by Ross Thomas
“Maybe you'd like a little earnest money?” he said.
“I don’t think I mentioned it.”
“I’ve heard it talks,” he said, “but I never paid much attention.” He reached into his jacket’s inside breast pocket and pulled out a piece of paper that looked very much like a check. He handed it to me. It was a check and it was drawn in dollars on a New York bank. It was certified. It had my name on it. And it was exactly half of the nut I needed to open the doors of Bonn’s newest and friendliest bar and grill.
I handed it back to him. “I don’t need a partner. I’m not looking for one.”
He took the check, stood up, walked over to the table where the typewriter was, and laid it on the typewriter. Then he turned and looked at me. There was no expression on his face.
“How about another drink?” he asked.
I handed him the bottle. He drank and handed it back. “Thanks. Now I’m going to tell you a story. It won’t take long, but when I’m through you’ll know why you have a new partner.”
I took a drink. “Go ahead. I’ve got another bottle in case we run dry.”
His name, he said, as he sat there talking in the cluttered, half-lighted room, was Michael Padillo. He was half Estonian, half Spanish. His father had been an attorney in Madrid who chose the losing side during the civil war and was shot in 1937. His mother was the daughter of an Estonian doctor. She had met Padillo senior in Paris in 1925 while on a holiday. They were married and he, the son, was born the following year. His mother had been a striking, even beautiful, woman of considerable culture and accomplishment.
After the death of her husband she used her Estonian passport to reach Lisbon and eventually Mexico City. There she survived by teaching piano and giving language lessons in French, German, English and, occasionally, Russian.
“If you can speak Estonian, you can speak anything,” Padillo said. “She spoke eight without accent. She told me once that the first three languages are the hardest. One month we would speak nothing but English, the next month French. Then German or Russian or Estonian or Polish and back to Spanish or Italian and then start the whole thing over. I was young enough to think it was fun.”
Padillo’s mother died of tuberculosis in the spring of 1941. “I was fifteen then and I spoke six languages, so I said to hell with Mexico and headed for the States. I got as far as El Paso. I became a bellhop, a guide, and a part-time smuggler. I also picked up the fundamentals of bartending.
“By mid-1942 I decided that El Paso had offered all it was going to. I got a Social Security card and a driver’s license and registered for the draft although I was still under age. I swiped a couple of letterheads from two of the better hotels and wrote myself glowing recommendations as a bartender. I forged the managers' names on both of them.”
He hitchhiked through the Big Bend country of Texas up to Albuquerque, where he caught 66 all the way to Los Angeles. Padillo talked about Los Angeles in its palmy, scared, war-feverish days of 1942 as if it were a personal but long-lost Beulah Land.
“It was a crazy town, full of phonies, dames, soldiers and nuts. I got a job tending bar. It was a nice place, they treated me well, but it only lasted a little while before they caught up with me.”
“Who?”
“The FBI. It was August of 1942 and I was just opening up. The pair of them. Polite as preachers. They showed me their little black passbooks that said sure enough they were with the FBI and asked if I would mind coming along because the draft board had been writing letters to me for the longest time and they kept coming back marked ‘address unknown.’ And they were sure it was a mistake, but it had taken them five goddamn months to trace me and so forth.
“Well, I went downtown with them and gave a story of sorts. I made a statement and signed it. I was mugged and fingerprinted. And then they took me in to see an assistant U.S. attorney general and he gave me a lecture and a choice. I could either join up or go to jail for draft evasion.”
Padillo joined the Army and applied for cooks and bakers school. In late 1942 he was happily running the bar of an officers’ club at a small Infantry Training Replacement Center in north Texas, not too far from Dallas and Fort Worth, before someone, browsing through his records, discovered that he could speak and write six languages.
“They came at night,” he said. “The top sergeant and the CO. and this jerk in civilian clothes. It was all very bad, late TV. The olive-drab Packard, the silent ride to the airport, the tight-lipped pilots glancing at their watches while they paced up and down under the wing of the C-47. Pure corn.”
