Backup Men (15 page)

“You want another one?” I said, gesturing with the glass.

He nodded, not looking at me, not looking really at anything.

“They must have tapped into the central panel box,” he said, more to himself than to me.

I handed him his drink. “I thought that was a tough job, especially in this building.”

Padillo shook his head. “Not for Kragstein. He’d have someone legitimate from the phone company do it. It wouldn’t cost him anything. He’d blackmail them into it. He works that way, not because he has to but because he likes to.”

“That’s how they knew about the armored truck.”

“That’s how.”

“Do you think they hijacked it?”

“God knows,” Padillo said. “Maybe they rented one and then called Amanda and told her that they’d be fifteen minutes early. You can rent anything you want in New York if you have the connections, and Kragstein has them.”

“I don’t know what to say about Amanda,” I said, not wanting to look at Padillo, but forcing myself to.

Padillo’s face tightened. “There’s nothing to say.”

“Yes. Well, I thought—”

“There’s nothing to say,” and from the way he said it, I decided that there really wasn’t.

He put his drink down on the bar and again looked at me. “You didn’t pick up that little gray box she was carrying, did you?”

“The one with the ring? No.”

“Well, if it’s worth half a million dollars, I don’t suppose we should leave it lying around like that.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose we should.”

It wasn’t hard to find the ring. It was still in the box and the box was still in Amanda Clarkmann’s left hand. Padillo lifted the blanket away, reached down for the box, and handed it to me. He stood there, holding the blanket, and looking at Amanda Clarkmann for what seemed to be a long time. I opened the box and looked at the ring. It may have been worth a half million dollars, but just then I wouldn’t have given a dime for it.

I drove out of the basement entrance and onto Sixty-fourth just as a carload of men in dark suits and white shirts got out of a black Ford Galaxie and flashed some identification at the three doormen. Two of the men looked at us and then looked away quickly, as if we were someone whom they’d cross the street to avoid meeting. Maybe we were.

Padillo sat next to me. The king and Scales were in the rear. Neither of them had said much other than some murmured condolences to Padillo about Amanda Clarkmann’s death. Padillo had turned away before they were half through with their murmurings. We were just coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel when I said, “What’ll we do with the car?”

“Leave it in the parking lot and mail the ticket back to William.”

“I have another question.”

“You worry too much.”

“Only over nonessentials such as our reservations.”

“What about them?”

“If you made them over the phone and Kragstein was tapped in, then he knows where we’re going.”

“I didn’t make them over the phone,” Padillo said.

“Who did?”

“No one. We don’t have any.”

Because there is only one direct flight a day from Newark to Denver and because not too many persons seemed interested in making the trip, we had no trouble getting first-class reservations on United Flight 855 which would get us into Denver at four o’clock, just in time to make connections with United Flight 367 to Los Angeles, leaving Denver at 4:40 and arriving in Los Angeles at 5:53 providing that no one decided to go to Cuba.

Padillo turned to me and said, “How much money have you got?”

“Around five hundred.”

“Can you pay for your own ticket?”

“Sure,” I said and handed over two hundred dollars. The United man gave me $13 in change. He actually owed me $13.10, but Congress now lets them round it off to the next highest dollar so if your ticket actually costs $162.02, you pay $163.00, which not only simplifies the airlines’ bookkeeping, but also nets them $50 million a year. It also gives me something else to brood about.

When I looked at the ticket that Padillo had handed me I saw that my new name was R. Miller.

“What did you call our two friends?”

“F. Jones and L. Brown.”

“And yours?”

“Q. Smythe—with a y and an e.”

“That’s real class,” I said. “What’s the Q stand for?”

“Quaint.”

There were those who once swore by the air in Denver, claiming that it could cure anything from rickets to tuberculosis. I don’t suppose they do anymore, not if that gray, greasy-looking blanket of smog that I saw out of the plane’s window occurs every other day or so. I could still see the frosted mountains in the background, but the smog even made them look as though they needed to be hosed down.

“I didn’t know Denver had smog,” I said to Padillo. “What do they do, import it from L.A.?”

“They grow their own,” he said. “Everybody does nowadays.”

As soon as we were inside Stapleton Airport, the public address system started calling for Mr. Q. Smythe. “Mr. Q. Smythe, will you please report to the United Airlines information counter.”

“Do you think there might be two of them?” I said.

Padillo shook his head and turned to the king and Scales. “Sit down over there,” he said, motioning toward two chairs. “Don’t move.” He turned back to me. “You go. I don’t want to leave them loose.”

“Who do you think it is?”

“Somebody from Burmser.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Nothing. Just listen.”

I nodded and walked to the information counter where a blond with silvered eyelids smiled at me and said that two gentlemen were waiting for me in the VIP lounge. She gave me directions to the lounge and once inside it wasn’t hard to spot them. They both wore vests and no sideburns and nice, quiet ties and quiet, hard looks. I walked over to them and said, “I’ve got time for just one drink. A Scotch and water.”

One of them had a turned-up nose and pale blue eyes. He glanced down at a small four-by-five-inch photograph that he held in his left hand. “You don’t look much like this wire-photo of Mr. Smythe, friend.”

“I just take messages for him.”

“We’d rather talk to Mr. Smythe,” the other one said, rising from his chair. His nose leaned a little to the left, as if a football cleat might have smacked into it once. He was larger than his partner and he had brown eyes that were almost hazel. Neither of them was over thirty.

“Mr. Smythe’s tied up,” I said, “and I’d still like that drink.”

The taller one looked at his partner and then back at me. “You McCorkle?”

