Backup Men

by Ross Thomas

  There was nothing salvageable left. The mirror that had hung above the writing desk now lay in tiny pieces on the floor. There was no glass in the windows. There was something brown splashed on the walls just above the ruined writing desk, but on close inspection it turned out to be coffee.

  Padillo turned slowly, giving the mess that was the room a careful survey as he stuck the automatic back into the waistband of his trousers. My revolver was still in my jacket pocket because I had forgotten about it again. Padillo turned to look at me, shaking his head in mild disbelief and disgust that seemed not so mild. The disbelief was directed at the room, the disgust at himself.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” he said.

  “It lacks a little something. Such as gore.”

  “No blood-spattered walls. No unattached limbs lying about.”

  “Which means,” I said, “that there was nobody home.”

  “It also means something else.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve been sacked. Fired.”

  I gave the room another elaborate glance. “We probably deserved it. That’s just an offhand opinion, of course.”

  Padillo bent down and picked up a piece of blackened foam rubber and sniffed it before tossing it away. “Grenades. Three of them.”

  “I thought I heard three.”

  Padillo looked about the room once more, as if searching for something, perhaps a farewell note. “They had to have some reason.”

  “The king and Scales?”

  He nodded.

  “Reason for what?”

  “For running out on us.”

  I gave the room one last final look. What hadn’t been demolished had been ruined. “If they had a reason,” I said, “I think I know what kind it was.”

  “What kind?”

  “A sound one.”

  19

  PADILLO and Wanda Gothar waited in the Ford while I went into the motel office where the sad-eyed young room service waiter was holding down the front desk. The night manager was back at the bombed-out room, clucking his tongue over the damage and waiting for the police to arrive.

  “Hey, didja hear those bombs?” the young man asked. “Big boom, huh?”

  “I was over there,” I said.

  “Didja know those two guys?”

  “Just casually. They said they had to catch a plane and gave me some money to take care of any charges they might have run up.”

  “They didn’t have no charges,” he said. “That was the first thing Hinckle checked. Hinckle’s the night manager.”

  “He didn’t check with me,” a woman’s voice said. I turned and a middle-aged woman with frosted hair and green eyeshadow glared at me from her post at the switchboard. “I got T and C on that long-distance call they made and didn’t pay for.”

  “T and C’s time and charges,” the young man said, assuming my ignorance.

  I reached for my wallet. “I’ll be glad to pay it.”

  “They should’ve paid it themselves,” the woman said. “A lot of people think they can skip out on their phone bills here just because it’s a motel and they have to pay in advance. The telephone company don’t like it either.”

  “To hell with the phone company,” the young man said, but not too loudly.

  “If you’ll just give me the time and charges,” I said.

  “We’re gonna start making people put their home phone numbers down when they register,” the woman said. “Then if they call Honolulu or New York and try to skip out without paying, they’ll get stuck for it when they get their monthly bill. The phone company said they’d cooperate.”

  “That’s Mrs. Hinckle,” the young man said. “She used to work for the phone company. She thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world. You know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think it’s a monopoly and I got a way to beat it.”

  “How?” I said, interested in spite of myself.

  “You know how when you get your monthly bill the phone company sends along an envelope that you can mail your payment back to them in?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, all that envelope’s got on it is just their name. Not yours, just theirs. So you know what I do?”

  “No.”

  He looked around as if he were about to slip me the formula for transforming lead into gold. “I don’t put no stamp on it,” he whispered. “And they gotta pay for it.” He went on hurriedly, still whispering. “Now suppose everybody did this. How many people got phones, maybe fifty, a hundred million?”

  “Say fifty.”

  “So fifty million times six cents is how much? That’s three million dollars a month the phone company gotta pay in postage due if everybody did it.”

  “Ingenious,” I said. “I’ll spread the word.”

  “We gotta start small, but it’s coming.”

  “What?”

  “The revolution, man.”

  Mrs. Hinckle bore down on me, clutching a slip of paper. “Number twenty-six owes eleven dollars and twenty-eight cents for a call to Washington. That’s D.C., not the state.”

  I handed her fifteen dollars. “Could I have a receipt, please?”

  She nodded and went back to her switchboard. From outside, I could hear the wail of a police siren. I estimated it to be two blocks away. “And the number that was called, too, if you don’t mind.”

  She looked up and glared at me again, but nodded, and kept on writing. I thanked her when she handed me the receipt and she managed a “You’re welcome.” As I turned away, the would-be revolutionary whispered, “Don’t forget about the phone bill deal.”

  “I couldn’t,” I said. “It’s a great step forward.”

  On the way to the Ford I looked at the Washington number that Mrs. Hinckle had written on the receipt. I didn’t recognize it, but I have a bad memory for phone numbers. Just as I opened the door on the driver’s side, the police car swept into the motel entrance, its siren dying with a reluctant moan. The two uniformed cops gave me a quick glance, but apparently saw nothing that interested them. I got in the car quickly, started the engine, and headed down Van Ness. Wanda Gothar was in front, Padillo in back. I handed him the receipt.

