Brass Go-Between

by Ross Thomas

  “All right,” I said. “Where’s Mbwato?”

  “Just down the street. We had quite some difficulty in finding a place to park.”

  I turned and the young black man turned with me, his raincoat-covered arm still aimed at my left kidney. “How did you know I was here?”

  “In the George Building? We observed you going in; we assumed that you would be coming out.”

  “You followed me from the hotel then?”

  “Yes, Mr. St. Ives, we did.”

  The car was an appropriately black seven-passenger Cadillac that, according to the license number, had been rented for the occasion. The tall young man opened the rear door for me and I climbed in. Mbwato was seated in the back, making the car look smaller than it was, and another black man was behind the wheel. The one with the raincoat walked around the car and got in beside the driver.

  “Mr. St. Ives,” Mbwato said in his bass voice which sounded as though it had started somewhere down near the subway. “What a distinct pleasure to see you again. Where can we drop you?”

  “My hotel would be nice.”

  “Of course. Mr. St. Ives’ hotel,” he said to the driver. Mbwato, really dwarfing the rear of the Cadillac, wore a different suit this time, a dark green one with brass buttons on its vest, a white shirt with a widespread collar and a paisley tie. Everything fitted admirably and for all I knew he may have been patronizing Myron Greene’s tailor.

  “Why?” I said.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Why the gunpoint invitation?”

  “Gunpoint?” he said. “There was no gun.”

  “Your friend in the front seat said there was.”

  Mbwato chuckled and sounded like an amused bullfrog. “Did Mr. Ulado tell you that he had a gun?”

  “He did.”

  Mr. Ulado turned in his seat and smiled at me. He held up a fountain pen and winked. “This was the gun, Mr. St. Ives. I apologize for my method of persuasion, but Mr. Mbwato did so much wish to have this chat with you.”

  “It’s really my fault,” Mbwato said. “I urged Mr. Ulado to make the invitation as convincing as possible. He must have been carried away.”

  “He did fine,” I said, and leaned back in the seat and stared out at the traffic. We rode in silence for a while and when I turned I saw that Mr. Ulado was gazing straight ahead while Mbwato was staring out of his window at whatever there was to see at 38th Street and Third Avenue. “The persons who have the shield have been in touch with you by now, I presume,” he said, still looking out of the window.

  “Yes.”

  “I scarcely think that you would care to tell me what they have proposed?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t tell you that.”

  He turned from the window. “I didn’t think that you would—or could, I suppose I should say. Nevertheless, I’m sure that you understand that I have to ask.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “I have exhausted all possibilities in Washington,” he said.

  “Possibilities for what?”

  “For recognition of Komporeen by your country. You’ve probably noticed the rather bizarre clothing that Mr. Ulado and I are wearing. It would be most difficult not to notice.”

  “I’ve noticed,” I said.

  “Yes. Well, we grew weary of waiting in the outer offices of your State Department in our conservative lounge suits, virtually ignored not only by your officials with whom we had appointments, but also by their clerks. Native dress would have been far more appropriate (especially in that ghastly Washington weather), but it was unobtainable so we purchased these rather garish garments off the peg.”

  “It’s a nice fit,” I said.

  Mbwato smiled. “They served their purpose. Rather than have us clutter up their reception rooms, your State Department officials no longer kept us waiting. Some of them were quite decent chaps, in fact. But it really made no difference. Their policy is set, their minds are closed, or at least made up. We even showed a motion-picture film to one of them, an assistant under-secretary of State for African Affairs.”

  “Littman Cox?” I said.

  “Yes. Littman Cox. Do you know him?”

  “No. I’ve just heard of him.”

  “I see. We had films flown in from Komporeen and in truth, Mr. St. Ives, they almost made me physically ill. They were films of our children as they literally starved to death before one’s eyes. One child, a seven-year-old boy, died while the camera recorded it. He died of starvation while we watched. He starved because of the Jandolaean blockade. I thought that surely this would have some impact.”

  “Did it?”

