Росс Томас - Cast a Yellow Shadow

“Now, honey—”

“Don’t honey me, you no good son-of-a-bitch.” She didn’t raise her voice when she said it. She didn’t have to. “You bring in some cut-up drunk and dump him into my bed. Whyn’t you take him to the hospital? Or to your house, ’cept that fancy wife of yours wouldn’t have stood for it.” Betty turned to me, and waved a hand at Hardman. “Look at him. Six-feet, four-inches tall, dresses just so fine, goes around pronouncing his name ‘Hard-Man,’ and then lets some little five-foot tall tight twat lead him around by the nose. Get me a drink.” Betty collapsed on the couch and Hardman hastily mixed her a drink.

“How about the man in your bed, Betty?” I said. “May I see him?”

She shrugged and waved her hand at a door. “Right through there. He’s still out cold.”

I nodded and set the glass down on a table that had a coaster on it. I went through the door and looked at the man in the bed. It was a big, fancy bed, oval in shape, and it made the man look smaller than he was. I hadn’t seen him in more than a year and there were some new lines in his face and more grey in his hair than I remembered. His name was Michael Padillo and he spoke six or seven languages without accent, was handy with either a gun or a knife, and could make what has been called the best whiskey sour in Europe.

His other chief distinction was that a lot of people thought he was dead. A lot more hoped that he was.

The last time I had seen Michael Padillo he had been falling off a barge into the Rhine. There had been a fight with guns and fists and a broken bottle. Padillo and a Chinese called Jimmy Ku had gone over the side. Somebody had been aiming a shotgun at me at the time and the shotgun had gone off, so I was never sure whether Padillo had drowned or not until I received a postcard from him. It had been mailed from Dahomey in West Africa, contained a one-word message — “Well” — and had been signed with a “P.” He had never been much of one to write.

On dull days after the postcard came I sometimes sat around and drank too much and speculated about how Padillo had made it from the Rhine to the West Coast of Africa and whether he liked the climate. He was good at getting from one place to another. When he was not helping to run the saloon that we owned in Bonn he had been on call to one of those spooky government agencies that kept sending him to such places as Lodz and Leipzig and Tollin. I never asked what he did; he never told me.

When his agency decided to trade him for a couple of defectors to the East, Padillo tried to buy up his contract. He succeeded that spring night when he fell off the barge into the Rhine about a half-mile up river from the American Embassy. His agency wrote him off and no one from the Embassy ever came around to inquire about what happened to the nice man who used to own half of Mac’s Place in Bad Godesberg.

Padillo’s attempt to retire from the secret-agent dodge had involved both of us in a trip to East Berlin and back. During our absence somebody had blown up the saloon in revenge for some real or imagined slight so I collected the insurance money, got married, and opened Mac’s Place in Washington a few blocks up from K Street, west of Connecticut Avenue. It’s dark and it’s quiet and the prices discourage the annual pilgrimages of high school graduating classes.

I stood there in the bedroom and looked at Padillo for a while. I couldn’t see where he had been cut. The covers were up to his neck. He lay perfectly still in the bed, breathing through his nose. I turned and went back into the living-room with the white carpet.

“How bad is he hurt?” I asked Hardman.

“Got him in the ribs and he bled some. Mush say that boy damn near got both those cats. Moved nice and easy and quick, just like he’d been doin it all his life.”

“He’s no virgin,” I said.

“Friend of yours?”

“My partner.”

“What you gonna do with him?” Betty said.

“He’s got a small suite in the Mayflower; I’ll move him there when he wakes up and get somebody to stay with him.”

“Mush’ll stay,” Hardman said. “Mush owes him a little.”

“Doctor Lambert say he wasn’t hurt bad, but that he’s all tired out — exhaustion,” Betty said. She looked at her watch. It had a lot of diamonds on it. “He’ll be waking up in bout half an hour.”

“I take it Doctor Lambert didn’t call the cops,” I said.

Hardman sniffed. “Now what kind of fool question is that?”

“I should have known. May I use your phone?”

Betty pointed it out. I dialed a number and it rang for a long time. Nobody answered. The phone was the pushbutton kind so I tried again on the chance that I had misdialed or mispunched. I was calling my wife and I was having a husband’s normal reactions when his wife fails to answer the telephone at one-forty-five in the morning. I let it ring nine times and then hung up.

My wife was a correspondent for a Frankfurt paper, the one with the thoughtful editorials. It was her second assignment in the States. I had met her in Bonn and she knew about Padillo and the odd jobs he had once done for the quietly inefficient rival of the CIA. My wife’s name was Fredl and before she married me it was Fraulein Doktor Fredl Arndt. The Doktor had been earned in Political Science at the University of Bonn and some of her tony friends addressed me as Herr Doktor McCorkle, which I bore well enough. After a little more than a year of marriage I found myself very much in love with my wife. I even liked her.

I called the saloon and got Karl. “Has my wife called?”

“Not tonight.”

“The Congressman still there?”

“He’s closing up the place with coffee and brandy. The tab is now $24.85 and he’s still looking for two votes a precinct. If he had had them, he could have made the runoff.”

“Maybe you can help him look. If my wife calls, tell her I’ll be home shortly.”

“Where’re you at?”

“Right before the at,” I said. Karl had no German accent, but he had learned his English from the endless procession of Pfc’s who came out of the huge Frankfurt PX during the postwar years. As a seven-year-old orphan, he had bought their cigarettes to sell on the black market.

“Never end a sentence with a preposition,” he recited.

“Not never; just seldom. I’m at a friend’s. I have to run an errand so if Fredl calls, tell her I’ll be home shortly.”

“See you tomorrow.”

“Right.”

Hardman raised his six feet, four inches of large bone and hard muscle from a chair, skirted around Betty as if she would bite, and walked over to mix another drink. He was as close to a racketeer as Washington had to offer, I suppose. He was far up in the Negro numbers hierarchy, ran a thriving bookie operation, and had a crew of boosters out lifting whatever they fancied from the city’s better department stores and specialty shops. He wore three- or four-hundred dollar suits and eighty-five dollar shoes and drove around town in a bronze Cadillac convertible talking to friends and acquaintances over his radio-telephone. He was a folk hero to the Negro youth in Washington and the police let him alone most of the time because he wasn’t too greedy and paid his dues where it counted.

Oddly enough I had met him through Fredl, who had once done a feature on Negro society in Washington. Hard-man ranked high in one clique of that mysteriously stratified social realm. After the story appeared in the Frankfurt paper, Fredl sent him a copy. The story was in German, but Hardman had had it translated and then dropped around the saloon carrying a couple of dozen long-stemmed roses for my wife. He had been a regular customer since and I patronized his bookie operation. Hardman liked to show the translation of the feature to friends and point out that he should be regarded as a celebrity of international note.