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.
“His lies might tell me something.”
“Gestapo stuff,” Erika said.
It wasn’t much of a smile that Haynes gave her. “Tonight the knock on the door, tomorrow the national ID card. Where will it all end?”
