“I liked it better when I thought Gail had mortgaged herself to the eyes to buy her freedom. Now that I know it’s just this week’s allotment for screwdrivers for the Pentagon the money’s lost its shine.”
“Our sources warned us you’re a romantic,” he said. “You’re still angry over being braced in the concourse. It was the only way I could set up this meeting without word getting back to certain parties. As it was I was followed there, but the sawhorse trick bought me the few minutes I needed. I’ve since shaken the tail, but tails always come back. Moss and Wessell got anxious when you reached for your gun; I apologize for their zeal.” He returned the money order to his pocket and drew out another envelope. I decided he wore his gun on the other side for balance. “There are ten thousand dollars in here. Cash, old bills. They’re yours if you can do something for me.”
“I don’t know any South American dictators.”
“I envy you. I don’t want to know any more of them. I’m sick of the whole racket. I’ve had my fill of signs and countersigns and code names and greasy little embassy men with their hands out and bilious congressmen demanding details on clandestine operations so they can broadcast them to their constituents and buy votes. I’m tired of doing business with people I should be putting handcuffs on. If I have to make love to one more lice-ridden slut of a female revolutionary for the freedom of man I’ll air-express my crabs to the director in Washington.”
“So quit.”
“It isn’t that easy.”
I laid my cigarette in the souvenir ashtray from Traverse City and got up and hung my coat next to his. I took a box of .38 cartridges out of the middle drawer of the file cabinet, unholstered the Smith & Wesson, and loaded it, filling all six chambers. He watched me with sleepy interest. I went around behind the desk and excused myself and opened the top drawer and laid the gun inside it and pushed it shut. Then I returned to the customer’s chair and picked up my cigarette. I was ready for the whole sad story.
“We’re an independent little group,” Sahara said. “True, the CIA itself has no authority in this country, but a dark horse outfit like the one I work for, without official status, is free to work wherever it chooses until it gets caught. Left to his devices in one place for a long enough period, a senior agent like me becomes something of a feudal lord, with his own private army of contacts, informants, and mercenaries like the two you met today. The attitude at the top is that sooner or later these individuals will take it into their heads to cause some damage on their own: strongarming, extortion, treating with the enemy — well, blackmailing the Company itself for the political dynamite it’s placed in his care. Then there are the renegades who write best sellers. A field man who wants to resign is a burning fuse. A burning fuse has to be snuffed out before it reaches the powder.”
“What do they call that, counter-counterassassination?”
He adjusted his glasses. “They already suspect me. That’s why I’m being followed. I’ve been based here five years, two years past the standard rotation deadline. I could disappear, but if I used any of the accepted Company methods of going underground, they’d track me down like a pencil in a drawer. To pull off a vanishing act they’ve never seen before I need a civilian mind, a good one that hasn’t been drilled into the procedural warp. That’s where you come in. As I said, I’ve read your file.”
“Who does the ten grand belong to, you or the Company?”
“It’s mine. I borrowed the seven hundred fifty thousand from the discretionary account. Seed money. I’ve bought presidents for less. Do you want the job? I don’t mind telling you I’ve gone to considerable lengths to consult with you. Far more than you know.”
“I wouldn’t know what to do with ten thousand dollars, Mr. Sahara. Is that your name, by the way?”
“It’s the one I’m using at present. The money isn’t meant to tempt you. If this works I’ll consider it well earned. I thought perhaps you might be swayed for reasons of sentiment.”
I felt the tightness again in the corners of my mouth. “Flag and country?”
“Wife and home. For a little while, anyway.” He touched his glasses a third time. “We’re related in a way, you and I. I’m married to your ex-wife.”
I
PUT MY CIGARETTE
out carefully, squashing it into a lump on top of Grand Traverse Bay and using the lump to tramp out the last glowing spark. “Where is she?”
“In the area. I wouldn’t advise a visit. She’s under surveillance too.”
“She gave you my name?”
