Catch Me: Kill Me

by Hallahan, William H. ;

  He opened his door and pushed it back. The room was like all the others—a silent dark brown cube like a large coffin, with exhausted furniture. Many transient hands had, year by year, rubbed dust, layer by layer, into a dull mahogany finish on the wood of the furniture.

  Brewer walked to the television set and turned it on, then went over to the window and opened it. He always slept with that window shut and locked for fear he’d jump in his sleep. He hated heights.

  Noises issued from the common airshaft through the window. Several floors below sounded the clicking of the billiard balls, the stamping of pool shooters’ shoes on bare woodboards, and the cries, groans, giggles and tumult. Somewhere a radio crooned. An old woman’s voice shouted angry gossip into a deaf ear. It was like an architectural umbilicus. Behind Brewer in lurid color a cowboy movie fluttered onto his TV screen.

  He went over to the black-varnished table he used for a desk and pushed back some books and pamphlets that were staggered there in a pile: Plans for an A-Frame House, Grow Your Own Food and Thrive, A Visitor’s Guide to Vermont, How to Write and Sell Your Book.

  The bed reminded him that that morning at four-thirty he’d awakened in fear. No more. At the table he sat down to open the large white envelope Geller had given him. Most of the material it contained was from the Kotlikoff file from the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization.

  Brewer felt good. He felt vastly stronger, no longer lost in that enormous land of dark and silence inside his head. He could do this, he told himself. He could find Kotlikoff. Had to. He was going to write a note to himself—a promissory note. He looked around for his pencils and realized they were still in his small brown case. Over to the closet he went and got it out. Unzipping an interior pocket, he grasped them and lifted them out, pencils, pens, and the crucifix.

  He looked at the cross with distaste. He’d meant to throw it away; as a religious symbol it meant nothing to him. But it had been his mother’s and for years had hung on the wall by the light switch in her bedroom, the only thing of hers he had, the only memento, the only thing that connected him with his own past, something touched by hands whose lives extended back in time to the beginning. It said to him, you’re not alone. But he felt it was a coward’s hedge, something he hesitated to throw away, just in case. After all, you just don’t drop such a thing in the hotel wastebasket as you check out. So, the moment for discarding it never having arrived, he’d carried it for more than twenty-five years. He always thought that if it was found on him while he lay dying from a bus accident or an air crash, a priest would be rushed up to give him the last rites. Maybe that’s what it meant: a false passport to the golden wings.

  He took one of the pencils and checked the point; satisfied, he smoothed out a sheet of paper and wrote a legend across it in large block letters: I CAN FIND HIM. I CAN SPRING HIM. He folded the paper and stuffed it into his trousers pocket. He patted it, feeling as though he’d just tucked away a fortune.

  Brewer decided to drop a quick note to Graybill up in Wisconsin before going through the Kotlikoff file. The poor old bastard was living with two spinster daughters who took his government pension check every month.

  “Well, hello, Graybill,” he wrote. “I’m moved into my new digs in New York. It’s not the Ritz of Paris but it’s in out of the rain. Three squares and no heavy lifting. I hear that that girl in Genoa is still looking for you. For a hundred dollars I won’t tell her where you are. Write when you get a chance.”

  Brewer took two tens from his wallet. He hesitated, looking at them; then he put one back, shook his head and drew it out again, folded the letter around the two bills, addressed the envelope and sealed it. Another one of Geller’s victims; it was a pleasure to send him a couple of bucks even if he couldn’t afford it. It wasn’t much, but it’d buy a bottle or two—a short rocket ride and a good night’s sleep. Brewer looked again at the crucifix. That and the luggage and the toilet case and some clothes plus a few bucks in a bank and a skimpy pension—that was all that he had to show for twenty-five years of service. He’d have to do better on the next twenty-five.

  When he started to read the file on Kotlikoff, he began to see possibilities right away. He was working again. He had a job, an assignment. His gut felt better. He patted the note in his pocket. Brewer was willing to lay eight to five it was Maksim Edemsky who’d abducted Kotlikoff.

  God damn that Abbott. Spreading fear and defeat like a disease, like a slowly rising flood to drown the world in.

