Backup Men

by Ross Thomas

  The elevator in the tiled vestibule was large enough to carry two persons if one of them held his breath. I got in and studied the ancient controls and pushed enough buttons and slammed enough doors until the elevator finally gave a moan and grunt and started up to the seventh floor. It seemed like a long trip.

  I was looking for 7-C and it was at the end of a hall, guarded by a sturdy wooden door that had a sheet of heavy-gauge steel bolted onto it, a decorative touch peculiar to New York. I knocked and glanced at my watch. It was five minutes past seven. Before I could knock again, there was the sound of a bolt being drawn back and of some sturdy locks being disengaged. The door opened three inches and Padillo looked at me over the chain of the final lock.

  “The plumber couldn’t make it,” I said.

  “Jesus,” he said and closed the door to undo the chain. He opened it and I went in and found myself in the living room of someone who was crazy about maple. A few of the pieces were new, but most of them were old, at least a hundred years or so, and all of them were maple and looked as if they were waxed every other day whether they needed it or not. What wasn’t maple was giddy chintz if it were on a chair or a sofa or partially covering the windows. On the floor was hooked wool. It was all very quaint and just escaped being comfortable.

  “Plomondon said no,” Padillo said.

  “He said he wasn’t good enough anymore. Not good enough for Gitner anyway. He also said that he hopes you are.”

  “What are you puffing about? Doesn’t the elevator work?”

  “You can put the gun away,” I said.

  Padillo looked down at his right hand which was holding an automatic, a foreign make that I didn’t recognize. He stuck it in his waistband, a little to the left of his navel. It had always seemed like an uncomfortable spot to me, but he liked it and I had seen it jump into his hand from there in less than four-tenths of a second, so I no longer felt qualified to comment on its inconvenience.

  “I’m puffing, if you want to call it that, because I ran into a couple of guys down the street who wanted to beat up on me.”

  “Was it impulse or did they know you?”

  “They knew who I was. They picked me up in Washington at the airport. I thought I’d lost them, but they’re either smarter than I thought or I’m not as clever as well-meaning friends have led me to believe.”

  “Probably the latter,” Padillo said. “If you were even half smart, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be holding down your regular spot at the far end of the bar.”

  “Now that you’ve brought it up—”

  “Scotch or bourbon?”

  “Scotch.”

  Padillo disappeared into the kitchen that was just off the living room. I looked around some more. There were two closed doors and an open one that led to the bath. I assumed that the flat had two bedrooms. Padillo came back with the drinks and handed me one.

  “Where’s the king and the royal adviser?” I said.

  He nodded toward one of the closed doors. “In there. It’s got a one-inch iron bar across the door plus three other kinds of locks.”

  “Who lives here?”

  “A forty-year-old spinster who’s determined to maintain her virginity,” Padillo said. “She’s in Europe for a month or two. Wanda arranged for the place. I think the spinster is a distant cousin or something.”

  “Well, now that I’m here, what do you want me to do?”

  “Go home.”

  “I thought you needed a fair hand.”

  “I need a pro, not an amateur. Not even a gifted one.”

  “Offer me money and I can leave the amateur ranks.”

  “Look at you,” he said, shaking his head.

  “That’s a little hard to do without a mirror.”

  “You’re ten pounds overweight and most of it’s in your gut. You should’ve got glasses three years ago but you’re afraid that they’ll spoil your aquiline profile. You think hard exercise is the five blocks that you walk home each night if the weather’s just right. You’re up to nearly three packs a day, you’ve got a cough that sounds like the second cousin to emphysema, and if the booze hasn’t given you a hobnailed liver, it’s not because you didn’t go out for it. You’re a mess.”

  “You forgot to mention my gums,” I said. “I’m having a little trouble with them, too.”

  Padillo took a swallow of his drink. “What would you do with Amos Gitner?” he said. “He’s faster than I am and I doubt that he’s ever felt compunction and probably doesn’t even know what the word means. I’m not going to be the one who tells Fredl that it all happened so fast that you couldn’t possibly have suffered.”

  “I could sit on him,” I said. “Squash him flat.”

  “There’s that.”

  “Well, you need somebody and there aren’t many that you can call on anymore, are there?”

  He shook his head. “Not many. There never were really and most of them are dead now.”

  “Or scared.”

  “Not scared,” he said. “Just sensible. That’s something that no one could ever accuse you of.”

  “Do I go or stay?” I said. “You call it.”

  Padillo’s dark Spanish eyes appraised me for several moments and then he shook his head again, a little sadly, I thought, as if only sentiment prevented him from dispatching the faithful old spaniel now that his teeth were gone. “Well, Christ,” he said, “since you’re already here.”

  “You don’t know what this chance means to me.”

  “If it presents the opportunity to turn coward, take it.”

  “Your advice was always sound, if a little self-righteous.”

  “Cheap though,” Padillo said, put his drink down, and turned toward one of the closed doors. “You might as well meet the king.”

  “What do I call him, King, your Excellency, or just Peter Paul?”

  “Try Mr. Kassim, if ‘you’ doesn’t seem to fit. He’s supposed to be incognito.”

