The Mordida Man

9

The Pimlico street number in Dunjee’s small Leathersmith address book had been written there more than ten years before, and he was no longer at all sure that either it or the phone number he had tried several times that afternoon was still valid.

It was nearly three o’clock when he got out of the taxi in the rain, looked briefly up at the stern red brick example of 1913 architecture, hurried up its steps, and into the foyer. There was a double row of black buttons, and beside each button was a card with a name either written or printed on it. Dunjee noticed that most of the printed cards were engraved.

In the slot beside the button that belonged to flat three-E was an engraved card that read “Hugh Scullard,” except that Hugh had been crossed out with green ink and above it had been printed “Pauline.”

“Well, shit,” Dunjee said, a little surprised that he had said it aloud, and pressed the three-E button. When nothing happened, he pressed it again.

He was about to press it a third time when a woman’s voice said over the tinny foyer speaker, “What do you want?”

“It’s Chubb Dunjee, Pauline.”

“Who?”

“Chubb Dunjee.”

There was a brief silence until the woman’s voice said, “Do I owe you any money?”

“No.”

“Then come up.”

The buzzer rang and Dunjee went through the door. There was a small elevator with a glass-and-wrought-iron cage and a sign that read, “Lift Out of Order.” Dunjee walked up four flights and knocked on the door of three-E.

A deadbolt was turned back. Then a second one. The door opened the length of its three-inch chain. An eye peered out — red-rimmed, bloodshot, with a lump of sleep granules collected in one corner.

Dunjee nodded and smiled at the eye. “Pauline.”

“Well,” the woman said. “Congressman.”

The door closed, the chain was removed, and the door was thrown open. “Come in,” the woman said. “It’s a mess. And so am I.”

Dunjee went in, closed the door, looked around, and said, “What happened?”

“What didn’t?” the woman said.

Dunjee couldn’t decide whether Pauline Scullard was moving in or out. Cartons of books were stacked in one corner of the room almost to the ceiling. A gray cat sat half asleep on the highest carton. A rolled-up rug lay before the grate. Several paintings leaned against one wall. The furniture — a couch, some chairs, a few tables, some lamps — was huddled together at one end of the room near the tall windows, There were shades on the windows but no curtains. The shades were drawn.

Pauline Scullard made a vague motion at the room. “I just haven’t been able to cope — or something.”

Dunjee took off his raincoat, looked around for somewhere to put it, and decided on one of the book cartons. When he turned back, the woman was pouring liquor into a glass. She handed the glass to him and poured another one for herself.

“Do sit down,” she said. “Someplace. Any place.”

Dunjee chose the couch. The woman picked up some magazines from a chair, dropped them to the floor, and sat down, tugging at her miniskirt, locking her knees primly together, and pointing her feet to the left.

“I have proper dresses. Three, I think. I wear them on Tuesdays and Fridays. Visiting days.”

“Visiting days,” Dunjee said.

“Yes.”

“Where is he?”

“Hugh?”

“Hugh.”

“Hugh’s not here.”

“How long have you been back?”

“You mean here — in this place? You know, we were frightfully clever to buy this place, or rather the lease. That was back in ’sixty-eight. It had ninety-two years to run then. Now it has — what? Seventy-eight years?”

“Nine,” Dunjee said. “Seventy-nine.”

“That many? Well, that should be quite enough to see us out nicely, don’t you think?”

“What happened, Pauline?” Dunjee said patiently.

“You mean after New York?”

He nodded.

“Well, we went to Beirut and stayed there ever so long and after that we went to Berlin, but that didn’t work out very well so we came home and, well, here we are, Mopsy and me.”

“The cat.”

“That’s Mopsy up there on the books. Would you like a cigarette?” She reached into the pocket of the man’s gray cardigan that was nearly as long as her ancient miniskirt and produced a package of Senior Service. Dunjee took one, although he seldom smoked, and lit both cigarettes. Pauline Scullard inhaled deeply, finished her drink in three swallows, and smiled.

“How silly of me. An ashtray.” She rose and wandered around the room until she found what she was looking for. “Here,” she said and handed Dunjee an empty cat-food can. It hadn’t been washed.

“Tell me about it, Pauline.”

“Well, there’s really not much to tell. We came back from Berlin five months ago, six now, I suppose — here, to this place — and then Hugh went crackers, and so now I wear one of my three nice dresses when I visit him on Tuesdays and Fridays.” She smiled again, a strained, somewhat gray-toothed smile that Dunjee found a bit odd.

