Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  “There are no losers,” Art had said in Tehran.

  The drive between Art’s house and Jud’s hotel averaged forty-two minutes, from the exclusive homes of Miami Beach, through blocks of decaying grandeur, past downtown’s glass and steel buildings that housed CIA airlines and malls where most Miamians couldn’t afford to shop. The route passed ornate doors of banks headquartered in Hong Kong and Manhattan and Switzerland. Jud had made the trip a hundred times in the eleven months he’d been in Miami. So had Art.

  On Fifth Street, a faded cardboard Santa Claus dangled on a wire strung between a light pole and a palm tree by the freeway.

  Ten minutes, Jud thought. I’ve been driving ten minutes. He loved his silver Porsche. The radio announced a selection by a group called Hiroshima.

  If …

  Jud pulled to the curb a block from the freeway ramp.

  If, Art wouldn’t do it himself. Too risky. A long shot could work, an Oswald, but only Kerns had the gun, and if he missed … Raul or the biker or the Vietnamese couldn’t cowboy it with shotguns and Uzis, Jud might spot them, dodge the play. Same with other guns in the organization. Art could contract Colombian shooters or Raul’s Cuban friends, but Art believed day labor was unreliable. He wouldn’t farm it to the Italians, give them a handle on a fellow paesano’s business. As the CIA hits on Castro had proved, esoteric stuff such as poison was for the funny papers.

  “I talked to the Italians …,” Art had said.

  Why? Art wouldn’t have asked them unless he suspected. He didn’t believe the judge buy. He went to the Italians to satisfy his suspicions, one way or the other.

  Twelve minutes since Jud had left Art’s. Raul’s being there made sense. But the biker, the Vietnamese, the regular two thugs, and Kerns in the gazebo: too many guns for a friend.

  “Did someone send you to look for me?” Art craved certainty. He believed Jud wouldn’t roll over on him—but Jud was walking away broke. Like a loser, and there are no losers, especially not Jud, which meant …

  “Ungood,” said Jud, remembering.

  Thirteen minutes. Jud’s mirrors were empty. Heat waves skittered paper trash down the empty sidewalk.

  The Special Forces file on Art Monterastelli noted he was trained as an expert in demolitions.

  “Send you away with a bang …”

  Fourteen minutes and Jud got out of the Porsche, hurried to the doorway of a boarded-up bar. Damn it! He wanted a drink—to pass the time, he told himself, not because of his hands or his thirst. This was the end, the exfiltration blues, the last riff of the sax. He’d play out the paranoia, let it tick off the clock for say, an hour, drive away laughing and pick up—

  The explosion blew the doors off the silver Porsche, shattering glass, flying metal, the gas tank erupting with a roaring orange fireball, another black cloud billowing over Miami.

  In three hours, Jud had grabbed his cash stash, bought a used car, and hit Highway 1 south to the Keys. Strategic retreat. He went to ground in a seedy hotel halfway to Key West. Bone fishermen filled the other cabins; they paid no attention to him. He coded his report that Monterastelli was a drug dealer only, no hostile contacts or connections, no evidence of national security leaks, no hint that he’d betrayed the team to anyone. Other than using his government-perfected skills and experience to smuggle marijuana, bribe, profit, and murder, Art was clean.

  In his report, Jud included the story from the Miami Herald about a Porsche exploding as it neared the freeway.

  Burned, he reported. The judge in the scam was probably safe, heavy to hit and no risk to Art, but watch him, warn him: Monterastelli craved certainty.

  Jud used the motel stationery. Let them know where I am, let them come see me, face-to-face, let them tell me what to do. His report requested orders. He mailed it to the Maryland postal box, bought two fifths of Scotch, and stayed out of sight.

  A week later, the grizzled motel owner brought him a letter postmarked New York.

  The envelope contained a follow-up story from the Herald reporting that nobody had been in the Porsche when it blew and a sheet of white paper with three printed words:

  Your option. ED

  Jud sat on the lumpy bed. Art knew he wasn’t dead. Art believed in no losers. Art craved certainty—the certainty contained in the words “expedited demise.” Jud thought about all that. He thought about geckos, when it was time to leave, what was the best way to go. Just before dark, he crumpled his mail into a paper ball in the glass ashtray. Lit it with a motel match.

