Catch Me: Kill Me

by Hallahan, William H. ;

  “What?”

  “Don’t go into your room.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “You know. You recognize my voice.”

  “All right. I recognize it.”

  “I have to see you immediately. Absolutely necessary. Can you get a taxi?”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “I will tell you when I see you. Take a cab to the Fosse d’Ardeatine. It’s just past the Porta San Sebastiano, down Via Appia Antica to Via Ardeantine. You know where?”

  “Yes.”

  “And tell the driver to make haste. The Memorial closes at dusk. I’ll meet you there. Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “And be sure you don’t go near your room.”

  Leary put the phone on its cradle and glanced at the deskman, who was leafing through room bills in a wooden box. Then he gazed about the lobby: empty. Reluctantly he went back out to the street and looked up six stories, trying to identify his window.

  They arrived silently, two Rome police cars, and hastily parked. Nine policemen hurried into the lobby. The two police cars were left at the curb with the motors running.

  The cab driver was delighted with his fare. It required him to traverse Rome on a diagonal, from the Via XX Settembre, Via Quatro Novembre to the Victor Emmanuel Monument, down to the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine, through the Porta San Sebastiano to the Ardeatine Monument. Leary told him to wait.

  Three agonized figures, back to back, rose high in the air, sculptured in an attitude of fear and dignity at the moment of martyrdom. Leary passed through the gate and entered the compound. An elderly guard sat in a chair before the large corridor that led directly into the cave in the hill. On the left was the memorial to the 335 dead, a vast squat, square building, massive and crushingly heavy, windowless except for a horizontal slot that coursed around it—in stone, a statement as profound as the event it protests. He mounted the walk that led to it, passing the towering figures, and stepped into the building.

  Three hundred thirty-five crypts, head to head, in double rows, coffin-shaped with rough-hewn stone slabs, most with the body inside. Each slab bore the name of a victim, most had a photograph, many bore the Star of David. Three hundred thirty-five slabs—the building seemed overcrowded with the dead.

  The structure was in permanent gloom, dominated by the stone-baffled silence. Leary stepped sidewise along an aisle, reading: among the dead were fifteen-year-old apprentices and sixty-year-old businessmen, shop clerks, hairdressers and lawyers, teachers, clerks and street cleaners—a complete cross-section of Roman life circa 1944. None of them had been connected with the bombing: proximity had been their crime, proximity to the German High Command when it had begun gathering victims for its reprisals.

  At the far end of the building he turned and waited.

  He waited ten minutes. Then he began to pace. In the crepuscular light, the darkness seemed to be rising from the floor, leaving barely enough light to see the hands on his wristwatch.

  As he paced, he saw a square lump on one of the slabs, a paper parcel someone had forgotten.

  Leary passed it by and searched the gloom again, feeling he had been outmaneuvered. He turned and paced back again, gazing at the bag; then he lifted it and looked inside. Even in the poor light, he recognized his attaché case. Leary looked at the crypt it had rested on. Under a six-pointed star was the identification: “Pesach Israello. Age 24. Occupation: Teacher.”

  Leary wondered if he was Napletano’s relative. In the case with the journals, he found a note which he had to carry outside to read: “Go home. Buon viaggio.”

  He dialed the phone at the lobby desk of his hotel.

  “Pronto,” a woman’s voice said.

  “This is Leary. I want to talk to Signor Napletano.”

  “But—I’m sorry. He’s not here.”

  “Well, that’s too bad. You tell him that I’m in the lobby of my hotel and I’m going to wait ten minutes. And then I’m calling Sardi.” He put the phone down.

  The clerk fussed again with his wooden box, and Leary leaned on the counter to watch his fingers stepping along the top edges of the paper.

  He put his hand on the fingers. “What did the police want?”

  “Police?”

  “Yes. Police. Nine policemen.”

  “Oh yes. It was nothing. They were looking for a what-do-you-call-him?”

  Leary waited. “I don’t know. What do you call him?”

