Cast a Yellow Shadow

by Ross Thomas

  “Nice bed,” he said.

  “Have a good nap?”

  “Pleasant. How bad am I?”

  “You’ll be O.K. Where’ve you been?”

  He smiled slightly, licked his lips, and sighed. “Out of town,” he said.

  Hardman and I helped Padillo to dress. He had a white shirt that had been washed but not ironed, a pair of khaki pants in the same condition, a Navy pea jacket, and black shoes with white cotton socks.

  “Who’s your new tailor?” I asked.

  Padillo glanced down at his clothes. “Little informal, huh?”

  “Betty washed ’em out in her machine,” Hardman said. “Blood hadn’t dried too much, so it came out easy. Didn’t get a chance to iron em.”

  “Who’s Betty?”

  “You’ve been sleeping in her bed,” I said.

  “Thank her for me.”

  “She’s in the next room. You can thank her yourself.”

  “Can you walk?” Hardman said.

  “Is there a drink in the next room along with Betty?”

  “Sure.”

  “I can walk.”

  He could, although he moved slowly. I carried the forbidden shoes. Padillo paused at the door and put one hand on the jamb to brace himself. Then he walked on into the livingroom. “Thanks for the use of your bed, Betty,” he said to the tall brown girl.

  “You’re welcome. How you feel?”

  “A little rocky, but I think it’s mostly dope. Who bandaged me?”

  “Doctor.”

  “He give me a shot?”

  “Uh-huh. Should be bout worn off.”

  “Just about is.”

  “Man wants a drink,” Hardman said. “What you like?”

  “Scotch, if you have it,” Padillo said.

  Hardman poured a generous drink and handed it to Padillo. “How’s yours, Mac?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Mush’ll be here any minute,” Hardman said. “He’ll take you down to the hotel.”

  “Where am I staying?” Padillo asked.

  “At your suite in the Mayflower.”

  “My suite?”

  “I booked it in your name and it’s paid for monthly out of your share of the profits. It’s small—but quietly elegant. You can take it off your income tax if you ever get around to filing it.”

  “How’s Fredl?”

  “We got married.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  Hardman looked at his watch. “Mush’ll be here any minute,” he said again.

  “Thanks for all your help—yours and Betty’s,” Padillo said.

  Hardman waved a big hand. “You saved us having a big razzoo in Baltimore. What you mess in that for?”

  Padillo shook his head slowly. “I didn’t see your friend. I just turned a corner and there they were. I thought they were after me. Whichever one had the knife knew how to use it.”

  “You off that boat?” Hardman said.

  “Which one?”

  “The Frances Jane.”

  “I was a passenger.”

  “Didn’t run across a little old Englishman, name of Landeed, about fifty or fifty-five, with crossed eyes?”

  “I remember him.”

  “He get off the boat?”

  “Not in Baltimore,” Padillo said. “His appendix burst four days out of Monrovia. They stored him away in the ship’s freezer.”

  Hardman frowned and swore. He put heart into it. The chimes rang and Betty went to open the door and admitted a tall Negro dressed in a crow-black suit, white shirt, and dark maroon tie. He wore sunglasses at two-thirty in the morning.

  “Hello, Mush,” I said.

  He nodded at me and the nod took in Betty and Hardman. He crossed over to Padillo. “How you feeling?” His voice was precise and soft.

  “Fine,” Padillo said.

  “This is Mustapha Ali,” Hardman told Padillo. “He’s the cat that brought you down from Baltimore. He’s a Black Muslim, but you can call him Mush. Everybody else does.”

  Padillo looked at Mush. “Are you really a Muslim?”

  “I am,” the man said gravely.

  Padillo said something in Arabic. Mush looked surprised, but responded quickly in the same language. He seemed pleased.

  “What you talkin, Mush?” Hardman asked.

  “Arabic.”

  “Where you learn Arabic?”

  “Records, man, records. I’ll need it when I get to Mecca.”

