The Mordida Man

25

Ko Yoshikawa watched the black queen slash diagonally across the board until it reached the white knight. The queen knocked the knight over none too gently. Bingo McKay picked up the knight and said, “Check — and mate in two. Three if you try and get cute.”

Ko studied the board. At last he nodded. “Yes, two — unless I try to get cute.” He leaned back in the chair and stretched. “What time is it?”

McKay looked at his watch. “A couple of minutes past three.”

“And the score?”

McKay picked up an envelope. On its back were three vertical rows of score-keeping figures that looked something like Roman numerals. He counted them up and added a vertical line. “So far, thirty-nine for you, forty-one for me, and six draws. You want to play another?”

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Do you?”

Ko smiled slightly. “Not a great deal.”

McKay took a cigarette from a half-empty packet of Gauloises and lit it. He inhaled the smoke, blew it out, and said, “Strong fuckers.” He peered through the smoke at Ko. “It’s getting to you, isn’t it?”

“How long has it been now — ten days?”

McKay looked at his watch again. “Nine days, fourteen hours, and thirty-two minutes — by west coast time. I don’t count the seconds any more.”

They were seated at a table in the main stateroom of the yacht that had been built for King Idris I. In a chair near the door a young Libyan guard sat sleeping and snoring gently, an Israeli-made submachinegun across his lap.

“Why don’t you wake up the Moose over there and send him out for some coffee,” McKay said.

“All right.” Ko turned in his chair. “Hey, Moussef!”

The young soldier awoke instantly, a sheepish smile on his face.

“Coffee,” said Ko in English and again in Italian.

The young soldier nodded and rose. He opened the door and said something in Arabic. Another Libyan guard came in and took Moussef’s place. The new guard was older and didn’t look at all sleepy. He kept his submachinegun cradled under an arm.

“Tell me something,” McKay said.

“What?”

“If push comes to shove, who’ll do it — him?” He nodded toward the new guard. “Or you, or old Frank?”

“What do you want to know for?”

“Just curious.”

“It’s morbid.”

“Well, hell, if you were in my fix, wouldn’t you be curious?”

“It won’t come to that.”

“Suppose it does?”

Ko sighed. “Frank. Frank would do it.”

“Fast?”

“So fast you’ll never even know it.”

McKay snorted. “I’ll know it. But I figured it’d be old Frank. Trouble with him, he was born too late. He should’ve been born around ’twenty-two or ’twenty-three. Could’ve gone into the SS and made something out of himself.”

“You’re typecasting again.”

“Well, you gotta admit, old Frank sure looks like an SS recruiting poster.”

“What if you were typecasting me? You don’t even know where I was born.”

“Where?”

“Utah. In a concentration camp. An American concentration camp, except they didn’t call them that. They called them relocation centers, or some such shit. My old man died of pleurisy in the spring of ‘forty-five, just before the war ended. After it was over, the war, she took me back to Japan. Tokyo. And we lived with her folks. She finally got a job. My mother. Guess what she did?”

“What?”

“She sold cigarettes in the PX. She worked in that PX for sixteen years and the four of us lived in one room and she saved her money for just one thing — to send me to Stanford. Well, I went to Stanford.”

“When was that — ’sixty-one, ’sixty-two?”

“ ’Sixty-two.”

“Sort of quiet on campus back around then, as I recollect.”

“Not necessarily. Not if you’re seventeen and dirt poor and in a foreign country and your nickname’s Tojo. It’s not exactly quiet. Your rage keeps it from being quiet.”

“Yeah,” McKay said after a while. “I imagine.”

“Imagine this, Bingo. Imagine that sheer loneliness drove you to the books. And because you read the books so diligently, and remembered what you read, they started giving you rewards. Scholarships. Prizes. Liberals like that — giving prizes to Jap kids and nigger kids and spic kids. Goddamn, it made them feel good! Well, I took their bloody prizes and scholarships and kept on reading, and the more I read the simpler it got. You have to go way past Marx to get where I got. Marx still had doubts — little niggling doubts — so you have to go past him and the others into a kind of place where there aren’t any doubts. You just know. It was a kind of metamorphosis.”

Bingo McKay nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I think I know what you mean. Something like that happened to me back in ’forty-six, right after the war.”

“What?”

“I went back to school — to OU. And hell, I was poor. I was living on the GI bill and wearing suntans to class and eating quarter hamburgers and then one day, sitting there in a Government 101 class, it just came to me. So I got up in the middle of that class and walked out and never went back. Like you said, I just all of a sudden knew.”

“Knew what?”

McKay grinned. “That I was gonna be rich.”

There was a knock at the door. The guard rose and opened it. Standing there holding a tray with a Pyrex carafe of coffee and three cups on it was Bingo McKay’s executive assistant, Eleanor Rhodes. Behind her was the guard Moussef, his submachinegun tucked under an arm.

“That woman needs help,” Rhodes said as she entered the stateroom and put the tray down on the table next to the chessboard. Moussef nodded at the older guard, who turned and left, closing the door behind him. Moussef resumed his seat.

