The Cold War Swap (3 page)

“What if I say no?”

Padillo looked at me cynically. “Been having a little trouble getting the necessary permits and licenses approved and issued?”

“A little.”

“You’d be surprised how easy it is if you have the right connections. But if you still insist on saying no, the odds are five hundred to one that you’ll never sell your first Martini.”

“It’s like that, huh?”

Padillo sighed. “Yes. It’s exactly like that.”

I took another drink and shrugged a shrug I did not feel. “O.K. It looks as if I have a partner.”

Padillo looked down at the floor. “I’m not sure I wanted you to say that, but then again I’m not sure I didn’t. You were in Burma, weren’t you?”

I said yes.

“Behind the lines?”

I nodded.

“There were some tough boys there.”

I nodded again. “I learned a little.”

“It might come in handy.”

“How?”

He grinned. “Tossing out the drunks on Saturday night.” He got up and walked over to the typewriter, picked up the certified check and handed it to me again. “Let’s go over to the club and spend some of this on getting stoned. They won’t like it, of course, but there’s not a hell of a lot they can do about it.”

“Should I ask who ‘they’ are?”

“No. Just remember you’re the cloak and I’m the dagger.”

“I think I can keep that straight.”

Padillo said, “Let’s get that drink.”

We got drunk that night, but before we entered the club’s bar Padillo picked up a phone and made a call. All he said was “It’s all right.” Then he cradled the phone and looked at me thoughtfully. “You poor bastard,” he said. “I don’t think you really deserve it.”

During the next decade we prospered, adding such symbols of success as a
touch of gray at the temples, a series of fast expensive cars, another series of fast expensive young ladies, bench-made shoes, London suits and jackets, and a comfortable inch or so around the waists.

There were also those certain days when I would drop down to the place around ten in the morning to find Padillo already sitting at the bar, a quart of dimple-bottle in front of him, staring into the mirror.

All he ever said was “I got one.”

All I ever asked was “How long?” He would say two weeks or ten days or a month and I would say: “Right.” It was very clipped, very British, just like Basil Rathbone and David Niven in
Dawn Patrol
Then I would help myself to the bottle and we would both sit there, staring into the mirror. I think it always rained those days.

We had made a good business team after Padillo taught me the fundamentals of saloon-keeping. He was an excellent host, and his ease with languages made the place a favorite with the embassy staffs in Bonn, including the Russians, who sometimes came by in twos and threes. I ran the business end, and our accounts at Deutsche Bank in Bad Godesberg grew pleasantly fat.

To compensate for Padillo’s “business trips” I occasionally flew to
London and the States, presumably in search of new ideas. I came back loaded with catalogues of kitchen equipment, eye-catching contemporary furniture, and cocktail-time gimmicks. But we didn’t change the place. It just grew a little shabbier and a little more relaxed. The customers seemed to like it that way.

The trip to Berlin presumably had been on business. I had gone there to see about a bartender who could mix drinks American style. He was working at the Berlin Hilton, but when I told him he would have to live in Bonn, he refused. “Those Rhinelanders are jerks,” he said, and went on carving up Mr. Hilton’s oranges.

Herr Maas kept up his chatter as I drove through the narrow streets of Godesberg and parked in one of the two reserved spaces in front of Mac’s Place that Padillo had managed to wrangle from the city fathers. We got out and Herr Mass was still murmuring his thanks as I held the door for him. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, too early for the cocktail hour. Inside the place was as dim and dark as always, and Herr Maas blinked to adjust his eyes. At table number six in the far corner a man sat, a glass before him. Maas thanked me once more and headed toward him. I moved to the bar where Padillo stood watching Karl, the bartender, polish some glasses that didn’t need polishing.

“How was Berlin?”

“Very wet,” I said, “and he didn’t like Rhinelanders.”

“A home-town boy, I take it?”

“Very.”

“Drink?”

“Just some coffee.”

Hilde, a cocktail-hour waitress, came up and ordered a Steinhaeger and a Coke for Herr Maas and the man he came to Bonn to meet. They were the only customers in the place.

“Who’s your friend?” Padillo asked, nodding toward Maas.

“A fat little man who carries a big fat gun. He says his name is Maas.”

