The Mordida Man (25 page)

“Tell me something,” McKay said.

“What?”

“If push comes to shove, who'll do it—him?” He nodded toward the new guard. “Or you, or old Frank?”

“What do you want to know for?”

“Just curious.”

“It's morbid.”

“Well, hell, if you were in my fix, wouldn't you be curious?”

“It won't come to that.”

“Suppose it does?”

Ko sighed. “Frank. Frank would do it.”

“Fast?”

“So fast you'll never even know it.”

McKay snorted. “I'll know it. But I figured it'd be old Frank. Trouble with him, he was born too late. He should've been born around 'twenty-two or 'twenty-three. Could've gone into the SS and made something out of himself.”

“You're typecasting again.”

“Well, you gotta admit, old Frank sure
looks
like an SS recruiting poster.”

“What if you were typecasting me? You don't even know where I was born.”

“Where?”

“Utah. In a concentration camp. An American concentration camp, except they didn't call them that. They called them relocation centers, or some such shit. My old man died of pleurisy in the spring of ‘forty-five, just before the war ended. After it was over, the war, she took me back to Japan. Tokyo. And we lived with her folks. She finally got a job. My mother. Guess what she did?”

“What?”

“She sold cigarettes in the PX. She worked in that PX for sixteen years and the four of us lived in one room and she saved her money for just one thing—to send me to Stanford. Well, I went to Stanford.”

“When was that—'sixty-one, 'sixty-two?”

“ 'Sixty-two.”

“Sort of quiet on campus back around then, as I recollect.”

“Not necessarily. Not if you're seventeen and dirt poor and in a foreign country and your nickname's Tojo. It's not exactly quiet. Your rage keeps it from being quiet.”

“Yeah,” McKay said after a while. “I imagine.”

“Imagine this, Bingo. Imagine that sheer loneliness drove you to the books. And because you read the books so diligently, and remembered what you read, they started giving you rewards. Scholarships. Prizes. Liberals like that—giving prizes to Jap kids and nigger kids and spic kids. Goddamn, it made them feel good! Well, I took their bloody prizes and scholarships and kept on reading, and the more I read the simpler it got. You have to go way past Marx to get where I got. Marx still had doubts—little niggling doubts—so you have to go past him and the others into a kind of place where there aren't any doubts. You just know. It was a kind of metamorphosis.”

Bingo McKay nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I think I know what you mean. Something like that happened to me back in 'forty-six, right after the war.”

“What?”

“I went back to school—to OU. And hell, I was poor. I was living on the GI bill and wearing suntans to class and eating quarter hamburgers and then one day, sitting there in a Government 101 class, it just came to me. So I got up in the middle of that class and walked out and never went back. Like you said, I just all of a sudden
knew.
”

“Knew what?”

McKay grinned. “That I was gonna be rich.”

There was a knock at the door. The guard rose and opened it. Standing there holding a tray with a Pyrex carafe of coffee and three cups on it was Bingo McKay's executive assistant, Eleanor Rhodes. Behind her was the guard Moussef, his submachinegun tucked under an arm.

“That woman needs help,” Rhodes said as she entered the stateroom and put the tray down on the table next to the chessboard. Moussef nodded at the older guard, who turned and left, closing the door behind him. Moussef resumed his seat.

“What now?” Ko said as he watched Rhodes pour the coffee. She handed cups to McKay and Ko. Pouring one for herself, she sat down next to McKay. “She won't let me sleep,” Rhodes said. “She talked until two yesterday and until—what, three this morning? I know all about her childhood in Algiers. I know all about her father, the paratroop colonel, and her mother and her mother's lovers, all of them, each one dissected and analyzed down to his socks. And Paris in 'sixty-eight; I know all about Paris then, too. That woman needs help.”

“Or a sympathetic ear,” Ko said.

“She asleep now?” McKay said.

Rhodes shrugged. “If you can call it that. When I saw Moussef go by heading for the galley, I escaped. When he said you were still up, I offered to carry the coffee.” She looked at the chessboard. “Who won?”

“Bingo,” Ko said. “Are Françoise's dreams getting worse?”

