Carnival of Shadows (40 page)

35

Travis was back on a side street near the McCaffrey Hotel as three o’clock approached. He sat there oblivious to all around him, his mind turning over the conversation he’d had with Tom Bishop.

So, let me tell you what I want from you. I want you to vigorously investigate this homicide. I want you to vigorously investigate the people that were present when this body was found. I want you to act alone. I want you to use whatever resources you deem fit to employ, but they cannot include this office, nor the office in Wichita.

But Travis was doubtful that Bishop even understood what he was saying. Bishop, just like every rank and file official in the Bureau, merely repeated what he had been told to say. There was the party line, the official response, the expected attitude, and there was nothing beyond that. Hoover had said that Travis lacked imagination, and yet Travis had always felt so very sure that imagination was the last thing required of an agent.

Fekete Kutya. Black Dog. What was this? Who were these people? Why had this body been removed from Seneca Falls? What did the Bureau really want from him? To investigate a murder, or—as Doyle and Valeria Mironescu kept trying to convince him—to investigate the personnel of Carnival Diablo? That’s what they believed, and Travis had started to appreciate their seeming paranoia. What could the Bureau possibly want from such people?

We are the outsiders, Agent Doyle. We are the ones nobody wants because we cannot be explained…

But perhaps it had more to do with Doyle’s wartime affiliations and loyalties. Was there some connection between this Hungarian killer and the activities Doyle had been involved in after meeting Valeria Mironescu in France in 1943? Did he really become part of this Nazi party Winterhilfswerk organization? Had the Hungarian come to kill Doyle? Was that what had happened? An intended act of vengeance against Doyle for what he had done during the war, and Doyle had killed the man in self-defense? And if so, then what interest did the FBI have in this matter? That would be external intelligence, far beyond the remit of any federal authority.

Travis’s mind reeled at the implications. Had he been set up? Had this whole thing been staged? Was this some kind of performance laid on for his entertainment and his alone, or was there a much deeper, far more covert agenda here? Did Bishop even know who had ordered this investigation? Had it come from Section Chief Gale, or even higher? Executive Assistant Director Warren perhaps? How high did this go, and what was the real intention here? More important, if he was unable to speak with Bishop, or if Bishop was actually unaware of the real agenda, then how could he determine the truth? Doyle would have him believe one thing, and yet his affirmed and inherent belief in the integrity of the Bureau denied such a possibility. He did not want to feel as though he was being played with like some sort of marionette, acting out a prescripted part while others watched, judging his reactions, his responses, his conclusions.

No, perhaps there was a middle ground, somewhere between the delusions of Edgar Doyle and the official line from Supervisor Bishop. There had to be a reason for the body’s removal, the unavailability of those standard resources and personnel as routinely afforded any agent in the field, the fact that no daily situation reports were required, even down to the fact that Travis was here in Seneca Falls at all.

Travis reached into the inner pocket of his jacket. He still possessed the picture of the dead man, a copy of his prints, the outline of his shoes, and the impression of the sole, did the small diagram he’d made of the tattoo behind the man’s knee. Beyond these things, and aside from the word of Farley, Rourke, and himself, there was nothing to confirm that the body had ever been here in Seneca Falls. There hadn’t even been any operational order issued in writing. How had he been so easily distracted? Simple. His own ego had distracted him, his promotion to senior special agent, the fact that it was his first lead assignment. But it was not only that, for didn’t he—always and automatically—trust that he was being told the truth? He had worked with these people for more than five years. He had shared an office with Raymond Carvahlo and Paul Erickson. He had done what was asked of him. He had committed his life to the work that the Bureau was carrying out. Even Unit X itself, a unit ostensibly established by Hoover to work alongside the Bureau laboratory he’d established back in 1932, was there for the very reasons that Hoover had stated. Or was it? What was Behavioral Science? Was this nothing more than a means by which the agents themselves could be viewed and analyzed? Was the clearance he’d been given prior to assignation as he stated, or was there some other ulterior motive?

