The Mordida Man (8 page)

“And the best of luck to you, sir.”

After the porter had gone, Dunjee unpacked quickly. He then sat down on the bed, took out his address book, looked up a number, and called it. The phone rang nineteen times before Dunjee gave up and looked at his watch. It was sixteen minutes before noon. He rose and settled into a chair by the window with that day's copy of the
Herald Tribune.
He again looked at his watch. His record for the
Tribune
puzzle was fourteen minutes. It was a three-month-old record that Dunjee sometimes despaired of ever breaking. Sixteen minutes later, with three words still to go, the phone rang.

Dunjee answered on the second ring. it was Paul Grimes. “Let's have lunch.”

“All right. Where?”

“My place.” He gave Dunjee a Kensington address not far from Harrods.

“You're not having fish, are you?”

“No. Why?”

“I'm sick of fish,” Dunjee said.

Grimes's place turned out to be a narrow three-story house, painted an almost cream, that faced onto a small green park. The park had a black iron fence around it and a locked gate. Dunjee got out of his taxi and watched a veiled Arab woman unlock the gate and wheel a large perambulator through it into the park.

Dunjee went up the six iron steps and rang the bell. He tried to appear surprised when Grimes himself opened the door.

“No butler?” Dunjee said as he went in. “I was kind of hoping there'd be a butler.”

“I don't live here,” Grimes said. “I can't afford to live here any more.”

Dunjee looked around the reception hall. There was no furniture. Not even a hatrack. “Whose place is it?”

“Mine,” Grimes said, shoving back a pair of sliding doors. “I bought it ten, maybe eleven years ago. When I bought it, it was crammed full of old furniture—Victorian stuff mostly. It was all kind of dinky, but what the hell, I liked it and so did my wife. She loves London for some reason. So we kept the furniture and used the place whenever we were over here—maybe four or five times a year. Well, about three months ago some guy from Kansas City comes through town, a dealer, and offers me as much for the furniture as I paid for the house. So what the hell, I sold it to him. All of it.”

They had moved into a reception room that was furnished with a lamp, two folding camp chairs, and a bridge table. On the bridge table was a large bucket of Colonel Sanders fried chicken.

Grimes waved Dunjee toward one of the camp chairs and said, “Lunch.”

Dunjee sat down, peered into the bucket, and selected a drumstick. Grimes reached down underneath the table into a paper sack and came up with two cans of beer. “No glasses,” he said, handing Dunjee one.

“None needed.”

They ate the chicken and the cool French fried potatoes and the sweetish cole slaw, which Dunjee didn't much like; and when they were through, Grimes dumped everything into a large plastic garbage bag, took it back to the kitchen, and returned carrying a thermos and two paper cups.

“Coffee,” he said. “Black.”

“Fine.”

When the coffee was poured, Grimes leaned back in his chair and stared at Dunjee. “I never worked with you on anything like this,” he said. “But I talked to some people who did when you were down there in Mexico. They say you work it funny.”

“Funny?”

“Oblique might be a better word. They say you used to take an oblique approach.”

“I always tried to use the smoothest path. Sometimes it was also the longest.”

“What's your approach here going to be?”

“You're not supposed to make regular reports back to the White House, are you?”

Grimes shook his head. “The only thing I want to report back there are results.”

“I have to get a line on a Libyan.”

“Which one?”

“I don't know yet. I'm hoping for the one who was the London contact for Felix. But that may be hoping for too much.”

“How're you going to do it?”

Dunjee smiled slightly and took a swallow of his coffee. When he continued to remain silent, Grimes sighed, and said, “Fifty thousand dollars, Chubb. It's got to buy a little encouragement.”

After a moment Dunjee nodded thoughtfully and said, “The Csider woman.”

“What about her?”

“I might have some use for her.”

“How?”

“I don't know yet.”

Grimes lit a cigarette, blew some smoke out, and fanned it away. “That other thing.”

“You mean how I'm going to get a line on my Libyan?”

Grimes nodded.

“I'm going to see a guy I used to know in New York.”

“When you were with the UN?”

