by Sam Stewart
He leaned in the doorway of the kitchen for a second and told her he was down to his last cigarettes. He said, We’ve got a lot more talking we should do, which means I’ve got a lot more smoking I should do, so I’ll be back in a minute.
She told him he’d better take his overcoat with him. He said he’d be fine. As he left, she said, “Asshole, you’re gonna catch a cold.”
In a booth on the corner, he got out the numbers that he’d copied from the Post; he punched out a 1, and then an 800 code and then the next seven digits.
The phone rang twice. A machine came on and said, Thank you for calling TWA. All reservation clerks are busy at the moment. Please hold on.
Mitchell held on. He held through Perdido, Hernando’s Hideaway, Pennies from Heaven, and Strangers in the Night.
“Yes?” a voice said.
Mitchell said, “You’ve got a flight six-twenty-one?”
“Yes,” the voice said.
“Where’s it go to?”
“Vienna.”
14
Mitchell checked into the Mayfair Regent, Park and 65th. The desk clerk put a little English on his eyeballs and asked about the luggage. Mitchell said his luggage would arrive within the hour. He’d traveled pretty light; he’d come to New York with an electric razor and ten thousand dollars.
He got to a room that was a hundred-and-ninety-seven dollars’ worth of room and was nothing very special. He telephoned Janet and found her, at 9:02, at her desk.
Mitchell said, “I need you to do me a gigantic personal favor.”
Janet said, “The last time a man asked me to do him a gigantic personal favor, it turned out the favor was to give him a divorce.”
Mitchell said, “Janet?”
“What?”
“No kidding, okay? What I need you to do now is go to my apartment and look for my passport. I think where I left it is the table in the hall. Then you want to look for the fastest most intelligent messenger on earth and send it to me.”
“Send it? Where are you?” Janet said.
Mitchell told her where he was; he didn’t say where he was going. He discussed the disposition of a couple of matters he expected to arise and repeated that he had to have his passport in time to make a nine o’clock plane.
Janet said she’d hustle an Elite Courier, the fleetest of the fleet. “They actually send little envoys with briefcases wired to their ankles. And considering it costs about fifty million dollars, is there anything else he can bring you while he’s up?”
Mitchell said a little clean underwear would do, if she could stick it in a duffle bag.
“For how many days?”
“Maybe three,” Mitchell said. “And a robe. I’ve got a dark brown terry-cloth robe.”
“And I’d love to sit and talk about your lingerie,” she said, “except I’d better get going.”
“I love you,” Mitchell said. “Don’t ever divorce me.”
The room service waiter brought a tunafish sandwich and a large glass of milk, both of which were hidden under large silver domes. The waiter had set up the table by the window. Mitchell brought the tunafish sandwich to the bed, along with the management’s freebie contribution, a copy of the Times.
The story, Day Two, was at the top of page one:
FBI GIVES TOP PRIORITY
TO NATURALITE DEATHS
Company Offers a Record Reward
The New York Times, which had covered the conference on Monday afternoon (Jesus Christ—only yesterday, he thought) described him as “direct … candid … articulate” and “showing the strains.”
How about that? If you think I was showing them yesterday, he thought …
He drank a little milk and it came to him he wasn’t really feeling any strain; he was tensed, revved up, alert—the way he’d felt before a downhill race. He could see himself flexing and tramping in the snow, punching his fist against the leather of his glove, blowing his breath into Colorado air. His mind would be a blank; he’d anticipate nothing, neither victory nor loss. He’d think about nothing; he’d wait, and then try.
“Number one-forty-seven. Mitchell Catlin, The Colorado Kid.” BANG! “Seventeen but he’s going like sixty. Ladies and gentlemen, look at him go!”
Down and down and down he goes. And where he stops …
In 1970, Mitchell’d made a phone call to the army’s National Records Center, St. Louis, Missouri. He used Mack’s military serial number that he’d read off the dogtags and pinned down a couple of military facts: that Catlin was officially missing in action, and that Mack had been born in Haeger, Wisconsin, on September 22, 1948.
From there it was easy. For a four-dollar payment, Haeger was happy to provide him with a photostatic copy of his birth, so he later got a passport as Robert R. Mitchell.
