Foxcatcher

by William H Hallahan

  As he stood studying the terrain, idly he scooped up some sunwarm sand and let it sift from his fingers. He watched the grains fall away in the breeze. The wind could be a factor in his sniping. He had to do the job with one shot.

  Jamil watched the blowing sand drift from his fingers. It reminded him of an hourglass. Three more days.

  At his home, in his library filled with books with leather bindings and uncut pages, Major Mudd calmed himself with a cup of tea, his ears blistered by Rus’s furious complaints about the choice of cut flowers.

  Before him on his desk lay the maintenance manual put out by the manufacturer of Rus’s elevator. Major Mudd had spent hours closely examining each schematic. The electronic relay panel got his greatest attention. He felt that his best line of attack was through the starter and controller units, although for some time he’d felt the motor generator set was the solution. He leafed through the schematics: the counterweight and its buffer, the traveling cables, the secondary sheaves, the governor, the roller guides, the terminal stopping switch cam. Which one?

  His eyes asked the drawing for the best way to drop the 50,000-pound car down its shaft. That would end that silly seminar. And make him a free man.

  Peno Rus would not be able to criticize the choice of cut flowers the major planned to send to his funeral.

  15

  South of Lyons a chilly autumn rain began, a light but steady soaking drizzle. Brewer looked through a pair of swaying windshield wipers at the dotted white line that twisted and turned, rose and fell through six countries, five border checks, and innumerable stops to Damascus.

  He felt like a shepherd herding his flock. As he drove he examined Georges’s cars with a critical eye, looking for telltale signs of trouble.

  He told himself over and over that he was a fool to have agreed to make delivery in Damascus. He should have drawn the line at New York or Boston and let Attashah get the stuff home from there. That way his work would already be finished. He would have done the job Attashah couldn’t do, and Attashah would have done the job he didn’t want to do. Instead, Attashah got him to do two jobs for the price of one.

  Worse—if he failed in the smuggling operation, it would cancel out the job he had done assembling the parts. And that disaster could happen at any border inspection. Certainly Attashah would accept no excuses. For failure there’d be no payoff—except perhaps a shot in the back of the head.

  Because of the rain and the poor road conditions, the cars made no attempt to stay together. It was well after dark before the last of them arrived at their first rest stop. Over a soggy, half-warmed meal, the drivers chatted eagerly of home. They were one day closer.

  After they were asleep, Brewer walked around the cars in a downpour, kicking tires and checking for loose exhausts and other signs of trouble. Then he tried to sleep, wondering how far behind him his pursuers were. Surely Dice had cut his deal with McCall by now.

  The caravan hit a crisis the next morning at its first checkpoint, the French-Italian border.

  Brewer was the first to go through. Then he waited for the twenty-car caravan. Ten of the caravan got through without incident, the guards merely checked passports, green insurance cards, and auto registration. Then one of the cars, an old red Renault, was stopped.

  Two Italian Customs men opened the Renault’s back doors and lifted the seat. They reached under the dashboard, groped under the front seat. They required the driver to open the trunk. They felt under the spare tire and lifted the trunk mat. Then they stood looking critically at the rear tires. They pressed down on the car trunk to depress the springs.

  “Why is this car so heavy?” one asked the driver. “Your springs are almost flat.” The driver shrugged. The two customs men conferred briefly in low voices, then signaled the driver. They wanted him to drive the vehicle onto a weighing scale. One of them wet his finger and turned the pages of a directory that listed all the makes and models of cars and their standard weights.

  The driver was complying when, abruptly, thick black smoke wrapped around the customs station. Horns blew and voices shouted. Soon everyone was coughing, and many were covering their faces with handkerchiefs. A truck’s cargo was burning, fanned by high driving speeds, and now that it had stopped, the smoke billowed out of the truck body and crept along the ground. Vehicles in the smoke’s path blew their horns, and the customs men hastily began waving all vehicles through in order to get the truck downwind of the station.

