Payback Read online

  They moved through the terminal and threaded through the crowd. Mitchell thinking only of a long hot shower and a long cold beer. Maybe a Sunday night television movie. Fall asleep to it.

  Leo said, “Quarter of seven.—Have you got any bags?”

  “I don’t know,” Mitchell said. “I worry. Any airport that calls itself LAX …”

  “You’re funny,” Leo said. “So I’ll meet you at the entrance. In the meanwhile, you’ll possibly contemplate your sins.”

  “I doubt it,” Mitchell said.

  He lit a cigarette now and paced around the floor. Waiting for three weeks of sweated-in clothes, bottle of tequila, Indian belt. The trip to Guatemala had gone pretty well, the factory was geared up and ready for production, and he hadn’t gone down there and acted like a gringo-imperialist ass, so he felt a little mellow; patient. He was moving to a Mexican beat.

  So was the baggage.

  Leo at the entrance, leaning on the hood now and smoking a cigar, looking arrows at his watch. Leo had a stretched-out silver Mercedes and a tall black chauffeur. Leo once told him, “If I were what I ate I’d be a Maalox tablet but luckily in Hollywood you are what you drive.”

  The car had everything. Television, telephone, tape deck and a bar.

  And a blonde. She was sitting in the corner in a sable. Blank; a showgirl with Midwestern eyes; about thirty. Leo slid over on the seat. Putting his hand over Mitchell’s shoulder, he said to the lady, “Now you see this face? You’ll forget you ever saw it and remember what you said about mature older men.”

  The girl said to Leo, “I think he’s mature,” and to Mitchell, “I’m Debbie.”

  Mitchell said, “Debbie, it’s very nice to meet you.”

  Leo said, “Handsome, polite, but an ass. As in stubborn.” Leo grinned. “I’m continuing my lecture.”

  Mitchell said nothing, yawning now, leaning his back against the leather, watching the taillights zoom along the road. Leo had to talk. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly.

  Leo said, “The deal in Guatemala—okay. Like I told you this morning, you might break even. Chalk it up to P.R. You want to bring low-cost drugs to the peasants—” He turned back to Debbie. “Pharmaceuticals,” he said. “This guy runs a pharmaceutical company. In case you turn out to be an undercover cop.” He turned back to Mitchell. “Where was I?”

  “You were telling me to cut out the research.”

  “Exactly,” Leo said. “You want to deal with reality, the research has to go. You have to understand this. Stockholders tend to be short-term thinkers. What they want is their dividends. They want another Ralph Lauren shirt. They want it now, and they don’t give a shit about paralyzed veterans or Guatemalan peasants. They don’t even know where Guatemala is but they know where Saks is. You follow what I’m saying?” Mitchell said nothing. Leo said to Debbie now, “Where’s Guatemala?”

  Debbie gave it thought and said, “Where you just were?”

  “Case rests,” Leo said.

  Mitchell watched some taillights zooming for a while. Then he said, “Yeah, but does she own any stock. Debbie? Do you own any Tate Pharmaceuticals?”

  “Do I?” Debbie asked.

  “You do in a manner of speaking,” Leo said. “It’s the one that makes the artificial sweetener.”

  “Oh.—Good,” Debbie said.

  “Case rests,” Mitchell added, and thought he had it wrapped because Leo was actually silent for a second.

  Mitchell watched a Bentley passing on the left; lady in back of it lining up a snort. Roadsign ahead: Los Angeles 8, Bel Air 17. Final scorecard in the Ballgame of Life.

  “The trouble,” Leo said, “is you’ve been dreaming out loud. You’re forgetting your purpose. The purpose of business is business,” Leo said. “The only thing that saves you is the fact that you can be such a bastard when you want.”

  Mitchell said nothing.

  Leo said to Debbie, “The man can be a shark. He gets hold of the sweetener. Beautiful maneuver. Then he takes the money and he pours it down the drain. He puts it into research. He tries to get paralyzed guinea pigs to walk.”

  Mitchell said patiently, “That’s what he does.”

  “Why?” Leo pressed.

  “Because somebody has to. Because somebody has to be a long-term thinker and a long-shot taker or we’re going down the tubes. We’ll choke on our own pragmatism, Leo. What’s the matter with you anyway? You’re starting to sound like you’ve been listening to Cy.”

