Payback (13 page)

“Definite?” she said.

“Passionate. Adamant. Determined.” He fiddled with the microwave oven and tossed in the bagels. “What else's in the larder?”

“A one-person pizza and a half a dozen eggs.”

“That's it?”

“You had some soggy saltines and I ate them.”

“Poor little darling.”

“What happened with the cops?”

“I mean that. I'm sorry.” He handed her the eggs and went ferreting for butter. “Come to think of it,” he said, “you could've eaten the pizza.”

“Come to think of it,” she said, “I could've eaten the couch.”

He laughed out loud and then, turning, he looked at her with absolute pleasure. And the absolute pleasure gave him absolute pain. A feeling of loss, complete, retroactive. “What happened with the cops”—he was reaching for a pan—“is I'm out of the fire.” He put it on the stove. “I'm just back in the usual frying pan again. I'd scramble these for you but there isn't any milk.”

“Would you like me to handle it?”

“No,” Mitchell said. “If there's one thing I hate it's a fuzzy pink egg. You are moulting, Joanna.” He buttered the pan. “If you want to have coffee, it'll have to be instant, I'm about to catch a plane.”

She angled her head at him and folded her arms. “By the way,” she said flatly.

He cracked a few eggs. “Would you want to come with me?”

“Where?”

“I don't know. Anywhere.”

“Whither thou goest?” she said.

He nodded. “Along those lines, I'm afraid.”

What he heard for a while was the filling of a kettle.

“Never mind,” he said quickly. “It was just an idea.” But he said it too late.

Joanna, from the sink, said, “We're heading for a pass. I'm not too certain I can handle this, Mitch. I think I could handle almost anything you did, but I just don't think I could handle not knowing. Not asking.”

He nodded. “I know.” Then he laughed. “We ain't farm kids, are we, Joanna. Too bad. You want your dinner to be sunny side up?”

“You think I'm just a fair-weather buddy to an egg?” She was opening the oven. “How about you? What do you want, Mitch?”

“I don't want it to be over.”

“Seriously.”

“Now you're getting serious,” he said.

“I want you to seriously tell me what you want.”

He looked at her; he wanted to take her in his arms. He got out the spatula and flipped out the eggs. “Okay,” he said. “Listen. I'll tell you what I want. What I want is, I want to be Mitchell Catlin. I want to come back from my year in Vietnam, I want to marry this definite peculiar little girl who is just about to burn herself neatly with a bagel. Use a fork there, Dumbo. Then I want to ski. I want to win the Olympics and I'm not very certain I could settle for the Bronze. Then I want to ski at all the tournaments in Europe. I want you to be with me. I want you to get pregnant the first time in Aix and the second time in Paris. Then I want to open up a thirty-room lodge. I mean, back in Colorado. A nice kind of simple kind of family establishment. Maybe a combo doing jazz in the bar. I want to ski-instruct kids. That's what I want, Joanna. Okay? And an Airedale. I almost forgot about the Airedale. I always had a thing about a big goofy dog. Okay? How's it sound?”

Joanna said nothing. She looked at him closely for a very long time. “Then why the hell didn't you do that?” she said. “I mean some of it, part of it. You could've done part.”

“Because,” he said patiently, “I'm not Mitchell Catlin.”

“Oh.” She looked over at the warm plate of eggs. “I keep on forgetting.”

Turning her gently, he looked her in the eyes and said levelly, “Don't.”

12

Leo's Mercedes was purring as it glided through the gate to Bel Air. Caspar, his chauffeur, started whistling idly as they moved through the gilded silence of the streets. “I Got Plenty A Nothin'” he whistled. The houses were set so far from the roads, down private entries with winding little drives, that at night you saw nothing. The only other car they passed was a Bel Air security patrol.

Leo said, “You want to hang a right at that tree.”

Caspar looked up at him darkly in the mirror. Caspar said, “Leo, you an old woman lately. You know how you gettin'? You gettin' to be all kinda featherhead fuss. I live another day, you gonna tell me how to drive?”

Leo shook his head and then leaned against leather. “How sharper than a servant's tooth,” he said flatly, taking minor satisfaction that Caspar, though he might know his way around the road, wouldn't know about the reference to the woes of King Lear.

