Backup Men Read online

  “You keep up with things.”

  “He left it all to her.”

  “Everything.”

  “She had a little to put in the pot herself, as I recall.”

  “About twenty million or so.”

  “Amanda Kent—the Kandy Kid, as a tabloid or two would have it.”

  “Kent’s Candies, Incorporated,” Padillo said. “Her grandfather founded it in Chicago and his major contribution was in refusing to spell candy with a K. A wise old bird.”

  We went through another door and into a room which was just what Padillo had said it would be, a bar. It was a dim place with all the bottles that one would need and an old bar that could have been rescued from a turn-of-the-century Third Avenue saloon. There were also some padded stools and some low tables surrounded by comfortable-looking leather chairs. It was a room designed for drinking and Padillo went behind the bar as if he knew the way.

  “Scotch,” I said and he poured us both doubles and after I’d tasted mine I admired the room some more and then waved my drink at it a little. “I don’t like to be crass, but how much down would I have to have before I could move in?”

  “As I said, it’s a cooperative.”

  “Sort of a people’s movement, huh?”

  “You buy shares. One share equals one floor. One floor goes for one million.”

  “Isn’t there what they call a maintenance charge?”

  “I think it’s twenty thousand a month, but I may be low.”

  “I won’t haggle,” I said. “Of course, I’d have to spend a little to furnish it.”

  “Another million, if you like nice things. By scrimping, you could get by for maybe seven hundred and fifty thousand.”

  “It’s a long way from Santa Monica Boulevard,” I said.

  Padillo glanced around the room. “Too far?”

  “Not with your charm.”

  “I met her at a party.”

  “You must know her pretty well if you can dump three unexpected weekend guests on her.”

  “I know her pretty well,” he said.

  “Is it serious?”

  “It pleases her to think so and I like to please her.”

  I tasted my Scotch again. It was expensive stuff, too expensive for me even at wholesale prices. I waved my glass around again, but gently so as not to spill any. “There probably would be a tense period of adjustment, but I think I just might be able to get used to all this. A matter of self-discipline, I suppose.”

  Padillo grinned, but it was the wry kind that contained more regret than humor. “You’d last six months,” he said. “Maybe a year.”

  “And you?”

  “I think I’m afraid to find out.”

  “Maybe,” I said, giving the room another look, “but I can see why you’ve spent so many weekends in New York. You used to hate it.”

  “There’s that keen insight of yours again.”

  “Not really.”

  “What would you call it?”

  I sighed and finished my drink. “Envy,” I said. “The green kind.”

  13

  EVEN IF her father and grandfather hadn’t supplied half of the nation’s chocolate bars, I could still see why the papers might have tagged her as the Kandy Kid. She had taffy-colored hair and cinnamon eyes and a creamy nougat complexion and a voice that was as smooth and as rich as melted butterscotch.

  She was also a little over thirty, but with eighty million dollars you don’t have to look it and she didn’t. She came through the door to the bar, wearing something off-white that everyone would be wearing two or three years from then, and held out her hand and said, “I’m Amanda Clarkmann; you must be the McCorkle that he keeps talking about.” She shook hands with me, a nice, firm friendly shake, and then she turned and kissed Padillo and it was a long, unabashed kiss which I watched and discovered what must have been a trace of voyeurism that I didn’t know existed.

  When it was over, Padillo said to me, “I’ve mentioned you a couple of times in passing.”

  “I can see why you changed your mind about New York.”

  “I’ve been trying to convince him that he should marry me for my money,” she said. “Or sex. Even love.”

  “Offer to pay off his debts,” I said.

  “Does he owe much?”

  I nodded. “He’s in to me for nine bucks and our head bartender told me to remind him of the five he borrowed last month when he needed cab fare.”

  “Bankruptcy—or the threat of it—has been known to make men do strange things,” Padillo said. “Some commit suicide. Some try the South Seas. Some even get married.” He mixed Amanda Clarkmann a drink and handed it to her.

  “Tell me about his women,” she said, smiling a little to let me know it was a joke, but not one funny enough to keep her from listening if I had something juicy to reveal.

  “What can I say? Some were short and some were tall. The rest were kind of in between.”

  “How many?” she said, once more smiling, as if she hoped that the smile would erase the interest in her voice, but it didn’t. She really wanted to know. Most women do.

  “Ask him,” I said.

  “He won’t talk about them.”

  “Then compliment him on his reticence.”

  “Were there many?”

  “Women?”

  “Yes.”

  “I never noticed a surplus,” I said, “but neither was there a shortage. When it came to women, he always maintained what they used to call an evernormal granary.”

  “If you have to talk about me,” Padillo said, “would you try the present tense? The past tense gives me a perspective that I don’t much care for.”

  “So what brings you back to New York so soon, Michael?” she said. “Mr. McCorkle here looks most presentable, but William sighed when I asked about your other two friends. That means they’re a little odd.”

  “One of them’s a king,” Padillo said.

  “Does he work at it?”

  “He hopes to.”

  “He’s the king of what? I should be able to guess because there aren’t too many of them around anymore.”