  “They made a call to Washington,” I said. “Does that number mean anything to you?”

  He read it, said no, and handed it up to Wanda. She shook her head and gave it back to me. “They must have talked for five or six minutes at least,” I said.

  “All right,” Padillo said, “let’s go to the St. Francis.”

  “You don’t think that you’re going to find them there, do you?” Wanda said, not trying to conceal the sarcasm in her voice.

  “I’m not trying to find them right now,” he said. “At ten o’clock tomorrow that’ll be easy. The king’ll be down at the oil company with his fountain pen uncapped—if he’s still alive. But sometime between now and then Kragstein is going to learn that those three grenades didn’t kill anybody. So he’s going to start looking. First, he’ll look for the king and Scales and when he can’t find them, he’s going to start looking for us. I want to make it easy for him and the St. Francis will be the first place he’ll look because he knows that’s where you’ve been staying.”

  Wanda Gothar turned around in the seat so that she could face Padillo. “For the last ten minutes I’ve been asking you questions and you haven’t had any answers. You don’t know why Kassim and Scales vanished. You don’t know where they might have gone. You don’t even know how they managed to slip by you.”

  “Fog,” I said. “A pair of elephants could have slipped by.”

  “They weren’t elephants,” she snapped. “They were two men who’re none too smart and not nearly clever. Something frightened them or forced them into flight and it’s good that it did because otherwise they’d be dead. What’s the matter with you, Padillo? Are you so preoccupied with revenging that dead woman in New York that you can’t keep your mind on the job at hand?”

  “I m
ade a mistake, Wanda. Let’s leave it at that.” I couldn’t see his face, but I was sure that I knew what it looked like—stiff and drawn with his mouth stretched into that thin, hard line.

  “We’d better find them,” she said.

  “It’s a big town,” I said. “By now they could be in Berkeley or Sausalito or even Oakland, although God knows why anyone would go there. I don’t mind spending the night looking, but if I do, I want to know that I’m at least warm if not red-hot.”

  “We’ve only got one lead so let’s try it,” Padillo said.

  “The Washington phone number?” Wanda asked.

  “If we have any other lead, nobody’s told me about it.”

  After I let Wanda and Padillo out in front of the St. Francis, I put the car in the underground lot beneath Union Square and joined them in Wanda’s suite. Padillo tossed me a key. “You’ve got a new room,” he said.

  “What about the name?”

  “It’s your old one. We’re no longer hiding.”

  “Did you call the Washington number?”

  “Not yet.” He turned to Wanda. “You want to call or do you want me to?”

  “You call,” she said. “It’s your lead.”

  The phone permitted direct dialing so Padillo got outside and then dialed the ten numbers. We all listened while the phone rang. The room was quiet and I could hear the voice that answered in Washington, but I couldn’t hear what it said. But it said the same thing twice and then Padillo slowly hung up the phone.

  “It was the Llaquah Embassy,” he said.

  There was a silence that grew until I diplomatically broke it with, “I think I’ll have a drink on that.”

  Wanda Gothar nodded and went into the bedroom, reappearing with three drinks on a small tray. Padillo accepted his and moved over to the window which offered a good view of the fog. I sat on the green and white striped sofa. Wanda was in a club chair with her hand that held the drink resting on its arm. Her head was back and her eyes were closed. No one seemed to have anything to say.

  After several minutes of silence Padillo turned from the window, his face expressionless.

  “As a lead, how good is it?” Wanda asked, not opening her eyes.

  “It might narrow the search,” he said.

  She opened her eyes. “How?”

  Padillo turned to me. “Has San Francisco got an Arab quarter or section or neighborhood?”

  “I don’t remember, if I ever knew, but I can find out.” I moved over to the phone and asked for information. “There’s a guy I used to know with UPI.”

  “If that intuitive leap of yours is correct, Padillo,” she said, “it may tell us where they’ve gone, but not why.”

  He turned back to the window. “There’s a possibility that I know that, too,” he said.

  “But you’re going to keep it to yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s still just a possibility.”

  There were a lot of representatives of what has been called the Arab world in San Francisco. There were Algerians and Egyptians and a large number of Syrians and Jordanians. There were a few Tunisians, I learned, and some Saudi Arabians.

  “What about Armenians?” the man from UPI asked. “We’ve got a lot of Armenians.”

  “I’d say that they’re geographically unacceptable.”

  “Saroyan’s an Armenian,” he said, trying to be helpful.

  “I thought there might be a section or a neighborhood where they congregated.”

  “Not really,” he said. “They’re all sort of scattered around.”

  “Do you know of any from Llaquah?”

  “Where the hell’s Llaquah?”

  “Not too far from Kuwait.”

  “What do you call somebody from Llaquah?”

  “A Llaquahian,” I said. “It rhymes with Hawaiian.”

  “Well, I don’t know of any Llaquahians, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some. If you really want to find out, there’s a restaurant that a lot of the Middle East types hang out in.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “The Arabian Knight. That’s knight with a k.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  We hung up after promising each other that we’d get together for a drink before I went back to Washington. Both of us knew that we wouldn’t.