  Brewer read the dossier with attention, then reread it. It was a very thin soup. Not much to go on. Not the slightest hint as to why the Russians did it. That Geller never concerned himself with motivation. He had no idea why Kotlikoff was abducted and no interest in the question. It was useless to explain to him that “why” often led to “where.”

  Brewer decided that his first step was to get a new identity; the second was to find out who did the abducting. He went over to the two-burner stove and, from the cabinet below it, pulled out an old pot. “I want it burned,” Geller had said. “I want it burned tonight—without fail.”

  Brewer sat and watched the fire, saw the smoke and paper ash ascend to the ceiling. He poked the papers in the pot with his pencil. The flames rose again. He watched the smoke, then stirred the char in the pot. Done. He carried the ash to the toilet and dumped it and flushed it.

  When he heard a knock on his door, he crossed the room, wondering if the television was too loud. Or was it Abbott?

  In the bad light of the hallway, a woman in a waitress’s black uniform stood looking wide-eyed at him. “Do you have a fire in your apartment?”

  Brewer shook his head. “No. I just burned some old papers in a pot. It’s out.” He looked at her. Her hair was piled like a blond turban on her head. She wore false eyelashes and thick makeup, and at the left shoulder of her uniform she wore a huge lace handkerchief in a spray. In the midst of the lacy spray was a plastic plaque with her name: Flo. “Come on in. Smell for yourself.”

  She peered into the room. “It’s okay. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “Not at all. Not at all.” Brewer used his best hearty voice. “Are we neighbors?”

  “Sure are, honey. We live down the hall.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “My husband. Rudy. And I’m Flo. And Rudy has a problem. He’s a drinker; you might as well know it—you’ll hear him often enough on the stairs.”

  “You mean now—? He’s lying on the—stairs?”

  “No, no. He’s down in Cahill’s right now, sound asleep with a load on. I just left him there when I came home.”

  “Oh. You work there?”

  “Yes. Cahill’s.” She stepped over the sill and gazed about his apartment. “I see you take from the same interior decorator.”

  “Nothing but the best. Funny I haven’t seen you around here before …”

  “I saw you. The day you moved in. Everybody thought you were a West Coast pool hustler.”

  “So I heard. How about a drink? Looks like we’re going to be neighbors for a while.”

  “Hi, neighbor.”

  “Hi,” said Brewer merrily. He pushed the door shut and smiled at her lacy spray.

  Part Three

  LEARY

  Before dawn, the rain had stopped. Mild air flowed through Washington with the unexpected fragrance of spring in it, and as Leary stood in the parking lot of his apartment house, there was a predawn glow in the eastern sky that promised a soft day, the first of the year, the day Kotlikoff’s journals had yearned for.

  After he’d checked in at the airline desk and sat down, he saw Gus Geller approaching. Geller scurried corpulently in haste, late, like the white rabbit, attended by three men. Everything about Geller spoke of haste. He’d cut himself in several places shaving, and he wore yesterday’s shirt with the spaghetti stains and the red bow tie. His shoes were dusty and scuffed. His blue suit bore long streaks of cigar ash, and his blackhorn eyeglass lenses in the sunlight showed lint-cov
ered fingerprints. The talk in the conference room must have run until very late the night before. Geller looked shopworn and slept-in.

  Geller, Leary decided, had wife trouble. And no clean shirts today. The wife—Leary could see the wife, a yellowy face of crepe paper and a bedside glass with her false teeth, a claw probing for earwax with a hairpin. Scandal-eyed she was, with a ripping falcon’s beak of a mouth; her hard skeletal body, unyielding as an ironing board, had never submitted gracefully to the awful indignity of sex with Mr. Geller. “Your shirts won’t be back until tomorrow,” shrieked the falcon’s mouth. “Put some talcum under your arms and no one will smell anything.”

  A living hairshirt for Geller: it pleased Leary to give Mrs. Geller to Mr. Geller.

  Leary tried to decide what occupation Geller looked like, standing at the flight counter, lighting a cigar and spitting pieces of tobacco, still breathing heavily from his hurried walk across the parking lot and down the long airline concourse.

