by Ross Thomas
“And not as dangerous as woodworking.”
“You get the Congressman home O.K. last night?” I asked.
Karl nodded. “I got him to the committee, too, this morning, and then the son-of-a-bitch doublecrossed me and voted wrong.”
“How’s it look for the redwoods?”
“Not good,” he said glumly.
Herr Horst marched up and made us welcome. “You had a call, Herr McCorkle. The person would not leave his name or number. He said to tell you that he was an African acquaintance and that he would call back.”
“Send some dinner back to the office for Padillo and me,” I said.
“Anything in particular?”
“Use your own judgment. But I’d like a bottle of good wine. What about you?” I asked Padillo.
“Sounds fine.”
“Do we have any of that Count Schoenborn 1959 left?”
“Indeed. The Erbacher Marcobrunn Trockenbeerenauslese.”
I nodded and Herr Horst said that he personally would take care of ordering our dinner.
Padillo told Karl that he’d see him later and we went back to the office where I could wait for a phone call and talk to my African friend and perhaps listen to my wife scream again.
ELEVEN
After fifteen minutes of waiting the telephone rang and I picked it up.
“This is McCorkle.”
“Yes, Mr. McCorkle. Your wife is well and you may talk to her in a few minutes. First, I must tell you of a change in plans. The project that Mr. Padillo is to carry out has been moved to an earlier time: to this coming Tuesday, rather than Friday.”
“All right,” I said.
“Secondly, the gentleman who is the subject of Mr. Pa-dillo’s assignment has expressed a strong interest in meeting him. And you, too.”
“Is he in Washington?”
“He flew in this afternoon, earlier than expected. But his appearance before the New York group has also been moved up to Thursday, so it was necessary for us to advance our plans.”
“I’d like to talk to my wife.”
“Do you understand the changes in times?”
“Yes. When do you want to meet?”
“Tomorrow afternoon.”
“Where?”
“At our trade mission. It’s on Massachusetts Avenue.” He gave me the address.
“All right. What time?”
“Three p.m. Please be punctual.”
“Let me talk to my wife.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Freal?”
“I’m on, darling.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. I’m all right. A little tired.”
“Did they hurt you?”
“Not badly—just twisted my arm. It wasn’t bad.”
“And you’re all right?”
“Yes, I’m—”
And that was the end of the conversation. I put the phone back and sat down behind the desk. Then I picked it up again and dialed a single number. “Send back a double vodka martini,” I said. I looked at Padillo. He nodded. “Make it two doubles.”
“Fredl all right?”
“She didn’t scream. She said she was all right, but tired. A little tired, she said.”
“Was it the same guy on the phone?”
“Yes.”
“What did he want?”
“They’ve advanced the date that you’re supposed to shoot Van Zandt. They’ve set it for this coming Tuesday and we’re supposed to meet with them and Van Zandt.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow at three o’clock at their trade mission out on Massachusetts.”
“You know where it is?”
“I’ve got the address. I’ve probably passed it a dozen times, but I don’t recall it.”
“What does Van Zandt want?”
“He wants to meet the man who’s going to kill him.”
Padillo rose from the couch and started to pace the small room. There wasn’t much space for it—five good steps, and then he had to turn and head back.
“You’re not making much headway,” I said.
“It’s called thinking.”
“I’d join you, except that there’s not enough room.”
There was a knock on the door and I said come in and one of the waiters entered and set the martinis down on the desk. I thanked him and he left.
“Maybe the vodka will help,” I said.
“Nothing like a two- or three-martini idea.”
“I’ve had some fine ones on four.”
Padillo lighted a cigarette. He inhaled, coughed, and blew most of it out. “You think filters help?”
“I have no idea.”
“I quit smoking in Africa.”
“For how long?”
“Two days; a little over two days. Three-and-a-half hours over two days to be exact.”
“What happened?”
“I admitted I had no will power. It was a great relief.”
“I’d say your will power can lick my will power.”
“I don’t think it would be much of a match.”
Padillo quit pacing and sat down on the couch again and absently rolled his cigarette in his fingers. I looked at my martini and then at the desk blotter and then at the filing cabinet. They seemed to be the most interesting objects in the room.
“How did Fredl sound?” Padillo asked.
“I don’t know; tired like she said, I suppose.”
“You’re looking a little frayed.”
“I probably look like she feels. I’m worried. It’s a new feeling; I never worried about anyone like this before. Maybe it’s because I married late. Maybe it’s like this when women have babies and men become fathers. For all I know it’s part of a giant plot. The world against McCorkle.”
“If you’d make it the world against Padillo, I’d go along. It’s very tricky, you know.”
“What—the world? I agree.”
“No. What we have to do tomorrow.”
“What?”
“I bow out and get Dymec in.”
“Have you thought up a good reason?”
“It’s a reason. I wouldn’t call it good.”
“What do you call it?”
“The FBI.”
There was a knock on the door again and this time it was Herr Horst and a waiter. Herr Horst served the auslese which we retailed for thirty dollars a bottle, but it was wasted on me. “Try Herr Padillo,” I told him. “My palate’s gone.”
