Twilight at Mac's Place (3 page)

After nearly a generation it could still be found at the same location a few blocks
north of K Street and a little less than that west of Connecticut Avenue. Because it had endured so long in Washington, where restaurants often have the life span of a mayfly, many thought of Mac’s Place as either an undesignated landmark or, if they were under thirty, a quaint and curious monument to the sixties.

That it still existed at all was largely because of a firm of prospering criminal defense lawyers who occasionally dabbled in real estate. In 1987 they had formed a syndicate to buy the land beneath Mac’s Place and much of that on either side of it.

The syndicate had then erected a seven-story office building over and around the restaurant, taking great pains to preserve its unprepossessing façade and excellent kitchen. When asked, the lawyers always justified the extravagant preservation by saying, “We needed a nice place close by to eat lunch.”

Long before the advent of either salad bars or nouvelle cuisine, and long, long before the fading craze for something called plain American cookery, which usually meant meat loaf redux, it was possible to find a restaurant, chop house or bar & grill very much like Mac’s Place in almost any American city. They were often long narrow quiet rooms with a slightly foreign, melancholy air that offered generous drinks, swift monosyllabic service and a varied menu that on Thursdays might even include spit-roasted sweetbreads.

Largely through inertia, Mac’s Place had managed to preserve a similar atmosphere. It was, as Michael Padillo, its co-owner, once said, “The sort of place you go when you have to meet someone and explain why you won’t be getting the divorce after all.”

It was 1:22
P.M
. when Tinker Burns escorted Isabelle Gelinet and Granville Haynes into Mac’s Place, where they stood blinking and waiting for their eyes to adjust to the perpetual twilight. Glancing around, Haynes noticed the lunch crowd was beginning to disperse.

Herr Horst, the seventy-four-year-old maître d’ with the enviable posture of a martinet, gathered up three menus and slowly advanced on the new customers, much as if he were leading a procession of bishops. When he was a few feet away from Tinker Burns, whom he hadn’t seen in three years, Herr Horst stopped and greeted him with the single abrupt nod that regular patrons had named The Whiplasher. “Three for lunch, Mr. Burns?”

“Three.”

“Still prefer to be seated with your back to the wall?”

“Old habits, good or bad, die hard.”

“But as Proust noted, they also fill up time. This way, please.”

After he had seated them at a banquette, handed out the menus and complimented Gelinet by name on what he called her frock, Herr Horst, as even Padillo called him, examined Granville Haynes and said, “We haven’t had the pleasure of your custom, Mr. Haynes, since September of nineteen seventy-four when you and your father dined with us. It was your eighteenth birthday, as I recall, and you were off the next day to the university at Charlottesville.” Herr Horst paused, dropped his voice to a somber note and added, “I was extremely saddened to learn of his death.”

“You’re very kind,” said Haynes.

Still studying his menu, Tinker Burns said, “You ever think of maybe taking that memory act of yours on the road with some carnival?”

“Not recently,” Herr Horst said.

Burns looked up. “The McCorkle around?”

“Alas, no.”

“What about Padillo?”

“I’ll tell him you’re here.”

“Don’t bother.”

Herr Horst’s lips twitched, as if he were considering a smile. “But he would be desolate were he not told.”

After the maître d’ turned and marched slowly away, still leading his invisible procession, a waiter hurried over to take their drink orders. Burns wanted a martini, straight up; Gelinet, a vermouth; and Haynes, a bottle of Beck’s. Arriving with the waiter and the drinks was Michael Padillo.

Haynes couldn’t remember Padillo from that seemingly endless birthday dinner of more than fourteen years ago. Yet there was something about him that he found oddly familiar.

Recalling the long-ago birthday dinner, Haynes discovered he could easily draw a mental picture of the man Tinker Burns had referred to as the McCorkle—a big man, well over six feet, who had stopped by their table to exchange pleasantries and quips with Steadfast Haynes. McCorkle had been wearing too many laugh lines around self-mocking eyes that were either hazel or brown. He also had a skeptical grin, most of his hair and the build of a middle-aged jock who had long since stopped bothering with the Canadian Air Force exercises. But the real reason you remember him so well, Haynes decided, is that he sent over two cognacs, which was the first time a publican ever bought you a drink.

Still watching Padillo, who was bowing over the hand of a smiling Isabelle Gelinet, Haynes found himself reverting to his abandoned role of homicide detective as he measured Padillo’s height at a little less than six feet; weighed him in at 160 or 165; classified his nose as straight-long, his mouth as thin-wide; judged his complexion to be a light olive, his hair a gray-streaked dark brown.

