Payback

by Sam Stewart

  “That’s for me to determine.”

  “And for me not to talk.”

  Mitchell took another bank­note from his wallet and held it with the other. “Talk,” he said, “fast.”

  “Underneath the name of the nightclub was a name.”

  “Keep going,” Mitchell said.

  “It said Eva Schoener.”

  “Keep going.”

  “That’s all. Nothing else. That was it.”

  “What else did he ask you?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “When he left—checked out—do you know where he was going?”

  The boy didn’t know.

  Mitchell pulled the last four-hundred from his wallet. “Now listen. For the sixty-dollar question,” Mitchell said, “you’re gonna show me your ledger.”

  The boy drew a blank.

  Mitchell pointed at the board. “The telephone ledger. The ledger where you write down the outgoing calls.”

  The boy made a face. “That’s illegal,” he said.

  “Legal,” Mitchell said, “pays two schillings flat.”

  The boy scratched his chin. “Make it sixteen hundred.”

  Mitchell said, “You’re going too far with this, kiddo.”

  “Then fourteen hundred.”

  “Hey buddy?” Mitchell said. “In another ten seconds, I am picking you up, I am breaking your neck, and I’m looking at the motherfucking phone book for free.”

  It got him the book.

  Room 124 had made two quick calls. He copied the numbers.

  Then he took the room key for 124 and put the money on the desk.

  ***

  The bed was a mess. It looked as though the Rose Bowl game had been played there and both sides had lost. A damp white towel at the bottom of the tub. The ashtrays were brimming. A whisky glass, still half full with the padding of some long-melted ice.

  He lit a cigarette. He had no idea what the hell he was doing; he was moving on impulse. Part of him was thinking, in the movies they’d’ve done it—grabbed the old room key and headed for the room. Miami Vice they’d’ve punched Herr Glauber and mutilated Hans, but they’d’ve come here anyway. Except in the movies they’d’ve found something too. They had to. The propman had put it there.

  Shit.

  He went over to the wastepaper basket: two crumpled packages of Chesterfield Lights and a match-book. The cover said, Krasdale Markets/Quality Products Since 1908. A crumpled piece of paper. He unfolded it and looked at a spiky writing in a ballpoint pen: Der Nachtlokal—Eva Schoener, it said.

  He hesitated, stood there poised in the doorway and peering through the room. Maybe he was trying to feel Mack’s presence, maybe catch a few vibes, a few stray electrics from a hard day’s night. But the only thing he caught was his own pragmatic, rather troubled reflection in the mirror on the wall.

  ***

  He called Janet from a booth, catching her at home before she chugged off to jog; it was 8 in L.A. He didn’t tell her where he was so she could lie with impunity to anybody else. He just wondered what was up.

  “Nightline,” she said. “They wanted you to appear. They were willing to handle it through their Guatemalan affiliate. Leo fielded it. Somehow.”

  “Good,” Mitchell said. “What else is up?”

  “You mean aside from Leo?” Janet said. “Well, you’ve got George who’s started muttering in the halls. George said you ate the contingency fund and you’re plunging into red. He likened it to a thermometer going well below zero. And our credit rating stinks. George said you pulled an international recall and it—”

  “Skip it,” Mitchell said. “What else?”

  Janet paused. “You got a threatening phone call.”

  Mitchell took a breath. “When?”

  “Around … five, five-thirty last night. I asked who’s calling and he said, ‘An old friend.’ Then he said something like, ‘Tell him if I don’t get the money on time he’s in serious trouble.’ I think he made about three syllables out of the word serious.”

  Mitchell doodled O’s. “What you do,” he said, “I think you sic a mike on the phone. If he calls again—”

  “You want me to give it to the cops?”

  He thought, bit his lip. “No,” he said. “Just … hold it. I want to hear it, that’s all.”

  He hung up and waited. He’d called from a phone center on Weisbaden Street, and he’d given three numbers to the lady at the desk. He lit a cigarette now and waited, going O O O with his pen.

