“If I were Kragstein, out on the street.”
“So it would be wiser to remain where we are?” Scales said, making it a question out of politeness. He seemed more worried about the king’s occasional grammatical lapses than he did about Kragstein’s threats. The king wasn’t exactly quivering either. He had chosen a chintz-covered armchair and was leaning back in it, smiling at whoever paid him any attention, anxious to please, and eager to keep out of the way. If one had to be a bodyguard, the king seemed to be the perfect client.
“We stay here until Wanda calls,” Padillo said. “Then we move.”
“And you have a place in mind?” Scales asked.
“Only if we need it,” Padillo said.
Conversation ended and we sat there in the maple- and chintz-furnished living room of the apartment that was located in what they used to call New York’s teeming lower East Side and examined the hooked rugs on the floor and the pastoral prints on the walls and the thoughts that slid through our minds and then we jumped, almost in unison, when the phone rang. Padillo got it before it rang twice and after he said hello he nodded at us so that we would know that it was Wanda. He said, “Hold on,” into the phone and gestured toward the room where the king and Scales had been when I arrived. “There’s an extension in there,” he said. “Get on it.”
The phone was next to the bed and I picked it up and said nothing.
“McCorkle’s on,” Padillo said.
“Why?” Wanda Gothar said.
“Because he’s in now. All the way.”
“You said Plomondon.”
“He thought Gitner was a little rich.”
“And McCorkle doesn’t?”
“He doesn’t know Gitner that well.”
“He can’t handle Gitner,” she said. “I’m not even sure that you can.”
“We may get the chance to settle that question in about fifteen minutes. Kragstein wants us out of here by then or they’re coming in.”
“Take care of it,” she said. She had no questions, no comments, not even any advice. Just the automatic admonition which assumed that Padillo would know how to do it just like he’d know how to pick up a quart of ice cream on the way home from work.
“How long have we got in New York?” he said.
“Two more days.”
“Then?”
“San Francisco.”
“That’s not just dumb,” he said “that’s inexcusable.”
“The oil companies don’t need any excuse,” she said. “That’s where the signing takes place. They won’t change it. I tried.”
“Why don’t you quote them the odds against us making a cross-country trip like that with the opposition we’ve got.”
“I did,” she said. “They seemed delighted.”
“You mean they don’t want the deal?”
“They’ll take it, but if something happened to Kassim, they think they could make another one that could be even better.”
“All right,” Padillo said. “I’ll give you a number where you can get me for the next two days.” He rattled one off without hesitation and I was fairly certain that Wanda Gothar didn’t need to write it down. They both had memories like that—the kind that could recall the combinations on their high school lockers.
“I’ll call you from San Francisco,” she said.
“Where are you now?”
“Where the power is,” she said. “Dallas.”
“Call me this time tomorrow.”
“All right,” she said. “By the way, Mr. McCorkle?”
“Yes?” I said.
“Shall I be seeing you in San Francisco?”
“Perhaps,” I said.
“It’s such a beautiful city. Do you like it?”
“My opinion doesn’t count much. I was born there.”
“Really? Then I hope you’re not planning to die there.”
She broke the connection before I could say something that would show off my incisive wit so I hung up the phone and spent a few moments admiring the spinster’s bedroom. It was really a boudoir in the classic French sense of the word which meant that it was a place to sulk in if the diamonds in the bracelet weren’t big enough or if the monthly check was a couple of days late. Although the living room might be chintz and maple, the bedroom was all sex and sin with lots of mirrors and a big round bed with a fur spread that looked like seal, but could have been sable, and careful lighting and a chaise longue big enough for two in case the bed got boring. It could have been the bedroom of a top-dollar call girl, or of a spinster who yearned to be one. Either way I had to feel sorry for her.
When I came out of the bedroom the first thing I saw was the king as he knelt by his chair, his hands clasped in front of him, his head up, his eyes closed, and his lips moving silently, presumably in prayer. Scales was watching him with what I took to be benign approval and Padillo, a failed Catholic of sorts himself, was checking the action on his automatic and looking as though he didn’t have too much faith in that either.
I stood there in the doorway of the bedroom for a while, shifting from one foot to the other until the king got through with his prayers. He signaled their conclusion by saying “Amen” aloud in a ringing, fervent voice and Padillo looked up at me and said, “Did you bring anything to shoot with?”
“The office thirty-eight,” I said and wondered if it were a good time to tell him that I’d forgotten to pack the bullets. Either he was a mind reader or he was resigned to my careless ways because he reached into his coat pocket and tossed me a box of .38 shells. “In case you run short,” he said and I thought that he should get some sort of prize for tact.
I took the revolver out of the attaché case and loaded it and then dropped it into the right-hand pocket of my jacket so that it was sure to ruin the drape. Padillo rose from his chair and crossed to a window and peered out through the cheery patterned drapes that were dyed rust and lemon and what looked for all the world like British Racing Green. Padillo looked through the drapes for a moment and then turned, crossed to the phone, and dialed a number.
“It’s Padillo,” he said and then listened for almost a minute, his eyes squeezed shut as he massaged the bridge of his nose.
When he said, “I’ve been awfully tied up down in Washington,” I knew it was a woman because it was the same thing that he told women in Washington, except that when he was there he was always being tied up in New York.
“Some friends of mine are in town and we need a place to stay for a couple of days,” he said. “No,” he said, “all men.” There was another pause while he listened and massaged his nose some more and then he said, “No, I don’t want you to go to all that trouble … Yes, I know that’s what you pay them for.” He looked at his watch and said, “We should be there within an hour … All right … Thanks very much.”
He hung up the phone and then looked at us, one at a time, as if trying to decide whether we were really worth some private sacrifice that he had to make. “It’s a cooperative apartment in the Sixties just off Fifth,” he said. “All we’ve got to do is get there.”
“I don’t mean to carp, Mr. Padillo,” Scales said, “but won’t another apartment be just as vulnerable as this one?”
“It’s not exactly an apartment,” Padillo said. “It’s the entire floor of a building and the person who owns it has something that makes it secure enough for the Secret Service to give it a top rating.”
“What does this person have?” Kassim said.
“The best protection there is,” Padillo said. “About eighty million dollars.”
12
IT WAS dark on the roof of the apartment building, but seven stories below a street lamp flooded the entrance with a pool of yellow light that had a sickly, jaundiced look about it. I peered over the three-foot-high brick wall that ran along the front of the building. The king and Emory Scales knelt beside me, but they weren’t looking down. They were looking to their left at the eight-foot-wide black void that they were going to have to leap across in about three minutes if Padillo’s plan worked.