“Flu? Bad cold?”
“You’re very good.” I called and talked to Fredl’s bureau chief and assured him it was nothing serious and promised to give her his best wishes for a speedy recovery.
“What now?” I asked.
“The tough part. We wait.”
I walked over to the file and opened a drawer. “You may as well learn where I buy the hamburger,” I said. For the next hour we went over the books, the peculiarities of our suppliers, the menu, and the help and their individual problems. I showed Padillo how much money we owed, to whom, and whether they allowed two per cent off if bills were paid before the tenth or the fifth of the month. “I ran on that two per cent discount the first three months,” I said. “I won’t buy now unless I get it.”
On the way through the kitchen I had told Herr Horst to bring Hardman back to the office when he arrived. At twenty minutes after one there was a knock on the door. “Herr Hardman is here,” Horst said. When he stepped through the door Hardman seemed to cut the small room’s living space in half.
“Hi, Mac. How you doin, baby?” he asked Padillo.
“Fine.”
“You lookin good. That’s a nice suit,” Hardman said as he sprawled on the couch and cocked his eighty-five dollar black calf shoes on one of the chairs. I noticed that the shoes didn’t turn up at the toes.
“Care for a drink?” Padillo asked.
“Fine with me,” Hardman said. “Scotch-and-water.”
“How do we get it?” Padillo asked.
“Simple,” I said and picked up the telephone and dialed one number. “Two martinis; one Scotch-and-water — the good Scotch,” I said.
We made some idle talk until the waiter came with the drinks. Hardman took a long swallow of his. “You lookin rough, Mac. Mush say somethin wrong when you go home last night. Say somethin wrong with Fredl.”
“That’s right.”
“She didn’t split on you?”
“No. Somebody took her away. She didn’t want to go.”
The big brown man nodded his head slowly. “Now that’s bad,” he said. “That’s real bad. What you want me to do?”
“We don’t know yet. I guess we want to know whether you want to do anything.”
“What you mean guess, man? Hell, Fredl’s my buddy. Here,” he said to Padillo, “look what she wrote about me in this Frankfurt, Germany, paper.”
“Show him the original,” I said. “He reads German and it’s more impressive.”
“Uh-huh,” Hardman said, taking a Xeroxed copy of the article from his inside jacket pocket. “Read this right here.”
Padillo read it quickly or pretended to. “That’s something,” he said, handing the article back. “That’s really something.”
“Ain’t it though.”
Before Hardman arrived, Padillo and I had discussed how much we should tell him. We decided that a fourth or even a half of the story would sound phony. We told him the entire thing — from Padillo’s original contact with the Van Zandt people in Lomé to the note that was waiting for me when we got home the night before. We didn’t tell him about Senora de Romanones.
“Then it wouldn’t do no good for you to just go ahead and shoot this mother?”
“No.”
“And you can’t go down to Ninth and Pennsylvania and see the FBI?”
“No.”
“Why don’t I go down? These African cats don’t know me.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” Padillo said.
“Man, I’ll just make a phone call, know what I mean? If you got the Feds down there, that we all payin good money for, we might as well use them. I ain’t got nothin against law workin for me.”
“Okay,” Padillo said. “Suppose you call the FBI — or Mc-Corkle or I call them from a phone booth. We say something like this: Prime Minister Van Zandt is coming to town and his cabinet wants me to shoot him to create sympathy for their independence. That’s just my opening line. But they’re trained to take complaints. They say: ‘All right, we’ve got that, Mr. Padillo. Can you just give us a few more details?’ Yes, I say, it seems that they’ve kidnapped my partner’s wife — Fredl McCorkle — and unless I shoot the Prime Minister, they’ll dispose of Mrs. McCorkle. That’s about it, fellows, except that it’s going to take place next Friday between two and three p.m. at the corner of Eighteenth and Pennsylvania just across the street from the United States Information Agency.”
“It won’t work, Hardman,” I said. “If you call the FBI, they’ll tighten the security to the point that Van Zandt’s crowd will know something’s gone wrong. If Van Zandt isn’t killed — then Fredl is — automatically.”
“You mean you can tell ’em the time and the place and everything and they can’t do nothin?”
“That’s the trouble,” I said. “They can do too much. They can save the Prime Minister, but my wife gets killed. I won’t make the trade.”
“So you gonna do it private?”
“We’re going to try.”
“Think we could get another drink and some lunch?” Hardman said.
“I’ve saved you a nice steak,” I said and picked up the phone and ordered. The drinks came first and when the waiter was gone, Hardman said: “How you want to fit me in?”
“You know this town,” I said. “And you have friends who know it even better. We have a wild idea. It’s possible that Van Zandt’s people are hiding Fredl in some Negro neighborhood. They might figure it’s the last place anyone would look. This is only a guess, but you’ve got ins with maids, liquor store delivery men, service people — guys who go in and out of dozens of houses a day. Maybe you can find out if they’ve spotted anything unusual, or if they’ve seen Fredl.”
“I’ll have to use Mush.”
“How much do you have to tell him?”
“Some. Not all. But some. He was with you when you got home last night.”
“What do you think?” Padillo asked.
Hardman leaned forward on the couch, looked at the floor, and sucked thoughtfully on a hollow tooth. “I don’t think much of your idea that she’s hid out in a colored section. But, hell, that ain’t hard to check. Hard thing’s goin to be to check out the white sections. But like you say, they might have a maid. Don’t this outfit have a front man in town — an embassy or something?”
“They have a trade mission,” Padillo said.
“I’d sure look those mothers up. They must know something.”
“We plan to.”
The waiter arrived with the lunch and we ate without much further conversation. When we were on the second cup of coffee, Hardman leaned back and sighed, “Mac, you serve about the best goddamned steak in town. And you have to pay about the highest price to get it.”
“Keeps out the riffraff.”
The big man got up and stretched. “I best be goin. I’ll get in touch with you later this evenin. Where you gonna be?”
Padillo gave him the number of his suite at the Mayflower and said: “We may need a place to meet with some friends. Some place private. You have any ideas?”
“How bout Betty’s where you was last night?”
“Think she’d object?”
“Baby, long’s I pay the rent she ain’t gonna object too much.”
“Fine.”
“I’ll call you... You think they got your line at the Mayflower bugged?”
Padillo shrugged. “I’ll play it cozy,” Hardman said. “Might even send Mush around to give you the word.” He found a toothpick in his shirt pocket, stuck it in his mouth, gave us a casual wave, and was gone.
“That’s a start,” I said.
“That’s about all you can call it.”
“Have any more suggestions?”
“Go back to the hotel and wait for the phone to ring.”