  Both of Mack’s phone calls were answered by machines: one of them a smartass American voice going, “This is a machine, you want to say something, say it,” and now he got another one, German and corporate; Muzak in his ears; Teutonic oom-pah in a telephone booth. He waited, patiently, feeling pretty good because his luck appeared to hold. Mack had made the phone call at seven in the morning, according to the logbook, just before he left. So Mitchell felt certain he was pulling out a plum when the number had announced itself as Austrian Airlines.

  The plum was a prune. Austrian Airlines could answer him in English but it wasn’t any help. They didn’t have a record of a Robert R. Mitchell. On the other hand, he could have bought his ticket at the airport or even on the plane. Air Austria flew to only sixty-five cities.

  Which narrowed it down.

  16

  Leo’d had severe chest pains at midnight and telephoned his doctor. Leo was given an EKG plus a few thousand dollars’ worth of coronary tests. Leo was then given Alka-Seltzer tablets, two, with some water, and had belched his way to health.

  Sitting in the hospital after it was over, Leo made decisions, the kind of decisions that would get him through the night: Plan #1, he would have to get Mitchell to resign. For everybody’s benefit, especially Mitchell’s. Plan #2 was the backup. If Mitchell toughed it out with the Tates, then Leo would reluctantly release the unpleasant little story to the press.

  Leo’d been fiddling with Plan #3—refuse, resign—when the onions or the beans had erupted in his chest. Leo knew it wasn’t any onions, any beans, it was mortal terror—fear for the flesh and forget about the soul, He could think about the honorable man he’d once been, about the liberal causes he’d espoused in the fifties when the going had been tough, but he couldn’t make it work. The price of honor had been rising too high and the value of honor in the operative universe had fallen too low.

  Leo, in jail, wouldn’t be any Hammett, any Hollywood Ten, any martyr to justice. Leo, in jail, would be a cheat (on the one hand), a putz (on the other). Sitting there belching in the Cedars-Sinai, he’d made himself comfortable with Plan #2. A stand would be futile. Cy would do a job. And if Leo didn’t do it for him, somebody would.

  Said the Nazis at Bergen-Belsen, Leo thought; the cops in Johannesburg; the dealers on the street.

  Well … that was life.

  “But Jesus, it was only indigestion,” Debbie said. “You gonna lie there like a lump?”

  Leo in his blue silk pajamas, in the bed, in the little condominium he’d bought in her name.

  “I’m exhausted,” Leo said. “I got out of the hospital seven in the morning.”

  “And it’s two,” Debbie said. She was squinting at the clock. “It’s either ten after one or it’s five after two but it’s late,” she said somberly.

  Leo looked up. Debbie’d gone into the bathroom for a moment where she’d rinsed out her mouth. Debbie thought Scope was a contraceptive. She stood in the doorway in a peach-colored robe. Leo said, “What—you got a date with your lover?”

  Debbie didn’t answer. Then she said, “For Christ sakes, Leo, grow up.”

  But he heard her not answer, that fraction of a second, and he felt another bean start snapping in his heart. The telephone rang. Debbie went over and answered it, Hello, and then waited for a time. Leo thought, Yeah, that’s the lover, that’s the guy.

  Debbie said, “You’ll have to speak louder” to the phone.

  Leo started thinking of a very old son
g going back to the 60’s—the Beatles imagining the seedy indignity of being sixty-four. Only Leo’d been—what? Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, he’d just thought it was funny,

  Debbie said, “You’ve got a confusing kind of phone call,” and handed him the phone.

  Leo said, “Genius. She can’t read a clock and she’s confounded by a phone.”

  Debbie said nothing.

  He grabbed the receiver, heard a long blast of static and a voice saying something, could’ve been Japanese. Then Mitchell’s voice hollering, “Leo, hang up. I’m gonna call you right back.” Leo hung up.

  Debbie, at the dresser, arms across her chest, said, “Talk about genius.”

  The phone rang again.

  Leo picked it up and said, “Where the fuck are you? I’ve been trying to reach you—”

  “So I heard,” Mitchell said. “Janet said you called about nine thousand times,”

  “You’ve got the timing,” Leo said, “of an oyster in July.”

  “Meaning rotten.”

  “Well, at least you’re not stupid,” Leo said, “not verbally stupid, but strategically—Jesus—you leave me with a lamebrained story for the press—”

  “Are they buying it?”

