The Mordida Man

16

The meeting between Paul Grimes and Chubb Dunjee took place at 4 P.M. that day in London in the sparsely furnished reception room of Grimes’s house that faced out onto the small green park with the black iron fence around it.

Grimes was bent over the card table examining the six photographs that Dunjee had removed from the steel lock box, which he had found in one of the two suitcases that had been ransomed from the landlord in Bayswater. Five of the pictures showed the two men and two women in swimsuits on a beach. The sixth picture showed the naked smiling man lying on a bed and pointing at his erection.

“The guy with the hard-on took the beach pictures, right?” Grimes said. “That’s why he isn’t in any of them.”

“Probably,” Dunjee said.

“Well, this one,” Grimes said, pointing, “this tubby guy with all the hair is definitely Felix. Let me show you.”

Grimes took out his wallet and removed a two-by-three-inch picture, which he handed to Dunjee. The picture, grainy and a little out of focus, portrayed a man with an open mouth and startled eyes. “That’s Felix. It’s the only picture there is of him except for some when he was five and six years old.”

“How’d they get it?” Dunjee said.

“He was coming out of a bank they’d just robbed in Brest. A Belgian tourist was taking a picture of his wife. Felix stepped into the picture. The tourist got shot. He died a couple of days later. Three months after that his wife finally got around to having the film developed. She turned it over to the Belgian cops. It took another two months before somebody woke up and figured out who the guy in the picture really was.”

“Not much of a resemblance,” Dunjee said, comparing the face of the startled man with that of the plumpish man on the beach.

“There’s enough,” Grimes said. He put his finger on the bare stomach of the Oriental man, who was also in the picture with Felix and the two women. “This guy is Ko Yoshikawa. Japanese. He went to Stanford. The thin broad next to him is dead. Her name was Maria Luisa de la Cova, and some kids found her strangled to death out in Hammersmith. She used to be Felix’s girl friend. The other woman with the figure is Françoise Leget. French — or Algerian, I guess. It’s where she was born anyway.”

“And the guy with the hard-on is German, right?”

“Right,” Grimes said. “Bernt Diringshoffen. From Hamburg. About thirty-two now.”

“He’s the connection,” Dunjee said.

“With the Libyan?”

Dunjee nodded. “They both like girls. Young ones. Very young. Or pictures of them anyway.”

“How’re you going to work it?”

“I’m going to sit next to the Libyan on the plane to Rome tomorrow and see what happens.”

“You sure something will?”

Dunjee said nothing, and after a moment Grimes said, “Yes, well, I almost forgot. That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it?”

“That’s what I’m good at.”

“You sure you need Delft?”

“I’m sure.”

“And what about this other guy you’re taking along? This Hopkins. Who’s he?”

“A thief.”

“Jesus. Why a thief?”

“They come in handy,” Dunjee said. “Sometimes.”

Grimes shook his head sadly and waved a hand at the photographs on the table. “You need these any more?”

“No.”

“I’m flying back tonight and meeting with McKay in the morning. I’ll give them to him. They’ll be our progress report — such as it is. He can turn them over to the FBI or the CIA, and maybe they can do something useful with them — like figuring out what beach they were taken on. Although I don’t know what the hell good that would do now.”

“None,” Dunjee said. He gathered the photographs up and handed them to Grimes. “Do they know about me?”

“Who — the CIA?”

Dunjee nodded.

“I don’t know. You want me to find out from McKay?”

“Tell him I want hands off.”

Grimes nodded thoughtfully. “All right. Anything else?”

“What if I need a lot of money all of a sudden?”

“Talk to Delft,” Grimes said. “She knows what to do.”

The restaurant was in Chelsea, one of those French places that last for a year or two, sometimes three, in the King’s Road in that stretch between Oakley Street and Sloane Square. This one was called Gustave’s, but Gustave was long gone, having sold out to a Greek at the crest of the restaurant’s popularity, which had occurred exactly eleven months after it had opened for business. The Greek was now looking for a buyer and thought he might have a couple of Indians lined up.

