The Mordida Man (15 page)

“Minder?” the voice that had said hello asked.

“Minder.”

“Thank you,” the voice said, and the phone went dead.

The co-pilot picked up his coffee and the cookie, which he ate as he wandered back into the auditorium. It was beginning to fill up. The co-pilot's practiced eye spotted the fresh fish coming through the door. The fish was a shaky forty-two-year-old male who looked pale and sick and terribly frightened. The co-pilot guessed that the fish was less than a week off a six-month drunk.

The co-pilot's mouth spread itself into a wide, warm smile as he moved over to the fish, stuck out his hand, and said, “Hi. I'm Don. How's it going, pal—a little rough?”

The man who had taken the telephone call from the co-pilot was Gambia's permanent representative to the United Nations, Dr. Joseph Mapangou, who lived far above his means in a $2,150-a-month one-bedroom-with-den apartment on East 60th, which almost, but not quite, commanded a view of Central Park.

During his nine years in New York, Dr. Mapangou had built the reputation of being one of the UN's most charming and lavish hosts. There was some small argument over whether he actually spent more than the Kuwait delegation, but there was no argument at all over his ranking as the UN's most delightfully wicked gossip.

As the principal representative of Africa's smallest nation, Dr. Mapangou's official duties and obligations were minimal, almost non-existent, and he had spent his first two years at the UN simply making friends, which he did with remarkable ease. For Dr. Mapangou was a naturally gregarious man, totally without pretense, who found everyone equally fascinating. He also was a true democrat, perhaps the only one accredited to the UN, and certainly the only delegate who still believed that the organization was really the parliament of the world.

It was perhaps because of his innocence that others confided in Dr. Mapangou. They told him their most awful secrets even though they knew he simply could not keep his mouth shut. And because he revealed everything he knew to others, they, in turn, confided in him even darker secrets, which he cheerfully recounted to anyone who would listen.

The Italians, of course, had been the first to recognize Dr. Mapangou's true value. The Italians were having a minor but irritating problem with a stubborn delegate from Somalia. Over an expensive lunch at Lutèce, the Italians had whispered to Dr. Mapangou about the Somalian delegate's shocking peculations. By nightfall it was all over the UN. By the next morning it had reached Mogadishu, and by that afternoon the Somalian delegate had been ordered home, much to the Italians' immense satisfaction.

Indeed, so grateful were they to Dr. Mapangou for his small favor that the Italians sent him an expensive silver coffee service. Dr. Mapangou immediately pawned it for four hundred dollars, which he needed to help pay the rent on the third-floor walk-up in the East Village where he then lived.

During the next few years, Dr. Mapangou became the UN's unofficial clearinghouse for rumor and innuendo of the base, vicious, and scurrilous kind. He was valued and even respected for two qualities: first, his meticulous accuracy, and second, his refusal ever to reveal his sources. Because of all this, he was not only tolerated but indeed encouraged by the spies and rumor-mongers who made extensive use of his services and rewarded him with expensive and easily pawnable gifts that Dr. Mapangou used to help finance his increasing social responsibilities.

On the anniversary of his seventh year at the UN, Dr. Mapangou found himself immensely popular and nearly ninety thousand dollars in debt—all because of his lavish hospitality. The exact figure of his debts was $89,831.19, and it stared up at him in red from the Litronix pocket calculator that rested on his desk next to the stack of bills and nasty letters from assorted collection agencies.

It was the morning after the party he had given himself in observance of his seventh anniversary with the UN and he was still in his pajamas. Around him in his East Village living room was all the depressing evidence of the previous night's party. During the party he had gleaned one delicious item that he knew would be worth at least a thousand dollars to the East Germans. But what good would a thousand dollars do? Dr. Mapangou pressed the C button on the calculator, which erased the hateful $89,831.19 figure. Three tears began to roll down his plump cheeks as he picked up his breakfast, which consisted of a piece of stale toast that he dipped into the remains of last night's caviar. He was still sniffing back his tears and chewing on the toast and caviar when the pounding began at his door.

