The Mordida Man

3

The real estate agent in Lisbon hadn’t told Chubb Dunjee, the ex-Congressman, about the steps. But even if she had, he probably would have rented the house in Sintra anyway, since it was relatively cheap, and the sixty-eight steps that led down to the road provided a bit of exercise and didn’t at all bother his visitors, because there weren’t any. Or hardly any.

The agent rather grandly had described the house as a villa, but Dunjee always thought of it as a five-room bungalow with an uncanny, somehow depressing resemblance to the red-tile-roof kind found all over his native Southern California. The house was owned by an elderly English widow who suddenly, at seventy-two, had decided to visit her late husband’s native Brazil. The widow was said to be particularly curious about what really lay up the Orinoco.

The house with the sixty-eight steps had been rented cheaply to Dunjee on the condition that he keep on its housekeeper-cook, plus the gardener who took exquisite care of the widow’s nearly one acre of periwinkles, roses, geraniums, camellias, wild lavender, and a couple of other varieties, one pink, the other yellow, that Dunjee (no flower fancier) couldn’t identify but always referred to as the pansies.

During his seventeen-month stay in Sintra, which eventually he came to regard as a kind of exile, or perhaps even banishment, Dunjee had taught himself some four hundred words of Portuguese. This was enough to praise the cook’s plain fare, chat with the gardener about the weather, and thank the mailman for climbing the sixty-eight steps to deliver the two-to-three-day-old copy of the International Herald Tribune — virtually the only mail Dunjee ever received.

Occasionally, when the weather was fine, he and the mailman would sit outside under the lemon trees near the steps’ iron gate and drink a glass or two of wine in comfortable silence. On each of the two Christmases he spent in Sintra, Dunjee had given the mailman a fine Chaves ham from Tràsos-Montes.

It was four days after the man called Felix fell a mile into the sea that Dunjee had his first real visitor in almost eleven months. He came unannounced at noon by taxi. Noon was a time when Dunjee liked to sit outside under the lemon trees and work the crossword puzzle in the Herald Tribune. Before Portugal, Dunjee had never worked crossword puzzles. He now regarded them as a faintly ridiculous vice which held for him some slight danger of addiction.

The visitor down in the road was Paul Grimes. He got out of the taxi, paid off the driver, and turned to give the sixty-eight steps a bleak assessment. When he started up the steps, Dunjee rose, tried to think of the Portuguese word for guest, and headed for the kitchen to tell the cook he was having one.

By the time Grimes reached the top of the steps he was breathing heavily, almost panting. He paused to lean against the brick retaining wall that was covered with morning glory vines. The housekeeper-cook, plump, curious, and a trifle flustered, stood near the wooden garden chairs with a tray that held glasses and two cold bottles of beer.

Grimes, sweating now, but not panting nearly so much, stared at Dunjee for several moments, then smiled and said, “Why Portugal?”

“The label on a sardine can,” Dunjee said. “I used to study it sometimes when I was poor. You remember when I was poor.”

Grimes nodded thoughtfully, still smiling.

“You want a beer?” Dunjee said.

“God, yes.”

They managed to avoid shaking hands — Dunjee by gesturing toward the garden chairs; Grimes by mopping his brow with a handkerchief as he moved over and lowered himself down with a sigh. When the housekeeper-cook served him his beer, he thanked her formally, even graciously, in Spanish, because he knew no Portuguese, but seemed to feel that Spanish would at least be closer than English. The housekeeper-cook smiled gravely and left to find the gardener so she could gossip with him about the visitor.

After producing a cigarette, Grimes lit it, drank half of the beer in his glass, filled it up again, looked around carefully as if really interested in what he saw, and said, “Nice place.”

“Quiet.”

“What do you do all day?”

Dunjee thought about it first. “I read a lot, run a few miles, do the shopping, hit a few bars, brood a little.”

Again Grimes nodded. This time it was an appreciative nod that seemed to compliment Dunjee on some rigorous but productive schedule. After another swallow of beer he got to the point. “How’s the money holding out?”

“There’s enough.”

“Well.”

“Well, what?”

Grimes moved his heavy shoulders in a slight, almost indifferent shrug. “Well, I just thought you might like to make some.”

Dunjee smiled. He had a curiously lazy, curiously warm smile, very white, that usually managed to charm most people. He had always found it a convenient, almost painless way to say no. Much of the smile was still in place when he said, “I don’t do that any more.”

