Cast a Yellow Shadow

Thirteen

About a quarter after two we walked over to my apartment building and got my car out of the basement garage. Padillo glanced at the mileage on the speedometer.

“You don’t use it much.”

“We take long drives on Sunday.”

“Then you really need something that will do one-fifty.”

“That’s what I thought.”

I turned down Twentieth Street and then left on Massachusetts. We went past the Cosmos Club, around Sheridan Circle, and past the Iranian Embassy. The trade mission was located in a narrow four-storied house that had been converted into office space. It was flanked by similar houses that served as embassies for a couple of small South American countries. There were a half-dozen Cadillacs parked in no-parking zones and it only took us fifteen minutes to find a place to put the Corvette.

We walked a block back to the trade mission that had the solid, respectable appearance of a rich man’s house built in the 1920’s with easy money. Its roof tried to look thatched and the shingles curved around and under the edges of the roof line. The brick was a glazed dark red that seemed almost purple. The mortar oozed out between the bricks, lending something to what was supposed to be a rustic appearance. It’s hard to make anything look rustic that’s four stories high, and the leaded windows didn’t make it come off either.

There was a polished brass plate that said it was the trade mission so I rang the bell and we waited until a thin man in a black suit opened the door and asked us to come in.

“You are Mr. Padillo and Mr. McCorkle?”

“Yes.”

The man nodded. “Please be seated. You are expected.” We were in a wide entrance hall that ran back towards what seemed to have been the kitchen at one time. To the left were some oaken sliding doors and to the right was a paneled one. They were all closed. A curved staircase was located about halfway down the hall. The floor was carpeted in dark brown and there were some couches and chairs along the walls. We sat in two of the chairs. The man had disappeared through the sliding doors. We waited five minutes before he opened them.

“The Prime Minister will see you now,” he said.

Padillo went through the doors first and I followed. It had been the drawing room of the house and now it served as the principal office. There was a large, rather ornate desk of wood so dark it was almost black. It dominated the room. A conference table made of the same wood adjoined the front of the desk. Two men sat at the conference table. Behind the desk sat another man. He looked tired and sick and terribly old.

“Do sit down,” the old man said. His voice was deep and there was no quaver in it. He gestured towards the end of the conference table. Padillo and I sat in two chairs at the end. There were two empty chairs between us and the two men who sat next to the desk and looked at us. They were fairly young, in their late thirties, and one was dark and one was fair. They were both big. Not fat. Just big.

“You’re Van Zandt,” I said.

“That is correct. Which of you will do the killing? I thought I might be able to tell, but you both have the hunter’s look about you.”

“Where’s my wife?” I said.

The old man looked at me with black eyes that sat deep in his skull. He looked at me carefully, then nodded to himself, and switched his gaze to Padillo.

“You’re the one,” he said.

“Where’s his wife?” Padillo said.

The fairhaired younger man spoke. “She’s quite safe.”

“I didn’t ask if she were safe,” I said. “I asked where she was.”

“We don’t propose to tell you that.”

Van Zandt shifted his gaze from Padillo to the blond man. “That will do, Wendell.” His eyes went back to Padillo.

“Few men, Mr. Padillo, have the opportunity to study the man who will kill them. I hope you will forgive my curiosity, but I find you fascinating.”

“Since nobody seems inclined to make the introductions,” Padillo said to me, “I will. On your right is Wendell Boggs. He’s the Minister of Transport. On your left: Lewis Darragh, the Minister of Home Affairs. We met in Lomé.”

“Your wife talks a lot,” I said to Boggs.

He flushed and looked at Van Zandt. The old man put his hands flat on the table, raised his elbows until they were level with his shoulders, and leaned forward. He looked like an angry turkey buzzard about to take off. His hands had brown mottled spots on their backs.

“We are not here to squabble,” he roared. “We are here to plan my death and I damn well intend to see that it’s planned correctly.”

“Sorry, sir,” Boggs said.

Darragh, the Minister of Home Affairs, looked at Padillo. “Are you willing to proceed?”

“With what?” Padillo asked.

“With the discussion.”

Padillo leaned back in his chair, produced a cigarette, lighted it, and blew the smoke out. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll discuss it. It’s set for Tuesday now, I understand.”

“That’s correct,” the old man said. “That gives me a little less than three days of living left, doesn’t it?” He seemed to almost enjoy the thought.

