Росс Томас - The Mordida Man

“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.

Occasionally, a patient dressed in a bathrobe and slippers would shuffle by and glance in fleetingly, almost surreptitiously, as though afraid of being caught, and shuffle on. All of the patients seemed to be men. Middle-aged men.

Hugh Scullard, dressed in pajamas, a brown flannel bathrobe, and slippers, took a cigar from the box, sniffed it appreciatively, and offered the box to Dunjee, who shook his head and said, “I never learned to enjoy them, Hugh.”

“Pity,” Scullard said. “It’s all right for us to smoke, but they won’t let us have matches. There’s an electric gadget down the hall at the nurses’ desk that we have to use. Awful nuisance.”

“Here,” Dunjee said, and handed him a disposable lighter. “Keep it.”

Scullard smiled. “If they find this, they’ll probably take away my pudding for three days.”

He used the lighter to get the cigar going, puffed on it several times, inhaling just a little, and then held it out and gazed at it with total pleasure.

“How’d she look?” he said.

“Pauline?”

“Pauline.”

“She looked awful.”

Scullard smiled again. The smile made him look younger, almost as young as he really was, which was fifty. Without the smile he looked sixty, perhaps sixty-five.

“Still no bullshit, right, Chubb?”

“Not unless I’m working.”

“Are you?”

“Working?”

“Mmm.”

“A little,” Dunjee said.

“Not for them, I hope?”

“Who’s them?”

Scullard nodded toward the window. “Take a look out there. Across the street there’s a green car. A Volvo. There’s a man in it, thirty-five, perhaps thirty-six, swarthy complexion, glasses. He’s there every day.”

Dunjee rose, crossed to the window, and looked out. There was a green car, a Volvo, and the man behind the wheel had a swarthy complexion. A woman wearing a gray raincoat and carrying an umbrella over her white nurse’s cap hurried across the street and got into the car. The man kissed her. The car pulled away.

“He seems to be picking up his wife or girl friend,” Dunjee said. “I think she’s a nurse.”

“Oh, she’s a nurse all right,” Scullard said. “Nurse Ganor. Now what kind of name do you suppose that is?”

“Irish?”

Scullard spelled it.

“I don’t know,” Dunjee said.

“Israeli.”

“I guess I was thinking of Janet Gaynor.”

“Nurse Ganor,” he said, then added significantly, “Dr. Levin.”

“He’s your doctor?”

“I spotted him right away, of course.”

“How?”

Scullard smiled mysteriously. “He made a slip. A very tiny one. I didn’t let on, at least not to him. I told Pauline. She’s arranging everything. By this time next week, we’ll be back in Beirut.”

“You’re depending on Pauline?”

“Certainly. Why not?”

“Pauline doesn’t look so hot.”

“You think I’ve let her down, don’t you?”

“Not at all. It’s just that she’s under a strain. Why don’t you use somebody else?”

“Who?”

“The Libyans,” Dunjee said, seizing his opportunity and wishing he were back in Sintra, or even Mexico. “You used to know a lot of Libyans in New York. Or some anyway. With all that oil money now, they’ve got their fingers in a lot of pies.”

“The Colonel’s dead.”

“I know.”

“Still...” Scullard let his thoughts slide away. “You were in Mexico.”

“For a while.”

“I heard. I even read about it somewhere. The Mordida Man. What happened?”

“They started swapping prisoners is what happened,” Dunjee said. “Business fell off. In fact, there wasn’t any business any more.”

“Odd sort of business, I’d say.”

“Very odd.”

“About that other thing.”

“You mean the Lib—” Dunjee stopped when Scullard held a finger up to his lips. Scullard then cupped the same hand to his ear and used his cigar to point around the room. Dunjee nodded. Scullard pantomimed writing. Dunjee took out his ball-point pen and an envelope and handed them to Scullard, who wrote something on the envelope and handed it back to Dunjee.

On the envelope Scullard had written, “Call Faraj Abedsaid — Cultural Attaché — Lib. emb. Tell him I be ready Thursday week Pauline and Mopsy too.”

“All of you, huh?” Dunjee said.

Scullard nodded his thin long head and sucked in his cheeks, which gave his head an almost skull-like look. His dark eyes were suddenly bright and excited.

“You’resure this is the right guy?” Dunjee said.

“He and I are in the same line of work, you might say. He’s a petroleum engineer, a product of one of your own universities, I believe. Oklahoma. They do have a university in Oklahoma, don’t they?’

“It’s at a place called Norman.”

“Tell him—” Scullard paused, then licked his thin lips, smiled, and said, “Tell him I think I know exactly where to drill.”

“Okay,” Dunjee said. “I’ll tell him.”

As Dunjee moved down the hall past the nurses’ desk, a man in his thirties, wearing a neatly trimmed dark mustache and a three-piecesuit stepped out of an office. “Mr. Dunjee?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Dr.Levin. I wonder if you could spare a moment?”

“Sure.”

“We might go in here,” Levin said and led the way into the office, which contained a walnut table that doubled as a desk, two armchairs, and a couch. “Please,” Levin said and indicated one of the armchairs.

When they were both seated, Levin smiled and said, “You’re am old friend of Mr. Scullard’s, I understand.”

“We knew each other in New York.”

“I suppose you noticed the change?”

“He’s crazy as hell, isn’t he?”

Levin smiled again, but this time it was a sad smile. “I don’t share some of my colleagues’ almost pathological aversion to the word, so I an agree with you. He is crazy as hell.”

“Will he get any better?”

“I hope so.”

“He thinks you’re with Israeli intelligence. You and Nurse Ganor.”

“Bernie Levin, the dread Mossad agent.”