  “You’re back in Guatemala,” Leo said. “On a previous engagement.”

  “Would I lie to you, Leo?”

  “Only on a weekday that ends in a ‘y.’ I gotta talk to you, Mitchell.”

  “So talk.”

  “In person.”

  “Impossible, Leo. For at least another week.”

  Leo made a sigh. Mitchell, undoubtedly, could live without the story, but Leo couldn’t live with this story by himself. He motioned to Debbie by pointing at the door. Debbie, half-dressed at the closet, didn’t move. Leo said to Mitchell, “Hold on for a second,” and to Debbie, “If you don’t get out of here now, this minute, you get out of here forever—understand? You go back to that crappy little studio in Venice and the chorus line at Freddy’s. You ready?” Leo said.

  Debbie shot a look and then ambled, with infuriating slowness, to the door.

  Leo leaned back against the blue-flowered pillows. He was sweating. “Okay,” he said to Mitchell. “Sit down. There’s a private detective called Schneider in New York …”

  Mitchell just listened. Once in a while, he injected, “Go on,” and then Leo kept going.

  And then something weird. Something totally peculiar in that Mitchell started laughing. Really all-out laughing. Leo’d heard other people laughing like that, one guy once when he’d landed on the jackpot in Chichi’s, Monte Carlo, and one guy once when his house had been entirely demolished by a storm.

  Leo said, “You want to just tell me why it’s funny?”

  Mitchell said, “It’s funnier than anyone could tell.”

  Leo hung up.

  Leo found Debbie, half-naked, in the kitchen, at the table with a Coke. He went over and kissed her. Debbie kissed back.

  “Tell me,” Leo said, “am I losing my grip on reality or something?”

  Debbie said patiently, “For God’s sake, Leo, it was only indigestion.”

  17

  The sign that blinked at Der Nachtlokal’s entrance was a man in the moon. He looked at you steadily and suddenly winked. The awning was gold and the doorman was costumed like an uber-lieutenant in the Prussian army, but he wasn’t any match for the bouncers in New York. No way, Mitchell thought. He let people in without a quarrel or a sneer.

  Inside it had a kind of an old-fashioned glitz. Backlit walls made of deep blue plastic with an iridescent glow that was here and there dotted with the pinpoint spotlights of imitation stars. The music was soft and the deep blue carpet even softer than the lights. It might’ve been a strip, and it could’ve been a tease, but it wasn’t, Mitchell figured out quickly, any joint.

  He handed his coat to a Chinese lady in a strapless arrangement at a blue-mirrored booth where a sign said MANTEL SCHEK, 85 SCHILLINGS, or about what it would take to send your coat to the cleaners. He told her, “No starch.” A girl in a bathing suit sauntered from the bar. She had a tray of cigarettes. She had Camels and Parliaments at ten bucks a box and a slow hot look that could have lit the whole tray.

  The next thing that happened was a chubby maitre d’ with a tourist-eating smile. He came over to Mitchell with a quick hard bow, a little clicking of the heels. “Und zo,” he said tightly, “is ze chentleman alone?”

  “Yep. Just me and my money,” Mitchell said.

  The maitre d’ gave it thought. Mitchell said fast, “I’d like to see Eva Schoener.” He was stabbing in the dark. The man got a suddenly stonewall expression that informed him he was right.

  “Is she expecting you?”

  “No, not exactly,” Mitchell said. “I’m a friend of a friend. I’m Mack’s friend, tell her. He saw her last night.”

  “And you vould be …?”

  “A friend of a mutual friend. I’m Mack’s friend, tell her.”

  The man made a face. “I vill see iff she’s aroundt. In ze meantime ze chentleman vould like to haff a front row table for ze show?”

  “Maybe later,” Mitchell said “In the meantime, tell her she can find me in the bar.”

  ***

  The Scotch in the bar went for twelve bucks a shot. Mitchell took his whisky to a sky-blue table in the corner of the barroom and lit a cigarette. The music that was coming through the lighted blue wall was “The One-Note Samba,” and he idly tapped out the rhythm on the table with a dark blue swizzle stick.