  The clerk scratched his forehead and clicked his tongue. “Ah.” Then he plucked an Italian-English dictionary from a cubbyhole and turned the pages impatiently. “Prowler. They were seeking a prowler.”

  “Did they find him?”

  “Oh well. They. You see. There were four men. And they left with the police.”

  “Four! In the hotel?”

  “Yes. Four.”

  “Whose room were they in?”

  “Signore?”

  “Whose room?”

  “Ah. Yours, signore.”

  The clerk turned his face to the lobby doorway and put on his official smile.

  Napletano entered alertly. He nodded at Leary and made a gathering motion with his hands. “Signore.” He glanced out at the dark street.

  Leary joined him at the door and followed him outside.

  “I must know how you got my sister’s phone number.”

  “It was right at my elbow when I sat on her couch.”

  “Oh. Of course.”

  “Is it my turn?”

  “Do as I told you. Go home.”

  “No. That’s not the way it works. How did you get my case?”

  Napletano, guiding Leary by the elbow, glanced repeatedly up and down the street as they walked. The shops, brightly lit, were open for the evening hours, and women with string bags were going from shop to shop purchasing vegetables, wines, meats.

  “I’m very sorry about your case. You see, I had to know what Kotlikoff wrote about—about his visit here. It must be clear to you, if you were able to find my sister’s apartment with his notes, who knows what else—you have your case back. True?”

  “You know what kind of heartburn you caused me?”

  “I’m sorry. I had to know. It was absolutely essential.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “But—that’s all!”

  “Oh no. No. No. That’s the beginning. How about the four men in my room?”

  “Yes, four men. Well, I sent one of my men to get your attaché case, and I’m sorry to tell you that another one of my people was sent to search your hotel room—”

  “Nice. Very nice.”

  “No, not nice. Necessary. Whether you like it or not, you have become a piece of cheese in a mousetrap.”

  “Tell me about the four men.”

  “My man saw them entering your room. It was a very simple matter to call the police—”

  “And me.”

  “Yes. And you—in the lobby.”

  “Oh. Now why would four men want to go into my room? Who were they?”

  “They were American agents.”

  “Americans!”

  “Four Americans.”

  “What for?”

  Napletano frowned at him. “What else do four men do? Two for the arms. Two for the legs. Understand?”

  “No.”

  “You are naïve.” He pointed at the upper floors of the hotel. “They were going to throw you from the window into the street.” His hand arched downward. “Six stories.”

  Slowly he pushed open the door to his room and peered inside. The open window was ghostly in the darkness, lit by the refracted light of the city’s skyline. The blind had been pulled to the top, and the sash had been opened fully. Night air touched the pulled-back drapes. He could see dots of starlight.

  He leaned on the doorjamb, suddenly weak. Four men—four Americans—had waited with the window open, two for the arms and two for the legs. The window gaped: a huge square hole into the Roman night.

&n
bsp; Leary crossed the room and stood at the window. He heard the night noises, felt the breeze touch his face, and thoughtfully he put his hand out and moved it through the air outside. Insubstantial: from his hand straight down six stories.

  “The message is, you don’t seem to be getting the message.”

  Cordially, Gus Geller.

  The kidnapping of Gabriele Napletano occurred as he walked back from Leary’s hotel to his sister’s apartment. Four men stood casually talking by a Fiat as Napletano walked by.

  He was grabbed from behind, bent over and tumbled into the car. It drove quickly away with its lights out.

  The car drove for several miles along the main route to the Autostrada, then turned off and passed through a section of high apartments to an old house. In the moonlit front yard, littered with debris, stood two tethered goats.

  Napletano was led inside. He recognized the man with the large brown mustache. All eyes watched the man prime and light a blowtorch. When the rushing flame was adjusted, he nodded at the three other men. Napletano was seized. His trousers and undershorts were removed and he was stretched on his back across an old plank table.