  “You the goddamndest cat I ever seen,” Hardman said.

  “Where’d you learn Arabic?” Mush asked Padillo.

  “From a friend.”

  “You speak it real good.”

  “I’ve had some practice lately.”

  “We’d better get you to the hotel,” I told Padillo. He nodded and stood up slowly.

  “Thanks very much for all your help,” he said to Betty. She said it was nothing and Hardman said he would see me tomorrow at lunch. I nodded, thanked Betty, and followed Padillo out to Mush’s car. It was a new Buick, a big one, and had a telephone in the front and a five-inch Sony television in the back.

  “I want to stop by my place on the way to the hotel,” I said to Mush. “It won’t take long.”

  He nodded and we drove in silence. Padillo stared out the window. “Washington’s changed,” he said once. “What happened to the streetcars?”

  “Took ’em off in ’sixty-one,” Mush said.

  Fredl and I lived in one of those new brick and glass apartments that have blossomed just south of Dupont Circle in a neighborhood that once was made up of three- and four-story rooming houses that catered to students, waiters, car washers, pensioners, and professional tire changers. Speculators tore down the rooming houses, covered the ground with asphalt, and called them parking lots for a while. When enough parking lots were put together, the speculators would apply for a government-insured loan, build an apartment house, and call it The Melanie or The Daphne after a wife or a girl friend. The rents for a two-bedroom apartment in those places were based on the supposition that both husband and wife were not only richly employed, but lucky in the stockmarket.

  Nobody ever seemed to care what had happened to the students, waiters, car washers, pensioners and the professional tire changers.

  Mush parked the car in the circular driveway where it said no parking and we rode the elevator up to the eighth floor.

  “Fredl will be glad to see you,” I told Padillo. “She might even invite you to dinner.” I opened the door. The light from one large lamp burned in the livingroom, but the lamp had been knocked to the floor and the shade was lying a foot or so away. I went over and picked up the lamp, put it on the table, and replaced the shade. I looked in the bedrooms, but that seemed a foolish thing to do. She wasn’t there. I walked back into the living room and Padillo was standing near the record player, holding a piece of paper in his right hand. Mush stood by the door.

  “A note,” I said.

  “A note,” he agreed.

  “But not from Fredl.”

  “No. It’s from whoever took her away.”

  “A ransom note,” I said. I didn’t want to read it.

  “Sort of.”

  “How much do they want?”

  Padillo saw that I didn’t want to read the note. He put it down on the coffee table.

  “Not much,” he said. “Just me.”

  THREE

  I sat down in my favorite chair and looked at the carpet. Then I watched Padillo turn to Mush and say: “You may as well go on back. This will take a while.” I looked at Mush. He nodded his head. “Anything you want me to do?” he asked. He sounded interested.

  “Nothing right now,” Padillo said.

  He nodded his head again. “You know where to get in touch.”

  “I know,” Padillo said.

  Mush turned quickly and left. He closed the door and the lock barely made a noise as it clicked into place. I looked around the livingroom. The pictures were still on the walls, some that
Fredl had brought from Germany, some I had brought, and some that we had decided on together in Washington and New York. The books were still in the bookcase that covered one wall. The furniture, an odd assortment, but comfortable, was still in place. Only a lamp had been upset. I liked the room. It had a couple of personalities in it. There was a small bar in one corner that was a facet of one of those personalities. I got up and walked over to it.

  “Scotch?” I asked Padillo.

  “Scotch.”

  “What’s the note say?”

  “You’d better read it.”

  “All right. I’ll read it.”

  I handed him the Scotch. He picked up the note and handed it to me. It was typed, single-spaced, undated, and unsigned.

  Dear Mr. McCorkle:

  We have taken Mrs. McCorkle into our custody. By this time you will have heard from your colleague, Mr. Michael Padillo, who was due to arrive in Baltimore this evening aboard the Frances Jane. When Mr. Padillo has performed the assignment which we have requested of him, we shall release Mrs. McCorkle quite unharmed.