  Leo said nothing. He fiddled with the unlit cigar in his hand. “Okay,” he admitted. “He invited me to dinner and he did his little shtik. So let me tell you how it goes: Cy wants you out of there and don’t underestimate the slimy little fucker.”

  Debbie said, “Is that the slimy little fucker we met at Capalbo’s?”

  “That’s right,” Leo said. “That was Cyrus Tate. Scion of the founder. I think you said he looked like a child molester, right?”

  And Mitchell had to laugh. Picturing Cy with his nervous little body and his speedy little eyes.

  Leo said, “He told her he’s a movie producer and she thought he was even too degenerate for that.”

  Mitchell laughed again and said, “No, he produces, and he almost gets it right. I think he came closest with Thursday, the Twelfth. Am I right, Leo?”

  “No. You’re wrong,” Leo said. “You can’t just dismiss him. He hates you in an actually biblical sense. He’d like to see you stricken with some seven-year boils. And he’ll fight you. You’re gonna have a proxy fight. Watch.”

  Mitchell just shrugged again and lit a cigarette. Nothing that Leo was telling him was news. The stockholders’ meeting wasn’t slated till August but already he’d caught the little stirrings in the wind. The troops had been massing. The last bitter dregs of the Tate family were even now rising from the bottom of their barrels, a family so quarrelsome that Thanksgiving dinners were served without knives, and now they were apparently united in a cause. Trying to get him to be drummed from the chairmanship and kicked off the board. Well … he could get overconfident about it and that, he was aware, would be asking to be kicked. But the thing was, he couldn’t take it seriously either. Cy was a jerk. Such an obvious jerk that even the most venal stockholder would have to be aware that he couldn’t run a vacuum cleaner let alone a company. So Mitchell wasn’t worried.

  Except, on occasion, in the middle of the night.

  Leo said, “You can’t just wait for it either. What you ought to have’s a personal publicity campaign. I can get you an article in—”

  “No,” Mitchell said.

  “You want to just listen to a—”

  “No,” Mitchell said, “so try listening to me. I told you to begin with. No personal publicity. Not ever. Not once. Not under any circumstances. No.—Would you like that again, Leo? Watch my fist. No.”

  Leo stared. “What’s the matter with you anyway?”

  “Plenty,” Mitchell said, and let it go at that.

  But of course Leo didn’t. Leo kept talking while Mitchell kept yawning and looking at the road, saying nothing, trading smiles with a showpiece redhead in a bright yellow Saab, and by the time he tuned in again, the lecture was over. Leo was off now describing Guatemala. Or Leo’s Guatemala. Twenty-four hours and he had it all down.

  “It’s hot,” Leo had it. “So what else can I tell you.”

  Debbie didn’t seem to want to know a lot more.

  The limo pulled up in front of Mitchell’s apartment—a skyscraper condo called The Harmony Towers. Mitchell liked to call it El Condo Pasa, imagining a lineup of vultures on the roof, waiting to eat it and return it to the landscape as a bucket of mulch. The chauffeur was out now and groping for the door. Mitchell feeling stupid. Mitchell in a faded pair of cords and a sweater while a black-suited person tipped a black-visored hat. He said, “Thanks,” and to Debbie and Leo, “Have fun,” and went into his building.

  The doorman at the desk said, “You’ve got a lot of mail,” and went off to pr
oduce it. Mitchell stood waiting in the Decorator Lobby, catching his reflection in the long mirrored wall. He was tanned and his hair had gone blonder in the sun. In the overhead lighting he cast a peculiarly shrunken shadow, a canted little dwarf, and he flickered on the line from the girl in Guatemala that he’d cast none at all. He’d thought about that. In old superstition, the shadow was the soul and a man who didn’t have one had sold it to the devil. Vampires, werewolves, Faust and Mitchell.

  It sounded like the name of a law firm, he thought.

  The doorman came back with a thick sheaf of mail, a four-inch stack of it, bundled in an Esquire and bound with some twine.

  In his penthouse apartment, he tossed it in the bedroom and went to the refrigerator, looking for a beer, thinking of a pizza, possibly a monstrous pastrami-on-rye, a little coleslaw on the side.