Dr. Mapangou didn't bother to put on a robe. Instead, he wiped away the tears with a used cocktail napkin and went to the door in his pajamas. He knew who it was. It was the police. They had come to seize him, to clap him into some kind of debtors' prison. He opened the door. A big man with a rubbery face stood there. In his hand was an attache case.

“You Dr. Joseph Mapangou?”

Dr. Mapangou tried to smile but couldn't. “I will get dressed,” he said and turned away.

“What for?” said the man as he came in and closed the door.

“I cannot go like this.”

“Go where?” the man said and moved over to the switch on the television set. “Where's your bathroom?”

Dr. Mapangou pointed. The rubbery-faced man went in and turned on all the taps in both the bath and the basin. He then lifted the top off the toilet and did something to the float bulb inside that made the toilet run and gurgle.

After that he came back into the living room, looked around, and moved to the desk, where he shoved the stack of bills and the Litronix calculator to one side. He placed the attaché case on the desk and glared at Dr. Mapangou.

“My name's Arnold,” lied Franklin Keeling, the ex-CIA agent. “You're going to work for me.”

“Work? I? Well, I mean, doing what?”

Keeling opened the attaché case. “What do you care?”

The case was packed with greenish pieces of paper. But then Dr. Mapangou fumbled his glasses from the pocket of his pajamas, put them on, blinked a few times, and discovered that the greenish pieces of paper were actually hundred-dollar bills. There seemed to be a simply enormous number of them.

All that had happened two years ago. The hundred-dollar bills in the attaché case had enabled Dr. Mapangou to erase his debts and to lease the apartment on East 60th, which he dearly loved, and to continue and even increase both the number and quality of his social engagements.

And every Friday morning at nine o'clock Dr. Mapangou would sit down at his new custom-made pecan desk, take pen in hand, and report in careful detail every item of gossip and rumor that he had heard during the week. When the report was done, he would seal it in a plain envelope, take the subway to East 12th Street, and drop it off with a blind man who ran a candy store. On the first Friday of every month the blind man would hand Dr. Mapangou an envelope. Sometimes it would contain instructions from the man called Arnold. Sometimes not. But it always contained fifty hundred-dollar bills.

After the call came from the co-pilot, Dr. Mapangou canceled the dinner for eight that he had scheduled at the Four Seasons, soaked for an hour in his tub, dressed carefully in a dark blue worsted suit, and resolved to walk to the Gotham Hotel to save money. Dr. Mapangou was often guilty of such small, mindless false economies, and he often twitted himself about them.

Nevertheless, he walked, arriving at the Gotham promptly at 10
P.M.
He failed to notice the black Mercury sedan that crept along behind him. The car trailed Dr. Mapangou all the way to the Gotham. When Dr. Mapangou entered the hotel, the driver got out and gave the doorman a twenty-dollar bill to let him park the Mercury on 55th Street just past the hotel's entrance.

Dr. Mapangou took the elevator up to room 542, which was registered to a Mr. Minder, but actually occupied by Franklin Keeling, formerly of the CIA, and Jack Spiceman, formerly of the FBI. The meeting of the three men lasted thirty-two minutes.

After Dr. Mapangou left room 542, he rode the elevator down, left the hotel, and—still seized by his fit of economy—decided to walk back to his apartment. In his left hand he carried an insulated paper sack, the kind that is used to get ice cream home before it melts.

It wasn't until he had reached 60th Street that the Mercury sedan pulled up beside him and the big man with the bald head got out. The big man was Alex Reese, who intended to become the CIA's chief of station in London, if everything worked out just right.

“Dr. Mapangou,” Reese said in his harsh bass voice.

Dr. Mapangou turned.

“What've you got in the bag, Doc?”

“It—it is ice cream. Yes, ice cream. Chocolate.”

Reese reached over and took the bag away from Dr. Mapangou. “Come on, I'll give you a lift.”

“I—I really would prefer to walk.”

“Come on,” Reese said, managing to turn the two words of invitation into a threat.

Dr. Mapangou climbed into the front seat of the sedan. Reese got behind the wheel. The car pulled away. “Let's take a little drive,” Reese said.

