The Mordida Man (2 page)

The de la Cova woman seemed to find Françoise Leget's question stupid. She sighed wearily and said, “I've already explained that.”

The second of the two men was older than the rest, nearly thirty-eight. He was also Japanese. The others called him Nelson, although his real name was Ko Yoshikawa. His English had a hard American edge to it.

“Please explain it again,” he said. “We would appreciate it very much.”

The de la Cova woman sighed. “He didn't say anything like that—that he was CIA. He didn't have to. He just sat down at my table that day in Soho and said he knew all about me—that I was thirty-two and sick and needed money for the baby and that Felix was going to dump me anyhow.” She looked at the Japanese. “That part was true, wasn't it—about Felix?”

Ko frowned and said, “What did you tell him about us?”

“Nothing. He wasn't interested in any of you. He seemed to know all about you—about all of us. But the only one he wanted was Felix.”

“And you gave him Felix,” Françoise Leget said.

“I gave him Felix. The baby was sick. I was sick. I'm still sick.” As if to prove it, she started coughing again.

After the coughing finally stopped, Diringshoffen said, “When did it happen—exactly?”

“At noon,” she said. “At exactly noon today. I called Felix this morning and told him I'd heard something bad—you know, something I couldn't say over the phone. We arranged to meet at the Lord Elgin pub in Maida Vale at noon. I was in a taxi with the American—with Arnold. I don't think it was a real taxi. When Felix came out of the tube station, I pointed him out. The American wanted to know if I was sure. I said yes, I was sure. He had already given me the money. He made me get out of the taxi. I don't know what happened to Felix.”

She looked up at the Japanese and in a soft plaintive voice said, “Won't you please kill me now?”

At first, Ko didn't reply. It was almost as if he hadn't heard her request because his thoughts were in some distant, more interesting place. But after a moment he nodded in an abstracted way at the German, who dropped the cigarette, ground it out, picked up a length of yellow insulation wire, and stepped behind the bound woman.

The Japanese looked at Maria Luisa de la Cova then. “Well, yes, of course,” he said almost apologetically. “We'll attend to that right away.”

It was Ko himself who made the call to the Embassy of the Libyan Arab Republic. He made it from a pay phone in the lobby of the Cunard Hotel. The call was taken by Faraj Abed-said, who was listed on the Embassy roster as Attache (Cultural Section), a position that left him with considerable free time.

After identifying himself as Mr. Leafgreen, Ko said, “Call me at this number,” and read off the number of the pay phone, carefully transposing its last two digits as a routine precautionary measure.

Twelve minutes later the phone in the Cunard lobby rang. After Ko answered with a toneless “Yes,” Abedsaid said, “Well?” and Ko said, “The Americans have Felix.”

There was a brief silence until Abedsaid whispered, “Well, shit.” Abedsaid was thirty-eight and one of the first Libyans to earn a degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Oklahoma. Or for that matter, from any university.

Ko spoke quickly, outlining what he felt were the facts. When he was done, there was another silence until Abedsaid sighed and said, “The Colonel's gonna be madder'n a shot bobcat with a toothache.” During his four-year stay in Oklahoma, Abedsaid had carefully acquired a large collection of aphorisms, metaphors, and similes peculiarly indigenous to the American southwest. He delighted in peppering his conversation with them, especially in London, where it seemed to offend almost everyone.

“How soon can you get word to him?” Ko asked.

“Within the hour.”

“We've decided it would be best if we went back to Rome.”

“All of you?”

“Yes, all three of us.”

“Do you need anything—money?”

“No, there's sufficient money,” Ko said, thinking of the twenty thousand dollars in twenty- and fifty-dollar bills.

“I can let them know in Rome that you're coming.”

“Yes, that would help.”

“The Colonel is … well, he's not going to like this at all.”

“No,” Ko said. “I don't suppose he will.”

“He and Felix were close. Extremely close.”

“I know. Have you any idea of what he might do?”

“The Colonel?” Abedsaid paused as though to consider the question. “Something weird, probably,” he said and hung up.