Travis knew he was making wild guesses. He was now erring toward suspicion of his own people, his own work colleagues, his own friends. But they were not friends, were they? Not really. Special Agent Michael Travis did not have friends. He had acquaintances, associates, contemporaries, peers, and seniors. That was the sum total of his social spectrum. And now he had Doyle and Valeria Mironescu, Gabor Benedek, Chester Greene, and Mr. Slate. He had a collection of the strangest of all strangers, and these people had somehow managed to inveigle their way into his sympathies and sensibilities. Right now, in that moment, who did he want to speak to? He had to be honest. It was Edgar Doyle. He wanted to tell Edgar Doyle that people had come from Kansas, people he knew by name and face, and they had taken away the dead body. If he was completely honest, then he had to confront the fact that they had used their federal authority to remove evidence from the scene of a crime. But for what purpose?

Travis felt claustrophobic. He wound down the window an inch or so and allowed a breeze of fresh air into the car. For a second he wondered whether he wasn’t touching the edges of what had befallen his mother. Perhaps it was not some violent impulse that had been passed from father to son, but a strain of insanity from his mother.

And then Travis was struck by the clearest memory of meeting Farley at the mortuary, the viewing of the body, the autopsy report that he’d been given.

Travis got out of the car immediately. He still had that report, right there in his room, and he had a question that needed an answer.

Danny was not at the desk, and Travis went straight on up. The report was still there, precisely where he had left it, and he scanned through Farley’s description of the laking and the wound in the back of the man’s neck. The laking confirmed that the victim was dead somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours before the body was hidden beneath the carousel. He wanted something more specific. He hoped that he would be able to determine a closer time frame.

Travis went back downstairs, through to the telephone from which he had called Bishop. He dialed the operator, asked to be connected to Jack Farley, and waited while she put him through to that number.

Mrs. Farley answered the phone, called her husband, and Travis had to raise his voice considerably before Farley really understood what he was asking.

Finally, after the third or fourth time of asking, Farley responded.

“Really, I cannot give you anything beyond what I already have, Agent Travis. You’d have to actually open up his head. From outward appearance, and from what I can recall, the wound in the back of his neck wasn’t old. Bruising was still relatively fresh, blood was congealed and hardened, of course, but not so brittle as to be much more than a day old. Like I say, being absolutely exact is not always easy, Agent Travis.”

“I understand that, Mr. Farley. So, perhaps you can tell me this much. From what you saw, are we safe to assume that the man was killed no more than twenty-four hours prior to the discovery of his body?”

“Yes, I believe we could safely say that.”

“Good. That’s much appreciated.”

Travis ended the call and went back up to his room.

He sat on the edge of the bed, his gaze directed toward the window but his eyes seeing nothing. If this man was once a member of Fekete Kutya, a known killer, then what possible involvement could he have with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation?

Considering the little information he had thus far gleaned, it seemed to him that identification of the dead man was still of paramount importance. He
had
to find out. He
had
to know.

His only choice was Kansas City. The Wichita field office was too small, but Unit X in Kansas, the very unit within which he had worked for the last five years, was a strong possibility. If his current assignment was being overseen by Supervisor Bishop and Section Chief Frank Gale, then there was a good chance that records and files existed there. By the time he reached Kansas, it would be close to evening, and the office would be unmanned. He would have to break into Bishop’s office, search through his desk, his file cabinets, whatever it took, and there hope to discover something that would confirm or deny what he was now so frightened to believe.

Without proof that there was a conspiracy here, then it was nothing more than supposition.

Travis did not hesitate. Once the decision was made, he went immediately to his car and set out. He drove the fifty miles or so to Emporia, but this time he did not stop for a BLT and a cup of coffee as he had on the way out there. He just kept on going for a further hundred miles or so into Kansas City itself. He played the radio as he drove, catching nothing other than prerecorded programs of music, the odd gospel station, but he needed the noise to stop his thoughts.

Travis arrived in Kansas just after six. He went to his own apartment first, collected his office keys, and then—as he was leaving—he stood for a moment in the doorway. He surveyed the rooms he had inhabited ever since he’d arrived to begin work with Unit X. He remembered how proud he had felt. He remembered how special the assignment had seemed to him. It was a new thing, a brave new thing, and there were only a select few who had been chosen to undertake this project. Now it seemed like something else altogether, and it was not only the possibility of conspiracy that frightened him, but the simple fact that without the Bureau, without this purpose, then who was he, and what would he do?

