The Mordida Man

Ross Thomas

BASTEI ENTERTAINMENT

Bastei Entertainment is an imprint of Bastei Lübbe AG

For the original edition:

Project management: Lori Herber

Cover adaptation: Christin Wilhelm, www.grafic4u.de

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

E-book production: Jouve Germany GmbH & Co. KG

ISBN 978-3-95859-021-2

www.bastei-entertainment.com

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this e-book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Chapter 1

It was an almost perfect disguise. To begin with, he had lost all that weight, at least twenty-five pounds, and the cleverly concealed lifts in the heels of his stodgy plain-toed black shoes had raised his height by nearly two inches and subtly altered his walk. The beard helped, too, of course; probably because it was so neatly trimmed.

Not long before, no more than three months back, he had been more or less clean-shaven and of medium height and rather dumpy, if not quite fat. Now he was a bit under six feet and trim, indeed almost slender. His clothes were different, too. Gone were the jeans and the Army surplus field jacket and the black turtleneck—an outfit that once had been virtually his trademark. Now he wore a blue pinstripe—not too old, but not too new either—and a crisp white shirt and even a neat bow tie that he had learned to knot himself. In his left hand he carried a worn leather briefcase that seemed to be an old and shabby friend—another nicely calculated touch of respectability that also helped.

The only thing that even hinted at concealment were the glasses. Their lenses—plain, but tinted a deep amber—made it difficult to see his eyes with their strange rain-gray giveaway color. But the glasses’ carefully selected frames were of a clear unadorned plastic that suggested practicability and necessity rather than concealment.

Much thought had also gone into his dark hair, which once had been a long, oily mess. Now it was short and neatly trimmed, both back and sides. Like his beard, it was sprinkled with gray. The gray was natural. It was also new and had crept into both his hair and beard during the past three months.

When he came out of the Maida Vale tube station and turned right up Elgin Avenue, the woman in the taxi across the street clutched the large purse tightly to her chest, sucked in some air, coughed once, and said, “That’s he. That’s Felix.”

The man sitting next to her said, “You’re sure?”

“That is he,” the woman insisted and wrapped her thin arms even more tightly around the purse, which was made of black leather with a silver clasp.

“It sure as hell doesn’t look like him,” the man said. He had an American accent of some kind.

“It is he, you fool.”

The American nodded dubiously, lowered the taxi window, and tossed a crumpled red pack of Pall Mall cigarettes onto the pavement. Across the street, a smallish middle-aged man who wore a brown three-piece suit and an old child’s mischievous face noted the pack’s fall, turned quickly away from the newsstand, and fell in behind the man identified as Felix. The smallish man walked with short mincing steps and carried a tightly furled black umbrella that he swung up and rested lightly on his right shoulder.

In the taxi, the American leaned over, opened the door nearest the curb, and said, “Out.”

The woman had to cough first. They were deep, hacking explosions, four or five of them, which racked her body and pink-ened her face. The American ignored them, just as he ignored her when she stumbled across his long legs as she dragged herself out of the taxi, still coughing. Once outside, she squeezed the purse even more tightly to her chest. It seemed to ease the coughing—possibly because it contained a comforting balm in the form of twenty thousand dollars in twenty- and fifty-dollar bills, which is what the American had paid her to lead him to Felix. The woman, her lips now tightly compressed, as if determined to cough no more ever, hurried away from the taxi without looking back.

The smallish man with the umbrella was now only five or six steps behind Felix. He picked up the pace with a neat little skip and closed the distance between them to no more than three feet. He swung the umbrella down in an arc that ended when its tip was less than an inch from Felix’s back—high up and dead centered between the shoulder blades.

The smallish man pressed the button in the umbrella’s handle. The button released the steel spring that shot the chromium-tipped plastic dart containing a hundred milligrams of a stepped-up fast-acting tranquilizer called Doxxeram through Felix’s coat and shirt and deep into his back. Doxxeram had been used only once on humans during a controlled experiment in a hospital for the criminally insane in upper Michigan. Although remarkably fast-acting when injected intramuscularly, its side effects had been labeled “unwarranted,” the experiment had been stamped “inconclusive,” and the drug had been withdrawn.