“They're not dreams, they're nightmares,” Rhodes said. “Do nightmares get better? Do you grade them? Hers are all about death. She dies, you die, I die, we all die. And Felix. He keeps dying, too. Over and over. First one way, then another, and all of them horrible. Then she wakes me up and tells me about them, every last detail. Damn it, I'm the hostage, the victim—not her! I'm the one who should be going crackers or sinking into despair or whatever happens. I want somebody to listen to me. I don't like this role. I don't want to be the Female Terrorist's Best Friend. God damn it, I want somebody to—”

Her voice had risen steadily until it cracked. She started sobbing and buried her head in her arms on the table. McKay reached over and put a hand on her shoulder. “Easy, sugar,” he said. “Just take it easy.” He couldn't think of anything else to say.

The sobbing died away. Rhodes looked up at McKay. Her nose was red, her eyes bloodshot, her cheeks tear-stained. McKay thought she looked beautiful. “That goddamned bandage needs changing again, too,” she said.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, automatically touching the bandage. “Old Doc Souri said he'd tend to it tomorrow.”

“I'll talk to him about Françoise, too,” Ko said. “Maybe he can give her something that will calm her down and help her to sleep.”

“You'd better—” A new knock at the stateroom's door interrupted Eleanor Rhodes's admonishment. Moussef rose and opened the door. The yacht's Libyan radio officer stepped into the room. “It's from Rome,” he said in Italian and handed a folded sheet of paper to Ko.

When the officer had gone, Ko unfolded the sheet of paper and read it slowly. He looked up first at McKay, then at Rhodes.

“Hostages should be kept in the dark,” he said. “It destroys their morale. I think it's in the book.”

“But you ain't gonna go by the book, are you, old buddy?” McKay said.

Ko smiled. It was a sad philosopher's tired smile. “The news is not good.”

“But it's news.”

“The Nigerian Ambassador to the States met yesterday afternoon in Rome with a representative from Libya. They got nowhere. The Nigerian seems to be stalling.”

“Well, shit, they're meeting anyway.”

“That's item one. Item two: Do you know an American called Chubb Dunjee?”

McKay commanded his face not to betray him. He frowned slightly as if trying to recall the face that went with the name. But his thoughts raced. Hot damn, the Mordida Man. The kid remembered. He called in Grimes and, god damn, old Paul must've dug up Dunjee somewhere.

“Dunjee,” McKay said slowly, but not too slowly. “Used to be a fellow in Congress by that name, why?”

“He served one term,” Eleanor Rhodes said. “He—” She broke off abruptly.

Ko looked at her curiously. “He what?”

“He went to the UN after that, I believe.”

McKay nodded proudly. “By God, she's got a memory, hasn't she? I believe he was with the UN for a while.” Innocence crept across McKay's face. “Why?”

“They're on their way to Tripoli,” Ko said. “Not too willingly, it would seem.”

“They?” McKay said, as indifferently as he could.

“Dunjee and his associates, who seem to be an English thief and a woman of uncertain nationality.”

God damn, but don't that sound just like Dunjee, McKay thought. Got himself a pickup crew somewhere and a hip pocket full of money—from the kid, most likely—and he's wiggling his way right into the henhouse. God bless the kid, God bless Paul Grimes, and God bless the Mordida Man. It was as close as McKay had come to prayer in forty-one years.

“You don't know this Dunjee, you say?” Ko asked.

“I'm trying to recollect. I believe we did meet once at a convention. 'Sixty-eight in Chicago. I think he was there and we maybe shook hands and said hello. And I think maybe we bumped into each other at a cocktail party in Washington one time. Probably talked a couple of minutes. But that's about it.”

“Eleanor?” Ko said.

She shook her head. “I never met him.”

“How come Tripoli?” McKay said, putting another cigarette into his mouth to supplement the casualness of his tone.

“How come?” Ko said. “Because he was sent for apparently, that's how come.”

“Sent for by who?”

“Mourabet.”

“The Colonel?”

Ko nodded. “Himself.”

“No kidding?” Bingo McKay said.

26

The plane in which Chubb Dunjee flew across the Mediterranean from Rome to Tripoli was the same Boeing 727 in which Bingo McKay's ear had been removed. Because of some kind of unexplained mechanical difficulties, the plane had not left Rome until nearly five o'clock in the morning. At 5:46
A.M
., the plane's passengers could watch dawn break over the sea.

