Catch Me: Kill Me

by Hallahan, William H. ;

  Leary studied the words. He still didn’t know what Kotlikoff had done, but now he knew why: He was trying to answer three questions over two thousand years old.

  Leary put the journal away and watched the maritime traffic on the river.

  Across from Leary, talking, sat Powell, talking about his morning at the United Nations. His huge head under curly hair was dominated by closely set, dark and unwavering blue eyes: eyes that clearly saw the nakedness of emperors.

  “Everyone,” Powell said, in a careful low voice, “is reading from the official script over there. The Russians say they don’t know anything about Kotlikoff at all. The Poles say Kotlikoff isn’t a Russian citizen and so the Russians couldn’t care less about him. But the Rumanians say he is a Russian citizen and that this is a quarrel between the Soviets and one of their own people—that means, of course, that the United States should mind its own business. The Czechoslovakians say Kotlikoff is nobody’s affair because he is a stateless person and that’s his own fault. The East Germans say Kotlikoff staged the whole thing to embarrass the Soviet’s worldwide relations with the Jews. The United States says it has no evidence of any crime and is still investigating. Let’s see—who did I leave out? Oh, yes, Israel—well, you can imagine what Israel is saying.”

  Leary said: “And what do you say?”

  “I say I only know what I heard at the UN—and that’s scaring the hell out of me. There are rumors flying all over the halls there about troop movements and transfers of large naval forces. Just before lunch—in fact, just as I was leaving—the United States officially denied that it is planning a partial mobilization—which may mean that it is. Or is it bluffing? Or trying to calm things down? Washington seems to want the whole thing to go away. The Russians have rattled a few bombs in their closet. With tempers very short on both sides, the Jews here in New York have called for a monster rally tonight in front of the Soviet Mission. Pray for rain, Leary love, because that could really be the beginning of a big number. It’s a mess—a big mess.”

  “I can’t believe that. There’s nothing big enough to fight over. You have any idea why he was kidnapped?”

  “Sure. Certainly. Everyone knows. But they all have different explanations. Some say Kotlikoff’s writing offended the Soviets. Some say the Russians are playing up to the Arabs again—or the Third World group. Take your pick. Some say that the Soviets want to set an example for other Soviet artists who are coming here on cultural exchange programs. And then if you like wheels within wheels, there’s the gas pipeline theory. You know about that?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you read the papers, Leary? It’s a marvelous piece of conjecture. It goes like this: Russia has a tremendous supply of natural gas. Both Japan and the United States want it. But there are no pipelines to carry it. So, Japan and the United States have signed an agreement with Russia to help build pipelines. The Japanese line would run over to the Pacific, and the gas would then be carried to Japan by tanker. It’s going to take an array of construction personnel to build it—Russian personnel. Guess what group in Russia is supposed to be very big in the construction trades? Jews.”

  “So? Where does Kotlikoff come in?”

  “Morale. Until the pipeline is finished, the Russians don’t want any more Jews trying to emigrate—so the kidnapping is a way of discouraging them.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I believe that no one knows why Kotlikoff was kidnapped, except his kidnappers and maybe Kotlikoff.”

  “The mystery of the year.”

  “If things don’t calm down, it’s going to be more than just a mystery. I can tell you one thing from direct observation: The Russians are very upset about something; maybe hysterical is the word. Mention Kotlikoff to them and they really react. It’s something very, very big. I would say they’re mad enough to go to war.”

  “I think I may have to go lie down after lunch.”

  “I’m glad you’re amused.”

  “To tell the truth, I got sick of waiting for Armageddon years ago. I have a policy: I refuse to be informed on or worry about problems over which I have no direct control, which is just about everything on earth. I avoid all newspapers, television reports, magazines. I live in a quiet leafy bower … a kind of glass terrarium. The next time you go by the florist’s, look in on the terrarium in his window. You’ll see me. I’m the ceramic frog.”

  Powell nodded solemnly. “So much for the store-front law office in the ghetto.”

  “Yes. So much for the store front.”

