Backup Men Read Online Free PDF

was through with that the three vertical furrows reappeared in his forehead, deeper than before. I remembered them as a sign that he was now not only thinking, but also deeply worried. He rose hurriedly. “Can I use your phone?”
    “You may,” I said, doing my snide bit to keep the language pure.
    He turned to Padillo once more. “Is he in the country?”
    “Amos? I don’t know.”
    “Come on, Padillo, who’s the twins’ client?”
    “I guess he’d be Wanda’s now, but I still don’t know who he is. I don’t know anything about him at all except that he’s either here or coming here incognito and Amos Gitner doesn’t bother him, which doesn’t make him too smart in my book.”
    “Mine either,” Burmser said and hurried over to the phone. He picked it up and then put it back down, turning to me. “Do you have another one?”
    “In the bedroom. Down the hall and to the left.”
    When Burmser came back a few minutes later, his gray hair was rumpled as if he’d been running a hand through it out of nervousness or frustration or both. By then he must have been the civilian equivalent of a two-star general in that weird outfit he worked for, the one that had kept sending Padillo on those hurry-up trips when he should have been helping me inventory the booze. Padillo was out of it now, just as he said. He had got out the hard way, getting himself shot in the process, and I was more than curious to see whether he could stay out.
    Burmser ran his hand over his hair again, bearing down hard as if trying to press away his look of mild embarrassment.
    “ He wants to talk to you,” Burmser said to Padillo.
    “Who?”
    “Maybe it’s the President,” I said.
    “I didn’t vote for him.”
    “Maybe that’s what he wants to talk to you about.”
    “For Christ’s sake, Padillo, he’s waiting.”
    Padillo crossed to the living room phone and after he picked it up and said hello he listened for what seemed to be a long time, but which couldn’t have been more than three minutes. I guessed that he was listening to the man who ran Burmser’s outfit, a publicity-shy multimillionaire who had once been a Rhodes scholar and who had gone into the business during World War II and had never done anything else. I assumed that he liked it.
    Finally Padillo said, “I’ll want that in writing on White House stationery.” He listened for another fifteen or twenty seconds before he said, “You can call it blackmail; I’ll call it insurance. If you think the price is too high, forget it.” Impatience spread across his face as he listened a while longer before he said, “I don’t work that way. When it’s done it’ll be done and you can hold all the postmortems you want, but don’t count on me to be there … All right … Yes, I understand … Here he is.” He held out the phone to Burmser who took it, said hello, listened fifteen seconds, said, “Yes, sir,” but didn’t get a chance to say good-bye bccause the connection was broken with a click that was audible across the room.
    Burmser turned to look at Padillo. “He says you’re solo.”
    “That’s right.”
    “What about him?” Burmser said, nodding in my direction as if I were some unwelcome intruder who’d bumbled his way into the conversation. Maybe I was.
    Padillo looked at me thoughtfully. “We could tie him up and gag him and hide him in the closet.”
    “Aw, Christ,” Burmser said, turning toward the door, “I don’t know why I talk to either of you.” He paused at the door with his hand on its knob. “You know where to reach me, Padillo.”
    “Don’t sit by the phone.”
    “Amos Gitner,” Burmser said and then repeated the name as if it cheered him considerably. “You still think you’re all that good?”
    “I guess I’ll just have to find that out, won’t I?” Padillo said.
    “Yes,” Burmser said, smiling broadly this time, “I guess we all will.”
    He opened the door and was halfway through it when I called to him.