Cast a Yellow Shadow (12 page)

“And the FBI's to give you protection against him?”

“His agent—or agents.”

“Why?”

“Because in exchange for the protection, I'll tell them about my other arms deals: the ones that did pan out.”

“So when Van Zandt asks why you can't do the job, you say the FBI is too interested in you.”

“And for proof, all he has to do is look behind me. They'll be there.”

“But we have an alternative proposal.”

“Dymec. And they can only get Dymec through me and they'll have to guarantee Fredl's safety.”

“Some guarantee.”

“I can't think of anything better. We'll demand that you have to talk to Fredl every night between tomorrow and Tuesday. They'll have to allow that or the deal's off.”

“We don't have much of a bargaining position.”

“No, we don't.”

“If the FBI's too close, they're going to tie us in with the assassination attempt. I don't want them around.”

“I think we can have them around just long enough to convince the Africans that they're there. That's all we need.”

“You're going for the seventy-five thousand dollars?”

“Yes. We'll need it for the trio.”

“How do the other two fit in—Price and Shadid?”

“One of them will work with Dymec; the other will work with us when we go after Fredl.”

“When we find out where she is.”

“We'll find out,” Padillo said.

I nodded. “We'd better.”

We agreed to meet at ten the next morning and Padillo said he'd like to stay around and watch the place operate. I walked out the front door and turned right. It was almost eleven o'clock. I turned left on Connecticut Avenue and walked up the west side of the street. There weren't too many people abroad and the October weather was cool and dry. The wind blew some litter about the sidewalk. A man in a World War II Eisenhower jacket said he was hungry and I gave him a quarter and wished him luck. He staggered away. I walked on, up Connecticut, towards Dupont Circle. I thought about things I wanted to tell Fredl so that she would laugh and I could listen to her.

But there wasn't any Fredl and there wasn't any laughter and there wasn't anything I could do about it except walk up Connecticut Avenue towards Dupont Circle and listen to the city sounds and the grinding of my teeth. There was no place to go but home; no one to talk to but myself; nothing to do but wait because if I didn't wait, Fredl would exist no more and without her it wasn't much worthwhile. None of it.

I saw them step out of the entrance of the office building. There were three of them. They looked young, about twenty-two or even less. There was some light from a street lamp and I could see their long brown and blonde hair. They wore short zipped-up jackets and tight pants. They had their hands in the pockets of their jackets as they stopped me, one in front, the other two on either side.

“Here's a citizen,” the one in front of me said. He was bigger than the other two.

“He's a citizen, all right, Gilly.”

Gilly seemed to think that was funny. He laughed and I could see his teeth. He didn't brush them often. Not often enough.

“Excuse me,” I said and started around Gilly. He took a hand out of his pocket and placed it against my left shoulder and shoved me back. It wasn't a hard shove.

“You in a hurry?”

“That's right.”

“Go ahead and take him, Gilly, he's about your size.” This came from the one on my left. He had a small tight mouth and thyroid eyes and a phony drawl.

“You're out late,” Gilly said.

“I work late.”

“Where do you work, citizen?”

“That's all, son. Get out of my way.”

“You're going to fight me, friend.”

“I don't want to fight you.”

“You're going to fight me,” Gilly insisted.

I decided to take out the one with the drawl first. He would be the knife carrier. I hit him with my right fist as hard as I could in the stomach. He whoofed and sat down and threw up. I turned to Gilly and the one who was still standing. Gilly knew enough to throw a left and I tried to go under it but it caught me on the shoulder. The smaller came burrowing in and I kicked him in the kneecap and he danced around holding it. I took the switchblade out of my pocket, flicked it open, and moved towards Gilly. He backed off. He backed until he ran against the building and couldn't go any farther. I took hold of him by the jacket and held the knife up so he could see the blade.

“Which eye do you want to lose, son?”

He closed his eyes and shook his head frantically from side to side. “Don't cut me, mister. For God's sake, don't cut me!” Then he started to cry. I didn't blame him. I let him go. He moved down the side of the building, his back to the wall, and then he ran. The other two ran after him. None of it made any sense; none of it had any purpose. It was just Washington on a Friday night. Maybe it was any city on a Friday night.

There was a group of people standing about twenty feet from me. Three men and two women. A couple of cars had stopped to watch the fight. One of the men detached himself from the group and came over to me.

“There were three of them,” he said.

“So there were.”

“You carry a knife all the time?”

“Sure,” I said. “Don't you?”

“By God, it's a good idea. It sure saved your skin, didn't it?”

I looked down at the knife, closed it, and slipped it into a pocket. “I had your moral support,” I said. “That meant a lot.”

I turned and walked to my apartment. I rode the elevator up to the floor where I lived, unlocked the door, took off my coat, fixed a drink, and turned on the television set. I watched Alan Ladd fall through a skylight and get knocked around by William Bendix. It didn't seem to bother him much and I wondered why I was still shaking at two-thirty.

TWELVE

I finally fell asleep around six in the morning and awoke at nine-forty-five. The bed was still too large for one person. I got up and went into the kitchen and turned on a burner to heat some water. It was boiling by the time I was dressed. I stirred a cup of coffee and lighted a cigarette, my first for the day. I got the paper from the hall. I called the saloon and told Padillo I was going to be late and he said not to hurry. I didn't. I had another cup of coffee and read the paper. I didn't want to go anywhere.

A front page story told about Van Zandt arriving in Washington early because his UN appearance had been moved up. The story said he would confer with somebody at the State Department, apparently nobody important; meet with members of his consulate and trade mission, and hold a press conference at four p.m., which would be just after he was through going over the details of his assassination. He seemed to have scheduled a full day.

