Free The Mordida Man by Ross Thomas Page A

said.
    Grimes’s place turned out to be a narrow three-story house, painted an almost cream, that faced onto a small green park. The park had a black iron fence around it and a locked gate. Dunjee got out of his taxi and watched a veiled Arab woman unlock the gate and wheel a large perambulator through it into the park.
    Dunjee went up the six iron steps and rang the bell. He tried to appear surprised when Grimes himself opened the door.
    â€œNo butler?” Dunjee said as he went in. “I was kind of hoping there’d be a butler.”
    â€œI don’t live here,” Grimes said. “I can’t afford to live here any more.”
    Dunjee looked around the reception hall. There was no furniture. Not even a hatrack. “Whose place is it?”
    â€œMine,” Grimes said, shoving back a pair of sliding doors. “I bought it ten, maybe eleven years ago. When I bought it, it was crammed full of old furniture—Victorian stuff mostly. It was all kind of dinky, but what the hell, I liked it and so did my wife. She loves London for some reason. So we kept the furniture and used the place whenever we were over here—maybe four or five times a year. Well, about three months ago some guy from Kansas City comes through town, a dealer, and offers me as much for the furniture as I paid for the house. So what the hell, I sold it to him. All of it.”
    They had moved into a reception room that was furnished with a lamp, two folding camp chairs, and a bridge table. On the bridge table was a large bucket of Colonel Sanders fried chicken.
    Grimes waved Dunjee toward one of the camp chairs and said, “Lunch.”
    Dunjee sat down, peered into the bucket, and selected a drumstick. Grimes reached down underneath the table into a paper sack and came up with two cans of beer. “No glasses,” he said, handing Dunjee one.
    â€œNone needed.”
    They ate the chicken and the cool French fried potatoes and the sweetish cole slaw, which Dunjee didn’t much like; and when they were through, Grimes dumped everything into a large plastic garbage bag, took it back to the kitchen, and returned carrying a thermos and two paper cups.
    â€œCoffee,” he said. “Black.”
    â€œFine.”
    When the coffee was poured, Grimes leaned back in his chair and stared at Dunjee. “I never worked with you on anything like this,” he said. “But I talked to some people who did when you were down there in Mexico. They say you work it funny.”
    â€œFunny?”
    â€œOblique might be a better word. They say you used to take an oblique approach.”
    â€œI always tried to use the smoothest path. Sometimes it was also the longest.”
    â€œWhat’s your approach here going to be?”
    â€œYou’re not supposed to make regular reports back to the White House, are you?”
    Grimes shook his head. “The only thing I want to report back there are results.”
    â€œI have to get a line on a Libyan.”
    â€œWhich one?”
    â€œI don’t know yet. I’m hoping for the one who was the London contact for Felix. But that may be hoping for too much.”
    â€œHow’re you going to do it?”
    Dunjee smiled slightly and took a swallow of his coffee. When he continued to remain silent, Grimes sighed, and said, “Fifty thousand dollars, Chubb. It’s got to buy a little encouragement.”
    After a moment Dunjee nodded thoughtfully and said, “The Csider woman.”
    â€œWhat about her?”
    â€œI might have some use for her.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œI don’t know yet.”
    Grimes lit a cigarette, blew some smoke out, and fanned it away. “That other thing.”
    â€œYou mean how I’m going to get a line on my Libyan?”
    Grimes nodded.
    â€œI’m going to see a guy I used to know in New York.”
    â€œWhen you were with the UN?”
    â€œUh-huh. He owes me a favor. Maybe even