by Ross Thomas
“His face makes you out a liar, Michael,” she said looking at me with clear dark eyes. “You have to travel a far distance to acquire a face like that.”
I bowed over her hand again and Padillo said: “I am in your debt.”
“And I in yours, my young friend. Do not forget your promise this time.”
“I could not,” Padillo said.
The maid opened the door for us and I asked her to call a taxi.
“Goodbye, Mr. McCorkle,” Senora Romanones said. “I like your suit.” I turned to say goodbye and the light caught her just right. She was wearing a simple blue dress and her face was shadowed so that lines had disappeared. It was a remarkably well-boned face with full lips and eyes that seemed almost Eurasian. She had been stunning at one time. Then the light started to change, and she began to pull the doors together. They closed before the illusion of young beauty vanished.
We waited outside for the cab. “She’s getting old,” Padillo said. “It’s funny, but she’s one person who never seemed to age during all the years I’ve known her.”
“Does she know all the people she says she knows?”
“She knows everybody.”
“Maybe that’s why she’s getting old.”
SIX
I told the cab driver that we wanted to go to Mac’s Place and for once I wasn’t asked the address. That brightened the morning. We took Connecticut Avenue all the way and Padillo had a fine time trying to spot a familiar landmark. He didn’t find too many. “There used to be a church there,” he said at the corner of Connecticut and N. “It was ugly as sin, but it had a lot of style.”
“First Presbyterian. There was some talk about having it classified as a national monument or something, but nothing came of it. The offer was too high for the elders to ignore.”
“Predestination, I suppose.”
“Something like that. Maybe God intended it to be a parking lot.”
I told the driver to let us off across the street from the saloon. “You can drink it all in,” I told Padillo. We got out and he gave it a long appraising stare. “Nice,” he said. “Real nice.”
It was a two-story building of vaguely Federal lines that had been built a century before. It was constructed of brick that I’d had sandblasted to its original texture. Black shutters flanked the windows which were criss-crossed with moulding that held small diamond-shaped panes of glass. A grey and black canopy ran from the door across the sidewalk to the street. The name, “Mac’s Place,” was white on black at the end of the canopy in appropriately discreet letters.
We crossed the street and went through the two-inch thick slab door. “We’re still saving on electricity,” Padillo said when we were inside.
It was dim all right, but not so dim that the thirsty couldn’t find their way to the bar that ran down the length of the left-hand side of the room. It was a good bar to sit at or to lean on. There were the usual tables and chairs and carpeted floor, but the tables were far enough apart so that the diners could wave their elbows around and talk above a whisper without being overheard.
“What’s upstairs?” Padillo asked.
“Private dining rooms. They’ll hold from six to twenty people.”
“That’s a good touch.”
“It’s paying off.”
“What’s the nut?”
I told him.
“What did you do last week?”
“About fifteen hundred above it, but it was an exceptional week.”
“Is Horst here yet?”
We walked over to the day bartender. I introduced him to Padillo and then asked him to find Horst. The thin, ascetic man marched quickly in from the kitchen where he probably had been holding fingernail inspection. He blinked and almost lost a step when he saw Padillo, but recovered quickly.
“Herr Padillo, it is very good to see you,” he said in German.
“It’s nice to be back, Herr Horst. Things go well for you?”
“Very well, thank you. And with you?”
“Quite well, thanks.”
“Herr Padillo will resume his active partnership, Herr Horst,” I said. “Would you inform the rest of the staff?”
“Of course, Herr McCorkle. Permit me to say, Herr Padillo, that it is very good to have you back.”
Padillo smiled. “It’s good to be with friends again, Herr Horst.”
Horst beamed, and I prayed that he wouldn’t throw us a Nazi salute. He settled for a stiff military bow and an almost imperceptible clicking of the heels. He had been a captain in the German Wehrmacht during World War II. He was Prussian and I suppose he once had been a party member, but neither Padillo nor I had ever inquired. He was an excellent maitre d’ with a phenomenal memory for names who provided a continental touch and kept the help properly awed.
