Unforced Error

by Michael Bowen

“Israel was fighting for its life in ’ sixty-seven against enemies that could attack across every land border it had. Bad things happen in war. Israeli planes attacked the U.S.S. Liberty by mistake. That isn’t murder.”

  “Mistake?” Lawrence scoffed. “None of the Arab states had any navy to speak of, or a warship anywhere close to the Liberty in size or profile.”

  “The Soviet Mediterranean Fleet had ships in that category, and they weren’t above sailing under false colors,” Rep said. “Egypt had supply ships that big, and tapes of radio messages from the Israeli fighters that were released a while back showed they thought that’s what they were attacking.”

  “A Zionist construct,” Lawrence shrugged.

  “I earn my living in the real world,” Rep said. “Down here on Planet Earth, a horrible mistake in the fog of battle makes a lot more sense than Israel deliberately attacking a vessel of its one indispensable ally.”

  “Unless it was the one ally that would let Israel get away with anything,” Lawrence said, affecting a condescending smirk.

  Time to cut the nonsense, Rep thought. Lawrence was playing with him. He knew what was going on and Rep didn’t. Rep needed to make Lawrence blow a fuse, lose a bit of the control he was effortlessly exercising.

  “That painting is an unforced error,” Rep said. “Like General Order Number 11 and the Brassilach picture and that medal. It’s not enough for you to pursue your vendetta, you have to flaunt what you’re doing, rub people’s noses in it, and then laugh at them for being too dumb to pick up your clever subtleties. Sooner or later, though, someone was bound to.”

  “The things you mention are certainly unforced,” Lawrence said smugly, showing no sign at all of provocation. “Whether they are errors remains to be seen. So far they don’t seem to have cost me anything.”

  “You’re wrong. Some reckless questions I asked made a pilfering sutler think you might have Civil War collectibles lying around, and he snuck up here to see. You were afraid he might come across evidence that you’re the one who killed Quinlan—like remnants of blood soaked clothing that you burned in one of the outbuildings afterward, for example—and you ran him off with a warning shot. You snuck into the library downtown to see if you could find out how much Peter had told Klimchock. You only escaped by firing another shot. Live ammunition twice in one day doesn’t suggest a smoothly functioning plan.”

  “It is functioning well enough to get three people I’m interested in under my control,” Lawrence said.

  “I think you’ve actually gone over the edge,” Rep said, shaking his head as he decided to play his most provocative card. “Look, I’m sorry your father died before he should have. If you want to build a private shrine to him, go ahead, and if you want to blame the Jews for it I can’t stop you. But public libraries are sacred places. You don’t have a right to turn one into a monument to bigotry just so you can bury the ghost of a dead collaborator.”

  The calculated insult fell short of his hopes. Lawrence stiffened and recoiled, but then quickly recovered.

  “‘Collaborator,’” he said contemptuously. “My father was a bureaucrat. A pathetic, paper-shuffling, pencil-pushing, clerk. He took forms from his in-box, centered them on his green baize desk top, scribbled his initials on them, stamped them with a red tampon, and handed them to a huissier to pass on to the fonctionnaire two offices down.”

  “Right,” Rep said. “And he did this with enough zeal to get a medal for it. Because some of those forms said, ‘Arrest the Jew so-and-so and his family and hold them for deportation to such-and-such labor camp.’ ”

  “No doubt,” Lawrence said. “And if he had high-mindedly refused to stamp them, some other glorified clerk would have stamped them in his place. He would have accomplished nothing but to sacrifice food and shelter for himself and his family in a crisis situation.”

  “Did he accept a few thousand francs or the odd collection of family jewels in exchange for losing a form now and then?” Rep asked. “Is that where the civil servant got the stake he needed to bribe his way into the United States after the war and start a printing business once he got here?”

  “Whatever he did, it didn’t deserve the death penalty,” Lawrence said, his speech getting a little faster and less polished, a bit of the icy control finally slipping. “There was no reason to rake all that muck up decades after it happened, threaten him with deportation in the twilight of his life because some Jew who stumbled over him wanted to settle scores.”