The Boeing 727 was painted a light cream color and bore no markings other than the minimum required by international air regulations. It was five miles high and 213 miles west of Ireland when the fifty-nine-year-old doctor shuffled into the customized lounge section and slumped down into an armchair across from the man who sometimes called himself Arnold.

“Well, sir, he's gone,” the doctor said with a heavy sigh that wafted whisky fumes into the other man's face.

“What do you mean, gone?”

“Like I said, gone. Dead. He died. You want the technical explanation or you want it in laymanese?”

Arnold sprang up out of his chair and bent down low over the doctor, who shrank back from the large hands that fluttered around erratically as though in search of something to grab—or choke. Arnold's eyes bulged and his curiously rubbery face flushed a dark, dangerous red as his mouth began to stretch itself into odd shapes. The nut's going to scream, the doctor thought.

“He's not dead,” Arnold said after his mouth finally had twisted itself into a set smile, which the doctor regarded as more than a trifle mad.

The doctor shook his head wisely. “How much of that junk did you guys pump into him?”

Arnold wiped hard at the bottom half of his face, as though to erase all evidence of shock and surprise. “How much? Just what you told us, Dr. Lush. That's how much. One hundred milligrams.”

The doctor frowned, struggling to appear thoughtful, even judicious. “Well, he should've been able to handle that much—providing you guys didn't make some damn fool mistake—or he had some kind of respiratory problem. Or heart condition. Or something.” He brightened. “Anyway, the autopsy will tell.”

“No,” Arnold said, smiling again, although not quite so madly.

“No what?”

“He's not dead.”

“Oh, yeah, he's dead all right,” the doctor said comfortably, confident of his diagnosis. “He's dead because of all that dope you pumped into him. It probably made him so nice and relaxed he just forgot to breathe. But like I said, the autopsy will tell.”

“No,” Arnold said.

“No what this time?”

“No autopsy.”

The doctor frowned, as if trying to remember some half-forgotten instructions. At last he seemed to recall them. “Well, if there's not gonna be any autopsy, then I gotta do the other thing.”

“How long will that take?”

The doctor frowned again. “A couple of minutes. Maybe three.”

“Do it then,” Arnold said.

When the doctor was finished, it took only four minutes for the 727 to drop to six thousand feet. Its rear door, a device at one time much favored by parachuting skyjackers, was lowered. A moment later the body of the man called Felix fell a little more than a mile into the sea.

3

The real estate agent in Lisbon hadn't told Chubb Dunjee, the ex-Congressman, about the steps. But even if she had, he probably would have rented the house in Sintra anyway, since it was relatively cheap, and the sixty-eight steps that led down to the road provided a bit of exercise and didn't at all bother his visitors, because there weren't any. Or hardly any.

The agent rather grandly had described the house as a villa, but Dunjee always thought of it as a five-room bungalow with an uncanny, somehow depressing resemblance to the red-tile-roof kind found all over his native Southern California. The house was owned by an elderly English widow who suddenly, at seventy-two, had decided to visit her late husband's native Brazil. The widow was said to be particularly curious about what really lay up the Orinoco.

The house with the sixty-eight steps had been rented cheaply to Dunjee on the condition that he keep on its housekeeper-cook, plus the gardener who took exquisite care of the widow's nearly one acre of periwinkles, roses, geraniums, camellias, wild lavender, and a couple of other varieties, one pink, the other yellow, that Dunjee (no flower fancier) couldn't identify but always referred to as the pansies.

During his seventeen-month stay in Sintra, which eventually he came to regard as a kind of exile, or perhaps even banishment, Dunjee had taught himself some four hundred words of Portuguese. This was enough to praise the cook's plain fare, chat with the gardener about the weather, and thank the mailman for climbing the sixty-eight steps to deliver the two-to-three-day-old copy of the
International Herald Tribune
—virtually the only mail Dunjee ever received.

Occasionally, when the weather was fine, he and the mailman would sit outside under the lemon trees near the steps' iron gate and drink a glass or two of wine in comfortable silence. On each of the two Christmases he spent in Sintra, Dunjee had given the mailman a fine Chaves ham from Tràs-os-Montes.

