Payback (14 page)

Leo said nothing.

“Eyewitnesses, Leo.”

Leo said nothing. He pulled at his Scotch. Then he said slowly, “What's the army have to say?”

“That P.R. Burdick had his gullet slit open while he's sitting on the can.”

“By Mitchell?” Leo said.

“Hey—if they'd pinned it on Mitchell,” Cy said, “he'd be in Leavenworth, Leo. You don't kill sergeants in the outhouse, Leo. It isn't patriotic.”

“It isn't even smart,” Leo said.

“Yeah, but you're thinking premeditated, right? What the rest of us're thinking is a hothead junkie. Little fighter from the streets.”

“And to think he almost married our Ginger,” Margaret said. “You know I was all for it? Or I wasn't against it. Or at least I didn't have any cataleptic fit. Jeremy got her letter from New York, he almost choked on his biscuit. And I was the one who said, Give the boy a chance. You'll meet him in September. But of course he never did. Mitchell got drafted and Ginger, little scamp, went and—”

“Maggie—” Cy looked at her. “You want to get senile, you'll wait a couple minutes. Okay? We got some serious business to discuss.”

Leo was over at the bar again, pouring. “Jesus. I really hate this,” he said. He looked up at Burt now; Burt slumped over and communing with his Scotch. “So what do you intend to do about it?”

“Who—me?” Burt said. “I assume it's my civic—not to mention my corporate and patriotic duty … to get up and get a drink.” He went over to the bar, not steady as he went.

“What we'll do,” Carol said, “or the first thing we'll do, is we'll show this to Mitchell. And then, who knows? Maybe that's the end of it. Maybe that's all. Maybe like the classical good Old Soldier he will simply fade away.”

Leo shook his head. “I don't believe this, you know? I mean, you know what you're doing? You're cutting off your entire head to spite your nose. I mean, Jesus, if he fades away
now
,” Leo said, “you can also, right now, kiss your company good-bye.”

“You're wrong,” Cy said. “We're not assholes, Leo. Our intention is to wait. But the question is, if Mitchell doesn't ‘freeze and bug out,' just to borrow an expression, how do we handle it?”

“And that,” Carol said, “is what we're leaving up to you.”

Leo at the window, looking over at the garden said, “No. No way.”

“Come again?” Cy said. “Didn't catch that.”

“I said I'm sorry.” Leo turned. “What you've got is allegations. You want me to show your allegations to Mitchell, then I'll do that for you, Cy. I'm assuming if he's guilty that he will, as you're figuring, simply fade away, and I think it's pretty lousy.” He paced to the sofa. “Or maybe it's not. I don't know. I don't know. But I won't be part of some underhanded smear or some military trial or whatever's on your mind. I'm sorry, but I can't.”

There was silence for a moment.

“Siddown,” Burt said. “You're gonna need a little seat.”

Leo glanced over. Cy, shuffling papers and grinning like a cat. Leo felt a sudden flicker of canary.

“This Schneider,” Cy said. “He's a real shifty dick. See, while he was up, we said, take a look at Leo. Just look at how it goes. How it goes is, Leo, there's a friendly little banker down in Freeport, Grand Bahamas—you want me to continue? There's a secret little bank account that Uncle never taxed. Am I right about it, Leo? Hey listen. No sweat. They got federal prisons for tax evaders—shit—like Miami condominiums. Really. Okay?”

Leo looked at Margaret who was looking at the wall.

MACK

13

Mitchell called Marian Cleaver from a phone booth at Kennedy Airport at 8
AM.
He'd had two hours' sleep.

She sounded as though she'd had maybe the same. She answered fuzzily.

Mitchell took a breath. He said, “Listen, Marian, I'm sorry I woke you, but a friend of mine called me last week in L.A. and he left me this number. I've been trying to reach him.”

“Oh,” she said. “Mack?”

And Mitchell had to suddenly lean against the wall. For a moment he was blank.

“Hello?” she said.

“Yeah. I'm sorry. Is he there?”

“In spirit,” she said. “In body, he is gone.—Who is this?”

“You know when he'll be back?” Mitchell said.

“Hey look, I got home last night, he was gone. I mean gone. As in bag-and-baggage kind of gone. Who is this?”