Padillo sampled the wine, pronounced it fit, and Horst skillfully filled our glasses. The waiter served. I don’t remember what it was, except that it was hot and the butter was too hard. “Tell Horst that he’s serving the butter too hard when you get around to it,” I told Padillo.
“We sell much of this?” he asked, holding up his glass of wine.
“Not at thirty dollars a bottle.”
“What’s it cost us?”
“Nineteen seventy-five a bottle—by the case.”
“It’s worth it.”
“What do we do with the FBI?”
“We use them to bring Dymec in.”
“Where do you send off for your ideas?”
“There’s no address; just a box number.”
I nodded, drank the rest of my wine, shoved my plate back, and lighted a cigarette. It was my fifty-seventh for the day. My mouth had a strange, dark yellow taste. “We were speaking of the FBI—Mr. Hoover and all those polite young accountants and lawyers who work for him. They’re on our side now?”
“They will be. For a couple of days anyhow. I’m going to demand protection.”
“Protection from whom?”
“I can think of a number of people.”
“So can I, but which ones?”
“We’ll make it the gun-running crowd.”
“A fast set all right. This the African branch?”
“Right.”
“And they’re after you for what—faulty firing pins or sand in the cosmolene?”
“That’s interesting. Probably as interesting as the reason you have for the FBI, provided you have one.”
“I’m going to tell them about Angola.”
“Ah.”
Padillo leaned back on the couch and looked up at the ceiling. “You know much about Angola?”
“It’s Portuguese real estate on the West Coast of Africa. Below the Equator. It’s not getting along too well with the Congo.”
“That’s why I sidetracked the shipment of arms. The already-paid-for shipment.”
“Of course.”
“They were intended for the mercenaries being trained in Angola and scheduled for the Congo.”
“That would never do.”
“That’s what I thought. I also thought it wouldn’t help diplomatic relations between Portugal and the Congo.”
“Already strained.”
“Exactly,” Padillo said.
“Can you string it out?”
“For a few days.”
“Who’s supposed to be after you?”
“A Portuguese who paid for the guns and trains mercenaries and sends them to the Congo. He’s real enough. I almost did some business with him.”
“And the FBI’s to give you protection against him?”
“His agent—or agents.”
“Why?”
“Because in exchange for the protection, I’ll tell them about my other arms deals: the ones that did pan out.”
“So when Van Zandt asks why you can’t do the job, you say the FBI is too interested in you.”
“And for proof, all he has to do is look behind me. They’ll be there.”
“But we have an alternative proposal.”
“Dymec. And they can only get Dymec through me and they’ll have to guarantee Fredl’s safety.”
“Some guarantee.”
“I can’t think of anything better. We’ll demand that you have to talk to Fredl every night between tomorrow and Tuesday. They’ll have to allow that or the deal’s off.”
“We don’t have much of a bargaining position.”
“No, we don’t.”
“If the FBI’s too close, they’re going to tie us in with the assassination attempt. I don’t want them around.”
“I think we can have them around just long enough to convince the Africans that they’re there. That’s all we need.”
“You’re going for the seventy-five thousand dollars?”
“Yes. We’ll need it for the trio.”
“How do the other two fit in—Price and Shadid?”
“One of them will work with Dymec; the other will work with us when we go after Fredl.”
“When we find out where she is.”
“We’ll find out,” Padillo said.
I nodded. “We’d better.”
We agreed to meet at ten the next morning and Padillo said he’d like to stay around and watch the place operate. I walked out the front door and turned right. It was almost eleven o’clock. I turned left on Connecticut Avenue and walked up the west side of the street. There weren’t too many people abroad and the October weather was cool and dry. The wind blew some litter about the sidewalk. A man in a World War II Eisenhower jacket said he was hungry and I gave him a quarter and wished him luck. He staggered away. I walked on, up Connecticut, towards Dupont Circle. I thought about things I wanted to tell Fredl so that she would laugh and I could listen to her.
But there wasn’t any Fredl and there wasn’t any laughter and there wasn’t anything I could do about it except walk up Connecticut Avenue towards Dupont Circle and listen to the city sounds and the grinding of my teeth. There was no place to go but home; no one to talk to but myself; nothing to do but wait because if I didn’t wait, Fredl would exist no more and without her it wasn’t much worthwhile. None of it.
I saw them step out of the entrance of the office building. There were three of them. They looked young, about twenty-two or even less. There was some light from a street lamp and I could see their long brown and blonde hair. They wore short zipped-up jackets and tight pants. They had their hands in the pockets of their jackets as they stopped me, one in front, the other two on either side.
“Here’s a citizen,” the one in front of me said. He was bigger than the other two.
“He’s a citizen, all right, Gilly.”
Gilly seemed to think that was funny. He laughed and I could see his teeth. He didn’t brush them often. Not often enough.
“Excuse me,” I said and started around Gilly. He took a hand out of his pocket and placed it against my left shoulder and shoved me back. It wasn’t a hard shove.
