Cast a Yellow Shadow by Ross Thomas Page B

up at the toes.
    â€œCare for a drink?” Padillo asked.
    â€œFine with me,” Hardman said. “Scotch-and-water.”
    â€œHow do we get it?” Padillo asked.
    â€œSimple,” I said and picked up the telephone and dialed one number. “Two martinis; one Scotch-and-water—the good Scotch,” I said.
    We made some idle talk until the waiter came with the drinks. Hardman took a long swallow of his. “You lookin rough, Mac. Mush say somethin wrong when you go home last night. Say somethin wrong with Fredl.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œShe didn’t split on you?”
    â€œNo. Somebody took her away. She didn’t want to go.”
    The big brown man nodded his head slowly. “Now that’s bad,” he said. “That’s real bad. What you want me to do?”
    â€œWe don’t know yet. I guess we want to know whether you want to do anything.”
    â€œWhat you mean guess, man? Hell, Fredl’s my buddy. Here,” he said to Padillo, “look what she wrote about me in this Frankfurt, Germany, paper.”
    â€œShow him the original,” I said. “He reads German and it’s more impressive.”
    â€œUh-huh,” Hardman said, taking a Xeroxed copy of the article from his inside jacket pocket. “Read this right here.”
    Padillo read it quickly or pretended to. “That’s something,” he said, handing the article back. “That’s really something.”
    â€œAin’t it though.”
    Before Hardman arrived, Padillo and I had discussed how much we should tell him. We decided that a fourth or even a half of the story would sound phony. We told him the entire thing—from Padillo’s original contact with the Van Zandt people in Lomé to the note that was waiting for me when we got home the night before. We didn’t tell him about Senora de Romanones.
    â€œThen it wouldn’t do no good for you to just go ahead and shoot this mother?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAnd you can’t go down to Ninth and Pennsylvania and see the FBI?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhy don’t I go down? These African cats don’t know me.”
    â€œI wouldn’t bet on that,” Padillo said.
    â€œMan, I’ll just make a phone call, know what I mean? If you got the Feds down there, that we all payin good money for, we might as well use them. I ain’t got nothin against law workin for me.”
    â€œOkay,” Padillo said. “Suppose you call the FBI—or Mc-Corkle or I call them from a phone booth. We say something like this: Prime Minister Van Zandt is coming to town and his cabinet wants me to shoot him to create sympathy for their independence. That’s just my opening line. But they’re trained to take complaints. They say: ‘All right, we’ve got that, Mr. Padillo. Can you just give us a few more details?’ Yes, I say, it seems that they’ve kidnapped my partner’s wife—Fredl McCorkle—and unless I shoot the Prime Minister, they’ll dispose of Mrs. McCorkle. That’s about it, fellows, except that it’s going to take place next Friday between two and three p.m. at the corner of Eighteenth and Pennsylvania just across the street from the United States Information Agency.”
    â€œIt won’t work, Hardman,” I said. “If you call the FBI, they’ll tighten the security to the point that Van Zandt’s crowd will know something’s gone wrong. If Van Zandt isn’t killed—then Fredl is—automatically.”
    â€œYou mean you can tell ’em the time and the place and everything and they can’t do nothin?”
    â€œThat’s the trouble,” I said. “They can do too much. They can save the Prime Minister, but my wife gets killed. I won’t make the trade.”
    â€œSo you gonna do it private?”
    â€œWe’re going to try.”
    â€œThink we could get another