“What now?” Ko said as he watched Rhodes pour the coffee. She handed cups to McKay and Ko. Pouring one for herself, she sat down next to McKay. “She won’t let me sleep,” Rhodes said. “She talked until two yesterday and until — what, three this morning? I know all about her childhood in Algiers. I know all about her father, the paratroop colonel, and her mother and her mother’s lovers, all of them, each one dissected and analyzed down to his socks. And Paris in ’sixty-eight; I know all about Paris then, too. That woman needs help.”

“Or a sympathetic ear,” Ko said.

“She asleep now?” McKay said.

Rhodes shrugged. “If you can call it that. When I saw Moussef go by heading for the galley, I escaped. When he said you were still up, I offered to carry the coffee.” She looked at the chessboard. “Who won?”

“Bingo,” Ko said. “Are Françoise’s dreams getting worse?”

“They’re not dreams, they’re nightmares,” Rhodes said. “Do nightmares get better? Do you grade them? Hers are all about death. She dies, you die, I die, we all die. And Felix. He keeps dying, too. Over and over. First one way, then another, and all of them horrible. Then she wakes me up and tells me about them, every last detail. Damn it, I’m the hostage, the victim — not her! I’m the one who should be going crackers or sinking into despair or whatever happens. I want somebody to listen to me. I don’t like this role. I don’t want to be the Female Terrorist’s Best Friend. God damn it, I want somebody to—”

Her voice had risen steadily until it cracked. She started sobbing and buried her head in her arms on the table. McKay reached over and put a hand on her shoulder. “Easy, sugar,” he said. “Just take it easy.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

The sobbing died away. Rhodes looked up at McKay. Her nose was red, her eyes bloodshot, her cheeks tear-stained. McKay thought she looked beautiful. “That goddamned bandage needs changing again, too,” she said.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, automatically touching the bandage. “Old Doc Souri said he’d tend to it tomorrow.”

“I’ll talk to him about Françoise, too,” Ko said. “Maybe he can give her something that will calm her down and help her to sleep.”

“You’d better—” A new knock at the stateroom’s door interrupted Eleanor Rhodes’s admonishment. Moussef rose and opened the door. The yacht’s Libyan radio officer stepped into the room. “It’s from Rome,” he said in Italian and handed a folded sheet of paper to Ko.

When the officer had gone, Ko unfolded the sheet of paper and read it slowly. He looked up first at McKay, then at Rhodes.

“Hostages should be kept in the dark,” he said. “It destroys their morale. I think it’s in the book.”

“But you ain’t gonna go by the book, are you, old buddy?” McKay said.

Ko smiled. It was a sad philosopher’s tired smile. “The news is not good.”

“But it’s news.”

“The Nigerian Ambassador to the States met yesterday afternoon in Rome with a representative from Libya. They got nowhere. The Nigerian seems to be stalling.”

“Well, shit, they’re meeting anyway.”

“That’s item one. Item two: Do you know an American called Chubb Dunjee?”

McKay commanded his face not to betray him. He frowned slightly as if trying to recall the face that went with the name. But his thoughts raced. Hot damn, the Mordida Man. The kid remembered. He called in Grimes and, god damn, old Paul must’ve dug up Dunjee somewhere.

“Dunjee,” McKay said slowly, but not too slowly. “Used to be a fellow in Congress by that name, why?”

“He served one term,” Eleanor Rhodes said. “He—” She broke off abruptly.

Ko looked at her curiously. “He what?”

“He went to the UN after that, I believe.”

McKay nodded proudly. “By God, she’s got a memory, hasn’t she? I believe he was with the UN for a while.” Innocence crept across McKay’s face. “Why?”

“They’re on their way to Tripoli,” Ko said. “Not too willingly, it would seem.”

“They?” McKay said, as indifferently as he could.

“Dunjee and his associates, who seem to be an English thief and a woman of uncertain nationality.”

God damn, but don’t that sound just like Dunjee, McKay thought. Got himself a pickup crew somewhere and a hip pocket full of money — from the kid, most likely — and he’s wiggling his way right into the henhouse. God bless the kid, God bless Paul Grimes, and God bless the Mordida Man. It was as close as McKay had come to prayer in forty-one years.

“You don’t know this Dunjee, you say?” Ko asked.

“I’m trying to recollect. I believe we did meet once at a convention. ’Sixty-eight in Chicago. I think he was there and we maybe shook hands and said hello. And I think maybe we bumped into each other at a cocktail party in Washington one time. Probably talked a couple of minutes. But that’s about it.”

“Eleanor?” Ko said.

She shook her head. “I never met him.”

“How come Tripoli?” McKay said, putting another cigarette into his mouth to supplement the casualness of his tone.

“How come?” Ko said. “Because he was sent for apparently, that’s how come.”

“Sent for by who?”

“Mourabet.”

“The Colonel?”

Ko nodded. “Himself.”

“No kidding?” Bingo McKay said.