Backup Men

5

WHEN THE two homicide detectives had gone after making sure that we’d be down at police headquarters to make a full statement by 2 P.M., which was as soon as Lieutenant Schoolcraft would be out of court, I went into the kitchen and put on some water for coffee. It helps me to sleep for some inexplicable reason. Just as the water was beginning to boil there was a knock at the door. After I opened it I wished that I hadn’t.

I knew the man who stood there with the oyster-white raincoat buttoned up to his neck and the lilac pajama bottoms that poked out from beneath his uncuffed gray flannels. He had been bad news when I’d first met him several years ago in Bonn and he was probably bad news now and I saw no reason to pretend that I was glad to see him at two o’clock in the morning.

“It couldn’t wait, huh?” I said.

Stan Burmser shook his head and frowned so that three vertical creases appeared in his forehead, a sure sign that he was thinking. Or trying to.

“He’s here, isn’t he?”

“He’s helping me put up some marmalade.”

Burmser shook his head again, a little sadly, I thought. “Still the sick comic,” he said. “I thought you might’ve gone into therapy by now.”

I turned my head. “You need anything from the Harvard man?” I called to Padillo.

He appeared in the foyer and looked at Burmser. He took his time. “I think your pajamas are ducky,” Padillo said.

“So does my wife.”

“What have you got, a police teletype in your bedroom?”

“Just a phone.”

Padillo shrugged and turned back toward the living room. “Let’s get it over with,” he said.

I motioned Burmser to my chair where they had found Walter Gothar dead and he lowered himself into it without any obvious discomfort. I toyed with the idea of telling him who had sat in it last, but decided not to. It probably wouldn’t have bothered him; he might even have enjoyed it.

“What happened to Gothar?” Burmser asked Padillo.

“He got himself killed.”

“Why here?”

“Maybe because of its convenient in-town location.”

“We knew the twins were around. We know that they saw you. We want to know why.”

“Ask Wanda.”

“I don’t want to have to put somebody on you, Padillo.”

“I won’t mind as long as he’s got a cheery manner and doesn’t try to run up a tab.”

I rose. “You want some coffee?” I said to Burmser.

He looked at his watch. “It’s past two o’clock.”

“I didn’t ask what time it was.”

“No, thanks.”

I made two cups of instant coffee and brought them into the living room, handing one to Padillo who claimed that it never kept him awake either. Burmser watched us drink it, not trying to hide his disapproval.

“I realize that you’re no longer with us, Padillo.”

“I never was. I was an indentured servant, if anything.”

“You got paid.”

“Not enough. Nobody’s ever paid enough for what you wanted.”

“You could have said no.”

“I can now; I couldn’t then. I tried, remember? How many times did I try to say no, a dozen? And each time until the last one you found a new pressure point that made me say yes and pack my bag and catch the next plane heading east for some place like Breslau with the odds eight to five and rising that I wouldn’t make it back.”

“Well, you’re out of it for good now.”

“Sure.”

“All I’m after is information.”

“I run a saloon, not an inquiry service.”

“The twins wanted something. What?”

Padillo rose, moved over to the window, pulled back the curtain slightly, and looked out. If he’d craned his neck a little, he could have seen the Washington Monument and beyond that, the Potomac. I don’t think he saw anything.

“A backup man,” he said after several moments.

“You?”

“Me.”

“Why you? I don’t mean that like it sounds.”

“They thought I owed their brother something.”

“Paul? He’s dead.”

Padillo turned from the window. Burmser watched him carefully, as if waiting for him to go on with a particularly fascinating tale. When Padillo said nothing, but instead wandered over to look at a fairly good Irish seascape, Burmser cleared his throat.

“What were they on?” he said, trying to make his question casual, and almost bringing it off.

“A protection job.”

“Who?”

“They didn’t say. Somebody important enough to be able to afford them.”

“Why a backup man?”

Padillo turned from his inspection of the painting and smiled at Burmser for the first time. “Franz Kragstein,” he said, as if he enjoyed saying the name. “You remember Franz.”