When the Doxxeram went into Felix, he stopped abruptly. His left hand went behind him and up, clawing for the dart. His hand found part of it, the plastic part—empty now—that had contained the drug. He wrenched it loose, stared at it briefly, dropped it, and smashed it with the heel of his shoe. The chromium tip, slightly barbed, remained in place. Felix quickly shifted the old briefcase to his left hand, clapped his right hand up and around his neck, and tried to reach the chromium tip over his left shoulder. But his arm wasn’t long enough for that. Almost no one’s is.

Felix turned then, spinning really, and fumbled at the clasp of his old briefcase. By now the smallish man, his umbrella back on his shoulder, was already well past him and heading for the corner with his quick-step sissy’s walk. A middle-aged woman stared at Felix curiously for a brief moment, but then looked away and hurried on.

Felix groped around inside the briefcase until his hand closed over the butt of the short-barreled .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. While groping for the pistol, he tried to identify his assailant—the one he would have to shoot. He decided that there were four possible candidates, all of them extremely improbable.

Two of them were a couple of fortyish women shoppers with string bags—possibly sisters. The third was the jockey-sized news vendor who was now engrossed in counting his change. The fourth was an elderly man of more than seventy who stood leaning on his cane as he stared thoughtfully into the butcher’s window at a row of fat capons. The old man seemed to be debating whether he could really afford one.

Felix felt the first slight effect of the drug just after the smallish man with the umbrella turned the corner and disappeared. Felix’s shoulders sagged involuntarily, and his knees began to tremble—although both may have been caused by the relief that flooded through him when he realized that the drug wasn’t a poison.

Tranquilizer, he thought. Somebody’s shot you full of tranquilizer. Yet the drug didn’t seem very strong, and he wondered if they had used enough. Perhaps they had made a mistake and he wouldn’t need the pistol after all. He removed his hand from inside the briefcase and crossed, not quite dreamily, over to the door of the greengrocer, where he turned, yawned, and started rubbing the spot between his shoulder blades against the door-jamb. He only succeeded in driving the barbed chromium tip in even more deeply as he rubbed away unhurriedly, almost languorously, as though trying to rid himself of some old familiar itch.

It would still take minutes for the drug to work, and across the street the American waited patiently in the taxi, his eyes flicking from his watch to Felix and back again. In the greengrocer’s doorway, Felix kept rubbing away and trying to decide whether to head for the underground entrance. But perhaps that’s where they wanted him to go. A fast train. A quick shove. Felix decided to think about it some more.

At last, the American looked up from his watch, leaned forward, and said to the driver, “Let’s do it.”

The taxi made a U-turn and pulled up at the curb less than three yards from where Felix stood yawning and rubbing the dart into his back. When Felix saw the taxi pull up, he knew why it was there and that he should do something about it—providing it didn’t require too much effort. He thought almost idly of the pistol again, but then he noticed that his vision was beginning to blur. Reality seemed to be edging away. He decided it would probably be better if he simply started walking. Not too fast, of course. No need to attract attention. Just up to the corner, slowly, very slowly, because he was tired, and then right.

He took a step away from the greengrocer’s doorway and then another. But he could no longer control his legs. They began to wobble and his feet were beginning to refuse all commands. Still he managed another step, then yet another, but after that he sank slowly to his knees.

The American got out of the taxi and approached him cautiously. A few people turned to stare. With his eyes fixed on the American, Felix again started groping around inside his briefcase. The American reached down and took it away from him. Felix watched indifferently as the American tucked the briefcase away under an arm.

They stared at each other for several moments, and Felix found himself wondering about the American’s increasingly wav-ery outline. Perhaps it was the light—the dusk. But there could be no dusk at noon. Reality took another few quick steps away from Felix. Then, from what seemed to be a long way off, he heard the American say in awful border Spanish, “Vamos, amigo.”

Felix closed his eyes, licked his lips, and thought about asking where; but it was simply too much effort. At least it wouldn’t be Israel. At least it wouldn’t be the Jews. He wondered vaguely how the Americans had got onto the informer—and how much she had been paid. But all that could be sorted out later after he had rested. Perhaps even a nap. It would be so pleasant to curl up right there on the walk. He had almost decided to do exactly that when the smallish man in the three-piece brown suit reappeared. The smallish man no longer carried his umbrella.

