Росс Томас - Twilight at Mac’s Place

“Yeah. I would. Thanks”

Keyes picked up his telephone and asked for two coffees. They waited in silence until a young man brought them in on a tray. After the young man left without speaking, Undean took a sip, put his cup down and said, “If Steady wasn’t ever in any branch of the service, why bury him at Arlington?”

“The woman who was at the graveside services thought it would be nice if we did.”

“Isabelle Gelinet.”

“Pretty name, isn’t it?” said Keyes. “Mile Gelinet quit her job at AF-P a few years ago and moved in with Steady at that place of his in Virginia.”

“The farm near Berryville?”

Keyes nodded.

“Heard it was part of his divorce settlement from that rich widow he married.”

“I see you’ve kept up with the gossip, Gilbert.”

“I’m retired, not deaf.”

“In any event, Gelinet moved in, ostensibly to help Steady write his memoirs.”

“I’ll buy a copy.”

Keyes chose to ignore the comment. “The day after Steady died, the day of the inauguration, in fa.ct, Gelinet called us. Her call was finally routed to me at home because Steady, there at the very end, had been one of mine. She refused to identify herself, but I’m sure she didn’t care that I could easily guess who was calling.”

“What’d she want?”

“She wanted him buried at Arlington with a bugler blowing ‘Taps’ over his grave. That was the last forthright statement she made. The rest was all hints and verbal nudges, the gist of them being that unless we agreed to bury him at Arlington, the manuscript of his memoirs would be expressed that same day to a most reputable literary agent in New York. I hinted back that if this indeed were to happen, we might be forced to take legal remedies. She said we were more than welcome to try and hung up.”

The courtly man stopped talking, looked somewhere past Undean’s left shoulder and added, “So we buried him at Arlington.”

“And sent me to count the house.”

“You were the only one left who had the slightest reason to go — except for me.”

Undean frowned. “What happened to your legal remedies?”

Keyes shrugged.

“A bluff, right? And after she called it, you caved in.”

When Keyes only stared at him, saying nothing, revealing nothing, Undean smiled sourly and said, “It doesn’t scan. You’ve stopped plenty of others from publishing. You even stopped two or three guys so hard they went bankrupt. So why not Steady?”

“Because one, he’s dead, and two, he never worked for us.”

“Number two is bullshit”

“Not this time, Gilbert. You see, we never had a contract with Steady. He would never sign anything, never endorse any check of ours or even set up an offshore account we could move his funds into. From the very first — there in the Congo — he insisted on being paid all fees and expenses in either Swiss francs or gold. So how could we stop a dead man, who we couldn’t even prove had ever worked for us, from publishing his memoirs, which we hadn’t even read? And that’s why we caved in, as you so nicely put it, and buried him at Arlington.”

When Undean made no reply, Keyes picked up his cup and drank the rest of his now tepid coffee. As he put the cup down, he said, “What did you make of his son, Granville?”

“I thought he was nice and polite, maybe too polite for this day and age, and I think you just threw the switch.”

“To sidetrack you?”

Undean nodded. “What’re you really going to do about them?”

“Who?”

“His memoirs.”

“Oh. Those, Well, nothing more than we’ve already done, which is to pay a plot of what? — hallowed ground? — to prevent them from being published. Of course, I wouldn’t really worry if they were published because I’m sure they’re nothing more than the same old thrice-regurgitated public domain rogue elephant stuff. Warmed-over old hat, to mix yet another metaphor. At best, a slow read on a long flight.”

“I know better,” Undean said. “And if I know better, you damn sure do.”

Hamilton Keyes favored Undean with another polite but empty stare.

“Want some advice?” Undean said.

“Not really.”

“Buy ’em,” Undean said. “Buy the memoirs and all the rights thereto. It’ll save you one hell of a lot of grief and money in the long run.”

The courtly man rose with a smile that was neither warm nor cold. A room-temperature smile, Undean decided. A smile of dismissal.

“It’s been awfully nice chatting with you again, Gilbert,” Keyes said as he came around the rosewood desk, waited for Undean to rise, put a comforting hand on the old man’s shoulder and gently guided him to the door.

After nearly a generation it could still be found at the same location a few blocks north of K Street and a little less than that west of Connecticut Avenue. Because it had endured so long in Washington, where restaurants often have the life span of a mayfly, many thought of Mac’s Place as either an undesignated landmark or, if they were under thirty, a quaint and curious monument to the sixties.

That it still existed at all was largely because of a firm of prospering criminal defense lawyers who occasionally dabbled in real estate. In 1987 they had formed a syndicate to buy the land beneath Mac’s Place and much of that on either side of it.

The syndicate had then erected a seven-story office building over and around the restaurant, taking great pains to preserve its unprepossessing façade and excellent kitchen. When asked, the lawyers always justified the extravagant preservation by saying, “We needed a nice place close by to eat lunch.”

Long before the advent of either salad bars or nouvelle cuisine, and long, long before the fading craze for something called plain American cookery, which usually meant meat loaf redux, it was possible to find a restaurant, chop house or bar 8c grill very much like Mac’s Place in almost any American city. They were often long narrow quiet rooms with a slightly foreign, melancholy air that offered generous drinks, swift monosyllabic service and a varied menu that on Thursdays might even include spit-roasted sweetbreads.

Largely through inertia, Mac’s Place had managed to preserve a similar atmosphere. It was, as Michael Padillo, its co-owner, once said, “The sort of place you go when you have to meet someone and explain why you won’t be getting the divorce after all”

It was 1:22 P.M. when linker Burns escorted Isabelle Gelinet and Granville Haynes into Mac’s Place, where they stood blinking and waiting for their eyes to adjust to the perpetual twilight. Glancing around, Haynes noticed the lunch crowd was beginning to disperse.

Herr Horst, the seventy-four-year-old maître d’ with the enviable posture of a martinet, gathered up three menus and slowly advanced on the new customers, much as if he were leading a procession of bishops. When he was a few feet away from Tinker Burns, whom he hadn’t seen in three years, Herr Horst stopped and greeted him with the single abrupt nod that regular patrons had named The Whiplasher. “Three for lunch, Mr. Burns?”

“Three.”

“Still prefer to be seated with your back to the wall?”

“Old habits, good or bad, die hard.”

“But as Proust noted, they also fill up time. This way, please.”

After he had seated them at a banquette, handed out the menus and complimented Gelinet by name on what he called her frock, Herr Horst, as even Padillo called him, examined Granville Haynes and said, “We haven’t had the pleasure of your custom, Mr. Haynes, since September of nineteen seventy-four when you and your father dined with us. It was your eighteenth birthday, as I recall, and you were off the next day to the university at Charlottesville.” Herr Horst paused, dropped his voice to a somber note and added, “I was extremely saddened to learn of his death.”