Catch Me: Kill Me

by Hallahan, William H. ;

  Interspersed were cryptic entries that appeared regularly—surfacings from a substratum of secret events in Kotlikoff’s life: something impending.

  One entry was dated December 2, four months ago: “The true test of a poet is his courage. How is mine? We’ll soon see.”

  On December 14 was a note: “It is agreed! I will translate into English (American!) my first volume of Russian poems on the twentieth anniversary of publication in Moscow. Dare I use the same dedication? It might cause great trouble for him.”

  On December 20 appeared a row of exclamation points. “!!!!!!!!! A day to remember.”

  A note: “Jay Simmonds has walked sideways through life—like a crab.”

  In January: “Yes, it is possible !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

  February 13: “And what if they torture me? Will they? Will I submit quickly to torture? Bent fingers. Electric shock. Denied sleep. Psychological disorientation. They know all the tricks. I will submit easily. I am a coward. Yet I must go through with this, or every line of poetry I ever wrote is a lie!”

  February 23: “How can I hide? Where? He wants me to go underground. It’s impossible. We cannot live in hiding. I will not. I refuse.”

  March 4: “A day in history! All arrangements are made! A poet is good for something after all.” That was less than a month ago.

  On March 14: “Ready with the last of it. It will be a great day!”

  On March 28, six days ago: “It must have happened today. Must have. Good luck!”

  March 29: “I must stop thinking about torture. It unnerves me. Simmonds said something really profound: The most subversive thing in the world is a well-trained mind. Well, here’s to a world stuffed with well-trained minds.”

  Leary thumbed through Kotlikoff’s appointment book. Kotlikoff had noted his appointment four days hence—Friday, April 5 (“Inspection to qualify for Immigrant Status, 3 p.m., Mr. Bennett’s office”), and heavily underlined it. It was like an exultant shout. Leary sighed at it: not likely now.

  Also on Friday, the fifth, 11 P.M. had a faint circle around it, almost like a whisper, and a faint exclamation mark. Next to it, the number 90.

  On the cover was a separate entry:

  More than two thousand years ago

  Hillel asked three questions:

  If I am not for myself, who will be?

  If I am only for myself, what am I?

  If not now, when?

  The questions were too explosive to be answered. He stood up. An instinct told him: “Don’t get involved. Tomorrow, just open the door, throw the case in and run like hell.”

  He went to bed.

  Part Two

  BREWER

  Over on the East Side, not too far from Grand Central Station, there’s an old Sports Complex Building. In it, around it, near it, lives a whole world of marginal people: hustlers, high binders, schemers, dreamers, the busted, the lost, the seeking, and those just out of the cocoon.

  Million-dollar ideas are three for a nickel there. And wherever you look—in the Sports Complex itself, in the bowling alley, up in the second-floor poolroom, in the furnished apartments on the upper floors, in the coffee shop down the street, the saloon across the way and the other saloon down the alley, the Lido Tuscany Restaurant up the street, on the corners in good weather, or just on the stair landings—you can see the groups, two or three, rarely four or more, their heads in a big pillow of cigarette smoke.

  The facial expressions are a dead giveaway: one talks with upraised hands eagerly, throat muscles taut, murmuring and hissing, glancing around periodically for eavesdroppers. His audience of two listens, scowling, slouching, watching each other’s silent faces, an expression of shrewd doubt mixing with guileless naked hope: maybe this is it.

  When you learn to read the faces, you could make an arrest on the expressions alone: there’s a crooked deal cooking; it’s a proposition, a cakewalk, a barn-burner, a bustout, a pants-wetter, an opportunity of a lifetime, the promise of riches, the fast express out of the neighborhood into the uptown world that farts through silk.

