Payback (21 page)

“I could never hate you,” she said.

“Or betray me.”

She looked at him. “If you think I'd betray you—”

“I don't. I'm just telling you you could. It's okay. You're under no obligations.” He was looking at his glass. “I have to talk to you because I have to talk to you,” he said, his eyes a little moist. “Are you ready?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” he said somberly. “Once upon a time …”

22

Ortega couldn't believe it. Sitting in Delgado's office on the window ledge and looking at the smog, Delgado on the phone saying, “Uh-uh … no … uh-uh. No, Tom, no …” He couldn't believe all the smog. It was knocking on the panes. There was air out there about the color of the ugly unappetizing lung of a pack-a-day smoker. Ortega was beginning to believe he ought to quit. Quit going outdoors.

His gaze moved down again and back around the room and then clicked out the picture. Inspector Delgado presiding at his desk: a mahogany desk with a photograph of tiny Delgados in a frame. Delgado with his full head of bushy white hair and his furrowed white face and his grandchildren smiling. Frowning at the phone. “Tom,” he said, “no. You want to diddle with the press, I wouldn't make any definite statements. Uh-uh. The only thing we know for a fact right now is that all nine packages were taken out of restaurants. Guy on the beach filled his Thermos at a deli. Girl on her floor—yeah, the naked one, Tom—” Delgado shook his head; he sighed; he looked up at Ortega, shook his head again, listened. “No I wouldn't conclude anything, Tom.… Yeah.… Uh-huh. Posted. Right.”

Delgado hung up. “Hanslicher wants me to keep him posted. Little fucker's supposed to be running this thing. Mr. District Attorney. Mr. Titular Head.” Delgado poured some coffee from a Silex on the table. “Got his titular in the ringer, doesn't know to get it out. He likes to talk,” Delgado said. “He likes the cameras and the lights.”

Ortega lit a cigarette. Delgado came back with his coffee in a mug that had a picture of a gun.
Top Gun
, the mug said. He dropped a few packetsful of sugar on the desk and then sat. “So where were we?”

“In the dark,” Ortega said.

“But aside from that. Christ. I got a memo here this morning. FBI is still ‘studying' the packages. No signs of tampering. You want a conclusion? I can tell you. We've either got an inside job or an outside job's a lot smarter than the Feds. Would that be the first time? No,” Delgado said.

Ortega said nothing.

“What I like,” Delgado said, “is a good Agatha Christie. Six people in a mansion. One of 'em's dead, you figure one of 'em's a killer. Everybody always knows what time it is too. Butler walked into the drawing room at six-oh-seven. He happened to notice.”

Ortega said nothing.

Delgado looked thoughtful. He picked up a packet of the sugar from his desk, eyed it, put it down. “So in answer to your question now. Billy. McAllister. Hasn't left Majorca in a year. Friday last week he gives a party at his house. He's got the local police chief, the mayor and a nun.”

Ortega looked up.

“So I lied about the nun, but you follow what I'm saying.”

“What time was it?”

“Six-oh-five,” Delgado said. “And that's on the sworn testimony of a nun.” He sipped at his coffee. “What I'm saying is, forget it. I think it's a dead end. I don't think we'd ever prove anything
and
—I don't think there's anything to prove.” He drank some more coffee. “How's the other stuff going?”

“Zip,” Ortega said.

“In a well-chosen word.”

“Cy,” Ortega said.

“Speaking of little zips.”

“Was in New York—did you know that?”

Delgado raised his eyes.

“Meanwhile,” Ortega said, “back in Ohio there is Carol Tate's brother.”

“So I heard,” Delgado said. “Guy walks into his local Merrill Lynch.” He was staring at Ortega. “What's the matter, Paul? I thought you'd be in love with it.”

“Sure.”

“But?”

“I don't know. It's very sexy but it's dumb. They're gonna shit in their own well?”

“Possibly. If they're moving on. You'd be surprised how much Perrier you can buy you got a couple of millions in your kip.—No shit,” Delgado said. He waited; then, “What? What'd get you in the heart?”

“I don't know,” Ortega said. “But I think if we find the guy—
if
we find the guy—he's the guy you never heard of till you heard of him.”

“Ah, yes,” Delgado said. “The Mysterious Stranger.”

