“Didn’t you ever want to go to school?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. For an education, I suppose.”
“Are you saying I’m not educated?”
It was an apologetic smile that Dunjee gave her. “No. I’m not saying that.”
“I’ll give you the rest of it. I find long division still a little murky, but who cares now that you can buy a calculator for nine dollars. I’m weak in baseball and American football. But I’m a whiz at geography and history and politics and how the rich live. I took a post-graduate course in that, you might say. After my mother died, I lived with a very rich, very elderly man. We traveled. I’d picked up enough nursing skills to give him his shots and check his blood pressure twice a day. The old man was interested in politics. He liked to back winners. That’s how I met Grimes. He came by to pick up some money from the old gentleman in 1976. Quite a lot of money. We talked, Grimes and I. He didn’t seem to care whether I’d ever gone to school or not. But he said if ever I left the old man and needed a job, to come see him. The old man died six months later. I went to see Grimes and I’ve been working with him ever since.”
“Doing what he does.”
She nodded. “Learning how to do it, anyway. He says I do it rather well. What about it, philosopher? Do I measure up?”
Dunjee smiled again. “Sure,” he said. “You’ll do fine.”
It was cool when they came out of the restaurant. Delft Csider wore a wraparound camel’s-hair coat. She turned the collar up and started to her left. Dunjee touched her arm. “Wait here a second,” he said.
He put his hands deep into the pockets of his brown tweed topcoat and moved down the sidewalk twenty paces or so until he came to the parked green Jaguar sedan with the two men in the front seat. He stood next to the window of the car until one of the men rolled it down.
“You want something?” the man said in an accent that came from somewhere east of Texas and west of Georgia.
Dunjee nodded. “Tell whoever sent you to pull you off — or I pull out. You got that?”
They stared at each other for a moment and finally the man nodded and rolled the window back up. Dunjee turned and moved back to Delft Csider.
“Who was that?” she said.
“Kibitzers,” Dunjee said.
17
Up in Dr. Joseph Mapangou’s dearly beloved apartment on East 60th Street, Alex Reese lowered himself into the chair behind the custom pecan desk, put the ice cream bag down on the leather-edged blotter, and stared balefully at Dr. Mapangou, who stood nervously before him, not at all sure whether he needed permission to sit.
“What’ve you got to drink?” Reese demanded.
Dr. Mapangou smiled. Now he could be host — a familiar and comfortable role. “Some very nice whisky perhaps? Or some excellent brandy?”
“Whisky,” Reese said. “About that much.” He held his thumb and middle finger about two inches apart.
Dr. Mapangou poured the drinks quickly, the whisky for Reese and a smaller measure of brandy for himself. “May I sit?” he said as he put the drinks down on the desk.
“Sit,” Reese said, drank off half of the whisky, and took the metal cylinders out of the ice cream bag. He opened both cylinders and shook their contents out on the blotter. Two frozen severed fingers pointed accusingly at Dr. Mapangou, who shuddered.
Reese bent forward slightly to examine the fingers more carefully. “Bit his nails, didn’t he?” he said and again turned his baleful stare on Dr. Mapangou.
Dr. Mapangou seemed to feel that the question required an answer, so he bent forward, gave the fingers a quick inspection, nodded slightly, and hastily drank some of his brandy.
“You got an ink pad?” Reese said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“An ink pad. You know.” Reese pounded a fist from side to side on the desk as though demonstrating how documents should be stamped to someone who had never heard of documents.
“In the second drawer on the left,” Dr. Mapangou said, suddenly convinced that Reese would have made a perfect district officer in some repressive African colonial regime.
Reese found the ink pad as well as two sheets of smooth white paper. Dr. Mapangou watched as Reese inked the severed fingers carefully and then rolled each one onto a separate sheet. Reese tenderly put the sheets away in a used manila envelope that he had found in the desk’s middle drawer.
“Wash ’em off,” he said and used his own middle finger and thumb to flick the two severed fingers across the desk toward Dr. Mapangou.
Again, Dr. Mapangou said, “I beg your pardon?”
“You know,” Reese said, dry-washing his own hands. “Washee, washee.”
Dr. Mapangou gingerly picked up the two fingers and moved to his wet bar, where he washed the ink off them with a bar of lavender-scented soap. After that he dried them with a paper towel and turned back to Reese.
“They’re beginning to thaw, I believe,” Dr. Mapangou said.
“You got any aluminum foil?”
Dr. Mapangou nodded.
“Wrap ’em up good in that and pop ’em into your freezer.”
After finishing his chores in the kitchen, Dr. Mapangou returned to the living room and sat back down in front of the desk. He watched as Reese drank more whisky, looked around the room, and nodded appreciatively at what he saw.
“You got a real nice place here,” Reese said. “How much does it run you?”
“Twenty-one-fifty a month.”
“No kidding? That much. Tell me about the fingers, Doc.”
“I did not know what they were.”
“You didn’t, huh?”
“No.”
“Let’s see now. You left here about a quarter to ten, walked to the Gotham, went in, stayed about half an hour, and came out with a couple of frozen fingers in cigar tubes all nice and insulated in an ice cream bag — except you didn’t know what they were, right?”
“That is correct.”
“What’d you think they were?”
“I was not told.”
Reese nodded. “What room did you go up to? Remember, I’m gonna check it all out.”
“Room 542.”
“And whose room was that?”
“I was told that it was a Mr. Minder’s.”
“Is that who you saw?”
“No.”
Reese sighed. “Okay. Who did you see up there in room 542?”
“Mr. Arnold,” Dr. Mapangou said. “And Mr. Benedict.”
“Arnold and Benedict.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about Arnold and Benedict. They white folks?”
“Americans.”
“What’re their first names?”
“I do not know. The only names they ever gave me were Arnold and Benedict.”
“All right, we’ll let that slide. What did Arnold and Benedict want you to do?”
“They wanted me to deliver the two... cigar tubes.”
“They did, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Who did they want you to deliver them to?”
Dr. Mapangou picked up his brandy and took a swallow, thinking, Now it’s going to become unpleasant. He sighed and put the brandy glass back down on the desk.
“They wanted me to deliver the cigar tubes to certain members of the Libyan and Israeli delegations. One each.”
“Which members?”
“To Fathi Ashour, who is Libyan, and to Gad Efrati. He, of course, is Israeli.”
“And what were you supposed to tell Brother Ashour and Brother Efrati after you delivered them the sliced-off fingers?”
“I did not know about the fingers.”
“Okay. You didn’t know. But what were you supposed to tell them?”