It was four days after the man called Felix fell a mile into the sea that Dunjee had his first real visitor in almost eleven months. He came unannounced at noon by taxi. Noon was a time when Dunjee liked to sit outside under the lemon trees and work the crossword puzzle in the
Herald Tribune.
Before Portugal, Dunjee had never worked crossword puzzles. He now regarded them as a faintly ridiculous vice which held for him some slight danger of addiction.

The visitor down in the road was Paul Grimes. He got out of the taxi, paid off the driver, and turned to give the sixty-eight steps a bleak assessment. When he started up the steps, Dunjee rose, tried to think of the Portuguese word for guest, and headed for the kitchen to tell the cook he was having one.

By the time Grimes reached the top of the steps he was breathing heavily, almost panting. He paused to lean against the brick retaining wall that was covered with morning glory vines. The housekeeper-cook, plump, curious, and a trifle flustered, stood near the wooden garden chairs with a tray that held glasses and two cold bottles of beer.

Grimes, sweating now, but not panting nearly so much, stared at Dunjee for several moments, then smiled and said, “Why Portugal?”

“The label on a sardine can,” Dunjee said. “I used to study it sometimes when I was poor. You remember when I was poor.”

Grimes nodded thoughtfully, still smiling.

“You want a beer?” Dunjee said.

“God, yes.”

They managed to avoid shaking hands—Dunjee by gesturing toward the garden chairs; Grimes by mopping his brow with a handkerchief as he moved over and lowered himself down with a sigh. When the housekeeper-cook served him his beer, he thanked her formally, even graciously, in Spanish, because he knew no Portuguese, but seemed to feel that Spanish would at least be closer than English. The housekeeper-cook smiled gravely and left to find the gardener so she could gossip with him about the visitor.

After producing a cigarette, Grimes lit it, drank half of the beer in his glass, filled it up again, looked around carefully as if really interested in what he saw, and said, “Nice place.”

“Quiet.”

“What do you do all day?”

Dunjee thought about it first. “I read a lot, run a few miles, do the shopping, hit a few bars, brood a little.”

Again Grimes nodded. This time it was an appreciative nod that seemed to compliment Dunjee on some rigorous but productive schedule. After another swallow of beer he got to the point. “How's the money holding out?”

“There's enough.”

“Well.”

“Well, what?”

Grimes moved his heavy shoulders in a slight, almost indifferent shrug. “Well, I just thought you might like to make some.”

Dunjee smiled. He had a curiously lazy, curiously warm smile, very white, that usually managed to charm most people. He had always found it a convenient, almost painless way to say no. Much of the smile was still in place when he said, “I don't do that any more.”

“What?”

“Whatever it is you want me to do.”

Dunjee discovered it was a pleasure to watch Grimes shift topics. He did it smoothly, effortlessly—in a manner that made old brand names pop into Dunjee's head: Fluid Drive, Hydra-matic, Powerglide.

“You know what I've been trying to remember?” Grimes said. “I've been trying to remember how long it's been since we've seen each other. Twelve years?”

“Thirteen,” Dunjee said. “Almost fourteen. Chicago, 'sixty-eight.”

Grimes nodded, as if suddenly remembering. “That mess. You ever hear from her?”

“Nan?”

“Our Nan.” Grimes said the name almost reverently. Nan was Dunjee's ex-wife.

“They say she married a grain broker and lives in St. Paul,” Dunjee said. “She's also supposed to be very active in Little League baseball. Coaching. They say.”

“Jesus. Our Nan.”

The housekeeper-cook reappeared with two more bottles of beer and again Grimes thanked her in Spanish. When she had gone he smiled wryly. “I was just trying to think—of what she kept calling you up there in the Hilton right after you told her there was no way you were going out in the streets and get your head bashed in for the movement. Sort of a pet name.”

“Crypto-fascist,” Dunjee said.

“Our Nan,” said Grimes, nodding and smiling now, as if at some fond memory. “Right after that was when she took off with the Weathermen, wasn't it?”

Dunjee shook his head. “That was the next year—'sixty-nine.”

“How long did that last?”