If you’d asked him this morning, he’d have said, flip a coin. Either Mack had done a similar process in reverse and would now have a passport as Mitchell Catlin, or he’d done it more directly and would travel as himself.
Mitchell wasn’t sure. On the other hand, he figured it was something he should know. From the phone booth, earlier, on Marian’s corner, talking to the airline and booking his ticket to Vienna on the spot, he decided he was one or two questions from the truth. He started with this one, an “Oh, by the way …” His secretary’d booked him on the flight for last night and he couldn’t remember if he’d told her to cancel. “So you want to look it up?”
He read the graffiti on the innards of the phonebooth and listened to the clicks and clacks of the computer.
The girl said, “No sir, it seems she didn’t cancel.” The voice a little wounded. “We’d also made a booking for the Wien Hotel, or at least we sent a telex.”
Mitchell said, “Oh,” and then grinned against the air. He felt like a guy who’d put a couple of pennies in a gumball machine and got a waterfall of diamonds: The Wien Hotel.
He flattened his voice. “And did she book me a return?”
“No sir. It’s basically an open-end ticket. Just the way you’re doing it now, sir,” she said.
Mitchell, in a bedroom with a tunafish sandwich, could think about the various levels of his luck, like the levels of irony in blockbuster fiction, but he couldn’t keep it straight. The good and the bad luck were petrified together in the same ball of wax.
As he and Mack were in the same ball of wax. All balled up. Or maybe they were something like colliding meteors, two foreign bodies slammed together so hard they’d absorbed each other’s atoms and changed each other’s course.
Everything connected to a moment in the rain—the egg that gave birth to unfathomable chickens, who kept laying eggs. Cause and Effect. Things breeding Things.
Jeremy, he thought, had been one of those things.
Jeremy Tate, who’d come weeping to the VA ward in San Francisco; Jeremy in search of that now (and retrospectively) legitimate hero whom his daughter might have married if his daughter had survived. Ginger’d crapped out. Ginger, at the wheel of a shiny Lamborghini that was Daddy’s little present, had rammed it at a wall. A wall on which Jeremy had now seen the writing. His sister had warned him: he was trying to come between Romeo and Juliet; acting like a pigheaded bigot, Margaret said, but Jeremy’d been adamant. Just as he’d been adamant in sending off his son Alexander to the wars “because no son of mine will take the fruits of this country if he doesn’t take the pits.” Alex took the pits and got splattered over acreage of napalmed countryside where nothing, neither fruits nor vegetables, would grow in any calculable future. Jeremy had doubly seen the errors of his ways. He’d come to seek Mitchell as he’d come to seek a partial absolution for his sins. Chastened and humbled, he’d tracked Mitchell down. And Mitchell, afloat, with no future, no past, alone in that envelopment of metal and woe where they’d told him he’d never get around without a couple of crutches and a brace, had squinted at the ceiling, from which all guidance might eventually drop, and decided, what the hell.
That he’d later come to
have an affection for Jeremy, as well as to play upon his born-again feelings of Humanity to Man, getting him to drop into charitable functions and to drop his Emersonian perspectives on the world, wasn’t nearly to the point. The point being simply and decidedly this: It was Mack’s good fortune that Mitchell had inherited along with his tags.
He’d not only stolen Mack’s death, but his life; and whatever Mack had done, as Mitchell saw it now, it was strictly and inexorably Mitchell’s doing.
***
He turned on the radio and got the click-clacks of an all-news station. Give us twenty-two minutes and we’ll give you the world. Click-clack, click-clack. There were no new deaths in the Naturalite case. There were no new leads. No old leads either. On the other hand, according to the L.A. police, there was “one very interesting angle that emerged and to which we’re pursuant.” Mitchell stopped to wonder what the angle might be and where cops learned to talk. Click-clack, click-clack. The company’s stock, which had yesterday plummetted by nine-and-a-quarter, was today holding steady.
Mitchell got through to the L.A. Task Force and asked for Ortega. “You’re pursuant to an interesting angle,” Mitchell said.
