Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  “Ask the Director,” said Wes.

  “That’s not my prerogative, is it, Major?”

  “What do you want?”

  “My pension’s guaranteed. I can leave anytime.”

  “You don’t care about your pension,” Wes told him.

  And saw Kramer smile for the first time.

  “What do I want?” said Kramer. “I want this place to run like it should. No fat-cat appointees preening upstairs until something better comes along. No meddlers on the Hill saying don’t do this and don’t do that but don’t let the bad guys win.”

  “I’m not one of the bad guys.”

  “Maybe not. But you aren’t one of us. You’re a toy soldier doing dirty work for the politician on the top floor.”

  The bare walls held no clock to count the silence between the two men.

  “Thank you for your warm cooperation,” Wes finally said.

  “I do my job,” said Kramer. “You want cooperation, get me to trust you.”

  “I don’t care if you trust me.” Wes stood.

  “One more thing,” said Kramer as Wes opened the door. In the hall waited the escort who’d guided Wes to this basement lair. “Deputy Director Cochran wants to see you. You’re smart, you’ll do what Billy says.”

  In the hall, Wes tarried outside Kramer’s closed door. His escort finally coughed. “Director Cochran is waiting—”

  And Wes jerked open Kramer’s door.

  The security chief had taken a telephone from a desk drawer, was punching in a number.

  “Just wanted to say thanks again,” said Wes, smiling at the man caught making a secret phone call on a secret phone.

  As he left, Wes slammed the door.

  * * *

  “I appreciate your taking the time to see me,” Billy Cochran told Wes.

  “No problem,” Wes told the man who had souls of a hundred nations reflected in the thick lenses of his glasses. On the Deputy Director’s desk, a stack of classified files awaited Billy’s eyes.

  They sat on padded chairs in a corner of Cochran’s office. One wall held five Japanese woodblock prints, ink portraits and still lifes, wisps of blue and red with black calligraphy. The room was quiet and still. Cool.

  “The Director informed me of your job,” said Billy. “I recommended against pursuing this matter.”

  “Why?”

  Billy looked out the bank of windows.

  “You can’t see the Potomac,” said Billy, “because of the those trees. Most of them are rooted in Virginia, but Maryland is out there somewhere. So, we trust, is the river.”

  The Deputy Director looked back to Wes.

  “The longer I work in intelligence, the more cautious I become. The actions we take trying to acquire data can trigger the catastrophes we fear. Our job is to learn facts, not create them. I don’t believe this phone call necessitates an effort by us.”

  “I’m not much of an effort,” said Wes.

  “The danger is not who you are,” said Billy, “it’s what you could become. You must be careful of nuances you might not sense. Both the Director and I agree on the absolute necessity for this undertaking to be as discreet as possible.”

  “Of course,” said Wes. He hesitated, then said, “Do you know anything about Jud Stuart?”

  “I know the Agency’s data,” said Billy.

  “I’m only trying to find the truth.”

  “Then you’ll be employed forever,” said Billy.

  “We’re both soldiers,” said the three-star Air Force general. “You’re carrying out a legitimate order from a superior officer. I want to see you do well.”

  “Your head of security thinks I’m the enemy.”

  Billy frowned. Wes told him about his encounter with Kramer, thought, But I bet you already know.

  Billy walked to his desk. The cold weather made him limp. In 1964, Billy’d been an Air Force intelligence officer whose myopia almost washed him out of uniform. He was at Bien Hoa Air Base on Halloween night when the Viet Cong mortared the runways and sappers penetrated the wire. As two giant planes burned on the runway, unarmed Billy left his bunker to pull a wounded airman from a jeep, grabbed a carbine off a dead air policeman, and fought off the VC. Mortar shrapnel peppered his leg; he lost his glasses. “I shot at blurs,” he told the commanding officer. Billy refused any medal higher than a Silver Star: anything else might shine a spotlight on a spy.

  “Mike?” said the Deputy Director into the phone. “Please provide Major Chandler with those tapes…. My authority…. Thanks.”

  Now am I supposed to be obligated to you? thought Wes.

  Billy walked Wes toward the exit.

