Росс Томас - The Mordida Man

Ko looked at her curiously. “He what?”

“He went to the UN after that, I believe.”

McKay nodded proudly. “By God, she’s got a memory, hasn’t she? I believe he was with the UN for a while.” Innocence crept across McKay’s face. “Why?”

“They’re on their way to Tripoli,” Ko said. “Not too willingly, it would seem.”

“They?” McKay said, as indifferently as he could.

“Dunjee and his associates, who seem to be an English thief and a woman of uncertain nationality.”

God damn, but don’t that sound just like Dunjee, McKay thought. Got himself a pickup crew somewhere and a hip pocket full of money — from the kid, most likely — and he’s wiggling his way right into the henhouse. God bless the kid, God bless Paul Grimes, and God bless the Mordida Man. It was as close as McKay had come to prayer in forty-one years.

“You don’t know this Dunjee, you say?” Ko asked.

“I’m trying to recollect. I believe we did meet once at a convention. ’Sixty-eight in Chicago. I think he was there and we maybe shook hands and said hello. And I think maybe we bumped into each other at a cocktail party in Washington one time. Probably talked a couple of minutes. But that’s about it.”

“Eleanor?” Ko said.

She shook her head. “I never met him.”

“How come Tripoli?” McKay said, putting another cigarette into his mouth to supplement the casualness of his tone.

“How come?” Ko said. “Because he was sent for apparently, that’s how come.”

“Sent for by who?”

“Mourabet.”

“The Colonel?”

Ko nodded. “Himself.”

“No kidding?” Bingo McKay said.

The plane in which Chubb Dunjee flew across the Mediterranean from Rome to Tripoli was the same Boeing 727 in which Bingo McKay’s ear had been removed. Because of some kind of unexplained mechanical difficulties, the plane had not left Rome until nearly five o’clock in the morning. At 5:46 A.M., the plane’s passengers could watch dawn break over the sea.

“It’s getting light,” Delft Csider said. Dunjee and Harold Hopkins turned to look out the window, then turned back.

“You resist, he implores, then you give in,” she said and shook her head. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“What’s she talking about?” Hopkins said.

“It’s how he works,” Csider said. “He puts his neck in the noose, then tries to talk his way out of it before they draw it tight and cut off all the air. All the hot air.”

Hopkins frowned. “I didn’t sign on for this, mate. I signed on for Rome with maybe a quick peek at the Colosseum. I didn’t sign on for Libya. What the hell’s in Libya?”

“A lot of sand,” Dunjee said. “And a lot of oil.”

“Before the oil, you know what they used to call it?” Csider asked.

“The poorest country on earth,” Dunjee said.

“I forgot,” she said. “You were with the UN.”

“World War Two scrap and esparto grass. That’s about all Libya had to export then. They didn’t even want to let them into the UN, because everyone knew they’d be just another LDC with their hand out.”

“What’s an LDC?” Hopkins said.

“A lesser-developed country,” Dunjee said. “They used to call them underdeveloped, but that hurt their feelings, so they started calling them ‘developing countries.’ But then some sticklers insisted that that wasn’t quite accurate either, because a lot of them weren’t developing anything except their politics. So about the time I went with the UN they’d started calling them lesser-developed, which seemed to please almost nobody. But that’s one of the things the UN is good at — pleasing nobody.”

“Fooled ’em though, didn’t they?” Hopkins said. “I mean with all that oil they found and the price it’s bringing. But I don’t blame ’em, the Arabs, I mean. If I’d been poor all me life, which I bloody well have been, and then woke up one morning and found out I had something everybody in the world was dying to get their hands on, you think I wouldn’t sell it dear? Not likely, mate. What the traffic would bear, that’s what I’d sell it for. What the traffic would bear.”

Hopkins nodded as though he found his economic analysis unassailable. They were seated in the lounge section of the plane. The door to the forward section was locked. The forward section was where Bingo McKay’s ear had been sliced off. It was now occupied by Faraj Abedsaid and the two tough young Libyan guards. The guards had remained in the lounge section with Dunjee and the others during the long delay on the ground in Rome. But once the plane was airborne, they had gone into the forward section, locking the door behind them.

“When we get to wherever we’re going—”

“Tripoli,” Dunjee said.

Hopkins nodded. “Right, Tripoli. What then?”

“I see the man.”

“The chief panjandrum, huh?”

“Right.”

“Then?”

Dunjee sighed. “Then I try to convince him that I’m the sole supplier.”

“Of what?”

“Of whatever his heart desires,” Dunjee said, and attempted a smile, which turned into a lip-stretching exercise without either humor or confidence.

The three of them turned when they heard the door to the forward compartment being unlocked. Abedsaid came through it. He bent down to peer out a window and then looked at Dunjee.

“We’ll be landing in about twenty minutes,” he said, straightening up. “The Captain wants you to fasten your seat belts.”

“What happens after we land?” Dunjee said, snapping his seat belt together.

Abedsaid frowned, as if weary of answering questions. He apparently had had no sleep in the forward compartment. The lines around his mouth had deepened. His eyes were bloodshot.

“You and I,” he said, still frowning at Dunjee. “You and I will take another small journey.”

“Where to?”

Abedsaid shook his head. “The name would mean nothing. As for your two colleagues, they will be taken to a hotel. The Inter-Continental, I think. It’s quite comfortable.”

“You sure it’s a hotel?” Dunjee said.

“A prison perhaps?” Abedsaid said. “A dungeon even?”

“All right. It’s a hotel.”

“You’re very suspicious, Mr. Dunjee.”

“You’re right,” Dunjee said. “I am.”

From one thousand feet up Dunjee counted six chrome-shiny Airstream trailers. They formed an L. Next to them were parked two flatbed trucks. On the beds of the trucks were diesel generators. Parked near the generators were two tanker trucks containing the oil that ran the generators. Scattered here and there were at least two dozen sedans and heavy-duty pickup trucks. Farther away were two French six-passenger Aérospatiale AS 350 Squirrel helicopters, twins of the one that had flown Dunjee and Abedsaid east and south of Tripoli for a little more than forty-five minutes.

Some one hundred yards away from everything was the black tent. Cables from the generators snaked across the sand to it. Near the tent were some stunted trees of some kind.

“That’s the oasis?” Dunjee said as the helicopter wheeled and started down.

“What did you expect?” Abedsaid asked. “Date palms surrounding a small crystal clear pool with cool deep shade and belly dancers?”

“Yeah,” Dunjee said. “Something like that.”

The helicopter landed on a hundred-foot-square of thick green heavy-duty staked-down plastic, something like that used to make garbage bags, only heavier, thicker. Abedsaid said it was to keep the dust and sand from blowing.

But it wasn’t sand that the plastic covered. It was more like a not-quite-formed thin gravel that was mixed together with a gray grit. Nothing grew in it.