  “How does he like being king?”

  “If we can keep him alive, he may like it just fine.”

  11

  THE KING came out first. I didn’t think that he looked much like a king, but that’s another field in which my expertise is limited. He shook hands with me after Padillo introduced him as Mr. Kassim which I thought was a nice egalitarian touch. He said, “I am very pleased to make your acquaintance,” pronouncing each word without accent, other than the kind that you would pick up from an English tutor. He spoke as if he hadn’t used the language in quite a while and was trying it on again with some trepidation, like last summer’s suit.

  I was next introduced to Emory Scales, ex-tutor and now grand royal adviser to the Kingdom of Llaquah. He also shook hands with me and I felt that it was for the first and last time, but that’s the way a lot of Englishmen shake hands and I no longer think much about it.

  Scales was an elbow man, nearly always at Kassim’s right one, almost nudging it, but not quite as he bent slightly forward, his long, skinny face constantly turning this way and that, depending on who was doing the talking, the king or someone else. Scales moved his lips a little when the king spoke, much like a ventriloquist and his dummy. I decided that he was a royal adviser who took his duties seriously.

  They were an incongruous pair. The king himself was short, plump and totally bald at twenty-one. Either that or the monastery where he’d spent the last five years had a thing about shaved heads. His eyes jumped around almost constantly, as if seeking something comfortable and reassuring to look at and seldom finding it in other people’s faces. He smiled a lot, too, but I put that down to nervousness since his teeth were bad and not very rewarding to look at. Now that he was almost rich I thought that he might afford an inexpensive cap job or at least a toothbrush.

  Scales, even with his hovering posture, loomed over Kassim. If he had straightened up he would have been as tall as I and a lot slimmer. I judged him to be somewhere near fifty, a little seedy, a little worn, even a little sad. It may have been
his first and last chance at the big time and he was afraid that he would muff it. But then I always read too much into things.

  After we had shaken hands, Scales turned toward Padillo and said, “I thought that you said a Mr. Plomondon would be joining you.”

  “He couldn’t make it so I persuaded Mr. McCorkle to accept the assignment.” There was always that about Padillo—he lied beautifully.

  “You are a very big man,” Kassim said to me and let me have another look at his awful teeth.

  I didn’t see any reason to apologize for my size, only ten pounds of which could be blamed on self-indulgence, so I contented myself with an answering smile and a nod.

  “The bigger they are,” the king said carefully, “the harder they fall.” He beamed when he got it all out and then turned to Scales and said, “Is that not correct, Mr. Scales?”

  “It is the correct idiomatic expression, your Majesty, but scarcely appropriate for the occasion.”

  Kassim nodded his understanding and turned back to me. “I did not mean to offend, Mr. McCorkle. It is only that I have not spoken English in many years and I am trying to recall it. Have you had much experience in guardingbody?”

  “Bodyguarding,” Scales said, almost automatically, as if he’d been correcting Kassim for days.

  The king didn’t seem to mind. “Yes, bodyguarding,” he said.

  “Some,” I said, “but not nearly as much as Mr. Padillo, of course.”

  “We may have to move from here ahead of schedule,” Padillo said. “McCorkle ran into some trouble on his way up from Washington. It looks as if they know that we’re here.”

  “Was it Kragstein and Gitner?” Scales asked me.

  “No. I’d never seen this pair before. I thought I’d lost them uptown, but they seemed to know where I was heading.”

  “That means that they have added to their strength,” Scales said.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Those two won’t trouble anyone for a while. They may even be in jail right now.”

  “Are you responsible for their—uh—misfortune, Mr. McCorkle?” Kassim said, putting a trace of real humor into his nervous smile.

  “Partly, at least.”

  “Do you have an alternate place in mind, Mr. Padillo?” Scales said.

  “Here in New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can locate one if we need it. What we need more than another hideout is that call from Wanda Gothar.”

  Scales fished an old-fashioned gold pocket watch from his vest and snapped it open. “It’s nearly seven thirty,” he said. “She should be calling any minute.”

  No one said anything for a while as though we all expected the phone to ring right on cue. When it didn’t, Padillo said to me, “Wanda’s been making the arrangements with the oil companies for Mr. Kassim to sign certain papers.”

  “Why don’t they just send them over here by messenger?” I said. “We could probably find a notary down at the corner.”

  “I’m afraid that the magnitude of the transaction prevents that, Mr. McCorkle,” Scales said. “Although the preliminary negotiations were conducted by his Majesty’s late brother, there must—for a number of reasons, some political, some not—there must be a certain amount of formality and protocol, even grandeur, if you will, incorporated into the actual signing of the documents.”

  “You’re not going to do it publicly, are you?” I said.

  “No, but nevertheless there will be appropriate ceremony and this is to be recorded on film. The films will be shown throughout Llaquah as part of an educational program that will acquaint the people with the significance of the transaction.”

  “Will it be just Mr. Kassim by himself,” I said, “or will other representatives of Llaquah attend?”