I nodded. He held out his hand and I reached into my pocket and took out my billfold. Slowly. If they worked for Burmser, I didn’t want to upset them. I handed him a D.C. driver’s license, which had my photograph on it in color. He looked at the photograph and then at me and then back at the photograph. It wasn’t all that bad. He handed the license back, turned, and signaled to a cocktail waitress who came over, smiling expectantly.

“One Scotch and water and two Cokes,” he said and then motioned me to sit down across the cocktail table from them. I sat down and looked around and smiled to show how nice I thought everything was. They didn’t smile back. They didn’t say anything until the drinks were served and the waitress had left. I picked mine up and took a large swallow. They didn’t touch theirs.

“We heard about you,” the one with the snub nose said. “They said you were a semi-pro. Not quite sharp enough for the minors.”

“I won’t even play next year,” I said. “What about the message?”

“You had trouble in New York,” the tall one with the almost hazel eyes said.

“Some,” I agreed.

“They can’t sit on it more than forty-eight hours. Tell your Mr. Smythe that.”

“All right.”

“And tell him that they want both Kragstein and Gitner out of the way within forty-eight hours. Especially Gitner.”

“Out of the way,” I said. “Just where would that be?”

They exchanged glances and then the one with the snub nose leaned forward and said softly, “That would be dead.”

“Oh.”

“Have you got it?”

“It’s simple enough,” I said. “There’s just one thing.”

“What?” the taller of the two said.

“What happens after forty-eight hours if they’re not out of the way?”

They rose together as if they had practiced it. Maybe they had. The one with the snub nose looked down at me and his blue eyes seemed to drop far below freezing. “What happens?” he said. “Anything that’s necessary. Tell him that. Anything that’s necessary.”

I watched them leave while I finished my Scotch. The cocktail waitress came over and let me pay for the drinks. Back in the waiting room I found Padillo standing with his back to the wall about ten feet from the king and Scales.

“What did they want?” he said.

“They want Kragstein and Gitner dead within forty-eight hours,” I said. “Especially Gitner.”

Padillo looked at me and then past me, through the glass windows that faced west toward the mountains which the smog seemed to have soiled. “It’s not going to take that long,” he said either to himself or to the mountains. From the way he said it, I was almost glad that he wasn’t talking to me.

16

WE DROVE all night and the king didn’t get to see much of California until we got to San Jose at dawn. But he had had a good look at the Grand Canyon on our way to Los Angeles from Denver because the United Airlines pilot had circled it once and had even given a brief little lecture on its geological formation which the king seemed to find fascinating. As for the canyon itself, the king went along with everybody else and called it magnificent.

We rented a Ford Galaxie at the Los Angeles airport and Padillo drove, claiming that he knew the town better than I. But it was still nearly dark before we got to Ventura because he read a sign wrong and landed us on the Santa Monica freeway which forced us to take Alternate 101 through Malibu and Topanga Beach. Southern California to me had always been lollipop land but the route made the king happy since it let him look at the ocean.

We had a sandwich on the other side of Santa Barbara along with a flat left front tire and together they killed an hour and a half. After that Padillo and I switched off on the driving, stopping for coffee every hour or so, not going much over sixty, and talking hardly at all. After Santa Barbara the king and Scales slept most of the way.

I suppose everybody has to have a home town and San Francisco was mine although I don’t think that we cared too much for each other anymore. I had been born there in the old French Hospital at Sixth and Geary and I had grown up in the Richmond District in a middle-class neighborhood which then had a large number of Russian families. I assume that it still does. We had lived on Twenty-sixth Avenue about two blocks north of Golden Gate Park. Fredl and I had once spent a week in the Bay area and I had shown her the house and the neighborhood where I had lived until I got out of George Washington High School and went into the Army, but all she had said was, “It doesn’t look much like you, does it?”

I decided that over the years both the city and I have changed, perhaps neither of us for the better. San Francisco reminds me of nothing so much as a middle-aged hooker relying solely on technique now that her looks have gone. But I suspect that my real antagonism stems from being taken for a tourist in my own home town. There’s nothing much worse than that.

Padillo was awake now as were the king and Scales. The Freeway isn’t the most scenic approach to San Francisco, but when we neared the Ninth Street Civic Center exit, the two in the back seat got their first glimpse of the Bay Bridge on their right and later they got a look at Golden Gate Bridge, neither of which led anywhere that I wanted to go.

“I used to come up here from L.A. on weekends sometimes,” Padillo said. “I knew a girl who lived on Russian Hill. She got mad when I called it Frisco.”

“The natives have a lot of civic pride,” I said.

“She was from New Orleans.”

Padillo wanted a motel so we checked into one called the Bay View Lodge at Van Ness and Washington which, because of its in-town location, offered as expensive lodgings as we could hope to find. We got two double rooms and after Padillo made sure that the king and Scales were safely tucked away in theirs and that room service would bring them some breakfast he joined me in our room where I lay on the bed, the telephone to my ear, ordering our own breakfast which consisted of scrambled eggs, ham, rye toast, a quart or so of coffee, and two double Bloody Marys which the young lady on the other end of the telephone didn’t seem to think that I really wanted at seven fifteen in the morning. I eventually won her consent, if not her approval.

Padillo took the automatic from his waistband and slipped it under the pillow before lying down on the other bed. He folded his arms beneath his head and stared at the ceiling. I lit a cigarette, which tasted foul, and blew some smoke at the spot on the ceiling that Padillo stared at.

“Now what?” I said.

“First we get some sleep.”

“Have we got time for that?”

“We’ll take it.”

“And then.”