Padillo asked me where Karl was. “Up on the Hill,” I said. “He’s fallen for Congress. He comes on around five and spends his days keeping a box score on legislation.”
Padillo looked at his watch. “It’s eleven-thirty—”
“I was just going to suggest it,” I said. “Would you do the honors?”
Padillo went around the bar and said: “What’ll it be, pal?”
“A martini.”
“Extra dry, pal?”
“Extra dry is twenty cents extra,” I said.
“Another good touch. What do we charge for a regular martini?”
“Ninety-five cents—ninety-eight cents with tax.”
“What’s it do to the tips?”
“Builds them. There aren’t as many dimes and nickels around, so they usually leave two-bits. The two cents’ change is a sting to conscience.”
Padillo mixed and poured the martinis and slid mine across the bar. It was brimful but none was spilled. I tasted it. “You haven’t lost your touch.”
Padillo came around to the customer’s side and we sat at the end of the bar and watched the early drinkers arrive. They were the ones with luncheon dates at twelve who arrived fifteen minutes early for a couple of quick ones.
By twelve-thirty we were taking up valuable space so I led Padillo back through the kitchen, introduced him to the chef, and then we went farther back to the small room that I called the office. It had a desk and three chairs and a filing cabinet. There was also a couch that was fairly comfortable about three o’clock in the afternoon.
I sat down behind the desk. “I’m going to call Fredl’s office and tell them she won’t be in for a few days. Can you think up any good excuses?”
“Flu? Bad cold?”
“You’re very good.” I called and talked to Fredl’s bureau chief and assured him it was nothing serious and promised to give her his best wishes for a speedy recovery.
“What now?” I asked.
“The tough part. We wait.”
I walked over to the file and opened a drawer. “You may as well learn where I buy the hamburger,” I said. For the next hour we went over the books, the peculiarities of our suppliers, the menu, and the help and their individual problems. I showed Padillo how much money we owed, to whom, and whether they allowed two per cent off if bills were paid before the tenth or the fifth of the month. “I ran on that two per cent discount the first three months,” I said. “I won’t buy now unless I get it.”
On the way through the kitchen I had told Herr Horst to bring Hardman back to the office when he arrived. At twenty minutes after one there was a knock on the door. “Herr Hardman is here,” Horst said. When he stepped through the door Hardman seemed to cut the small room’s living space in half.
“Hi, Mac. How you doin, baby?” he asked Padillo.
“Fine.”
“You lookin good. That’s a nice suit,” Hardman said as he sprawled on the couch and cocked his eighty-five dollar black calf shoes on one of the chairs. I noticed that the shoes didn’t turn up at the toes.
“Care for a drink?” Padillo asked.
“Fine with me,” Hardman said. “Scotch-and-water.”
“How
do we get it?” Padillo asked.
“Simple,” I said and picked up the telephone and dialed one number. “Two martinis; one Scotch-and-water—the good Scotch,” I said.
We made some idle talk until the waiter came with the drinks. Hardman took a long swallow of his. “You lookin rough, Mac. Mush say somethin wrong when you go home last night. Say somethin wrong with Fredl.”
“That’s right.”
“She didn’t split on you?”
“No. Somebody took her away. She didn’t want to go.”
The big brown man nodded his head slowly. “Now that’s bad,” he said. “That’s real bad. What you want me to do?”
“We don’t know yet. I guess we want to know whether you want to do anything.”
“What you mean guess, man? Hell, Fredl’s my buddy. Here,” he said to Padillo, “look what she wrote about me in this Frankfurt, Germany, paper.”
“Show him the original,” I said. “He reads German and it’s more impressive.”
“Uh-huh,” Hardman said, taking a Xeroxed copy of the article from his inside jacket pocket. “Read this right here.”
Padillo read it quickly or pretended to. “That’s something,” he said, handing the article back. “That’s really something.”