  “Napletano, you are going to die tonight. Sorry. No hard feelings. But we have to find out where you hid the bastard. So. It’s up to you whether you go quick and with no pain or after a long night of big pain. You decide.” He picked up the blowtorch. “Now I want to make sure I have your complete and undivided attention.” He brought the blowtorch over to Napletano and aimed it down at his genitals.

  Part Eight

  FRIDAY

  The flight from Paris. … Leary sat alone, distracting himself with the many time-passing ceremonies of a commercial jet liner: the dispensing of cocktails, the serving of the meal, the showing of the motion picture, the selling of duty-free goods, the fruitless handing out of pillows, the continuing across-the-aisle trading of cellophane-jacketed magazines in two languages—he watched it all, yet what he saw, in memory, was an open hotel window in Rome.

  If Napletano’s man hadn’t been sent to search his hotel room, he himself would have stepped into the darkened room, and, in seconds, four men would have seized him, lifted him, pitched him through the open window to fall, still snatching at neckties, curtains, blind cords and air. Another second or two of a long, turning, tumble down, down, down: the last message from Geller.

  Remembering the window, he knew that his first act upon landing would be to buy a handgun. Remembering, he flew all the way home with his seat belt fastened.

  The flight from Paris arrived in New York at nine o’clock Friday morning. Kotlikoff, in his appointment book, had circled eleven o’clock Friday night and under it had written “#90” Fourteen hours to go to #90.

  As he walked toward the cabstand, Leary consciously looked at the faces in the crowd. A stiff wind was blowing, driving great chunks of white clouds like icebergs across the morning sky, the smashed remnants of a spring day. The softness of the season was gone, and winter had returned, unwanted, unwelcome, angry. The newspapers feared that the cherry trees in Washington would lose their buds unblossomed. The weatherman warned vaguely of snow flurries.

  “We’re supposed to get fog and warm air tonight,” the cab driver told him. “I think them Russian bomb tests is causing all this crazy weather.”

  The committee room in the State Department would be filling; committee members brushing their hands through windblown hair, rubbing their cold fingers and blowing their noses, their faces pale with fatigue and care, gaunt as from a terrible sickness, thinking of Armageddon as they saw in one another’s faces the lack of a solution.

  What was Jay Simmonds doing, and his grandfather? Amy Kotlikoff and her child, Napletano and Sardi, Geller and Kotlikoff? What of Kotlikoff. Alive? Dead? Well? Screaming with pain? At least, New York was still there and fourteen hours to go to something.

  The first thing he did in Manhattan was to buy a handgun. Then he called Gus Geller’s Washington office.

  “Mr. Geller,” said his secretary, “is not here. He’s in New York City for the next few days.”

  “Tell him Boris called.”

  Leary called his own office.

  “Nothing,” said his secretary. The biggest news was the increase in the cost of a danish from the coffee cart—up a nickel. The secretaries were forming a cooperative to buy pastry direct in quantity from a local bakery. There were three phone messages: his wife was with her mother, who was sick again; back home at eight in the evening. Call a man in New York named Harry Gelb. Important. And a Washington bookseller left a message to call him.

  “Okay,” said Leary. “Get out the Airline Guide. I want a list of every airline flight arriving in New York from overseas at eleven tonight. And find out if there are any ships expected to dock in New York around eleven.”

  On the phone, the bookseller was excited. “I located a copy at Schoonover College Library, and I made a thermofax copy. We have to be careful here with anything printed in Russian—the whole thing about international copyrights and piracy is up in the air again. You want to pick it up or what?”

  “My secretary will. Read the name on the dedication page.”

  “I can’t. See, it’s in this Russian alphabet, what do you call it?”

  “Cyrillic.”

  “Yeah. And I can’t make it out.”

  “You know anyone down there who reads Russian?”

  “Yeah. Guy up the street in the hobby shop. I’ll take it up there.”

  “Good. You did a great job. I’ll call you later.”

  Harry Gelb wasn’t in the precinct house. It was his day off. Leary called his home.

  “Where you been?” said Gelb. “I been trying to get you.”

  “Out of town. What have you got?”