  Mbwato shook his head slowly from side to side and his eyes seemed to grow infinitely sad. “Your Mr. Cox said that it was terrible, but that there was nothing he could do. Then he thanked us for what he described as a ‘most instructive morning’ and excused himself to keep an important luncheon date. I must say that I found him rather ineffectual.”

  “I’ve heard him called worse,” I said, remembering Myron Greene’s comment. “But you didn’t stop with an assistant under-secretary of State, did you? He has about as much influence as I do.”

  “No,” Mbwato said. “We didn’t stop with Mr. Cox. We ended with him. He was at the tail of what has proved to be a rather long line. In the two months that Mr. Ulado and I have been in the States—planning the theft of the shield, if all else failed—we have seen scores of your senators and congressmen, the secretaries of your Departments of State and Agriculture and Defense. We have even spent an hour with your Vice-President, and all have been personally sympathetic, but none has been encouraging. Our one port remains blockaded. The British have provided the Jandolaeans with radar-guided antiaircraft weaponry so that it is impossible to fly in supplies except at great risk which only a few pilots are willing to take.”

  Ulado had turned in the front seat and was following the conversation closely, nodding his head in sharp little jerks when he felt that Mbwato had made a telling point. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish there was something I could do. But there isn’t.”

  Mbwato took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was more than a sigh: it seemed to be the cautious physical response of a man who has something important to say, but who also knows that his anger and rage might make it come out all wrong. “There is something you can do, Mr. St. Ives. There is indeed. You can return the shield of Komporeen to us once it is in your possession. I have been authorized to raise your fee to seventy-five thousand dollars.” There was no smile this time.

  I shook my head. “I can’t do that; you know I can’t.”

  The four weeks of the Washington run-around seemed to bubble and then boil over. Mbwato fought it. I could see the muscles in his large face working as he tried to recover his poise, but it was no use. When he spoke it came out as a deep roar. I thought it was the pained outcry of a man to whose desperate need too many persons had already said no.

  “Can’t! Can’t, you say. Goddamn it, man, that shield can save a country, a nation, a people, and you sit there and say ‘I can’t do that.’ Let me tell you about starvation, St. Ives. Let me tell you what it’s already done to more than 800,000 children in my country. During the first few days they have stomach cramps, horrible, intense pain. Then the stomach bloats while it shrinks in size. They cry for the first few days. They cry and they eat anything that will stop the horrible pain. They eat mud and grass and straw and chalk. Anything. And then they grow weaker, so weak that they can no longer cry, only whimper, and their breath begins to stink and smell like acetone because they’re burning up their fat and they have no carbohydrates to replace it. Then, after this, they sink into lethargy and at least they can sleep. That’s all they have left. Sleep and death. The proteins are gone now and their stomachs are distended and the degeneration of the kidneys and the liver sets in. If they’re lucky, they’ll catch a disease which they can’t fight and which will finish them off quickly. Even a slight infection from a
cut or a scratch will do it. If they don’t contract a disease or develop an infection, they just die—slowly and painfully. How much—how much do you want, St. Ives, to keep my nation’s children alive? A hundred thousand? Is that your price? All right. I’ll increase it to one hundred thousand. It’s cheap really. With the shield we can hold out until recognition comes from France and Germany, and with the recognition will come food, and perhaps only another hundred thousand or so children will starve instead of another five hundred or seven hundred thousand. It’s only a piece of brass to you, St. Ives. To my country, it’s life itself.”

  Mbwato slumped back against the seat. He looked spent and utterly weary. I turned my head and stared out the window of the car at the well-fed pedestrians. Somehow they all seemed fat, almost blubbery. I didn’t look at Mbwato when I spoke and I could feel the flush rising in my face.