  Powell’s eyes saw the emperor’s bare hairy buttocks: “You said you wanted to know something about Gus Geller.”

  “Yes.”

  Powell glanced about the restaurant. “I’d better watch my voice. I tend to shout when I talk about him. He’s barely literate, you know. Don’t laugh; he reads very, very slowly and with very limited comprehension. Okay? He was a high school gym teacher somewhere, specializing in weight lifting. Does that tell you anything? During the forties he got a wartime commission in the Army, and someone as dumb as he is assigned him to military intelligence. Isn’t that a howler? Geller in intelligence? When the CIA was formed, he managed to wiggle his little lard-ass in there. He contrived to look pretty good for a number of years. In fact, a lot of old-timers from the war years will tell you that Geller was a pretty good intelligence man. Story I get is that it was all because of a guy he latched onto, name of Graybill. Graybill was a drunk, but he was supposed to be a tremendous intelligence man. They say Geller kept Graybill sober and Graybill kept Geller out of trouble. I hear Graybill’s retired … and lately Geller’s been really goofing up: One of his animals caused quite a buzz in London last year. You heard about that? Brewer, his name was. Carved up one of those little rats who infest the intelligence world. Did it right in a booth in a London pub. Place was packed—mean, nasty job with a knife. Brewer kills easily, they say. An unreliable cat, I hear they bounced him. How that Geller survives, I’ll never know; big bow ties, belching and farting and sucking on a big cigar, forever agitating, conniving, a born troublemaker. I don’t mean to pry, Leary, but if he’s on the Kotlikoff case, abandon hope.”

  “How serious are his threats?”

  Powell looked sternly at Leary. “Did he threaten you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you asking me what I’d do if he threatened me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmm.” Powell rubbed his chin. “What I would do is not what others may do. These are parlous times.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “I would not let a threat of his go unattended.”

  “Okay. What would you do?”

  “Either get out of town immediately, or get a handgun and, on the very first opportunity, kill him very dead.”

  An expert was what Leary needed, someone who could understand how the Russians think and react. So he called the man who had written the foreword to Kotlikoff’s new volume of poetry, Professor Daniel Schuler, Department of Slavic Literature, Manhattan Center for Cognate Studies.

  “What wouldn’t be an offense to the Soviets?” asked Professor Schuler. “Kotlikoff was what they call a bone in their throats.” His blue blazer jacket was covered with white cat hairs and his hands hungrily turned a freshly filled tobacco pipe. “He wrote articles attacking them. Did you read In Praise of Chaos?” Professor Schuler popped the pipe into his mouth and quickly began to light it.

  “You think the Russians were mad enough to kidnap him right off the streets?”

  “No. In foreign affairs the Russians are usually either timid or paranoid. Kotlikoff just wasn’t worth the risk. Oh, he could sting them. He knew all their flaws.” His pipe gurgled.

  “What would it be, then?”

  Professor Schuler sighed. “My subject is East European literature.”

  “Mine is finding Kotlikoff. Isn’t that yours?”

  “Look, I care. I care. This Boris Kotlikoff is a great, great man, and he let me into his li
fe—”

  “Can’t you make a guess?”

  “Guess?”

  “Did you notice anything lately about his behavior? Was he morose?”

  “Morose? Of course he was morose! He was a sensitive human being. What thinking human being isn’t morose these days?”

  “Darkness. Misery.”

  “Yes. Darkness. That was one of his words.”

  “On the bad days.”

  “Amy. You’ve been talking to Amy.”

  “Who’s Jay Simmonds?”

  “Haven’t got the foggiest.”

  “Did he have an eleven o’clock appointment this Friday with anyone?”

  “I don’t know. Not with me.”

  “Think about the last few weeks. Any unusual events?”

  “Nothing. Except he seemed extraordinarily happy one day. He was right here in this office, and he was singing some silly nursery rhyme in Russian.”

  “When was that?”

  “Three, four weeks ago.” The pipe was out and he cuddled it in his hands.

  “You don’t think his new volume of poems could have aroused the Soviets?”

