Росс Томас - The Mordida Man

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 pinkened 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.