The two younger men stirred uncomfortably in their chairs. “How does it feel to plan a man’s death like this, Mr. Padillo?” Van Zandt said. “I mean in a civilized manner, over the coffee and cigars that I’ll offer later? I understand you’ve done this type of work before.”

“So they say.”

“I remarked that look about you. You’ve got the hunter’s eye. At eighty-two I’m not sorry for a damned thing so I’m not sorry about ending this way. Tell me, what type of piece do you plan to use?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. What would you say to a Ga-rand M-i — the old World War II standby?”

“No sporting piece for you?”

“It depends upon what’s available. I have no favorites.”

The old man leaned back in his chair. “Just recalling my first military rifle. Was an old Lee Metford Mark II with a ten-round magazine and a half-length cleaning rod attached. Damned thing weighed more than ten pounds, and it stood more than four feet tall.”

Van Zandt stopped talking and coughed. It was a deep, wracking cough. His face flushed and a vein popped out on his forehead. He shook his head when he was done.

“Let’s get on with it,” he said. “First, let me say it’s a dirty business. I know it and you gentlemen know it. Kidnapping a man’s wife — well, it’s something that I’d rather have had no part of. But it’s done; it’s done. I’m going to have myself assassinated because of politics, but that’s usually the reason for assassinations, isn’t it? Unless you have one that’s wasted, like that fool Verwoerd’s. The only thing he ever drew were madmen. He could have died for something, if he’d planned it. I’m dying anyway, you know. Be gone in a month or two, no matter what. Cancer of the stomach. Nasty thing — a truly nasty thing.” The old man paused and stared across the room. He seemed to be staring at nothing. The two younger men twitched in their chairs.

“Just remembering,” Van Zandt said. He smoothed his long thin white hair with a mottled hand. “Remembering how it was sixty years ago before they built the roads and brought in their stinking autos and spread out their filthy cities. It was a good country then. Still a good country and that’s what my dying’s all about. To keep it a good country.”

He looked at me. “You have blacks here and you have trouble with them, don’t you, Mr. McCorkle?”

“We have all kinds of trouble,” I said. “We’ve got a big country.”

“Have you found a solution to your color problem? Have you? Of course not. Never will either. Black and white can’t live together. Never could and never will. That’s why I’m dying. My death will slow down the blacks. It won’t stop them. I know that. But it will slow them down. It will shock people.”

“Nobody grieved much over Verwoerd,” Padillo said.

“Of course not. The bloody fool got killed in his own country, by a madman and white at that. My country wants to be independent and run its own affairs, elect its own government, conduct its own foreign relations, arrange its own trade agreements. The blacks can’t do this — they haven’t a notion.”

He stopped again and again the young men twitched. “My death will help do this one thing, gentlemen: it will slow down the encroachment of the blacks on the affairs of my country. It will create sympathy. It will — since I am to be assassinated in the United States — weaken your country’s resistance to our independence. My death at the hands of a black will give my country twenty years to put its affairs in order. By then it will be able to cope. I assure you: we will be able to cope. Rhodesia, South Africa, and us — we will conduct our own affairs. And my death will serve this purpose.” He paused again. “Separate development,” he said firmly. “It’s the only solution. Your country should adopt it.”

Padillo moved his chair closer to the table. “I don’t know if your death will affect the future of your country or not. It sounds to me as if you’re giving it too much weight. Maybe it will create the political climate you’re looking for and get the British off your back. Maybe they’ll let you go independent and then a hundred-thousand whites can go on keeping two million blacks in their place — wherever their place is. The back door, I suppose. Maybe it will work; maybe it won’t. But before you get too carried away with it all, let me mention something. I won’t be the one who pulls the trigger.”

There was a brief silence. The old man looked at Padillo and then at Boggs and Darragh. It was Darragh who sighed as he spoke.

“I don’t like to keep mentioning Mrs. McCorkle, but—”

“You don’t have to mention her,” Padillo said. “I only said that I couldn’t do it. I didn’t say it couldn’t still be done.”

“Why can’t you do it, Mr. Padillo?” Van Zandt asked.

“Because the FBI is interested in me. They’re interested in the guns I ran in Africa. They’ve had a tail on me since I’ve been here.”

“We’ve been watching you, too, Padillo,” Boggs said. “We haven’t noticed the tail, as you say.”