“Ain’t it though.”
Before Hardman arrived, Padillo and I had discussed how much we should tell him. We decided that a fourth or even a half of the story would sound phony. We told him the entire thing—from Padillo’s original contact with the Van Zandt people in Lomé to the note that was waiting for me when we got home the night before. We didn’t tell him about Senora de Romanones.
“Then it wouldn’t do no good for you to just go ahead and shoot this mother?”
“No.”
“And you can’t go down to Ninth and Pennsylvania and see the FBI?”
“No.”
“Why don’t I go down? These African cats don’t know me.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” Padillo said.
“Man, I’ll just make a phone call, know what I mean? If you got the Feds down there, that we all payin good money for, we might as well use them. I ain’t got nothin against law workin for me.”
“Okay,” Padillo said. “Suppose you call the FBI—or Mc-Corkle or I call them from a phone booth. We say something like this: Prime Minister Van Zandt is coming to town and his cabinet wants me to shoot him to create sympathy for their independence. That’s just my opening line. But they’re trained to take complaints. They say: ‘All right, we’ve got that, Mr. Padillo. Can you just give us a few more details?’ Yes, I say, it seems that they’ve kidnapped my partner’s wife—Fredl McCorkle—and unless I shoot the Prime Minister, they’ll dispose of Mrs. McCorkle. That’s about it, fellows, except that it’s going to take place next Friday between two and three p.m. at the corner of Eighteenth and Pennsylvania just across the street from the United States Information Agency.”
“It won’t work, Hardman,” I said. “If you call the FBI, they’ll tighten the security to the point that Van Zandt’s crowd will know something’s gone wrong. If Van Zandt isn’t killed—then Fredl is—automatically.”
“You mean you can tell ’em the time and the place and everything and they can’t do nothin?”
“That’s the trouble,” I said. “They can do too much. They can save the Prime Minister, but my wife gets killed. I won’t make the trade.”
“So you gonna do it private?”
“We’re going to try.”
“Think we could get another drink and some lunch?” Hardman said.
“I’ve saved you a nice steak,” I said and picked up the phone and ordered. The drinks came first and when the waiter was gone, Hardman said: “How you want to fit me in?”
“You know this town,” I said. “And you have friends who know it even better. We have a wild idea. It’s possible that Van Zandt’s people are hiding Fredl in some Negro neighborhood. They might figure it’s the last place anyone would look. This is only a guess, but you’ve got ins with maids, liquor store delivery men, service people—guys who go in and out of dozens of houses a day. Maybe you can find out if they’ve spotted anything unusual, or if they’ve seen Fredl.”
“I’ll have to use Mush.”
“How much do you have to tell him?”
“Some. Not all. But some. He was with you when you got home last night.”
“What do you think?” Padillo asked.
Hardman leaned forward on the couch, looked at the floor, and sucked thoughtfully on a hollow tooth. “I don’t think much of your idea that she’s hid out in a colored section. But, hell, that ain’t hard to check. Hard thing’s goin to be to check out the white sections. But like you say, they might have a maid. Don’t this outfit have a front man in town—an embassy or something?”
“They have a trade mission,” Padillo said.
“I’d sure look those mothers up. They must know something.”
“We plan to.”
The waiter arrived with the lunch and we ate without much further conversation. When we were on the second cup of coffee, Hardman leaned back and sighed, “Mac, you serve about the best goddamned steak in town. And you have to pay about the highest price to get it.”
“Keeps out the riffraff.”
The big man got up and stretched. “I best be goin. I’ll get in touch with you later this evenin. Where you gonna be?”
Padillo gave him the number of his suite at the Mayflower and said: “We may need a place to meet with some friends. Some place private. You have any ideas?”
“How bout Betty’s where you was last night?”
“Think she’d object?”
“Baby, long’s I pay the rent she ain’t gonna object too much.”
“Fine.”
