Payback (15 page)

“Last night, you mean.”

“No. This was … four, five weeks ago. After he saw the guy. He doesn't talk, he's just gone.”

“You know where?”

“Not at first. A couple of days ago, I got a postcard from Disneyland. You know what it's telling me? ‘Mickey Mouse Is Dead.' He signs it with one of those faces-with-a-smile it's got mouse ears on it. I said to him, ‘Mack, if you ever do that to me again—.' He says, no. This was Saturday. He got back Saturday night. Very tan, very rested. He says to me, no, everything's fine now. Lollipops and roses.” Marian shook her head. “That was two fucking nights ago. You be
lieve
that?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. So do I.” She nodded. “Only boy oh boy am I a sucker. He does that, you know?”

“Did he leave you any message?”

“‘Babe—I'll be back here dead or alive.'”

“Oh.”

“He isn't heavy into sharing things,” she said. “The only time he handed me an out-and-out answer was the first time I met him.”

Mitchell sipped his coffee. “How long ago?” he said.

She looked at him, silent for a moment. “I don't know. What year was the flood?”

“Depends,” Mitchell said. “Mostly, I think there's been a flood every year.”

“Well, then I figure ten floods ago,” she said. “I was just twenty-five. My birthday present to myself that year was to straighten out my life so I joined AA. I go into a meeting on a Sunday, there's a guy. He didn't say anything. He just sat there chain-smoking, looking like he's making it a second at a time. He was thin. He was wearing an old army jacket. He needed a shave and you have to understand this, I thought he was attractive. I went up to him. I was trying to be cute. I said, ‘Hi. My name's Marian. I'm an alcoholic.' He said, ‘Hi. My name's Mack. I'm a fucking mess.'” She had to laugh, a little ruefully. Throwing up her hands, she said, “Love at first sight.—Not that to love him is to know him or anything. I knew him a long time before he talked about … things.”

He looked at her carefully. “What things, Marian?”

“War things, Julian. What he calls the big W.”

Mitchell tried to wait. He looked at the butt-filled ashtray on the table and fiddled with the pen that was resting near the phone. Then he said, “What did he say about it, Marian?”

She looked at him flatly. “Well, Big Julie, not a hell of a lot. He said one little sentence. He said, ‘I was captured.'”

Mitchell made a sound.

“I asked him, how long? He said, ‘Longer than a football stadium, I think.' I found out later that a football stadium is thirty-seven months.”

Mitchell couldn't breathe. He swallowed the dregs of something warm and lousy that was rising in his throat but he'd forgotten how to breathe.

Marian was saying to him, “Hey—you all right?”

He could swallow very hard. He was picturing Mack, lying bloody on a bad little island in the rain. If he pictured it that Mack had been secretly alive, then he'd also have to see it that he'd stolen Mack's rifle. That he'd not only left him, but he'd left him unarmed.

He looked up at Marian who looked at him with something like a genuine concern. He had a feeling if he told her he was just about to vomit, about to spit bucketsful of rancid garbage in the middle of her sofa, that she'd simply react to it by cradling his head.

She said, “I guess you know what it was like in those places.”

“In the south,” Mitchell said. “He was captured in the south.”

She nodded. “I know. Like
The Deer Hunter
, huh? Or like
Rambo
but there wasn't any Rambo around.” She was looking at the floor. “It's a reason, though, isn't it. I mean, if you go around fucking up your life. If you can't stay sober and you can't stay straight, if you wind up doing a dumb armed robbery and wind up in fucking Attica, for Christ sake, for seven whole years, it's a pretty nice history to have in your pocket. Dear Teacher: Please forgive Mack for acting like an animal, they kept him in a cage.”

Mitchell looked up at her.

“I love him,” she said. “I never heard a worse story in my life than that one little sentence, but I want him to go on. I think he could do something. I think he could be something. I think he's got a lot of spirit in him, Julian. I mean a lot of soul. Or maybe …” She shrugged. “Maybe I just love him, that's all.”

Mitchell looked away. He was looking at a face so loaded with love that he had to look away from it or take on its pain and he was holding more baggage than he figured he could lift.