Haynes wondered briefly whether Padillo was part Mexican or part Spanish but decided it didn’t really matter because he’d never seen anyone with that many years move with so much athletic grace, which usually was the franchise of those who’d made a living from it on some playing field—or in rings where they send in either the bull or another middleweight.

What made Padillo so strangely familiar to Haynes were his eyes. Not their color, which on Haynes’s private chart was coded as Gray-Green Cools #1, but rather their look of semi-devout fatalism. This look, he believed, was acquired only by those who at some risk have peered into the human abyss and aren’t at all reassured by what they’ve seen.

Haynes had known old homicide badges, nearing their pensions, who had worn that same look. So had two poets, one young, one old, both women. And once, on the rooftop of a Wilshire Boulevard office building in Westwood, a forty-seven-year-old psychiatrist had turned to gaze briefly at Haynes with that same look just before he turned yet again and stepped off the edge.

It was Isabelle Gelinet who introduced Padillo to Granville Haynes. After they shook hands, Padillo said he was very sorry about Steady’s death. Haynes thanked him and asked whether they had been close friends.

“Close acquaintances,” Padillo said.

“You knew Steady well enough to have shown up at Arlington,” Tinker Burns said. “Either you or the McCorkle.”

Padillo, still standing, examined the seated Burns as if for signs of moth and rust. “McCorkle’s out of town and I no longer go to funerals.”

“Then you must miss out on a lot of quiet satisfaction,” Haynes said.

The small surprised smile Padillo gave him was that of a very minor prophet discovering his first disciple. It encouraged Haynes to say, “Join us for a drink?”

Padillo thought about it, agreed with a nod and glanced at a waiter, who hurried over with a chair. Once seated, Padillo resumed his inspection of Tinker Burns, nodded again, as if partially satisfied, and said, “That arms boutique of yours must be flourishing, Tinker.”

“A steady, unseasonal demand,” Burns said. “Much like the toilet paper business.”

The waiter returned with a pale drink that could have been either plain ginger ale or a very weak Scotch and water. Padillo ignored it and looked at Gelinet. “Who showed, Isabelle?”

“We three—and a man from Langley. Gilbert Undean.”

“They send him?”

“He said he’d known Steady in Laos and volunteered before he got sent.” She shrugged. “But who can say?”

Padillo picked up his drink, tasted it and put it back down. “I heard Steady died of a stroke in the Hay-Adams the night before the inauguration. He wasn’t in town for that, was he?”

“We were here for the North trial,” she said. “Steady had booked us rooms for the next three months.”

“Why so early?”

“He was trying to arrange for a permanent seat in the courtroom.”

“Did he know North?” Granville Haynes asked.

“Not North,” she said. “But he’d known Secord since the Congo and, of course, Albert Hakim.” She paused. “And some of the others.”

“Dear Albert,” Tinker Burns said and, displaying a remarkable flair for mimicry, added, “ ‘Just let us handle the money, Ollie, so you won’t be burdened with all that tedious bookkeeping.’ ”

“Was he in on it, Tinker?” Haynes asked.

“Steady? Nah. Nowhere near it. And it’s too bad in a way. If they’d’ve had Steady doing the retouch, Secord, Hakim, North and the others might be thinking about what they oughta say at Oslo when they got handed the peace prize.”

Haynes turned to Padillo and said, “My old man and the truth were never more than nodding acquaintances.”

“He was exactly what he claimed to be—a propagandist,” Gelinet said. “And a superb one.”

Haynes stared at her. “That’s what I just said. What I don’t understand is why he’d want to spend weeks or even months in some courtroom.”

“It was to be the epilogue,” she said.

“To what?”

“His memoirs. He thought the North verdict, however it goes, would serve as the perfect metaphor for an epilogue—although there won’t be one now.”

“No book or no epilogue?” Padillo said.

“No epilogue.”

“But there will be a book?”

She shrugged.

“Who’s in it?”

Isabelle Gelinet made a small but encompassing gesture that managed to capture the restaurant, Washington and half the world.

Padillo rose. “Then I’ll have to buy a copy, won’t I?”

Standing at the very end of the long line, McCorkle rearranged his expression
into one of terminal boredom and used a foot to shove his ancient one-suiter toward customs at Dulles International Airport. For years he had been convinced that a bored look, when combined with a suit and tie, made the perfect match to the U.S. Customs Service’s profile of the innocent traveler.

Still looking bored, McCorkle watched two Federal dogs, both mutts, sniff out a pile of luggage for drugs. He continued to watch the dogs when a roving uniformed customs inspector appeared at his elbow and said, “Nice flight?”