His apartment seemed like the rooms of a stranger, a hotel room, a room with no personality impressed upon it. Prior to Seneca Falls, he had wanted for nothing. Life had been simple, straightforward, the cases he investigated being all that he’d required to occupy his mind. Now it had all been turned inside out, twisted back upon itself, and he felt as if he was looking at everything from a reversed perspective.

For a moment he again questioned what he was doing, even glanced toward the bookshelf and the letter from Esther that he’d never read, but it did not divert him.

Travis closed the door behind him, went back down to the car, and headed for the office.

36

It was cold, the sky was clear and cloudless, and he sat for a while listening to the cooling tick of the engine. He was a block from the Bureau offices, a couple of minutes’ walk, and he did not understand why he was waiting. There was no reason to wait. There was no one there. No one would see him, and—in all likelihood—no one would ever know he had been there. It had to be done.

Travis took a flashlight from the trunk of his car and approached from the rear of the building. He made his way along the alley, left, left again, and down a narrow walkway to the back door. He opened up, stepped inside, closed and then locked the door behind him. His heart raced. There was sweat on the palms of his hands, and he wiped them on his pants.

Bishop’s office would be locked, and for this he had no key, but he was not unschooled in accessing locked rooms. He even carried a blank on his own key chain, and employing this along with a straightened paper clip, he managed to open the door without difficulty.

Travis stood for some minutes in Bishop’s room. How many times had he been called into this very office? How many times had he sat in this very chair to discuss progress on an ongoing case, to be briefed, debriefed, directed, acknowledged, even commended? More times than he could recall. In fact, the very last conversation he’d had with Bishop, the conversation that resulted in his dispatch to Seneca Falls, had taken place right here less than a week before. It did not seem real that only five days had elapsed since he had listened to Supervisor Bishop’s explanation of the situation. He remembered how he’d felt as he left, his intention to set a standard that would presage a stunningly successful and important career. He was SSA Michael Travis, and it was merely a matter of time before he’d be supervisor, special agent in charge, section chief, deputy assistant director, and on it would go, as high as the stratosphere. Those heights now seemed to bear the characteristics of depths, like some strange optical illusion. What was wide was narrow; what was once profound was now a meaningless untruth.

Before he started searching the room, he stood by the door and surveyed the interior. He assumed the viewpoint of someone who had never been there before, taking a mental note of every object within, clarifying in his own mind precisely how it looked. The filing cabinet to the right was imperfectly aligned to its neighbor, the potted plant on the sill was merely an inch from the edge. He took in every detail so as to ensure that he left it just as he’d found it. And then started looking—going through every cabinet in the room, every file, every document. He looked at papers that were stamped three or four levels above his own clearance grade, and yet he did not care. He replaced everything precisely as he had found it and did not consider for a moment that his presence would ever be discovered. And yet he did not find what he was looking for. He found no file with his name, nor that of Seneca Falls, nothing that mentioned Edgar Doyle or the Carnival Diablo. He found no reference to the murder that had taken place, no memorandums addressed to Bishop from anyone in Washington about the “Kansas investigation.”

Travis’s imagination had been exercised sufficiently for one night, for he felt nothing at all,
wanted
to feel nothing at all. He tried to convince himself that everything had been blown out of proportion, that there was no conspiracy, that he had been blindsided by Edgar Doyle and his people. And then it struck him. What if this was nothing more than a further distraction? What if Doyle was even now disassembling the carnival, taking down the tents, loading everything that he possessed into the convoy of vehicles, and fleeing Seneca Falls as dawn broke?

No. Travis did not believe that was happening. As it stood, Travis considered the likelihood of Doyle’s involvement in the murder as real and as possible as that of the Bureau. The old saw applied. He was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, but which was the devil here?