Ortega said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Hey, not me,” Mitchell said. “Your inspector. On the news.”
“Oh,” Ortega said. “That one,”
“As opposed to all the others,” Mitchell said.
There was silence, a pause.
“Where are you, by the way?”
“Me?” Mitchell said. “In bed. Where’re you?”
“On the phone,” Ortega said, “—where your secretary told me you were off in Guatemala.”
“Well … I’ll be leaving any second,” Mitchell said. “I just thought I’d say good-bye.”
“Or auf Wiedersehen?”
“No.”
“Okay,” Ortega said. “Because I wouldn’t want to see you throwing money after bad.”
“Have you got something?”
“Yeah, we do,” Ortega said. “We got somebody bet about a hundred thousand dollars that your stock was gonna drop. That was Friday afternoon. And you know what the odds’ve been?”
“Thirty-three to one.”
“Pretty good,” Ortega said. “Any buyers come to mind?”
Mitchell lit a smoke. “Anyone with a hundred-thousand dollars in his fist.”
“Yeah. It’s not a whole lot of money anymore. You got a teenage executive’ll do it in a month. You got a dope guy, forget it. He could do it in a day.”
“Very likely,” Mitchell said.
“Very likely and a half. And the poison. We could play a little game,” Ortega said. “I mean, why not cyanide? Strychnine? Or something’s maybe easier to get. You ever think of that angle? Heroin. Synthetic heroin. Why?”
Mitchell didn’t answer.
“Cuz he’s got it in the house. That’s why,” Ortega said. “He’s a chemist. He’s a dealer. He’s a head. I don’t know except he’s tangled up with drugs.”
Mitchell didn’t answer.
“Or not,” Ortega said. “I’m kind of spitballing.”
“Oh.”
There was silence for a time.
Mitchell said, “The angle you’re pursuing …”
“Is the stock. It’s the stock market angle. Not that we could take it very far,” Ortega said. “We kind of stand at the shoreline and wave at it.”
“Offshore bankers,” Mitchell said.
“You got it. In Panama, Nassau, Geneva—”
“In Vienna?”
“Don’t forget about Liechtenstein. Yeah. He’s ahead,” Ortega said. “About two million dollars, is the figure I’ve been given, and there’s nothing we can do, and the point is, you want to give him two million more.”
“In Guatemala?” Mitchell said.
“Yeah. Okay. All right,” Ortega told him. “Fine. Up to you.” He whistled through his teeth. “Cuidado, amigo. You know what that means?”
“Be careful.”
“And if not—be good,” Ortega said.
15
It was snowing in Vienna. The way Mitchell saw it—crawling in a taxicab, radio blasting him with FM Strauss—it might have been a city in a glass paperweight. Miniature, frozen, calm and unreal. He watched it going by now, gingerbread and Gothic, block-long palaces every other block. He could find another image: City mit Schlag; whipped cream topping on a pastry-shop world. Moving up the Ring, that continuous boulevard that ran around the whole Inner City like a moat, he could picture it animate with two-horse phaetons, with Hapsburg royalty spitting on the Volk, Maria-Theresa saying let ’em eat strudel and the Austrian peasantry grinning like a fool. It wasn’t too far from the Hapsburgs to Hitler; the music had been louder but the dance was the same.
They passed the university, its architecture dating from the 17th century, and turned off the Ring to the more or less Left Bank quarter of the town. Cobblestoned streets and the tiny cafés and eclectic bookstores that blossom on the turf.
The driver pulled up at a 19th-century limestone facade. A gilded sign that said Hotel Wien. It looked, from the front, like a forty-room establishment, something with a listing like “charming but cheap” in American guidebooks, and tidy enough to rate a Michelin star.
The lobby was small but not without pretension. Oriental carpeting and dark, almost ominous red velvet drapes that blocked out the daylight. A couple of stiff-looking red velvet chairs. Over to the side was an onyx counter with a switchboard on it and a porter behind it—a teenage troublemaker buried in a book, its cover showing two bare tits and a knife. A second counter, made of shinier onyx, had a small bowl of flowers and a middle-aged clerk. Mitchell wondered idly if the clerk and the porter ever spoke to each other and what they’d have to say.
