Backup Men (10 page)

A middle-aged man wearing a black, unbuttoned vest and a white tieless shirt stepped out of a produce store and asked, “What’s going on here?” I hit the taller man in the stomach with my left hand. His breath exploded from him and he doubled over and the man who’d come out of the produce store said, “Let’s break it up.” I kicked the tall man in the face, just as if I were trying for a sixty-yard punt. That straightened him up long enough so that the man in the white shirt and I could note how I’d ruined his looks. The beaked nose was smashed almost flat and some bone showed through the blood.

A small crowd had formed and a fat man in a blue suit asked the man in the vest and the white shirt what had happened. The man in the white shirt pointed at me and said, “That big guy’s been beating up on these two little guys.” Both of the little guys were an inch or so over six feet.

“Anybody call the cops?” the fat man asked.

“Nah. It’s just getting started good.”

The taller man with the ruined nose was now kneeling on the sidewalk, not too far from his friend with the bad kneecap, which I hoped would give him trouble for years to come. I picked up my attaché case and walked over to them. The tall man didn’t know I was there. He didn’t seem to know much of anything other than that his nose was a bloody, shapeless lump of pain. The shorter man, still sitting on the sidewalk, still holding his kneecap, had stopped yelling. He looked up at me. I had some questions to ask him but I had to wait until he got tired of calling me five different kinds of motherfucker. Then I started to ask who had put him on to me, but I saw the blue uniform on the motor scooter down the street, so I turned and headed the other way—or started to. The fat man in the blue suit moved in front of me.

“You want something, friend?” I said.

“Those two guys are hurt real bad. You can’t just—”

I put my hand on his chest and pressed gently. He didn’t move. Instead, he stared at me with mean little blue eyes that were only slits in the fat folds of his face. “Those two guys are wanted in six states,” I said. “If you hustle, you can nail ‘em and beat the cops to the reward.”

“How much reward?” he said.

“Six thousand in Pittsburgh and seventy-five hundred in Altoona. Bank jobs.”

The fat man looked at me and then over my shoulder. He gave me another quick glance, as if hoping that there was something in my face that would let him believe me. Apparently there was because he stepped aside and I started across First Avenue. I’d only gone a few steps when there was a yell. I turned. The fat man stood over the dark Spanish-looking man whose nose I’d ruined. The dark man still knelt on the sidewalk and the fat man had an arm around his neck. He was choking him. At the same time he was trying to kick the smaller, blond man in the head. He missed in what must have been his second try, but the blond man yelled anyway and tried to crawl toward the curb. It hurt him to crawl and he yelled again as the fat man aimed another kick at his head, but again missed. The crowd was watching it all happen when the policeman arrived and I turned the corner.

The address on Avenue A that Padillo had given me was in a grimy seven-story apartment building which was located across the street from a dusty-looking park. It was a block of small, sour businesses that looked as if they could provide their owners a bare living, if the owners didn’t eat too much and too often. There were two candy stores, a dry cleaner’s, a small grocery, and a liquor store. None of them looked solvent and the liquor store for some reason appeared to be on the verge of bankruptcy. It may have been because of the defeated look in the eyes of its owner as he stood in the doorway, searching for whatever signs of Spring he could find in the dusty park across the street.

I glanced around before ducking through the dirty glass entrance door of the apartment house. No one on the street seemed interested in me. Not the dark young woman with the baby stroller that was stacked with old newspapers. Not the old man in the limp gray suit who used a cane to help him edge along the sidewalk. The liquor store owner had looked at me once, as if recognizing someone who could turn into an excellent customer. But he also seemed to know that I was a stranger in the neighborhood, the kind who would buy his liquor farther uptown.

The elevator in the tiled vestibule was large enough to carry two persons if one of them held his breath. I got in and studied the ancient controls and pushed enough buttons and slammed enough doors until the elevator finally gave a moan and grunt and started up to the seventh floor. It seemed like a long trip.

I was looking for 7-C and it was at the end of a hall, guarded by a sturdy wooden door that had a sheet of heavy-gauge steel bolted onto it, a decorative touch peculiar to New York. I knocked and glanced at my watch. It was five minutes past seven. Before I could knock again, there was the sound of a bolt being drawn back and of some sturdy locks being disengaged. The door opened three inches and Padillo looked at me over the chain of the final lock.

“The plumber couldn’t make it,” I said.

“Jesus,” he said and closed the door to undo the chain. He opened it and I went in and found myself in the living room of someone who was crazy about maple. A few of the pieces were new, but most of them were old, at least a hundred years or so, and all of them were maple and looked as if they were waxed every other day whether they needed it or not. What wasn’t maple was giddy chintz if it were on a chair or a sofa or partially covering the windows. On the floor was hooked wool. It was all very quaint and just escaped being comfortable.

“Plomondon said no,” Padillo said.

“He said he wasn’t good enough anymore. Not good enough for Gitner anyway. He also said that he hopes you are.”

“What are you puffing about? Doesn’t the elevator work?”

“You can put the gun away,” I said.

Padillo looked down at his right hand which was holding an automatic, a foreign make that I didn’t recognize. He stuck it in his waistband, a little to the left of his navel. It had always seemed like an uncomfortable spot to me, but he liked it and I had seen it jump into his hand from there in less than four-tenths of a second, so I no longer felt qualified to comment on its inconvenience.

“I’m puffing, if you want to call it that, because I ran into a couple of guys down the street who wanted to beat up on me.”

“Was it impulse or did they know you?”

“They knew who I was. They picked me up in Washington at the airport. I thought I’d lost them, but they’re either smarter than I thought or I’m not as clever as well-meaning friends have led me to believe.”