  The Gringo Returns.

  He went into the bedroom and sprawled on the covers with some crackers and a beer. The muscle in his thigh was going stiff on him again and he shucked off his trousers and propped the thing up against a bolster from the bed. He looked at it slowly with a hard narrowed eye.

  Jesus, he thought, that is one ugly leg.

  For a moment he pictured it straight, unmangled and strapped in a ski boot and flying down a hill. Colorado State Intermediate Champion of 1967. Known to the fans as The Colorado Kid. Big hot shit.

  He pulled at his beer now and wondered once again about what kind of future would have happened to the Kid if that leg had stayed straight. Probably nothing. Ski bum. Aging instructor at Vail. Only that would be, of course, to forget about the war—and whatever would have happened to The Colorado Kid with a severed femur and four-hundred-sixty-seven stitches, by count. And the answer to that would be “bum,” forget “ski,” so considering the options, he hadn’t done wrong. Or at least, having done it, he’d done a little right. But the kid from Colorado—oh shit, he thought, forget about the kid from Colorado. The kid was a fraud and a chickenshit coward and a mangy little thief.

  But aside from that, he was a hell of a skier.

  He dreamt about a Colorado mountainful of snow. Virgin fields of it, effortless flight, and was suddenly, surprisingly, awakened by the phone.

  He clicked the machine on and squinted at the clock: quarter of five.

  “This is Bob Mitchell speaking, leave your message at the beep.”

  He waited, bleary. There was slight hesitation, then a voice:

  “Mr. Mitchell. This is the police.…”

  2

  Five in the morning and all of Wilshire Boulevard could have been a palm-lined bowling alley. Nothing was moving on the street. He tried to keep anything from moving in his mind. Wait, he kept telling it. Stay very still. Feeling like he’d felt doing recon in the jungle, like everything depended on an absolute calm, and the deadliest enemies you’d meet were in your head, the ones that could freeze you into fatal attitudes and bend your antenna, picture going black. Dawn patrol, he thought. It was that kind of time. The sky was still dark; the lamps were still lit and the sun was still an optimist’s article of faith.

  He turned on the radio, ranging through the dial till he caught it on the news, heard it officially. “… deaths have been linked to the artificial sweetener Naturalite, made by Tate Pharmaceuticals. According to officials, the contaminated packets had been laced with a substance called TMF, a synthetic narcotic capable of causing instantaneous death. Repeating this bulletin: Federal officials have confirmed seven deaths, five in Los Angeles and two in New York, and have linked—”

  He turned it off, felt suddenly sweaty and opened a window, then lit a cigarette. From the moment he’d heard it, he’d sprung into action—awakened his secretary, told her who to call, grabbed three packs of cigarettes, and headed for his car. Whatever he was feeling had been purely physical—a fist that kept rising from the center of his stomach and wedging in his throat.

  Braking at the intersection of La Brea, allowing a couple of purple-haired rockers to wobble to their car, he decided it was probably time to let it out. Or failing in that, to give a moment of appropriate silence for the dead.

  There were seven people dead.

  Seven people dead because—no, he thought quickly, forget about because. Dead people didn’t give a shit about because. Which was one of the legitimate rewards of being dead. Nor did they particularly hunger for silence. The dead had been stranded in a hallway of silence, what they wanted was noise.

  He turned on the radio and got a little jazz. Erroll Garner doing “Hot Toddy.” Joe Williams vocal going,

  Hot toddy

  Sure makes a body

  Feel might nice …

  Well … there you go.

  He turned at La Brea, aware that he was already turning from the subject; not that it surprised him. He couldn’t think of death without running into walls. He wasn’t—or hoped that he wasn’t—indifferent, he simply had a feel for the futility of thought, the notorious impotence of piety and wit. What you knew could hurt you and could help no one else so the thing was, Whistle. Hear your own breath. Help the living and bury the dead and whistle while you work. Legacy of war: A grunt named Merriweather staring at a chopper that was dropping like a stone, saying, “Hey lookit Dumbo, man. Thinks he can fly.” Or the guy named The Doctor with the Latin tattoo running right around his pectoral: Joco Ergo Sum. I joke, therefore I am.