Burmser seemed to relax. He sank back into the chair that Walter Gothar had been strangled in and crossed his legs and produced a cigarette and lit it with a chrome lighter. Padillo wandered over to another painting, a turn-of-the-century portrait that I’d paid too little for a long time ago.

“Kragstein shouldn’t have bothered them much,” Burmser said.

Padillo cocked his head, as if trying to make up his mind about the portrait. “This guy really had it, didn’t he?” he said and, not expecting an answer, told Burmser, “It wasn’t Kragstein who bothered them. It was his new partner. Or maybe associate.”

“Who?”

“Amos Gitner,” Padillo said and turned to watch the show.

It was worth it. Burmser let his jaw drop and then stubbed out his cigarette as if he were giving them up forever. When he was through with that the three vertical furrows reappeared in his forehead, deeper than before. I remembered them as a sign that he was now not only thinking, but also deeply worried. He rose hurriedly. “Can I use your phone?”

“You may,” I said, doing my snide bit to keep the language pure.

He turned to Padillo once more. “Is he in the country?”

“Amos? I don’t know.”

“Come on, Padillo, who’s the twins’ client?”

“I guess he’d be Wanda’s now, but I still don’t know who he is. I don’t know anything about him at all except that he’s either here or coming here incognito and Amos Gitner doesn’t bother him, which doesn’t make him too smart in my book.”

“Mine either,” Burmser said and hurried over to the phone. He picked it up and then put it back down, turning to me. “Do you have another one?”

“In the bedroom. Down the hall and to the left.”

When Burmser came back a few minutes later, his gray hair was rumpled as if he’d been running a hand through it out of nervousness or frustration or both. By then he must have been the civilian equivalent of a two-star general in that weird outfit he worked for, the one that had kept sending Padillo on those hurry-up trips when he should have been helping me inventory the booze. Padillo was out of it now, just as he said. He had got out the hard way, getting himself shot in the process, and I was more than curious to see whether he could stay out.

Burmser ran his hand over his hair again, bearing down hard as if trying to press away his look of mild embarrassment.

“He wants to talk to you,” Burmser said to Padillo.

“Who?”

“Maybe it’s the President,” I said.

“I didn’t vote for him.”

“Maybe that’s what he wants to talk to you about.”

“For Christ’s sake, Padillo, he’s waiting.”

Padillo crossed to the living room phone and after he picked it up and said hello he listened for what seemed to be a long time, but which couldn’t have been more than three minutes. I guessed that he was listening to the man who ran Burmser’s outfit, a publicity-shy multimillionaire who had once been a Rhodes scholar and who had gone into the business during World War II and had never done anything else. I assumed that he liked it.

Finally Padillo said, “I’ll want that in writing on White House stationery.” He listened for another fifteen or twenty seconds before he said, “You can call it blackmail; I’ll call it insurance. If you think the price is too high, forget it.” Impatience spread across his face as he listened a while longer before he said, “I don’t work that way. When it’s done it’ll be done and you can hold all the postmortems you want, but don’t count on me to be there … All right … Yes, I understand … Here he is.” He held out the phone to Burmser who took it, said hello, listened fifteen seconds, said, “Yes, sir,” but didn’t get a chance to say good-bye bccause the connection was broken with a click that was audible across the room.

Burmser turned to look at Padillo. “He says you’re solo.”

“That’s right.”

“What about him?” Burmser said, nodding in my direction as if I were some unwelcome intruder who’d bumbled his way into the conversation. Maybe I was.

Padillo looked at me thoughtfully. “We could tie him up and gag him and hide him in the closet.”

“Aw, Christ,” Burmser said, turning toward the door, “I don’t know why I talk to either of you.” He paused at the door with his hand on its knob. “You know where to reach me, Padillo.”

“Don’t sit by the phone.”

“Amos Gitner,” Burmser said and then repeated the name as if it cheered him considerably. “You still think you’re all that good?”

“I guess I’ll just have to find that out, won’t I?” Padillo said.

“Yes,” Burmser said, smiling broadly this time, “I guess we all will.”

He opened the door and was halfway through it when I called to him. “You forgot something.”

He stopped and turned. “What?”

“You forgot to hang up the phone in the bedroom.”