Ross Thomas - Backup Men

“It wasn’t a choice,” I said. “It was an automatic reaction, a reflex.”

Padillo turned to look over his shoulder at me. “Was it?”

“I saw it,” I said. “I saw the whole thing.”

“You saw me depend on a high-priced security system that had grown flabby because nobody like Gitner had ever taken it on. It was a system designed to discourage the gentleman jewel thief who’d be afraid to go up against it because he might get his dinner jacket mussed. I made my mistake when I believed that it would keep somebody like Gitner from getting where he wanted to go. He probably thought it was quaint. I know that’s what he thinks I am.”

“Aren’t you?” Wanda Gothar said. “Oh, not just you, Padillo, but all of us. Aren’t we something like the characters in a post-World War II set piece? A trifle grim as we brood about revenge, but a little self-conscious about being here at all, and rather ashamed, I’d say, for having so quickly become such anachronisms. You’re right. Quaint is the word.”

Padillo rose and walked over to Wanda Gothar and looked down at her for several moments and then smiled. It wasn’t his usual quick, hard grin. It was an almost gentle smile, one that he seemed to have been saving for a sentimental occasion on the off chance that he might have to attend one some day.

“You’re not old enough to be quaint, Wanda, but you’re still young enough to get out.”

It was the second and last time I ever saw her smile and she still didn’t put much into it, perhaps because she didn’t want to waste what little was left. But still, it was a smile, and some of it seemed to creep into her voice. “You’re forgetting something, Padillo.”

“What?”

“The Gothar tradition, the one that goes back almost a hundred and seventy years. You know what it means?”

“Not really.”

“It means that I’ve always been too old to get out.”

The motel was a U-shaped affair, two stories high, built of redwood and glass and some kind of stone that looked too pretty to be real although it was. Our room and the one that Scales and the king occupied were at the bottom of the U. Padillo had rented two more rooms. One of them was on the right-hand side of the U on the second floor. The other one was on the ground floor on the U’s left-hand side.

Padillo handed Wanda Gothar a room key and she dropped it into her purse. It clunked against something metallic.

“What are you carrying?” he said.

“A Smith and Wesson thirty-eight.”

“That all?”

“No. A Walther PPK. It was my brother’s.”

“Which one?”

“Paul.”

“I seem to remember that he did like a Walther.” He turned to me. “You know what the PPK stands for?”

“ Polezei something,” I said.

“ Polezei Pistol Kriminal. They’re both a lot of gun for you, Wanda.”

“I know how to use them,” she said. “Or don’t you remember?”

“I remember. You get the upstairs room.”

She nodded. “McCorkle will be downstairs on the left. I’ll be upstairs on the right and so you have a crossfire. Where will you be, in with them?”

“If I were in with them when it happens, it would be too late for me to do any good. I’ll be here. You want to see them before you go up?”

She rose, shaking her head. “Is it necessary?”

“No.”

“Then I see no point in it unless they need reassurance. Do they?”

“No.”

She turned and started for the door, but stopped, and looked back at Padillo.

“Tell me something.”

“What?”

“You’re not putting me up there because it’s the farthest and presumably the safest place, are you?”

“No.”

“But you do have a reason?”

“Yes. I have a reason.”

“Well?”

“You shoot better than McCorkle.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I thought it was.”

18

IT WAS nearly dark and the April fog was settling down for the evening as I walked Wanda Gothar to the stairs that led to the second floor.

“You should have brought a coat,” I said.

“I’m not cold.” She stopped at the stairs and looked up at me. Curiously, I thought. “Why are you here, McCorkle? This isn’t your métier.”

“My wife’s out of town,” I said. It was as good an answer as any.

“Is she pretty?” Before I could reply, Wanda Gothar nodded thoughtfully and said, “Yes, she would be. You’d need that.” She looked at my face some more, studying it as if she hoped to discover some vanished trace of character. “Children?” she said.

“No.”

“Are you planning on any?”

“The demand for them seems to have slacked off.”

“And you’re faithful to your wife.” It wasn’t a question.

“Being unfaithful is hard work and I work hard to avoid that.”

“Was Padillo in love with her?”

“Who?” I knew whom she meant, but I was trying to think up an answer.

“The woman in New York.”

“He seemed to like her a lot.”

“And she was rich.”

“Very.”

“That could have stopped him.”

“From what?”

“From marrying her. Did you ever notice that in some ways he’s frightfully old-fashioned?”

“No.”

“If he weren’t concerned about such an outdated emotion as revenge, we wouldn’t be here.” She made a small gesture that took in the motel. “This is no sanctuary, it’s a trap. There must be a great many places to hide in San Francisco. He could easily have found one.”

“Why don’t you tell him?”

“Because,” she said, “I’m even more old-fashioned than he is.”

She turned and started up the stairs to her room. From the rear she looked as old-fashioned as next week. But perhaps she was right, I thought, as I made my way around the heated, Olympic-sized swimming pool that no one was swimming in, and headed for the room that Padillo had rented for me, the one from which I could pot away at Kragstein and Gitner with the office .38 if they ever showed up. And if I could see them in the fog. And if I didn’t fall asleep.

Revenge might be an old-fashioned emotion or motive or whatever it was, I thought, as I tossed the room key onto the plastic topped writing desk, but it still drew all sorts of people into all sorts of trouble. It could make a wispy little housewife chuckle as she splashed acid in the Other Woman’s face. A fifty-year-old accountant grinned at midnight while he stuffed the money into the suitcase and thought about the look on the boss’s face when it was discovered that the monthly payroll was on its way to Rio. And I had seen the self-righteousness in the face of the steady customer who had sped out to Chevy Chase to pick up his shotgun so that he could come back and blow the head off the waiter who had spilled the veal Niçoise all over the wife’s new dress.

That type of revenge was based on rage which, if heated to just the right temperature, can make any action, no matter how foolish, seem coldly logical and completely justified—even slamming the six-week-old baby against the wall because it won’t stop crying.

But there was nothing impetuous in the way that Wanda Gothar and Padillo sought their revenge. They went about it dispassionately, purposely setting a weak-jawed trap and then installing themselves as part of the bait. I decided that I didn’t want either one of them miffed at me.

I turned a chair around at the window, mixed a drink from a pint of Scotch that I’d bought in Los Angeles, turned off the lights, and settled down to watch the entrance of the motel. I even took the revolver out of my jacket pocket and laid it on a convenient table next to my chair so that I could reach it easily when I needed to shoot someone.