  “I got this guy in Bedford-Stuyvesant sacked a ware-house in Jersey—hot razor blades twin-track in wholesale cases never been touched. We get them for twenty-two a case and hustle them to druggists for forty. Move twenty cases a day. All we need is a van. Listen …”

  “This guy tells me he done a lot of painting in the apartment and he seen the safe in the bedroom, stuffed with jewels big as glass grapes …”

  “Now, here’s the deal. I talk to Fatty the Fence to make sure we can move this stuff. You go in and set the guy up with a little eight ball—let him win—and then I drop around about ten and we’ll get him talking. He always carries the keys with him …”

  “George, it’s a piece of cake. Would I lie to you? This guy wears it right here on his hip pocket big as a banjo. Always two, three grand. You bump and slide him and I nudge him by the wall. Eddie, you’re the booster. Excuse me, sir, excuse me likewise, and you’re through the door, up the stairs and over the rooftop before he knows …”

  Night and day, talk and listen, hanging on a cue stick, or sticking butts in cold coffee cups or scoffing drinks—no matter; it’s the land of big dreams, desperate men and burst bubbles. Most of the talk comes to nothing.

  It was the end of winter—sometime in late March, maybe—when Brewer showed up. Naturally, he is something of a mystery man. And at first, the wise guys thought he was a West Coast hustler named Scratch Something-or-other. So they watched him rack off a few and he was good. But not that good. He was no hustler.

  Someone decided he was a cop. Bunco detail. Nobody who wants to keep his teeth asks anybody any questions in the Sports Complex. So they put Abbott up to kiting him—early on this one evening before Abbott really got stinko on the sauce. And Abbott opened him up a bit with a typical Abbott move: he asked Brewer what his game was.

  “Retired,” said Brewer.

  “Oh, yeah? What kind of retired?”

  “Retired retired. I’m on a pension.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. What kind of pension?”

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Abbott.”

  “Oh. What did you say your game is?”

  “I’m a magician.”

  “A what?”

  “I’m a drunk.”

  “Oh. That’s nice. What kind of a drunk?”

  Abbott scowled at Brewer for a moment, then smiled: “A drunk drunk.”

  “How come you’re not?”

  “I ain’t got there yet. It takes a three eighty-five bottle of Tiger Rose to do the job. What kind of a pension you got?”

  “Government.”

  “Oh, yeah? That’s nice. What government?”

  Brewer took his cigar out of his mouth and scowled at it. “What the hell kind of government would you think? Russian?”

  “No, no. City, county, state or federal. We got all kinds of governments. What kind?”

  “Abbott, tell you what. You go back to those old ladies over there with the pool cues and the bad hands and you tell them my name is Brewer, I rented a room two floors up, I’m on an early pension and I retired from the CIA.”

  “That’s nice. They’ll be glad. They thought you was a cop.”

  “I wasn’t. I was in the CIA, is all.”

  “That makes you a cop. A CIA cop.”

  “That’s not a cop. It’s intelligence.”

  “There’s no difference between a cop and a spy. How about a game of shit ball?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I invented it. You shoot and you sink a ball, then I shoot and I miss and I yell …”

  “Don’t! Just don’t say it.”

  “Wild horses wouldn’t drag it from me.”

  The hustlers were still careful around Brewer. And they waited. CIA or no, pension or no, Brewer was a cop type with a cop-type pension. Safe he was, fixed for life, never to work again if he didn’t want to. He had nothing in common with them and their le
an-dog outlook. Besides, why would a spy with a pension come to live in the cruddy Sports Complex? And there was another problem with Brewer. He wasn’t anything like sixty-five. Couldn’t be. He was bald, but his fringe was black. It could have been dyed, of course, but he was built solidly, barrel-chested with powerful arms, and thick black hair on the backs of his hands. He had hard brown eyes and a muscular muzzle, black-bearded. When he smiled or scowled at the lie of a ball on the table, he showed powerful teeth, brown-stained from the cigars. Abbott said they looked like tough old meerschaum, those teeth, but they were real teeth. He looked like a bull—strong enough to tear the poolroom to pieces. He just couldn’t be sixty-five. Nah, not even fifty. Maybe forty-five. So how could he have a pension? How early is an early pension? Early—as in cock-and-bull story.