The plane landed in Washington and Padillo was shuffled from office to office. “Some of them were dressed in civilian clothes, some in uniform. I seem to remember that they all smoked pipes that year.”
They tested him on his languages. “I can speak English with either a Mississippi or an Oxford accent. I can talk like a Berliner or a Marseille pimp. Berlitz would love me.
“They sent me to Maryland then, where I learned some tricks and I taught them a few I’d picked up in Juirez. It was all very gung-ho with assumed names and identities. I said I was a towel boy in a Mexican whorehouse. The rest of the guys never busted me, but they liked to ask detailed questions about my occupation.”
When the Maryland training was over, Padillo was hustled back to Washington. It was a house on R Street, just west of Connecticut Avenue. They told him the colonel wanted to see him. “He looked very much like the Hollywood actor who used to play the colonel in all the VD movies they showed you in basic,” Padillo said. “I think it embarrassed him.
“He told me that I could make a very important contribution to what he called the ‘national effort’. If I would agree to do so, I would be discharged, given American citizenship, and a certain amount of money would be paid to an account in my name at the American Security and Trust Company. I could collect the money when I got back.
“So I asked him back from where.
“ ‘Paris,’ he said, sucked on his pipe, and stared out the window. He was having a fine time for a former assistant professor of French at Ohio State.”
Padillo spent two years in France with the underground, most of the time in Paris, where he operated as American liaison with the Maquis. After the war they shipped him back to the States. He collected his money from the bank, was handed a draft card that said he was 4-F, and received a discreet pat on the back from the General himself.
“I headed for L.A. It was still wacky in 1945, but it wasn’t like it was. But perhaps the reason I liked it is because it was so goddamned phony, I’d had enough of reality.
“I also had enough money so I could hang around the strip for a while. I got a few jobs as an extra and then started bartending in this small place on Santa Monica. I was even buying in when they came. You know: young, single-breasted suits, hats. They had a little job, they said, that would take two or three weeks. In Warsaw. Nobody would ever know I was gone, and there was a couple of grand in it for me.”
Padillo ground his cigarette out on the floor and lighted another. “I went. That time and maybe two dozen times more, and the last time they came around in their dark suits and their fraternity-house manners I told them no. They just got even more polite and reasonable and kept coming back. They started dropping hints about the fact that some question had been raised in Washington about the validity of my citizenship, but they were sure that if I took on this one more job everything could be straightened out.
“I got back part of the money I had invested in the place and headed east. I was working in Denver at the Senate Lounge on Colfax and they found me there. So I went to Chicago and from Chicago to Pittsburgh and from there to New York. In New York I heard about this place in Jersey. It was nice and it was quiet. Some college kids, some neighborhood traffic. I made the down payment.”
It was completely dark outside. The kerosene lantern gave off its soft warm glow. The Scotch bottle was getting low. The silence seemed thick and thoughtful.
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br /> “They came once more, and that time they weren’t polite. So now I’m doing to you what they did to me. I need a cover in Bonn, and you’ve been thoughtful enough to provide a perfect one.”
“What if I say no?”
Padillo looked at me cynically. “Been having a little trouble getting the necessary permits and licenses approved and issued?”
“A little.”
“You’d be surprised how easy it is if you have the right connections. But if you still insist on saying no, the odds are five hundred to one that you’ll never sell your first Martini.”
“It’s like that, huh?”
Padillo sighed. “Yes. It’s exactly like that.”
I took another drink and shrugged a shrug I did not feel. “O.K. It looks as if I have a partner.”
Padillo looked down at the floor. “I’m not sure I wanted you to say that, but then again I’m not sure I didn’t. You were in Burma, weren’t you?”
I said yes.
“Behind the lines?”
I nodded.
“There were some tough boys there.”
I nodded again. “I learned a little.”
“It might come in handy.”
“How?”