  Leary tried several roles on Geller: a bumbling burglar-alarm salesman wandering the eastern seaboard from Boston to Norfolk; a goldbricking little shipping clerk making unimaginative peculations from inventory; the protected brother-in-law to a powerful politician, given a drone’s job to stay out of the way.

  But when Geller turned away from the check-in counter and looked at Leary, his eyes didn’t fit any of those roles. Behind the lint-layered lenses of his blackhorn glasses were the eyes of a hanging judge.

  “That’s Kotlikoff’s case you got there, Leary.” He regarded it severely. “Where you taking it?”

  “I’m returning it.”

  “You’re a pretty expensive messenger.”

  Leary held it out to him. “Would you rather—”

  “Do you think I’m cheaper, Leary?”

  “I don’t know. How much do you charge?”

  “Don’t joke with me, Leary. And by the way, you’re off the case, right? Your office has no further interest in the case unless the man turns up.”

  “Who made that ruling?”

  “Your boss. You people in Justice ought to talk more to one another. You’re off the case. Understand?”

  Leary opened his crossword puzzle book as soon as they were airborne: 13 Down: Noted Russian scientist. Six letters. He looked thoughtfully at the vast sprawl of the East Coast below. Kotlikoff was down there, somewhere down there in the hundreds of square miles of congestion and urban confusion.

  At ten, Leary presented to the Federal District Court judge in Manhattan a brief of amicus curiae prepared by the Department of Justice. It took only a few minutes. He was dismissed with thanks by the court and asked to return the next morning at ten.

  When he called Mrs. Kotlikoff from the courthouse, she invited him to come immediately. He took a cab, and as he rode through the bright streets it occurred to him again what an unpleasant errand he was on. He rehearsed a few lines of sympathy, a verbal bouquet of insincerities to say at the door as he passed the case in. Mrs. Kotlikoff would be a woman in her forties with a strong intellectual face and an eloquence to befit a great poet’s wife. As she received the attache case she would weep without expression.

  No. It was not that way at all: Amy Kotlikoff was in her late twenties. She had glossy black hair; slanting, almost Oriental eyes of bright green; and a long, slim neck that gave her an innocent yet regal bearing of exceptional grace.

  “Come in, Mr. Leary,” she said, shaking his hand.

  If there was any of Kotlikoff’s personality there, Leary didn’t find it—except in the trees. Through the front windows of the living room, he could see the crowns of several bare sweet-gum trees, filled with buds of pale green, just as his journal had described them.

  Amy Kotlikoffled him over to the table in the dining area by the kitchen. He glanced again at her face, and in the brighter light by the window he saw the strain in it and the lack of sleep.

  “I hesitated to bother you today with this, Mrs. Kotlikoff.”

  “I’m glad you—it was so nice of—Here, sit down,” she said as she settled into a chair with the attaché case in her lap. She stared at it desperately. It was as though she were pulling back the sheet on a corpse. When she saw the name tag by the handle, she stiffened perceptibly. She took a deep breath, eyes shut, and exhaled. Her fingers sprung the right latch, then the left.

  She forced her eyes to examine the interior of the case as her hand, reaching inside, lifted out the train ticket. She looked at it and at the other objects and took a slow, deep breath.

  “Yes. Yes. It’s—it’s his.” She sat, still staring at it. “I’d hoped … it was silly, but—well, it isn’t somebody else’s, is it? It’s his and that’s that. Do I sign anything?”

  “No, there’s nothing to sign.” Leary looked past her to a bedroom and saw an older woman holding an infant.

  “Tea. Have some tea.”

  “Well, I think—”

  “It’s fresh. A full pot. There’s—is there—have you heard any more news?”

  “No.” It struck him suddenly that he’d never even checked for new developments. Kotlikoff was irretrievably lost. He knew there would be no news. Her eyes wanted news—a morsel, something to get her through the day.

  “What do you think will happen next?” Her hands were painful to watch. They writhed tormented in her lap.

  “I can tell you that the federal government is doing everything in its power.” Leary was pained by the falseness. Patriotic—the words sounded patriotic. He should have a metal flag in his lapel. Everyone will now rise and applaud. “Is that your child?”

