by Joseph Flynn
Nancy laughed, “Sounds good.” Then she regained her focus. “Robin, why are you letting me help you?”
“You’re my sister.”
“What’s the real reason?”
“You’re so suspicious, Nancy. I even baked a plate of fresh, warm strudel to share with you for all your help. But maybe I should just eat it myself and take a cab to work.”
Nancy didn’t have many weaknesses when it came to food. She could take or leave most things. Mostly she left them. But her Achilles’s heel, the one temptation she really had to battle was freshly baked pastry. Especially the first thing in the morning.
“Don’t you dare eat it yourself,” Nancy said. “I’ll be right over.”
Nancy came, she ate, she defeated Robin utterly. That damn self-control of hers, the piece of strudel she cut for herself wasn’t big enough to bait a mousetrap. Hardly a useful sampling to see if it was poisoned. Still, Nancy seemed to get as much enjoyment out of the tiny crumb as if she’d gobbled the whole plate. Robin half-expected her to start rolling on the floor in ecstasy.
For the first time, Robin got an insight into the success of her sister’s marriage. If Nancy could get so much out of so little, she must have made Charlie feel like a god every time they hit the sack.
“Robin, that was wonderful,” Nancy said. “I didn’t know you were such an incredible baker. You call me any time you make that strudel.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that. Bake you a plate, it’ll last all year.”
Nancy smiled and turned in profile.
“Well, I do have to watch my figure.”
It was a dig, but Robin let it go. She was depending on Nancy for help today.
“You know what you ought to do?” Nancy asked.
“What?”
“Take that strudel to work. You could sell it at the deli, I’m not kidding.”
Robin hated to admit it, but the notion struck her as a good idea. She’d wait and see if Nancy got sick on the drive over. If she didn’t, Robin could cut the pastry into little free samples and see how the public tolerated it. Then if there were something wrong with the stuff, maybe Ant-knee would eat a slice and get diarrhea or something.
Wouldn’t that be fun to capture on videotape?
“You know,” Robin said, “I think you’ve got something there.”
Nancy nodded and smiled and licked her lips.
“Maybe if I do an extra twenty minutes on the Stairmaster today you could save me another little piece?”
“Be happy to,” Robin said.
Nancy took Robin to work, and she didn’t start heaving or show any other signs of distress. Since Tone and his lensman weren’t laying in wait when they arrived, Nancy left, saying she’d be at her office until Robin called.
Feeling just a little uneasy, Robin put out the strudel on the counter next to the cash register. She’d cut the pastry into small squares and made a sign: Free samples. Take just one. Even having cooled on the way over to the deli, the stuff still smelled wonderful.
“What’s this?” Mimi asked, walking over.
“Just a little something I brought in. Homemade strudel. Nancy thought maybe we could sell it here.”
“Nancy, huh?”
Mimi knew Nancy’s opinion of the deli’s food and calibrated her opinion of Robin’s sister accordingly. Even so, Mimi had caught a whiff of the strudel.
“May I?” she asked.
What could Robin say?
“Just one,” she said.
“Oh, sure.”
With predatory speed, Mimi unerringly seized the largest slice, easily three times the size of the amount Nancy had consumed.
Robin watched her chew ... saw the smile form on her lips ... saw the gleam enter her eyes ... saw the shiver run through her. Head-to-toe. Mimi looked so blissful and relaxed ... well, Robin couldn’t help but think that Mimi had just had an orgasm.
Then the thought hit her: What if Manfred hadn’t put air freshener in the strudel, but had put something else? Who knew what kind of chemicals somebody who’d worked for the CIA might have on hand? She’d read that the nation’s intelligence agencies had experimented with LSD. How was she to know they didn’t have some kind of aphrodisiac in their medicine chest?
Mimi reached for another piece but Robin grabbed her wrist.
She shook her finger. “One’s all you get.”
Mimi didn’t say a word, just looked woeful until Robin let her go. Then, looking over Robin’s shoulder, Mimi’s eyes grew large and round with amazement. Robin quickly turned to look, but there was nothing there. The door was still locked. They weren’t even open for business yet.
Robin knew before she turned back that she’d been had. Mimi was ten feet away with a slice of strudel in each hand.
“Ha-ha,” Mimi said. “There’s still a trick or two I can teach you.”
Then Mimi headed off to the kitchen savoring each bite of her stolen strudel, “Mmmm-ing” all the way.
Robin muttered, “Hope your insurance is paid up.”
In the event of food poisoning, Robin had intended to dispose of Manfred’s note and the can of air freshener and lay the blame for the whole thing on him. Until her recent moment of paranoia, she hadn’t actually thought he’d put anything into the strudel that would rise above the level of a prank, say adding Ex-Lax to fudge cake.
But the strudel was the hit of the breakfast rush. Nobody got sick and everybody enjoyed the heck out of it. Robin couldn’t remember how many hands she’d had to slap when people came back for seconds. Including Mimi, who’d come back several times for fourths.
Knowing she was tempting fate, Robin ate the last piece herself.