  The final comments connected the last of the dots, explaining how the deportation proceedings against André Laurent had started. They also removed all doubt about Rep’s present situation. Lawrence wouldn’t have told Rep this much unless he planned on Rep, Melissa, and Linda ending up dead.

  Rep saw no reason to cooperate. He jerked his head and upper body toward the hallway door. Raising a Starr Arms revolver that he grabbed from the desk drawer, the older man moved sideways to block Rep’s path.

  Rep spun around and hustled for the other door, leading to the editorial offices. He can’t shoot, Rep told himself, or I’d be dead already. Even if he could hide my body, gunfire inside the building would be hard to explain to Pignatano and Henderson, who probably aren’t in on anything illegal.

  He was right. He reached the door without the white hot explosion inside his head that would signal his brains being spattered all over Lawrence’s elegant wainscoting. Throwing the door open, he dashed into the other office.

  He saw Melissa in Linda’s desk chair. Mouth gagged, hands tied behind her, eyes defiant and now widening in alarm. He saw the bearded man in the blue uniform. He didn’t see the other uniformed man against the wall next to the door, and so the searing pain from a metallic smash to the back of his head and the inky blackness that followed came as a complete and thoroughly unpleasant surprise. His last conscious thought was You total schmuck.

  ***

  When Rep groggily shook himself to consciousness a few minutes later, he was bound and gagged in a chair next to Melissa’s. Lawrence was on the phone in his adjoining office. Though it made his temples throb to do so, Rep concentrated on picking up Lawrence’s words through the still open doorway.

  “Yes, Karin, please tell Mr. Pignatano that I don’t want to take up any more of his time. He can leave a debriefing on my voice-mail while he’s driving back downtown. Mr. and Mrs. Pennyworth are waiting up in my office for Linda. As soon as Mr. Pignatano is on his way you can leave for lunch if you wish, and if you’d like to take an extra hour or so to watch the target-shooting competition at the encampment I don’t think that will do any harm.”

  Rep convulsively jerked his body in an effort to tip over the chair he was tied to. He wanted to make enough noise to alarm Henderson. He got the chair’s two left legs a couple of inches off the floor before one of the uniformed guys grabbed Rep’s hair and jerked in the opposite direction.

  Lawrence glanced at the action, murmured something else into the phone, and hung up. Then he closed the connecting door.

  Hearing Linda’s steps a minute or so later on the stairs and then in the hallway outside, Melissa felt as if she were watching a slasher flick. Impotently screaming “DON’T!” in her mind at the coed about to open the fatal door, after several of her friends had already made the same mistake.

  Three more minutes passed after the footsteps stopped. Rep could hear occasional sounds—a scrape of shoe-sole on parquet, a snatch of human voice—but he couldn’t make out any words. Finally, the connecting door opened and Linda walked in.

  She shrieked.

  Well naturally, Rep thought, she would scream, wouldn’t she?

  “Yell as loudly you wish,” Lawrence said. “While we were chatting just now I watched both Pignatano and Karin drive off. There’s no one to hear you. If you will stop screaming, however, I will take the gags off your two friends.”

  Linda choked back what had all the earmarks of a very promising follow-up yelp. Lawrence nodd
ed to his two henchmen, who ungently ripped off the adhesive tape sealing in the socks that had silenced Rep and Melissa.

  Rep shook his head and gulped breath. His diaphragm felt hollow. His lungs burned. Gasps ragged and uncontrolled escaped from him. Five agonizing seconds later he trusted himself to speak.

  “I assume he took the gags off because he wants us to tell him what we know,” he said to Melissa. He tried for a conversational tone and, somewhat to his surprise, just about made it.

  “He’s also worried about autopsies finding aspirated fibers in our lungs,” Melissa said, as if they were debating the comparative merits of quiche and subs. “Eleanor Taylor Bland’s procedurals are very good on that.”

  “You’re hardly in a position to be flippant,” Lawrence said. “Your situation at the moment is not entirely hopeless. I want to keep you alive for awhile yet, and it’s in your interest to humor me.”