  “You might find it useful to check with me from time to time,” said Billy. “Perhaps I can open other doors.”

  At his office exit, he put his hand on Wes’s arm. “I’ll be sure to stay in touch.”

  Back at the Pentagon, alone in a windowless office, Wes ate a vending-machine sandwich and drank cold coffee. The lime-green walls were hung with mementos of a nineteen-year Army career. The framed photo on the desk showed a twenty-nine-year-old second wife and a new baby in front of a suburban Virginia home.

  A colonel wearing the screaming-eagle shoulder patch of the 101st Airborne Division hurried into the office, carefully shutting the door behind him. He held a file folder in one hand, and with the other signaled Wes to be silent. The colonel unplugged the phone on his desk.

  “They can do things with phones,” said the colonel as he sat down. He’d gained a belly since jump school. His eyes darted around the room, then locked on the Marine in the visitor’s chair.

  “Do you know what you’ve done?” whispered the colonel.

  “What’s the matter, Larry?”

  “This!” The colonel tossed the file folder to the man who’d given it to him. “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s supposed to be a soldier’s service records.”

  “You’re with the Naval Investigative Service. This is Army!”

  “It’s one country.”

  “Don’t give me that. What are you doing?”

  “Routine,” said Wes. “Trying to understand that file. Blanks on the form aren’t filled in. When did he leave the Army? And where was he stationed? Special Forces, but what command?”

  “You’ve got the file. You figure it out.”

  “The file’s bullshit. No photo. And ‘Twenty Simulated Combat Jumps.’ There’s no such designation—and you know it.”

  “I can’t help you, Wes.”

  “You spent ninety-some minutes with this file. Colonel Whiz, the guy who knows the Pentagon inside out, get you anything, do anything. Your dick gone limp?”

  “You’ve got no right to talk like that to me!”

  “Larry: help me.”

  “I don’t know who you are,” said the man who’d known Wes for a decade. “You give me a bullshit file and a bullshit story about not wanting to waste time with channels. Send me out like a good dog. My sergeants pop stuff into the computers—all those designations? My stripes have never seen ’em.

  “Half hour later, a captain I don’t know hands me hard copy of the input, says a major he doesn’t know got it from a two-star who ordered everybody not to even think about this guy. And then the captain says: ‘Tell Chandler he has all he needs to know.’”

  “They know your name, Wes!” whispered the colonel.

  “I’m flattered. Can you help me?”

  Larry shook his head. “They know my name, too.”

  “Who can help me? Where should I go next?”

  “Back to your office at NIS. Home. I don’t know.”

  “It’s just brass, Larry. Buckin’ the brass.”

  “These days, I’m a good soldier.”

  Wes stood and tossed his sandwich wrapper and Styrofoam coffee cup in the colonel’s trash.

  “Wes,” said his old friend when Wes’s hand was on the door, “just guessing, but …

  “That file, that guy: they’re
off the books. Things happen out there, people … You need to know about that guy, find somebody else off the books. Way off.”

  Jack Berns lived in a suburban Virginia cul-de-sac one price bracket down from and five miles east of CIA Director Denton. Berns was a short man and mostly bald. He wore a lime-green golf sweater and his pants cinched high over a sagging belly. He had tassels on his shoes.

  “Glad to meet you!” said Berns as he led Wes inside his home. “How do you like my place? Cost me fifty-two K back in ’69, worth a half mil’ today, easy. Come on down to my den.”

  Law books covered two walls of the den. Glass doors and windows overlooking a garden. The wall behind the desk held pictures of Berns with celebrities, framed newspaper articles featuring his exploits, and the first page of a Q&A interview Berns gave a “men’s” magazine. Berns had framed the redheaded, twenty-year-old centerfold from that issue next to the article. She wore a black garter belt, mesh stockings, high heels, and a pout.

  A pool table sat in the middle of the room.

  “Nice place,” said Wes. His eyes pointed to the centerfold, but he was looking for the hidden microphones.

  “And fully tax deductible,” noted Berns.

  Colored globes waited on the pool table’s green felt.

