The Mordida Man (3 page)

“Six months. Until she turned thirty—and ran out of money.”

“And that wrecked it for you, didn't it? Even in your district. Hell, you must've had more dopers and crazies and old retired Jewish socialists and ex-Trotskyites than any place in the state, except maybe Berkeley.”

Dunjee shrugged. “Even they couldn't swallow the Weathermen thing. I got beat over the head with it.”

“But you had the one term.”

“That's right. I had the one term.”

Grimes shook his head sadly. “Our Nan,” he said, reproach in his voice this time. “If it hadn't been for her, you'd probably still be there. You had it all going for you then—ex-Special Forces captain, medals down to here, good anti-war plank, and almost the youngest member of Congress with a real fine pinko district. Shoot, Chubb, you'd still've been
planted
there if it hadn't been for her. Our Nan.”

“I
was
the youngest member of Congress,” Dunjee said, disliking himself for making the point. “At least when I was elected I was.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” There was a silence until Grimes said, “You know what I'm doing now?”

Dunjee examined him carefully for several moments. “Probably what you've always done—cleaning up after other people's messes.”

Grimes chuckled. It was a fat man's low, bubbling chuckle with a trace of wheeze in it. When Dunjee had first known him in school, more than twenty years before at UCLA, Grimes had borne an almost ominous resemblance to Victor Mature, a noted actor. Grimes had always blamed the resemblance for keeping him out of elective politics, since he was totally convinced that nobody would ever dream of voting for Victor Mature for anything.

Now forty-three, possibly forty-four, Grimes no longer bore any resemblance to Victor Mature—except perhaps for that hawklike nose. Over the years, Grimes's face had grown round and plump and pink and smooth, his jaw wreathed by two thick soft rolls of fat. What was left of his hair was parted very low down on the left side, almost to the ear, and combed up and over. But it didn't really help much. He still looked bald. About all that saved Grimes from looking like a jolly fat man were that beak of a nose and those cold, wet, silvery eyes. The eyes gleamed with something, Dunjee decided, possibly amusement, but certainly not jollity.

Grimes was still chuckling his practiced fat man's chuckle when he said, “How'd you like to make a bunch of money?”

“I don't need any money.”

Again, there was reproach in Grimes's smile and tone; gentle reproach. “You've got 4,136 dollars and change in that Lisbon bank. It'll last another two months—three if you scrimp.”

It was at least thirty seconds before Dunjee replied. “How much is a bunch of money nowadays?”

“Say one hundred thousand—plus expenses.”

Dunjee nodded. It was a nod indicating mild interest, but nothing else. It was all Grimes needed.

“We sort of lost touch after the election. The 1970 election. But I—”

Dunjee interrupted. “I lost touch with a lot of people. Ex-freshman Congressmen carry a certain pariahlike atmosphere around with them. Or maybe it's a smell. The smell of defeat and shock. Somebody should come up with a soap.”

“As I was saying, we lost touch, but I kept track. You bounced back. You went into oil.”

“A cream puff,” Dunjee said. “All you had to do was stick a straw down and out it would gush. Well, I raised the money, all tax-shelter stuff. Five thousand here, ten there. And we stuck the straw down and out it gushed. Salt water. A million barrels a day—or something like that. Hell, I don't remember.”

Grimes made a sympathetic clucking noise and started lighting another cigarette. Staring at the match flame before moving it to the end of his cigarette, he said, “Then there was that stint with the UN.”

“Stint,” Dunjee said in a faintly mocking tone. “Yes, my stint with the UN. Forty-two thousand a year tax free, a lot of travel, and useful and productive dialogue with the leaders of the world's lesser-developed countries. It was just like talking to Nan.”

“Our Nan. Well, when you left the UN I lost track for a couple of years.”