“Oh fuck him,” she said. “Do you want some more coffee?”

He told her he did and she clattered around again, banging through the kitchen while he sat there silently and wondered what to think. He could think about Mack doing seven in Attica and three in Vietnam. He could picture him ready to attack with a pistol or a tire iron maybe or possibly a knife. But a poison and elaborate Viennese blackmail? He figured, it's a reach.

Or possibly not. Because the actual concrete evidence in front of him—exactly in front of him—could say something else:

Mack had been sitting on the sofa last night. He'd looked at the paper; he'd chain-smoked cigarettes; he'd made a few phone calls, and then he'd run out.

“
Babe
—
I'll be back here dead or alive.
”

Mitchell lit a cigarette and looked at the paper with its ½
MIL REWARD!!
An enticing distraction. He moved the telephone and set it on the floor but the only thing its absence revealed was a box that said Story, page 3.

And a couple of numbers that were scribbled with a pen: 8008924141 621, with the 621 in a circle.

He leaned in the doorway of the kitchen for a second and told her he was down to his last cigarettes. He said, We've got a lot more talking we should do, which means I've got a lot more smoking I should do, so I'll be back in a minute.

She told him he'd better take his overcoat with him. He said he'd be fine. As he left, she said, “Asshole, you're gonna catch a cold.”

In a booth on the corner, he got out the numbers that he'd copied from the
Post
; he punched out a 1, and then an 800 code and then the next seven digits.

The phone rang twice. A machine came on and said, Thank you for calling TWA. All reservation clerks are busy at the moment. Please hold on.

Mitchell held on. He held through
Perdido, Hernando's Hideaway, Pennies from Heaven
, and
Strangers in the Night
.

“Yes?” a voice said.

Mitchell said, “You've got a flight six-twenty-one?”

“Yes,” the voice said.

“Where's it go to?”

“Vienna.”

14

Mitchell checked into the Mayfair Regent, Park and 65th. The desk clerk put a little English on his eyeballs and asked about the luggage. Mitchell said his luggage would arrive within the hour. He'd traveled pretty light; he'd come to New York with an electric razor and ten thousand dollars.

He got to a room that was a hundred-and-ninety-seven dollars' worth of room and was nothing very special. He telephoned Janet and found her, at 9:02, at her desk.

Mitchell said, “I need you to do me a gigantic personal favor.”

Janet said, “The last time a man asked me to do him a gigantic personal favor, it turned out the favor was to give him a divorce.”

Mitchell said, “Janet?”

“What?”

“No kidding, okay? What I need you to do now is go to my apartment and look for my passport. I think where I left it is the table in the hall. Then you want to look for the fastest most intelligent messenger on earth and send it to me.”

“Send it? Where are you?” Janet said.

Mitchell told her where he was; he didn't say where he was going. He discussed the disposition of a couple of matters he expected to arise and repeated that he had to have his passport in time to make a nine o'clock plane.

Janet said she'd hustle an Elite Courier, the fleetest of the fleet. “They actually send little envoys with briefcases wired to their ankles. And considering it costs about fifty million dollars, is there anything else he can bring you while he's up?”

Mitchell said a little clean underwear would do, if she could stick it in a duffle bag.

“For how many days?”

“Maybe three,” Mitchell said. “And a robe. I've got a dark brown terry-cloth robe.”

“And I'd love to sit and talk about your lingerie,” she said, “except I'd better get going.”

“I love you,” Mitchell said. “Don't ever divorce me.”

The room service waiter brought a tunafish sandwich and a large glass of milk, both of which were hidden under large silver domes. The waiter had set up the table by the window. Mitchell brought the tunafish sandwich to the bed, along with the management's freebie contribution, a copy of the
Times
.

The story, Day Two, was at the top of page one:

FBI GIVES TOP PRIORITY

TO NATURALITE DEATHS

Company Offers a Record Reward

The New York
Times
, which had covered the conference on Monday afternoon (Jesus Christ—only yesterday, he thought) described him as “direct … candid … articulate” and “showing the strains.”