“Uh-huh. He owes me a favor. Maybe even two.”

“He British?”

“British.”

“You're not going to … ” Grimes let his question trail off.

Dunjee smiled. “I'll be … oblique.”

“What'd this guy do?”

“At the UN?”

Grimes nodded again.

“He was a spy.”

9

The Pimlico street number in Dunjee's small Leathersmith address book had been written there more than ten years before, and he was no longer at all sure that either it or the phone number he had tried several times that afternoon was still valid.

It was nearly three o'clock when he got out of the taxi in the rain, looked briefly up at the stern red brick example of 1913 architecture, hurried up its steps, and into the foyer. There was a double row of black buttons, and beside each button was a card with a name either written or printed on it. Dunjee noticed that most of the printed cards were engraved.

In the slot beside the button that belonged to flat three-E was an engraved card that read “Hugh Scullard,” except that Hugh had been crossed out with green ink and above it had been printed “Pauline.”

“Well, shit,” Dunjee said, a little surprised that he had said it aloud, and pressed the three-E button. When nothing happened, he pressed it again.

He was about to press it a third time when a woman's voice said over the tinny foyer speaker, “What do you want?”

“It's Chubb Dunjee, Pauline.”

“Who?”

“Chubb Dunjee.”

There was a brief silence until the woman's voice said, “Do I owe you any money?”

“No.”

“Then come up.”

The buzzer rang and Dunjee went through the door. There was a small elevator with a glass-and-wrought-iron cage and a sign that read, “Lift Out of Order.” Dunjee walked up four flights and knocked on the door of three-E.

A deadbolt was turned back. Then a second one. The door opened the length of its three-inch chain. An eye peered out—red-rimmed, bloodshot, with a lump of sleep granules collected in one corner.

Dunjee nodded and smiled at the eye. “Pauline.”

“Well,” the woman said. “Congressman.”

The door closed, the chain was removed, and the door was thrown open. “Come in,” the woman said. “It's a mess. And so am I.”

Dunjee went in, closed the door, looked around, and said, “What happened?”

“What didn't?” the woman said.

Dunjee couldn't decide whether Pauline Scullard was moving in or out. Cartons of books were stacked in one corner of the room almost to the ceiling. A gray cat sat half asleep on the highest carton. A rolled-up rug lay before the grate. Several paintings leaned against one wall. The furniture—a couch, some chairs, a few tables, some lamps—was huddled together at one end of the room near the tall windows, There were shades on the windows but no curtains. The shades were drawn.

Pauline Scullard made a vague motion at the room. “I just haven't been able to cope—or something.”

Dunjee took off his raincoat, looked around for somewhere to put it, and decided on one of the book cartons. When he turned back, the woman was pouring liquor into a glass. She handed the glass to him and poured another one for herself.

“Do sit down,” she said. “Someplace. Any place.”

Dunjee chose the couch. The woman picked up some magazines from a chair, dropped them to the floor, and sat down, tugging at her miniskirt, locking her knees primly together, and pointing her feet to the left.

“I have proper dresses. Three, I think. I wear them on Tuesdays and Fridays. Visiting days.”

“Visiting days,” Dunjee said.

“Yes.”

“Where is he?”

“Hugh?”

“Hugh.”

“Hugh's not here.”

“How long have you been back?”

“You mean here—in this place? You know, we were frightfully clever to buy this place, or rather the lease. That was back in 'sixty-eight. It had ninety-two years to run then. Now it has—what? Seventy-eight years?”

“Nine,” Dunjee said. “Seventy-nine.”

“That many? Well, that should be quite enough to see us out nicely, don't you think?”

“What happened, Pauline?” Dunjee said patiently.

“You mean after New York?”

He nodded.

“Well, we went to Beirut and stayed there ever so long and after that we went to Berlin, but that didn't work out very well so we came home and, well, here we are, Mopsy and me.”

“The cat.”