“May I give you a hand with your friend?” the smallish man said in a sweet British voice that matched his mincing walk.

The American nodded. “I’d be much obliged.”

Together they each got an arm around Felix and lifted him to his feet.

“Likes his nip now and then, does he, poor dear?” the smallish man said.

“Now and then.”

The smallish man opened the taxi’s rear door and they tumbled Felix into the back seat.

“Thanks a million,” the American said as he climbed into the taxi.

“Don’t mention it,” the smallish man said. He watched the taxi pull away, and when it was gone he turned toward the butcher shop. He had almost decided on a plump capon for his supper; but if the lamb chops looked particularly good, he might even treat himself to a pair of those.

Chapter 2

There were four of them in the dank cellar of the old boarded-up house in the short street in Hammersmith. Two men and two women. The houses on either side were also boarded up and vacant, waiting for the wrecker who was now three weeks past due. The cellar smelled of dead cat.

One of the women had been stripped almost naked and bound with yellow insulation wire to a heavy dining-room chair. Her name was Maria Luisa de la Cova, and she was a thirty-four-year-old Venezuelan. She was also the coughing woman who had sold the man called Felix to the American for twenty thousand dollars in twenty- and fifty-dollar bills.

The money was now stacked neatly on a water-ringed oak dining-room table that matched the chair. The table had only three legs. A substitute fourth leg had been fashioned out of two Cutty Sark whisky crates. Next to the stacked money was the large black leather purse with the silver clasp. The purse had been turned inside out and its lining ripped away. There was no electricity. Light came from six pink candles stuck into beer bottles.

One of the men, a pallid, almost lashless blond with a slab body and a flat solemn face, lit a cigarette with a disposable lighter. He was called Frank by the others, although his real name was Bernt Diringshoffen and he had been born thirty-two years ago in Hamburg. After lighting the cigarette, he puffed on it inexpertly, not inhaling, obviously a non-smoker.

The de la Cova woman watched him. Her eyes were pink and her face was tear-streaked, but she was no longer crying. There were angry red burns on the left side of her neck and on her small breasts. Four burns in all.

“Tell us,” Diringshoffen said and blew on the coal of the cigarette.

“I’ve already told you,” the de la Cova woman said and began to cough harshly. Diringshoffen waited patiently until the coughing at last had ended. “Tell us again,” he said pleasantly.

She began speaking in a rapid monotone so low and indistinct that the others had to bend forward to hear.

“He said his name was Arnold. I don’t know if that was his real name or not. I don’t even know if it was his surname or his given name. I don’t care. I just called him Arnold, if I ever called him anything. We met several times, maybe four, maybe five. Twice in Soho, at least twice there, and again in Islington in a cafe he knew. Maybe three times there. In Islington. Maybe just two. I can’t remember.”

“Did he say he was CIA?” the other woman asked. The other woman also spoke English, but with an almost crippling French accent. Her name was Françhise Leget, and she had been born twenty-nine years ago in Algiers. She had large black eyes that she blinked rapidly and a thin stylish body, and many thought her to be quite pretty.

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.

Chapter 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?”

“Six months. Until she turned thirty—and ran out of money.”

“And that wrecked it for you, didn’t it? Even in your district. Hell, you must’ve had more dopers and crazies and old retired Jewish socialists and ex-Trotskyites than any place in the state, except maybe Berkeley.”

Dunjee shrugged. “Even they couldn’t swallow the Weathermen thing. I got beat over the head with it.”

“But you had the one term.”

“That’s right. I had the one term.”

Grimes shook his head sadly. “Our Nan,” he said, reproach in his voice this time. “If it hadn’t been for her, you’d probably still be there. You had it all going for you then—ex-Special Forces captain, medals down to here, good anti-war plank, and almost the youngest member of Congress with a real fine pinko district. Shoot, Chubb, you’d still’ve been planted there if it hadn’t been for her. Our Nan.”