  We must caution you, however, not to inform the police or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or any other law enforcement agency. If you do so, or should Mr. Padillo fail to carry out his assignment, we regretfully, but of necessity, will dispose of Mrs. McCorkle.

  Mr. Padillo will be able to brief you fully about his assignment. The continued well-being of Mrs. McCorkle depends upon his willingness to cooperate. He has been uncooperative until now. We regret that we must use this method of persuasion.

  I read it twice and then put it back on the coffee table. “Why Fredl?” I asked.

  “Because I wouldn’t do it for money and they couldn’t find any other pressure. They’ve already tried.”

  “Will they kill her?”

  He looked at me and his dark Spanish eyes were steady and cold and curiously without reflection. “They’ll kill her no matter what I do.”

  “Is she dead already? Have they already killed her?”

  Padillo shook his head. “No. They haven’t killed her yet. They’ll use her for persuasion.”

  I got up and walked over to the bookcase and ran a finger absently over the spines of a row of books. “Maybe I should yell,” I said. “Maybe I should scream and yell and pound the wall.”

  “Maybe you should,” he said.

  “I’ve read that it’s smarter to call the cops. Just call the cops and the FBI and let them take over. They go to school to learn about stuff like this.”

  “If you call them, they’ll kill her. They’ll be watching you. They may have your phone bugged. You’ll have to meet the FBI or the police someplace. When you do, she’ll die. And then all you’ll have is a letter written on dime-store stationery with a rented typewriter and a dead wife.”

  I took down a book and looked at it. I put it back and two seconds later I couldn’t remember its title. “You’d better tell me what it’s all about,” I said. “Then I’ll decide whether to call the cops or not.”

  Padillo nodded and got up and went over to the bar and poured himself another drink. “I’ll do anything to get her back,” he said. “Anything. I’ll do what they want me to do or I’ll go to the police and the FBI with you—if you decide on that. Or we can try something else. You want another drink?” I nodded.

  “But you have to make the decision,” he continued. “You have to decide what has to be done.”

  He carried the drinks over to the coffee table and lowered himself carefully into a chair. He winced as he did it. The knife wound seemed to bother him.

  “That night on the Rhine when I went over the side with Jimmy Ku,” he said. “Jimmy had never learned to swim. He drowned. I was shot in the left arm, but I made it to shore. I was sick, I was shot and I was damned tired. I heard you when they helped you up the bank. I wasn’t too far away. You finally flagged a truck, right?”

  I nodded.

  “It was while I was lying there that I decided to be dead for a while. I decided to be dead in Switzerland. I went to Zurich. It’s easy to be dead there. You don’t have to hear how I got to Switzerland.”

  “Let’s just assume that you didn’t swim.”

  “No. I went to Remagen first and found a doctor and then I went to Zurich. I kept in touch indirectly. I heard about the saloon getting blown up and I figured that you’d collect the insurance—we were over-insured anyway. So I sat in Zurich for a couple of months and did nothing. I was staying with a friend and the friend offered me a proposition.”

  “In Africa.”

  “That’s right. Africa. West Africa. We were in his office and he had a large map. He also had a large office. It seemed to my friend that several countries in West Africa would soon be in the market for small arms and he just happened to have a couple of warehouses that were full of them and only slightly used. He ticked the countries off for me: Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Dahomey, perhaps the Cameroons, and so forth. He needed a traveling salesman. He had the list of hot prospects and all he needed really was an order-taker. If the prospects bought, fine. If they didn’t, somebody else would. I would get a straight salary—a high one.”

  “You went,” I said.

  Padillo nodded. “I flew to Guinea and sort of worked my way down the coast. I took orders from one faction one day and another faction the next. The product was good and my Zurich friend knew who was ripe for what. I pushed the 7.62 millimeter stuff. He was very strong on standardizing weaponry all over Africa. I made quite a few sales. If you’ve been reading the papers, you know where I made them.”