  “What you ask is impossible,” I said, but it didn’t seem to be me who was talking. It was some totally rational stranger. I didn’t much care for him. “You’re asking me to take a quarter of a million dollars of other people’s money,” the Rational Stranger said, “and turn it over to a gang of thieves. Then I’m to hand the shield over to you while you slip me a hundred thousand or seventy-five thousand under the table. That turns me into a thief, of course, and that’s why I’m not going to do it. Because I’d get caught and go to jail and I don’t want to go to jail. Not for you. Not for Komporeen. Not even for the kids that are starving to death. It’s just not in me—do you understand? I just can’t do it.” The Rational Stranger hurried on. “All I can suggest is that you get the shield back from whoever stole it. Get it back anyway you can. Buy it back or steal it back. I don’t care which. But I won’t help you do that either.”

  I looked at Mbwato then and found that he was staring at me. There was dislike in his gaze; not hatred, just dislike. And there was also bitter contempt, enough to make the flush in my face start up again. But he was calm now and when he spoke his voice was as cold and as hard as frosted chrome. “Is it that you fear your reputation as a go-between will suffer, Mr. St. Ives? Let me assure you that you won’t suffer nearly the agony that one child in Komporeen suffers as he starves to death.”

  The Cadillac had drawn up in front of my hotel, but I made no move to get out. Ulado was still turned in the front seat and his head jerked in agreement with Mbwato’s last statement.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just can’t do it. I told you why and you’ll simply have to accept it. I’m sorry.” I reached for the handle of the door, but turned and looked at Mbwato again. He was staring at me and there was a half-smile on his face. Suddenly it became a full smile, that dazzling white-on-black smile that threatened to light up the world. He reached over and slapped me on the knee. “Don’t be sorry, Mr. St. Ives. Don’t ever be sorry about anything that you lack the courage to attempt, otherwise you will go through life with a burden of guilt that eventually will crush you.”

  “All right,” I said, and again reached for the handle of the door.

  “We’ll be seeing more of each other,” Mbwato said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then you are mistaken.”

  “All right,” I said again.

  “Just one thing that struck me,” he said.

  “What?”

  “When you were describing why you could not return the shield to us. It sounded as though your excuses were coming from the lips of one of your minor State Department officials.” He smiled broadly as I opened the door and got out. “Good-by,” he said. I merely nodded and watched the car as it drew away from the curb. Considering what Mbwato said he had just been through in Washington, he could probably think of no more cutting remark for a parting insult. And it may have been that there wasn’t one.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE RATIONAL STRANGER TOOK the elevator up to his ninth-floor de luxe efficiency, fetched a bottle of Scotch down from the cabinet above the Pullman sink, and poured himself a jumbo drink in the vain hope that it would help to erase the memory of the hopelessness and pain that seemed to have flickered in the eyes of Conception Mbwato.

  It didn’t, of course. It merely transformed the Rational Stranger into the Sententious Slob who stood by the window and looked down at the street while mouthing to himself such pithy aphorisms as “the master of action oft becomes the servant of regret” and “the fool thinks with his heart; the wise man with his mind.” They weren’t very good aphorisms, and the Scotch didn’t help any, so I picked up the Manhattan directory and looked up the number and address of Frank Spellacy. There was only one Spellacy in the book and he had a Park Avenue address, which could mean something or nothing at all. I dialed the number and a man’s voice answered on the second ring with “Mesa Verde Estates.”

  “Mr. Spellacy, please.”

  “This is Mr. Spellacy,” the voice said, a pleasant, cheerful voice that seemed to be larded with great, fat streaks of sincerity. “My secretary’s just stepped out for the institutional coffee break.” He chuckled about that, as if he were gently tolerant of most of the world’s foibles. “Now how can I help you?”

  “I’d like to talk to you,” I said. “This afternoon. My name’s St. Ives. Philip St. Ives.”

  There was a moment’s silence; perhaps half a moment, only a beat really, and then Spellacy’s voice came over the phone again, still exuding its confidence, but tinged with a touch of regret. “I was just glancing at my appointment book, Mr. St. Ives, and it seems that I’m rather tied up this afternoon with a couple of important conferences. Perhaps we could make it later in the week—Friday would be good. Yes. Say Friday afternoon at three?”

  “No. Friday at three’s no good. This afternoon at four is fine.”

  “I just told you—”

  “I know what you told me. A couple of important conferences. Postpone them.”