“I was the youngest member of Congress,” Dunjee said, disliking himself for making the point. “At least when I was elected I was.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” There was a silence until Grimes said, “You know what I’m doing now?”

Dunjee examined him carefully for several moments. “Probably what you’ve always done—cleaning up after other people’s messes.”

Grimes chuckled. It was a fat man’s low, bubbling chuckle with a trace of wheeze in it. When Dunjee had first known him in school, more than twenty years before at UCLA, Grimes had borne an almost ominous resemblance to Victor Mature, a noted actor. Grimes had always blamed the resemblance for keeping him out of elective politics, since he was totally convinced that nobody would ever dream of voting for Victor Mature for anything.

Now forty-three, possibly forty-four, Grimes no longer bore any resemblance to Victor Mature—except perhaps for that hawklike nose. Over the years, Grimes’s face had grown round and plump and pink and smooth, his jaw wreathed by two thick soft rolls of fat. What was left of his hair was parted very low down on the left side, almost to the ear, and combed up and over. But it didn’t really help much. He still looked bald. About all that saved Grimes from looking like a jolly fat man were that beak of a nose and those cold, wet, silvery eyes. The eyes gleamed with something, Dunjee decided, possibly amusement, but certainly not jollity.

Grimes was still chuckling his practiced fat man’s chuckle when he said, “How’d you like to make a bunch of money?”

“I don’t need any money.”

Again, there was reproach in Grimes’s smile and tone; gentle reproach. “You’ve got 4,136 dollars and change in that Lisbon bank. It’ll last another two months—three if you scrimp.”

It was at least thirty seconds before Dunjee replied. “How much is a bunch of money nowadays?”

“Say one hundred thousand—plus expenses.”

Dunjee nodded. It was a nod indicating mild interest, but nothing else. It was all Grimes needed.

“We sort of lost touch after the election. The 1970 election. But I—”

Dunjee interrupted. “I lost touch with a lot of people. Ex-freshman Congressmen carry a certain pariahlike atmosphere around with them. Or maybe it’s a smell. The smell of defeat and shock. Somebody should come up with a soap.”

“As I was saying, we lost touch, but I kept track. You bounced back. You went into oil.”

“A cream puff,” Dunjee said. “All you had to do was stick a straw down and out it would gush. Well, I raised the money, all tax-shelter stuff. Five thousand here, ten there. And we stuck the straw down and out it gushed. Salt water. A million barrels a day—or something like that. Hell, I don’t remember.”

Grimes made a sympathetic clucking noise and started lighting another cigarette. Staring at the match flame before moving it to the end of his cigarette, he said, “Then there was that stint with the UN.”

“Stint,” Dunjee said in a faintly mocking tone. “Yes, my stint with the UN. Forty-two thousand a year tax free, a lot of travel, and useful and productive dialogue with the leaders of the world’s lesser-developed countries. It was just like talking to Nan.”

“Our Nan. Well, when you left the UN I lost track for a couple of years.”

Dunjee stared at Grimes again, then smiled and said, “You didn’t lose track. For two years I drove a cab. I drove a cab in Miami and Houston and Denver and Seattle and San Francisco and Great Falls and New Orleans. A good week, I’d make a hundred and fifty bucks. Then one day I decided I didn’t want to become a human interest story. You see them all the time. I think there was one in the Herald Trib the other day. Something like ‘Ex-Boy Governor Now Chicago Hackie,’ or some such crap. And it’s all about how this guy who was governor of Michigan or West Virginia at twenty-seven or so, until he found out about booze and broads, is fifty now and driving a cab and he’s never been happier because of this deep insight he’s gained not only into himself but into humanity in general.”

Grimes nodded several times as if he too had read the same stories. “So you went to Mexico.”

“I went to Mexico.”

“The Mordida Man. You got your name in the papers after all.”

Dunjee shrugged. “And they got out of jail.”

“How many did you”—Grimes paused to select his word—“negotiate out?”

“Sixty-two.”

“Bribes and blackmail.”

“They got out of jail. I was good at it. My background helped—Congress, the UN. And being a cab driver. You gain a lot of wonderful insight into human nature by being a cab driver.”