“I don’t care for guns,” Padillo said, “but I care less for the company he keeps.”

“Know him?”

“Just who he is. Vaguely attached to the Jordanian Embassy.”

“Trouble?”

“Something like that.”

Karl slid my coffee over to me.

“You ever hear of a seven-layer mint frappe?” he said.

“Only in New Orleans.”

“Maybe that’s where this chick was from. She comes in at lunch and orders one. Mike never taught me to make no seven-layer mint frappe.”

“A seven-layer mint frappe,” I said automatically. A war orphan, Karl had picked up his English just outside the Army’s huge PX in Frankfurt, where, in his early teens, he had made a precarious living by buying cigarettes from soldiers and selling them on the black market. He was a good bartender, but his grammar needed a little polish. His Americanese had virtually no German accent.

“So what did you do?” I asked.

He didn’t get the chance to say. Padillo grabbed me by the left shoulder, kicked my legs out from under me, and slammed me to the floor. I turned as I fell and glimpsed the pair of them, faces covered with white handkerchiefs, running toward the table where Maas and his friend sat. They fired four shots and the sound hurt my sinus cavities. Padillo had fallen on top of me. We got up in time to see Herr Maas darting out the door, his shabby brief case banging against his fat legs. Hilde, the cocktail waitress, stood frozen in a corner, a tray forgotten in her hand. Then she screamed and Padillo snapped at Karl to go over and shut her up. Karl, pale under his sun-lamp tan, moved quickly from around the bar and began talking to the girl in what he intended to be soothing words. They only seemed to make her more upset, but she at least stopped screaming.

Padillo and I went over to the table where Herr Maas and his late
friend had sat. The friend was sprawled back in his chair, his eyes staring fixedly at the ceiling, his mouth slightly open. It was too dark to see any blood. He had been in life a small, dark man with smooth black hair that was combed straight back in a pompadour with no part. His features were sharp with a hooked nose and a weak chin that seemed to have been in need of a shave. He may have been quick in his movements, volatile in his talk. Now he was just dead—only a dummy that presented problems.

Padillo looked at him without expression. “They’ll probably find four slugs right in his heart in a two-inch group. They seemed like pros.”

I could still smell the shots. “You want me to call the Polizei?”

Padillo looked at me absently and gnawed some on his lower lip. “I wasn’t here, Mac,” he said. “I was down in Bonn having a beer. Or up on Petersberg checking the opposition. Just so I wasn’t here. They wouldn’t have liked me to be here, and I’ve got to catch a plane tonight.”

“I can fix it with Hilde and Karl. The kitchen help’s still on their afternoon break, aren’t they?”

Padillo nodded. “We’ve got time for a quick one before you call.” We walked over to the bar and Padillo went behind it and took down the dimpled bottle of Haig. He poured two stiff ones. Karl was still over in the corner making soothing noises to Hilde, and I noticed his hands were patting the right places.

“After I catch that plane tonight, I should be back in ten days, maybe two weeks.”

“Why don’t you tell them you’ve come down with a bad cold?”

Padillo took a swallow of his drink and smiled. “I don’t much care for this trip. It’s a little more than routine.”

“Anything else I should know?”

He looked as if he wanted to say something; then he shrugged. “No. Nothing. Just keep me clean. Give me two minutes and then call the cops. O.K.?”

He finished his drink and came around from the bar. “Have fun,” I said.

“Same to you.”

We didn’t shake hands. We never did. I watched Padillo go out the door. He didn’t seem to walk as quickly as he once had. He seemed to stand just a little less straight.

I finished my drink, walked over and helped comfort Hilde for a moment, and fixed it up with her and Karl about how Padillo wasn’t there when the small dark man had had his last drink of Coca-Cola. Then I walked over to the bar, picked up the phone, and called the police.

After that I sat down at the bar and wondered about Padillo and where he was going. I thought about that, but not too much. Then I wondered about Herr Maas and his slight, dark friend and about the masked pair who came in and stopped him from living. By the time the police arrived I was wondering about myself, and I was glad when they came so I could stop that and start lying about something else.