It was the best damn strudel she’d ever tasted — every bit as good as it smelled — and she could have had the whole plate for herself!
Worse, she had to admit that sauerkraut-slurping golem had put one over on her good.
Mimi came over one last time and when she saw that the strudel was gone her face fell so far it was comic. But then her jaw firmed quickly and a look of diamond-hard determination glistened in her eyes.
“Robin, I want four trays of this strudel every morning.”
“And how many for the deli?” Robin asked.
“Okay, six trays then.”
“I’d like to help, Mimi, but I didn’t bake it.”
“But you said you did.”
“I said it was homemade.”
It took Mimi a second.
“Your new German?”
Robin nodded.
“I don’t care,” Mimi said. “You tell him I’ve got a business proposition for him.”
In the lull between breakfast and lunch, Robin told Mimi how she intended to deal with Tone and his cameraman. The taste of the strudel lingering in her memory and on her taste buds, Mimi wanted to stay in Robin’s good graces. So she offered some suggestions as to how the plan might be improved. Instead of waiting for Tone to arrive before calling Nancy, Mimi would have one of her oldest customers, who also worked at Tone’s TV station, give the deli a call the moment Tone and his accomplice walked out the door. That’d give them the jump on the idiot.
“What’s the other idea?” Robin asked.
Mimi said, “You may be too young to remember but a very historic event once happened not more than a few blocks from here. Maybe we can recreate it. As far as the flop-sweat goes, anyway.”
“Mimi,” Robin asked, “what are you talking about?”
“The Kennedy-Nixon debate,” she said with a smile.
Warner Lisle leaned against the door of the weight room at St. Malachy High School. Inside the room, Manfred was coaching some young but already startlingly big student-athletes in the proper way to lift weights. As large as the kids were, they looked malnourished next to Manfred, and the barbells that they burst blood vessels to budge he manipulated as though they were broomsticks, pausing at various points in the range-of-motion to explain technique and calling for questions.
When
Warner had first placed Manfred at St. Malachy’s his original position was as the building’s custodian. A couple of weeks later, Manfred secured the permission of the headmaster, Brother Damian, to use the weight room. After the canny brother happened to see Manfred bench-pressing several hundred pounds without apparent effort, he had an idea. He asked Manfred how he’d like to split his time between his custodial duties and coaching those athletes who maintained a superior grade point average. In short order, Manfred became the school’s full-time strength coach, and both the academic and athletic standings of the school soared.
Every boy at St. Malachy’s wanted Manfred’s instruction and cracked the books to get it.
Manfred saw Warner standing in the doorway and knew something was up, but as a measure of his professionalism he finished his class before leading the spy to his tiny cubicle off the weight room.
“You have news,” he said.
“Once we got the names, things went fast,” Warner said. “We’ve pinned them.”
“Where are they?”
“Your old home town, Dresden.”
“Muehlmann is still stealing for a living?”
“No, he’s moved up in the world. He’s the bouncer at a bordello that he and your ex are fronting for the Russian Mafia. Ulrike’s the madam.”
“And Hannelore?”
“She has a room down the hall from where the ladies ply their trade.”
Manfred’s face grew grim.
“This is no place for a little girl. What will become of her living there?”
Warner didn’t tell him that little “Bianca” seemed to like her digs just fine, according to the agent who’d paid his ex a visit. In fact, she was the whores’ pet and seemed to revel in the role.
“Our man talked to Ulrike,” he said “And just as you suspected, she’s perfectly willing to sell your daughter back to you.”
Manfred was not pleased with the accuracy of his prediction. The idea of having to buy his daughter back galled him.
“Could you kidnap her for me?”
Warner shook his head.
“The GDR and the Cold War are both finished. Germany’s united and an allied nation. I’d never get permission for that.”
“I helped you quite a bit,” Manfred pointed out.
“And we’ll help you all we can. But no kidnapping.”
“How much does she want?”
“One hundred thousand dollars.”
Manfred sagged under a weight far greater than any barbell he’d ever lifted. When he’d been freed from prison, the CIA had brought him to America, got him his job, set him up for eventual citizenship and given him fifty thousand dollars to start his new life. Manfred had not spent a penny of that money, knowing he would likely have to ransom his daughter someday. He’d worked at his job, lived as cheaply as he could in a tiny room at a YMCA and added to his savings. He now had sixty thousand dollars to his name. He could save even more now that he was living rent-free, but he couldn’t stand to wait any longer.
“I don’t have enough,” he said.
Warner nodded.
“We’re friends, right?” The question was rhetorical. “And you know how I feel about you winding up in prison. So I’m going to give you some of my own money, a little something I’ve put aside, and you’re not going to argue about it.”
Manfred didn’t.
“How much?” he asked.
“Twenty-five thousand.”
“That’s still not enough.”
“It’s close enough to bargain.”
Manfred nodded, and a look came into his eyes that would have scared the hell out of Warner if it had been directed at him.
“Ja, bargain. And tell Ulrike and Horst that if they don’t accept the bargain, I will visit them ... and they won’t be happy to see me again.”