“He went crackers?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. We had to tuck him away in this ever so nice looney bin out in St. John’s Wood. Visiting days, Tuesdays and Fridays. It’s private and terribly expensive and suddenly I’m very poor. Do you remember when I was rich? I mean, two thousand a year forever. Well, back then that was rich, wasn’t it? I mean, I was almost an heiress.”

“You’re broke?”

She stared at him for a moment, then nodded. Dunjee decided that she was still an extremely attractive woman, despite her odd dress and tear-swollen eyes. Her complexion was still creamy, and hugging her head was still that same curly cap of straw-colored hair; and if she would only start brushing her teeth and quit weeping she wouldn’t look much different from the way she had looked in New York a dozen years ago, although she must be thirty-seven now, perhaps even thirty-eight.

Dunjee sighed, took out his wallet, removed some hundred-dollar bills without counting them, and held them out to her. “Here,” he said. “Buy yourself something pretty.”

She looked at the money but didn’t touch it.

“It’s Monopoly money, Pauline. I didn’t work for it.”

“A loan?”

“Sure.”

She took the money. “It’ll be a while before I can—”

“I understand.”

“You’re very sweet, Chubb.”

“Tell me about Hugh.”

She picked up the Scotch bottle from the floor, poured some more into her glass, and held the bottle out toward Dunjee. He shook his head. She put the bottle back down on the floor.

“It started in Beirut,” she said. “Then it got really bad in Berlin, so they sent us home and pensioned him off. We lived like this for almost two months. He wouldn’t let me touch anything. He sat here in this chair by the window and looked out through the shade. He said he was waiting for them. When he slept, he slept on the couch. I brought him his meals on a tray over there by the window. He didn’t eat much. So finally I went to see them, you know, them, and they sent a doctor over, a shrink, I think, and two days later they came and got him and put him away in that private looney bin. It’s ever so nice and somehow I get dressed every Tuesday and Friday and actually go out there and see him. Paranoid-schizophrenic is what they say. I’m afraid it may be contagious.”

“Could I see him?”

“Why?”

“I could take him some cigars. He used to like cigars.”

“He’s not all that well.”

“Is he rational?”

“Most of the time. His doctor is Jewish. Hugh thinks he’s with Mossad. I don’t know what he’d think about you. Where’ve you been?”

“Mexico,” Dunjee said. “Portugal.”

“Was it nice?”

“Quiet.”

“I suppose I could call, tell them you’re an old friend. He doesn’t have many, you know. All our old friends are now our new creditors.”

“I’d like to see him this afternoon.”

“All right. I’ll ring them.”

While she was making the call, Pauline Scullard looked down at the money she was still holding in her left hand. She seemed surprised at the sight of it. Cradling the phone against her left shoulder and ear, she used both hands to count the money. She counted it twice. When the call was finished, she turned to Dunjee and said, “You can see him at half past five.”

“I’ll take him some cigars.”

“There’s a thousand, four hundred dollars here, Chubb.”

Dunjee smiled. “Buy yourself something pretty.”

“A dress?”

“A dress would be nice.”

It was an immense old house on a quiet street about halfway between Lord’s cricket grounds and the place where the Beatles were once headquartered. The room in which Hugh Scullard sat on the bed opening the box of Cuban cigars faced the street. The room was on the second floor if you were American; the first if you were British. There were no bars on the window, no lock on the door, which was open.

Occasionally, a patient dressed in a bathrobe and slippers would shuffle by and glance in fleetingly, almost surreptitiously, as though afraid of being caught, and shuffle on. All of the patients seemed to be men. Middle-aged men.

Hugh Scullard, dressed in pajamas, a brown flannel bathrobe, and slippers, took a cigar from the box, sniffed it appreciatively, and offered the box to Dunjee, who shook his head and said, “I never learned to enjoy them, Hugh.”

“Pity,” Scullard said. “It’s all right for us to smoke, but they won’t let us have matches. There’s an electric gadget down the hall at the nurses’ desk that we have to use. Awful nuisance.”

“Here,” Dunjee said, and handed him a disposable lighter. “Keep it.”

Scullard smiled. “If they find this, they’ll probably take away my pudding for three days.”

He used the lighter to get the cigar going, puffed on it several times, inhaling just a little, and then held it out and gazed at it with total pleasure.

“How’d she look?” he said.

“Pauline?”

“Pauline.”

“She looked awful.”

Scullard smiled again. The smile made him look younger, almost as young as he really was, which was fifty. Without the smile he looked sixty, perhaps sixty-five.

“Still no bullshit, right, Chubb?”

“Not unless I’m working.”

“Are you?”

“Working?”

“Mmm.”

“A little,” Dunjee said.