“I'm an old buddy,” Mitchell said. “From the army. He left me a message he's in trouble and I'm calling from a phone booth at Kennedy.”

“Oh.” There was a calculating pause. Then: “Maybe you better come over here,” she said. “Except not until ten.” She gave him the address.

***

He got out of the cab at 42nd and Eighth, killed some time having coffee, going over what he knew.

Mack was dead. He'd been there and he'd seen it. Of every kind of sonofabitch that he knew himself certainly to be, he was not the kind of bastard who'd have left him in the grass. Not if he was living.

Except he was living.

That, or this was some kind of psy war exercise that didn't stand a chance; so he'd have to start figuring that Mack had been alive. It was difficult to think. He could think of those incidents in supermarket tabloids or Leonard Nimoy in search of the gaudy:
MAN RESURRECTED AFTER TWO DAYS IN MORGUE
. Only maybe it had happened. Some medical conundrum, some comalike shock. Only maybe it was possible they'd both been in shock. If he tried to think back about his own state of mind, he could only imagine he was desperate, crazed, in emotional fragments. Not Quite Himself.

He could turn it around again and think about Mack. He could think about Mack being so fucking angry he'd be ready for a war. And if not, then certainly for war reparations: half a million dollars or I'll blow you through the roof.

After that, it got hazy. He'd known the man—what? Maybe forty-eight hours. And a few hundred years ago. Any kind of character judgment he could make would be strictly unfounded.

He would just have to wait.

9:15.

Forty-five minutes.

He walked around the icy pornographic streets. Sky the color of dirty sidewalk, sidewalk the color of dirty snow. He checked the marquees:
S-M LIKE IT HOT, KNIGHTFEVER, RAINMAKER, VICE AND CONSENT
. Isometric exercises in the First Amendment, while the actual pornography walked around the streets: the hooked, the homeless, the kids with no future, the men with no past, the wretched refuse and nobody noticed it and nobody cared. Liberty, lifting her reconstructed lamp, had nothing to give to this island but her back.

And all of it was somehow connected, he could think. The old American Dream and the new American Nightmare. Endless possibility coming to an end, leaving only the swift and the shifty to survive, and the national purpose getting suddenly bent. An entire country deprived of its REM's, going quickly psychopathic.

Poison in the mind and then poison in the well.

***

A quarter of ten and he was heading toward the haven of Eleventh Avenue—Manhattan Plaza, a subsidized project for the struggling artists and actors of New York, a residential tower on the edge of the edge. A uniformed guard at a high and fortresslike desk in the lobby. Television monitors. A turnstile gate.

“Can I help you?” said the guard. A gigantic black man who looked like he was equally entitled to hurt you if it happened to be so. Mitchell told him, Marian Cleaver expects me. The guard said, you want to give your name now or what?

Mitchell said, “You just want to tell her Mack's friend? She's expecting me.”

“I gotta have a name,” the guard said. “You gotta write it in the book.” He pointed at a registry ledger on the desk. Mitchell took the pen and then wrote:

MAX FRIEND

The guard turned the book around and looked at it. “You putting me on, Mr. Friend?”

“You, Mr. Guard?”

The guard shrugged his shoulders but he picked up the house phone, dialed, spoke into it, and nodded. “Go ahead.”

***

The girl in the doorway had a look that said silently, “Yeah, and what else?” and she stood around silently and said it for a while. Then she said less of it and let him through the door.

Mitchell said, “Thanks.”

The girl said nothing and leaned against the wall. She had one of those tough-pretty Irish faces, a face with a solid bedrock of bone, no makeup at the moment, a navy blue sweater and a soft pair of jeans. She was tall and he guessed automatically, a dancer. An auburn ponytail that swung so neatly you could choreograph it. It hung in a Lady Godiva kind of pattern in the middle of a breast.

He said, “Thanks for seeing me.”

The girl said nothing, just leaned against the wall and then watched him as he started unbuttoning his coat. Mitchell said nothing, not sure of what to say or of the reason for the scrutiny. Whether she was checking him for general intentions, or checking him for lice, or for something more advanced. He shrugged and said neutrally, “It's freezing out there.” The girl said, “I'll put on some coffee if you want,” and then stayed against the wall. She said, “You can throw the thing anywhere you want.”

“My coat?”

“Your name.”