  The king smiled nervously again and ran his right hand over his smooth head as if testing to see whether it needed another shave. “I’m afraid, Mr. McCorkle, that the representatives of Llaquah who are in this country are also the employers of Messrs. Gitner and Kragstein. My fellow countrymen are not at all anxious for my Patrick Henry to appear on the documents. They would prefer their own signatures.”

  “John Henry, I believe,” Scales murmured, looking at Padillo for confirmation.

  “John Henry,” Padillo said. “But whoever signs the documents gets the bonus which is four million dollars.”

  “Five million,” Scales said. He said it almost dreamily, as if there really weren’t that much money in the world. He was silent for a moment and he may have been counting his share of the prize again. “I suppose it must sound like a rather bizarre situation, but we live in unusual times and in this particular case, extremely high stakes are involved. For some, it is a matter of personal gain. For his Majesty, it is the opportunity to transform his country from a povertv-stricken desert waste into one of the economic wonders of the world in which all of the people—”

  Scales might have gone on for another fifteen minutes if the phone hadn’t rung. Padillo answered it with a curt hello and then began listening. I watched the knuckles of his right hand blanch as his grip tightened. He didn’t say good-bye before he hung up and if he didn’t slam the instrument down, neither did he use any gentleness when he recradled it. He turned toward us and his mouth was stretched into that thin, hard line that made his lips seem bloodless.

  “Miss Gothar?” Scales asked.

  Padillo shook his head. “No,” he said. “Franz Kragstein.”

  “Dear me,” Scales said, which must have meant that he was distressed. “What did he say?”

  “He’s giving us an hour.”

  “To do what?” Scales said.

  “To get out of here.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “He’ll come in after us.”

  Kassim produced one of his nervous smiles. “But how could he possibly do that? Is not our door impregnated?”

  “Impregnable,” Scales said.

  Padillo turned to give the door a look. “It’s neither to Kragstein,” he said.

  “What is it then?” Scales said.

  “To him it’s just another door.”

  I didn’t like the sound of it so I decided to say so. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “What?” Padillo said.

  “Why should he call you? Why not just make his try?”

  “Where would you rather try it, here or out on the street?”

  “If I were Kragstein, out on the street.”

  “So it would be wiser to remain where we are?” Scales said, making it a question out of politeness. He seemed more worried about the king’s occasional grammatical lapses than he did about Kragstein’s threats. The king wasn’t exactly quivering either. He had chosen a chintz-covered armchair and was leaning back in it, smiling at whoever paid him any attention, anxious to please, and eager to keep out of the way. If one had to be a bodyguard, the king seemed to be the perfect client.

  “We stay here until Wanda calls,” Padillo said. “Then we move.”

  “And you have a place in mind?” Scales asked.

  “Only if we need it,” Padillo said.

  Conversation ended and we sat there in the maple- and chintz-furnished living room of the apartment that was located in what they used to call New York’s teeming lower East Side and examined the hooked rugs on the floor and the pastoral prints on the walls and the thoughts that slid through our minds and then we jumped, almost in unison, when the phone rang. Padillo got it before it rang twice and after he said hello he nodded at us so that we would know that it was Wanda. He said, “Hold on,” into the phone and gestured toward the room where the king and Scales had been when I arrived. “There’s an extension in there,” he said. “Get on it.”

  The phone was next to the bed and I picked it up and said nothing.

  “McCorkle’s on,” Padillo said.

  “Why?” Wanda Gothar said.

  “Because he’s in now. All the way.”

  “You said Plomondon.”

  “He th
ought Gitner was a little rich.”

  “And McCorkle doesn’t?”

  “He doesn’t know Gitner that well.”

  “He can’t handle Gitner,” she said. “I’m not even sure that you can.”

  “We may get the chance to settle that question in about fifteen minutes. Kragstein wants us out of here by then or they’re coming in.”

  “Take care of it,” she said. She had no questions, no comments, not even any advice. Just the automatic admonition which assumed that Padillo would know how to do it just like he’d know how to pick up a quart of ice cream on the way home from work.

  “How long have we got in New York?” he said.

  “Two more days.”

  “Then?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “That’s not just dumb,” he said “that’s inexcusable.”

  “The oil companies don’t need any excuse,” she said. “That’s where the signing takes place. They won’t change it. I tried.”

  “Why don’t you quote them the odds against us making a cross-country trip like that with the opposition we’ve got.”

  “I did,” she said. “They seemed delighted.”

  “You mean they don’t want the deal?”

  “They’ll take it, but if something happened to Kassim, they think they could make another one that could be even better.”

  “All right,” Padillo said. “I’ll give you a number where you can get me for the next two days.” He rattled one off without hesitation and I was fairly certain that Wanda Gothar didn’t need to write it down. They both had memories like that—the kind that could recall the combinations on their high school lockers.

  “I’ll call you from San Francisco,” she said.

  “Where are you now?”

  “Where the power is,” she said. “Dallas.”

  “Call me this time tomorrow.”

  “All right,” she said. “By the way, Mr. McCorkle?”

  “Yes?” I said.

  “Shall I be seeing you in San Francisco?”

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “It’s such a beautiful city. Do you like it?”

  “My opinion doesn’t count much. I was born there.”