  “Why does our friend think you can help me?” asked Wes.

  “Because he’s smart,” said Berns. “You’re looking for a guy—Jud Stuart.”

  Wes rolled the red 7 ball into a corner pocket.

  “What else did Noah tell you?”

  “Nothing—’cept that you might need help. And that you’d have cash. What’s important is what I didn’t tell him.”

  “What’s that?” Wes snapped his wrist: the yellow-striped 9 ball bounced off the cushion, smacked into the solid-green 6, and almost rolled into a side pocket.

  “I met your man once.”

  “When?” said Wes. “Where?”

  And Berns smiled. “You got a uniform, I got a business.”

  “How much?”

  “I ain’t a nickel-and-dime kind of guy.”

  Wes tapped the black 8 ball into the corner pocket. While the ball rolled through the table, he got his briefcase from the sofa, put it on the green felt.

  “Your business doesn’t have confidentiality protection,” said Wes, “and I’m a private citizen who requires discretion.”

  “I can do a whole lot more for you than a doctor or a priest,” said the private investigator.

  “You take my money,” said the Marine, “then we’ve got a contract. My first rule is you tell no one anything—including Noah. If I see anything about me or my business in any newspapers or magazine interviews or Peter Murphy’s column, any government files … you’ll need more than a lawyer.”

  “Noah wouldn’t send you to me if I couldn’t be trusted.”

  Wes reached inside his briefcase where Berns couldn’t see, counted out five hundred dollars, and dropped the bills on the pool table.

  Berns scooped them up as Wes continued:

  “That’s a retainer for your services from me, a private citizen. Whatever your story, telling it won’t use up five hundred dollars.”

  The private eye grinned.

  “Before I leave,” continued Wes, “I’ll get a receipt.”

  “Noah said that wasn’t how this was.”

  “Noah didn’t just pay you five hundred dollars. I’ll take a receipt.”

  “On my business card.” Berns laughed. “I can do it all: phone records, tax records. I got people on payrolls the IRS never imagined. You want a wire? I use a guy can tell you when your grandmother farts. ’Course, they all cost. Plus my time.”

  “Tell me about Jud Stuart.”

  “It was 1977,” said Berns as Wes opened a notebook. “I was trying to broker an electronics deal with a guy named Andre Dubeck, a Czech turned American after World War Two. Dubeck was the technical security adviser to the president of an African country. Who knows what that means. But I knew he had ten million dollars for sophisticated devices I could supply.

  “Dubeck was in town. I arranged to buy him dinner. Rented a white Rolls—cost me ninety-five of those days’ dollars. Pick him up in his hotel lobby and he’s got this clown with him.”

  “Jud Stuart.”

  “That’s the name,” said Berns. “If Noah’s looking for a guy with that name, he’d be the kind of guy who might know Dubeck. Anyway, we pile in the Rolls, go to a Georgetown restaurant.

  “Fifty-dollar entrées, Dom Pérignon. Those two bullshit, saying a lot and saying nothing. Jud claims he’s providing ‘technical security’ to forty embassies in D.C. Said something about soon getting a change of climate. I figured he was fishing for an invite to Africa from Dubeck. Come to find out over salad, he’s a damn locksmith!”

  “’Course,” said Berns, “that’s as good a way of getting into someplace as I know. The old fly on the wall trick. I was thinking about putting him on one of my special retainers.

  “We finish dinner, I’m setting up my pitch, they order brandy and coffee, go off to the bathroom together like women or …”

  “And they skip! Leave me with the check!”

  After a moment of silence, Wes said, “That’s it?”

  “Never saw the son of a bitch again. Until now, there was no money in him. Dubeck’s on a plane before dawn, and as far as anybody knows, Africa swallowed him up in ’79 or ’80.”

  “That wasn’t worth five hundred dollars.”

  “The five hundred included my retainer—remember? You use me for the other stuff, you’ll get your money’s worth.”

  “Oh,” added Berns, “I almost forgot about the picture.”

  “What picture?”