  Brewer, waiting by the side of the road, counted all twenty of his cars as they drove by. Then came the truck. The driver stopped it, jumped out, and ran as the cargo burst into leaping flames. A towering pall of black acrid smoke ascended. Brewer drove off after his flock.

  He caught up with the caravan and drove behind the red Renault to examine it. It had an undulating, laboring quality. The shock absorbers were shot. They would have to be replaced and the tires would have to be overinflated before they reached the next checkpoint at the Yugoslavian border. But that was on the other side of Italy. They had a lot of road to traverse first.

  With twenty elderly cars, veterans of Parisian traffic wars, Brewer knew he had to expect breakdowns soon.

  The strain was beginning to tell on Madeline Hale. She went everywhere in cabs. She always walked the last two or three blocks to her furnished apartment in Georgetown, sometimes walking in a complete circle to mislead anyone who was following her.

  The slightest noise would awaken her. And there were many noises in the old brownstone building, creaks and snaps in the woodwork, doors closing, footsteps in the hallway.

  One morning the mail girl walked into her office with a quizzical expression on her face, holding a letter. It was a piece of ordinary white paper that had been sent in an ordinary white #10 envelope. On it was written one word: BOOM.

  On another day, she was told she had a phone call from a referee in a court case. But when she picked up the phone it wasn’t the referee.

  “Hello,” she said for the third time.

  And the voice on the other end said, very softly: “Boom.”

  She tried not to let it shake her. But it terrified her. And Brewer’s attack on her came back vividly. With a shudder she felt anew his fingernail being drawn down the length of her torso, across her throat. She thought of being dropped seven stories off her balcony. And she remembered with nightmare clarity the explosion of her automobile.

  One sleepless night she recalled her childhood prayer: “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

  The phone call when it came was unexpected. Her mind was on other things. Her friend in the FBI said: “Meet me in the Lizard Lounge.”

  He wasn’t hard to find. He was sitting with a soft drink and a bunch of papers, a busy FBI attorney with too heavy a caseload and too short a workday. All the world was his office. When she walked up to the booth, he was busy editing a brief.

  “Hurrah for the Red and the Blue,” she said.

  “Yay, Pennsylvania,” he replied. When she sat down he pushed a piece of paper to her. “This is the guy who put the red flag on Brewer’s personnel file.”

  She read the name. Robert McCall. “Oh,” she said. “That’s his boss.”

  “No surprise there,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing bosses do, I would say. And here’s the name of the guy who put the red flag on the Anton Rumbh file over at Immigration and Naturalization.”

  It was a name she’d never heard before: Roger Hardy.

  “Who’s he?” she asked.

  “A ranker. Career man. GS-sixteen or so. My contact tells me that when Hardy put the flag on, he said to her: “A little favor for a neighbor.”

  Her unlisted phone rang at two in the morning. She had been sleeping fitfully and she straggled through her dark apartment to the phone, sure it must be trouble from home.

  “Hello,” she said.

  There was no reply.

  “Hello,” she said again.

  And a voice said, “Bo
om.”

  She dressed and called a cab and rode to her office. It was now two-thirty. She heard the night bell ring in the office lobby somewhere, and soon an old man in a guard’s uniform came strolling to the entrance. He studied her through the glass doors, then slowly unlocked them.

  She signed in, then took the elevator to her office. When she entered she turned on all the lights and put her coat on her desk. Then she went to the library and searched for the U.S. government Who’s Who. She found Roger Hardy’s name and title. Middle initial T. She dialed the emergency number listed.

  “This is State,” she said. “London desk. Urgent message for Roger Hardy. Home phone number, please.”

  The operator read it off. Hale then went to the master phone number directory and ran her finger down the columns of numbers. She found Hardy’s address. She got the cross-check directory down, a house-by-house listing of all the phones in the area. She found Hardy’s house address, then studied the names of the families on either side, across the street, and around the corner. A favor for a neighbor. Directly behind Hardy’s house was the neighbor. Madeline Hale recognized the name immediately. She had found Anton Rumbh’s true identity.

