Росс Томас - The Mordida Man

Dunjee crumpled the note and dropped it into the toilet. He then went back into the lounge, mixed himself a second drink, and joined Delft Csider, who sat in a corner, well away from everyone else, leafing through a tattered copy of Country Life.

She looked up at him as he sat down. “All there?”

“All there. Anyone else in on this mess?”

“No. Just he and I.”

“And you’re what?”

“The backup.”

“Why you — in particular, I mean?”

“I have the languages, should it come to that.”

“How many?”

“Six.”

“I’ll guess: French, German, Spanish, Italian and” — he paused — “Hungarian.”

She acknowledged his guess with a slight nod and an even slighter smile. “You left out one.”

“What?”

“Arabic.”

“Arabic makes seven, not six.”

“I don’t count English.”

“Are you?”

“What?”

“English?”

“No.”

“I couldn’t tell.”

She didn’t seem to care. She finished her drink, rattled the ice in her glass and said, “I have a car if you could use a lift.”

“Thanks. I could.”

“Where’re you staying, the Connaught?”

“Do I look like the Connaught?”

She again examined him briefly. “Almost.”

Dunjee canceled his seat on the Rome flight while Delft Csider went to get her car, which turned out to be an elderly Morgan 2 + 2 with a patched top. Dunjee put his suitcase in the rear seat and climbed in beside her.

“Old, but reliable,” she said. “The car, I mean.”

They made most of the fast bumpy drive along the M4 in silence. The hard rain fell in sheets that leaked through the top and coated the windshield with what seemed to be thick layers of gray gelatin. The Morgan’s worn blades scrubbed away earnestly but with little effect. After fifteen minutes, Dunjee said, “You should get some new blades.”

“Probably.”

“And some new shocks.”

“They are new.”

Five minutes later she said, “I was just wondering.”

“What?”

“What kind of name is Dunjee?”

“I don’t know. Scotch, maybe.”

“And Chubb?”

“My father was a locksmith. I had an older brother called Yale, but he died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. He was three and I was one.”

Dunjee’s hotel was the Hilton. After thanking Delft Csider for the lift, he allowed the doorman to fetch his bag from the rear and shield him from the rain with a large black umbrella. Inside, the reservation clerk ran a practiced eye over Dunjee and assigned him to a hundred-and-twenty-two-dollar-a-night room on the sixth floor with a view of Hyde Park. Up in the room, the middle-aged porter, perhaps the last native-born English yeoman still in hotel service, deposited Dunjee’s bag on the stand and put the room key on top of the television set. Dunjee took out a twenty-dollar bill, folded it lengthwise, and held it out. The porter pocketed the bill smoothly with thanks and then waited to see what Dunjee expected for his money.

“I might like to do some gambling, but I don’t want to wait forty-eight hours. That’s the law, isn’t it?”

The porter smiled. It was the smile of the practiced conspirator. “These things can be arranged, sir. No trouble at all. If you’ll check your box downstairs a bit later this afternoon, you’ll find a membership card all made out. And a very nice club it is, too.”

“Poker?”

“Seven-card stud, I believe it is, sir.”

“Thank you.”

“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.”