Round Robin (9 page)

“Clean environment?” he asked.

Manfred nodded.

That was good enough for Warner. You had to trust that somebody who’d lost five years of his life due to casual treachery would be very careful these days.

“We’re making progress,” Warner said.

“You know where she is?”

The big guy tried to keep his face impassive, but Warner could see the hope in his eyes.

“Not yet. But we’ve learned your wife has gone back to using her maiden name. She’s using it for your little girl, too.”

“Hannelore Krump?” Manfred asked.

Warner shook his head.

“No, your ex changed your daughter’s first name, too. It’s Bianca now.”

“Bianca? What kind of name is that?”

“It’s the one Mick Jagger’s ex has.”

“Bianca Krump?” Manfred shuddered.

“We’ve got the two of them hooked up with a guy named Horst Muehlmann, a/k/a The Bear.”

“Muehlmann,” Manfred snorted. “A third-rate shotputter who’d be fourth-rate without his daily fistful of steroids.”

Warner said quietly, “Horst doesn’t have any athletic standing these days except maybe in the smash-and-grab. He was suspected of doing a number of muggings in Magdeburg, but that was quite some time ago and when the victims wouldn’t testify all three of them moved on.”

“My daughter,” Manfred said regretfully, “my little Hannelore, given a ridiculous name by a vindictive mother and living off money stolen by an incompetent clod of a shotputter.”

Warner felt worse than Manfred looked. He also blamed himself for the little girl’s misfortunes. If he’d kept Manfred out of prison ... Well, he didn’t see any point in adding that the former Mrs. Welk had been fined for working as an unlicensed prostitute.

“We’ll find them,” Warner said. “It won’t be long now. We’ll get your daughter back.”

Manfred nodded his massive head solemnly.

“Ja,
please do.”

Up in her own apartment, a short while later, Robin heard the blues harmonica resume. More wonderfully sweet and sad than ever, the music drifted up through the heating vents. Along with the warm air that Manfred had also supplied. She ought to be grateful to the guy, Robin thought. So what if he had spies dropping in? All spies did was whisper furtively. They didn’t throw loud parties and wreck your night’s sleep.

Unfortunately, the scent of the sauerkraut wafted upward, too. But it wasn’t as strong up here, and Robin thought of a hint she could drop to Manfred about his cooking. It was just mean enough to make her grin. After all, she didn’t want to go all mushy about the guy.

But, she thought, he sure must have some soul inside of all that bulk to play the harmonica that way.

This time the music was interrupted by her phone. Robin picked it up, annoyed.

“Hello,” she said abruptly.

“What? Someone calls to find out how you are, and you bite her ear off?”

It was Mimi.

“I’m sorry,” Robin said. “I was just listening to music.”

“So start the record over, dear.”

Robin didn’t feel like explaining.

She said, “I’m doing okay, Mimi. The doctor said just take it easy ... and lose sixty or seventy pounds.”

“He didn’t!”

“He did.”

“But you’re not —”

“Fat. Yes, I am.”

“Not like some people.”

“No, I’m fat like me.”

“I would have said hefty.”

“Mimi, can we talk about something else?”

“That was one of the reasons I called. To tell you what that Tone Morello is up to.”

Robin was incredulous.

“You called to talk about Ant-knee? What, the idiot was in today?”

“Yes, and looking for you.”

“The guy never learns.”

“He had a cameraman with him, Robin. He said he wanted to put you on TV.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No. Now, why would he want to do that? He can’t have anything good in mind.”

“Maybe he wants me to do some grunts for his highlight films.”

“Robin, don’t you dare.”

“Come on, Mimi. I was kidding.”

“Well, he made a nasty crack about you right into the camera.”

Robin’s gloom was lifting. There was a challenge here. She was getting intrigued, wondering what that goof Ant-knee was up to this time.

“What’d he say?”

Mimi hesitated and then told her.

Robin laughed, even if the crack stung a little too, coming on the heels of her doctor visit.

“Miss Piggy’s body double? That’s pretty good. Too good for Ant-knee. He’s got somebody thinking up lines for him.”

“I might get some grief for it,” Mimi said, “but I think I’m going to ban him.”

“Don’t you dare,” Robin replied.

“But he’s up to something.”

“Yes, he is,” Robin said, feeling tough now, feeling much better really, “and whatever it is, I’ll be ready for it.”

By the time Robin got off the phone with Mimi, she felt buoyant enough to tiptoe, if you could call it that when you got about on crutches, down to Manfred’s front door. Without making a sound, she left a can of air-freshener and a note for him.

The note said:
Try adding this to all of your recipes.

Chapter 9

Robin woke the next morning with a plan for Tone in mind and a delicious odor in her nose. Somebody had been baking. And the results had been delivered to her front door. She knew who the deliveryman had to be: Daddy.

He’d seen that she’d been troubled yesterday, so he’d gone out to a bakery first thing this morning, just when they were taking everything out of the oven, and then he’d let himself into the building and left the package on her doorstep for her to find when she woke up.

What a sweetheart.

Robin crutched over to her front door in her pajamas, opened it and almost got jolted off her feet again.