  Eva was a blonde. A real deadpan beauty. Everything going and nothing going on. She had the blue-blue eyes and the ash-blond hair and the tough cool mouth and the body of a dream and the arrogance of a stoplight.

  “Vell?” she said. “Vat?”

  Mitchell took his time. He lifted his eyes very slowly from the table and appeared unimpressed. She had her hair in a knot, very stiff, very high. She was wearing an evening gown of dark blue sequins—a slit up the side and a neckline that took a kind of suicidal plunge. He blew out his smoke and said, “Mack said to see you.”

  “Ja? About vat?”

  “About life,” Mitchell said. “Happenings. Events. Can I offer you a drink?”

  She remained on her feet, standing for a second with her back against the wall, kind of looking, Mitchell thought, like one of those ladies a magician throws knives at; gaudy but alert.

  “Zis is interesting,” she said. “Zis is very very strange.” She smiled. “You are vorking togezzer—zis is right?”

  He looked at her.

  “Oh you needn’t vorry,” Eva said. “He has told me all about it. I am vat he vas saying to me, vun of ze boyce.—You understand zis expression?”

  Mitchell nodded that he did.

  She leaned over slowly. “Zen come,” she said discreetly. “Ve vill go vere ve can sink.”

  Mitchell took his glass. He followed her back across the carpeted lobby to the one-note samba and the twinkling of the stars. Even her can had an arrogance, he thought. The light bouncing off of those dark blue sequins like moonlight on an ocean. It signaled an announcement, you’re out of your depths.

  She led him down a hall to a star-size dressing room and waved him through the door. “So—” she said. “Ve gonna make a shitpile—ja?”

  Mitchell cocked his head at her and watched her as she moved.

  “Ze first sing I personally do is buy a mink and zen a microvave,” she said. “Zis is very very qvick. You vant a grilled cheese sandvich? Like zat,” she said. “Zis is not kidding how it’s qvick.”

  Mitchell just looked at her and dragged his cigarette. He watched her as she rat-a-tat-tatted to the closet, her stilettos beating hell out of a white wooden floor. Everything was white. There was a white chaise longue and a white chair and a white dressing table and a white paneled screen.

  She was poking through the closet. Mitchell paced around and then tried to get comfortable on the dead wrong end of a white satin chaise. “On the other ha
nd,” he said. “I don’t want to put a damper on your shopping trip or something but suppose he doesn’t pay.”

  “Vat?” She was peering from the closet. “Vy not?”

  “Hey—I don’t know. I don’t know the man. I just think it’s possible he wouldn’t.”

  “Sink up,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Sink peppy—zis is right?”

  “Think positive.”

  “Ja.” She came out of the closet with suspenders and a whip. She was looking at her watch. “Ve have now ten minutes, tventy seconds,” Eva said. “You vould like to undo me?”

  No, he thought, no, he hadn’t heard that. It couldn’t’ve been nearly what she said. He could think about the radio station in New York: give me twenty-two minutes and I’ll give you the world. But ten …? No.

  On the other hand, maybe. She was moving right up to him. Adamant; brisk. Not exactly heartwarming or anything, but then on the other hand, ole Richard the Lionhearted didn’t seem to care. She stopped, turned around, a kind of fast about-face, pivoting in front of him and waving that star-spangled banner of her backside and pushing up her hair.

  He undid the zipper.

  She did a little fan dance with her shoulders and the whole house of sequins came crashing to the floor.

  She said, “Sanks,” and stepped over it, and rat-a-tat-tat, she was standing at the dresser. She was sitting on the chair kind of peering in the mirror. In nothing but her shoes and her little black panties and her huge white breasts. Mitchell cocked his head again and watched them in the mirror. They were show-stoppers. Christ. They were breath-stoppers. Shit. Big round ones. They’d get a big round of applause.

  “So—” she said. “Now. Zis is hurry-time, ja? Zis is rush, rush, rush.” She was poking at her eyes with a wand of mascara, her breasts grazing the table. “You know zis expression, ‘no rest for ze veary …’?” She was frowning in the mirror. “Mein Gott!” she said. “Ach! Vould you look at zis? Vould you chust look at zis?”