“Probably the latter,” Padillo said. “If you were even half smart, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be holding down your regular spot at the far end of the bar.”

“Now that you’ve brought it up—”

“Scotch or bourbon?”

“Scotch.”

Padillo disappeared into the kitchen that was just off the living room. I looked around some more. There were two closed doors and an open one that led to the bath. I assumed that the flat had two bedrooms. Padillo came back with the drinks and handed me one.

“Where’s the king and the royal adviser?” I said.

He nodded toward one of the closed doors. “In there. It’s got a one-inch iron bar across the door plus three other kinds of locks.”

“Who lives here?”

“A forty-year-old spinster who’s determined to maintain her virginity,” Padillo said. “She’s in Europe for a month or two. Wanda arranged for the place. I think the spinster is a distant cousin or something.”

“Well, now that I’m here, what do you want me to do?”

“Go home.”

“I thought you needed a fair hand.”

“I need a pro, not an amateur. Not even a gifted one.”

“Offer me money and I can leave the amateur ranks.”

“Look at you,” he said, shaking his head.

“That’s a little hard to do without a mirror.”

“You’re ten pounds overweight and most of it’s in your gut. You should’ve got glasses three years ago but you’re afraid that they’ll spoil your aquiline profile. You think hard exercise is the five blocks that you walk home each night if the weather’s just right. You’re up to nearly three packs a day, you’ve got a cough that sounds like the second cousin to emphysema, and if the booze hasn’t given you a hobnailed liver, it’s not because you didn’t go out for it. You’re a mess.”

“You forgot to mention my gums,” I said. “I’m having a little trouble with them, too.”

Padillo took a swallow of his drink. “What would you do with Amos Gitner?” he said. “He’s faster than I am and I doubt that he’s ever felt compunction and probably doesn’t even know what the word means. I’m not going to be the one who tells Fredl that it all happened so fast that you couldn’t possibly have suffered.”

“I could sit on him,” I said. “Squash him flat.”

“There’s that.”

“Well, you need somebody and there aren’t many that you can call on anymore, are there?”

He shook his head. “Not many. There never were really and most of them are dead now.”

“Or scared.”

“Not scared,” he said. “Just sensible. That’s something that no one could ever accuse you of.”

“Do I go or stay?” I said. “You call it.”

Padillo’s dark Spanish eyes appraised me for several moments and then he shook his head again, a little sadly, I thought, as if only sentiment prevented him from dispatching the faithful old spaniel now that his teeth were gone. “Well, Christ,” he said, “since you’re already here.”

“You don’t know what this chance means to me.”

“If it presents the opportunity to turn coward, take it.”

“Your advice was always sound, if a little self-righteous.”

“Cheap though,” Padillo said, put his drink down, and turned toward one of the closed doors. “You might as well meet the king.”

“What do I call him, King, your Excellency, or just Peter Paul?”

“Try Mr. Kassim, if ‘you’ doesn’t seem to fit. He’s supposed to be incognito.”

“How does he like being king?”

“If we can keep him alive, he may like it just fine.”

11

THE KING came out first. I didn’t think that he looked much like a king, but that’s another field in which my expertise is limited. He shook hands with me after Padillo introduced him as Mr. Kassim which I thought was a nice egalitarian touch. He said, “I am very pleased to make your acquaintance,” pronouncing each word without accent, other than the kind that you would pick up from an English tutor. He spoke as if he hadn’t used the language in quite a while and was trying it on again with some trepidation, like last summer’s suit.

I was next introduced to Emory Scales, ex-tutor and now grand royal adviser to the Kingdom of Llaquah. He also shook hands with me and I felt that it was for the first and last time, but that’s the way a lot of Englishmen shake hands and I no longer think much about it.

Scales was an elbow man, nearly always at Kassim’s right one, almost nudging it, but not quite as he bent slightly forward, his long, skinny face constantly turning this way and that, depending on who was doing the talking, the king or someone else. Scales moved his lips a little when the king spoke, much like a ventriloquist and his dummy. I decided that he was a royal adviser who took his duties seriously.

They were an incongruous pair. The king himself was short, plump and totally bald at twenty-one. Either that or the monastery where he’d spent the last five years had a thing about shaved heads. His eyes jumped around almost constantly, as if seeking something comfortable and reassuring to look at and seldom finding it in other people’s faces. He smiled a lot, too, but I put that down to nervousness since his teeth were bad and not very rewarding to look at. Now that he was almost rich I thought that he might afford an inexpensive cap job or at least a toothbrush.

Scales, even with his hovering posture, loomed over Kassim. If he had straightened up he would have been as tall as I and a lot slimmer. I judged him to be somewhere near fifty, a little seedy, a little worn, even a little sad. It may have been his first and last chance at the big time and he was afraid that he would muff it. But then I always read too much into things.

After we had shaken hands, Scales turned toward Padillo and said, “I thought that you said a Mr. Plomondon would be joining you.”

“He couldn’t make it so I persuaded Mr. McCorkle to accept the assignment.” There was always that about Padillo—he lied beautifully.

“You are a very big man,” Kassim said to me and let me have another look at his awful teeth.

I didn’t see any reason to apologize for my size, only ten pounds of which could be blamed on self-indulgence, so I contented myself with an answering smile and a nod.

“The bigger they are,” the king said carefully, “the harder they fall.” He beamed when he got it all out and then turned to Scales and said, “Is that not correct, Mr. Scales?”

“It is the correct idiomatic expression, your Majesty, but scarcely appropriate for the occasion.”

Kassim nodded his understanding and turned back to me. “I did not mean to offend, Mr. McCorkle. It is only that I have not spoken English in many years and I am trying to recall it. Have you had much experience in guardingbody?”