The courtly man stopped talking, looked somewhere past Undean’s left shoulder and added, “So we buried him at Arlington.”
“And sent me to count the house.”
“You were the only one left who had the slightest reason to go—except for me.”
Undean frowned. “What happened to your legal remedies?”
Keyes shrugged.
“A bluff, right? And after she called it, you caved in.”
When Keyes only stared at him, saying nothing, revealing nothing, Undean smiled sourly and said, “It doesn’t scan. You’ve stopped plenty of others from publishing. You even stopped two or three guys so hard they went bankrupt. So why not Steady?”
“Because one, he’s dead, and two, he never worked for us.”
“Number two is bullshit.”
“Not this time, Gilbert. You see, we never had a contract with Steady. He would never sign anything, never endorse any check of ours or even set up an offshore account we could move his funds into. From the very first—there in the Congo—he insisted on being paid all fees and expenses in either Swiss francs or gold. So how could we stop a dead man, who we couldn’t even prove had ever worked for us, from publishing his memoirs, which we hadn’t even read? And that’s why we caved in, as you so nicely put it, and buried him at Arlington.”
When Undean made no reply, Keyes picked up his cup and drank the rest of his now tepid coffee. As he put the cup down, he said, “What did you make of his son, Granville?”
“I thought he was nice and polite, maybe too polite for this day and age, and I think you just threw the switch.”
“To sidetrack you?”
Undean nodded. “What’re you really going to do about them?”
“Who?”
“His memoirs.”
“Oh. Those. Well, nothing more than we’ve already done, which is to pay a plot of what?—hallowed ground?—to prevent them from being published. Of course, I wouldn’t really worry if they were published because I’m sure they’re nothing more than the same old thrice-regurgitated public domain rogue elephant stuff. Warmed-over old hat, to mix yet another metaphor. At best, a slow read on a long flight.”
“I know better,” Undean said. “And if I know better, you damn sure do.”
Hamilton Keyes favored Undean with another polite but empty stare.
“Want some advice?” Undean said.
“Not really.”
“Buy ’em,” Undean said. “Buy the memoirs and all the rights thereto. It’ll save you one hell of a lot of grief and money in the long run.”
The courtly man rose with a smile that was neither warm nor cold. A room-temperature smile, Undean decided. A smile of dismissal.
“It’s been awfully nice chatting with you again, Gilbert,” Keyes said as he came around the rosewood desk, waited for Undean to rise, put a comforting hand on the old man’s shoulder and gently guided him to the door.
Chapter 4
After nearly a generation it could still be found at the same location a few blocks north of K Street and a little less than that west of Connecticut Avenue. Because it had endured so long in Washington, where restaurants often have the life span of a mayfly, many thought of Mac’s Place as either an undesignated landmark or, if they were under thirty, a quaint and curious monument to the sixties.
That it still existed at all was largely because of a firm of prospering criminal defense lawyers who occasionally dabbled in real estate. In 1987 they had formed a syndicate to buy the land beneath Mac’s Place and much of that on either side of it.
The syndicate had then erected a seven-story office building over and around the restaurant, taking great pains to preserve its unprepossessing façade and excellent kitchen. When asked, the lawyers always justified the extravagant preservation by saying, “We needed a nice place close by to eat lunch.”
Long before the advent of either salad bars or nouvelle cuisine, and long, long before the fading craze for something called plain American cookery, which usually meant meat loaf redux, it was possible to find a restaurant, chop house or bar & grill very much like Mac’s Place in almost any American city. They were often long narrow quiet rooms with a slightly foreign, melancholy air that offered generous drinks, swift monosyllabic service and a varied menu that on Thursdays might even include spit-roasted sweetbreads.
Largely through inertia, Mac’s Place had managed to preserve a similar atmosphere. It was, as Michael Padillo, its co-owner, once said, “The sort of place you go when you have to meet someone and explain why you won’t be getting the divorce after all.”
It was 1:22 P.M. when Tinker Burns escorted Isabelle Gelinet and Granville Haynes into Mac’s Place, where they stood blinking and waiting for their eyes to adjust to the perpetual twilight. Glancing around, Haynes noticed the lunch crowd was beginning to disperse.
Herr Horst, the seventy-four-year-old maître d’ with the enviable posture of a martinet, gathered up three menus and slowly advanced on the new customers, much as if he were leading a procession of bishops. When he was a few feet away from Tinker Burns, whom he hadn’t seen in three years, Herr Horst stopped and greeted him with the single abrupt nod that regular patrons had named The Whiplasher. “Three for lunch, Mr. Burns?”
“Three.”
“Still prefer to be seated with your back to the wall?”
“Old habits, good or bad, die hard.”
“But as Proust noted, they also fill up time. This way, please.”
After he had seated them at a banquette, handed out the menus and complimented Gelinet by name on what he called her frock, Herr Horst, as even Padillo called him, examined Granville Haynes and said, “We haven’t had the pleasure of your custom, Mr. Haynes, since September of nineteen seventy-four when you and your father dined with us. It was your eighteenth birthday, as I recall, and you were off the next day to the university at Charlottesville.” Herr Horst paused, dropped his voice to a somber note and added, “I was extremely saddened to learn of his death.”
“You’re very kind,” said Haynes.
Still studying his menu, Tinker Burns said, “You ever think of maybe taking that memory act of yours on the road with some carnival?”
“Not recently,” Herr Horst said.
Burns looked up. “The McCorkle around?”
“Alas, no.”
“What about Padillo?”
“I’ll tell him you’re here.”
“Don’t bother.”
Herr Horst’s lips twitched, as if he were considering a smile. “But he would be desolate were he not told.”
After the maître d’ turned and marched slowly away, still leading his invisible procession, a waiter hurried over to take their drink orders. Burns wanted a martini, straight up; Gelinet, a vermouth; and Haynes, a bottle of Beck’s. Arriving with the waiter and the drinks was Michael Padillo.
Haynes couldn’t remember Padillo from that seemingly endless birthday dinner of more than fourteen years ago. Yet there was something about him that he found oddly familiar.
Recalling the long-ago birthday dinner, Haynes discovered he could easily draw a mental picture of the man Tinker Burns had referred to as the McCorkle—a big man, well over six feet, who had stopped by their table to exchange pleasantries and quips with Steadfast Haynes. McCorkle had been wearing too many laugh lines around self-mocking eyes that were either hazel or brown. He also had a skeptical grin, most of his hair and the build of a middle-aged jock who had long since stopped bothering with the Canadian Air Force exercises. But the real reason you remember him so well, Haynes decided, is that he sent over two cognacs, which was the first time a publican ever bought you a drink.
Still watching Padillo, who was bowing over the hand of a smiling Isabelle Gelinet, Haynes found himself reverting to his abandoned role of homicide detective as he measured Padillo’s height at a little less than six feet; weighed him in at 160 or 165; classified his nose as straight-long, his mouth as thin-wide; judged his complexion to be a light olive, his hair a gray-streaked dark brown.