  For two days he cruised the Keys, buying his gear, testing it in the mango swamps off Route 1. Art knew Jud’s patterns, knew Jud excelled at close-in work. Jud checked the weather, astronomical charts, drove back to Miami.

  Waited until dark. Until midnight. There was no moon, no storm expected.

  The inflatable, dark-blue swimming-pool raft buoyed Jud in his black wet suit as he paddled down the canal, past the lights of wealthy homes, past blue lamps marking private docks. Laughter floated over the water; a married couple bickering; the sounds of television, cars. He worried each time he drifted under a bridge, but no one saw him. Once a motorboat, lights out, racing inland, passed within ten feet of him, but whoever was aboard was too intent scanning the shoreline for threats to notice Jud’s silent passage.

  At one-thirty, he reached the cluster of stubby pilings. The last slab of the burned dock screened him from the lawyer’s house. He lashed his raft and waterproof bag to a fire-blackened post with bungee cords, used more bungees to hold the rifle steady against the wood. Jud squinted through the scope sight: Art’s windows were dark.

  Charred wood, creosote, pungent water, filled Jud’s nostrils as the waves lapped around him. Filth floated past. All night Jud rolled with the waves, just enough out of the water to breathe the salty, wet air and watch the dark shore.

  Dawn came on time. The heat. Jud’s skin became clammy and tepid with the water. Only his head showed above the choppy surface, a black-hooded bump next to stubby pilings a quarter mile up the waterway from Art’s dock. From Art’s veranda, it was barely possible to see a dark ball bobbing by the charred wood and the flat line of something lashed parallel to the gray-green water.

  Art’s lawn sloped up from sea level. His veranda was higher off the water than a man. The house had two stories above that. At seven, Jud’s binoculars showed curtains fluttering on the second floor. They parted briefly, and he saw the girl. Naked. She turned to say something to someone in the bedroom.

  At 8:20, Raul stepped onto the veranda. Jud hugged the piling. Raul went back inside.

  At 9:11, Raul came back out on the veranda. He scanned the lawn: the mines were armed. His eyes flicked to the canal, saw no boats. He turned and called into the house. Jud hugged the thick piling with his legs, fitted his shoulder to the rifle stock, reached around the wood to push the bungee-tight barrel until the cross hairs in the scope lined up with …

  Art Monterastelli, former Green Beret captain, former spy, walking out the French doors, crossing to the railing, a china cup of sweet Cuban coffee in his hand as he joined Raul.

  The high-powered bullet slammed into Art—a marble going into his chest, baseball blasting out his back, crashing through the French windows, blood spraying the white walls before the crack of the rifle shot reached the veranda.

  Through the scope, Jud saw Raul’s jaw fall open. The Cuban glanced toward the corpse on the veranda; flinched as though he were about to dive for cover.

  But instead, Raul froze: no second bullet had come. There’d been time. Jud’s finger was damp on the curved metal trigger, the cross hairs were on Raul’s heart.

  The Cuban stared toward the pilings. Through the telescopic sight, Jud watched Raul turn, nod to the corpse, look back. Shrug. And smile. Raul fished a cigarette out of his suit jacket. Lit up, stood tall by the rail, smoking: a clean shot and a clear deal.

  Raul didn’t move even when he saw the dark form swim through the pilings, scurry to dry land, run away. />
  By sunset, Jud was in North Carolina. By dawn, Virginia. By noon the next day, he’d reached the interstate-highway Beltway encircling Washington, D.C.

  Nick Kelley was somewhere in the city.

  Don’t let us run into each other, thought Jud.

  He stopped at a gas station for a map, ran his finger down the list of outlying Maryland towns: Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Rockville … Saunders.

  Saunders, Maryland, was an American classic, a crossroads town with two gas stations, a general store, a dozen houses, some cornfields, and a brick-and-glass post office. In that year of 1978, Baltimore and Washington were growing into one another, swallowing the towns between them that had once been surrounded by cornfields. Saunders had five years left before no fields separated it from the capital city.

  The gas station across from the post office was boarded up, a victim of the first Arab oil embargo. Jud scouted the town, then drove to a hardware store where he dipped into his last thousand dollars to buy a ladder, paint, rollers and brushes, overalls.