  “I seen him. No mistake. Positive identification.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy. That Rooski bastard, the leader of the parade.”

  “Where?”

  “Going into the Russian building, couple of blocks from the UN. He’s a chauffeur.”

  “Who? The Russian? A chauffeur?”

  “Yeah. Ain’t that a kick in the head? You want to see the place? Meet me.”

  Harry Gelb arrived, walking against the wind with his head down. He wore a billed cap and a short zippered jacket with his hands thrust into the slash pockets. The legs of his trousers fluttered in the stiff breeze. “What happened to spring?”

  Leary, waiting in the lee of a doorway, nodded at him. “That the building?”

  “Yeah. It worked perfect. I hung around the Russian Mission building, and the other day he comes walking out like he owns New York and walks down here. What can I tell you? I had plenty of time to look him over. No mistake. He’s the one. The uniform nearly threw me. But it’s the same guy.”

  Leary studied the building. It might as well have been in Moscow. If Kotlikoff was in there, he could stand at a window waving a flag and blowing a cavalry bugle and the United States still wouldn’t be able to help him.

  Gelb said, “See that guy at the front door? Plainclothes?”

  Leary nodded. “Guard. They have one on every floor. See them?”

  “Yeah. Looks bad. You know who that chauffeur is?”

  “We can find out.”

  “Maybe he’s not in there. Maybe he’s in the Mission building.”

  “Who?” asked Leary.

  “Kotlikoff.”

  “The Russians aren’t about to tell us.”

  Leary’s eyes roved over the old mansion, noting its brick walls and slate roof, the high wrought-iron fencing and the brick wall at the back, surmounted with barbed wire. On the other side rose a high office building.

  It seemed impregnable.

  Actually, when he considered it, it wasn’t much new information: it confirmed what was known—the Russians had grabbed Kotlikoff. That chauffeur could be sent back to Russia as a persona non grata and that would be the end of it.

  Gelb was waiting for him to say somethi
ng. He glanced at Leary several times sidewise. He looked smaller out of his uniform.

  “You used to fight down in the old Seaman’s Center.”

  “Yeah. How’d you know that?”

  “It’s no secret.”

  “Yeah. No secret. But I got to tell you, not many people remember me with the gloves on.” He gazed thoughtfully at the sidewalk. “I was good—as good as anyone in my weight class in those days—but I tell you, I didn’t have enough sand, I didn’t have a takeout punch; even hitting from the heels I couldn’t deck you, you know? It was all right in the PAL stuff, but when I started against the ranking amateurs I got known as a light puncher, and so they came in after me. They’d take three of my punches to land one, and one night I got smozzled right through the ropes. Even weightlifting didn’t help. I could cut you but I couldn’t kill you.” He glanced again at Leary. “What else you heard about me?”

  “Not much. I met an old man from your neighborhood—Pitkin Avenue.”

  “Yeah. Pitkin. Been years.”

  “He told me something funny.”

  “Yeah? Make me laugh.”

  “He told me you and Boris Kotlikoff are cousins.”

  “Cousins! Kotlikoff and me?”

  “That’s what the man said.”

  “How did he know that?”

  “He said you’re both from the same village in Russia.”

  Harry Gelb frowned at his feet and rocked, bending away from the wind. “Ain’t that a kick in the head? A New York cop and a Commie poet—cousins. I got some of his poems out of the library.” He glanced again at Leary. “I couldn’t understand a word of it. Imagine, cousins.” He stood in the doorway touching his left wrist with his right hand. “Shit.”

  By the process of inductive reasoning, by eliminating all other names, Leary’s mind finally returned to Mr. J. Simmonds. Leary had gone through a mental list of names, starting with Boris Kotlikoff (unaccessible) and including Jay Simmonds (flatly refusing to talk). No one else, not the United States government or the Soviet government, not Napletano or Sardi, not even Geller, knew the whole story, knew even as much as he, Leary, knew—no one except possibly the old man, Mr. J. Simmonds. Possibly.