  He looked more like he’d been in the Army or the Air Force. He wore plain Army-style officer’s shoes and light brown pants and an old leather flight jacket and a big Hawaii-type flowered shirt. He looked just like an Army officer on leave. Not a retired spy. Nah, it just didn’t fit. They treated him like crows treat a scarecrow: they ignored him and avoided him. For a while.

  For days, he sat every afternoon in one of the high spectators’ chairs in the poolroom, right in full sunlight with his sunglasses on, watching things. He was making everyone nervous. Even Slick Willie Walker, a very hungry hustler, avoided him.

  No one could guess why he was there.

  Brewer got the telegram Tuesday afternoon. That was an event. He was shooting a game of nine-ball with Abbott when the guy who runs the apartments—the superintendent, he called himself—walks in with an old rummy. The rummy is delivering telegrams, and he’s got one for Brewer.

  Brewer looked surprised for a moment; then he took it and tore the end off very slowly, just a strip about as wide as a fingernail. He slipped out the folded message and glanced around the poolroom. Everyone looked the other way. Brewer opened the message and read it close up under his chin like a poker hand: “Want to see you tonight. Wait until I call.”

  Brewer glanced around the room once again and put the telegram in his pocket. He gave the old man two bits, and they all went back to their pool games.

  “I hope it wasn’t bad news.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat, Abbott.”

  “Satisfaction brought it back.”

  “The hell it did.”

  Brewer played the game, but he was preoccupied. He ate an early dinner with Abbott at the Lido Tuscany, then came back and dressed in his English tweed jacket and a clean shirt. He went down to the shoe repair and got a fifty-cent shine; then he came back and he sat in one of the high spectators’ chairs in the poolroom, just watching.

  He got called to the phone at eight on the money, by Arty the rack man. He went over to the phone, and right after, he left the building. From the Sports Complex he walked over to Forty-second near Grand Central to a bar-restaurant there and went in.

  It was a typical train station bar-restaurant. It was long and narrow with a bunch of booths and barely enough light to find your drink. And it had a front entrance and a back door that led down an alley and out onto the street.

  When Brewer entered, they were playing the national anthem over the television at the ballpark—the Mets and the Phillies. Brewer walked the length of the bar, past the bubbling whiskey signs and the bottles and bar stools, looking. He found his man near the back door in a booth.

  “I figured the next time I see you I’d be putting a firecracker right up your kazoo.”

  “Yeah. Sit down.”

  Brewer sat down.

  “Move over toward the wall. You’re blocking my view.”

  Brewer turned and looked over his shoulder at the bar. A girl was working a john in a uniform. In the bad light she looked like a movie star, but Brewer could make out the double chin and the thickness of the waist—too fat from all the sauce and the sitting around.

  “Still like them fat with fleas, eh, Geller?”

  Geller watched the girl put her lips over the john’s earlobe, then she drew it slowly between her teeth. The john caved in. So she put her keys on the bar and walked out. The john quickly scoffed his drink and walked out after her, with the keys. When he opened the front door, the girl was visible, standing on the sidewalk, waiting.

  “Love, love, love,” said Geller.

  “Syph, syph, syph.”

  “Cynicism, that was always your problem.”

  “Funny. I never saw it that way.”

  “How are you doing, Brewer? What are you doing?”

  “Why ask? You know. When my book comes out I’ll send you an autographed copy.”

  “That’s not smart. You signed a paper binding you to silence. The government will sue you cross-eyed. But don’t let me stop you. Write. Write.”

  “Sure I will. What else can I do? I got a special chapter on you. I’m going to tell how you cut off my buttons and now I’m a nobody on the beach alone, nothing to do, a half-assed pension. I owe you. Right up your kazoo. I owe you.”

  “You did it yourself.”

  “I played the game. Someone had to do the job. I did it. You knew it. You knew I was going to do it. Then you pretended you got religion. The rules said I should put it to that bastard, and I did. It’s not my fault. I didn’t invent the world.”

  “What rules said you should do it?”