  In North Carolina, Jud had mailed a birthday card in an oversize red envelope to the post office box in Saunders, Maryland. He used too few stamps and counted on the mail’s being slow.

  The clerk in the Saunders General Store was surprised that someone had hired Jud to paint the deserted gas station, but neither she nor anyone else in the town pursued their curiosity beyond idle gossip about how slowly that man worked, how he always seemed to be watching the post office and not the walls.

  At eight A.M. on his third day of painting, a clean-cut, coat-and-tied man in his twenties parked a shiny blue sedan with D.C. plates in the post office lot. The young man put on sunglasses, marched his spit-shined shoes inside. Jud climbed the ladder leaning against the gas station, stared through the government windows as Spit Shine went to the wall where that post office box was. Got something from a box, took it to the postal counter. The clerk handed Spit Shine an oversize red envelope.

  When Spit Shine pulled his sedan out of the parking lot, the ladder leaning against the gas station was empty, the paint roller was on the ground. And Jud was in his car, behind him.

  An officer, thought Jud. An eager lieutenant. An unbloodied gofer grubbing for brownie points.

  Instead of going to the Pentagon or Ft. Meade, the blue sedan headed toward Annapolis. Country highways, rolling fields, other small towns waiting to be eaten by suburbs. Highways became gravel roads. Jud’s heart slammed against his ribs.

  The blue sedan went down a long gravel road, pulled into a driveway. Jud rolled past, parked, ran back in time to see Spit Shine standing at the front door of the house, handing the red envelope to a short man in civilian clothes. Spit Shine marched back to the sedan, held the back door open.

  The man in the civilian suit put on his glasses. Opened the envelope, read Jud’s terse plainspeak report:

  Option ED completed.

  Spit Shine drove the man away. Hidden, Jud watched.

  He waited until the mail truck made its delivery to the silver box at the end of the driveway. No one came out of the house to get the mail. No one saw Jud steal it.

  Circulars, fund-raisers, junk mail, and a personal letter—all addressed to the name Jud had never known.

  Got you.

  Very carefully, Jud opened the personal letter. It was on embossed stationery from a foundation, thanking the general for agreeing to speak at the foundation’s Patriotism Day dinner, discussing his honorarium, thanking him for sending his official biography and picture for their newsletter and saving them the trouble of making that request of the Pentagon.

  Later that day, Jud called the Pentagon public affairs office, told the officer who answered the phone that he was the editor of the foundation’s newsletter, asked for a copy of the general’s bio and photograph, and had the PAO release it to a messenger “so we can make our deadline.” By the day’s close of business, Jud had resealed and remailed the foundation’s letter and paid the messenger for the picture and bio of the man who’d commanded Jud’s life for a decade.

  “No more,” Jud told the smiling official photo as he sat in his car. The Beltway was only a few blocks away.

  A pay phone hung on a gas station’s wall. Nick Kelley was a local call. An old friend. But Jud didn’t want to talk to Nick, didn’t want to see him. Not until he was clear.

  The gas station postcard showed a full moon rising over the Capitol dome and Washington Monument. On its back, Jud scrawled Sayonara. Signed it Malice. Addressed it to the post office box in Saunders, Maryland.

  When Jud dropped the postcard in a corner mailbox, the world fell from his shoulders: no more orders, no more messages in newspapers, no more phone calls, no more illusionary options that all added up to ED—expedited demise. He was free, he was done, he was gone. Casper. And now that he had the name of the man, Jud was certain he could stay that way.

  “Fuck you, General,” said Jud. “My turn now.”

  He pointed his car west, ran away for the first time; ran toward something better.

  Twelve years later, in 1990, he ran a second time. To Nora. And then a third.

  In a red car, Jud realized he was in a red car. On the road.

  Nora was dead.

  Las Vegas rose out of the desert, neon glittering in the daylight. Jud drove by a casino with a fire-belching volcano constructed in its parking lot. Nora had worked in the casinos, in the hotels. Jud had cut deals with sharp-suited men in the same type of suits where she’d turned tricks.