  “Until you’ve got your hands on Peter, you mean,” Melissa said.

  “If you like. The point is, as long as you’re alive you can pray for a miracle. Prayer is a low-percentage tactic, but it’s better than nothing. Since you have something to lose, you should avoid undue annoyance.”

  “If all we have to lose is a long lunch-hour with our hands tied behind us,” Rep said, “you can probably bet against complaisance.”

  “I can’t count on coming up with Peter quite that quickly,” Lawrence said. “There’s a silo—an actual silo, for storing grain, quaint Americana at its tackiest—a few hundred yards west of this building. It’s empty. After you give me the information I want, we’re going to take you to that silo and keep you there until Peter turns up—unless you provoke me into premature unpleasantness in the meantime.”

  Another unforced error, Rep thought when he heard the word “silo.”

  “I wouldn’t plan on Peter turning up,” Melissa said.

  “Oh, he’ll be found,” Lawrence answered. “He is guileless. I think the reason he hasn’t been found already is that the police can’t ask questions quite as aggressively as the men working for me can. With the help of the information Linda was kind enough to provide, several gentlemen like the two you have encountered this afternoon, less conspicuously dressed but just as efficient, will be looking for him. If the police find him first, Mr. Pignatano will try to arrange bail. Either way, he’ll be out here sooner or later.”

  “So that you can make it look like Peter killed us,” Linda said.

  “More or less. What I have in mind, if it’s any comfort, is some kind of ghastly accident taking place while he was committing suicide and the rest of you were trying to dissuade him. The black powder used in Civil War-era ammunition is notoriously volatile, and the police will discover that several barrels of it were stored in the silo. It isn’t there now, of course, but it will be when the time comes. A dramatic gesture on Peter’s part, a stray shot or spark and—BANG!—instant human silage.”

  “You’re banking on no cops looking beyond the obvious,” Rep said. “I think the police here are a lot smarter than you think they are.”

  “The solution to Quinlan’s murder that I’ll offer them will be simple and straightforward,” Lawrence said serenely. “They’ll accept the obvious answer.”

  “What if Peter isn’t let out on bail?” Linda asked.

  “Then we’ll have to come up with a pure accident. It’s the kind of thing that can happen when three rank amateurs meddle in a police matter and arrange to meet a fugitive at a silo they didn’t know was being used to store explosive material. Ms. Pennyworth apparently brought cigarettes with her. Perhaps we’ll work something about careless use of smoking materials into it.”

  “So as long as Peter is missing, you can’t kill us,” Linda said.

  “‘Can’t’ is the wrong word. I’d prefer not to kill you until the Peter issue is resolved, but if I have to kill you I can and I will. Heroics while you’re being taken to the silo, for example, will be both pointless and painful. The target shooting competition will be going on at the encampment. No one will notice three stray shots less than a mile away. All you’ll accomplish is to throw away the slight chance you have.”

  Lawrence paused and looked at the three of them in turn.

  “Now for the part about telling me everything you know,” he said.

  Chapter 25

  “Are we going to tell him everything we know, dear?” Melissa asked Rep with what might have been taken for mild interest.

  “Of course. Do you think I want those knuckle-draggers to beat me up?”

  Both of the blue-uniformed goons bristled at this and one of them took a step towards Rep. Lawrence grabbed the man’s sleeve.

  “Mr. Pennyworth is deliberately trying to provoke you,” he said. “He wants you to bruise him in a way that the explosion we’re planning won’t explain, so that the police won’t buy the Peter-did-it story.”

  “Well,” Rep said modestly, “it was worth a try.”

  “Just talk,” Lawrence said. “Time is short. If need be, I’m willing to take my chances on the explosion covering all injuries. And if one of you has to be hurt, Mr. Pennyworth, you won’t be the first.”

  “Since you put it that way,” Melissa said, “the first thing we know is how you framed Peter for Quinlan’s murder.”

  “Do we know that?” Rep asked.

  “Oh, yeah, I haven’t had a chance to tell you, but I pretty much confirmed my theory up here.”

  “The marathon thing?” Rep asked.