He grinned. “Tossing out the drunks on Saturday night.” He got up and walked over to the typewriter, picked up the certified check and handed it to me again. “Let’s go over to the club and spend some of this on getting stoned. They won’t like it, of course, but there’s not a hell of a lot they can do about it.”
“Should I ask who ‘they’ are?”
“No. Just remember you’re the cloak and I’m the dagger.”
“I think I can keep that straight.”
Padillo said, “Let’s get that drink.”
We got drunk that night, but before we entered the club’s bar Padillo picked up a phone and made a call. All he said was “It’s all right.” Then he cradled the phone and looked at me thoughtfully. “You poor bastard,” he said. “I don’t think you really deserve it.”
CHAPTER 3
During the next decade we prospered, adding such symbols of success as a touch of gray at the temples, a series of fast expensive cars, another series of fast expensive young ladies, bench-made shoes, London suits and jackets, and a comfortable inch or so around the waists.
There were also those certain days when I would drop down to the place around ten in the morning to find Padillo already sitting at the bar, a quart of dimple-bottle in front of him, staring into the mirror.
All he ever said was “I got one.”
All I ever asked was “How long?” He would say two weeks or ten days or a month and I would say: “Right.” It was very clipped, very British, just like Basil Rathbone and David Niven in Dawn Patrol Then I would help myself to the bottle and we would both sit there, staring into the mirror. I think it always rained those days.
We had made a good business team after Padillo taught me the fundamentals of saloon-keeping. He was an excellent host, and his ease with languages made the place a favorite with the embassy staffs in Bonn, including the Russians, who sometimes came by in twos and threes. I ran the business end, and our accounts at Deutsche Bank in Bad Godesberg grew pleasantly fat.
To compensate for Padillo’s “business trips” I occasionally flew to London and the States, presumably in search of new ideas. I came back loaded with catalogues of kitchen equipment, eye-catching contemporary furniture, and cocktail-time gimmicks. But we didn’t change the place. It just grew a little shabbier and a little more relaxed. The customers seemed to like it that way.
The trip to Berlin presumably had been on business. I had gone there to see about a bartender who could mix drinks American style. He was working at the Berlin Hilton, but when I told him he would have to live in Bonn, he refused. “Those Rhinelanders are jerks,” he said, and went on carving up Mr. Hilton’s oranges.
Herr Maas kept up his chatter as I drove through the narrow streets of Godesberg and parked in one of the two reserved spaces in front of Mac’s Place that Padillo had managed to wrangle from the city fathers. We got out and Herr Mass was still murmuring his thanks as I held the door for him. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, too early for the cocktail hour. Inside the place was as dim and dark as always, and Herr Maas blinked to adjust his eyes. At table number six in the far corner a man sat, a glass before him. Maas thanked me once more and headed toward him. I moved to the bar where Padillo stood watching Karl, the bartender, polish some glasses that didn’t need polishing.
“How was Berlin?”
“Very wet,” I said, “and he didn’t like Rhinelanders.”
“A home-town boy, I take it?”
“Very.”
“Drink?”
“Just some coffee.”
Hilde, a cocktail-hour waitress, came up and ordered a Steinhaeger and a Coke for Herr Maas and the man he came to Bonn to meet. They were the only customers in the place.
“Who’s your friend?” Padillo asked, nodding toward Maas.
“A fat little man who carries a big fat gun. He says his name is Maas.”
“I don’t care for guns,” Padillo said, “but I care less for the company he keeps.”
“Know him?”
“Just who he is. Vaguely attached to the Jordanian Embassy.”
“Trouble?”
“Something like that.”
Karl slid my coffee over to me.
“You ever hear of a seven-layer mint frappe?” he said.
“Only in New Orleans.”
“Maybe that’s where this chick was from. She comes in at lunch and orders one. Mike never taught me to make no seven-layer mint frappe.”