There was a brief item on page twelve about Evelyn Underbill, fifty-one, who had been struck and killed yesterday by a hit-and-run driver in the 1100 block of Connecticut Avenue. There wasn't much else about Underhill.

I thought about Padillo's plan to have the FBI traipse around after him so that the Africans would think he was too hot and agree to send in Dymec as substitute. Padillo's reputation would help convince the FBI about his Portuguese nemesis, at least for a little while. Whether Van Zandt and his people would buy the package was something else. They were a hard bunch, hard enough to kidnap my wife, hard enough to kill their opposition by running him down in the middle of the afternoon, and hard enough to plan an assassination. I decided that they were hard enough for anything.

I sat there with a cup of cold coffee trying not to think of Fredl, and not doing very well at it. So I got up and rode the elevator down and walked to the saloon. When I arrived, Padillo was saying goodbye on the telephone. “That was Magda,” he said. “She's the last to call. We're to meet them at the Seventh Street address at eleven.”

“You'll split the seventeen thousand pounds this morning, right?”

“The fifteen thousand. They get five each.”

“Will Hardman be there?”

“No. He says Mush will let us in. We can lock it up when we leave. We'll keep the key.” He glanced at his watch. “We might as well go.”

“All right.”

“What did you do, go to bed with a bottle last night?”

“No. Why?”

Padillo eyed me critically. “You look like hell. You look even worse than you did yesterday.”

“I got brushed by some drunk-rollers; three of them.”

“Where?”

“About three blocks from here.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I just showed them my genuine pearl-handled switch blade and they went away.”

“Nice neighborhood.”

“One of the best,” I said. “Wait till you see where we're going this morning.”

If Washington has a skid row, the area between Seventh and Ninth is probably it. It runs as far north as N Street; as far south as H. The Carnegie Public Library, located in the middle of a couple of city blocks between Seventh and Ninth, serves as a kind of headquarters for the down-and-out, the drunks, and those who somehow have gone past caring. They can sit in the sun on the curved benches that Andrew Carnegie built in 1899 and read a sign that says the library is intended to be a “University for the People.” Most of them look as if they would like a drink.

The library sits in a pleasant enough park with wooden benches and grass and trees and a couple of squirrels. There's a public toilet. In winter one can always go in the library and get warm while nodding over a magazine or newspaper. Across the street from the library on the north side is a deserted seven-story building that once housed a labor union's Washington headquarters until it moved downtown, closer to the White House. There's a church on the west side, a string of bars and secondhand stores on the south, and some liquor stores on the east.

The area is to be included in the city's urban renewal plans someday. In the meantime, the bums sit in the sun and wonder where the next bottle of wine is coming from and read the stone letters above the library entrance which proclaim that the whole thing is “Dedicated to the Diffusion of Knowledge.”

Hardman had his sometime collection office around the corner a block or so from the library on Seventh. We climbed a flight of stairs and Mush was there, leaning against the door. He and Padillo said something in Arabic to each other. Then Mush opened the door and handed me the key. “Hard says keep it long as you need it.”

“Thanks.”

“Need anything, he say, just holler. You got his car telephone number.”

“I've got it,” I said.

“He'll be cruisin today.”

“Tell him we'll see him later.”

Mush nodded and went down the stairs two at a time. We went into the one-room office. The window that faced Seventh looked as if it hadn't been opened or washed since Roosevelt was sworn in for his second term. There was a yellow oak desk with a telephone on it and a blotter that had accumulated a thick coating of dust. There were six chairs, the metal kind that fold and can be stacked against the wall. There was no name on the pebble-glass door; no carpet on the pine floor. It was an office that would be rented to somebody who sold penny stocks, or who promoted Lonely Hearts' clubs, or who founded organizations to hate someone or abolish something. It was an office that seemed to have witnessed scores of failures and half-a-hundred shattered dreams. It was an end-of-the-line office, and Hardman sometimes used it as a numbers counting house and sometimes lent it to friends who wanted a place to split up forty-two thousand dollars among three thieves.

Philip Price arrived first. He said hello and looked around the office, dusted off a chair, and sat down. “Am I early?” he asked.

“You're on time,” Padillo said.

“Good.”

We waited five minutes and Dymec arrived. He sat down without bothering to dust off anything. I don't think he noticed the office.

Magda Shadid arrived three minutes or so after Dymec. She wore a loose, white wool coat and brown alligator shoes with wicked heels.

“It's so dirty,” she said. Padillo gave her a handkerchief.

“Clean off a chair,” he said.

“I'll get my coat just filthy.”

“Is this all?” Price asked.

“This is all,” Padillo said.

“Where's the nigger?”

“He's busy.”

“On our job?”

“On something else.”

“Today we get money, right?” Dymec said.

“Today you get money,” Padillo said. “First you get some information. Can you wait?”

“Looks as if we'll have to,” Price said.

“McCorkle and I are meeting with Van Zandt and his people, whoever they are, this afternoon.”

“I saw in the paper that he flew in early,” Price said.

“Why does he want to meet you?” Magda said. “You're going to kill him, or you're supposed to.”

“We didn't ask,” I said. “We're not in much of an asking position. If he wants to see us, we want to see him. All we've had up until now are a couple of phone calls and a note.”

“We see him at three o'clock this afternoon,” Padillo said. “I'm going to name Dymec as my substitute then.”

“What reason will you give?” Dymec said.

“Would I normally tell you?”

Dymec thought a moment. “No. You wouldn't. You'd only mention money to me.”

“Then you don't need to know my reason.”

“Agreed.”

“They'll probably want to check on you. Can they?”

“I have a certain reputation, not under the name Dymec, of course, but—”

“I'll mention another name.”

He nodded.

“They'll probably want to meet you, possibly tonight, possibly tomorrow. Keep yourself available.”

“Of course.”