“They say you made a lot of money in Mexico.”

“Who’s they?”

“The IRS.”

Dunjee smiled. “I’m having a slight problem with them.”

“Not so slight. They’re talking about extradition.”

“I’ve got a lawyer on it.”

“I talked to him. He’s worried. The deductions you put down: 251,817 bucks for business expenses. The IRS has decided those were bribes. Bribes aren’t legitimate business expenses.” Grimes yawned. “Of course, I could fix all that.”

There was another long silence until Dunjee said, “You’ll stay for lunch?”

“What’re you having?”

“I don’t know what we’re having. I’ll go see.” He rose and headed for the house, a tall man, two inches or so over six feet, perhaps more. Grimes noticed that there was still that quick, springy lift to Dunjee’s heels as they came up off the grass. He thought that at forty-one (or was it forty-two?) Dunjee still looked fit enough to pass for a professional athlete with at least a season of play left in him. Or perhaps only part of a season.

The revised estimate made Grimes feel somewhat better. So did the gray in Dunjee’s medium long dark-brown hair. That was new. But the gray and those fresh deep lines were about the only physical changes that Grimes could detect. Dunjee’s hazel-green eyes were still more clever than wise, and his features were still rescued from being too regular, almost handsome, by that cheekbone, the left one, that poked up almost three-quarters of an inch higher than the right. From a certain angle the skewed cheekbone made Dunjee look just a bit cockeyed.

Grimes was finishing the last of his beer when Dunjee returned. “Fish,” he said. “We’re having fish.”

“Good,” Grimes said. “I can eat fish.”

Dunjee sank back down into the low garden chair. “You say you can fix the IRS people.”

“I can fix them.”

“Who’s your client?”

Grimes shook his head.

Dunjee stared at him for a moment and then nodded impatiently. “All right. If you tell me, I’m in. Committed. Who’s your client?”

“The White House,” Grimes said, savoring the name in spite of himself.

Dunjee scratched the back of his left hand, noticed a hangnail, and decided to bite it. “The White House, huh?” he said between bites. “That could mean the head gardener or the pool man or some twenty-eight-year-old Yalie savant over there in the West Wing basement or—”

Grimes interrupted. “The President.”

Dunjee sighed. “Well, hell, Paul. I guess you’d better tell me about it.”

Chapter 4

According to Paul Grimes, there were several reasons why Bristol “Bingo” McKay had not gone to Disneyland with the others, the foremost being that he had always considered the place to be just a trifle dumb. Besides, he had already visited it once before, under protest, nearly fifteen years before. But the real reason he had not gone this time was simply because once you passed through its gates there was no liquor to be had, and the terrible prospect of again encountering Mickey Mouse cold sober was something that Bingo McKay would gladly perjure himself to avoid.

So he had lied his way out of it and filled the early afternoon with twenty-six long-distance telephone calls, three drinks, a light lunch, and five laps around the Marriott Hotel pool. At 4 P.M., which was 7 P.M. on the east coast, he had made his regular five-minute call to his kid brother in Washington. Bingo McKay’s kid brother was President of the United States.

As always, they talked politics, domestic politics primarily, which was Bingo McKay’s special preserve; and, as always, the President listened carefully to his brother’s trenchant, totally unvarnished report, whose more troublesome blips would be reflected in the national polls ten days later.

But by then the President, with his brother’s canny guidance, would have worked the legerdemain necessary to correct whatever political imbalances might exist. It was one of the reasons why Jerome McKay, at thirty-nine was often called the most totally political animal to occupy the White House since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom the President, try as he might, couldn’t quite remember.

Now barely nine months in office, the new McKay administration had failed utterly to work any of the economic miracles it more or less had promised. Inflation was nudging an estimated 19 percent; the monthly balance of payments deficit was steady at around $2.6 billion; unemployment had shot up to almost 10 percent; the Gross National Product growth rate had somehow got stuck at just about zero, and gasoline, although rationed, cost $2.26 per gallon on the east coast and $2.31 in the west. The average wait at a filling station had been timed by NBC News at twenty-seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds, although an hour was not in the least uncommon.