But then, if he wanted to be absolutely honest, he'd have to face up to it that Caspar had been right. Leo had been acting like an old woman lately. Caviling. Fussing. Jockeying for tiny little areas of power. Face it: potence. Leo Blackburn, age sixty-five, still looking maybe fifty-seven in the dusk, tennis player, gym-hound, time catching up with him, slipping through his fingers, slipping through
her
fingers. Panic. Fear. Loathing. Anxiety. He thought about his wife who'd done battle with sixty like some kind of pixilated Lady Macbeth, stabbing it with every surgical instrument known to man. He thought he could get his eyes done again but he couldn't get his cock done. He thought, in the middle of the night, about death. He thought about fates that were nastier than death. He thought about the musty old codgers in the park, the ones with the walkers and the ones that got wheeled and the ones with the smoldering Hispanic nurses who looked at their charges with malevolent contempt, the overclass demoted to geriatric diapers and
now
we're gonna see who's boss, Mr. Boss. He thought about money. More and more now, he thought about money. Money to buy his way out of the country, to go to a country that was older in itself and more tolerant of age, where a person might conceivably arrange to stay a person on the annual income from, let's say, a half a million dollars in cash. Or at least he could try. It wasn't living well that was the best revenge, it was dying well.

They turned at the tree; a gatekeeper stopped them, peering through the window and waiting for the password.

Leo said, “Leo Blackburn, okay?”

The guard looked him over—carefully; hard—and Leo had to wonder if he feared Armageddon would be coming in the form of a silver Mercedes. But then, on the other hand, maybe it would.

“Mrs. Tate is expecting you,” the guard said at last.

To do what? Leo wondered as they glided down the road. He listened to the sound of the crickets that were sexily chirring in the dark.

***

They were all in the drawing room—one of those rooms out of
Town & Country
—countrified chintzes and leaded windows and Tiffany lamps. Margaret, the dowager, commanding the sofa with a brown cigarette, and everybody else kind of crowded into chairs around a crackling fire. Burt looking drunk, Carol looking something like the Bel Air Bombshell, and Cy looking crafty through the smoke of his cigar. Perfect, Leo thought. And Margaret in pants—ratty old flannels and a baggy old shirt; thin and sharp-eyed; a liberated born-again Katy Hepburn, assuring him with, “Well, you haven't missed much tonight. What we've had so far is the troubadours and mimes but you're in time for the hanging.”

Leo said, “Good,” and then wondered what he meant.

Burt said, “Mother's being dangerously wry. Mother's in her Mary Mary mood tonight.” Burt gone to seed—his hair getting thinner and his speech getting thicker. Burt said, “We all agreed on this, Mother.”

“And I didn't say I
dis
agreed with you, did I? It's simply that I'm calling this spade what it is now, Birdy. It's a lynching party. Oh for God's sake, Leo, do stop looking so completely unconcerned. Your own little piggie will live to go wee-wee all the way home so just tell it to relax. Get a whisky if you want it but kindly take a seat.”

Leo went to the bar and poured himself a good stiff Cutty on the rocks. “Would you like something, Margaret?”

“Yes, I'd like to get this over with, please. The way I understand it, over dinner with Cy, you allowed him to believe that your gun was for hire. Was that reported correctly?”

Turning, Leo shrugged. “Margaret, what I said was, I'd keep an open mind.”

“And a tight-shut mouth—am I right?” Cy said. “Because we're playing for absolute keeps here, Leo. We want to see Mitchell get blasted out of town.”

“Like I said to you before, Cy. You need the ammunition.”

“And we've got it, okay?”

“Things've changed,” Leo said. “I mean in case you haven't noticed. Like a funny thing happened on the way to nirvana.” Leo settled in a wing chair, opposite the wing chair where Carol sat flashing her formidable legs. “You want to take a look at the television, Cy? Right now. Go on. He's a star,” Leo said. “He is right now beaming into everybody's bedroom. He's getting in their pants. He looks like Redford in
The Candidate
, Cy. You want to have a Nixon-Kennedy debate?”

Cy looked over now, grinning like a clown. “You like that?” he said. “Jesus—he thinks he's insulting me, Ma.
Ken
nedy, Leo—Jack, with his cute little Jackie and his jack—was the much bigger crook. And we know that—don't we.”

“Now,” Leo said.

“And
now
we know Mitchell's even crookeder'n craps.”

Leo looked up. “Does that mean something?”