“Not in connection with this. She mentions you from time to time, although not as often now as in the beginning. We’ve been married three years. I knew you were a private investigator, and she was willing to admit you were dedicated. The rest I got from your file.”
“Last I heard she was in Aruba helping somebody spend his inheritance.”
“She returned here when that blew up. It was before we met, but I know most of the details. I investigated her past. That’s when I first came across your name.”
“Being a spy sure comes in handy in the romance department.”
“We have to be careful about our associations. Actually, I ran the check before I developed a personal attachment. I first saw her four years ago at a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn. For world hunger, if you can believe it. Her escort later used the money raised there to buy guns to sell to the rebels in El Salvador. He’s doing eight to twenty now in the federal corrections facility in Marion, Illinois.”
“Congratulations.”
“It wasn’t my bust. I just kept track of his movements while he was here and passed the information on to Washington, including what I’d learned about his lady friend. The job isn’t
all
killing. Anyway, something about Catherine interested me apart from the bare facts of her life — maybe I don’t have to tell you what it was — and I looked her up six months later. Six months after that, we were married.”
“Sweet of her not to hold it against you for throwing her boyfriend in the slam.”
“He wasn’t her boyfriend, just someone she’d met and a chance to dress up for the evening. When she was questioned she claimed ignorance of his activities, and our information confirmed that. Women get caught up in these things. It’s one reason most field agents are male. There are definite advantages.”
“Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘service of your country.’ ” I looked at Custer. “Catherine always had lousy taste in men.”
“I wasn’t aware from your file you’d given up on yourself.”
“I meant the men she ran around with. She’s an adventuress, or she was when I knew her. Not too many of those left. They went out with silk bodices and schooners.”
“I sensed that in her. Maybe it gave me a head start: James Bond and all that. You haven’t once asked how she is.”
“Fine, I suppose. She always took care of herself first. Is she disappearing with you?”
“No. The first rule of going underground is you have to cut yourself off from your past life entirely.” He raised and resettled his glasses. “You may as well know that things haven’t been good between us for a long time. That’s not why I’m dropping out, but it’s made the decision easier. Naturally she’ll be provided for.”
“Naturally.” I picked up the envelope from the blotter, thumbed through the frayed $100 and $500 bills, took out a thousand, and gave him back the rest. “This buys four days: expenses. If it takes longer than that I’ll come back for more. This — and one other thing.”
His amber gaze hardened. “You can’t see her. She’s being watched too closely. I can’t use you if the Company finds out we’re in contact.”
“I don’t want to see her. I want my file.”
“Your file, why?”
“I’m fascinated by me. Can’t get enough of myself. I want every copy of every document, every picture and negative. The memory banks wiped clean. Six weeks from now when somebody feeds my name to a government computer, I want it to kick out a big fat question mark.” I caught a glimpse of Custer’s uniform. “On second thought, you can leave my service record; that’s public property. Everything else goes. Can you do it?”
“The people who compile those things will just get back to work and in two years the record on you will be nearly as complete.”
“I’ll take the two years. I didn’t hang those blinds because I was afraid someone would break in and steal the dead moths out of the light fixture. Can you do it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve falsified reports and destroyed papers, but that was when they were still in my hands, before they went into the mill. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have the ten thousand?”
“It would just put me in a tax bracket. Can you do it?”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that.”
“Can you do it?”
“Yes, damn it. I’ll have to call in some favors.”
“The telephone’s in front of you.”
“
Now?
”
“Later you’ll be vanished. If I work it right I won’t be able to find you. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
He laid a hand on the receiver. “Give me twenty minutes.”
I got my coat, went to the delicatessen down the street, and drank a cup of coffee. A pair of young women in rabbit coats seated at the next table were discussing trying out for parts in something by Ibsen at the Attic Theater. One of them stopped emoting long enough to ask me to put out my cigarette. We were in the smoking section, but I obliged. The neighborhood was changing. The next thing you knew they would plant trees along the sidewalks and drive away the working girls on the corner, and what street trade I had would dry up and blow away. I considered consulting the lady astrologer about a change in careers. Maybe Ibsen had something for me.