The tables on either side of the one that Delft Csider and Chubb Dunjee sat at were deserted and had been for nearly thirty minutes. A mildly attentive waiter drifted by occasionally to replenish their coffee cups. They both had ordered the trout, which had been surprisingly good. Instead of dessert, Csider had asked for a Drambuie; Dunjee a brandy.

“That’s it then,” she said. “I just hand you letters to sign and call you Congressman.”

“That’s it.”

“And what do you do?”

“Ignore him.”

“What if he ignores you?”

“He won’t,” Dunjee said. “He’ll either be curious, or suspect it’s a setup, or both.”

“Then what?”

“Then he discovers that he can use me — or exploit me, probably. I resist; he implores; I give in.”

She shook her head. “I don’t believe it.”

“It’s the way it works.”

“Why aren’t you still in Congress, if you’re so smart?”

Dunjee grinned. “My wife ran off with the Weathermen. For some reason, my constituents didn’t think that was such a hot idea.”

“Did you like it?”

“Being a Congressman?”

She nodded.

Dunjee thought about it — or at least seemed to. “Sure. I liked it. It was a good job. Back then in ’sixty-eight, it paid thirty thousand a year plus perks. The year before I was elected, I was a $10,176-a-year Army captain.”

“They gave you a string of medals, didn’t they? That’s what Grimes says.”

“They gave me a string of medals.”

“For what?”

“For killing people. Rather small people. They seemed to think it was important and necessary. The people who gave me the medals, I mean.”

“But you sent them back.”

“That was later. I took them and kept them awhile, and then got drunk for a while and sent them back. As gestures go, it was pretty sophomoric.”

“All those rather small people were still dead.”

“Still dead.”

“But it got you in the papers.”

“And on television. Don’t forget television. They liked the way I looked on television.”

“Who?”

“The guys who came to see me. They were a couple of movers and shakers who wanted to know whether I’d like to be a U.S. Congressman. I was twenty-eight and broke. My opponent in the primary was seventy-two and rich and a little senile. I was hungry. He wasn’t. So I won. He had been in Congress for forty-two years, and when he lost they say it broke his heart. I got elected because I said I was sorry about all those rather small people I’d killed. Back in ’sixty-eight that was one hell of a platform — at least in my district. I had all the crazies in my district.”

Delft Csider took another sip of her Drambuie. “Where’d you meet Grimes?”

“At school. UCLA.”

“But you knew him after that.”

“He was one of the two movers and shakers who came to see me about whether I’d like to be a U.S. Congressman.”

“I was wondering. He knew your wife, didn’t he?”

“He knew her.”

“What was she like?”

“Very pretty, overly intelligent, deeply concerned, highly motivated — and very much a pain in the ass. Her father was a vice-president of the old Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. Her mother was an actress who got blacklisted. A very political family. An uncle once socked Joe McCarthy on the jaw — or so he claimed. My wife was born in ’thirty-nine and always said her earliest memory was of attending a Second Front Now rally in New York when she was three — or maybe four. Her proudest moment came in ’fifty-two, when she watched her mother on television tell the House Un-American Activities Committee to go fuck itself. I turned out to be something of a disappointment to Our Nan, as Grimes calls her.”

“For some reason you don’t strike me as the typical politician.”

Dunjee shrugged. “They come in all sizes and shades. The president of Mexico writes novels. Or did. The Senate Majority Leader plays the fiddle and sings. There’ve been Senators and Congressmen who’ve been astronauts, actors, and athletes. When they get too old for that, they sometimes become politicians. It’s a good way to keep answering a question that nags a lot of people: Who am I? If you’re a politician, you can say, I’m the Mayor or the State Treasurer or even the President of the United States. And if you can get a majority of the people to agree with you, then that’s what you are and there’s a sign on the door to prove it.”

“What are you now?”

Dunjee smiled. “A philosopher.”

“That doesn’t require an election, does it?”