“I’ll call you … You think they got your line at the Mayflower bugged?”
Padillo shrugged. “I’ll play it cozy,” Hardman said. “Might even send Mush around to give you the word.” He found a toothpick in his shirt pocket, stuck it in his mouth, gave us a casual wave, and was gone.
“That’s a start,” I said.
“That’s about all you can call it.”
“Have any more suggestions?”
“Go back to the hotel and wait for the phone to ring.”
“The hard part.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Waiting. The hardest part of all.”
We walked to the Mayflower and caught the elevator. Padillo fitted his key in the door of his suite, turned it, and we went in. The man was sitting on the couch, his hands carefully in view.
“I’m Evelyn Underhill,” he said. “I mean no harm, and I have no weapon. I wish to talk to you.”
Padillo tossed his key on the coffee table. “You pick the lock?”
“It’s not a difficult one. Locks are a hobby.”
“Who are you, Mr. Underhill?”
“I’m a fellow countryman of Hennings Van Zandt.”
I moved over to him quickly. “Do you know where my wife is?”
“You’re Mr. McCorkle?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“Evelyn Underhill. I was a member of our Parliament until Prime Minister Van Zandt dissolved it. I suppose you could call me a voice of reason. There are a few of us there—a minority within a minority, so to speak.”
“You’re not clear,” Padillo said.
“You’re Mr. Padillo, aren’t you? I saw you from a distance in Lomé.”
“I’m Padillo, you’re Underhill, and he’s McCorkle. We know why we’re here. We don’t know why you are.”
He smiled faintly; there was just a touch of humor in it. “I’m usually more coherent, but the trip was exhausting.” He was a slight man, about fifty, with small bones and long grey hair combed back. The tweed suit he wore looked old and worn and rumpled. He fumbled in one of his jacket pockets and produced a pipe and a pouch of tobacco. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked. He wore glasses with gold rims and his pale blue eyes turn
ed to each of us as he asked the question. His voice sounded British.
“Go ahead.” There was no use rushing him. He would tell it in his own time and his own way.
He got the pipe going with three matches. “Perhaps I should first summarize it all for you and then supply the details. There are certain fellow citizens of mine who have financed my trip here. They are members of that small minority of reason which I mentioned—at least we like to think that we are.” He puffed away on his pipe some more.
“My mission here is really quite simple: I’m to prevent Mr. Padillo from assassinating the Prime Minister.”
SEVEN
I turned to Padillo and couldn’t keep the exasperation out of my voice. “It was going to be a conspiracy of three, you said, but an official, revised estimate later put it at six: just Van Zandt and a few cronies, you said. Now we’re well past six with the rest of Underbill’s precinct still to be heard from. Christ, this is no conspiracy; it’s a convention.”
“I didn’t sign on to be clairvoyant,” Padillo said. “Just clever.”
“I’m edgy.”
“I notice.”
He pulled a chair over by Underhill, sat down on it, and lighted a cigarette. “You saw me in Lomé?”
The thin man nodded through a haze of pipe tobacco that mingled with the smoke from Padillo’s cigarette. His blue eyes blinked rapidly behind his glasses. “At the hotel just after they talked to you.”
“You know them?”
“Grew up with them.”
“And you think they tried to hire me to kill your Prime Minister?”
“Know it for a fact.” He puffed away on his pipe some more, and then used it to gesture with. “You see, Mr. Padillo, the white community in my country is very small—around a hundred thousand or so. People in government tend to compose an even smaller community. It might be called a minor establishment. We’re not very good at this espionage business, you know. Haven’t had the experience, for one thing. But the information about you was obtained from what I believe is usually described as an unimpeachable source.”
“What was the source?”
This time the blue eyes fairly twinkled. “My wife,” Underhill said and grinned and went on hurriedly: “You remember the chap who called on you at the hotel in Lomé and said his name was Kraus. He was the taller of the two, pretended to be German and later admitted that he was really the Minister of Transport?”