“What?”

“Whatever it is you want me to do.”

Dunjee discovered it was a pleasure to watch Grimes shift topics. He did it smoothly, effortlessly — in a manner that made old brand names pop into Dunjee’s head: Fluid Drive, Hydramatic, Powerglide.

“You know what I’ve been trying to remember?” Grimes said. “I’ve been trying to remember how long it’s been since we’ve seen each other. Twelve years?”

“Thirteen,” Dunjee said. “Almost fourteen. Chicago, ’sixty-eight.”

Grimes nodded, as if suddenly remembering. “That mess. You ever hear from her?”

“Nan?”

“Our Nan.” Grimes said the name almost reverently. Nan was Dunjee’s ex-wife.

“They say she married a grain broker and lives in St. Paul,” Dunjee said. “She’s also supposed to be very active in Little League baseball. Coaching. They say.”

“Jesus. Our Nan.”

The housekeeper-cook reappeared with two more bottles of beer and again Grimes thanked her in Spanish. When she had gone he smiled wryly. “I was just trying to think — of what she kept calling you up there in the Hilton right after you told her there was no way you were going out in the streets and get your head bashed in for the movement. Sort of a pet name.”

“Crypto-fascist,” Dunjee said.

“Our Nan,” said Grimes, nodding and smiling now, as if at some fond memory. “Right after that was when she took off with the Weathermen, wasn’t it?”

Dunjee shook his head. “That was the next year — ’sixty-nine.”

“How long did that last?”

“Six months. Until she turned thirty — and ran out of money.”

“And that wrecked it for you, didn’t it? Even in your district. Hell, you must’ve had more dopers and crazies and old retired Jewish socialists and ex-Trotskyites than any place in the state, except maybe Berkeley.”

Dunjee shrugged. “Even they couldn’t swallow the Weathermen thing. I got beat over the head with it.”

“But you had the one term.”

“That’s right. I had the one term.”

Grimes shook his head sadly. “Our Nan,” he said, reproach in his voice this time. “If it hadn’t been for her, you’d probably still be there. You had it all going for you then — ex-Special Forces captain, medals down to here, good anti-war plank, and almost the youngest member of Congress with a real fine pinko district. Shoot, Chubb, you’d still’ve been planted there if it hadn’t been for her. Our Nan.”

“I was the youngest member of Congress,” Dunjee said, disliking himself for making the point. “At least when I was elected I was.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” There was a silence until Grimes said, “You know what I’m doing now?”

Dunjee examined him carefully for several moments. “Probably what you’ve always done — cleaning up after other people’s messes.”

Grimes chuckled. It was a fat man’s low, bubbling chuckle with a trace of wheeze in it. When Dunjee had first known him in school, more than twenty years before at UCLA, Grimes had borne an almost ominous resemblance to Victor Mature, a noted actor. Grimes had always blamed the resemblance for keeping him out of elective politics, since he was totally convinced that nobody would ever dream of voting for Victor Mature for anything.

Now forty-three, possibly forty-four, Grimes no longer bore any resemblance to Victor Mature — except perhaps for that hawklike nose. Over the years, Grimes’s face had grown round and plump and pink and smooth, his jaw wreathed by two thick soft rolls of fat. What was left of his hair was parted very low down on the left side, almost to the ear, and combed up and over. But it didn’t really help much. He still looked bald. About all that saved Grimes from looking like a jolly fat man were that beak of a nose and those cold, wet, silvery eyes. The eyes gleamed with something, Dunjee decided, possibly amusement, but certainly not jollity.

Grimes was still chuckling his practiced fat man’s chuckle when he said, “How’d you like to make a bunch of money?”

“I don’t need any money.”

Again, there was reproach in Grimes’s smile and tone; gentle reproach. “You’ve got 4,136 dollars and change in that Lisbon bank. It’ll last another two months — three if you scrimp.”

It was at least thirty seconds before Dunjee replied. “How much is a bunch of money nowadays?”

“Say one hundred thousand — plus expenses.”

Dunjee nodded. It was a nod indicating mild interest, but nothing else. It was all Grimes needed.

“We sort of lost touch after the election. The 1970 election. But I—”

Dunjee interrupted. “I lost touch with a lot of people. Ex-freshman Congressmen carry a certain pariahlike atmosphere around with them. Or maybe it’s a smell. The smell of defeat and shock. Somebody should come up with a soap.”