  Airport, he pulled into the airport. Parking lot, the first empty space. A handicapped spot. The blue airline bag with his money was still around his neck. He left his white apron on the red car’s front seat, couldn’t think clearly enough to search the suitcase or briefcase someone had left in the car.

  Jud didn’t see the two dusty sedans pulling into the lot behind him, scrambling to find parking places as he stumbled through the sliding glass doors into the air-conditioned terminal.

  Drifting, flowing with the crowd, bells dinging from slot machines, the excited babble of tour groups arriving, the quiet shuffle of those headed home.

  A bar. Jud bought three shots in four minutes, was about to order again when he realized the bartender was staring at him. Noticing him. Jud stumbled back into the stream of airport people.

  A counter, a line, a woman in a blue uniform behind a computer terminal asking him questions.

  “What?” mumbled Jud.

  “Can I help you, sir?” she said, sniffing him: Scotch and a burnt smell she couldn’t place. “Do you want a ticket?”

  “Where?”

  She blinked.

  “The next plane,” he said.

  “The plane to Chicago?” she asked.

  “When does it leave?”

  “You’ve cut it close.” She punched keys, asked him for his credit card. She shook her head as he counted out the cash. “Do you have any luggage?”

  But he only stared.

  “Must have been rough at the tables.” She handed him his ticket, pointed to a Jetway door. “They’re holding the plane.”

  On board, he couldn’t stop crying, shaking. The stewardess wouldn’t serve him more than three drinks. Other passengers pretended he wasn’t there, counted their blessings.

  It was a misty night in Chicago. At Midway Airport, Jud had two more drinks, drifted into a line for a limousine service to swank city hotels, bought the eight-dollar ticket, and got on the van.

  Forty minutes later, he was wandering the vast glass-and-steel canyons of a rebuilding city. He answered the blinking red neon summons to an old brick hotel, put enough money on the counter for the sullen desk clerk to give him a room key. Beefy men in leather raincoats and custom-cut suits glared at Jud when he went into the hotel coffee shop. He ate the first thing on the menu, a cabbage-sweet Irish stew.

  His room was small and brown and dusty. He stared at the thin floral bedspread. Went back into the night.

  The blue bag had forty-six dol
lars left in it. Eight of them bought a fifth of whiskey. The cork was out of the bottle before Jud was out of the bar. He shuffled through the city, looking for nothing, stepping into the shadows when blue-lighted police cruisers rolled past. An elevated train clattered by. The world spun: he leaned against the board fence of a construction site, threw up. When his eyes cleared, he saw his hand pressed against the brown wood beside black-lettered gang graffiti: P.V.P.s and Vice Lords. Farther down the wood, someone had scrawled Hog Butcherer.

  A civic plaza was catercorner from his hotel. Rising through the night mist from the plaza’s marble square was an iron rusted black monster, a looming Picasso beast of poles and wings and eyes.

  Jud staggered, his blurry vision full of the beast. His calves hit a chain, and he turned: an orange flame flickered from a burner in the earth. The brass plaque dedicated an eternal flame to the war dead of Korea and Vietnam.

  And Jud howled, his anguish and anger echoing through the civic plaza.

  The beast was silent.

  Until that night, in Jud’s dreams, it roared in fire and woke him shaking, trembling, sweating, and filthy, and he knew he couldn’t stay still any longer, knew he had to run.

  Realized where he had to go. Whom he had to see.

  Before dawn, he stole a car parked on State Street, found his way to the freeways of America.

  THE BURNING VILLAGE

  The morning after Nora died, Wes charged into Noah Hall’s office at CIA headquarters. Noah and Denton’s secretary, Mary, looked up from a file-covered desk.

  “Where’s the Director?” yelled Wes.

  Noah hurried around the desk. Mary glided toward a door.

  “Where are you going?” Wes called to her. “I want—”

  Noah grabbed his arm. Wes knocked Noah’s hand away, cocked his fist, and barely checked his swing. Noah didn’t flinch.

  “In the hall!” he whispered, touching his ear, nodding to the walls.

  It was 7:47 A.M. Outside, a steady stream of cars checked through the main gate as America’s shadow warriors reported for another Tuesday of work. The carpeted seventh-floor corridor was silent. Empty. Except for Wes and Noah, standing toe to toe.