“Not for them, I hope?”

“Who’s them?”

Scullard nodded toward the window. “Take a look out there. Across the street there’s a green car. A Volvo. There’s a man in it, thirty-five, perhaps thirty-six, swarthy complexion, glasses. He’s there every day.”

Dunjee rose, crossed to the window, and looked out. There was a green car, a Volvo, and the man behind the wheel had a swarthy complexion. A woman wearing a gray raincoat and carrying an umbrella over her white nurse’s cap hurried across the street and got into the car. The man kissed her. The car pulled away.

“He seems to be picking up his wife or girl friend,” Dunjee said. “I think she’s a nurse.”

“Oh, she’s a nurse all right,” Scullard said. “Nurse Ganor. Now what kind of name do you suppose that is?”

“Irish?”

Scullard spelled it.

“I don’t know,” Dunjee said.

“Israeli.”

“I guess I was thinking of Janet Gaynor.”

“Nurse Ganor,” he said, then added significantly, “Dr. Levin.”

“He’s your doctor?”

“I spotted him right away, of course.”

“How?”

Scullard smiled mysteriously. “He made a slip. A very tiny one. I didn’t let on, at least not to him. I told Pauline. She’s arranging everything. By this time next week, we’ll be back in Beirut.”

“You’re depending on Pauline?”

“Certainly. Why not?”

“Pauline doesn’t look so hot.”

“You think I’ve let her down, don’t you?”

“Not at all. It’s just that she’s under a strain. Why don’t you use somebody else?”

“Who?”

“The Libyans,” Dunjee said, seizing his opportunity and wishing he were back in Sintra, or even Mexico. “You used to know a lot of Libyans in New York. Or some anyway. With all that oil money now, they’ve got their fingers in a lot of pies.”

“The Colonel’s dead.”

“I know.”

“Still...” Scullard let his thoughts slide away. “You were in Mexico.”

“For a while.”

“I heard. I even read about it somewhere. The Mordida Man. What happened?”

“They started swapping prisoners is what happened,” Dunjee said. “Business fell off. In fact, there wasn’t any business any more.”

“Odd sort of business, I’d say.”

“Very odd.”

“About that other thing.”

“You mean the Lib—” Dunjee stopped when Scullard held a finger up to his lips. Scullard then cupped the same hand to his ear and used his cigar to point around the room. Dunjee nodded. Scullard pantomimed writing. Dunjee took out his ball-point pen and an envelope and handed them to Scullard, who wrote something on the envelope and handed it back to Dunjee.

On the envelope Scullard had written, “Call Faraj Abedsaid — Cultural Attaché — Lib. emb. Tell him I be ready Thursday week Pauline and Mopsy too.”

“All of you, huh?” Dunjee said.

Scullard nodded his thin long head and sucked in his cheeks, which gave his head an almost skull-like look. His dark eyes were suddenly bright and excited.

“You’resure this is the right guy?” Dunjee said.

“He and I are in the same line of work, you might say. He’s a petroleum engineer, a product of one of your own universities, I believe. Oklahoma. They do have a university in Oklahoma, don’t they?’

“It’s at a place called Norman.”

“Tell him—” Scullard paused, then licked his thin lips, smiled, and said, “Tell him I think I know exactly where to drill.”

“Okay,” Dunjee said. “I’ll tell him.”

As Dunjee moved down the hall past the nurses’ desk, a man in his thirties, wearing a neatly trimmed dark mustache and a three-piecesuit stepped out of an office. “Mr. Dunjee?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Dr.Levin. I wonder if you could spare a moment?”

“Sure.”

“We might go in here,” Levin said and led the way into the office, which contained a walnut table that doubled as a desk, two armchairs, and a couch. “Please,” Levin said and indicated one of the armchairs.

When they were both seated, Levin smiled and said, “You’re am old friend of Mr. Scullard’s, I understand.”

“We knew each other in New York.”

“I suppose you noticed the change?”

“He’s crazy as hell, isn’t he?”

Levin smiled again, but this time it was a sad smile. “I don’t share some of my colleagues’ almost pathological aversion to the word, so I an agree with you. He is crazy as hell.”

“Will he get any better?”

“I hope so.”

“He thinks you’re with Israeli intelligence. You and Nurse Ganor.”

“Bernie Levin, the dread Mossad agent.”

“He also thinks he’s going to bust out of here next week.”

Dr. Levin sighed. “Well, at least he still has plans for the future.”

“I also gave him a cigarette lighter.”

Dr. Levin sighed again and frowned. “I wish you hadn’t done that.”

“So do I,” Dunjee said.