  “Oh, yes. Momma. Bring the baby.” She stood up. “Here’s my honey.” She held out her arms, and her mother gave the baby to her. “This is my mother, Mrs. Corson, and this is Mr. Leary—as you know.”

  Mrs. Corson nodded agreeably at him. It was easy to see what Amy Kotlikoff was going to look like in her mid fifties: Mrs. Corson was a beautiful woman with a remarkable resemblance to her daughter, including the same green eyes and graceful neck. “How do you do,” she said.

  Leary asked: “What is the baby’s name?”

  “Mindy. Six months.” Amy Kotlikoff watched his face, waiting. “I can see you’re not a fan of my husband’s poetry.”

  “How?”

  “That’s the title of the first book of poetry he wrote in English. Mindy. Just published. All the poems are about her.”

  “I’m all thumbs around poetry,” he said. “I can’t seem to find the handle on it. I tried to read modern poetry in college. It was just as though someone had taken all the words in a crossword puzzle and strung them together. Hopkins, I think. I had a terrible time.”

  “Gerard Manley Hopkins.”

  “Yes. That’s it.”

  She smiled. “You like things logical? You like clarity, brevity, simplicity?”

  He smiled back at her. “That sounds like you’re describing a third-grade reader. I can handle things a little more complex than that.”

  “But poetry has nothing to say to you.”

  “Well—okay.”

  “Maybe you should try harder.”

  “She talks like a salesman,” said Mrs. Corson.

  Amy Kotlikoff said: “He said he struggled to write, and then no one would read it.”

  Mrs. Corson said hastily, “Tea? Here, we have a full pot.” She poured tea into the cups. “So tell me, Mr. Leary. I heard you say that the government is doing everything it can to find Boris. How much is everything?”

  “Momma.”

  Leary said, “I wish I could say something specific, Mrs. Corson, but to tell the truth, there are so many different parts of the federal government involved in this case, I can’t answer your question. There must be dozens and dozens of people here and in Washington working on this.”

  “Are you part of the investigation, Mr. Leary?” The two women watched him. Say something, he told himself.

  “Yes, my office is involved in this, very much.” Pompous. So pompous. He tried not t
o picture his “involved” Theater of the Absurd on their morning coffee break. A great comfort, that Leary. “Don’t worry, we’ll find him. Has anyone talked to you, Mrs. Kotlikoff?”

  “Yes, a detective. Yesterday afternoon. They wouldn’t even let me go over and identify this bag. They said it was being flown to Washington.”

  He told himself it was time to go. He told himself to not get involved in a hopeless case, to not ask any more questions. But he did: “Were you able to give any information? Did anything happen recently that might help explain—”

  “No. Nothing. Nothing.”

  “Were there any contacts? Any unusual business affairs? Any approaches from the Russians?”

  “No.”

  “Any unexplained moods?”

  “Moods! Boris is nothing but moods. Up, down. Up, down. He reads Auden, he’s ecstatic. He reads Dylan Thomas or Sylvia Plath, he’s transported. He reads the newspaper and he’s down in the cellar. He was like a man possessed when he was learning English. He couldn’t learn it fast enough. It was a vast new toy to him. But then he read all the books he couldn’t get in Russia—history and philosophy—and he became depressed. And when his own books didn’t sell, he’d cry ‘Americans don’t read!’ He had his bad days. Really bad. I call them ‘Suffering Mother Russia Days.’ ‘Darkness.’ That is his favorite word when he’s depressed.”

  “But no unexplained moods.”

  “Well, there was, actually—a few weeks ago—he was quite excited one night when he came home. I said to him, ‘What’s made you so excited?’ and he said, ‘Nothing, nothing. You’ll hear all about it later.’”

  “Excited. You mean upset?”

  “No. Excited. Thrilled.”

  “When?”

  “I can’t remember. A few weeks ago.”

  “Who did he dedicate his first book of poems to?”

  “The baby.”

  “No. I mean his Russian poems.”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Did he have a date for next Friday night at eleven o’clock?”