All this was particularly embarrassing for the McKay administration, because it had run on oil—or rather against it. The McKay brothers’ strategy had been really quite simple—criminally so, many said later. Jerome McKay had ignored Iris political opponents and had run instead against OPEC and the giant oil companies—and the Russians.

The future President had an uncommon grasp of the oil and natural gas industry because Bingo McKay had steered him into the business at twenty-two, turning him into a multimillionaire by the time he was twenty-eight. At thirty, Jerome McKay had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Oklahoma’s Fifth Congressional District, serving with some distinction, or at least with considerable national attention, for two terms until he relinquished his seat to run successfully for Governor of his native state.

Bingo McKay was fifty-one when he had lugged the huge map of the United States into his kid brother’s office in the Governor’s mansion on Northeast 23rd Street in Oklahoma City and propped it up on an easel. “What the hell’s that for?” the Governor, then only thirty-seven, had asked.

“Basic political geography, lesson number one. How’d you like to be elected President?”

“Very much.”

“Lemme tell you how we’re gonna do it.”

They did it by paying extremely close attention to elementary politics and by running single-mindedly against OPEC and what Jerome McKay branded the oilogopoly—and the Russians. McKay vigorously damned the oil companies’ greed and avarice with unassailable facts and figures, thus confirming the darkest suspicions of 69.2 percent of the American voting public, who had long been hankering for just such a readily identifiable scapegoat.

McKay offered apparently practical, eminently sensible solutions and presented himself as an expert on the oil business, which he certainly was, and also as a repentant sinner who had made his fortune by following the same villainous practices he now condemned. His campaign autobiography, which he wrote himself in three weeks, was called Plunder! and it stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for thirty-seven weeks and then did even better in paperback.

The McKay brothers’ strategy was both excellent theater and sound politics. Jerome McKay whipped his rivals in nearly a third of the primaries, secured his party’s nomination on the fourteenth ballot at three o’clock in the morning, and went on to win the national election with 48.3 percent of the popular vote and an electoral vote margin of two. A little less than a year later he found himself caught up in a delicate, even desperate, gamble for oil.

It had started with a whisper in the delegates’ lounge at the United Nations. Then a hint was dropped into the ear of the American Ambassador in Rome. There was nothing firm, of course, said the hinter, but it was just possible that the Libyan Arab Republic, a country rich in both oil and truculence, just might (might now, you must remember) be willing to increase its production of oil and earmark it for the United States—a firm guarantee, of course—in exchange for the right to purchase some of the latest in American technological gadgetry, including just a few items that might be described as extremely sophisticated weaponry.

Jerome McKay decided to nibble at the tempting bait and sent some murmurings and whisperings of his own to Tripoli by way of Lagos, Nigeria. The American signal in due course reached the ears of the leader of the new military regime in Libya, Colonel Youssef Mourabet, a jumped-up Army major who had come to power after the unexpected death six months before from a heart attack of the still young, often choleric Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. The heart attack, it was rumored widely, had been brought on by a fit of apoplectic rage.

So an unofficial twelve-man delegation headed by Libya’s new Minister of Defense, Major Ali Arifi, had been dispatched to the United States on an informal exploratory window-shopping expedition. And since it was all totally and determinedly unofficial, the President had slipped his brother in as tour guide, thus separating the administration nicely from any official recognition of the junket, but pleasing the Libyans enormously because Bingo McKay, although burdened with no government post, was usually regarded to be either the third or fourth most powerful man in Washington. Many even said second.

The junket had gone nowhere near Washington, of course. Instead, it had started in Houston, where the much maligned oil companies, anxious now to scramble back into the administration’s grace and favor, had laid on a lavish reception. After Texas, it was straight out to Southern California for a demonstration of the new F-18a fighter, which the Libyans were known to covet, even lust after, feeling that the new plane would give far more pause to their increasingly jingoistic Egyptian neighbor than did their current fleet of aging Soviet MiG 25s.

The fighter demonstrations were scheduled for the next day at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and after that there was to be a quick side trip up to Northern California, to San Jose—or Silicon Gulch—where the latest in electronic wizardry would be wheeled out for inspection—and possible barter.