Cast a Yellow Shadow (3 page)

Mr. Padillo will be able to brief you fully about his assignment. The continued well-being of Mrs. McCorkle depends upon his willingness to cooperate. He has been uncooperative until now. We regret that we must use this method of persuasion.

I read it twice and then put it back on the coffee table. “Why Fredl?” I asked.

“Because I wouldn't do it for money and they couldn't find any other pressure. They've already tried.”

“Will they kill her?”

He looked at me and his dark Spanish eyes were steady and cold and curiously without reflection. “They'll kill her no matter what I do.”

“Is she dead already? Have they already killed her?”

Padillo shook his head. “No. They haven't killed her yet. They'll use her for persuasion.”

I got up and walked over to the bookcase and ran a finger absently over the spines of a row of books. “Maybe I should yell,” I said. “Maybe I should scream and yell and pound the wall.”

“Maybe you should,” he said.

“I've read that it's smarter to call the cops. Just call the cops and the FBI and let them take over. They go to school to learn about stuff like this.”

“If you call them, they'll kill her. They'll be watching you. They may have your phone bugged. You'll have to meet the FBI or the police someplace. When you do, she'll die. And then all you'll have is a letter written on dime-store stationery with a rented typewriter and a dead wife.”

I took down a book and looked at it. I put it back and two seconds later I couldn't remember its title. “You'd better tell me what it's all about,” I said. “Then I'll decide whether to call the cops or not.”

Padillo nodded and got up and went over to the bar and poured himself another drink. “I'll do anything to get her back,” he said. “Anything. I'll do what they want me to do or I'll go to the police and the FBI with you—if you decide on that. Or we can try something else. You want another drink?” I nodded.

“But you have to make the decision,” he continued. “You have to decide what has to be done.”

He carried the drinks over to the coffee table and lowered himself carefully into a chair. He winced as he did it. The knife wound seemed to bother him.

“That night on the Rhine when I went over the side with Jimmy Ku,” he said. “Jimmy had never learned to swim. He drowned. I was shot in the left arm, but I made it to shore. I was sick, I was shot and I was damned tired. I heard you when they helped you up the bank. I wasn't too far away. You finally flagged a truck, right?”

I nodded.

“It was while I was lying there that I decided to be dead for a while. I decided to be dead in Switzerland. I went to Zurich. It's easy to be dead there. You don't have to hear how I got to Switzerland.”

“Let's just assume that you didn't swim.”

“No. I went to Remagen first and found a doctor and then I went to Zurich. I kept in touch indirectly. I heard about the saloon getting blown up and I figured that you'd collect the insurance—we were over-insured anyway. So I sat in Zurich for a couple of months and did nothing. I was staying with a friend and the friend offered me a proposition.”

“In Africa.”

“That's right. Africa. West Africa. We were in his office and he had a large map. He also had a large office. It seemed to my friend that several countries in West Africa would soon be in the market for small arms and he just happened to have a couple of warehouses that were full of them and only slightly used. He ticked the countries off for me: Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Dahomey, perhaps the Cameroons, and so forth. He needed a traveling salesman. He had the list of hot prospects and all he needed really was an order-taker. If the prospects bought, fine. If they didn't, somebody else would. I would get a straight salary—a high one.”

“You went,” I said.

Padillo nodded. “I flew to Guinea and sort of worked my way down the coast. I took orders from one faction one day and another faction the next. The product was good and my Zurich friend knew who was ripe for what. I pushed the 7.62 millimeter stuff. He was very strong on standardizing weaponry all over Africa. I made quite a few sales. If you've been reading the papers, you know where I made them.”

“I've kept up.”

“The last country I was in was quiet. It was just before Independence and my friend in Zurich thought I should stick around a few months, so he arranged for me to run a saloon that belonged to one of his business associates. The saloon was about fifty miles from nowhere. It was a dull wait, but my Zurich friend was convinced that it would pay off.”

“Did it?” I said.

Padillo nodded. “He had thought it would be even better than Nigeria and he was right. The military pulled a coup and those who escaped being shot made off with most of the treasury. They placed a rather large order. Togo was last on my list. It had been quiet there since Olympio was assassinated in 'sixty-three and my friend in Zurich thought things might be ripening.”

He paused and took a swallow of his drink. “On my way to Togo I went through Dahomey. I sent you a card.”

“You seemed to have had writer's cramp that day.”

He smiled slightly. “Something like that. I was in this hotel in Togo—in Lomé—when they dropped by to see me.”

“Are they the ones who wrote the note?”

“Probably. They were trying to appear German for some reason. They made their proposition in German and I turned them down in English and they forgot about their German. Then they raised the ante—from fifty thousand dollars to seventy-five thousand. I still said no.”

He paused for a moment. “There were two of them,” he continued. “And they told me about myself. They told me quite a bit—even some stuff that I'd almost forgotten. They had everything about you and the saloon and me and my former employers. They even knew about the two who had defected and how we'd got them back.”

“Where'd they get it?”

“Wolgemuth probably lost somebody in Berlin and whoever it was took a file with him. Wolgemuth knew a lot about us.”

“Then what?”

“They talked about blackmail to me there in Lomé and I laughed at them. I said I'd just go back to Switzerland and die again. You have to have something to lose to be blackmailed and there wasn't anything they could take away from me. So they got down to that one last threat that they all use because it's supposed to make you cry. Either I agreed to do what they wanted, or I'd be dead within forty-eight hours.”

“Who were you supposed to kill?”

“Their Prime Minister. They had the time and the place all picked out: Pennsylvania Avenue, a block and a half west of the White House. What's today?”

“Thursday.”

“It's supposed to happen a week from tomorrow.”