“The Hillside Strangler. Son of Sam,” Ortega said.

Delgado got up now and paced around the room. He filled up his mug again and brought it to his desk and then picked up some sugar. He examined it. “I keep checking everything for holes. Needle marks. Rips. I got a whole fucking laboratory doesn't find the answer and I'm checking like a loon.” He put it down again. “Mysterious Stranger in nine restaurants on two coasts. You gotta think he's got a partner.”

“Or a plane ticket.”

“Right. Or not,” Delgado said. He was opening the sugar. “Well, what the hell,” he said, “here goes nothing,” and poured it in his cup.

23

Mitchell checked his watch. “You know what time it is?” he said.

Joanna said, “Relax.” Pulling her boots off in the big sunny bedroom at the St. Moritz Palace. They'd just gotten in, having gone a crooked mile. A private charter from Vienna to Innsbruck, a train across the border, a charter after that. Because Mitchell had a gun that would jangle the machines, and no papers to support it. It was twenty after three.

“You want some lunch?” Joanna said. Opening the room service menu on the bed. Looking at Mitchell as he paced around the room. He'd bought a pair of thick red guidebooks in the lobby and he tossed her one. “I underlined the dirty parts,” he said.

She was looking at the menu.

He was looking at the index. There were street maps of St. Moritz. There were ski maps of the trails. Boutiques … bars … banks …

She said, “Orange juice is seven ninety-five.”

He said levelly, “I'm worth about forty million bucks. You want some orange juice?”

She laughed. Because he was serious. Because he was Mitchell. Because he was standing there in a stretched-out navy blue turtleneck, a faded pair of jeans.

She said, “Forty?”

“It's in stock,” he said. “So don't get carried away with it. I'm not allowed to sell it.” He went back to his reading.

She was looking at the room. In the lotus position in a puddle of sunshine on the white satin spread. On a bed, she was thinking, from
The Princess and the Pea
. The room about the size of her entire apartment. The polished antiques and the fresh white tulips and the white linen sheets and the Alps busting in through the big French windows, all glittering and shiny in the afternoon sun. Best thing to look at: Mitchell in the chair, his legs out in front of him, frowning at the book. The way he used to study in her living room in high school.

She said, “I suppose you wouldn't have any contacts in St. Moritz?”

He said, “Uh-uh. Do you?” Not looking up.

She said, “Not that I can think of. I used to have a friend at the Paris office of
W
. She used to tell me all the gossip.”

“You want to call her?”

“She was canned in eighty-six,” Joanna said. “I think she wrote that Diana Vreeland looked like Margaret Hamilton and she got the axe.… You don't know what I'm talking about, do you.”

He nodded. “You're telling me we're screwed without a contact.”

“Counts,” Joanna said, “tend to belong to things like the Corviglia Ski Club. Compared to which the Everglades is Jack LaLanne's.”

“The Everglades is—what's the Everglades?” he said.

“It's the most exclusive club in Palm Beach. I love it that you don't know these things, Mitchell. With your forty million dollars.”

“Margaret Hamilton,” he said. “Was in
The Wizard of Oz
. She was the witch. Okay?”

She was staring at the wall. “So forget about the Corviglia Club because they'll never let us in. Money doesn't count there unless it was earned before the fourteenth century. I'm serious. You have to bring a letter from the doge.”

He looked at her quickly.

“There are restaurants,” she said. “We could go to Chesa Veglia. Maybe Hanselmann's for tea …”

“And do what? Gawk around?—Do your homework,” Mitchell said. He was pointing at the book.

She looked at the copy of it lying on the bed,
St. Moritz, A to Z
. “For what?” she said. “What should I be looking for?”

“The count.”

“Should I be looking under C? Or is it B. Count Basie. We don't even know his name. Maybe it begins with an F. Maybe he likes jazz …”

“Hey Joanna?” He was trying to be patient. “I don't know. But what you're looking for, I think, would be a place to ask questions. Otherwise we could just blunder around here for a week. We could go to all the right places and never at the right times. And the only thing we're sure about, they're staying with the count so we have to find the count. Okay? Do your work.”

“Mine?” she said. “Wow. What's yours?”

