Payback

by Sam Stewart

  Mack was taller but nobody measured the dimensions of a corpse. Both of them were blond, that would be enough.…

  And then there was the interesting coincidence of names—the reason why a postcard for Robert R. Mitchell went to Mitchell R. Catlin. Symbols and portents. Predictions of Things. The fates wanted Mitchell R. Catlin for a corpse? he could give it to them, couldn’t he. Here. Right now. Throw death off the scent.

  Jesus. He was getting into something very weird. Half superstition and half pure logic.

  Whatever works out.

  The enormity hit him when he took off his dogtags and bounced them in his hand. If later there were parts of it he cursed and regretted, he couldn’t ever claim that, at least for that moment, he hadn’t thought it out.

  It occurred to him there, on that island in the mud, that it wasn’t only Mitchell Catlin he’d be ditching but a series of identities: Citizen. Grunt. Colorado State Intermediate Champion of 1967. Patriot. Man. Honorable man.

  But all of it paled against one very simple, very elemental thought:

  Listen, you asshole, you’ll DIE either way.

  Later, as he walked off, heading for the jungle, with Bob Mitchell’s rifle hanging from his shoulder and Bob Mitchell’s dogtags swinging from his neck, certain he was walking into imminent death, he felt himself finally in tune with the system, a man who was totally plugged into entropy and playing by the rules.

  He fought in that jungle, one against twenty, bagged seventeen, and was choppered into Tokyo with most of his right leg shredded to the bone, though the ankle wasn’t broken—it was lacerated, sprained.

  He was decorated, adulated, lionized, stuck.

  He was Robert R. Mitchell.

  Mitchell R. Catlin was officially accounted for as MIA.

  ***

  He was staring at the card.

  Standing at his dresser, dressed in a dark business suit, ready for dark business and interpreting the facts:

  Somebody offering his Catlin dogtags for half a million dollars.

  The family jewels.

  The cheap piece of tin with the personal engraving that he’d left on the body of a very dead man. In a very sick jungle.

  He could think about Who.

  He could think about How, but it would come back to Who. Find out Who and the rest would come after. What he needed, it occurred to him quickly, was a plan. He had no clear thoughts about what he ought to do. Or if what he ought to do and exactly what he would do would be the same thing. But looking in the mirror, for a fraction of a second he could almost feel relief; he could almost feel free. He could even look back, because whatever it was that was gaining on him—figure it was already here.

  9

  Joanna, in the back row of the crowded auditorium, scribbled in her notebook:

  Tate Meets the Press—Tate Factory Bldg—Noon (so they say)

  She looked at her watch now: 11:58 and the meeting room was jammed. Twenty-two rows seating fourteen across. Three hundred people and the one right in front of her would have to be the one who was wider than a truck.

  She doodled a gun, its muzzle-end pointed at the middle of his back. She fingered the trigger.

  Bang!

  It was Richard’s fault she was late and had barely got a seat. She’d arrived here in time. Richard had spotted her coming down the corridor and fixed her with a look—a really terrible look, all tight and appalled, like she’d walked into the locker room just before the game.

  He said furiously, “What are you doing here, Joanna?”

  She told him, a story.

  He said, “What a joke. Don’t tell me what you’re doing here, I know what you’re doing.”

  She said, “My goodness, Richard, what am I doing?” and he pulled her down the hall—literally pulled her, by the hand, like a kid—and then out to a terrace. “Well?” she said. “What?”

  Richard paced around. She decided, that moment, he reminded her of Nixon. A martyred bulldog.

  “Come on, Richard. Talk.”

  He’d have to talk fast and she found herself interested in what he might say. The truth would be that Richard didn’t like to be witnessed. Anywhere. Either in the john or in bed. A witness could testify, go before the court, interpret reality a very different way, could even be encouraged to abet the prosecution. It occurred to her that living, for Richard, was a trial; so of course he’d be a lawyer.

