When his agency decided to trade him for a couple of defectors to the East, Padillo tried to buy up his contract. He succeeded that spring night when he fell off the barge into the Rhine about a half-mile up river from the American Embassy. His agency wrote him off and no one from the Embassy ever came around to inquire about what happened to the nice man who used to own half of Mac’s Place in Bad Godesberg.
Padillo’s attempt to retire from the secret-agent dodge had involved both of us in a trip to East Berlin and back. During our absence somebody had blown up the saloon in revenge for some real or imagined slight so I collected the insurance money, got married, and opened Mac’s Place in Washington a few blocks up from K Street, west of Connecticut Avenue. It’s dark and it’s quiet and the prices discourage the annual pilgrimages of high school graduating classes.
I stood there in the bedroom and looked at Padillo for a while. I couldn’t see where he had been cut. The covers were up to his neck. He lay perfectly still in the bed, breathing through his nose. I turned and went back into the livingroom with the white carpet.
“How bad is he hurt?” I asked Hardman.
“Got him in the ribs and he bled some. Mush say that boy damn near got both those cats. Moved nice and easy and quick, just like he’d been doin it all his life.”
“He’s no virgin,” I said.
“Friend of yours?”
“My partner.”
“What you gonna do with him?” Betty said.
“He’s got a small suite in the Mayflower; I’ll move him there when he wakes up and get somebody to stay with him.”
“Mush’ll stay,” Hardman said. “Mush owes him a little.”
“Doctor Lambert say he wasn’t hurt bad, but that he’s all tired out — exhaustion,” Betty said. She looked at her watch. It had a lot of diamonds on it. “He’ll be waking up in bout half an hour.”
“I take it Doctor Lambert didn’t call the cops,” I said.
Hardman sniffed. “Now what kind of fool question is that?”
I should have known. “May I use your phone?”
Betty pointed it out. I dialed a number and it rang for a long time. Nobody answered. The phone was the push-button kind so I tried again on the chance that I had misdialed or mispunched. I was calling my wife and I was having a husband’s normal reactions when his wife fails to answer the telephone at one-forty-five in the morning. I let it ring nine times and then hung up.
My wife was a correspondent for a Frankfurt paper, the one with the thoughtful editorials. It was her second assignment in the States. I had met her in Bonn and she knew about Padillo and the odd jobs he had once done for the quietly inefficient rival of the CIA. My wife’s name was Fredl and before she married me it was Fraulein Doktor Fredl Arndt. The Doktor had been earned in Political Science at the University of Bonn and some of her tony friends addressed me as Herr Doktor McCorkle, which I bore well enough. After a little more than a year of marriage I found myself very much in love with my wife. I even liked her.
I called the saloon and got Karl. “Has my wife called?”
“Not tonight.”
“The Congressman still there?”
“He’s closing up the place with coffee and brandy. The tab is now $24.85 and he’s still looking for two votes a precinct. If he had had them, he could have made the runoff.”
“Maybe you can help him look. If my wife calls, tell her I’ll be home shortly.”
“Where’re you at?”
“Right before the at,” I said. Karl had no German accent, but he had learned his English from the endless procession of Pfc’s who came out of the huge Frankfurt PX during the postwar years. As a seven-year-old orphan, he had bought their cigarettes to sell on the black market.
“Never end a sentence with a preposition,” he recited.
“Not never; just seldom. I’m at a friend’s. I have to run an errand so if Fredl calls, tell her I’ll be home shortly.”
“See you tomorrow.”
“Right.”
Hardman raised his six feet, four inches of large bone and hard muscle from a chair, skirted around Betty as if she would bite, and walked over to mix another drink. He was as close to a racketeer as Washington had to offer. I suppose. He was far up in the Negro numbers hierarchy, ran a thriving bookie operation, and had a crew of boosters out lifting whatever they fancied from the city’s better department stores and specialty shops. He wore three- or four-hundred-dollar suits and eighty-five-dollar shoes and drove around town in a bronze Cadillac convertible talking to friends and acquaintances over his radio-telephone. He was a folk hero to the Negro youth in Washington and the police let him alone most of the time because he wasn’t too greedy and paid his dues where it counted.
Oddly enough I had met him through Fredl, who had once done a feature on Negro society in Washington. Hardman ranked high in one clique of that mysteriously stratified social realm. After the story appeared in the Frankfurt paper, Fredl sent him a copy. The story was in German, but Hardman had had it translated and then dropped around the saloon carrying a couple of dozen long-stemmed roses for my wife. He had been a regular customer since and I patronized his bookie operation. Hardman liked to show the translation of the feature to friends and point out that he should be regarded as a celebrity of international note.
Holding three drinks in one giant hand, he moved over to Betty and served her and then handed one to me.
“Did my partner come off a ship?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Which one?”
“Flyin a Liberian flag and believe it or not was out of Monrovia. She’s called the Frances Jane and was carryin cocoa mostly.”
“Mush wasn’t picking up a pound of cocoa.”
“Well, it was a little more’n a pound.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Mush was waitin to meet somebody off that boat and was just hangin around waitin for him when the two of them jumped him. Next thing he knows he’s lyin down and this friend of yours has done stepped in and was mixin with both of them. He doin fine till they start with the knives. One of them gets your friend in the ribs and by then Mush is back up and saps one of them and then they both take off. Your friend’s down and out so Mush goes through his pockets and comes up with your address and calls me. I tell him to hang around to see if he can make his meet and if he don’t connect in ten minutes, to come back to Washington and bring the white boy with him. He bled some on Mush’s car.”
“Tell him to send me a bill.”
“Shit, man, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
“Mush’ll be back in a little while. He’ll take you and your buddy down to the hotel.”
“Fine.”
I got up and walked back into the bedroom. Padillo was still lying quietly in the bed. I stood there looking at him, holding my drink and smoking a cigarette. He stirred and opened his eyes. He saw me, nodded carefully, and then moved his eyes around the room.
“Nice bed,” he said.
“Have a good nap?”
“Pleasant. How bad am I?”
“You’ll be O.K. Where’ve you been?”
He smiled slightly, licked his lips, and sighed. “Out of town,” he said.
Hardman and I helped Padillo to dress. He had a white shirt that had been washed but not ironed, a pair of Khaki pants in the same condition, a Navy pea jacket, and black shoes with white cotton socks.
“Who’s your new tailor?” I asked.
Padillo glanced down at his clothes. “Little informal, huh?”
“Betty washed em out in her machine,” Hardman said. “Blood hadn’t dried too much, so it came out easy. Didn’t get a chance to iron em.”