  Now she had to find Brewer. If there was one person who knew where Charlie Brewer was, Hale knew who it must be. She dialed the home of Joanie Walsh, Bobby McCall’s secretary.

  While the phone was ringing, she looked down at a white piece of paper that had been tucked under her telephone. It contained one word.

  BOOM.

  Five hours after they’d crashed Georges’s garage, McCall’s team was still stonewalled.

  They had quickly gone through Georges’s neighborhood, interviewed the family, tried to interrogate shopkeepers and pedestrians. Many people pretended not to understand French.

  McCall met Borden and Dice at a café at eleven to compare notes. McCall drummed his fingers frantically on the tabletop. Each minute that cargo got farther and farther away.

  “How?” he demanded of Borden and Dice. “Plane? Truck? Boat? Camel back?”

  Borden shrugged. “The Fat Man uses them all, Bobby. One time he shipped small handguns into Algeria inside vacuum cleaners. I don’t know where to look next. But I’ll say one thing. If we ask enough people, someone is going to say something, some little thing that we can use to pry open the other people. Sooner or later we’ll come up with something.”

  McCall sat under the dripping awning, watching the drizzle pimple the puddles. He snorted at Borden. “Sooner or later Brewer will make delivery to Attashah. We’re out of time, Borden.”

  “And out of ideas,” Borden said.

  “Not quite,” McCall said. He raised his umbrella and walked off in the rain.

  Early in his career McCall had been taught the proper attributes of a policeman: to be systematic, plodding, patient, and thorough. And to trust to luck. Above all, one must put oneself in a position to receive the breaks. In desperate times, he learned, one must not panic; stop chasing and become the chased; let the world come to you. Return to the scene of the crime.

  The door to Georges’s garage was still ajar when McCall arrived before noon. He stepped in and shut the door firmly behind him. He began systematically to search the building.

  Rain muttered in a downspout. Mice scurried in a dark corner. Under a tarpaulin he found an ancient Citroen in the process of restoration. There were many tools on benches and in old metal toolboxes. Grease and oil stains everywhere.

  Brewer was proving too smart for him, too cunning. He seemed to know what moves McCall was going to make before he made them. And the passage of each succeeding hour increased Brewer’s chances of success, Maybe the game was over already.

  With the odors of oil, gas, and acetylene in his nose, McCall poked morosely among abandoned papers in a nearly empty office file.

  McCall stood bemused in the middle of the garage, studying a large pan that leaned against a wall and wondering what it was for. He examined the welding torches. And he asked himself why there were so many cots stacked against a wall. Why so many blankets? What kind of a business was operated here? He searched the drawers of the old desk in the office. He asked himself, if he were Brewer, how would he smuggle those parts to Iran?

  Through the wet garage windows he watched the people of Montmartre hurry along the old twisted streets, with umbrellas and sheets of paper over their heads, women hurrying home with noontime loaves of bread. Children in hoods, bearing school knapsacks, went by.

  Footsteps approached and paused at the door. McCall stepped quickly up to it and waited. The doorknob was tried. Then the footsteps hurried away. Through a grimy window McCall saw the retreating back of a young woman under a large red umbrella.

  It was maddening. Brewer’s contraband had come to this place in the truck that was still parked on the apron in front of the building. The parts had evidently been brought into the garage, been placed where he now stood, been processed somehow, repacked, and now were gone again.

  He sat and propped his elbows on the old kitchen table in the corner. With his chin on his hands he glanced at the headlines of the loose newspaper pages that covered the tabletop. They were from a French scandal sheet—tales of infidelities, improbabilities, and impossibilities. Man, eighty, marries childhood sweetheart after fifty years in jail. Man discovers that his wife had been keeping a lover in their attic for seven years. Woman gives birth to a monkey. Male girl makes self pregnant.