  What he said was, “It’s difficult to say this, Joanna, but you’re trying to exploit me. You used a position of advantage this morning and you’re trying to abuse my connections with the firm. So let’s get it down. If you’re imagining I’ll help you get an interview with Mitchell—”

  “Did I ask you to?”

  “Implicitly.”

  “Oh,” Joanna said.

  “And further,” Richard told her, “I wouldn’t have to guess that you’d been rifling my files.”

  “Well, there you have it, Your Honor. Case rests.”

  “So.” Richard nodded.

  Joanna shook her head. “I don’t believe this,” she said. “I really don’t believe this. Whatever’s in your files is in the library, Richard. Christ, I could’ve gone to the library, Richard.”

  “But you didn’t. That’s the point.”

  She said nothing for a second. Then she said, “Boy, you really lost me there, Richard. I mean figuratively too. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Point of what? Point of honor? Point of order? Point of departure? Decimal point? What the fuck are you talking about, Richard? The point is it’s absolutely pointless, is the point. So why don’t I come over and pack what I’ve got there and leave you with the keys.”

  He looked at her grimly. “It’s a shame, Joanna.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  Her last shot of Richard: he was standing there nodding philosophically at air; looking less like a lover who’d been losing his lover than a lawyer who’d fucked up a thorny little case.

  And oh Joanna, she’d been thinking as she turned, you mustn’t do this again. You should just go gently into those bad nights—get a cat, read a book, do some macrame, jog; give it up. You’re not even any heroine here. Richard was Richard. He was always Richard and you knew it from the start.

  She looked at her watch again: twelve on the nose.

  A man at the microphone was testing for a level.

  Richard was standing at the back, on the aisle, his head bent forward as he listened intently to a natty-looking fellow in a tan worsted suit.

  Leo Blackburn, she wrote in her notebook. Hollywood’s answer to questionable acts. Leo had handled the public relations for David Begelman and Stacy Keach. So judging it correlatively, why not for this? Everything was show business, wasn’t it? she thought. There was no business that wasn’t show business. No tragedy or damage that couldn’t be interpreted with hard-driven patter and a soft-focus lens. Wink, talk fast, throw sequins in their eyes.

  Richard and Leo were moving down the aisle.

  ***

  A reporter was asking, “… what you know about the poison. They’re saying it’s a legal synthetic narcotic. Is it anything you make?”

  Mitchell peered out: Preppy-looking kid, twenty-two, twenty-three. He angled his head. “What paper’re you with?”

  “Why?” the kid said. “Does it make any difference?”

  “No, I’m just figuring it wasn’t High Times, Rolling Stone, like that,” Mitchell said. “The drug here’s a variant of TMF—that’s tri-methyl-fentanyl. Synthetic heroin. It isn’t made from poppies, it’s made out of greed, but the technical difference makes it technically legal. What you’ve got here’s a question of It looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, it cooks, flies and dies like a duck, but it isn’t a duck because its molecules are different. So much for that. If it doesn’t make sense to you, complain to your congressman.

  “Now. What I know. It’s unbelievably potent. You want to know how potent? If one bad chemist worked eight hours straight, he c
ould make enough to fly every addict in America for twenty-four hours. You turn that around and you can kill fifty people with whatever you can feed them from the head of a pin. The addicts who shoot it call it Russian Roulette. It can take you on a moon-trip or scramble your brain cells or freeze you like a pillar or kill you like a shot. So in answer to your question, kid—no, we don’t make it.—The lady in the hat.”

  “Thank you. The stock market closed in New York and the story is your stock was down nine and a quarter. Have you got any comment?”

  Mitchell said nothing; then he said, “I do, but I don’t think you’d print it.”

  The answer got a quick tension-breaking laugh.

  ***

  The man right in front of her listed to the right and Joanna got a good open picture of the stage. She liked the way Mitchell was reacting to the laugh, unassuming but aware. She liked the way he stood there, not quite relaxed, in his sober single-breasted navy blue suit, blue shirt, blue eyes. She liked the way he looked …

  (… only, wait a second, wait a second. How could you know about the color of his eyes …?)