“Then you haven’t looked. We shook them off to come here. But that will only make them interested. They’ll make sure they stick next time.”

“Obviously you couldn’t carry out your assignment if you are under strict surveillance,” Van Zandt said. “But how do we know that you are?”

“I’ll be back at my hotel at six tonight,” Padillo said. “Just have someone in the lobby. There’ll be at least two from the FBI there; perhaps more. They’re not hard to spot.”

“Someone will be there, Mr. Padillo,” Darragh said. “I can assure you.”

“You can also be there at six in the morning. They’ll be there then, too.”

Van Zandt shook his head. “I don’t like this, Wendell. I don’t like to have plans go wrong.”

“They haven’t necessarily gone wrong,” Padillo said. “The assassination can still be brought off.”

“By whom?”

“By a professional.”

There was another silence and then the old man went into another coughing fit.

“How could we trust him?” he said between coughs.

“You engage me as the contractor. I just subcontract it out. The chief difference is that I’ll have to have the seventy-five thousand dollars you mentioned in Lomé. The man I have in mind doesn’t come cheap.”

“Our hold on you would still be Mrs. McCorkle?”

“With one exception. McCorkle must be allowed to talk to her at length Monday night. He must also be allowed to talk to her just prior to the assassination.”

“You don’t seem to trust us, Mr. Padillo,” Van Zandt said.

“I don’t trust you at all. I think you’re desperate and I think you’re scared. When you killed Underhill, you showed how desperate you are. You’re also sloppy. Boggs here talks to his wife who talks to her sister who is Underbill’s wife. This is supposed to be a conspiracy. I agree with McCorkle. It’s becoming a convention.”

“We have taken steps to make sure that Mrs. Boggs doesn’t talk to anyone else,” Boggs said.

“I’ll bet you have,” Padillo said. “But you do things after the fact. When this is over, there’ll still be McCorkle and his wife and me around. We’ll know what happened. What do you plan to do with us?”

Darragh spread his hands in an open gesture. “You’ll have become involved, Mr. Padillo. You were to have been the killer; now you’ll be an accessory. So will Mr. McCorkle.”

“And his wife?”

“I doubt that she would jeopardize her husband.”

“This fellow you say you know. Who is he?” Van Zandt asked.

“He’s a professional.”

“Does he have a name?”

“He has several.”

Van Zandt stared at Darragh. “I don’t like things to go wrong, Lewis. And things have gone wrong. Now we must employ yet another person. We have endangered the entire plan.”

“Perhaps not,” Darragh said smoothly. “We would like to meet this professional, as you call him, Mr. McCorkle. Can that be arranged?”

“Yes.”

“Today?”

“Probably.”

“And could you give us a name that he has used so that we might determine his qualifications?”

“The name would depend upon what country you plantied to make your inquiry in.”

“Spain? Madrid, perhaps.”

“Ask about a man who called himself Vladisla Smolkski therein 1961.”

Darragh asked how it was spelled and Padillo told him. “We will send a cable to our representative there at once. We should have an immediate answer. If it is satisfactory, we wish to meet this man.”

“He’ll be available.”

“How shall we contact you?”

“Call either McCorkle or myself. The meeting will be set up for an office on Seventh Street.” He gave them the address and Darragh wrote it down next to Dymec’s other name.

“I suggest that you bring money,” Padillo said.

“I don’t think we would like to pay all at once,” Boggs said.

“Just half. And you pay it to me, not to the man you meet.”

Van Zandt chuckled. “You intend to make a profit from my death, Mr. Padillo.”

“Just covering expenses. I may have to take a long trip when this is over.”

“Do you feel that you can bring it off successfully?” Van Zandt asked.

“It shouldn’t be too hard. You won’t have much protection, if any. The United States doesn’t seem to think you’re important enough.”

“It should stir the world,” the old man said. Darragh and Boggs squirmed some more in their chairs. Van Zandt’s flights seemed to embarrass them.

“We’ll make definite plans tonight,” Boggs said.

“The exact time, the place, everything,” Padillo said. “There’s just one more thing.”

“What?” Boggs said.

“Mrs. McCorkle. I suggest that you make sure that she is returned unharmed after this is over.”

“We intend to keep our bargain,” Boggs said.

Padillo stood up. “I’m glad that you do,” he said, “because you wouldn’t live long enough to regret that you didn’t.”