“A seven-layer mint frappe,” I said automatically. A war orphan, Karl had picked up his English just outside the Army’s huge PX in Frankfurt, where, in his early teens, he had made a precarious living by buying cigarettes from soldiers and selling them on the black market. He was a good bartender, but his grammar needed a little polish. His Americanese had virtually no German accent.
“So what did you do?” I asked.
He didn’t get the chance to say. Padillo grabbed me by the left shoulder, kicked my legs out from under me, and slammed me to the floor. I turned as I fell and glimpsed the pair of them, faces covered with white handkerchiefs, running toward the table where Maas and his friend sat. They fired four shots and the sound hurt my sinus cavities. Padillo had fallen on top of me. We got up in time to see Herr Maas darting out the door, his shabby brief case banging against his fat legs. Hilde, the cocktail waitress, stood frozen in a corner, a tray forgotten in her hand. Then she screamed and Padillo snapped at Karl to go over and shut her up. Karl, pale under his sun-lamp tan, moved quickly from around the bar and began talking to the girl in what he intended to be soothing words. They only seemed to make her more upset, but she at least stopped screaming.
Padillo and I went over to the table where Herr Maas and his late friend had sat. The friend was sprawled back in his chair, his eyes staring fixedly at the ceiling, his mouth slightly open. It was too dark to see any blood. He had been in life a small, dark man with smooth black hair that was combed straight back in a pompadour with no part. His features were sharp with a hooked nose and a weak chin that seemed to have been in need of a shave. He may have been quick in his movements, volatile in his talk. Now he was just dead—only a dummy that presented problems.
Padillo looked at him without expression. “They’ll probably find four slugs right in his heart in a two-inch group. They seemed like pros.”
I could still smell the shots. “You want me to call the Polizei?”
Padillo looked at me absently and gnawed some on his lower lip. “I wasn’t here, Mac,” he said. “I was down in Bonn having a beer. Or up on Petersberg checking the opposition. Just so I wasn’t here. They wouldn’t have liked me to be here, and I’ve got to catch a plane tonight.”
“I can fix it with Hilde and Karl. The kitchen help’s still on their afternoon b
reak, aren’t they?”
Padillo nodded. “We’ve got time for a quick one before you call.” We walked over to the bar and Padillo went behind it and took down the dimpled bottle of Haig. He poured two stiff ones. Karl was still over in the corner making soothing noises to Hilde, and I noticed his hands were patting the right places.
“After I catch that plane tonight, I should be back in ten days, maybe two weeks.”
“Why don’t you tell them you’ve come down with a bad cold?”
Padillo took a swallow of his drink and smiled. “I don’t much care for this trip. It’s a little more than routine.”
“Anything else I should know?”
He looked as if he wanted to say something; then he shrugged. “No. Nothing. Just keep me clean. Give me two minutes and then call the cops. O.K.?”
He finished his drink and came around from the bar. “Have fun,” I said.
“Same to you.”
We didn’t shake hands. We never did. I watched Padillo go out the door. He didn’t seem to walk as quickly as he once had. He seemed to stand just a little less straight.
I finished my drink, walked over and helped comfort Hilde for a moment, and fixed it up with her and Karl about how Padillo wasn’t there when the small dark man had had his last drink of Coca-Cola. Then I walked over to the bar, picked up the phone, and called the police.
After that I sat down at the bar and wondered about Padillo and where he was going. I thought about that, but not too much. Then I wondered about Herr Maas and his slight, dark friend and about the masked pair who came in and stopped him from living. By the time the police arrived I was wondering about myself, and I was glad when they came so I could stop that and start lying about something else.
CHAPTER 4
They arrived in grand style: their oogah siren heralded their arrival by a full two minutes—plenty of time for a competent second-story man to make it down the back stairs and out into the alley. Two jack-booted, green uniformed troopers burst in batting their eyes against the dark. Number one stalked over to the bar and asked if I was the citizen who had telephoned. When I said yes, he turned and proudly announced the fact to number two and a couple of men in civilian clothes who had also moved in. One of the non-uniformed policemen nodded at me and then they all went over to look at the body.