s for when Dewey smashed the Spanish Fleet in Manila Bay which means that it’s nothing to toss your hat up in the air about now.

  They built the St. Francis in 1907 right after the earthquake and over the years it has carefully preserved its neoRenaissance elegance. With the prices that it charges it can afford to. Wanda Gothar had a two-room suite on the seventh floor, but except for some flowers that the hotel must have supplied, the suite looked just as impersonal and unoccupied as did her room at the Hay-Adams in Washington. I decided that she probably made a hit with hotel maids.

  “You’ll want a drink, of course,” she said.

  “If it’s no bother,” I said, moving to the window to see whether the suite had something of a view. It faced on the square and she could look down at the lake of rhododendrons to her heart’s content. The flowers appeared even gaudier from seven floors up, but it was a cheerful kind of flashiness that nobody could really object to.

  “Padillo mentioned that you had trouble in New York,” she said as she came back into the living room, carrying two drinks. She handed me one of them. “He said you could tell me about it.”

  I tasted my drink. It was Scotch and water. “They tried twice,” I said. “The second time they almost made it. Gitner killed the woman whose apartment we were using. She was a good friend of Padillo’s.”

  “Is he upset? Oh, I don’t mean upset. He wouldn’t show it if he were. He wouldn’t know how. I meant to ask is it something personal with him now?”

  “He’s upset and it’s personal,” I said.

  She nodded and lowered herself to the edge of a divan that was upholstered in green and white stripes. She moved as she always did, with grace and poise, but with a hesitancy that I hadn’t noticed before, as if she were listening for inaudible stage directions. Perhaps from her brother.

  “He’ll go after Gitner, of course.”

  “It seems that way.”

  “And he’ll try to use the king as bait.”

  “He’ll use whatever’s on hand,” I said.

  “Yes. The king. Or you. Or me.”

  “
She was rather special to him.”

  “The woman in New York?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded before taking a sip of her drink. “I know what that can mean.”

  I could have taken her remark several ways, but I decided not to take it at all. “Padillo wants to know where and when you want them delivered.”

  She put her drink down, picked up a cigarette and lit it before I could move more than a foot or two from my spot by the window. I decided to sit down and chose a comfortable-looking lounge chair. Wanda Gothar smoked her cigarette for several moments before saying anything.

  “Padillo’s keeping watch, I assume.”

  “Yes.”

  “They wouldn’t like anything to go wrong.”

  “They?”

  “The oil companies.”

  “Which ones?”

  She told me and I felt like whistling my surprise. Instead I took another swallow of my drink. When most persons think of oil towns, they think of Dallas and Houston and Tulsa and perhaps Los Angeles. For some reason San Francisco isn’t regarded as one. But down where Mechanics Square used to be were two buildings, one twenty-two stories tall, the other twenty-nine, which housed two of the world’s largest oil companies, one of them founded by a skinny old man who had lived for almost a century and whose heirs are among the richest people in the world. The other oil company, almost as big, was established by a European banking family whose spare cash more than once has been used to shore up tottering governments. At last count, the company that was founded by the skinny old man had overseas operations in seventy countries. Its other claim to immortality was that it had launched the world’s first filling station in Seattle back in 1907. The company that the European banking family controlled operated in nearly as many foreign countries and I decided that if there was enough oil underneath the sands of Llaquah to make a joint venture attractive to both firms, then the king had seriously underpriced himself with his demand for five million dollars in earnest money. Five million to them was probably a half hour’s income on a slow day.

  “Which firm plays host?” I said.

  “The one on the north side of Bush Street,” she said. “It was what the meeting in Dallas was largely about. They both wanted the honor.”

  “What did they say when you told them that there was a large chance that the king wouldn’t make it to the ceremonies?”

  “They smiled,” she said. “They smiled and then they got a distant look in their eyes. It’s surprising how much alike those oil men look.”

  “What kind of smiles?” I said.

  “Polite smiles. Indifferent smiles. They may have been thinking about what kind of agreement they could make with Kassim’s successor. That oil isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Maybe they didn’t believe you,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Perhaps.”

  “When do they want the king there?”

  “Tomorrow morning at ten. The twenty-ninth floor.”

  “All right,” I said and rose. “Anything else?”

  “Tell Padillo that I’ll join you at six this evening.”

  “For an all-night vigil?”

  “Something like that.”

  “He’s expecting company.”

  “I know. Gitner and Kragstein.”

  “That doesn’t bother you?”

  “On the contrary, I look forward to it.”

  “Why? Because you think they killed your brother?”

  “Don’t you? Doesn’t Padillo?”

  “He hasn’t said.”

  “But you, Mr. McCorkle, what do you think?”

  “Just one thing,” I said. “But it’s not conjecture, it’s fact, and I don’t much like it because it still bothers me.”

  “What bothers you?”

  “That whoever killed your brother killed him in my living room.”

  A pale blue Pontiac sedan followed my taxi from the St. Francis to the Bay View Lodge Motel. There were two men in the Pontiac, but I didn’t recognize them, and they didn’t try to disguise the fact that they were following me, which was just as well because that was the way that Padillo had planned it earlier that afternoon.

