Twenty
We walked down the stairs and out of the building and turned south on Seventh Street. When we neared the car, Padillo looked at his watch. “It’s too late for breakfast and too early for lunch,” he said. “What do you suggest?”
“A drink, except that it’s Sunday.”
“Don’t you know some scoff-law barkeep?”
“Me,” I said.
“That’ll have to do.”
The sermons were still going on as we traveled H Street over to Seventeenth and we missed the post-church traffic. “Let’s go by the Roger Smith,” Padillo said.
I turned left and drove down to Pennsylvania and then right. “Van Zandt will turn at this corner and the four-car parade will follow the same route we’re taking.”
Padillo ducked and looked up at the roof garden of the hotel. “It’s closed this time of year, you say?”
“That’s right.”
We turned right on Eighteenth and drove north until it ran into Connecticut Avenue again. I managed to find a parking place in front of the restaurant. Inside, I switched on one bank of lights which still left it dark enough to have made a flashlight handy. We felt our way to the bar, bumping once into a chair. Padillo went behind the bar and switched on the lights that illuminated the sinks and the bottles.
“What are you drinking?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Martini?”
“Why not.”
“Vodka?”
“Gin.”
“On the rocks?”
“No.”
He mixed the drinks deftly and placed mine before me. “That could help that sad look that Magda wanted to cure.”
“I bet she’s a lot of fun.”
“A swell kid and a peachy dancer.”
“Is she good with that gun you were talking about?”
“Very good.”
“Is that good enough to go in after Fredl?”
“It is if she’s on our team this week.”
“Is she?”
“I don’t know. That’s why you’d better go along.”
I nodded. “I was going to suggest it.”
Padillo took a sip of his drink. “After you rescue your wife and drop her off, you can come down to the Roger Smith and lend a hand.”
“There’ll be a few loose toys still out of the box?”
“A few.”
I tried the martini. It was quite good. “Do you think they’ll write that letter?”
“If Dymec leans on them hard enough. If he sits there with that ‘I-won’t-budge-till-you-do’ stare of his, they’ll probably give it to him. They won’t have much choice.”
“It’s insurance for him.”
“He’d better think so. Of course, he could just simply tell them what we want to use it for.”
“I thought of that,” I said. “But there’s not as much percentage in it for him.”
“Let’s hope so. I also hope that it gets Price off my neck.”
“It should,” I said, “but I’ve never known you to be so considerate of people who shoot at you.”
Padillo held up the cocktail shaker and looked at it. “I’m not really. Let’s have one more and then have some lunch.”
“All right.”
He mixed the drinks and poured them. “Funny about Price,” he said.
“How?”
“He wants the letter, but that alone won’t keep him off my back.”
“What else?”
“How many times did he shoot at me last night?”
“Twice.”
“He missed twice. Five years ago he wouldn’t have missed once. Three years ago he would have been dead if he had. You notice I didn’t shoot back.”
“I took it for a sporting gesture.”
Padillo grinned. “Not quite. My hand was shaking too much.”
We walked over to Harvey’s on Connecticut Avenue and had lunch there which was no better nor worse than the lunches they had been serving for the past 108 years. Afterwards, we drove back to Seventh Street, found a parking place, and climbed the stairs to the office with the folding steel chairs and the dust-covered desk. I asked Padillo how his side was and when he said it bothered him I offered him the chair behind the desk. I turned another chair around so that it would serve as a footrest and we sat there in the drab office on a Sunday afternoon and waited for the gangster men to arrive.
They arrived on time, at two p.m. Hardman brought them in, three Negroes of different shades of brown, all dressed in quiet, conservative dark suits, white shirts, muted ties and highly-polished shoes. He introduced us to them and then told us who they were.
“This Johnny Jay,” he said of a tall, thin man with dark skin, a bleak look, and wide mouth with thick rubbery lips. He looked to be about thirty-one or two. He nodded at us, took out a handkerchief, dusted off one of the folding chairs, and sat down.
“This here’s Tulip,” Hardman said, indicating a man with a dark pitted face, a wide, stocky build, and curiously delicate-looking hands that flitted around like thick butterflies, lighting first on his lapels, then down to check the flaps on his jacket pockets, then the trouser pockets, then up to his head to smooth a hair back into place, and then to the knot of his blue and maroon striped tie.
The last man that Hardman introduced was a mulatto, a sleek-skinned, handsome lad whom he called Nineball. Nine-ball wore a double-breasted suit of dark grey flannel, a white shirt with a tab collar, a neatly knotted green and black foulard tie, and a well-clipped mustache. He wore them all well and gave us a friendly smile when Hardman mentioned his name.
“These the men you gonna be workin with,” Hardman told them. “They also the men who gonna pay you two thousand dollars to do whatever needs to be done like I told you, and I don’t want no mess-ups.”
“I’ll have the money for you first thing in the morning,” I said. “As soon as the banks open.”
Hardman took out his ostrich billfold and opened it so he could read something he had written on a notepad.
“Gonna cost you $10,247 for the whole thing. Six big ones for my three friends here, a thousand each to rent the moving van and the pickup, a thousand into the hip pocket of the man at the phone company to get them phones in first thing in the morning, a thousand to get the two cars painted, and $247 for expenses like uniforms and a couple of other items.”
Nineball spoke up. “We gonna have to zap anybody?”
“Not if we can help it,” Padillo said.
Nineball nodded and said: “But it just possibly might be necessary.”
“It possibly might,” Padillo said.
“How you got it planned now?” Hardman asked.
“There’s one thing about those figures you were reeling off,” I said.
“What?” Hardman said.
“There’s no cut for you.”
“We get around to that later.”
Padillo leaned forward from his chair behind the desk and rested his arms on the blotter. I noticed that he had dusted it off. “It works like this,” he said. “You’ll be outside the trade mission on Massachusetts Avenue by eleven-thirty on Tuesday morning. You’ll be parked so that you have a clear view of the house. If there’s a rear entrance, whoever’s in the big truck will cover that. At precisely eleven-thirty a young white girl will go into the trade mission. She’ll be driving a new green Chevrolet with D.C. plates. At eleven-thirty you’ll start your four-way conference call. I assume that Hardman’s going to be in the pickup so he’ll originate the call. If that girl’s not out of that place by noon, you go and bring her out.”
He waited. There were no questions. Hardman cleared his throat and said: “I’ve told ’em about that part, baby. I also mentioned that there’d be a bonus in it if they gotta go in.”
“That’s right,” Padillo said.
“Who’s gonna be drivin my car?” Hardman said.