“That's Mopsy up there on the books. Would you like a cigarette?” She reached into the pocket of the man's gray cardigan that was nearly as long as her ancient miniskirt and produced a package of Senior Service. Dunjee took one, although he seldom smoked, and lit both cigarettes. Pauline Scullard inhaled deeply, finished her drink in three swallows, and smiled.

“How silly of me. An ashtray.” She rose and wandered around the room until she found what she was looking for. “Here,” she said and handed Dunjee an empty cat-food can. It hadn't been washed.

“Tell me about it, Pauline.”

“Well, there's really not much to tell. We came back from Berlin five months ago, six now, I suppose—here, to this place—and then Hugh went crackers, and so now I wear one of my three nice dresses when I visit him on Tuesdays and Fridays.” She smiled again, a strained, somewhat gray-toothed smile that Dunjee found a bit odd.

“He went crackers?”

“Yes, I'm afraid so. We had to tuck him away in this ever so nice looney bin out in St. John's Wood. Visiting days, Tuesdays and Fridays. It's private and terribly expensive and suddenly I'm very poor. Do you remember when I was rich? I mean, two thousand a year forever. Well, back then that was rich, wasn't it? I mean, I was almost an heiress.”

“You're broke?”

She stared at him for a moment, then nodded. Dunjee decided that she was still an extremely attractive woman, despite her odd dress and tear-swollen eyes. Her complexion was still creamy, and hugging her head was still that same curly cap of straw-colored hair; and if she would only start brushing her teeth and quit weeping she wouldn't look much different from the way she had looked in New York a dozen years ago, although she must be thirty-seven now, perhaps even thirty-eight.

Dunjee sighed, took out his wallet, removed some hundred-dollar bills without counting them, and held them out to her. “Here,” he said. “Buy yourself something pretty.”

She looked at the money but didn't touch it.

“It's Monopoly money, Pauline. I didn't work for it.”

“A loan?”

“Sure.”

She took the money. “It'll be a while before I can—”

“I understand.”

“You're very sweet, Chubb.”

“Tell me about Hugh.”

She picked up the Scotch bottle from the floor, poured some more into her glass, and held the bottle out toward Dunjee. He shook his head. She put the bottle back down on the floor.

“It started in Beirut,” she said. “Then it got really bad in Berlin, so they sent us home and pensioned him off. We lived like this for almost two months. He wouldn't let me touch anything. He sat here in this chair by the window and looked out through the shade. He said he was waiting for them. When he slept, he slept on the couch. I brought him his meals on a tray over there by the window. He didn't eat much. So finally I went to see them, you know,
them,
and they sent a doctor over, a shrink, I think, and two days later they came and got him and put him away in that private looney bin. It's ever so nice and somehow I get dressed every Tuesday and Friday and actually go out there and see him. Paranoid-schizophrenic is what they say. I'm afraid it may be contagious.”

“Could I see him?”

“Why?”

“I could take him some cigars. He used to like cigars.”

“He's not all that well.”

“Is he rational?”

“Most of the time. His doctor is Jewish. Hugh thinks he's with Mossad. I don't know what he'd think about you. Where've you been?”

“Mexico,” Dunjee said. “Portugal.”

“Was it nice?”

“Quiet.”

“I suppose I could call, tell them you're an old friend. He doesn't have many, you know. All our old friends are now our new creditors.”

“I'd like to see him this afternoon.”

“All right. I'll ring them.”

While she was making the call, Pauline Scullard looked down at the money she was still holding in her left hand. She seemed surprised at the sight of it. Cradling the phone against her left shoulder and ear, she used both hands to count the money. She counted it twice. When the call was finished, she turned to Dunjee and said, “You can see him at half past five.”

“I'll take him some cigars.”

“There's a thousand, four hundred dollars here, Chubb.”

Dunjee smiled. “Buy yourself something pretty.”

“A dress?”

“A dress would be nice.”

It was an immense old house on a quiet street about halfway between Lord's cricket grounds and the place where the Beatles were once headquartered. The room in which Hugh Scullard sat on the bed opening the box of Cuban cigars faced the street. The room was on the second floor if you were American; the first if you were British. There were no bars on the window, no lock on the door, which was open.