Dunjee stared at Grimes again, then smiled and said, “You didn't lose track. For two years I drove a cab. I drove a cab in Miami and Houston and Denver and Seattle and San Francisco and Great Falls and New Orleans. A good week, I'd make a hundred and fifty bucks. Then one day I decided I didn't want to become a human interest story. You see them all the time. I think there was one in the
Herald Trib
the other day. Something like ‘Ex-Boy Governor Now Chicago Hackie,' or some such crap. And it's all about how this guy who was governor of Michigan or West Virginia at twenty-seven or so, until he found out about booze and broads, is fifty now and driving a cab and he's never been happier because of this deep insight he's gained not only into himself but into humanity in general.”

Grimes nodded several times as if he too had read the same stories. “So you went to Mexico.”

“I went to Mexico.”

“The Mordida Man. You got your name in the papers after all.”

Dunjee shrugged. “And they got out of jail.”

“How many did you”—Grimes paused to select his word—“negotiate out?”

“Sixty-two.”

“Bribes and blackmail.”

“They got out of jail. I was good at it. My background helped—Congress, the UN. And being a cab driver. You gain a lot of wonderful insight into human nature by being a cab driver.”

“They say you made a lot of money in Mexico.”

“Who's they?”

“The IRS.”

Dunjee smiled. “I'm having a slight problem with them.”

“Not so slight. They're talking about extradition.”

“I've got a lawyer on it.”

“I talked to him. He's worried. The deductions you put down: 251,817 bucks for business expenses. The IRS has decided those were bribes. Bribes aren't legitimate business expenses.” Grimes yawned. “Of course, I could fix all that.”

There was another long silence until Dunjee said, “You'll stay for lunch?”

“What're you having?”

“I don't know what we're having. I'll go see.” He rose and headed for the house, a tall man, two inches or so over six feet, perhaps more. Grimes noticed that there was still that quick, springy lift to Dunjee's heels as they came up off the grass. He thought that at forty-one (or was it forty-two?) Dunjee still looked fit enough to pass for a professional athlete with at least a season of play left in him. Or perhaps only part of a season.

The revised estimate made Grimes feel somewhat better. So did the gray in Dunjee's medium long dark-brown hair. That was new. But the gray and those fresh deep lines were about the only physical changes that Grimes could detect. Dunjee's hazel-green eyes were still more clever than wise, and his features were still rescued from being too regular, almost handsome, by that cheekbone, the left one, that poked up almost three-quarters of an inch higher than the right. From a certain angle the skewed cheekbone made Dunjee look just a bit cockeyed.

Grimes was finishing the last of his beer when Dunjee returned. “Fish,” he said. “We're having fish.”

“Good,” Grimes said. “I can eat fish.”

Dunjee sank back down into the low garden chair. “You say you can fix the IRS people.”

“I can fix them.”

“Who's your client?”

Grimes shook his head.

Dunjee stared at him for a moment and then nodded impatiently. “All right. If you tell me, I'm in. Committed. Who's your client?”

“The White House,” Grimes said, savoring the name in spite of himself.

Dunjee scratched the back of his left hand, noticed a hangnail, and decided to bite it. “The White House, huh?” he said between bites. “That could mean the head gardener or the pool man or some twenty-eight-year-old Yalie savant over there in the West Wing basement or—”

Grimes interrupted. “The President.”

Dunjee sighed. “Well, hell, Paul. I guess you'd better tell me about it.”

4

According to Paul Grimes, there were several reasons why Bristol “Bingo” McKay had not gone to Disneyland with the others, the foremost being that he had always considered the place to be just a trifle dumb. Besides, he had already visited it once before, under protest, nearly fifteen years before. But the real reason he had not gone this time was simply because once you passed through its gates there was no liquor to be had, and the terrible prospect of again encountering Mickey Mouse cold sober was something that Bingo McKay would gladly perjure himself to avoid.

So he had lied his way out of it and filled the early afternoon with twenty-six long-distance telephone calls, three drinks, a light lunch, and five laps around the Marriott Hotel pool. At 4
P.M.,
which was 7
P.M.
on the east coast, he had made his regular five-minute call to his kid brother in Washington. Bingo McKay's kid brother was President of the United States.

