Free Backup Men by Ross Thomas Page A

Plomondon had said he couldn’t make it any earlier so there were several tables available. I caught Herr Horst’s eye and he nodded and glided across the room toward us.
    “Number eighteen, I think, Herr Horst,” I said.
    “Of course, Herr McCorkle,” he said with the stiff formality that we’d both maintained in private as well as public for nearly fifteen years.
    We could have squeezed another ten tables into the dining room and perhaps no one would have complained, but a lot of our customers ate with us because we kept the tables far enough apart so that they could describe their latest triumphs and disasters in a normal conversational tone without fear of being overheard.
    When we were seated, Plomondon waved away the menu. “I’d like a small steak rare and a salad. If you’re having a drink, I’ll take a martini any way that they like to make it.”
    To celebrate this no-nonsense approach I ordered the same thing and when the drinks came, he took a sip, put it down, folded his arms on the table, leaned forward and stared at me with brown eyes that didn’t seem overly impressed with what the world had to offer.
    “How’s Mike?” he said.
    “All right.”
    Plomondon shook his head. “If he was all right, he wouldn’t have you inviting me for lunch.”
    “He said he can use you in New York for three days and that there’d be a bonus.”
    Plomondon didn’t nod or frown or do anything other than blink at me twice with those seen-it-all eyes of his. “No,” he said. “Tell him that. No.”
    “He said he needed you by seven tonight.”
    “It’s still no.”
    “All right,” I said.
    Plomondon moved his head to look first right and then left and then over his shoulder. He had a small face for the size of his head. There was a great deal of forehead and chin and they seemed to have shoved his mouth, nose and eyes together into a neat, compact area that could be easily attended to. His nose tilted up at its end and his mouth didn’t have much upper lip which made him look as if he pouted a lot, although I don’t think he really did. When he was satisfied that nobody was eavesdropping, he leaned forward again and said, “You don’t talk about it a lot, do you?”
    “About what?”
    “About Padillo and what he does.”
    “He runs a saloon,” I said.
    “Good. I run a plumbing company. A big one.”
    “I’ve seen your trucks.”
    “I also take on the odd job now and then. Not often. Just now and then. So you see I’ve got my lines out.”
    After that he didn’t say anything for a while. We sat there sipping our drinks until the steaks came. Plomondon cut his up all at once into precise one-inch cubes which he proceeded to eat in a methodical manner, giving each cube twenty-five chews. I became so fascinated I counted. When he was through with the steak, he polished off the salad, cutting it up into manageable squares with knife and fork. I didn’t bother to count how many times he chewed his lettuce.
    Herr Horst was keeping an eye on us and when we were through eating, the coffee was served promptly. Mac’s Place is the only restaurant in the world where I get decent service. In others I seem to turn invisible. But Plomondon seemed no more impressed by the service than he had been by the food. I felt that he would have been just as happy eating fried cat as long as it came in one-inch cubes.
    When he’d finished his first cup of coffee he again leaned forward, signaling that he had something important to say. First, he nodded his head a couplc of times. “Nice lunch,” he said.
    “Thanks.”
    “I eat here quite a bit.”
    “I know.”
    “To eat here regular you’ve either got to have a lot of money or a loose expense account.”
    “We planned it that way.”
    “Yeah. Well, when I started out in the plumbing business right after Korea I couldn’t afford to eat in places like this. Sometimes I couldn’t even afford a White Tower.”
    “A lot of people had to struggle at