Daddy hadn’t been there, Manfred had.

There was a plate of something redolent of apples and cinnamon and quite possibly God’s grace sitting just outside her door. Steam seeped out from the edges of the crisp white dish-towel that covered the plate. It must have been dropped off not more than a minute ago. Whatever it was, it smelled good enough to drop to the floor and eat right there.

Except...

Next to the plate lay the can of air freshener she’d left for Manfred last night. It was as crumpled as a discarded Dixie cup. Under the can was a note. Leaning against the doorframe, Robin carefully bent over and picked up the note.

In a crabbed European-looking hand, it read: Took your advice. Squeezed every last drop into strudel. Let me know how it tastes.

As with Robin’s note, a signature had not been added or necessary.

Robin looked at the plate. And the can. Was he kidding her? Or trying to poison her for being smartass with him?

The safest thing to do with the stuff would be to just put it down her recently repaired garbage disposal. But it smelled
sooo
good. Then Robin smiled as she thought of an answer to the problem, one that fit in neatly with her other plan. What she needed was a food–taster ... and she knew just who it would be.

“Hello, Nancy,” Robin said into the phone.

“Well, isn’t this a surprise?” her sister asked. “Would you like to speak with Charlie, maybe ask him for a little favor?”

Robin shook her head. That noodge Charlie. He hadn’t been able to keep her plea for help with the furnace from Nancy. But that would only make what Robin planned to do even sweeter.

“Actually, I was wondering if I might ask you a favor, if you can spare a little time this morning and maybe later on today.”

Nancy was properly suspicious, but curious, too.

“What do you want?”

“Well, I’m on crutches these days—I sprained my ankle—and I hate to bother Dad all the time, so I was wondering if you might give me a lift to work.”

Nancy was silent a moment as she explored that idea for booby-traps.

“I usually have a few extra minutes,” she finally said. “I suppose I could do that.” Then she probed further. “Anything else?”

“Could I borrow your videocam?” Robin asked.

“What for?” Nancy asked, the mistrust clear in her voice now.

Robin told her sister about Tone and his cameraman, and outlined their previous skirmishes.

“I want to have my own record of any interview Ant-knee does with me,” Robin said. “It occurred to me that tapes might be edited.”

In fact, she knew this because Nancy was the only person she’d ever heard of who edited her home videos. Just as she put only the creme de la creme of still photos in her family albums.

“So you want me to shoot this confrontation for you?” Nancy asked.

“And edit it, if necessary.”

Nancy considered the idea for a moment.

“Okay. I’ll do it.”

“Great. The way we’ll do it is, I’ll excuse myself to use the ladies’ room as soon as Ant-Knee shows up. I’ll give you a call from the kitchen and reappear when Mimi tells me you’ve arrived.”

Nancy laughed, “Sounds good.” Then she regained her focus. “Robin, why are you letting me help you?”

“You’re my sister.”

“What’s the real reason?”

“You’re so suspicious, Nancy. I even baked a plate of fresh, warm strudel to share with you for all your help. But maybe I should just eat it myself and take a cab to work.”

Nancy didn’t have many weaknesses when it came to food. She could take or leave most things. Mostly she left them. But her Achilles’s heel, the one temptation she really had to battle was freshly baked pastry. Especially the first thing in the morning.

“Don’t you dare eat it yourself,” Nancy said. “I’ll be right over.”

Nancy came, she ate, she defeated Robin utterly. That damn self-control of hers, the piece of strudel she cut for herself wasn’t big enough to bait a mousetrap. Hardly a useful sampling to see if it was poisoned. Still, Nancy seemed to get as much enjoyment out of the tiny crumb as if she’d gobbled the whole plate. Robin half-expected her to start rolling on the floor in ecstasy.

For the first time, Robin got an insight into the success of her sister’s marriage. If Nancy could get so much out of so little, she must have made Charlie feel like a god every time they hit the sack.

“Robin, that was wonderful,” Nancy said. “I didn’t know you were such an incredible baker. You call me any time you make that strudel.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that. Bake you a plate, it’ll last all year.”

Nancy smiled and turned in profile.

“Well, I do have to watch my figure.”

It was a dig, but Robin let it go. She was depending on Nancy for help today.

“You know what you ought to do?” Nancy asked.

“What?”

“Take that strudel to work. You could sell it at the deli, I’m not kidding.”

Robin hated to admit it, but the notion struck her as a good idea. She’d wait and see if Nancy got sick on the drive over. If she didn’t, Robin could cut the pastry into little free samples and see how the public tolerated it. Then if there were something wrong with the stuff, maybe Ant-knee would eat a slice and get diarrhea or something.

Wouldn’t that be fun to capture on videotape?

“You know,” Robin said, “I think you’ve got something there.”

Nancy nodded and smiled and licked her lips.

“Maybe if I do an extra twenty minutes on the Stairmaster today you could save me another little piece?”

“Be happy to,” Robin said.

Nancy took Robin to work, and she didn’t start heaving or show any other signs of distress. Since Tone and his lensman weren’t laying in wait when they arrived, Nancy left, saying she’d be at her office until Robin called.