  “Of Llaquah,” Padillo said.

  “His brother just died, didn’t he? He was a pleasant man. A little frivolous, but pleasant.”

  “You knew him?” Padillo said.

  She nodded. “We met a couple of times. Once in Paris and once in Madrid, I think. I didn’t know him well. What do you call the new king?”

  “I call him Mr. Kassim.”

  “Wouldn’t he prefer ‘your Majesty’ or ‘your Highness’?”

  “Scales calls him that,” I said.

  “And who is Mr. Scales?”

  “The royal adviser,” Padillo said. “He used to be Kassim’s tutor.”

  “The royal adviser has a torn sleeve, according to William.”

  “He fell down,” I said.

  She looked at Padillo and then at me and then back at Padillo. “Well, I can’t say that the rest of his royal entourage is overly elegant.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What it lacks in elegance it makes up for in quiet competence and dogged loyalty.”

  “There’s something else about it, too,” Padillo said.

  “What?” she asked.

  “It’s cheap.”

  “And the king is poor?”

  “Today, he’s broke. Next week he may be the richest king in the world.”

  “Then I know what I’ll do,” she said.

  “What?” Padillo said.

  “I’ll try to cheer him up. Most of the kings I’ve known have been awfully sad.”

  The dining room that we gathered in that Friday night must have been the one that was used for those small, intimate parties of not more than a dozen guests. I don’t know what it was called, or even if it had a name. The staff may have just referred to it as “Auxiliary Dining Room number six.” Or seven. Or even eight.

  Nor do I know who worked out the protocol, but we sat at a large rou
nd table with Kassim on Amanda Clarkmann’s right, Padillo on her left, with me next to the king and Scales next to Padillo. In this case, “next” meant about three feet away.

  The king seemed to be interested in the world’s nicer things. He inspected the silver carefully, either to make sure that it was sterling or that it was clean. He turned a plate over to read its maker’s name and whoever it was seemed to satisfy him. For someone who had just spent five years in a monastery, Kassim appeared inordinately interested in secular stuff. I decided that he may have felt that he had missed out on a lot and was now trying to catch up.

  There were two to serve, a middle-aged man whom I’d have liked to have hired for the saloon and a younger one who was nearly as good. I would have given the chef a job, too, if I’d thought that we could afford him. He had done something miraculous to the veal and when the older man skillfully spooned another portion onto my plate, as if he thought of gluttony as a virtue, I knew how easily I might be corrupted. It didn’t bother me.

  Amanda Clarkmann kept the conversation going with effortless ease, directing most of it at the king who responded in monosyllables between bites. If his table talk and manners lacked polish, there was nothing wrong with his appetite. Whenever his hostess tried to steer the conversation toward Llaquah, the king redirected it toward the food, praising the veal so lavishly that she felt constrained to force a third portion on him.

  After dinner, the king and Scales excused themselves, pleading weariness. Amanda Clarkmann, Padillo and I had brandy in a drawing room whose main feature was a Thomas Eakins portrait that hung above the fireplace. Padillo and I were on our second brandy and Amanda was still on her first when William, whom I took to be the household’s major domo, brought in a phone, plugged it in, and informed Padillo that he had a call.

  “Is there another jack in this room?” Padillo said.

  “Yes, sir, there is.”

  “Can you get another phone and plug it in?”

  William nodded, made a swift exit, and was back shortly with another phone which he also plugged in.

  “Get on it,” Padillo said to me.

  “Would you like me to leave?” Amanda Clarkmann said.

  Padillo shook his head. “I’ll be listening mostly, not talking.”

  We picked up the phones together and Padillo said hello. There was a short pause and then a voice said, “Is that you, Padillo?” I didn’t have any trouble placing the tone or the accent. Both of them belonged to Franz Kragstein.

  “Give it up, Michael,” he said with what seemed to be a touch of regret in his voice. “It’s hopeless.”

  “You haven’t done too well so far, Franz,” Padillo said. “You can’t even keep a line on McCorkle.”

  “It is hard to get competent help these days, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “While amiable enough, Mr. McCorkle doesn’t seem to be overly experienced.”

  “He’s fairly bright though. Inexpensive, too.”

  “We would like to reopen negotiations.”

  “No.”

  “Really, Michael, I don’t understand why—”

  “You don’t have to understand why. All you need to know is that you and Gitner will have to go through me. If you want to try it, fine.”

  “I was only trying to be sensible. I am really quite fond of you, Michael, in my own way. It’s paternal, I suppose. That is why I wanted to give you this—oh, I suppose I should call it this last opportunity. And no recriminations, of course.”

  “Hang up, Franz.”

  “I see. Well, I did try.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “One final item, Michael.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s such a very long way to San Francisco.”

  “I’ve been there before.”

  “I’m sorry, Michael, that you won’t again.”

  There was a click as Kragstein hung up and when the dial tone came on it seemed to have a shrill, insistent note that I hadn’t heard before. But that may well be how all the dial tones sound in New York.