“The other end.—I can't study with you,” he said. “I never could.” He got up. She watched him as he stretched and went out to the balcony and leaned against the rail. There were so many things she wanted to say and wasn't saying. Questions she could ask: What'll you do if you find them? What'll you do if you don't? And the problem was that even if she asked, he wouldn't know. Didn't know. His mind could only take him to the act of confrontation. He'd said, “I have to face him.” He'd said, “We have to settle this.” He'd said, “We're accountable to each other.” That's the way he saw it. Just between the two of them. Two aggrieved parties. She thought, but there are three.

And she thought about the gun.…

***

He pulled on his cigarette and leaned against the rail. The hotel that surrounded him with turrets and towers and oriels and gables looked more like a castle, or a monumental whopper by the weird Brothers Grimm, than any actual location. He looked at the horseshoe of the snow-covered mountaintops that glittered in the sunlight and pictured The Colorado Kid doing forty-foot fliers like a bird. Flight. He could practically taste it with his feet. Shit. He used to think he could fly out of anything. Out of his life. Out of his skin. Tell Newton to fuck himself, man. I go
up
.

Went, he thought dryly.

Joanna beside him, her arms suddenly around his waist, her head against his shoulder. They were silent for a time. Mitchell reached around and then scooped her to his side and they stood there together, silently, looking at the wide white view.

“I was just reading about the ski runs,” he said. “They've got a Guinness Run, they've got a Niarchos Run. You like that?” he said. “There're guys're still working on getting a sandwich named after them at Reuben's.… I don't know,” he said. Knowing she was looking at him. “What?”

Joanna shook her head. “I'm not asking you,” she said.

He was looking at the Alps. “No,” he said. “Not since the army. Not once.”

“Why not?”

He turned around again and watched her for a while. “If you were a concert pianist,” he said, “not Vladimir Horowitz or anything, but good—if you broke all your fingers and you couldn't even make it to an octave anymore, would you sit and play ‘Chopsticks'?”

“No,” Joanna said.

He was looking at the Alps. He could tell her there was more. That he was scared he might panic. There were times he had dreams. He'd be skiing in Aspen, getting ready for a jump and he'd jump—and then freeze. And then wake in the middle of a terror so terrible he'd stink with its sweat.

She watched him as he turned, going back to the room again and reaching for a sweater. He looked at her. “You won't do anything dumb,” he said. “Right?” He paused. “What're you gonna do?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. What're you gonna do?”

He shrugged. “I don't know.” But he picked up the pistol now and shoved it in his belt.

***

Okay, he thought, move.

Corridor: out past the gilded mirrors, the Italian paintings and the painted commodes. Elevator: caption it, The Gilded Cage. Lobby: an almost cathedral-like intention with its carved wooden ceilings and its Khuzistan carpets and its wood-paneled walls; a Raphael madonna hanging in a room between the high Gothic arches that pointed down a corridor of Cartier, Hermès, Chanel, Gubelin. The Raphael madonna, it appeared, looking sad. Just another brand-name madonna in the hall.

Outside it was crisp. Snow on the ground and a pleasant sharp invigorating wind. Hands in his pockets, layered in a couple of sweaters and a scarf, he walked up the Via Sarlas to the Kulm. He saw kids wearing sables and dogs wearing boots. A shop that had an actual gold-plated Nikon that glittered in its window. Alligator boots that had gold-plated heels. The windows of Bucherer shimmering with emeralds, a woman saying, “Diamonds are tacky, don't you think?” just making conversation, and Mitchell saying cryptically, “I don't speak English,” and the woman moving on.

On the Via del Bagn, he found what he was looking for—listed in the guidebook as “cozy, American, and mostly where the local instructors have a beer.” The Black Diamond Bar had a large black diamond announcing what it was, no words, none needed. The black diamond symbol on a sign above a ski trail meaning, Very Tricky Here/Experts Only.

The bar was deserted; the experts were obviously dancing on the granular diamonds in the snow. A guy with an arm cast lounging at the bar. Another guy who might have been lunching with his mother if his mother went for circling her fingers on his thigh. Mitchell went over and settled at the bar where a rangy-looking bartender, redhead and tan—a very tricky combination—was pulling at a Scotch, saying to the arm cast, “Bullshit. Absolute
bull
shit to that.” He looked up at Mitchell—How's it goin? Okay?—and then siphoned him a beer.