The Mordida Man (16 page)

Grimes nodded thoughtfully. “All right. Anything else?”

“What if I need a lot of money all of a sudden?”

“Talk to Delft,” Grimes said. “She knows what to do.”

The restaurant was in Chelsea, one of those French places that last for a year or two, sometimes three, in the King's Road in that stretch between Oakley Street and Sloane Square. This one was called Gustave's, but Gustave was long gone, having sold out to a Greek at the crest of the restaurant's popularity, which had occurred exactly eleven months after it had opened for business. The Greek was now looking for a buyer and thought he might have a couple of Indians lined up.

The tables on either side of the one that Delft Csider and Chubb Dunjee sat at were deserted and had been for nearly thirty minutes. A mildly attentive waiter drifted by occasionally to replenish their coffee cups. They both had ordered the trout, which had been surprisingly good. Instead of dessert, Csider had asked for a Drambuie; Dunjee a brandy.

“That's it then,” she said. “I just hand you letters to sign and call you Congressman.”

“That's it.”

“And what do you do?”

“Ignore him.”

“What if he ignores you?”

“He won't,” Dunjee said. “He'll either be curious, or suspect it's a setup, or both.”

“Then what?”

“Then he discovers that he can use me—or exploit me, probably. I resist; he implores; I give in.”

She shook her head. “I don't believe it.”

“It's the way it works.”

“Why aren't you still in Congress, if you're so smart?”

Dunjee grinned. “My wife ran off with the Weathermen. For some reason, my constituents didn't think that was such a hot idea.”

“Did you like it?”

“Being a Congressman?”

She nodded.

Dunjee thought about it—or at least seemed to. “Sure. I liked it. It was a good job. Back then in 'sixty-eight, it paid thirty thousand a year plus perks. The year before I was elected, I was a $10,176-a-year Army captain.”

“They gave you a string of medals, didn't they? That's what Grimes says.”

“They gave me a string of medals.”

“For what?”

“For killing people. Rather small people. They seemed to think it was important and necessary. The people who gave me the medals, I mean.”

“But you sent them back.”

“That was later. I took them and kept them awhile, and then got drunk for a while and sent them back. As gestures go, it was pretty sophomoric.”

“All those rather small people were still dead.”

“Still dead.”

“But it got you in the papers.”

“And on television. Don't forget television. They liked the way I looked on television.”

“Who?”

“The guys who came to see me. They were a couple of movers and shakers who wanted to know whether I'd like to be a U.S. Congressman. I was twenty-eight and broke. My opponent in the primary was seventy-two and rich and a little senile. I was hungry. He wasn't. So I won. He had been in Congress for forty-two years, and when he lost they say it broke his heart. I got elected because I said I was sorry about all those rather small people I'd killed. Back in 'sixty-eight that was one hell of a platform—at least in my district. I had all the crazies in my district.”

Delft Csider took another sip of her Drambuie. “Where'd you meet Grimes?”

“At school. UCLA.”

“But you knew him after that.”

“He was one of the two movers and shakers who came to see me about whether I'd like to be a U.S. Congressman.”

“I was wondering. He knew your wife, didn't he?”

“He knew her.”

“What was she like?”

“Very pretty, overly intelligent, deeply concerned, highly motivated—and very much a pain in the ass. Her father was a vice-president of the old Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. Her mother was an actress who got blacklisted. A very political family. An uncle once socked Joe McCarthy on the jaw—or so he claimed. My wife was born in 'thirty-nine and always said her earliest memory was of attending a Second Front Now rally in New York when she was three—or maybe four. Her proudest moment came in 'fifty-two, when she watched her mother on television tell the House Un-American Activities Committee to go fuck itself. I turned out to be something of a disappointment to Our Nan, as Grimes calls her.”

“For some reason you don't strike me as the typical politician.”