  14

  THE KING was going for a grand slam in spades when Padillo came in and went behind the bar to mix himself a drink. Trumps were all in and the king used a spare one to get back to the board so that he could finesse his jack of hearts through me, but Amanda Clarkmann nailed the jack with her queen and the king was down one and doubled. He took it hard.

  We had been playing bridge for nearly two hours that morning for a cent a point and the king and Scales were nearly thirty-five dollars ahead, probably because I hadn’t played in more than ten years and hoped that it would be another ten before I was talked into trying it again, even with a partner who played as well as Amanda Clarkmann.

  On the next hand the bidding stopped when she went to four hearts which would be not only game, but also rubber. It made me dummy so after I laid down my hand, I joined Padillo at the bar. It was nearly noon and I had nothing to do until Wanda Gothar called that evening so I went behind the bar and mixed a martini, lying to myself as usual that it was needed to spark the appetite.

  “Who’s winning?” Padillo said as I debated about whether I wanted an olive.

  “They are,” I said, deciding that I didn’t really need the extra calories.

  “I ordered the armored truck.”

  “The armored truck,” I said wisely and took a quick swallow of the martini.

  “It’s due at four.”

  “The banks will be closed by then,” I said, once again demonstrating that I can keep up my end of any conversation.

  “It’s not going to a bank.”

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s going to the airport.”

  “LaGuardia,” I said, just to give him the chance to correct me. It made him feel better.

  “Kennedy.”

  “Well, I’ve heard that they make them so that they’re pretty comfortable nowadays.”

  “We won’t be in it.”

  “This came to you in the night, I assume.”

  “Around two.”

  “As a diversionary measure,” I said, “it has a touch of genius.”

  “It’s half good and it gives us half a chance,” he said, “which is about one hundred percent better than we had before.”

  “What’s going to the airport? In the armored car, I mean.”

  “The ring.”

  “The good one, of course.”

  “Amanda says that it’s insured for five hundred thousand.”

  “And where does the ring go once it gets to the airport?”

  “To a jeweler in San Francisco. He’ll clean it and send it back.”

  “But our nemeses, Mr. Kragstein and Mr. Gitner, will think that this is just a ruse—that we’re really inside the armored truck.”

  “That’s it.”

  “And while they’re following or pursuing the armored truck, we’ll be heading somewhere else.”

  “Newark,” Padillo said.

  “Ah, Newark.”

  “Then to Denver.”

  “Of course.”

  “And from Denver guess where.”

  “If I said San Francisco, I’d be wrong so I’ll say Los Angeles.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Where we rent a car and drive to San Francisco, sneaking in the back door so to speak. Whose armored truck is it, Brink’s?”

  “It’s the other outfit,” he said, “the one with the red ones.”

  “I’ve never ordered an armored truck,” I said, “probably because I felt that they’d be picky about having me as a customer. Did they give you any static?”

  “I doubt that they’d give me the time. But then my Dun and Bradstreet rating doesn’t glow in the dark the way Amanda’s does.”

  “She ordered it,” I said.

  Padillo nodded.

  “I can’t think of any disadvantages in being rich,” I said.

  Padillo looked around the room. “Only one,” he said.r />
  “What?”

  “Worrying that someday you might be poor.”

  After the game broke up and Amanda and I paid the king and Scales the $31.58 that we owed them, she excused herself, and the older of the two men who had waited on us the night before served lunch in the same room where we had played bridge.

  Lunch was a shrimp cocktail with a sauce whose recipe I would have paid $100 for, thick rare roast beef sandwiches, and a Mexican beer that I’d never tried before but liked very much. The king said he didn’t drink beer, so he was brought a Coca-Cola.

  During lunch Padillo told the king and Scales about the armored truck. They exchanged glances and after the king caught Scales’s almost imperceptible nod, he beamed and complimented Padillo on his deviation.

  “I think you mean deviousness, your Majesty,” Scales murmured, looking a little embarrassed. The king beamed happily and said yes, that’s what he had meant all along. “It will also give me the opportunity to see more of your great country than I had thought possible,” he said, making it sound as though he felt that Padillo and I ranked not too far below the President and considerably above the Secretary of State.

  Just before the coffee was served, the king got another one of those almost invisible nods from Scales. He rose, smoothing his bald head again, and begged to be excused, mentioning that it was time for his afternoon meditations.

  When he was gone, Scales leaned across the table toward us in a confidential if not conspiratorial manner, said “uh” a couple of times, and then asked, “I had no wish to alarm his Majesty, of course, but are you quite convinced that this is our safest route to San Francisco?”

  “There aren’t any safe routes,” Padillo said. “But this is the best I can come up with unless you change your mind about bringing in either the local cops or the Secret Service. I’d recommend both.”

  Scales frowned, shook his head twice, and said, “Impossible,” in a tone that clearly implied that further discussion would be unwelcome.

  It didn’t bother Padillo. “Why?” he said.

  Scales pulled at the end of his long, skinny nose, looking first at Padillo and then at me, as if trying to decide whether we could be trusted with some more royal secrets. “I haven’t brought this up before because you might think it a bit ridiculous,” he said.