How about that? If you think I was showing them
yes
terday, he thought …

He drank a little milk and it came to him he wasn't really feeling any strain; he was tensed, revved up, alert—the way he'd felt before a downhill race. He could see himself flexing and tramping in the snow, punching his fist against the leather of his glove, blowing his breath into Colorado air. His mind would be a blank; he'd anticipate nothing, neither victory nor loss. He'd think about nothing; he'd wait, and then try.

“
Number one-forty-seven. Mitchell Catlin, The Colorado Kid.
” BANG! “
Seventeen but he's going like sixty. Ladies and gentlemen, look at him go!
”

Down and down and down he goes. And where he stops …

In 1970, Mitchell'd made a phone call to the army's National Records Center, St. Louis, Missouri. He used Mack's military serial number that he'd read off the dogtags and pinned down a couple of military facts: that Catlin was officially missing in action, and that Mack had been born in Haeger, Wisconsin, on September 22, 1948.

From there it was easy. For a four-dollar payment, Haeger was happy to provide him with a photostatic copy of his birth, so he later got a passport as Robert R. Mitchell.

If you'd asked him this morning, he'd have said, flip a coin. Either Mack had done a similar process in reverse and would now have a passport as Mitchell Catlin, or he'd done it more directly and would travel as himself.

Mitchell wasn't sure. On the other hand, he figured it was something he should know. From the phone booth, earlier, on Marian's corner, talking to the airline and booking his ticket to Vienna on the spot, he decided he was one or two questions from the truth. He started with this one, an “Oh, by the way …” His secretary'd booked him on the flight for last night and he couldn't remember if he'd told her to cancel. “So you want to look it up?”

He read the graffiti on the innards of the phonebooth and listened to the clicks and clacks of the computer.

The girl said, “No sir, it seems she didn't cancel.” The voice a little wounded. “We'd also made a booking for the Wien Hotel, or at least we sent a telex.”

Mitchell said, “Oh,” and then grinned against the air. He felt like a guy who'd put a couple of pennies in a gumball machine and got a waterfall of diamonds: The Wien Hotel.

He flattened his voice. “And did she book me a return?”

“No sir. It's basically an open-end ticket. Just the way you're doing it now, sir,” she said.

Mitchell, in a bedroom with a tunafish sandwich, could think about the various levels of his luck, like the levels of irony in blockbuster fiction, but he couldn't keep it straight. The good and the bad luck were petrified together in the same ball of wax.

As he and Mack were in the same ball of wax. All balled up. Or maybe they were something like colliding meteors, two foreign bodies slammed together so hard they'd absorbed each other's atoms and changed each other's course.

Everything connected to a moment in the rain—the egg that gave birth to unfathomable chickens, who kept laying eggs. Cause and Effect. Things breeding Things.

Jeremy, he thought, had been one of those things.

Jeremy Tate, who'd come weeping to the VA ward in San Francisco; Jeremy in search of that now (and retrospectively) legitimate hero whom his daughter might have married if his daughter had survived. Ginger'd crapped out. Ginger, at the wheel of a shiny Lamborghini that was Daddy's little present, had rammed it at a wall. A wall on which Jeremy had now seen the writing. His sister had warned him: he was trying to come between Romeo and Juliet; acting like a pigheaded bigot, Margaret said, but Jeremy'd been adamant. Just as he'd been adamant in sending off his son Alexander to the wars “because no son of mine will take the fruits of this country if he doesn't take the pits.” Alex took the pits and got splattered over acreage of napalmed countryside where nothing, neither fruits nor vegetables, would grow in any calculable future. Jeremy had doubly seen the errors of his ways. He'd come to seek Mitchell as he'd come to seek a partial absolution for his sins. Chastened and humbled, he'd tracked Mitchell down. And Mitchell, afloat, with no future, no past, alone in that envelopment of metal and woe where they'd told him he'd never get around without a couple of crutches and a brace, had squinted at the ceiling, from which all guidance might eventually drop, and decided, what the hell.

That he'd later come to have an affection for Jeremy, as well as to play upon his born-again feelings of Humanity to Man, getting him to drop into charitable functions and to drop his Emersonian perspectives on the world, wasn't nearly to the point. The point being simply and decidedly this: It was Mack's good fortune that Mitchell had inherited along with his tags.