Росс Томас - Twilight at Mac’s Place

“You’re very kind,” said Haynes,

Still studying his menu, Tinker Burns said, “You ever think of maybe taking that memory act of yours on the road with some carnival?”

“Not recently,” Herr Horst said.

Burns looked up. “The McCorkle around?”

“Alas, no.”

“What about Padillo?”

“I’ll tell him you’re here.”

“Don’t bother.”

Herr Horst’s lips twitched, as if he were considering a smile. “But he would be desolate were he not told.”

After the maître d’ turned and marched slowly away, still leading his invisible procession, a waiter hurried over to take their drink orders. Burns wanted a martini, straight up; Gelinet, a vermouth; and Haynes, a bottle of Beck’s. Arriving with the waiter and the drinks was Michael Padillo.

Haynes couldn’t remember Padillo from that seemingly endless birthday dinner of more than fourteen years ago. Yet there was something about him that he found oddly familiar.

Recalling the long-ago birthday dinner, Haynes discovered he could easily draw a mental picture of the man Tinker Burns had referred to as the McCorkle — a big man, well over six feet, who had stopped by their table to exchange pleasantries and quips with Steadfast Haynes. McCorkle had been wearing too many laugh lines around self-mocking eyes that were either hazel or brown. He also had a skeptical grin, most of his hair and the build of a middle-aged jock who had long since stopped bothering with the Canadian Air Force exercises. But the real reason you remember him so well, Haynes decided, is that he sent over two cognacs, which was the first time a publican ever bought you a drink.

Still watching Padillo, who was bowing over the hand of a smiling Isabelle Gelinet, Haynes found himself reverting to his abandoned role of homicide detective as he measured Padillo’s height at a little less than six feet; weighed him in at 160 or 165; classified his nose as straight-long, his mouth as thin-wide; judged his complexion to be a light olive, his hair a gray-streaked dark brown.

Haynes wondered briefly whether Padillo was part Mexican or part Spanish but decided it didn’t really matter because he’d never seen anyone with that many years move with so much athletic grace, which usually was the franchise of those who’d made a living from it on some playing field — or in rings where they send in either the bull or another middleweight.

What made Padillo so strangely familiar to Haynes were his eyes. Not their color, which on Haynes’s private chart was coded as Gray-Green Cools #1, but rather their look of semi-devout fatalism. This look, he believed, was acquired only by those who at some risk have peered into the human abyss and aren’t at all reassured by what they’ve seen.

Haynes had known old homicide badges, nearing their pensions, who had worn that same look. So had two poets, one young, one old, both women. And once, on the rooftop of a Wilshire Boulevard office building in Westwood, a forty-seven year-old psychiatrist had turned to gaze briefly at Haynes with that same look just before he turned yet again and stepped off the edge.

It was Isabelle Gelinet who introduced Padillo to Granville Haynes. After they shook hands, Padillo said he was very sorry about Steady’s death. Haynes thanked him and asked whether they had been close friends.

“Close acquaintances,” Padillo said.

“You knew Steady well enough to have shown up at Arlington,” Tinker Burns said. “Either you or the McCorkle.”

Padillo, still standing, examined the seated Burns as if for signs of moth and rust. “McCorkle’s out of town and I no longer go to funerals.”

“Then you must miss out on a lot of quiet satisfaction,” Haynes said.

The small surprised smile Padillo gave him was that of a very minor prophet discovering his first disciple. It encouraged Haynes to say, “Join us for a drink?”

Padillo thought about it, agreed with a nod and glanced at a waiter, who hurried over with a chair. Once seated, Padillo resumed his inspection of Tinker Burns, nodded again, as if partially satisfied, and said, “That arms boutique of yours must be flourishing, Tinker.”

“A steady, unseasonal demand,” Burns said. “Much like the toilet paper business.”

The waiter returned with a pale drink that could have been either plain ginger ale or a very weak Scotch and water. Padillo ignored it and looked at Gelinet. “Who showed, Isabelle?”

“We three — and a man from Langley. Gilbert Undean.”

“They send him?”

“He said he’d known Steady in Laos and volunteered before he got sent.” She shrugged. “But who can say?”

Padillo picked up his drink, tasted it and put it back down. “I heard Steady died of a stroke in the Hay-Adams the night before the inauguration. He wasn’t in town for that, was he?”

“We were here for the North trial,” she said. “Steady had booked us rooms for the next three months.”

“Why so early?”

“He was trying to arrange for a permanent seat in the courtroom.”

“Did he know North?” Granville Haynes asked.

“Not North,” she said. “But he’d known Secord since the Congo and, of course, Albert Hakim.” She paused. “And some of the others.”

“Dear Albert,” Tinker Burns said and, displaying a remarkable flair for mimicry, added, “ ‘Just let us handle the money, Ollie, so you won’t be burdened with all that tedious bookkeeping.’ “

“Was he in on it, Tinker?” Haynes asked.

“Steady? Nah. Nowhere near it. And it’s too bad in a way. If they’d’ve had Steady doing the retouch, Secord, Hakim, North and the others might be thinking about what they oughta say at Oslo when they got handed the peace prize.”

Haynes turned to Padillo and said, “My old man and the truth were never more than nodding acquaintances.”

“He was exactly what he claimed to be — a propagandist,” Gelinet said. “And a superb one.”

Haynes stared at her. “That’s what I just said. What I don’t understand is why he’d want to spend weeks or even months in some courtroom.”

“It was to be the epilogue,” she said.

“To what?”

“His memoirs. He thought the North verdict, however it goes, would serve as the perfect metaphor for an epilogue — although there won’t be one now.”

“No book or no epilogue?” Padillo said.

“No epilogue.”

“But there will be a book?”

She shrugged.

“Who’s in it?”

Isabelle Gelinet made a small but encompassing gesture that managed to capture the restaurant, Washington and half the world.

Padillo rose. “Then I’ll have to buy a copy, won’t I?”

Standing at the very end of the long line, McCorkle rearranged his expression into one of terminal boredom and used a foot to shove his ancient one-suiter toward customs at Dulles International Airport. For years he had been convinced that a bored look, when combined with a suit and tie, made the perfect match to the U.S. Customs Service’s profile of the innocent traveler.

Still looking bored, McCorkle watched two Federal dogs, both mutts, sniff out a pile of luggage for drugs. He continued to watch the dogs when a roving uniformed customs inspector appeared at his elbow and said, “Nice flight?”

“Not bad.”

“Could I see your passport?”

McCorkle turned and began the search, slowly patting his pockets with no sign of panic. He finally removed the passport from his hip pocket, the last one left, and handed it over, trusting that his carefully unhurried search was another hallmark of innocence.

The inspector opened the passport and leafed through it. “Frankfurt, huh?”

“Frankfurt,” McCorkle agreed.