  He turned off La Brea and aimed at the driveway of a glitzy little tower; going down the ramp; electronically injecting himself into gloom. He had to use keys to get into the lobby and he rode in the elevator jingling the chain.

  The reception room was lit. TATE PHARMACEUTICALS spelled out in silver on a copper-colored wall. Janet, his secretary, moving through the arch. She looked at him somberly and said, “Welcome home.”

  Mitchell said, “Thanks.”

  In his office she handed him a carton of coffee. His telephone was ringing. Janet picked it up and said, “Tate Pharmaceuticals” like nothing was the matter, like it’s just another five-in-the-morning-on-the-phone. He watched her with approval. The lady, at fifty, had a new-fashioned swagger with an old-fashioned grace. She’d arrived in a jogging suit but all of her makeup. She said to the telephone, “I’m sorry but it’s true.… Definitely.…” Pivoting, she mouthed at him, Cy. He said, “No.” She said, “No, he’s in a meeting right now.… No, Mr. Tate, he’s really in a meeting.… Right. I’ll have him call you. Definitely. Right.”

  He waited while she hung up the telephone and sat. She looked at him slowly. “The Examiner called him.”

  “Did he talk to them?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Call Gucci’s and order him a muzzle.—What else is going on?”

  “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “Leo’s coming over. Jake is at the plant. George is in the men’s room, he’s either attempting to vomit or to shave. A man from the FDA is coming over and then we’ve got a couple of inspectors and lieutenants.”

  He opened his coffee and said in a soft voice, “How you doing?”

  She said, “I was wondering the same about you.”

  He said nothing for a moment, then he said, “I think we need some legal men this morning. Is Zef coming over?”

  “Any minute,” Janet said.

  “Good. Then let’s try and get an advertising man. Let’s try and get Scully. If he’s not in his bedroom, I tell you what you do. You can pick up the phone book, you can check it for a number named Pepper Salerno. In Hollywood, I think.” He looked at her quickly. “Unless,” he said, “it makes you uncomfortable to call.”

  She shrugged. “Not me. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is girdles.—Go on.”

  “I want to set up a customer hotline. Number they can call with any questions on their mind. Meaning we need to get an eight hundred number and a perforated ulcer.”

  Janet half-smiled.

  “Yeah, okay. Smile now,” he said flatly. “You want to spend the morning with the telephone company? You want to ex
plain we need a hundred new phones? And convince them how ‘quickly’ doesn’t mean ‘in July’? I tell you what you do, you put whatshisname on it. Henderson. He’s into Oriental meditation. Maybe he can deep-breathe his way to understanding.”

  Janet cocked her head at him. “Anything else? Because your telephone’s ringing.”

  “Yeah. Let it ring. If the calls are from the press, you better say I’m not ducking but I haven’t been briefed, I’ll make a statement in a while.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling them.”

  He shrugged with both hands. “So why do you need me?”

  “You’re handsome,” she said. “A good-looking blond kind of brightens up the office.”

  He looked at her flatly and picked up a notebook, ignoring a couple of folders on his desk: “Phonecalls received in the last 3 weeks,” and another one with “Letters.”

  Telegrams, he wrote. Radio Airtime. Box #. Press.

  He swiveled in his chair.

  Now there was a subject. He could, if he wanted to, think about the press, about getting his “good-looking blondness” on the tube—and the gamble that entailed. The chance it would turn around and bite him in his own very personal ass.

  But then if he wanted to get into all that he’d be borrowing disaster, counting his chickens before they came home to roost, so the thing was relax. Take it a step at a time.

  He put down his coffee cup and lit a cigarette, then moved across the green-and-brown Oriental carpet to the balcony doors.

  Outside it was chilly, starless. A couple of birds making pooped-out noises, little whistlers in the dark, too late for the lovers, too early for the worms. It occurred to him to jump, not kill himself, just make a parachutist’s jump, a dream jump. He saw himself sprinting through the grass and disappearing into jungle. Missing. Gone in a puff of smog.

  The intercom buzzed.

  The telephone rang.

  Janet said, “The FDA’s on the phone and Leo just got here and Pepper Salerno denies all knowledge of Harrison Scully.”

  “He’s there,” Mitchell said. “Give him five more minutes and he’ll struggle to the phone.”