Dunjee shrugged. “They come in all sizes and shades. The president of Mexico writes novels. Or did. The Senate Majority Leader plays the fiddle and sings. There've been Senators and Congressmen who've been astronauts, actors, and athletes. When they get too old for that, they sometimes become politicians. It's a good way to keep answering a question that nags a lot of people: Who am I? If you're a politician, you can say, I'm the Mayor or the State Treasurer or even the President of the United States. And if you can get a majority of the people to agree with you, then that's what you are and there's a sign on the door to prove it.”

“What are you now?”

Dunjee smiled. “A philosopher.”

“That doesn't require an election, does it?”

“Self-appointed. Or self-anointed might be better. What about you? Have you got a handy label?”

“As I said, I'm the back-up.”

“And before you were the back-up?”

“I did this and that—here and there.”

“Since you're the back-up, you mind if I ask where here and there was?”

“I don't mind,” she said and finished the last of her Drambuie. She then lit a cigarette and blew the smoke to one side. “I'm thirty. I might be thirty for a couple more years. I haven't decided yet. My mother and I came out of Hungary in 'fifty-six. I was five. I don't know what happened to my father, except that he was killed. We never did find out how. We went to Vienna and stayed there a year. I learned German. After Vienna, we went to Genoa. Two years there. I learned Italian. Did I mention that my mother was a nurse? She married a doctor in Genoa. A Lebanese. A nice man. We went to Beirut. I learned Arabic. And French. The doctor died two years later of cancer. He left a little money, but not much. At the time, nurses were needed in Berlin, so we went there. I don't suppose I ever really learned any language. ‘Absorbed' is probably more accurate. I'm a parrot. We were in Berlin from 'sixty-one to 'sixty-four. There was a growing shortage of nurses in the States. So we decided to go there. I was thirteen then. We taught ourselves English in six months and went to San Francisco. My mother worked as a private nurse. For the rich mostly. She was very good. We usually lived with them. The rich, I mean. My mother died of a stroke in 'seventy when she was forty-one. I was nineteen.”

“A lot of moving around,” Dunjee said. “A lot of schools.”

Delft Csider smiled slightly. “I never went to school.”

“Never? Not even kindergarten?”

“Not even kindergarten. Don't look so surprised.”

“Everybody goes to school.”

“Not everybody.”

“What about—”

“Truant officers? That's what you were going to ask, wasn't it? Everybody does.”

Dunjee nodded.

“Truant officers don't go looking for neatly dressed, solemn little girls who spend their school hours in public libraries. That's where I hung out when my mother worked days. When she worked nights, which she mostly did, I stayed home with her. She was my … best friend, I suppose you could say.”

“Didn't you ever want to go to school?”

“Why?”

“I don't know. For an education, I suppose.”

“Are you saying I'm not educated?”

It was an apologetic smile that Dunjee gave her. “No. I'm not saying that.”

“I'll give you the rest of it. I find long division still a little murky, but who cares now that you can buy a calculator for nine dollars. I'm weak in baseball and American football. But I'm a whiz at geography and history and politics and how the rich live. I took a post-graduate course in that, you might say. After my mother died, I lived with a very rich, very elderly man. We traveled. I'd picked up enough nursing skills to give him his shots and check his blood pressure twice a day. The old man was interested in politics. He liked to back winners. That's how I met Grimes. He came by to pick up some money from the old gentleman in 1976. Quite a lot of money. We talked, Grimes and I. He didn't seem to care whether I'd ever gone to school or not. But he said if ever I left the old man and needed a job, to come see him. The old man died six months later. I went to see Grimes and I've been working with him ever since.”

“Doing what he does.”

She nodded. “Learning how to do it, anyway. He says I do it rather well. What about it, philosopher? Do I measure up?”

Dunjee smiled again. “Sure,” he said. “You'll do fine.”

It was cool when they came out of the restaurant. Delft Csider wore a wraparound camel's-hair coat. She turned the collar up and started to her left. Dunjee touched her arm. “Wait here a second,” he said.

He put his hands deep into the pockets of his brown tweed topcoat and moved down the sidewalk twenty paces or so until he came to the parked green Jaguar sedan with the two men in the front seat. He stood next to the window of the car until one of the men rolled it down.