  The Arabian Knight restaurant was near Eighteenth and Querrero Streets in the Mission District and I remembered it as an area of German bakeries, Greek and Italian restaurants, a couple of Russian bars, and a sizable number of people who claimed to be from Malta. Now there was a rash of Se Habla Español signs in the shop windows so I assumed that a lot of persons of Spanish descent had moved back into the area which was named for the Misión San Francisco de Asís, founded five days before a group of malcontents in Philadelphia got around to issuing their Declaration of Independence.

  Despite its name, San Francisco has about as much Spanish flavor as a bagel. Although widely admired for its high suicide rate, its nicely rising incidence of alcoholism, its occasional riot, and its cosmopolitan atmosphere, the city hasn’t done much about promoting its Spanish heritage. No doubt it will as soon as somebody figures out how it can bring a fast dollar.

  We parked the car and walked back to the Arabian Knight which occupied the lower half of a two-story building whose front someone had gussied up with Permastone. Inside it was smoky and dark and crowded. There was a long bar, a row of high-backed booths, and some tables covered with red and white checkered oilcloth which helped cut down on the laundry bill.

  The door to the kitchen was open and either customers or waiters wandered in and out. I couldn’t tell the difference. A jukebox blared out some Mideast music, marching songs for all I knew. There were only a few women in the place. The male customers sat in the booths or at tables in groups of three and four, drinking coffee and arrack and beer, their faces only a few inches apart, shouting at each other over the noise of the jukebox, probably conspiring against Israel.

  A swarthy, slim man of about thirty who wore a white shirt and a narrow black tie came up to us and yelled to determine whether we wanted a booth or a table. Padillo yelled booth and we were led back to one which was close enough to the kitchen for us to hear the cooks arguing with the waiters.

  The waiter handed Padillo a menu and Padillo handed it back, saying that we only wanted drinks—arrack for the three of us. The waiter nodded, left, and when he returned, Padillo asked if the owner was around. The waiter nodded again, pointed to the last booth, bent down, and yelled “Dr. Asfourh!” Padillo brought out a card, the one which said only, “Michael Padillo, Washington, D.C.,” and handed it to the waiter, and asked him to find out whether Dr. Asfourh could spare us a few moments. In private. The waiter looked dubious, but went away, came back, and screamed that Dr. Asfourh would see us in his office upstairs in ten minutes. It came out in a short series of screams really. “Dr. Asfourh—upstairs—he see you—ten minutes.” He held up all of his fingers to make sure that we got it straight.

  Wanda Gothar sat next to me in the booth. She leaned toward Padillo and raised her voice so that both of us could hear. “I’ll stay here.”

  Padillo looked at her, a little strangely, I thought. “Why?” he said.

  “You were about to leave your flanks unprotected again. It’s getting to be a habit with you, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Think again. How many tries have Kragstein and Gitner made, five?”

  “Four,” Padillo said. “One in Delaware, two in New York, and one here.”

  “And how many people are dead?”

  “Two. One of theirs and a friend of mine.”

  “Two of theirs might be in the hospital,” I said. “My contribution.”

  “My brother,” she said. “You forgot Walter.”

  Padillo shook his head. “I didn’t forget Walter, I just didn’t mention him.”

  “Why?”

&n
bsp; “Because,” Padillo said, “I don’t think Kragstein and Gitner killed him.”

  20

  IF WANDA Gothar wanted to ask Padillo if he thought he knew who had killed her brother, she didn’t get the chance because he rose, turned, and headed for the door just behind the last booth. The door opened onto a flight of stairs. I followed my leader.

  At the top of the stairs there was a grimy hall that needed to be swept. Padillo hesitated before turning right or left and then turned right when a rich bass voice called out, “This way, Mr. Padillo.”

  That way was down the hall toward the rear of the building. Pale amber light flooded through a half-open door. We went through it and into a room that seemed to have been decorated by someone enthralled with Egyptian antiquity. There was a large, authentic-looking statue of Osiris, king of the dead, which was flanked by one of his sister-wife Isis—the goddess of fertility, I remembered from somewhere. An old movie, probably. The rugs were also from the Middle East, Lebanon no doubt, and looked expensive.

  The room had no windows that I could see, but that may have been because heavy amber drapes that looked like real silk covered two of its walls. The indirect lighting revealed some other Egyptian artifacts which I felt should have been in a museum: there was a large fresco that hung on one wall and looked as if it might have been stolen from the ceiling of Ramses VI’s tomb at Thebes; a sculpted head of Cleopatra could have been the double of the one I’d seen in the British Museum, and a bas relief that someone later told me depicted Hapi, the male god of the Nile who had the breasts of a woman because they were thought to represent fertility.

  There were also some comfortable-looking chairs, an immense carved desk, and behind it stood Dr. Asfourh who could have lost 150 pounds and still been overweight. He was as fat as the late King Farouk I and even looked something like him, which he didn’t seem to mind at all.