called Mac’s Place. Do you know it?”
“Sure,” I said, shifting down into second for a red light. “I own it.”
CHAPTER 2
You can probably find a couple of thousand spots like Mac’s Place in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. They are dark and quiet with the furniture growing just a little shabby, the carpet stained to an indeterminate shade by spilled drinks and cigarette ashes, and the bartender friendly and fast but tactful enough to let it ride if you walk in with someone else’s wife. The drinks are cold, generous and somewhat expensive; the service is efficient; and the menu, although usually limited to chicken and steaks, affords very good chicken and steaks indeed.
There were a few other places in Bonn and Bad Godesberg that year where you could get a decently mixed drink. One was the American Embassy Club (where you had to be a member or a guest); another was the Schaumberger Hof, where you paid expense-account prices for two centiliters of Scotch.
I opened the saloon the year after they elected Eisenhower president for the first time. What with his campaign promise to go to Korea and all, the Army decided that national security would not suffer appreciably if the Military Assistance Advisory Group housed in the sprawling U.S. Embassy on the Rhine did without my services. In fact, there was some mild speculation as to why they had called me up for the second time at all. I wondered, too, since no one had asked me to advise or assist on anything important during my pleasant twenty-month stay at the Embassy, which is to be turned into a hospital if and when Germany’s capital is ever moved back to Berlin.
A month after my discharge in Frankfurt I was back in Bad Godesberg, sitting on a couple of cases of beer in a low-ceilinged room that once had been a
When he came in, he came in quietly. He could have been there only a minute or he could have been there ten. I jumped when he spoke.
“You McCorkle?”
“I’m McCorkle,” I said, keeping on with my typing.
“You got a nice place here.”
I turned around to look at him. “Christ—a Yalely.”
He was about five-eleven and would have weighed in at around 160. He dragged up a case of beer to sit on, and the way he moved reminded me of a Siamese torn I had once owned named Pajama Cord.
“New Jersey, not New Haven,” he said.
He wore the uniform well: the crew-cut black hair; the young, tanned, friendly face; the soft tweed three- button jacket with a button-down shirt and regimental-striped tie that sported a knot the size of a Thompson seedless grape. He also had on plain-toed cordovan shoes that gleamed blackly in the lamp’s light. I didn’t see his socks, but I assumed that they weren’t white.
“Princeton, maybe?”
He grinned. It was a smile that almost reached his eyes. “You’re getting warm, friend. Really the Blue Willow Bar and Grill in Jersey City. We had a dandy shuffleboard crowd on Saturday nights.”
“So what can I do for you besides offering a beer case to sit on and a drink on the house?” I passed him the Scotch and he took two long gulps without bothering to wipe the neck of the bottle. I thought that was polite.
He passed it back to me and I took a drink. He waited until I lighted a cigarette. He seemed to have plenty of time.
“I’d like a piece of this place.”
I looked around at the shambles. “A piece of nothing is nothing.”
“I’d like to buy in. Half.”
“Just like that, huh?”
“Just like that.”
I picked up the Scotch and handed it to him and he took another drink and then I had another one.
“Maybe you'd like a little earnest money?” he said.
“I don’t think I mentioned it.”
“I’ve heard it talks,” he said, “but I never paid much attention.” He reached into his jacket’s inside breast pocket and pulled out a piece of paper that looked very much like a check. He handed it to me. It was a check and it was drawn in dollars on a New York bank. It was certified. It had my name on it. And it was exactly half of the nut I needed to open the doors of Bonn’s newest and friendliest bar and grill.
I handed it back to him. “I don’t need a partner. I’m not looking for one.”
He took the check, stood up, walked over to the table where the typewriter was, and laid it on the typewriter. Then he turned and looked at me. There was no expression on his face.
“How about another drink?” he asked.
I handed him the bottle. He drank and handed it back. “Thanks. Now I’m going to tell you a story. It won’t take long, but when I’m through you’ll know why you have a new partner.”
I took a drink. “Go ahead. I’ve got another bottle in case we run dry.”