“Not bad.”

“Could I see your passport?”

McCorkle turned and began the search, slowly patting his pockets with no sign of panic. He finally removed the passport from his hip pocket, the last one left, and handed it over, trusting that his carefully unhurried search was another hallmark of innocence.

The inspector opened the passport and leafed through it. “Frankfurt, huh?”

“Frankfurt,” McCorkle agreed.

“Business or pleasure?”

“Neither. My wife’s brother died. We went to his funeral.”

The inspector glanced around as if hoping to discover a Mrs. McCorkle. “She stayed on?”

“There was some family business to clear up.”

“Your wife’s first name, Mr. McCorkle?”

“Fredl.”

“Eine gute Deutsche Hausfrau, ja?”

“Washington correspondent for a Frankfurt paper.”

“You’re kidding. Which one?”

After McCorkle told him, the inspector nodded approvingly and said, “The serious one.”

“Profoundly so.”

“And what do you do, Mr. McCorkle?” the inspector asked, his eyes pricing the five-year-old gray worsted Southwick suit McCorkle had bought on sale at Arthur Adler’s.

“I run a saloon.”

“In Washington?”

“Right.”

“What’s it called?”

“Mac’s Place.”

“Ate there once,” the inspector said. “Not bad.” He looked down at the passport again, read the name “Cyril McCorkle” aloud and looked up with a smile. “Bet everybody calls you Mac.”

“You win.”

The inspector bent down, marked the old suitcase with a piece of chalk, straightened and handed McCorkle a slip of paper that was the treasured
laissez-passer.
“Take the express line, Cyril,” the inspector said. “And welcome home.”

McCorkle later blamed his sunglasses for having caused the case of mistaken identity in front of Mac’s Place just after he paid off the taxi, picked up his old suitcase and turned. Although his eyesight in recent years had gone from near perfect to good to the stage where he now needed reading glasses, McCorkle refused to wear prescription sunglasses because he couldn’t remember, offhand, ever having read a book all the way through in the sunshine. And since he felt the need to blame something, he blamed the sunglasses for causing him to mistake the man who came out of Mac’s Place for the late Steadfast Haynes.

“It was a quarter past three or a little earlier,” he said as he later recounted the incident to Padillo. “And he was in the shade and the sun was just low enough to stab me right in the eyes. So when I looked away from the sun into the shade, there he was—same tennis-pro build, same walk that makes you wonder when he’ll start tap-dancing and that same face.”

“But a face at least twenty-five years younger,” Padillo said.

“Not if you’re half blind from the sun and looking into deep shade through dirty dark glasses. So what I saw were the same moves, height, build—plus a face that shade, sunglasses and memory were adding twenty-five years to.”

“The world’s most honest face,” Padillo said.

“I always felt it was those flag-blue eyes.”

“Plus the resolute chin and that most serene brow.”

“But somehow you knew nobody could be as honest as Steady looked,” McCorkle said. “So just before you started edging away from him, he’d grin that god-awful kid’s grin that could melt rocks.”

“And also make you want to believe everything he said.”

“Another mistake,” McCorkle said. “How big a tab did he run up?”

Padillo shrugged. “A few hundred dollars that we might as well eat.” He paused, obviously curious. “So what’d you say to him?”

“Well, since I didn’t know he was dead, I said, ‘How the hell are you, Steady?’ ”

Granville Haynes said, “I’m afraid he’s dead, Mr. McCorkle.”

McCorkle put the old suitcase down, removed his dirty sunglasses, stared at Haynes and said, “When?”

“About a week ago. A stroke.”

“Then you’re…Granville, right?”

Haynes nodded. “We buried him earlier today. At Arlington.”

“I’m very sorry,” McCorkle said. “I didn’t know. I would like to have been there.”

“Thank you. Tinker Burns flew in. Isabelle Gelinet was there. And some guy from Langley.”

“I know Padillo would’ve gone except—”

Haynes interrupted him with a smile. “He told me.”

McCorkle found the smile to be an exact and uncanny replica of the one the late Steadfast Haynes had so successfully employed. “How long will you be in town?”

“A day or two. I have to see a lawyer whose office seems to be in this same building.” He looked up. “They just built it over and around you, didn’t they?”

“We were lucky,” McCorkle said.

“The lawyer’s name is Mott. Howard Mott. You know him?”

“He’s one of our landlords.”

“What’s he like?”

“I don’t know how he is on probate,” McCorkle said, “but if I ever got in a real jam, he’s the one I’d call.”

Haynes smiled his inherited smile again. “Sounds like Steady’s lawyer, doesn’t it?”