Feeling just a little uneasy, Robin put out the strudel on the counter next to the cash register. She’d cut the pastry into small squares and made a sign:
Free samples. Take just one.
Even having cooled on the way over to the deli, the stuff still smelled wonderful.

“What’s this?” Mimi asked, walking over.

“Just a little something I brought in. Homemade strudel. Nancy thought maybe we could sell it here.”

“Nancy, huh?”

Mimi knew Nancy’s opinion of the deli’s food and calibrated her opinion of Robin’s sister accordingly. Even so, Mimi had caught a whiff of the strudel.

“May I?” she asked.

What could Robin say?

“Just one,” she said.

“Oh, sure.”

With predatory speed, Mimi unerringly seized the largest slice, easily three times the size of the amount Nancy had consumed.

Robin watched her chew ... saw the smile form on her lips ... saw the gleam enter her eyes ... saw the shiver run through her. Head-to-toe. Mimi looked so blissful and relaxed ... well, Robin couldn’t help but think that Mimi had just had an orgasm.

Then the thought hit her: What if Manfred hadn’t put air freshener in the strudel, but had put something else? Who knew what kind of chemicals somebody who’d worked for the CIA might have on hand? She’d read that the nation’s intelligence agencies had experimented with LSD. How was she to know they didn’t have some kind of aphrodisiac in their medicine chest?

Mimi reached for another piece but Robin grabbed her wrist.

She shook her finger. “One’s all you get.”

Mimi didn’t say a word, just looked woeful until Robin let her go. Then, looking over Robin’s shoulder, Mimi’s eyes grew large and round with amazement. Robin quickly turned to look, but there was nothing there. The door was still locked. They weren’t even open for business yet.

Robin knew before she turned back that she’d been had. Mimi was ten feet away with a slice of strudel in each hand.

“Ha-ha,” Mimi said. “There’s still a trick or two I can teach you.”

Then Mimi headed off to the kitchen savoring each bite of her stolen strudel, “Mmmm-ing” all the way.

Robin muttered, “Hope your insurance is paid up.”

In the event of food poisoning, Robin had intended to dispose of Manfred’s note and the can of air freshener and lay the blame for the whole thing on him. Until her recent moment of paranoia, she hadn’t actually thought he’d put anything into the strudel that would rise above the level of a prank, say adding Ex-Lax to fudge cake.

But the strudel was the hit of the breakfast rush. Nobody got sick and everybody enjoyed the heck out of it. Robin couldn’t remember how many hands she’d had to slap when people came back for seconds. Including Mimi, who’d come back several times for fourths.

Knowing she was tempting fate, Robin ate the last piece herself.

It was the best damn strudel she’d ever tasted — every bit as good as it smelled — and she could have had the whole plate for herself!

Worse, she had to admit that sauerkraut-slurping golem had put one over on her good.

Mimi came over one last time and when she saw that the strudel was gone her face fell so far it was comic. But then her jaw firmed quickly and a look of diamond-hard determination glistened in her eyes.

“Robin, I want four trays of this strudel every morning.”

“And how many for the deli?” Robin asked.

“Okay, six trays then.”

“I’d like to help, Mimi, but I didn’t bake it.”

“But you said you did.”

“I said it was homemade.”

It took Mimi a second.

“Your new German?”

Robin nodded.

“I don’t care,” Mimi said. “You tell him I’ve got a business proposition for him.”

In the lull between breakfast and lunch, Robin told Mimi how she intended to deal with Tone and his cameraman. The taste of the strudel lingering in her memory and on her taste buds, Mimi wanted to stay in Robin’s good graces. So she offered some suggestions as to how the plan might be improved. Instead of waiting for Tone to arrive before calling Nancy, Mimi would have one of her oldest customers, who also worked at Tone’s TV station, give the deli a call the moment Tone and his accomplice walked out the door. That’d give them the jump on the idiot.

“What’s the other idea?” Robin asked.

Mimi said, “You may be too young to remember but a very historic event once happened not more than a few blocks from here. Maybe we can recreate it. As far as the flop-sweat goes, anyway.”

“Mimi,” Robin asked, “what are you talking about?”

“The Kennedy-Nixon debate,” she said with a smile.

Warner Lisle leaned against the door of the weight room at St. Malachy High School. Inside the room, Manfred was coaching some young but already startlingly big student-athletes in the proper way to lift weights. As large as the kids were, they looked malnourished next to Manfred, and the barbells that they burst blood vessels to budge he manipulated as though they were broomsticks, pausing at various points in the range-of-motion to explain technique and calling for questions.

When Warner had first placed Manfred at St. Malachy’s his original position was as the building’s custodian. A couple of weeks later, Manfred secured the permission of the headmaster, Brother Damian, to use the weight room. After the canny brother happened to see Manfred bench-pressing several hundred pounds without apparent effort, he had an idea. He asked Manfred how he’d like to split his time between his custodial duties and coaching those athletes who maintained a superior grade point average. In short order, Manfred became the school’s full-time strength coach, and both the academic and athletic standings of the school soared.