  “But how could they know—? No. No. I can’t think of anything in the poetry that would have incensed them. Maybe my introduction hit a little hard, but—no, it is nothing that hasn’t been written many times before.”

  “Did he have a girl friend?”

  “Who? Boris? Girl friend? You mean—a girl friend besides his wife? A mistress?” Professor Schuler clasped his hands behind his head and pondered. “I can’t think of anything more unbelievable than that. He was so totally involved with Amy. No. Absolutely not. No. It can’t be.”

  Absolutely not. It can’t be.

  Leary stood indecisively on the sidewalk.

  The day remained flawless. It was a poet’s day: a Kotlikoff day: spring sunlight glowed in the streets like good news, dazzling, amidst the winter-stained grayness of the buildings. In response, here and there, the city tried to cavort, to show a blithe spirit, to put a ribbon in its cap. A shopkeeper had draped a pale blue banner over his store entrance, its trailing edge curving lightly in the faint air. A few stores away, out over the sidewalk at a raffish angle, hung an auctioneer’s red flag; while by a door entrance, under the buffing cloth of a janitor on a stepladder, a brass plate gleamed richly, a satellite sun. Yellow—a vivid dab of it—showed in a crowded basket of daffodils, a basket that hung in the crook of the right arm of an old woman who strolled on flat slow feet and piped: “Daaaffodils. Daaaffodils,” a spring song. Clouds of whipped cream hovered motionless over the city. It was a poet’s day: Kotlikoff’s day.

  Yet in the matter of Kotlikoff the sunlight bore no good news: no new leads, no hint of why he had been abducted. Leary saw himself wandering around from place to place in superb sunlight, the appointment book, the journals and the check stubs all in hand, investigating Kotlikoff’s dry cleaner’s receipts, lunches with authors, visits to the family physician which in turn would lead inevitably to a corner pharmacy that had made up the prescribed syrup—an endless round to no purpose.

  “Mr. Leary—”

  Leary, just entering a subway phone booth, turned and looked at the man who had called him. The concourse was thick with hurrying people; in the background the Lexington Avenue subway rumbled.

  “I have a message for you.”

  “Message?”

  “My message is you don’t seem to be getting the message. Understand?”

  Leary frowned. He noticed the man’s Buffalo Bill mustache and he frowned at it.

  “No.”

  Leary’s glasses were pulled off. The man held them up and peered through them. “You don’t seem to see through these so good. Maybe you ought to clean them. And clean out your ears too.”

  Leary reached out for his glasses, and the man seized his fingers and bent them back. “Now, now, Leary, play nice.” He pushed the glasses into Leary’s other hand. “Here, you can hold them. The message is: This is the last time you’re going to be told—it’s as nice as we can make it. Get off and stay off.” He released Leary’s throbbing hand from his extraordinarily powerful grip, then drew back his own hand: it was a short thrust with the tips of his fingers into Leary’s midriff, but the piercing pain bent him instantly, ramming his head into the edge of the folding door. He fell back and struck the base of his head on the telephone, then collapsed onto the seat. As he rolled forward and down, the man hit him with brass knuckles: a glancing punch, but it struck him high on his head and drove him up and back against the wall again. He curled forward and down on his knees, pressing his arms against the pain in his midriff. Rolling, he tried to raise his hands to his head, to block the next blow. But none came. The man was gone.

  Leary got up on one knee and held on to the wall. Then he gripped the folded door and stood up, only to stumble backward onto the seat in the booth. His legs would not support him. Blood trickled down through his hair to one eyebrow; more blood flowed from his crown down through his hair, back to the nape of his neck.

  At his feet were his glasses, pencil, coins, envelopes and papers, raincoat and attaché case, like wreckage from a crash.

  He looked, panting, at the dozens, the hundreds of people hurrying by, their eyes averted, carefully walking around his coat. He felt embarrassed at deflecting their ways.

  He looked at their faces—and that was the message.

  Part Four

  BREWER

  Brewer was up before nine.

  His confidence had sagged a little during the night, and to pump it up he’d taken his note and taped it to the bathroom mirror. I CAN FIND HIM. I CAN SPRING HIM. It was like a telegram from the Future, promising success.