  “I’ve kept up.”

  “The last country I was in was quiet. It was just before Independence and my friend in Zurich thought I should stick around a few months, so he arranged for me to run a saloon that belonged to one of his business associates. The saloon was about fifty miles from nowhere. It was a dull wait, but my Zurich friend was convinced that it would pay off.”

  “Did it?” I said.

  Padillo nodded. “He had thought it would be even better than Nigeria and he was right. The military pulled a coup and those who escaped being shot made off with most of the treasury. They placed a rather large order. Togo was last on my list. It had been quiet there since Olympio was assassinated in ’sixty-three and my friend in Zurich thought things might be ripening.”

  He paused and took a swallow of his drink. “On my way to Togo I went through Dahomey. I sent you a card.”

  “You seemed to have had writer’s cramp that day.”

  He smiled slightly. “Something like that. I was in this hotel in Togo—in Lomé—when they dropped by to see me.”

  “Are they the ones who wrote the note?”

  “Probably. They were trying to appear German for some reason. They made their proposition in German and I turned them down in English and they forgot about their German. Then they raised the ante—from fifty thousand dollars to seventy-five thousand. I still said no.”

  He paused for a moment. “There were two of them,” he continued. “And they told me about myself. They told me quite a bit—even some stuff that I’d almost forgotten. They had everything about you and the saloon and me and my former employers. They even knew about the two who had defected and how we’d got them back.”

  “Where’d they get it?”

  “Wolgemuth probably lost somebody in Berlin and whoever it was took a file with him. Wolgemuth knew a lot about us.”

  “Then what?”

  “They talked about blackmail to me there in Lomé and I laughed at them. I said I’d just go back to Switzerland and die again. You have to have something to lose to be blackmailed and there wasn’t anything they could take away from me. So they got down to that one last threat that they all use because it’s supposed to make you cry. Either I agreed to do what they wanted, or I’d be dead within forty-eight hours.”

  “Who were you supposed to kill?”

  “Their Prime Minister. They had the time and the place all picked out: Pennsylvania Aven
ue, a block and a half west of the White House. What’s today?”

  “Thursday.”

  “It’s supposed to happen a week from tomorrow.”

  I found myself unable to be surprised or even concerned. I had known Padillo for a long time and together we had seen a few die. A Prime Minister would be just one more and his death would be nothing compared with what I stood to lose. That’s how it seemed then because Fredl was gone and because I was afraid that she would be gone forever and I would be alone again. I was afraid that if she were dead, all the years that had gone before would add up to nothing. Yet there was no panic or frenzy or scurrying about. I just sat there with Padillo and listened to him talk about the man somebody wanted him to kill so that they wouldn’t kill my wife. I wondered how Fredl was and if she had cigarettes and where she would sleep and if she were cold and what she had had for dinner.

  “A week from tomorrow,” I said.

  “A Friday.”

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “I told them I’d let them know and then I got out of Togo. I flew out with a fifty-year-old ex-Luftwaffe pilot who thought he was still diving Stukas. He charged me a thousand dollars to go to Liberia—Monrovia. I took the next ship out—the bucket that landed me in Baltimore.”

  “And they knew all about it,” I said. “They knew you’d gone to Monrovia and to Baltimore and they knew about Fredl and about me.”

  “They knew,” Padillo said. “I should have gone back to Switzerland. I carry a lot of trouble around with me.”

  “Who is it you’re supposed to kill?”

  “His name is Van Zandt. He’s Prime Minister of one of the smaller south African nations—the one that followed Rhodesia in declaring its unilateral independence from Britain. The British got excited and started talking about treason and then put through some economic sanctions.”

  “I remember,” I said. “It’s before the UN now. The country has about two million people and one hundred thousand of them are whites. What else has it got?”

  “A hell of a lot of chromium—about a third of our supply.”

  “We can’t let that go.”

  “Not according to Detroit.”