Pabst, still staring at the asphalt, muttered, “Harry don’t have to know.”
“Sorry?” Padillo said.
Pabst looked up. “I said Harry won’t know if you don’t tell him.”
“Why wouldn’t I tell him? You sliced my car top. But Harry won’t pay for it unless I tell him what you two did and why.”
“Maybe we could work it out,” Schlitz said with a broad smile utterly lacking in confidence.
“How?”
“I mean if you guys need something done, well, maybe we could do it and that’d sort of pay for your car top and then Harry wouldn’t have to know about this.”
Padillo studied Schlitz for a moment before asking, “Does Tinker Burns worry either of you?”
“Nope,” Pabst said. It was a quick answer and McCorkle thought it was probably far too quick.
“Then you wouldn’t mind lying to him, would you?” Padillo said.
After a cautious nod, Pabst said, “Go on.”
“We want you to call Tinker at his hotel,” Padillo said. “If he’s not there, leave a message. The message will say only that you’ve learned that McCorkle and Padillo have the Haynes manuscript. That’s all. But if Tinker himself answers the phone, tell him you were at Pong’s with Harry Warnock and the lads and heard talk that McCorkle and I have the Haynes manuscript. When Tinker asks for details, tell him that’s all you know. Absolutely all.”
It was Schlitz who repeated a reasonably close version of the instructions and asked, “When d’you want us to call him?”
“Now,” Padillo said.
“I’ll use your car phone.”
“I don’t have a car phone.”
Not bothering to conceal his astonishment, Schlitz said, “Jesus, everybody’s got a—”
“I don’t,” Padillo said.
“He doesn’t have a fax machine either,” McCorkle said.
“Well,” Schlitz said, “I guess we can use the phone in my car.”
After McCorkle knocked on the hotel room door, it was opened by his daughter, who apparently wore nothing other than a man’s white oxford shirt and it rather loosely buttoned.
“They have house phones in the lobby,” she said.
“We can wait out here till you get—”
McCorkle was interrupted by Granville Haynes’s voice from behind the partially open door. “Who is it?”
“It’s Pop and the old guy who rides shotgun.”
“Then ask them in.”
“You’re invited,” she said, walked away from the half-open door and disappeared into the bathroom.
McCorkle entered the room, followed by an amused looking Padillo. Once inside, McCorkle turned slowly, nodding at Haynes, who wore pants, shirt and loafers, but no socks. McCorkle continued his slow turn, noting the room-service cart, the empty and half-empty glasses, the discarded copies of the Sunday Washington Post and New York Times, the rumpled bed and, finally, Padillo’s amused expression.
“What’s so funny?” McCorkle said.
“Outraged fathers are always funny.”
“Who says I’m outraged?”
“Your choleric flush.”
“Care for a drink?” Haynes said.
McCorkle turned to stare at him. “Care? No. Need? Yes.”
“Scotch, vodka, beer, what?”
“Scotch.”
“Mr. Padillo?”
“Nothing, thanks.”
“You may need one after you hear about our threatening phone call.”
“Who from?”
“Since Erika took the call, I’ll let her tell it.”
After the drinks were poured and served, Erika McCorkle came out of the bathroom, wearing pants and over them the man’s white shirt, now buttoned except for the collar button and the one just below it. She went to the mini-refrigerator, removed a can of beer, popped it open and drank thirstily. She then turned to her father and said, “Okay. Let’s have it.”
McCorkle took another look around the room. “I suppose this is as good a way as any to spend a long Sunday afternoon. Your mother and I used to spend them like this in Bonn a hundred years ago. Usually out at her place in Tannenbusch. She lived in a one-room studio on the top floor of a Hochhaus with a view of the Rhine and the Drachenfels. Padillo always opened up on Sundays, so I’d drop by Fredl’s around noon with a bottle of wine or two and a couple of steaks. People still ate steak then. Fredl would read the papers, all six or seven of them, and after that we’d talk and fool around, then eat, and talk and maybe even fool around some more. Around six or seven I’d drive out to Godesberg to take over from Padillo. Sometimes she’d come with me.”
“She came with you most of the time,” Padillo said.
McCorkle nodded. “I guess she did.”
“You two weren’t married then?” Erika asked.
“Not even engaged.”
“How old was she?”
“Fredl? Twenty-four, twenty-five.”
“And you?”
McCorkle looked at Haynes, who was leaning against the windowsill again and wearing what seemed to be a look of polite sympathy. “Thirty-two, thirty-three,” McCorkle said. “Around in there.”
“This was the late fifties?”
“The late, late fifties.”
“You and Mutti never talk about it, do you?”
“Not much.”
“He’s not talking about it now,” Padillo said.
“Then what’s he saying?”
“For Christsake, Gurgles,” Padillo said.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Gurgles?” Haynes asked.
“When she was learning to talk,” Padillo said, “she couldn’t quite handle Erika McCorkle and it came out Erigga McGurgle. I called her Gurgles until she turned six and made me stop.”
“That still doesn’t explain what Pop was saying.”
Padillo shrugged. “Ask him.”
She turned to McCorkle. “Well, what was it—a roundabout invitation to join the grown-ups?”
“Who wants that?”
“What then?”
“I think it was a promise,” McCorkle said.
“What kind of promise?”
“That next time I’ll use the house phone.”
Wearing her sunshine smile, she hurried over to McCorkle, went up on tiptoe, kissed him and, still smiling, turned to Granville Haynes and said, “You can tell we’re a very demonstrative family.”
“If the demonstration’s over, maybe you should tell the family about the threatening phone call.”
She turned automatically to Padillo, as if he were the usual receiver of bad news. “Mr. Tinker Burns called,” she said. “About twenty or thirty minutes before you got here. He was looking for you and Pop. After I told him we didn’t know where you were, he asked—no, he told me to give you a message. I asked him to hold on while I got something to write with. But he said I wouldn’t need anything because his message was short and simple.”
“And was it?” Padillo said. “Short and simple?”
She nodded. “Mr. Burns told me to tell you that unless you let him look at Steady’s manuscript, he’s going to break your fucking necks. Or have it done.”
Chapter 32
The four of them traded information for the next twenty minutes. Haynes and Erika went first with their account of Hamilton Keyes’s offer of $750,000 for all rights to the still unfound, unread memoirs of Steadfast Haynes. McCorkle and Padillo then described events leading up to their encounter outside Pong’s Palace with Mr. Schlitz and Mr. Pabst.
After that they went back over everything—poking at this recalling that and speculating about other just-remembered bits and pieces, most of them inconsequential, until they suddenly stopped when it became apparent they were getting nowhere. A silence began and lasted nearly two minutes before it was ended by Granville Haynes.
“Since Tinker’s obviously got his own deal going,” Haynes said, “I think I’ll drop by his hotel around two-thirty or three tomorrow morning and ask him what it is.”
“He won’t tell you,” Padillo said.