They arrived in grand style: their oogah siren heralded their arrival by a full two
minutes—plenty of time for a competent second-story man to make it down the back stairs and out into the alley. Two jack-booted, green uniformed troopers burst in batting their eyes against the dark. Number one stalked over to the bar and asked if I was the citizen who had telephoned. When I said yes, he turned and proudly announced the fact to number two and a couple of men in civilian clothes who had also moved in. One of the non-uniformed policemen nodded at me and then they all went over to look at the body.

I glanced at my watch. Seventeen minutes had passed since the dark little man had been shot. While the police were looking at the body for clues or whatever they do I smoked a cigarette. By now Karl was behind the bar again and Hilde was standing near the door crumpling her apron.

“You fixed it with Hilde?”

Karl nodded. “She hasn’t seen him all day.”

One of the two plainclothes men detached himself from the group that was fiddling with the body and moved to the bar.

“You are Herr McCorkle?” he asked, giving my name a fine gutteral pronunciation.

“That’s correct. I called just after it happened.”

“I’m Lieutenant Wentzel.”

We shook hands. I asked him if he would like a drink. He said he would have a brandy. We waited while Karl poured it, said
prosit
, and he drank. Then back to business.

“You saw this happen?” Wentzel asked.

“Some of it. Not all.”

He nodded, his blue eyes direct and steady, his mouth a thin straight line that offered neither sympathy nor suspicion. He could have been asking about how the fender got dented.

“Please, would you mind telling me what happened just as you remember it? Omit nothing, no matter how trivial.”

I told it to him as it had happened from the time I left Berlin, leaving out only Padillo’s presence, which I suppose was something less than trivial. While I talked the technical crew came in, took pictures, dusted for fingerprints, examined the body, put it on a stretcher, threw a blanket over it, and carted it off to wherever they take dead bodies. The morgue, I suppose.

Wentzel listened carefully but took no notes. I guessed that he had that kind of mind. He never prompted or asked a question. He merely listened, occasionally glancing at his fingernails. They were clean, and so was the white shirt whose widespread collar was plugged by a double-Windsor knot tied into a brown-and-black tie. It didn’t do much for his dark-blue suit. He had shaved sometime during the day and he smelled faintly of lotion.

I finally ran down, but he kept on listening. The silence grew and I resisted the temptation to add a little frosting here and there. I offered him a cigarette, which he accepted.

“Uh—this man Maas?”

“Yes.”

“You had never seen him before?”

“Never.”

“But yet he managed to meet you on the plane at Tempelhof, became
friendly with you, secured a ride with you to Godesberg—in fact, to exactly the same destination—and here you observed him running from your establishment after his companion had been shot. Is this not true?”

“That’s what happened.”

“Of course,” Wentzel murmured, “of course. But do you not think, Herr McCorkle, do you not think it is something of a coincidence— indeed, an amazing coincidence—that this man should sit next to
you
, that
you
should offer him a ride, that he should be going to
your
establishment, where he was to meet a man who was to be killed?”

“It had struck me that way,” I said.

“Your partner, Herr Padillo, was not here?”

“No; he’s away on a business trip.”

“I see. If this man Maas attempts to get in touch with you by some fashion, you will notify us immediately?”

“You’ll be the first.”

“And tomorrow would it be possible for you to come down to our bureau to sign a statement? It will be necessary for your employees to come also. At eleven hours, shall we say?”

“Good. Anything else?”

He looked at me carefully. He would remember my face ten years from now.

“No,” he said. “Not for the present.”

I offered the other three a drink; they looked at Wentzel, who nodded. They ordered brandy and drank it at a gulp. It was just as well. Karl had not poured the best. We shook hands all around and Wentzel marched off into the afternoon. I stared at the corner table where Maas and his friend had sat. There was nothing there now. Just some tables and chairs that almost looked inviting.

If it weren’t for money, I told myself, I would sell out and go to Santa Fe or Kalispell and open a bar where the only problem would be how to get old Jack Hudson back to the ranch of a Saturday night. But there is a lot of difference in saloon-keeping. Here in the shadow
of the Siebengebirge, in the purple shadows of the seven hills where once lived Snow White and the Seven Drawfs and where Siegfried slew the fearsome dragon, I was more or less the Sherman Billingsley of the Rhine. A community fixture, friend and confidant of minister and jackanapes alike. Respected. Even admired.