“You in a hurry?”
“That’s right.”
“Go ahead and take him, Gilly, he’s about your size.” This came from the one on my left. He had a small tight mouth and thyroid eyes and a phony drawl.
“You’re out late,” Gilly said.
“I work late.”
“Where do you work, citizen?”
“That’s all, son. Get out of my way.”
“You’re going to fight me, friend.”
“I don’t want to fight you.”
“You’re going to fight me,” Gilly insisted.
I decided to take out the one with the drawl first. He would be the knife carrier. I hit him with my right fist as hard as I could in the stomach. He whoofed and sat down and threw up. I turned to Gilly and the one who was still standing. Gilly knew enough to throw a left and I tried to go under it but it caught me on the shoulder. The smaller came burrowing in and I kicked him in the kneecap and he danced around holding it. I took the switchblade out of my pocket, flicked it open, and moved towards Gilly. He backed off. He backed until he ran against the building and couldn’t go any farther. I took hold of him by the jacket and held the knife up so he could see the blade.
“Which eye do you want to lose, son?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head frantically from side to side. “Don’t cut me, mister. For God’s sake, don’t cut me!” Then he started to cry. I didn’t blame him. I let him go. He moved down the side of the building, his back to the wall, and then he ran. The other two ran after him. None of it made any sense; none of it had any purpose. It was just Washington on a Friday night. Maybe it was any city on a Friday night.
There was a group of people standing about twenty feet from me. Three men and two women. A couple of cars had stopped to watch the fight. One of the men detached himself from the group and came over to me.
“There were three of them,” he said.
“So there were.”
“You carry a knife all the time?”
“Sure,” I said. “Don’t you?”
“By God, it’s a good idea. It sure saved your skin, didn’t it?”
I looked down at the knife, closed it, and slipped it into a pocket. “I had your moral support,” I said. “That meant a lot.”
I turned and walked to my apartment. I rode the elevator up to the floor where I lived, unlocked the door, took off my coat, fixed a drink, and turned on the television set. I watched Alan Ladd fall through a skylight and get knocked around by William Bendix. It didn’t seem to bother him much and I wondered why I was still shaking at two-thirty.
TWELVE
I finally fell asleep around six in the morning and awoke at nine-forty-five. The bed was still too large for one person. I got up and went into the kitchen and turned on a burner to heat some water. It was boiling by the time I was dressed. I stirred a cup of coffee and lighted a cigarette, my first for the day. I got the paper from the hall. I called the saloon and told Padillo I was going to be late and he said not to hurry. I didn’t. I had another cup of coffee and read the paper. I didn’t want to go anywhere.
A front page story told about Van Zandt arriving in Washington early because his UN appearance had been moved up. The story said he would confer with somebody
at the State Department, apparently nobody important; meet with members of his consulate and trade mission, and hold a press conference at four p.m., which would be just after he was through going over the details of his assassination. He seemed to have scheduled a full day.
There was a brief item on page twelve about Evelyn Underbill, fifty-one, who had been struck and killed yesterday by a hit-and-run driver in the 1100 block of Connecticut Avenue. There wasn’t much else about Underhill.
I thought about Padillo’s plan to have the FBI traipse around after him so that the Africans would think he was too hot and agree to send in Dymec as substitute. Padillo’s reputation would help convince the FBI about his Portuguese nemesis, at least for a little while. Whether Van Zandt and his people would buy the package was something else. They were a hard bunch, hard enough to kidnap my wife, hard enough to kill their opposition by running him down in the middle of the afternoon, and hard enough to plan an assassination. I decided that they were hard enough for anything.
I sat there with a cup of cold coffee trying not to think of Fredl, and not doing very well at it. So I got up and rode the elevator down and walked to the saloon. When I arrived, Padillo was saying goodbye on the telephone. “That was Magda,” he said. “She’s the last to call. We’re to meet them at the Seventh Street address at eleven.”
“You’ll split the seventeen thousand pounds this morning, right?”
“The fifteen thousand. They get five each.”
“Will Hardman be there?”
“No. He says Mush will let us in. We can lock it up when we leave. We’ll keep the key.” He glanced at his watch. “We might as well go.”
“All right.”
“What did you do, go to bed with a bottle last night?”
“No. Why?”
Padillo eyed me critically. “You look like hell. You look even worse than you did yesterday.”
“I got brushed by some drunk-rollers; three of them.”
“Where?”
“About three blocks from here.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I just showed them my genuine pearl-handled switch blade and they went away.”
“Nice neighborhood.”
“One of the best,” I said. “Wait till you see where we’re going this morning.”
If Washington has a skid row, the area between Seventh and Ninth is probably it. It runs as far north as N Street; as far south as H. The Carnegie Public Library, located in the middle of a couple of city blocks between Seventh and Ninth, serves as a kind of headquarters for the down-and-out, the drunks, and those who somehow have gone past caring. They can sit in the sun on the curved benches that Andrew Carnegie built in 1899 and read a sign that says the library is intended to be a “University for the People.” Most of them look as if they would like a drink.