  17

  PADILLO was still lying on the bed and still examining the ceiling when I entered the motel room.

  “You called it,” I said. “They picked me up just as I left the St. Francis.”

  “Gitner and Kragstein?” he asked, as if he expected me to say no.

  “Two I didn’t recognize. They were driving a Pontiac. A light blue one, if it makes any difference.”

  “What did Wanda say?”

  I told him all about the meeting that was scheduled for ten the next morning and as he listened he kept his eyes on the ceiling, not moving, rarely blinking, not even smoking. When I finally stopped talking, he sat up slowly, his hands still clasped behind his head, and then, with his legs fully extended, touched each elbow to his knees.

  “What’s that, your exercise for the year?”

  “I just wanted to see whether I could still do it.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “No,” he said and looked a little surprised. “Is it supposed to?”

  “Only those who deserve it—like me.”

  “She say anything else?”

  “Wanda?”

  He nodded, swung his feet off the bed, and rose.

  “Just that she’s joining us at six and that she’s convinced that Kragstein and Gitner killed her brother.”

  “That’s a theory anyway,” Padillo said as he reached under the pillow for his automatic. “She needs one.”

  “You’ve got your own, of course.”

  “I’m still working on it,” he said.

  We went next door where the king and Scales were watching a fifteen-year-old movie that seemed to be about the good times that could be had down on a subsistence farm. Scales switched it off when we came in and looked a little embarrassed. The king looked only disappointed.

  He also looked less like a king than ever. He was sprawled on one of the twin beds, wearing only slacks and a T-shirt. The T-shirt seemed fairly clean but it had a hole in its side. The king’s belly strained at the shirt and he was comforting himself with a giant-size Baby Ruth. Other than that he needed a shave he appeared to be as placid and content as ever and I had the feeling that he had all the makings of a first-class benevolent despot.

  Padillo had never cared much for preambles, so he began at the crux of things. “They’re going to try to kill you between now and ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” he said. The king choked on a mouthful of Baby Ruth, but recovered nicely. Scales, seated in a chair near the TV set, crossed his legs the other way to show that he was concerned.

  Now that he had their attention Padillo told them what Wanda Gothar had told me. When he was through he looked at the king and said, “I’m going to say it just one more time. If I were you, I’d ask for police protection. If you have some aversion to the local police, then I suggest that you request protection from the Secret Service or the FBI or even some other Federal agency. All it takes is a phone call. If you were really smart, you’d not only ask for that, but also for a cell in the city jail tonight.”

  The king bit off another bite from his candy bar, chewed it thoroughly, swallowed, and then said in a soft, reproachful voice, “The jail in Dallas did not afford much protection for the Oswald person, Mr. Padillo. Forgive me, but I have little faith in your jails or your police or your Mr. Herbert Hoover.”

  “J. Edgar,” Padillo said. “Herbert’s dead.”

  “Yes. J. Edgar.”

  “So you won’t change your mind?”

  The king shook his head. Stubbornly, I thought. “No, I will not change my mind. I have every confidence in you and Miss Gothar.” He paused and then added quickly, “And Mr. McCorkle, of course.” I decided that when Kassim became king, the diplomatic corps had suffered no great loss.

  “You agree with this, Scales?” Padillo said.

 
; “I think his Majesty’s point is well taken. Furthermore, Mr. Padillo, I feel that you and your colleagues have just been paid a great compliment—one that you will remember in years to come.”

  “Especially if he gets killed tonight,” Padillo said. He looked at his watch. “It’s five o’clock now. That means we have seventeen hours to go before the ceremony takes place. I don’t know when Kragstein and Gitner will try it. Maybe as soon as it gets dark. Or at three o’clock in the morning or even on the way down to the oil company. They may even try it more than once, but that seems unlikely if they want to avoid the cops. So I want neither of you to move out of this room between now and tomorrow morning. Your food will be brought to you by either McCorkle or me. You’re to answer the door to no one but us. You are not to answer the phone or to make any calls. If something happens, try to get to the bathroom and lock yourself in. That might give you a minute or two and that minute or two could make the difference between whether you’re dead or alive. If you have any questions, you’d better ask them now.”

  It had been a long speech for Padillo and both the king and Scales seemed to have followed it closely. When he was done, they looked at each other, and the king shook his head slightly.

  “We have no questions,” Scales said. “His Majesty’s safety is in your hands.”

  Padillo looked as though he wanted to say something, something rude, even nasty, but apparently thought better of it. He turned and moved to the door where he turned once again and looked back at the king. “I think—” he said and then stopped. Instead he pointed at the door. “Be sure to lock and bolt this after we’re gone.”

  When we were back in our own room I said, “What were you going to tell him before you changed your mind?”

  “That he was a damned fool. But you don’t tell kings that, do you?”

  “Not unless they are—but if they are, it doesn’t do any good.”

  Wanda Gothar arrived promptly at six, carrying a large dark brown leather purse and wearing shoes that matched, a dun-colored pantsuit that would have looked drab on anyone else, and a concerned expression.