I found myself unable to be surprised or even concerned. I had known Padillo for a long time and together we had seen a few die. A Prime Minister would be just one more and his death would be nothing compared with what I stood to lose. That's how it seemed then because Fredl was gone and because I was afraid that she would be gone forever and I would be alone again. I was afraid that if she were dead, all the years that had gone before would add up to nothing. Yet there was no panic or frenzy or scurrying about. I just sat there with Padillo and listened to him talk about the man somebody wanted him to kill so that they wouldn't kill my wife. I wondered how Fredl was and if she had cigarettes and where she would sleep and if she were cold and what she had had for dinner.

“A week from tomorrow,” I said.

“A Friday.”

“And what did you tell them?”

“I told them I'd let them know and then I got out of Togo. I flew out with a fifty-year-old ex-Luftwaffe pilot who thought he was still diving Stukas. He charged me a thousand dollars to go to Liberia—Monrovia. I took the next ship out—the bucket that landed me in Baltimore.”

“And they knew all about it,” I said. “They knew you'd gone to Monrovia and to Baltimore and they knew about Fredl and about me.”

“They knew,” Padillo said. “I should have gone back to Switzerland. I carry a lot of trouble around with me.”

“Who is it you're supposed to kill?”

“His name is Van Zandt. He's Prime Minister of one of the smaller south African nations—the one that followed Rhodesia in declaring its unilateral independence from Britain. The British got excited and started talking about treason and then put through some economic sanctions.”

“I remember,” I said. “It's before the UN now. The country has about two million people and one hundred thousand of them are whites. What else has it got?”

“A hell of a lot of chromium—about a third of our supply.”

“We can't let that go.”

“Not according to Detroit.”

“Who wants you to kill Van Zandt? He's an old man.”

“The two who approached me were from his cabinet. He's arriving here in a couple of days to make a plea before the UN. First he'll put in an appearance in Washington. There won't be any royal treatment here—just an Assistant Secretary of State to meet him at the airport and a ride down Constitution Avenue. He won't get near the White House.”

“What're you supposed to do?”

“Pick him off with a rifle. They're to set it up for me.”

“Won't the old man get suspicious?”

“Hardly. It's all his idea. He'll be dead of cancer within two months anyhow.”

They liked to mention that Hennings Van Zandt was eighty-two years old and that he had been one of the first whites to be born in the country that he served as Prime Minister. He had watched it evolve from a virtually unexplored territory into a private preserve of the British South Africa Company, then into a colony, and finally into a self-governing country. Now he claimed it was independent, but Britain said it wasn't and that its declaration of independence was tantamount to treason. Because of the chromium, the U.S. had made only gruff warnings about not recognizing the declaration.

“When they made me the proposition, they spelled it all out,” Padillo said. “I don't know if it's logical or not. All I know is that it could cause a hell of an uproar.”

According to Padillo the plan was to announce that Van Zandt was coming to the U.S. to plead his country's cause before the United Nations. He would stop first in Washington for trade talks and for a try at countering the British anti-independence campaign.

“They've followed the civil rights action here,” Padillo said. “Van Zandt himself came up with the idea. He gets assassinated, the blame is placed upon an unnamed American Negro, and public opinion here does a flip-flop in support of Van Zandt and his government.”

“That's tricky thinking,” I said, “but they sound like a tricky bunch.”

“They have it all mapped out. There'll be almost no police or security protection for Van Zandt—nothing like what's laid on for De Gaulle or Wilson. They'll make sure that the Prime Minister is riding in an open car. When he's shot, he becomes a martyr in America to the cause of white supremacy, which is about as good a way to go as any if you're eighty-two, think like he does, and have a stomach that's three-fourths eaten away by cancer.”

“Why did they pick you?” I said.

“They wanted a pro—someone who wouldn't get caught—because they're going to have unimpeachable eyewitnesses who saw a Negro with a rifle. They need someone who can make it down the elevator, out into the lobby, and across the street. They picked me.”

“Could you do it?”

Padillo held up his glass to the light and looked at it as if it contained an unfriendly cockroach. “I suppose so. I could do it and feel nothing. Zero. I think that's what I'm most afraid of. It's been getting a little empty. But say the word and I'll do it and I won't get caught and you might get your wife back.”

“Might?”

“She'll be dead, of course, but they could let you live long enough to bury her.”

“You don't think they'd like to have me walking around with all my inside knowledge?”

“Neither you nor Fredl nor me. The two who made me the proposition are to be the eye witnesses. If you include Van Zandt, that's a conspiracy of three and that's damned big for something like this.”

“With us, it's six,” I said.

“That's why they won't want us around.”

I looked at my watch. It was almost three in the morning and the apartment seemed to be assuming the impersonal quality of one of the rooming houses that had once stood in its place. Padillo was sitting in the chair, his drink on the coffee table, his head in his hands. He seemed to be giving the rug a careful examination.

“I should have gone to Switzerland,” he said again.

“But you didn't.”

“I wasn't very smart. I must be getting old. I feel old.”

“You're two months younger than I am.”

“So what do you want me to do? Go down to the FBI with you or take out my Husqvarna with the 7X scope and pop away at the old man?”

“If I go to the police, they'll kill her,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I don't want her killed. I don't want me killed. I don't even want you killed which proves how generous I'm getting now that the shock's wearing off. But they'll kill all three of us if you shoot him.”

“I can almost guarantee that they'll kill you and Fredl,” Padillo said. “It might take longer for me, but then they're not so much concerned about me because I'm not the kind to turn myself in for the murder of a visiting Prime Minister. They could take their time, but they'd put someone on it and some day I'd get careless or he'd get lucky.”

“They knew I'd figure it out,” I said. “They knew I'd realize that they wouldn't want Fredl or me around after the assassination. They may know I'm not overly bright, but they must also know that I'm not that thick.”