He moved to the desk. The clerk did a formal and obsequious smile and said, “Ja. Guten Tag.”
Mitchell said, “Does anyone sprechen Sie English?”
The clerk said, “A little,” and widened up his smile. It didn’t get any better, it just got bigger.
Mitchell put his bag down and said, “You have a Mr. Mitchell from the States. From America. He checked in yesterday, I think.”
The clerk said, “Ja. Herr Mitchell check in, Herr Mitchell check aus.”
Mitchell closed an eye. “Out,” he said. “Gone?”
“Gone,” the clerk said. “Very firshtick in ze morgen.”
“When?” Mitchell said. “How early? What time?”
The clerk looked over at the rebel with the book. “Hans—Herr Mitchell. Wann ging der Herr weg?”
“Nein,” the kid said.
“Was bedeutet das, ‘nein’?”
“Nine,” the kid said. “O’clock. Checked out. About an hour and a half ago.”
Mitchell said to Hans, “Did he say where he was going?”
“Nein,” the kid said, and retreated to intense concentration on his work: Studies in Advanced Sado-Sexual Perversion in the European Novels of the Twentieth Century.
“Yeah. Okay,” Mitchell said. “I’d like a room.”
***
It was small and clean. It had a serviceable dresser and a straight-back chair and a hard double bed; a night table holding a built-in radio, a built-in lamp and a big black telephone that looked like a boot. He picked up the phone and then waited while the kid finished Chapter Twenty-seven and decided on a plug.
“Was nehmen Sie?” The voice had a twinge of annoyance.
“Hans,” Mitchell said, “we’ve got business to discuss. In private. At your desk. So when do you think you could arrange for that, huh?”
“Shit. What’s the deal—you want a hooker?” Hans said.
“I want to talk,” Mitchell said. “To you. At your desk. I want to put a little silver in your come-spattered hand and I want some information.”
“At noon,” the kid said, “Herr Glauber takes a break. Herr Glauber leaves without variation on the dot and is back within the hour.”
<
br /> Mitchell took a walk. He had a beer and a sandwich at a side-street tavern with a student clientele. The students around him were engagingly scruffy and furiously earnest, the boys pontifical, the girls on the make. There were times he felt old.
Hans was alone, presiding at the switchboard with a slow-dripping cigarette hanging from his mouth. He was eighteen, tops, and a student of everything Bogart ever did. He had stringy blond hair, a few pimples on his chin.
Mitchell said, “Hi.” He had four hundred schillings—a twenty-dollar bill—waiting crisply in his hand.
Hans said, “You better make it eight hundred schillings.”
“Hey punk.” Mitchell squinted. “You don’t even know what I’ll be asking for yet.”
The porter just nodded. “But whatever it is if you’ll hit me with a four-note, you’ll hit me with an eight.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Mitchell said. “If I’d’ve had your brains when I’d’ve been your age—”
“You’d be rich.”
“I’d be in jail.” But he grabbed another banknote and put it on the desk. “Herr Mitchell,” he said, “who checked in yesterday and checked out this morning—what room was he in?”
“Room one-twenty-four.”
“Did he have any visitors?”
“No.”
“Did he get any phone calls from anyone?”
“Not that I know.”
“Did he ask you for directions?”
“Directions?”
“Say how to get from this place to that.”
“Uh-huh.” The boy nodded.
“Good,” Mitchell said. “Then directions to where?”
The boy said nothing, just looked at him. The butt dripped ashes on his pants. Mitchell took another four-hundred from his wallet but held it in his hand.
“Der Nachtlokal.”
“What the hell’s that?” Mitchell said.
“It’s a nightclub. It’s what you call in English, it’s a strip.” The boy thought it over. “It’s a striptease joint.”
“Uh-huh. And you know all the words,” Mitchell said. “Did you tell him to go there? I mean … did you recommend it to him?”
“No. He already knew it. He had it written down. In a notebook, okay? The name of this nightclub. He couldn’t pronounce it so he showed it to me.” Hans looked quickly at the money. “The next part is worth a little more,” the boy said.