Driving with one hand, Reese opened the insulated ice cream bag and then switched on the sedan's map light. He reached into the bag and took out a frozen metal cylinder, the kind that cigars sometimes come in. The cylinder was sealed with Scotch tape. At a stop sign, Reese peeled it off.

“Ice cream, huh?” he said to Dr. Mapangou. Dr. Mapangou said nothing.

Reese twisted the cap from the metal cylinder and shook its contents out into the palm of his left hand. The contents consisted of a single human forefinger, frozen solid.

Reese stared at it for a long moment, then looked at Dr. Mapangou and smiled. “You and me, Doc—you and me'd better have a little talk.”

Dr. Mapangou licked his lips nervously, nodded slightly, and was surprised to discover that, despite everything, he was quite looking forward to it.

16

The meeting between Paul Grimes and Chubb Dunjee took place at 4
P.M.
that day in London in the sparsely furnished reception room of Grimes's house that faced out onto the small green park with the black iron fence around it.

Grimes was bent over the card table examining the six photographs that Dunjee had removed from the steel lock box, which he had found in one of the two suitcases that had been ransomed from the landlord in Bayswater. Five of the pictures showed the two men and two women in swimsuits on a beach. The sixth picture showed the naked smiling man lying on a bed and pointing at his erection.

“The guy with the hard-on took the beach pictures, right?” Grimes said. “That's why he isn't in any of them.”

“Probably,” Dunjee said.

“Well, this one,” Grimes said, pointing, “this tubby guy with all the hair is definitely Felix. Let me show you.”

Grimes took out his wallet and removed a two-by-three-inch picture, which he handed to Dunjee. The picture, grainy and a little out of focus, portrayed a man with an open mouth and startled eyes. “That's Felix. It's the only picture there is of him except for some when he was five and six years old.”

“How'd they get it?” Dunjee said.

“He was coming out of a bank they'd just robbed in Brest. A Belgian tourist was taking a picture of his wife. Felix stepped into the picture. The tourist got shot. He died a couple of days later. Three months after that his wife finally got around to having the film developed. She turned it over to the Belgian cops. It took another two months before somebody woke up and figured out who the guy in the picture really was.”

“Not much of a resemblance,” Dunjee said, comparing the face of the startled man with that of the plumpish man on the beach.

“There's enough,” Grimes said. He put his finger on the bare stomach of the Oriental man, who was also in the picture with Felix and the two women. “This guy is Ko Yoshikawa. Japanese. He went to Stanford. The thin broad next to him is dead. Her name was Maria Luisa de la Cova, and some kids found her strangled to death out in Hammersmith. She used to be Felix's girl friend. The other woman with the figure is Françoise Leget. French—or Algerian, I guess. It's where she was born anyway.”

“And the guy with the hard-on is German, right?”

“Right,” Grimes said. “Bernt Diringshoffen. From Hamburg. About thirty-two now.”

“He's the connection,” Dunjee said.

“With the Libyan?”

Dunjee nodded. “They both like girls. Young ones. Very young. Or pictures of them anyway.”

“How're you going to work it?”

“I'm going to sit next to the Libyan on the plane to Rome tomorrow and see what happens.”

“You sure something will?”

Dunjee said nothing, and after a moment Grimes said, “Yes, well, I almost forgot. That's what you're good at, isn't it?”

“That's what I'm good at.”

“You sure you need Delft?”

“I'm sure.”

“And what about this other guy you're taking along? This Hopkins. Who's he?”

“A thief.”

“Jesus. Why a thief?”

“They come in handy,” Dunjee said. “Sometimes.”

Grimes shook his head sadly and waved a hand at the photographs on the table. “You need these any more?”

“No.”

“I'm flying back tonight and meeting with McKay in the morning. I'll give them to him. They'll be our progress report—such as it is. He can turn them over to the FBI or the CIA, and maybe they can do something useful with them—like figuring out what beach they were taken on. Although I don't know what the hell good that would do now.”

“None,” Dunjee said. He gathered the photographs up and handed them to Grimes. “Do they know about me?”

“Who—the CIA?”

Dunjee nodded.

“I don't know. You want me to find out from McKay?”

“Tell him I want hands off.”