  “You think I’d meet a high roller like Dubeck and not be sure I could prove it?” Berns laughed. “In my business, your word is only as good as your proof. Cost another hundred and twenty dollars in dinners plus a big tip to the maître d’. Had me a retired couple sitting close by, camera rigged in grandma’s purse—I can fix you up with something like it. Got one nice shot of your boy.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Let’s see. The investment expense, storage, my time to dig it out, print it up…. Cost you another thousand.”

  “It’s thirteen years old and you’ve been paid.”

  Berns shrugged.

  “You get five hundred more, and your phone won’t ring,” said Wes.

  The money went into Berns’s hand and a black-and-white photo came out from under his desk pad.

  “Give you a pocket-sized one, too,” said the private eye.

  Big man, thought Wes. Broad chest, muscles. Curly hair. Laughing. Wild eyes.

  “Don’t forget,” said Berns when Wes left with the photos and another secret receipt, “you need me to do it all.”

  Wes parked across from a row of shops and cafés in Arlington’s Little Saigon. Hand-painted black calligraphy signs hung next to multicolored Madison Avenue–crafted posters for beers and shampoos. The late-afternoon light was flat. Wes left his motor running while he leafed through the slim CIA file.

  Scrawled on a yellow sheet of Noah Hall’s notes was the name of the policeman investigating the death in the L.A. bar.

  At the corner grocery store, Wes interrupted Asian chatter between the owner and a compatriot wearing a wool cap.

  “Don’t have twenty-dollar change,” the owner told Wes.

  “For twenty-five dollars,” said Wes, laying another bill on the counter.

  Wes got a handful of coins. The two men shrugged when he asked them for a pay phone. As Wes walked out, the owner said something in French, and the two friends laughed.

  The Laundromat at the corner was warm inside. Humid. Dusty yellow. A dishwater-blond girl of nineteen kept her blank eyes pointed at a tumbling dryer while a baby boy slept beside her and a two-year-old girl played with dirt balls on the floor. Wes didn’t care what they overheard as he dropped coins in the pay phone.

  “Rawlins,” sn
apped a man’s voice answering Wes’s call.

  “Detective Rawlins? I’m calling from Washington, D.C. My name is Wes Chandler, and I’m working with Noah Hall.”

  “Shit,” moaned Rawlins. “Next time your buddies in the mayor’s office blow smoke about how come their LAPD ain’t winning the war on crack and coke and the gangbangers, you remind them we’re paying off their chits and wasting time with Washington over some who-cares D.U.O.”

  “What’s a D.U.O.?”

  “Death of unknown origin. You calling about the stiff citizen in back of the Oasis bar, aren’t you?”

  “Haven’t you determined cause of death?”

  “Broken neck, cause unknown. Ask me, a rummy falls down some stairs, then other rummies pick his body clean. ‘Course, the coroner said he was well inside the legal limit. Why do you care?”

  “Routine investigation. Have you identified him yet?”

  “Yeah.” Rawlins shuffled through a stack of files on his desk. “FBI made him through his prints and a Navy record.”

  “He was in the Navy?” said Wes.

  “We got an ocean out here. Lots of sailors. The VA has his home address as San Francisco. No next of kin. Hopkins, Mathew J., forty-eight years old. VA lists him as one hundred percent disabled, though the coroner says he’s a white male in average health.”

  “What progress have you made in the investigation?”

  “You writing a report?” said Detective Rawlins. “Put in there that with fourteen open-file citizen murders plus six gangbanger bodies, I have progressed to a state of indifference regarding Mathew J. Hopkins—and Washington, D.C.”

  Wes’s call to his old office only cost him a quarter.

  “NIS, Greco.”

  “It’s me,” said Wes. Frank Greco was an ex-Marine sergeant who spent nine years in St. Louis getting through college and working as a cop. Greco was NIS’s head counterspy.

  “Heard you’re with the import-export bank,” said Greco.

  “In a manner of speaking. Can you do me a favor?”

  “Like what?”

  “A complete file pull on a newly deceased Navy vet,” said Wes. He gave Greco the man’s biography he’d gotten from the L.A. cop. “Don’t link it to me and don’t red flag it, but don’t let the search get lost. I’ll call you in a few days.”