  Bobby McCall admitted to himself he was beaten. He stood up to leave, brushing the loose newspaper pages. And found himself looking at several sheets of paper peeking out from under the newspaper. He sat down to read them.

  One sheet contained a list of names with passport numbers—twenty of them. Another contained a list of automobile serial numbers and license-plate numbers—twenty of them. Twenty names, twenty cars, twenty-odd cots—and one pan.

  McCall stood up and hurried to the door.

  To Borden the problem was simple. “Why don’t we just turn the license numbers over to the border checks?” he asked.

  “No, no,” McCall said. “This is not our turf. If this story gets out, half those countries might provide Brewer a goddammed armed escort all the way to Iran, just to embarrass the U.S. The papers over here would have a bloody party. It would raise hell in Washington. No, that’s not the way to do it.”

  “Then what is?” Borden demanded. “Christ, Brewer has a full day’s head start on us already. Even if we started right now we could never catch up with them.”

  “Not by car,” McCall said.

  “Then what?”

  “Airplanes,” McCall said.

  “What about airplanes?”

  “Small private ones,” McCall said. “We can fly low over the main roads from here to Syria until we spot the cars with the right license numbers.”

  “Smart,” Borden said. “Very smart.”

  McCall said, “When you want to catch a Brewer, think like a Brewer.”

  The auto route across Italy led them south of Milan toward Verona. Not far from Verona the red Renault commenced blowing heavy smoke from its exhaust. It lost power and drifted over to the shoulder. And there it died. Brewer wondered if the Renault was going to become his Nemesis.

  Brewer and two other cars in the caravan stopped. They raised the hood and fiddled with the carburetor. The automatic choke had jammed. The driver adjusted it, started the engine, and watched it shudder and die, emitting more black smoke.

  One of the drivers quickly pulled out the oil dipstick, stroked his finger along the oily rod, then wiped the oil drops onto the hinged flap of the automatic choke. It worked; the car started without smoking.

  “Are you a mechanic?” Brewer asked him in French.

  He shrugged and smiled. “In Syria most cars are old, so everybody is a mechanic.”

  During the day, when they stopped for gas, Brewer watched each driver check his own oil, cooling system, battery, belts, and tires. Georges had chosen his drivers well.


  But the caravan was spreading out. It was scattered along a sixty-mile length of Italian roadway. Some cars were more than an hour ahead of others. Brewer looked down the long white ribbon of roadway. The next major test was the Yugoslavian border.

  Then he looked back. That’s where the real trouble would come from. He was nursing twenty old wrecks, fixing breakdowns, stopping for meals, for sleep, for road checks, for fuel, for regrouping, for customs barriers. McCall could travel light, day and night.

  Now he knew how the old cattle barons had felt on their long cattle drives through hostile Indian territory. It would be a miracle if he got this wandering herd of exhausted cars through the shooting gallery of customs checkpoints and into Damascus before McCall caught up with him.

  He was sure that trouble was hatching under every hood, lurking at every customs post, and pursuing him from the rear on greyhound’s legs. Trouble was coming from every direction—like Nemesis in Act Five.

  Interpol-Aid helped McCall get two small police planes from the Italians, with pilots and air clearance through Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey to Syria.

  He and Borden made a rendezvous with the Italian pilots in the airport near Venice. The morning was wet and windy, and they stood inside the briefing room, over the air maps and the coffee cups, looking at two slowly shaking Italian heads.

  “Too risky,” one of the pilots said. “Low-level flying is too risky. Wind shear at low levels. Later today.”

  McCall stood at the window and looked out at the red windsocks that veered in the quixotic wind. Somewhere out in the weather, Brewer’s cars were bounding over the roadway, slipping away from him mile after mile while the two pilots sat and played cards.

  He and Borden drank coffee, flipped through magazines, and watched the two pilots play cards until noon. Then they all went to lunch in an airport restaurant crowded with people. All that light banter and relaxed meal-making seemed to mock him. The frustration was like a lump in McCall’s throat, and he was unable to eat anything. He believed he was an inch away from madness.