“You want something?” the man said in an accent that came from somewhere east of Texas and west of Georgia.

Dunjee nodded. “Tell whoever sent you to pull you off—or I pull out. You got that?”

They stared at each other for a moment and finally the man nodded and rolled the window back up. Dunjee turned and moved back to Delft Csider.

“Who was that?” she said.

“Kibitzers,” Dunjee said.

17

Up in Dr. Joseph Mapangou's dearly beloved apartment on East 60th Street, Alex Reese lowered himself into the chair behind the custom pecan desk, put the ice cream bag down on the leather-edged blotter, and stared balefully at Dr. Mapangou, who stood nervously before him, not at all sure whether he needed permission to sit.

“What've you got to drink?” Reese demanded.

Dr. Mapangou smiled. Now he could be host—a familiar and comfortable role. “Some very nice whisky perhaps? Or some excellent brandy?”

“Whisky,” Reese said. “About that much.” He held his thumb and middle finger about two inches apart.

Dr. Mapangou poured the drinks quickly, the whisky for Reese and a smaller measure of brandy for himself. “May I sit?” he said as he put the drinks down on the desk.

“Sit,” Reese said, drank off half of the whisky, and took the metal cylinders out of the ice cream bag. He opened both cylinders and shook their contents out on the blotter. Two frozen severed fingers pointed accusingly at Dr. Mapangou, who shuddered.

Reese bent forward slightly to examine the fingers more carefully. “Bit his nails, didn't he?” he said and again turned his baleful stare on Dr. Mapangou.

Dr. Mapangou seemed to feel that the question required an answer, so he bent forward, gave the fingers a quick inspection, nodded slightly, and hastily drank some of his brandy.

“You got an ink pad?” Reese said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“An ink pad. You know.” Reese pounded a fist from side to side on the desk as though demonstrating how documents should be stamped to someone who had never heard of documents.

“In the second drawer on the left,” Dr. Mapangou said, suddenly convinced that Reese would have made a perfect district officer in some repressive African colonial regime.

Reese found the ink pad as well as two sheets of smooth white paper. Dr. Mapangou watched as Reese inked the severed fingers carefully and then rolled each one onto a separate sheet. Reese tenderly put the sheets away in a used manila envelope that he had found in the desk's middle drawer.

“Wash 'em off,” he said and used his own middle finger and thumb to flick the two severed fingers across the desk toward Dr. Mapangou.

Again, Dr. Mapangou said, “I beg your pardon?”

“You know,” Reese said, dry-washing his own hands. “Washee, washee.”

Dr. Mapangou gingerly picked up the two fingers and moved to his wet bar, where he washed the ink off them with a bar of lavender-scented soap. After that he dried them with a paper towel and turned back to Reese.

“They're beginning to thaw, I believe,” Dr. Mapangou said.

“You got any aluminum foil?”

Dr. Mapangou nodded.

“Wrap 'em up good in that and pop 'em into your freezer.”

After finishing his chores in the kitchen, Dr. Mapangou returned to the living room and sat back down in front of the desk. He watched as Reese drank more whisky, looked around the room, and nodded appreciatively at what he saw.

“You got a real nice place here,” Reese said. “How much does it run you?”

“Twenty-one-fifty a month.”

“No kidding? That much. Tell me about the fingers, Doc.”

“I did not know what they were.”

“You didn't, huh?”

“No.”

“Let's see now. You left here about a quarter to ten, walked to the Gotham, went in, stayed about half an hour, and came out with a couple of frozen fingers in cigar tubes all nice and insulated in an ice cream bag—except you didn't know what they were, right?”

“That is correct.”

“What'd you think they were?”

“I was not told.”

Reese nodded. “What room did you go up to? Remember, I'm gonna check it all out.”

“Room 542.”

“And whose room was that?”

“I was told that it was a Mr. Minder's.”

“Is that who you saw?”

“No.”

Reese sighed. “Okay. Who did you see up there in room 542?”

“Mr. Arnold,” Dr. Mapangou said. “And Mr. Benedict.”