Sahara was still talking on the telephone when I got back. I sat down in the waiting room and started an article about dinosaurs in the
National Geographic,
but that was too depressing, so I returned it to the coffee table and blew smoke at my framed
Casablanca
poster. Just then Sahara poked his head out of the office. “Well, there’s no going back to Washington now.”
“Did you do it?”
“I had to promise some things I won’t be able to deliver on from hiding. I’ll have the file by the end of the week.”
“Thanks. Let’s talk details.” I patted the settee adjacent to my chair. A fine puff of dust coughed up. He chose the chair facing mine, which gave him a view of the door to the hallway. “Who’s following you and on whose orders?” I asked.
“I’m not sure who’s doing the following. That suggests someone in particular, because if it were anyone else I’d have gotten a look at him by now. I haven’t lasted twenty years in this work by being inept. This one’s less so. His name’s Usher.”
“Roderick?”
“Frank. Short for Franklin. He prefers to be called Papa. He’s pushing sixty — not unheard of in the field, but rare enough to underline in his jacket. That should tell you something.”
“Is he a killer?”
“We’re all killers. This one made his bones infiltrating the black market in Vienna for the OSS after World War Two. I pulled his picture from the file.” He took it out of his handkerchief pocket and gave it to me.
It was an old-fashioned portrait with a soft focus. I looked at an ordinary face, somewhat plump, with smoky eyes and dark thinning hair in a widow’s peak and a neat little moustache. The face could have belonged to a clerk who had been passed over for promotion so many times you could see footprints on his forehead. “How long ago was this taken?”
“Nineteen sixty. He hasn’t posed for one since, and if there were ever any candids he’s burned all of them. He doesn’t have a standard ID because he refuses to sit for the picture.”
“What’s he look like now?”
“I don’t know. We’ve never met and there was no description in his file. He has cheap taste in clothes, that much I can tell you, and he sometimes carries a stick, but it’s just show. Papa’s a special case. Our little group was built around him, the way you build a road around a shaggy old oak because it’s too much trouble to cut down and blast out the stump. Also he’s good. That’s why he’s as old as he is. Some of the younger agents think he’s just a legend, one of those bogey stories rookies get told as part of their initiation. He’s real enough, all right. Thirty or forty witnesses would swear to it, if they weren’t all dead.”
I put the picture in my shirt pocket. “Can he cross running water, and will ordinary bullets work on him or should I have some made out of silver?”
“I just don’t want you complaining to me later I didn’t tell you how bad it can get,” he said. “I’m not even sure he’s the one tailing me. I hope I’m wrong. Shadow men come cheap. Papa doesn’t get on you unless he smells blood in the water.”
“You didn’t answer the second part of my question. Who sicced him on you?”
“Some desk pilot in Washington. Take your pick, they punch them out of a big sheet.”
I asked a few more questions. When I had enough to fly on, I stood. “Let me set some stuff up. Where can I reach you?”
“Leave a message if I’m not in. There’s a machine.” Rising, he handed me a stiff white card with a whorled surface bearing the legend
JEROME BOSCH, COUNSELOR AT LAW
and a city telephone number in shiny black characters.
“Who’s Bosch?”
“Nobody. You don’t think I put my own name on business cards.”
“Hieronymous Bosch.
The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Cute. Would Usher know you’re an art connoisseur?” I put the card away with some others in my wallet.
“I’m not. I took an art survey course twenty years ago in college and that’s all that stuck. I cover my tracks better than that.” He studied me. His scrutiny had all the disturbing power of screws in a strikeplate. “Was it Catherine that decided you to take the job?”
“I think about Catherine as often as you think about Bosch. It so happens I’m not up to my hips in clients just now; it so happens that happens pretty often. I don’t like to do crossword puzzles and I’ve got a winter property tax payment due next month. And you and the Twins from the Tunnel will probably go on bracing me in embarrassing places until I agree to help you, so why not cut my losses?”