  Brewer looked into his mirror and examined his beard like a man making an estimate of labor. Then he swabbed out his armpits with a cloth drooling hot soapy water. His face he washed in hot water, softening the tough bristles of his beard with his soapy fingers. He lathered his cheeks, jowls and throat with a shaving brush carefully, to avoid his cigar, then shaved with attention around the cigar, first down with the grain of his beard, then, after another lathering, up against the grain. Finished, he pressed his face into a hot cloth, letting the heat penetrate his eyes. He felt his skin: smooth as a barber’s shave. Into his palm he dribbled aftershave lotion, clapped it onto his face, and wiped his hands on the soft damp hair of his armpits.

  I CAN FIND HIM. I CAN SPRING HIM.

  He’d already decided on his wardrobe. If he was going to impress what’s-his-face with his new writing career, he had to look very classy: black shoes polished carefully, gray pants, tweed jacket, white shirt, no wrinkles, and a striped tie. He put a pencil in his shirt pocket. Dressed, he looked definitely literary.

  Brewer smoked another cigar with his morning coffee, mentally rehearsing his itinerary, then set off on the first phase of his plan to find Boris Kotlikoff. He walked to the post office.

  Just inside the entrance to the post office, he paused and took out his wallet. From it he removed a newspaper clipping and reread it in a shaft of morning sunlight.

  It was reported that Mr. Charles McMurry of Manhattan had been elected commodore of the Squaw Bay Sailboat Club. This was an unexpected present, for club election day had fallen on his birthday, April 2. He was fifty-one. It was noted that Mr. McMurry was holder of the club record, Long Island to Bermuda, in his sailboat class, a 45-foot ketch with a crew of four.

  Brewer went into the post office and stood in line under the window marked “Post Office Boxes and Drawers.”

  “I want to have my mail delivered to a post box.”

  The clerk nodded. “Where is your mail being delivered now?”

  “To my home.”

  “There’s a fee for the post box.”

  “I understand.”

  The clerk opened a drawer and extracted two forms. “If you’ll fill out the blanks and sign it here to authorize transfer … then fill out this form for the post box rental.”

&nbs
p; Brewer took the forms to a standup table and filled in the name of Charles McMurry, with McMurry’s address from the clipping, then returned to the window with the two forms and with the fee in cash for a ninety-day post box rental.

  “When do you want this to begin, Mr. McMurry?”

  “With tomorrow’s mail.”

  The clerk nodded. Brewer left.

  He walked up to the reception counter of the Credit Research Reference Bureau of Greater New York and asked for a Credit Research form. The woman at the counter gave it to him.

  He filled it out deliberately. Subject: Charles McMurry. He signed as his own name Thomas Plummer, Sales Manager, Titanic Cleaning Corporation.

  The woman glanced at the form. “Cash or bill?”

  “Cash. Now.”

  “Thirty dollars,” she said.

  Brewer took out his wallet and counted out thirty dollars. Three tens. The woman stamped the form “Paid” and initialed it. She turned around and examined the roomful of desks behind her. Men in shirt sleeves sat at the desks using telephones and typewriters.

  “Mr. Morse,” she said. “See? Bald, blue shirt, scratching his ear?”

  “Gotcha.” Brewer walked down an aisle between the rows of desks. “Morse?”

  “Yeah. Sit down.”

  Brewer handed him the form. “I want a fast skim-off on this guy. First report this afternoon, okay? By phone, okay? Nothing complicated. If you get a clean skim first reading, quit. If you smell a fish, tell me.”

  Morse nodded. “Three o’clock.”

  Brewer nodded and walked out.

  He walked in sunlight toward the library. Outside a bar he paused to pet a small dog, then straightened up and walked on, whistling faintly. It felt good to be working again.

  He told the librarian, “I want to get a library card.”

  She handed him a form. “Fill it out on both sides and sign it here. In two or three days you will receive your card in the mail at the address you put on this card.”

  Brewer filled out the form in the name of Charles McMurry.