“Oh,” he said. “Julian. It's Julian Sorel.”

She lifted up her shoulders. “If you say so,” she said.

“What's the matter,” Mitchell asked her, “I don't look Julian?”

The girl said nothing. Then she said, “Yeah. You look like a guy that if the guy was named Julian then he'd call himself Jack.”

“I've matured,” Mitchell said. “I was Jack for a while, then I was Big Julie, and then I decided on the dignity of Julian.”

The girl said, “Jesus.” Then she said, “Christ. You look like him, now you even sound like him.”

“Meaning like Mack,” Mitchell said.

“That's the subject of discussion.” Still leaning on the wall. “Okay, so you told me he's in trouble now—right?”

Mitchell said, “Possibly.”

“Possibly,” she said. “Only possibly, huh? You get a telephone message and you're jumping on a plane, he's only possibly in trouble.”

“That's right,” Mitchell said.

“That's beautiful,” she nodded. “Tell me—you guys get together, work it out, or are you born with this bullshit?” She bolted from the wall and then headed for the kitchen. “Doctor looks down at the delivery table. There's a penis, he observes, there're tiny little balls, but the absolute test, he's gonna learn if it's a boy, he's gotta hit you with a question. Baby doesn't answer him, he says, It's a boy!”

She was filling up a kettle and turning on the water in a hard full force.

“Hey Julian,” she said. “If this is how it goes, you can pick up your coffee in a bag, you can leave.”

He went into the living room and lit a cigarette. He listened as the kettle went banging to the stove. He could, as they put it, “relate to” her anger. A total stranger playing games before coffee on a cold winter's morning. On the other hand there wasn't very much he could say and even less he could offer. He needed information; if he put the wrong foot in his mouth, he'd get zip.

“John Wayne,” she said, “corrupted an entire generation. All quiet where the men are.
Bull
shit” she said.
Plunk-plunk;
she was putting down some cups on the counter.

He thought about Joanna and looked around the room: a small blue sofa and a club chair that matched. A theatrical poster from
A Chorus Line
hanging in the center of a wall, surrounded by a staggering of butcher-block shelves. An Indian rug. A coffee table holding a yesterday's edition of the afternoon
Post
with its screamer of a headline: ½
MIL REWARD
!! On top of the paper was a butt-filled ashtray and a phone pulled over from a stand against the wall.

A refrigerator opened and slammed in the kitchen.

Mitchell walked over and cruised around the shelves—a little bit of everything you needed to survive: a few records, a few books, a few Japanese components, a check from the VA …
Mitchell Catlin c/o Marian Cleaver
.

“So how do you want your coffee?” she was saying.

“In a cup,” Mitchell said.

A collection of photographs in curlicue frames. A man and a woman: possibly a sister with a cloddy-looking mate. A man and a woman: He took it to the window. Marian looked about five years younger and Mack about twenty years older than he'd been but it was definitely Mack. Hands in his pockets and squinting into sun.

He was finding it increasingly difficult to breathe.

Marian, behind him, said, “You want to call a truce?”

He turned and she handed him some hot black coffee in a cheerful-looking mug. Taking it, he said, “I'm not dancing with you, Marian. I didn't talk to him, I got a message. And, yeah, I got a plane because I owe him something.”

“Oh.” She looked at him directly, her eyes very blue, a little creased around the edges. The eyes of a reformed innocent, he thought.

He settled on the couch and said, “I need some information.”

She sat in the lotus position on the chair and regarded him awhile. “Okay,” she said, “Julian. I agree that he's in trouble. I'd imagine with the law.”

“Go on.”

“I don't know. He got out about … what? six weeks ago.”

“Out?”

“Out of Attica,” she said. “The correctional facility?” Bitter; very dry.

“Go on,” he said.

“Yeah, well that's the point about it, huh? You'd say to him, go on, he'd just look at you: ‘To what?' Not angry or anything. Cool. Flat. To what? Then he'd laugh. Then he'd look at the want ads. ‘Part-time experienced
Wang
operations.—You like that?' he'd say. ‘They got immediate openings.' Then he'd take a walk or he'd go to sleep … I don't know. He was down but I didn't think … well … it doesn't matter. Point is, he gets this visitor. This old buddy cellmate or something? He's out all night, he comes home, disappears.”