  “Look, Mr. St. John—”

  “Ives,” I said. “St. Ives.”

  “Ives then. I’m not in the habit of having strangers call me up and tell me how to run my business.” He managed to get some real indignation into that.

  “But I’m not exactly a stranger, am I? I believe we have some mutual friends. We have the art dealer, Mr. Albert Shippo, and that man about town, the noted sportsman, Mr. Johnny Parisi. In fact, I had dinner with Johnny just last night.”

  “You mention my name?” Spellacy said, and all the cheerfulness and goodwill were gone.

  “That’s something I thought we might talk about. This afternoon.”

  There was another pause, this time a long one, and then Spellacy said, “All right. Four o’clock. Here.”

  “At four,” I said, and hung up.

  I was boiling some water for a cup of tea and slicing up some cucumbers for a sandwich when I heard the knock at the door. The tomato soup and crackers hadn’t been enough and I was hungry again. I had been half watching some English film on TV where the principals sat around drinking tea and eating cucumber sandwiches, which I happen to like, and it had provoked my appetite, but then I’m highly susceptible to fictional portrayals of food, whether written or filmed. In my youth the passages that Thomas Wolfe wrote about food had made me ravenous. And once, while reading Tom Lea’s The Brave Bulls, I had put the book down, left my apartment, and walked four miles to find a Spanish-American store that sold canned tortillas and frijoles. Now I found myself craving a cucumber sandwich. I laid the knife on the minuscule drainboard, went to the door, and opened it. Lieutenant Kenneth Ogden of vice stood there, wearing one of his three-hundred-dollar suits and a smile that only made him look a little less angry than usual.

  “Would you like a cucumber sandwich?” I said.

  “A what?”

  “A cucumber sandwich. Come on in.”

  He came in. “The trouble with you, St. Ives, is that you live alone. It’s not natural. It’s against nature and God.”

  “If you don’t want a cucumber sandwich, would you like a drink? I’ve got Scotch, vodka, a
nd bourbon.”

  “Bourbon,” Ogden said. “And water.”

  I mixed him a bourbon and water and then went back to my sandwich. I cut the crusts off the bread, spread butter on both pieces, placed the cucumbers carefully on one slice, covered it with the other, and then cut it diagonally both ways into four parts—just like an old maid expecting an afternoon call from the vicar.

  Ogden stood to one side and watched me work. I glanced at him once and there didn’t seem to be any admiration in his gaze. I found the tea bags and placed one in a cup and poured it full of boiling water. When it had steeped enough I carried it and the cucumber sandwich over to my favorite chair and lowered myself into it carefully, holding the cup of tea in one hand, the cucumber sandwich in the other.

  “You oughta get married again,” he said. “Or get a job. Cucumber sandwiches at half-past two in the afternoon and the goddamned TV set on along with it. Christ.” He moved over to the set and switched it off. “You’re coming apart, St. Ives. Your seams are splitting.”

  “I like cucumbers,” I said. “I also like tea and cucumber sandwiches.” I took a bite and chewed it slowly. It didn’t taste as good as I’d thought it would. If I could have eaten it alone while watching the actors in the English film eat their sandwiches, it probably would have tasted all right.

  “What’s on your mind?” I said.

  Ogden took a small swallow of his drink. “That’s good bourbon,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I don’t drink bourbon. It’s another one of my idiosyncrasies probably brought about by a monklike existence.”

  Ogden quit wandering around the room and sat in a chair opposite me. Although pushing fifty or five years past it, he wore his clothes well, but they did nothing to disguise the gray in his short-cropped hair or the lines in his face, all of which seemed to turn down, as if in constant disapproval. It was an oblong face, almost as wide at the chin as it was at the forehead. It was also a tough face, a hard one, which had heard all the lies and witnessed all the depravity that New York had to offer. His Captain Easy nose, a little red at the tip, snuffled every few minutes as if he had just smelled something rotten but couldn’t quite tell what it was. The eyes that looked at me over the rim of his glass were blue with all the color and warmth of a dreary day in February.