Haynes grinned, which again caused Padillo to realize how closely the son resembled the dead father. “Anyway,” Padillo said, “we lasted eighteen months, maybe twenty, and then came Steady.”
“What’d he have to offer other than limitless charm?”
“New directions.”
“Leading where?”
“To covert action fiascoes. Terrorism, theirs and ours. An assortment of foreign intrigue imbroglios. Homegrown money spies. Redefecting defectors. It was heady times and Isabelle began to wonder if it wasn’t mostly because old Bill Casey was back.”
“Back?”
“From his glory days in OSS.”
“You knew him then?”
“In a way.”
“And Isabelle?”
“Eventually, she did an unauthorized and very unflattering three-part profile on Casey,” Padillo said. “She had a lot of help from Steady and a mixed bag of Casey watchers he’d rounded up for her. A few even let her quote them by name. She later sent me a copy of the piece. I think I still have it somewhere—a hell of a story. But twenty minutes after AF-P moved it, they sent out a kill. Isabelle got mad and quit, did some free-lancing for a while, then moved in with Steady at his farm either to write or help him write his memoirs—or so I gathered from what she said at lunch today.”
After studying Padillo for almost fifteen seconds, Haynes said, “You haven’t always run a saloon, have you?”
“I’ve always wanted to.”
“What’d you do before you and McCorkle opened this one?”
“We ran one in Bonn.”
“What happened to it?”
“They blew it up.”
“Who’re they?”
“McCorkle’s always been convinced it was the CIA who supplied the bomb and the KGB who threw it.” He smiled slightly. “But then McCorkle has a rather jaundiced view of world events.”
Another silence was again ended by Haynes, talking at first to the floor, then to Padillo. “Isabelle was my oldest friend. We grew up almost next door in Nice. When Tinker came back from the Legion, Dien Bien Phu and all that, he rented a room in the house of a pregnant widow in Nice. Three months later, Isabelle was born. Tinker stayed on as Madeleine Gelinet’s paying guest, lover and surrogate father to Isabelle. In nineteen fifty-nine my mother died. I was three. Steady and I moved from Paris to Nice and rented a house three doors up from Madeleine Gelinet. That’s how Steady and I met Isabelle and Tinker.”
“I’ve wondered,” Padillo said.
“Not long after Steady married my stepmother number one, he and Tinker were off to the Congo—but on different sides. When Tinker came back, he started up his arms business and resumed his on-again, off-again affair with Isabelle’s mother.”
“Where’d he get the capital?” Padillo asked. “One day Tinker’s an out-of-work mercenary, the next day he’s a budding international arms dealer.”
“He stole it. He and Steady. Want the details?”
“I don’t think so,” Padillo said. “When’d you last see Isabelle—before today?”
“Almost twenty years ago. It was just before Steady had me fly here to enroll in St. Alban’s. By then, I was living in Italy with stepmother number two. As always, Steady sent cash. So I took a bus to Nice, saw Isabelle and caught a flight from Paris to Washington. But before I left Nice, Isabelle and I swore our undying love, which expired six or seven months later. But we always wrote each other long letters at Christmas—until she moved in with Steady.”
“Who stopped writing?”
“She did.”
“I would’ve guessed you.”
“Along with my old man’s goofy smile, I also inherited a lot of his goofy laissez-faire attitudes.”
Padillo took his feet down from the desk and slipped them into a pair of black loafers. As he bent down to tug the left shoe up over his heel, he said, “Is there really a book?”
“Steady’s lawyer and your landlord handed me a manuscript this afternoon.”
“You look at it?” Padillo said, once more leaning back in his chair.
Haynes nodded.
“A lot of people in this town would pray they’re not in it.”
“Think you’re in it?”
“I hope so. It might give our lunch business a boost.”
Haynes rose. “Like to see it?”
Padillo nodded. “Especially if it has an index.”
“It doesn’t, but McCorkle was kind enough to put it in your safe for me this afternoon.”
Padillo examined Haynes thoughtfully. “The Willard has a much better safe.”
“I’m sure it does.”
“But the Willard also gives receipts and keeps records.”
“Right again,” Haynes said.
Padillo rose, went over to the old safe, spun the combination and tugged open the heavy door. From the safe he took the folded-over grocery sack and handed it to Haynes, who placed it on the partners desk. “Have a look,” Haynes said.
Padillo studied him again, briefly this time, before turning to the desk and removing the brown-paper-wrapped package from the sack. He read the address label and asked, “Steady mailed it to himself?”
“He thought it would ensure the copyright’s validity.”
“Did it?”
“It was already valid.”
Padillo slowly removed the wrapping paper and lifted the top from the Keebord box. He read the title page without expression, then the four lines by Housman and the dedication to the dead author’s son. After reading the two sentences that composed Chapter One and also the entire book, Padillo quickly leafed through the rest of the blank pages, turned to Haynes and said, “Why’d you really want me to see this?”
“Because you were Isabelle’s friend.”
“Did this all begin as one of Steady’s diddles?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there a book somewhere?”
“I’m not sure, but everything you just read is copyrighted—except the Housman quote.”
Padillo carefully put the top back on the box. “And what can you do with the copyright to a two-sentence book?”
“I can sell it.”
“As is?”
“Possibly.”
“Who to?”
“The highest bidder. Which is when I might need a little help.”
Padillo nodded, but it was a noncommittal nod. “And who do you think the highest bidder will be?”
“Whoever killed Isabelle,” Haynes said. “Or had her killed.”
Chapter 15
Erika McCorkle picked Haynes up in front of the Willard Hotel at exactly 7 A.M. that Saturday, each of them surprised at the other’s promptness. After muttered good mornings, she handed him a plastic container of Roy Rogers coffee and sped them to Pennsylvania Avenue and M Street, then across Key Bridge and onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway in what Haynes suspected was record time, even for a Saturday morning.
After passing the road sign that beckoned passersby to CIA headquarters, Haynes ended the long silence with a question: “You usually eat breakfast?”
“Never. Do you?”
“No.”
“You’re not much on morning chatter either,” she said.
“Turn on the radio.”
She said it was broken.
Another silence began and lasted until she turned off to take the Old Georgetown Pike that dipped and curled its way through rolling Virginia countryside. They were now in a holdout exurbia of wintry browns and grays where a faded bumper sticker on an old Volvo station wagon begged for propertied recruits to enlist in a rearguard action against unnamed developers. Haynes guessed it was a skirmish the exurbanites had already lost.
In some of the deeper brush- and tree-protected gullies—or runs, which were what Haynes remembered arroyos were called in Virginia—he could see patches of dirty snow. And since the sky was overcast with dark wet-looking clouds, he asked Erika McCorkle if she had heard a weather forecast.