“Self-appointed. Or self-anointed might be better. What about you? Have you got a handy label?”

“As I said, I’m the back-up.”

“And before you were the back-up?”

“I did this and that — here and there.”

“Since you’re the back-up, you mind if I ask where here and there was?”

“I don’t mind,” she said and finished the last of her Drambuie. She then lit a cigarette and blew the smoke to one side. “I’m thirty. I might be thirty for a couple more years. I haven’t decided yet. My mother and I came out of Hungary in ’fifty-six. I was five. I don’t know what happened to my father, except that he was killed. We never did find out how. We went to Vienna and stayed there a year. I learned German. After Vienna, we went to Genoa. Two years there. I learned Italian. Did I mention that my mother was a nurse? She married a doctor in Genoa. A Lebanese. A nice man. We went to Beirut. I learned Arabic. And French. The doctor died two years later of cancer. He left a little money, but not much. At the time, nurses were needed in Berlin, so we went there. I don’t suppose I ever really learned any language. ‘Absorbed’ is probably more accurate. I’m a parrot. We were in Berlin from ’sixty-one to ’sixty-four. There was a growing shortage of nurses in the States. So we decided to go there. I was thirteen then. We taught ourselves English in six months and went to San Francisco. My mother worked as a private nurse. For the rich mostly. She was very good. We usually lived with them. The rich, I mean. My mother died of a stroke in ’seventy when she was forty-one. I was nineteen.”

“A lot of moving around,” Dunjee said. “A lot of schools.”

Delft Csider smiled slightly. “I never went to school.”

“Never? Not even kindergarten?”

“Not even kindergarten. Don’t look so surprised.”

“Everybody goes to school.”

“Not everybody.”

“What about—”

“Truant officers? That’s what you were going to ask, wasn’t it? Everybody does.”

Dunjee nodded.

“Truant officers don’t go looking for neatly dressed, solemn little girls who spend their school hours in public libraries. That’s where I hung out when my mother worked days. When she worked nights, which she mostly did, I stayed home with her. She was my... best friend, I suppose you could say.”

“Didn’t you ever want to go to school?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. For an education, I suppose.”

“Are you saying I’m not educated?”

It was an apologetic smile that Dunjee gave her. “No. I’m not saying that.”

“I’ll give you the rest of it. I find long division still a little murky, but who cares now that you can buy a calculator for nine dollars. I’m weak in baseball and American football. But I’m a whiz at geography and history and politics and how the rich live. I took a post-graduate course in that, you might say. After my mother died, I lived with a very rich, very elderly man. We traveled. I’d picked up enough nursing skills to give him his shots and check his blood pressure twice a day. The old man was interested in politics. He liked to back winners. That’s how I met Grimes. He came by to pick up some money from the old gentleman in 1976. Quite a lot of money. We talked, Grimes and I. He didn’t seem to care whether I’d ever gone to school or not. But he said if ever I left the old man and needed a job, to come see him. The old man died six months later. I went to see Grimes and I’ve been working with him ever since.”

“Doing what he does.”

She nodded. “Learning how to do it, anyway. He says I do it rather well. What about it, philosopher? Do I measure up?”

Dunjee smiled again. “Sure,” he said. “You’ll do fine.”

It was cool when they came out of the restaurant. Delft Csider wore a wraparound camel’s-hair coat. She turned the collar up and started to her left. Dunjee touched her arm. “Wait here a second,” he said.

He put his hands deep into the pockets of his brown tweed topcoat and moved down the sidewalk twenty paces or so until he came to the parked green Jaguar sedan with the two men in the front seat. He stood next to the window of the car until one of the men rolled it down.

“You want something?” the man said in an accent that came from somewhere east of Texas and west of Georgia.

Dunjee nodded. “Tell whoever sent you to pull you off — or I pull out. You got that?”

They stared at each other for a moment and finally the man nodded and rolled the window back up. Dunjee turned and moved back to Delft Csider.

“Who was that?” she said.

“Kibitzers,” Dunjee said.