Tone Morello was not happy. The moment he set foot in Mimi’s and saw what was waiting for him, he was not a happy chappy at all. He’d have backed right out, and even tried to, except he bumped into his idiot cameraman who was practically stepping on his heels. From that point on, people were shaking his hand, practically pulling him into the room. Everybody was smiling at him, but the smiles were the kind that the big bad wolf had saved for the three little pigs when he was handing out eviction notices.
At the far end of the room Tone saw two lecterns made of stacked cardboard cartons. Somebody had drawn an emblem on each lectern. He had seen enough tapes of sports teams at the White House to recognize the Presidential Seal, but that only confused him further. As he continued to be urged forward, a storm cloud of questions formed in his mind.
What was going on here? Why were all the customers facing this grade school stage set like they were some kind of audience? Why was Robin waiting for him behind one of the lecterns instead of behind the counter where she belonged? And who the hell was the little blonde with the second videocam?
It took a final shove from Mimi to get Tone into position next to Robin. He looked out at the crowd and the two cameras and he started to sweat. He worked in a TV studio, not before a live audience. He wiped his brow. With the cuff of his shirt. Which both cameras caught.
Tone gave a sickly smile.
A thought popped into his head that suddenly made him queasy. He darted a glance at Robin and breathed fractionally easier. She didn’t have her carving knife. Thank God for that. She was sitting on a stool and there was a pair of crutches leaning on the wall behind her.
Then he looked back at the cameras, and he knew they’d seen him peeking at Robin. And he knew that it must’ve made him look as sneaky and nervous as hell.
Off to a helluva start, Tone-boy, he thought. Why prolong the agony? Why not just unzip, hang your schlong out in front of the world and end your life as you know it? Then with a grimace that he hoped he’d kept off his face he thought he probably couldn’t even do that. The way he felt right now, his dick was probably shriveled up so tight it was hiding between his lungs.
The best thing to do, he decided, was to hang tight. Tone might have remained semi-comatose indefinitely had not Mimi addressed the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “As you know, we usually don’t go in for formal debate around here; we ad-lib things. But then we usually don’t record our goings-on for television, either. However, Mr. Morello recently said that he’d like to do an interview with Robin for his sportscast, something about the competition we all face in our everyday lives. When I informed Robin of this, she said she had a few questions for Mr. Morello, too, and would like to have her own cameraperson on hand so she could see if there was a market for the unedited tape at any other TV station in town.”
Other TV stations, Tone thought aghast. Unedited tape. He’d be the laughingstock of the whole town.
He went ash gray under his sheen of sweat, looking not dissimilar to one of those statues — though hardly the Virgin Mary — that miraculously produce tears and other forms of bodily moisture.
Mimi continued, “Since we don’t care much about manners around here, but we do believe in home-field advantage, Robin, you can go first.”
Robin got to her feet and turned to her opponent, and waited until he finally glanced her way. Tone looked like a condemned man wondering why it was taking so long for the axe to fall.
Robin shook her head sadly.
“Ant-knee, Ant-knee, Ant-knee,” she said, “I really have to ask ... Why can’t you ever play fair?”
The question took Tone by surprise, hit him just the right way to get him mad, light a fire under his backside, make him forget his fear. His shaking knees suddenly firmed up. A healthy flush of red anger swept the death mask from his face. He straightened his spine so he could look down on Robin.
“What kind of a crap question is that?” Tone asked, repeating in a mocking tone. “Why can’t I play fair?” This time Tone shook his head at Robin. “I play to win. Same as every other man.”
“Anything goes? Ends justify the means?” Robin asked.
Robin nodded her head.
“And I suppose this attitude applies to all parts of your life?”
“Like Lombardi said, ‘Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.’ ”
“So, it’s okay to waltz in here one day with your own private cheering section?”
“Right,” Tone said, trying to tough out a memory that still stung.
“And it’s okay to try to nail me with an ambush interview?”
“Sixty Minutes does it all the time.”
Tone knew he was on solid professional ground here.
“All’s fair on your job, too, I bet.”
“TV’s dog eat dog. Everybody knows that.”
“How about women?”
Now, Tone smiled. Gleefully.
“We’re finally getting to it, aren’t we?” he asked.
“Yeah, we are,” Robin said.
Tone nodded.
“That’s the whole thing between you ‘n me. You can’t stand it that I’d never give you the time of time of day ... that ... ” He stopped to think; he wanted to get these lines right. “... That I think you’re never fully dressed without your flea collar ... That you don’t have a waistline, you have an equator.”
Tone was rolling now, remembering the lines he’d had written for him.
People were laughing. With him. At Robin.
It felt great.
He would have kept going except he saw Robin making check marks on an index card she had in front of her.
“Hey, what’re you doing?” Tone asked.
Robin slipped the card into a pocket, looked at the crowd and said, “In case any of you happened to miss it, Ant-knee here said the other day that I was Miss Piggy’s body double.”
The line got a good laugh, even from those who’d heard it before.
“Now, today, he’s come up with a couple more nice zingers, but the problem is, he doesn’t do his own material. He can’t have many darts left. Two, if my information is correct.”