“It's getting light,” Delft Csider said. Dunjee and Harold Hopkins turned to look out the window, then turned back.

“You resist, he implores, then you give in,” she said and shook her head. “I hope you know what you're doing.”

“What's she talking about?” Hopkins said.

“It's how he works,” Csider said. “He puts his neck in the noose, then tries to talk his way out of it before they draw it tight and cut off all the air. All the hot air.”

Hopkins frowned. “I didn't sign on for this, mate. I signed on for Rome with maybe a quick peek at the Colosseum. I didn't sign on for Libya. What the hell's in Libya?”

“A lot of sand,” Dunjee said. “And a lot of oil.”

“Before the oil, you know what they used to call it?” Csider asked.

“The poorest country on earth,” Dunjee said.

“I forgot,” she said. “You were with the UN.”

“World War Two scrap and esparto grass. That's about all Libya had to export then. They didn't even want to let them into the UN, because everyone knew they'd be just another LDC with their hand out.”

“What's an LDC?” Hopkins said.

“A lesser-developed country,” Dunjee said. “They used to call them underdeveloped, but that hurt their feelings, so they started calling them ‘developing countries.' But then some sticklers insisted that that wasn't quite accurate either, because a lot of them weren't developing anything except their politics. So about the time I went with the UN they'd started calling them lesser-developed, which seemed to please almost nobody. But that's one of the things the UN is good at—pleasing nobody.”

“Fooled 'em though, didn't they?” Hopkins said. “I mean with all that oil they found and the price it's bringing. But I don't blame 'em, the Arabs, I mean. If I'd been poor all me life, which I bloody well have been, and then woke up one morning and found out I had something everybody in the world was dying to get their hands on, you think I wouldn't sell it dear? Not likely, mate. What the traffic would bear, that's what I'd sell it for. What the traffic would bear.”

Hopkins nodded as though he found his economic analysis unassailable. They were seated in the lounge section of the plane. The door to the forward section was locked. The forward section was where Bingo McKay's ear had been sliced off. It was now occupied by Faraj Abedsaid and the two tough young Libyan guards. The guards had remained in the lounge section with Dunjee and the others during the long delay on the ground in Rome. But once the plane was airborne, they had gone into the forward section, locking the door behind them.

“When we get to wherever we're going—”

“Tripoli,” Dunjee said.

Hopkins nodded. “Right, Tripoli. What then?”

“I see the man.”

“The chief panjandrum, huh?”

“Right.”

“Then?”

Dunjee sighed. “Then I try to convince him that I'm the sole supplier.”

“Of what?”

“Of whatever his heart desires,” Dunjee said, and attempted a smile, which turned into a lip-stretching exercise without either humor or confidence.

The three of them turned when they heard the door to the forward compartment being unlocked. Abedsaid came through it. He bent down to peer out a window and then looked at Dunjee.

“We'll be landing in about twenty minutes,” he said, straightening up. “The Captain wants you to fasten your seat belts.”

“What happens after we land?” Dunjee said, snapping his seat belt together.

Abedsaid frowned, as if weary of answering questions. He apparently had had no sleep in the forward compartment. The lines around his mouth had deepened. His eyes were bloodshot.

“You and I,” he said, still frowning at Dunjee. “You and I will take another small journey.”

“Where to?”

Abedsaid shook his head. “The name would mean nothing. As for your two colleagues, they will be taken to a hotel. The Inter-Continental, I think. It's quite comfortable.”

“You sure it's a hotel?” Dunjee said.

“A prison perhaps?” Abedsaid said. “A dungeon even?”

“All right. It's a hotel.”

“You're very suspicious, Mr. Dunjee.”

“You're right,” Dunjee said. “I am.”

From one thousand feet up Dunjee counted six chrome-shiny Airstream trailers. They formed an L. Next to them were parked two flatbed trucks. On the beds of the trucks were diesel generators. Parked near the generators were two tanker trucks containing the oil that ran the generators. Scattered here and there were at least two dozen sedans and heavy-duty pickup trucks. Farther away were two French six-passenger Aérospatiale AS 350 Squirrel helicopters, twins of the one that had flown Dunjee and Abed-said east and south of Tripoli for a little more than forty-five minutes.