“As I was saying, we lost touch, but I kept track. You bounced back. You went into oil.”

“A cream puff,” Dunjee said. “All you had to do was stick a straw down and out it would gush. Well, I raised the money, all tax-shelter stuff. Five thousand here, ten there. And we stuck the straw down and out it gushed. Salt water. A million barrels a day — or something like that. Hell, I don’t remember.”

Grimes made a sympathetic clucking noise and started lighting another cigarette. Staring at the match flame before moving it to the end of his cigarette, he said, “Then there was that stint with the UN.”

“Stint,” Dunjee said in a faintly mocking tone. “Yes, my stint with the UN. Forty-two thousand a year tax free, a lot of travel, and useful and productive dialogue with the leaders of the world’s lesser-developed countries. It was just like talking to Nan.”

“Our Nan. Well, when you left the UN I lost track for a couple of years.”

Dunjee stared at Grimes again, then smiled and said, “You didn’t lose track. For two years I drove a cab. I drove a cab in Miami and Houston and Denver and Seattle and San Francisco and Great Falls and New Orleans. A good week, I’d make a hundred and fifty bucks. Then one day I decided I didn’t want to become a human interest story. You see them all the time. I think there was one in the Herald Trib the other day. Something like ‘Ex-Boy Governor Now Chicago Hackie,’ or some such crap. And it’s all about how this guy who was governor of Michigan or West Virginia at twenty-seven or so, until he found out about booze and broads, is fifty now and driving a cab and he’s never been happier because of this deep insight he’s gained not only into himself but into humanity in general.”

Grimes nodded several times as if he too had read the same stories. “So you went to Mexico.”

“I went to Mexico.”

“The Mordida Man. You got your name in the papers after all.”

Dunjee shrugged. “And they got out of jail.”

“How many did you” — Grimes paused to select his word — “negotiate out?”

“Sixty-two.”

“Bribes and blackmail.”

“They got out of jail. I was good at it. My background helped — Congress, the UN. And being a cab driver. You gain a lot of wonderful insight into human nature by being a cab driver.”

“They say you made a lot of money in Mexico.”

“Who’s they?”

“The IRS.”

Dunjee smiled. “I’m having a slight problem with them.”

“Not so slight. They’re talking about extradition.”

“I’ve got a lawyer on it.”

“I talked to him. He’s worried. The deductions you put down: 251,817 bucks for business expenses. The IRS has decided those were bribes. Bribes aren’t legitimate business expenses.” Grimes yawned. “Of course, I could fix all that.”

There was another long silence until Dunjee said, “You’ll stay for lunch?”

“What’re you having?”

“I don’t know what we’re having. I’ll go see.” He rose and headed for the house, a tall man, two inches or so over six feet, perhaps more. Grimes noticed that there was still that quick, springy lift to Dunjee’s heels as they came up off the grass. He thought that at forty-one (or was it forty-two?) Dunjee still looked fit enough to pass for a professional athlete with at least a season of play left in him. Or perhaps only part of a season.

The revised estimate made Grimes feel somewhat better. So did the gray in Dunjee’s medium long dark-brown hair. That was new. But the gray and those fresh deep lines were about the only physical changes that Grimes could detect. Dunjee’s hazel-green eyes were still more clever than wise, and his features were still rescued from being too regular, almost handsome, by that cheekbone, the left one, that poked up almost three-quarters of an inch higher than the right. From a certain angle the skewed cheekbone made Dunjee look just a bit cockeyed.

Grimes was finishing the last of his beer when Dunjee returned. “Fish,” he said. “We’re having fish.”

“Good,” Grimes said. “I can eat fish.”

Dunjee sank back down into the low garden chair. “You say you can fix the IRS people.”

“I can fix them.”

“Who’s your client?”

Grimes shook his head.

Dunjee stared at him for a moment and then nodded impatiently. “All right. If you tell me, I’m in. Committed. Who’s your client?”

“The White House,” Grimes said, savoring the name in spite of himself.

Dunjee scratched the back of his left hand, noticed a hangnail, and decided to bite it. “The White House, huh?” he said between bites. “That could mean the head gardener or the pool man or some twenty-eight-year-old Yalie savant over there in the West Wing basement or—”

Grimes interrupted. “The President.”

Dunjee sighed. “Well, hell, Paul. I guess you’d better tell me about it.”