Travis sat down in Bishop’s chair. He could not believe that there was no record of the Seneca Falls assignment in this room. If not here, then there had to be something in Chief Gale’s room, unless…

Travis knew then. He knew with certainty. The fire safe. Beneath the floor of the outer office was a metal safe buried in the footings of the building. Impregnable to most everything, it contained material considered to be sensitive or potentially inflammatory until further probative evidence had been obtained. It could be opened by two agents, no less, and one of those had to be Bishop himself. Bishop had a key, and there was a second key provided to each serving agent of the office staff. A further copy of Bishop’s key was also held in a strongbox in the outer office, itself securely locked. Travis did not doubt that he could open it, and with both keys he could access the fire safe.

Travis had greater difficulty than he’d predicted with the strongbox. He went through desk drawers in the office until he found some gum. Chewing it, then kneading it dry between his fingers, he pressed it around the face of the lock to prevent any scratching of the surface. He inserted each key he possessed, testing the levers gently, trying to ascertain where each lever sat. Employing the key that appeared to fit with the greatest ease, ironically the key to his room at the McCaffrey, he applied the finest layer of paper glue. He allowed it to dry, and then he tentatively inserted the key and angled it clockwise until he felt the pressure from the internal levers. Withdrawing the key again with the greatest care, ensuring that he did not make any contact with the outer edge of the lock aperture itself, he scrutinized the teeth. Left in the fine layer of paper adhesive was a clear enough impression of where the levers sat. There were only three, not five, which made the task somewhat easier. The hotel key was not so different from the one required to open the strongbox, and Travis searched the desks until he found a metal comb. Using it as a makeshift file, he started work on modifying the key as best he could. It took a good while. Each time he thought he was close he would try the key, but to no avail. He simply persisted, working at the thing until he felt sure it would turn the levers.

Finally, the strongbox was open. Travis returned the metal comb to the desk from which he’d taken it. He took the copy of Bishop’s key, retraced his steps, moved a file cabinet near the door to Bishop’s office, and then lifted the boards beneath. He looked down at the fire safe. He held his own key in his right hand, Bishop’s key in his left. This was it now. He knelt down, hesitated for one moment more. Now he would find what he was looking for, or he would not. He asked himself whether he wanted to know if he had been played like a pawn in some chess game engineered and created by people he did not know, people he perhaps would never know.

Travis cast aside any final shred of doubt he might have possessed. He turned the key, he heard the levers drop, and then he inserted the second key. He turned it, and the safe was open.

Later he could not have said what he had expected to find. Later he would recognize that the moment he reached into that safe and took out the files within was the moment that everything irrevocably changed. It seemed as if everything he believed in then turned one hundred and eighty degrees and looked back at him with an expression of condescension and superiority.

You are not who you think you are
, it said.
What you are doing, and what you think you are doing are not the same thing. And never have been. And you will never really understand how it was that you were so effortlessly fooled and deceived.

The dead man’s face looked back at him. There was no question. It was the same face as that on the picture in his pocket. It was a police precinct mug shot. The man held a board, and upon it was a date, a name, a location. New York City, June 11, 1954. The name given was Andris Varga.

The file itself gave very little further information. It seemed that this Andris Varga had been arrested on suspicion of murder in New York in June of 1954. Whether or not he had been formally charged or arraigned was unclear, but Travis’s question as to the man’s origin and nationality was confirmed by a handwritten note, author unknown, that stated that Varga was from Kecskemét in Hungary. There was a notation of his height, his weight, notable scars and identifying marks, the latter including details of his tattoos. It was most definitely the same man. And, providing another confirmation of what Doyle had told Travis, Varga was purported to be a member of a Hungarian organized-crime network known as Fekete Kutya.

Michael Travis sat cross-legged on the floor of the Kansas City Field Office with the slim dossier in his lap, and he wondered what the hell he had been thrown into. Who was Andris Varga? What was Fekete Kutya? Why had Varga been arrested in New York on suspicion of murder, and then—more than four years later—wound up dead from a fatal stab wound in the back of his neck, his body summarily deposited beneath the carousel of a traveling carnival organized and run by the strangest collection of misfits that Travis had even encountered?