As always, they talked politics, domestic politics primarily, which was Bingo McKay's special preserve; and, as always, the President listened carefully to his brother's trenchant, totally unvarnished report, whose more troublesome blips would be reflected in the national polls ten days later.

But by then the President, with his brother's canny guidance, would have worked the legerdemain necessary to correct whatever political imbalances might exist. It was one of the reasons why Jerome McKay, at thirty-nine was often called the most totally political animal to occupy the White House since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom the President, try as he might, couldn't quite remember.

Now barely nine months in office, the new McKay administration had failed utterly to work any of the economic miracles it more or less had promised. Inflation was nudging an estimated 19 percent; the monthly balance of payments deficit was steady at around $2.6 billion; unemployment had shot up to almost 10 percent; the Gross National Product growth rate had somehow got stuck at just about zero, and gasoline, although rationed, cost $2.26 per gallon on the east coast and $2.31 in the west. The average wait at a filling station had been timed by NBC News at twenty-seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds, although an hour was not in the least uncommon.

All this was particularly embarrassing for the McKay administration, because it had run on oil—or rather against it. The McKay brothers' strategy had been really quite simple—criminally so, many said later. Jerome McKay had ignored Iris political opponents and had run instead against OPEC and the giant oil companies—and the Russians.

The future President had an uncommon grasp of the oil and natural gas industry because Bingo McKay had steered him into the business at twenty-two, turning him into a multimillionaire by the time he was twenty-eight. At thirty, Jerome McKay had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Oklahoma's Fifth Congressional District, serving with some distinction, or at least with considerable national attention, for two terms until he relinquished his seat to run successfully for Governor of his native state.

Bingo McKay was fifty-one when he had lugged the huge map of the United States into his kid brother's office in the Governor's mansion on Northeast 23rd Street in Oklahoma City and propped it up on an easel. “What the hell's that for?” the Governor, then only thirty-seven, had asked.

“Basic political geography, lesson number one. How'd you like to be elected President?”

“Very much.”

“Lemme tell you how we're gonna do it.”

They did it by paying extremely close attention to elementary politics and by running single-mindedly against OPEC and what Jerome McKay branded the oilogopoly—and the Russians. McKay vigorously damned the oil companies' greed and avarice with unassailable facts and figures, thus confirming the darkest suspicions of 69.2 percent of the American voting public, who had long been hankering for just such a readily identifiable scapegoat.

McKay offered apparently practical, eminently sensible solutions and presented himself as an expert on the oil business, which he certainly was, and also as a repentant sinner who had made his fortune by following the same villainous practices he now condemned. His campaign autobiography, which he wrote himself in three weeks, was called
Plunder!
and it stayed on the New York
Times
best-seller list for thirty-seven weeks and then did even better in paperback.

The McKay brothers' strategy was both excellent theater and sound politics. Jerome McKay whipped his rivals in nearly a third of the primaries, secured his party's nomination on the fourteenth ballot at three o'clock in the morning, and went on to win the national election with 48.3 percent of the popular vote and an electoral vote margin of two. A little less than a year later he found himself caught up in a delicate, even desperate, gamble for oil.

It had started with a whisper in the delegates' lounge at the United Nations. Then a hint was dropped into the ear of the American Ambassador in Rome. There was nothing firm, of course, said the hinter, but it was just possible that the Libyan Arab Republic, a country rich in both oil and truculence, just might (
might
now, you must remember) be willing to increase its production of oil and earmark it for the United States—a firm guarantee, of course—in exchange for the right to purchase some of the latest in American technological gadgetry, including just a few items that might be described as extremely sophisticated weaponry.

Jerome McKay decided to nibble at the tempting bait and sent some murmurings and whisperings of his own to Tripoli by way of Lagos, Nigeria. The American signal in due course reached the ears of the leader of the new military regime in Libya, Colonel Youssef Mourabet, a jumped-up Army major who had come to power after the unexpected death six months before from a heart attack of the still young, often choleric Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. The heart attack, it was rumored widely, had been brought on by a fit of apoplectic rage.