  She stared at the stage again, squinting through the distance, and suddenly she knew about everything there was. Exactly how his hair grew closely on his neck and the funny little mole in the center of his palm. His face seemed to come at her from two ways at once, from outside and in, and the absolute punch of it brought her to her feet.

  ***

  A TV reporter was telling him, “Police think it happened at the plant. If it did, do you believe that the product could survive?”

  Mitchell took a breath. Then he said, “I think I stopped beating my wife on September twenty-second.” He shrugged. “What the hell. That’s the kind of question you’re asking me, isn’t it? Because first of all I don’t think it happened at the plant, which doesn’t mean I’m closing my mind to the subject. We’re working as closely as we can with the police but I think they’ll find nothing. I think within a week they’ll find the packets were jimmied. But again—we’ve been launching our own investigation and we’re helping the police.”

  Mitchell looked around. He drank a little water and knuckled at his jaw. “I don’t know. Kind of looks like a duck, though, doesn’t it. Listen—” He paused, lifting his shoulders, pacing, having no idea what he was doing.

  “Okay. If it happened at the factory,” he said, “then, one: We wouldn’t know it with an ordinary test. What we’re talking here is basically a microdot amount. It’s a microdot in twelve out of six million packets. The only way you’d find it, you could open every packet, you could test it specifically for TMF. Scientific equivalent of opening the barn door every two seconds to be certain that the horses hadn’t turned into pigs. It’s one of those things you wouldn’t think of till after.”

  He took another breath. “So now you want to ask me if the product could survive. I don’t know. Maybe the real question is if civilization can survive. I don’t know. The only thing I know is whatever’s going on here is way beyond the question of quality control. Or of any control. The controls aren’t working. Our assumptions aren’t working. The social contract’s been broken with an axe and your lawyer can’t fix it. We seem to be living where the rules don’t apply and the more rules we add, the more they don’t apply.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t think any of us do. The only thing I can do is offer a reward.” He squinted at the room. “Say half a million dollars for any information that’ll lead us to the killer.”

  Zoom lenses zoomed; hands shooting up at him from all across the floor. Mitchell looked around again, slowly, and now for the first time, at ease.

  Then he saw the redhead. Watching him quizzically and leaning on the wall. First thing that came to him was, Jesus—Joanna. Then he thought, uh-uh; couldn’t be; no. Then he said, “The man by the window in the tweed.”

  ***

  She was sitting there waiting on the hood of his car.

  Forget it; he couldn’t run away from his car and besides, he was dreaming.

  He wasn’t sure if it was a good dream or a bad dream. He wasn’t really sure about anything today except that anything could happen. The car could levitate. Ghosts could swim around the parking lot air.

  He stopped, lit a cigarette, and peered across the lot.

  Thirty yards away, and she could’ve been anyone—just another shined-up frizzy redhead with an angle and a pose. From twenty: Joanna. Fifteen: she was Jo, and he thought about running but he wasn’t sure where—going towards or away? He could say to her, reasonably, “Sorry, miss, I think you got a little bit confused.” He could say, “Who me?” He could say, indignantly, “What are you talking about, lady? I’ve never been to Elton, Colorado in my life.” He could say anything or nothing. No comment. No capish.

  Five yards away and she was tilting her head at him. Hair like a halo made of sunrise and fire. A yellow-rose sweater and a cream-colored skirt that was almost to her ankles. Funky little shoes. Eyes like a fawn. Smart fawn; nothing you could toss on your fender.

  She could say, “Do I know you?” He could look at her, smile, say, “No.—Would you like to?” All things considered, he could do it like that.

  She said, “Mitch?”

  He said, “You really look beautiful, Joanna.”

  10

  He said in the car: “How it goes is, you’re not gonna ask me any questions and that way I’m not gonna tell you any lies.”

  She said: “I don’t know. How can I not ask you any questions?”

  He said, “I don’t know.”

  He said to her, “You wouldn’t believe it how I’ve missed you.”