Travis went through the remainder of the documents and files in the fire safe and found nothing further. This absence, in and of itself, almost directly contradicted the routine and accepted operating basis of the Bureau. Everything was documented; everything was filed; everything was recorded, recoverable, signed, sealed, and accountable to someone. But this was not, it seemed. This was a thing all its own.

And where was Varga’s body now? Why had it been taken so swiftly from Seneca Falls, and to whom had it been delivered?

Travis made a note of Varga’s name, the New York precinct where he had been photographed, the date of arrest, the case number, and the town of his birth.

He replaced everything as he had found it, locked the safe with Bishop’s key and returned it to the strongbox before he used his own key. He cleaned the gum away from the face of the lock, checked to ensure that there were no telltale scratches or finger marks. He replaced the floorboards, moved the file cabinet back to its original position, and surveyed the area to determine if there was any telltale sign of his presence. From what he could see, there was nothing to say that anything out of the ordinary had taken place. He had managed to successfully execute an illegal search of a restricted access safe, read documents that were beyond his clearance grade, and note down details of those documents for his own use. Three charges, any one of which could mean his immediate dismissal from the Bureau.

Travis did not linger. He left the building the way he had come, locked everything securely behind him, and walked the block or so to his car.

By the time he was seated in the Fairlane, he was breathing heavily, not from any degree of physical exertion, but from the sheer mental and emotional burden of what he had discovered.

He had been sent to investigate the murder of a man whose identity was already known to the Bureau, a man who had been arrested on suspicion of murder in New York four years earlier, a man who was a confirmed member of an Eastern European organized-crime syndicate.

This was the truth, and for the first time in his life, the truth seemed a great deal more disturbing than any lie he might have been told.

The truth can hurt. He had heard that before. Michael Travis had never before realized how much.

Despite the hour, Travis knew he could not return to Seneca Falls without addressing one further issue. The badge that Doyle wore, the forget-me-not, the symbol of this Nazi fundraising organization that he had referred to as his shield against all ills.

Travis’s first thought was for Sarah Ebner from the Wichita University. She had been aware of Fekete Kutya, and Travis felt certain that she could assist him further. But Wichita was a four-hour drive, and he felt equally certain that she would not appreciate an unannounced visit from the FBI. But what else was there to do? He would not sleep,
could
not sleep, and this matter had to be resolved.

Travis stopped at the bus station and found a bank of phones. He called Information, asked for the residential number of Dr. Sarah Ebner in Wichita, and waited for the connection. Dr. Ebner came on the line almost immediately.

“I need to speak with you, and it is a matter of urgency,” Travis said. “I am in Kansas, and I can be there in three or four hours, but I wanted to make sure that you were there, that you would be willing to talk to me so late.”

Travis, if he was not mistaken, could hear the wry smile in her voice as she replied.

“Not only are you unschooled in the ways of women, Agent Travis, you are also unfamiliar with idiosyncratic academics, I see,” she said. “It is Saturday night, and the only reason I am not on campus is because they tell me I am supposed to stay home weekends. You are more than welcome. Let me give you my address.”

Dr. Ebner did so, and Travis wrote it down.

“I shall endeavor to get there as fast as possible,” Travis told her.

“And I shall endeavor to have some coffee ready.”

Travis stopped at a gas station to fill up. He spoke with the station attendant and determined the fastest route down to Wichita. Though the route he’d taken—I-35 out of Emporia—seemed quicker, the attendant suggested he take 169 southwest to Iola and then head west along 54.

“Might not sound like sense, but you’d be surprised the number of long-distance haulers they run on 35 on a Saturday night. You get a crowd o’ those—worse still, you get a bump or a spill—and you’re gonna be stuck there till next Tuesday while they sort it out. I figure you should take 169 and hope for the best.”

Travis followed the man’s advice, and was out on the highway before half past eight. He figured he could make it by eleven if he floored the Fairlane.

Somewhere between Olathe and Paola he knew he was losing all connections to anything certain. He forced himself to think of other things, other memories, other times and places and people.

His attention kept going back to Esther, perhaps occasioned by his return home, her letter now the only thing that seemed of any importance in his apartment.