  “Right,” Melissa said. “The reason Quinlan had those super Baggies to keep his pot in is that he bought hospital quality seral fluid bags for his own blood. He had his blood drawn and he kept it here, frozen, so that he could have it reinfused just before a qualifying race. It’s called blood doping.”

  “Wow,” Rep said. “You nailed all that down up here?”

  “Mm hmm. He’d shown me one of the Baggies when he was trying to impress me with his stash, and I found the freezer and a lab bill up here.”

  “Okay,” Rep said, nodding and then turning his eyes toward Lawrence. “So what you did was take a bag of Quinlan’s own blood from his own freezer and drench Peter’s saber with it during the encampment social.”

  “Then you wiped it off,” Melissa interjected, “so Peter wouldn’t notice it after you returned the saber to the rack. Which you’d sharpened while you were at it. The saber, not the rack. But you knew that even though you’d wiped the saber off, enough residue to be spotted by a competent forensic chemist would soak into the blade.”

  “After you killed Quinlan with a similar saber,” Rep added, “you hinted to the police about rumors of an affair and Peter’s supposed pathological jealousy. The blood on Peter’s saber would make him the obvious suspect.”

  “He’s certainly played the role to perfection so far,” Lawrence said, smiling. “But I hope you know more than that, because what I’ve heard up to now is of more interest to Linda than to me.”

  “I knew Peter couldn’t have done it,” Linda said.

  “You’re right,” Lawrence said, “he couldn’t. Cutting a man’s throat takes courage—something Peter conspicuously lacks. Now, continue.”

  “Well,” Rep said, “the first one is hard to top, but another thing we’ve figured out is why you killed Quinlan.”

  “Namely,” Melissa said, “because he was blackmailing you about using Jackrabbit Press as a front to funnel radical Islamic money into this country to finance long-term terrorist projects in the United States. By the way, as long as you have us under control, would you mind untying me? I’m not into bondage, and my wrists are getting stiff.”

  “The restraints are an unfortunate but prudent necessity,” Lawrence said. “Tell me more about the terrorist money.”

  “That part was pretty plain, once we dug into it,” Rep said. “No small press publisher could make enough from genre fiction to support the kind of numbers you’re running here. You supposedly
benefit from this secondary printing and distribution business, but that business only has three real customers—and they all happen to be offshore, in countries with strong radical Islamic movements.”

  “Countries where they could buy the same services without ever sending a wire transfer overseas,” Melissa said. “Quinlan found out about it.”

  “Which is how he got the DeLorean,” Rep said.

  “And how he got his own imprint despite being considerably south of Ruth Cavin on the superstar editor scale,” Melissa said.

  “And how he got his throat sliced open Tuesday night,” Rep said.

  Rep looked carefully at Lawrence to gauge his reaction. His face showed clear interest and some surprise, but not shock.

  “You see the point, don’t you?” Rep said.

  “If the point is that you two are too smart for your own good I certainly do see it,” Lawrence said.

  “Just the opposite,” Rep said. “If bumbling interlopers like us can figure this stuff out, the FBI won’t have any trouble with it. One corpse could be bad luck. When bodies start piling up like rejection notices from the New Yorker, the Feds are going to ask questions no matter how clever you think your set-up is. This operation of yours is blown. Time to cut your losses.”

  “Thanks for the advice, but I’ll take my chances,” Lawrence said.

  “Bad idea,” Rep said. “Because there’s one more thing we’ve learned.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense,” Lawrence said.

  Well, Rep thought, there are bluffs and then there are REAL bluffs.

  “The Battle of Cedar Creek,” Rep said. “October 19, 1864.”

  “What?” Lawrence snapped. There was no mistaking the reaction. That one had hit a nerve.

  “The one-hundred-fortieth anniversary of the once-famous Battle of Cedar Creek will be about two weeks before a presidential election,” Rep said. “The incumbent candidate in that election will be running on what a great job he’s done stopping terrorism and keeping American safe. A major re-enactment of the battle could bring more than a thousand well-armed men within striking distance of Washington, D.C.”