  She said, “I don’t believe it. You know what it’s been?”

  He said, “Eighteen years.”

  She said, “Nineteen years.”

  And she said, “I’ve missed you.”

  He grinned in the mirror. He didn’t have the right to any happiness today but he couldn’t seem to help it. He wasn’t even certain if he trusted her or not.

  He said, “Do you believe you could trust me for a while?”

  She said, “I don’t know.”

  He said, “I don’t blame you.”

  He said, “There’s only one other thing I want to ask. You can ask it of me and I’ll answer it.”

  “What?”

  “Are you married?”

  “No.—Are you?”

  “Never,” he said. “And I lied, because I’ve really got one other question.”

  “What?”

  “What time you want to meet me for dinner?”

  ***

  Standing at the open window in his living room, sun going down, vodka and tonics, Brubeck fiddling with “Time on My Hands” and the sky turning purple and Mitchell couldn’t move. Joanna smelled of Joy and he could stand there indefinitely, breathing her in. He didn’t want to speak. She was standing there next to him, dressed in something longish and fuzzy and pink that reminded him partially of cotton candy. He wanted to touch her but he knew if he touched her he wouldn’t ever stop.

  “So,” she said. “What can we talk about, huh?”

  He said, “Lots of things.”

  “The weather. Current events.”

  He said, “I’d like to skip it with the current events. I’m kind of currented out. Past events, maybe.” He moved from the window and settled on the couch. He said, “Listen—this is kind of difficult, Joanna.”

  “Oh boy,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You’re the second man to tell me ‘this is difficult’ today.”

  “Hey listen. You think it’s the day?” Mitchell said. “I looked at my horoscope, it told me, Forget it.” He watched her intently as she paced around the room—moving to the bookshelves, moving to the bar. “What we have to get settled is the role of the reporter. Like are you or aren’t you.”

  She looked at him. “I am.”

  “I’m aware of that,” he said. “What I’m asking is, now, this minut
e. What I’m asking is, we aren’t doing Items for the Press. For the purpose of the Items, I’ll be Robert R. Mitchell.”

  “From Haeger, Wisconsin.”

  He nodded. “You did a little research,” he said. “Right now,” he said, “a lot of my life is in your hands. And my company’s life. Just so we both understand this, Joanna. I’ve been thinking all day I should’ve shaken my head at you and busted for the hills.”

  She leaned against the wall. “Okay,” she said. “So? Why didn’t you?”

  “Or ask me something easy,” Mitchell offered. “We could talk about the moth that said fuck it to the flame.”

  She smiled at him. “Oh.”

  “Big surprise,” he said, “right?”

  She was floating through the room again. “Listen, if you want to make it easy on yourself, you could’ve shaken your head till it tumbled, Mr. Catlin, I’d’ve chased you through the hills. I mean, feature it. A girl meets her one true love and then drops it?”

  He looked at her. “You want to roll it back?”

  She was standing in front of him. “What?”

  “Do the part about the one true love.”

  “Oh,” she said, sitting. “Well …” She was looking very slowly in his eyes. “My God. You’re my entire childhood, Mitch. You’re my womanhood, I guess. I think about the whole first half of my life, I can’t remember not loving you—”

  “Yeah. Yes you can. That weekend. The last time I saw you in Aspen. You remember?”

  “I remember I acted like an ass.”

  “Well … so did I.”

  “No,” she said thoughtfully. “You acted like a stud.”

  “No I didn’t,” Mitchell said. “Not with you. Not ever. With the groupies, I did. I was—what? eighteen? On my own for two years? Jesus, you were still back in Elton with your parents, and I was … I don’t know. I didn’t know what I was. I was the son of a drunk. I was a kid on the road. I was a bellhop—and suddenly, bingo, I’m a white-hot hope for the Olympics.” He shrugged. “I was trying to show off a little, huh?”

  “Well …” she said. “Yeah. Maybe. A little.”

  “Conceited … insufferable … shallow … absurd—what else did you call me?”