“Yeah. Oh yeah. Fuckin A,” Cy said. “You remember that other thing I said to you at dinner? That I'm getting a private detective on his case?”

“
You?
” Carol said, leaning forward in her seat. “Oh seriously, Cy. I want to hear that again.”

“You want to hear it, Griselda, I can shove it up your ear. You don't like the billing, call your agent,” Cy said. “
We
had the notion but
I'm
the one't said we get Schneider—am I right?” He looked up at Leo. “Ever heard of him?”

“He works out of Wall Street,” Leo said.

“See?” Cy was nodding. “I told you Leo'd know. He's the best in the business, am I right, Leo? huh? Guy works for all the big corporate raiders. Guy works for T. Boone Pickens, am I right?”

“Oh for God's sakes,” Carol said, “get on with it, Cy.”

“Why?” Cy said. “You in a hurry or something? You want to get home to your Patty Nail kit?”

“
Children!
” Margaret said.

“All right,” Cy conceded. He fingered his cigar. “Now I just want to handle this strictly for the record. What Leo there told me, he told me he'd listen to whatever the report and he'd keep it confidential. He'd carry no tales.”

“And I haven't.” Leo took a big pull of his drink.

“That's good,” Burt said. “Because we want you on the team.”

“So I tell you up front what we're doing here, Leo. We're trusting you, Leo. We're showing you the cards. You want to be with us? Swell,” Cy said. “You don't, up to you. Stockholders' meeting gets over, you'll be out but that's also up to you. Okay? We all clear?”

“Absolutely,” Leo said. He leaned back with his Cutty, looking over at Margaret who was staring at the wall.

Cy picked some papers off the table at his side. “Schneider's report,” he said, grinning. “The poop. I don't know”—he was shrugging—“I don't know where to start it. Should I start at the beginning? Should I go for a little bit of audience tension? Should I grab you by the throat?”

Carol rolled her eyes.

Margaret said, “Start at the beginning now, Cyrus, only don't drag it out.”

“A synopsis,” Cy said. “Fade in: Our hero gets born in Wisconsin, grows up in the St. Jean Baptiste Orphanage. That's French Roman Catholic. Personally, I thought John the Baptist was a Baptist—”

“Speed it up,” Margaret said.

“He's a juvenile delinquent,” Cy said. “Stole cars. Ran away. Rest of the time there, he's getting into fights.”

“With knives,” Carol said.

“With knives,” Cy amended. “Knives which will subsequently figure in the plot. But right for this minute we establish, reel one, he's a vicious little kid.”

“Bad seed,” Margaret said.

“And we've got it on the word of a sister,” Cy said. “Sister Angela-Therese. Okay?” He took a long slow swallow of his smoke and then blew it in a ring. “So now he runs off. Seventeen, okay? So we lose him for a while but he settles in New York. He's gonna be an actor. You like that? Registers at Berghof Studios. Now he meets Ginger. Ginger, you'll remember, was at Barnard at the time—playing the role of the student princess. According to a friend of hers”—Cy checked the paper—“one Marilyn Marie Kranzfield Kline, Mitchell introduced her to, quote, ‘unnatural sexual acts and recreational drugs.'”

“Who?” Leo said. “Marilyn?”

“Ginger Tate,” Carol said.

“I see.” Leo started to enjoy himself a little. “Did Marilyn get more specific?”

“Okay,” Cy said. “Sixty-nine and marijuana.”

“Oh Jesus. I'm not gonna comment,” Leo said. “No. I take it back. I'm gonna comment,” Leo said. “I want to see the way it happens. Indulge me, okay? You'll be standing at the stockholders' meeting in August, in the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel—and then, what? You'll say, what? You'll say, Ladies and gentlemen, I have it in my hand, a signed deposition that he had it in his
mouth
? Come on, Cy. Jesus, if this is what you've got, I want to—”

“Hey. Relax. Be patient, okay? Okay? That was only the production notes anyway. However, the rest of this stuff is in the script. Okay? Are you ready? So now he's in the army. In the middle of the war. We have six depositions that our hero used smack, that he mainlined heroin. Not just once, not just once in a while, but consistently. Here—” Cy flourished some papers. “Six. Signed. Also, we have another
three
depositions—eye
wit
ness depositions—that Mitchell, who was alias Mack the Knife, did, on the morning of April twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-nine, personally execute infantry First Sergeant P. R. Burdick, who was murdered with a knife.”