  “The unwritten rules!”

  “Ah, come on. Unwritten rules aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.”

  “Funny. Funny. You’re feeling good tonight. How come I’m not laughing?”

  “Try.”

  “Not my fault!”

  “Yeah, Charlie. Then whose fault was it?”

  “I did what was expected of me.”

  “You liked it. How did it feel to put it to him?”

  “Dirty little bastard!”

  “Shhhhhh!”

  “I’m no good, Geller. Ever since I got out, ever since I hit the beach, I’m no good. I lost something. I don’t care anymore. I should have twisted your fat little arms out of their sockets. But funny to relate, I don’t care. I get up in the morning and I don’t know what to do with myself. I know I should plan something—get into something, but I don’t. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere.”

  Geller ordered drinks for both of them and lit up a cigar. He sat waiting for his drink, not talking. He was deliberately slowing things down, letting Brewer cool off.

  Finally he said: “Maybe I can do something for you.”

  “That sounds like maybe you want me to do something for you.”

  “Maybe I could help you a little. Put some rice in your bowl now and then, keep your hand in.”

  “Yeah?”

  “With your pension, it would be enough to make you comfortable and give you plenty of time for other things.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe I could do that. What do you think?”

  “Yeah? What’s in it for you? You’re sure good to the help, Geller.”

  “Well, it won’t be charity. It’ll be things I know you can handle. You’re still a valuable man. You could be a kind of free-lancer.”

  “No thanks, sweetheart; that’s what that little shit was that I took care of. Free lance. He didn’t care whose money he took or how he got it.”

  “No, no, no. Just free-lance for Uncle Sam. I could, for example, give you something right now. Tonight.”

  “I figured. Something dirty and red hot.”

  “Oh, no. It’s not so dirty, but it’s going to take a real pro.”

  “The old back massage—it must be really crummy.”

  “Look, Brewer, you tell me you’re hungry, but you don’t take when you’re offered. I got some other people—”

  “Never mind. Never mind, Geller. Just put it on the table.”

  “No, no. You know me. I don’t just put it down that way. I got to make sure you’re really interested. I can’t have any turndowns. Once you say yes, you go all the way
with it.”

  “What’s it worth?”

  “Oh, I can put some real fancy money on the table for this one.”

  “Oh, boy, it gets worse. How bad is it?”

  “I didn’t say it was bad. I said it takes a real pro, and there aren’t many around. First of all, it can’t be anyone inside. The man has to be totally unconnected. And he has to be very, very good. You work all alone. No contact. No direction. It’s all yours. You have to create a whole new identity. You can’t be Charlie Brewer, retired CIA. I can’t even give you CIA money until after. You work it any way you want. And if you do it right—well, there’s other things—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Give me more of a hint. Where is—”

  “No. All I can tell you is it’s right now and it’s in town and it’s got some fancy money on it … and you can handle it. It’s made for you.”

  “Kotlikoff.”

  “Shhhhhh!”

  “You’re out of your cage.”

  Geller didn’t answer. He just fixed his eyes on Brewer’s face and waited.

  Brewer spun his glass and stared down at it. He sat and thought while Geller waited. Finally, Geller ordered another round of drinks. “You had dinner?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Too bad. I was about to spring for a big steak.”

  “They got him where you’ll never find him, Geller.”

  “Nah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nah. It’s like losing a pair of skis in a phone booth. Where can they put him?”

  “Russia’s a big country.”

  “Nah. He’s still here. He’s right here in New York City.”

  Brewer turned his glass. “You know that for a fact?”

  “It’s pretty sure.”

  “Let’s pretend they got him in the Russian Mission up on Sixty-seventh Street. If he’s in there, how do you get him out?”

  “That’s the job.”

  Brewer thought. “That’s only half the job. The other half is finding him. Two impossible jobs.”

  “For you?”

  “Come on, Geller. Put the oilcan away.”

  “Look, you can do this.”

  “Maybe. But I’ll tell you one thing. I won’t do it for a fishcake.”