Backup Men

1

HE DIDN’T look old enough. Not old enough to order a martini at eleven forty-five in the morning, so when I got the small headshake from Joan, the cocktail waitress, I left the bar and a slightly hungover reporter from The Washington Post and went to see whether the youthful morning drinker had anything to prove that he was at least twenty-one.

It was still too early for the luncheon trade and the reporter and I had been trading diet tips over a bottle of beer and reminiscing about an infantry replacement training center in north Texas where we’d both spent a few months a long time ago, hating every minute of it.

Even close up he didn’t look old enough. I guessed him for nineteen, possibly twenty, but that may have been because of the pale blond, almost white hair that covered the tops of his ears and which he had carefully brushed and combed back into a revolutionary ducktail. The 1776 revolution, not the current one.

He didn’t watch me approach. He didn’t look up until I said, “Sorry to bother you, but have you got something that says you’re over twenty-one? We’d like to keep the license.”

He looked up then and when I saw his eyes, I felt that I’d made a mistake. When he smiled, I knew I had. Some people have dirty laughs, but he had a dirty smile and it had taken him a lot longer than twenty-one years to perfect it. He kept it in place while he reached into an inside pocket of his coat and brought out a thin black folding case and handed it to me. His eyes never left my face, eyes that were the palest of blue, almost the color of Arctic ice and nearly as compassionate.

He had handed me a Swiss passport and it claimed that his name was Walter Gothar and that he lived in Geneva and that he was thirty-two years old. I handed it back to him.

“Sorry, Mr. Gothar,” I said.

“It happens frequently.”

“The drink’s on the house.”

Gothar shook his head slightly. “I insist on paying.” He had an accent, but it seemed to come and go depending on which word he used. I shrugged and gave him a nice enough smile and started to turn away when he said, “Where is Michael Padillo?” I turned back.

“In Chicago. On business.”

“I regret that I have missed him.”

“He’ll be back tomorrow.”

“I would like for you to give him a message.”

“All right.”

He paused for a long moment, as if troubled over the phrasing of the message, and it gave me the opportunity to admire his dark blue shirt and his white knit tie and the rich raw silk that had been used to run up his new spring suit. He wore a display handkerchief tucked away up his left sleeve and it matched the color of his shirt and I might have taken him for a bit of a fop were it not for those icy eyes and that dirty smile which came and went like a warning beacon above a smooth, stubborn chin that would seldom need a shave. His thin nose had character, too, but I wasn’t sure what kind.

“You are the McCorkle?” he said and I said yes, I was the McCorkle. I turned and nodded at Joan and she quickly brought his martini over. After she had gone he removed two one-dollar bills from a thin brown wallet and smoothed them out on the table beside his drink, looking at it thoughtfully, but not touching it. He was still gazing at it when he said, “Tell Michael Padillo—” He stopped and looked up at me quickly, perhaps to make sure that I was really listening.

“Tell Padillo,” he said slowly, spacing each word, “that we don’t want to buy the farm.”

“He’ll be sorry to hear that,” I said, just to be saying something.

He studied me some more, apparently not so much to see if I’d got the message, but whether I’d understood it. I thought I had, but I saw no reason to let Gothar know. I have cautious days like that.

“I must discuss my reasons with him personally.”

“See him tomorrow.”

“What time is best?”

“He usually gets here between ten thirty and eleven.”

“You’ll not forget the message?”

“No.”

“And my name?”

“Walter Gothar.” I’m good at remembering names and faces. It’s about the only qualification needed to run a successful saloon.

Gothar rose from behind the banquette table in one smooth flowing motion. I saw that he was nearly as tall as I, something over six feet, and if he had kept his eyes closed and not smiled at anyone, he could have passed for some freshwater college’s sophomore quarterback. He looked at me carefully once more, as if still debating whether I had enough sense to deliver his message, nodded in an abrupt, Teutonic way after apparently concluding that I did, turned and headed toward the entrance without touching his drink or saying good-bye or good day or even auf Wiedersehen, which probably was the language that he felt most comfortable in.

I picked up his drink and carried it back to the bar, trying to decide whether to drink it myself or sell it again. I decided to drink it myself and as I sat at the bar and sipped it and watched the first customers arrive I thought about the message that Gothar wanted me to give Padillo. It was World War II slang and I felt that he was a little young to be using it, but then I had thought that he was too young to be ordering a martini at eleven forty-five in the morning.

Those who had bought the farm during World War II had been those who’d died, of course, and if Gothar didn’t want to buy it, that meant that he didn’t want to die and he wanted Michael Padillo to know it.

I found that a little odd because at one time Padillo had sold the farm to a number of persons for one huggermugger government agency or other and there were those who considered him to be quite good at it. There were also a number of others who wished that he had bought himself one a long time ago.