Also by Ross Thomas
The Cold War Swap
Cast a Yellow Shadow
The Seersucker Whipsaw
The Singapore Wink
The Fools in Town Are on Our Side
The Backup Men
The Porkchoppers
If You Can’t Be Good
The Money Harvest
Yellow-Dog Contract
Chinaman’s Chance
The Eighth Dwarf
The Mordida Man
Missionary Stew
Briarpatch
Out on the Rim
The Fourth Durango
Voodoo, Ltd.
Ah, Treachery!
www.ebookyes.com
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
TWILIGHT AT MAC’S PLACE. Copyright © 1990 by Ross E. Thomas, Inc. Introduction © 2003 by T. Jefferson Parker. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
ISBN 0-312-71177-8
First published by Mysterious Press in November 1990
First St. Martin’s Minotaur Edition: December 2003
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Introduction
by T. Jefferson Parker
Twilight at Mac’s Place is arguably Ross Thomas at his best, and certainly Ross Thomas at his most elegant and complex.
The novel was published in 1990 but the story takes place two years earlier, at the close of the Cold War. An era is coming to an end. The Berlin Wall is about to fall. A former CIA Director is about to become President. The third paragraph sets the date and Thomas’s indelible tone:
Steadfast Haynes was fifty-seven when he died at 11:32 P.M. on January 19, the night before the inauguration of the nation’s forty-first President…. He died quietly, even discreetly, much as he had lived, and the thirty-three-year-old woman who lay next to him when he died…knew just whom to call and what to do.
The close of the eighties seems a particularly rich timescape for one of Thomas’s unmistakable thrillers. The Republic had felt battered by hostile governments abroad—Iran, Libya, and Nicaragua come to mind. Rather than confront them directly, the Reagan-North-Secord alliance had tried to subvert them without the approval or even knowledge of the American people.
The televised Congressional hearing into the Iran-Contra scandal was a spectacle of legerdemain by master politicians. You couldn’t turn the volume up high enough to hear any truth. More than once, while reading Twilight at Mac’s Place, I pictured Thomas sitting in front of his TV, watching the testimony of Oliver North with a gigantic smile on his face.
From this background of secrecy and misdirection, Thomas asks, in Twilight at Mac’s Place, a million-dollar what-if. What if one of these covert players had written a book about it? To what lengths would his bosses go to make sure it never saw the light of day? That is the seed. What better soil for Ross Thomas to grow one of his brilliant hybrids of thriller, murder mystery, and political amorality tale?
It’s easy to lose yourself in trying to identify the specific agencies, bureaus, committees, news organizations, and scoundrels that populate this novel. But it’s even easier—and much more fun—to revel in Thomas’s dead-on characters and the wily dialogue upon which these characters are built. As with any good novelist, Thomas never falls for personification. Nobody stands for anything. That would be too simple. Each character is a bundle of enigmas, and we don’t learn which is the alpha-enigma until the end. Even their names are delicious: Tinker Burns and Isabelle Gelinet and Gilbert Undean and Michael Padillo and Hamilton Keyes and Cyril McCorkle and Detective-Sergeant Darius Pouncy. (McCorkle and Padillo appeared in Thomas’s first novel, The Cold War Swap, in 1966.)
Thomas was a terrific storyteller and a skilled wordsmith. His language pops with the unexpected and is a joy to read. An example:
[He] had a tree-trunk neck [and] one of those reflexive all-purpose smiles that show too much gum and are used to express pleasure, rage, pain, hope, fear, mirth, approval and sometimes nothing at all.
Tinker Burns had seen such smiles in the Legion and knew that they often belonged to nut cases. He remembered two particular Legionnaires, both borderline sociopaths, who had died two days apart in terrible agony, each of them gut-shot, their all-purpose smiles firmly in place.
Beyond the dizzying spiral of story, the rich characters, and the cocked and loaded language there isn’t much to say except thank you to St. Martin’s Press for reissuing Ross Thomas.
I think the years have been kind to Twilight at Mac’s Place. Thomas would live to write only two more novels. He died in 1995. Nice to know that such entertaining and topical writing can stand on its own two feet and get around so nimbly after fourteen years. Fourteen more and fourteen more? Sure.
Enjoy.
Chapter 1
Shortly after the death of the failed Quaker, Steadfast Haynes, the Central Intelligence Agency received a telephoned blackmail threat that was so carefully veiled and politely murmured it could have been misinterpreted as the work of some harmless crank.
But it wasn’t misinterpreted. And it was solely because of this vague threat to reveal what Haynes had really done while serving as an occasional agency hire in Africa, the Middle East, Central America and Southeast Asia that the Department of Defense, after much grumbling, gave in to CIA pressure and ordered the Army to bury him at Arlington National Cemetery with standard military honors.
Steadfast Haynes was fifty-seven when he died at 11:32 P.M. on January 19, the night before the inauguration of the nation’s forty-first President. He died in bed on the fourth floor of the Hay-Adams Hotel in a $185-a-night room that commanded a fine view of the White House. He died quietly, even discreetly, much as he had lived, and the thirty-three-year-old woman who lay next to him when he died was a former Agence France-Presse correspondent and old friend who knew just whom to call and what to do.
Her first call was to Paris and lasted a little more than four minutes. Her second call was to the front desk to notify the hotel that Haynes was dead. Her third call was to the robbery and homicide division of the Los Angeles Police Department.