by Bill Granger
But there was only the single sheet of paper.
It was standard 16-pound typing paper, white, 8½ by 11 inches.
In ink, at the top, was written a single word in block letters, as though Hanley decided on the word as a title for an essay. (He could not be sure it was Hanley’s handwriting; he had never seen it.)
NUTCRACKER
Below the single word were other words, lined up neatly flush left but in a slightly smaller handwriting:
January
New Moon
Equinox
June
August
Vernal
Winter
And below that, in a handwriting that might have been added later:
November?
The words fell out into his mind, formed patterns like falling leaves, fell wildly against the void of blackness. He waited for thought. He waited for the meaning of the words. He waited calmly in the light of a single lamp in the apartment. And after a time, he folded the paper, put it in his jacket. He turned out the lamp, closed the door, and left the building.
There were two approaches. They had been taught this at the training school in Maryland where he became an agent a long time before. The first approach is always best: To effect some sort of bluff of officialdom when approaching another for information. Most people are intimidated by those who appear to be officials or in charge, even if they are actually trained in the same business. No one wants unnecessary trouble.
The approach wasn’t going to work.
The young man in steel-rimmed glasses had a wise, mocking look to him and Devereaux waited while he read through the bona fides Devereaux had purchased in London. He wasn’t going to buy any of it.
The ambulance garage was on Sixth Street N.E., in a shabby section of Washington just east of Union Station. The garage was made of brick. It was one story high and the few windows carried bars on them. The windows were darkened by soot. The entrance of the garage was barred by a large Doberman pinscher, who set up a racket when Devereaux entered.
The man in the steel-rimmed glasses was not alone. He wore a white uniform and his shirt was open enough to reveal most of a pale, muscular chest. He had the easy grace of an athlete as he walked across the oil-stained floor. Devereaux waited in front of the barking dog.
“Come on, Tiger,” the young man said at last, waiting until the last moment to restrain the dog. “Go on over there, Tiger.”
Devereaux said who he was and why he had come. The young man looked at the papers and looked at Devereaux and looked at the dog. The second man, larger and softer, was in a sort of office at the back of the garage. There were sixteen bays in the garage, four occupied by ambulances, three by private cars, and one by a brand-new black Cadillac hearse.
“For the ones you don’t get to the hospital,” Devereaux said.
The young man looked up, annoyed, turned, saw the point of the joke. He grinned without pleasure. “Yeah. Something like that. You don’t leave anyone in the place where he dies.”
Devereaux was thinking about the dog. It was a shame. Because the kid wasn’t going to buy it the easy way. And Devereaux didn’t have all that much time.
Devereaux shifted on his feet and the dog sensed the shift and gurgled a growl. But the young man kept reading.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “So what do you want?”
“I want to see some of your records over the past two months. Delivery schedules, you might say.”
“I’m not sure I can do that,” the young man said.
“What’s your name?”
“Sellers,” he said. “What’s your name?”
Cocky.
“It’s on my identification.”
“I never heard of identification like this.”
“Maybe you’ve never had an insurance inspector come around before.”
“We have insurance guys—”
“We’re the guys who check up on insurance guys.” The line had worked in the apartment, of course, because the people there wanted to believe in him. But Sellers knew. And it was too bad.
“Come on back to the office,” said Sellers. “Let’s talk to Jerry.” Devereaux had not expected that.
It was late afternoon. Sunlight tried to fight its way through the dark windows but it was a losing battle. Caged lights hanging from the ceiling provided the only illumination.
The office was three stairs up at the back of the garage.
The walls were bright yellow and covered with graffiti and calendars. Miss National Hardware Convention held a wrench in one hand and showed her bottom.
The desks were butted into one wall and littered with bits of paper. There was grease on the chairs. Jerry was taller than Devereaux but his eyes looked a shade slower.
And the dog was outside. That was just as well. Not that it would have mattered.
Devereaux figured they would have made a call by now.
He walked into the room ahead of Sellers and when Sellers was nearly through the door, Devereaux turned suddenly and flung him at the second man.
But Sellers was braced. He only stumbled. Jerry pulled out a pistol.
Just a shade slow in the eyes.
Devereaux fired up and the bullet caught him flat in the throat. It was a small-caliber pistol—the Colt Python .357 Magnum was in the custody of the Swiss army captain named Boll—but it was good enough.
The dog was barking like mad and flinging itself against the door.
Sellers was deafened by the explosion. He turned and stared at Devereaux. His blue eyes were very wide. Jerry slid down the wall.
“I don’t have any time,” Devereaux said.
“We don’t keep the records here.”
“Sure you do.”
“I’m telling you—”
“When you do a job for an agency, you keep one copy of the records.” It was said like a dead man was not in the same room.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Devereaux said, “Take off your glasses.”
Sellers removed his wire-rims carefully.
“Give them to me.”
Sellers handed them to Devereaux, who stood with the pistol in hand.
Devereaux dropped them. He stepped on them and broke them.
“Glass,” Devereaux said. “I thought everyone used plastic.”
“I’ve got another pair,” Sellers said. He almost smirked. He was tough enough, Devereaux thought. No one was tough enough to stand up forever but the tough ones could wait you out. Especially if they had made a phone call and they were waiting for reinforcements.
Devereaux put the pistol in his pocket. There just wasn’t enough time.
“Come on,” he said.
“Tiger is waiting,” Sellers said.
“And I don’t want to kill the dog,” Devereaux said. “You see the way it is.”
The voice was reasoned and Sellers saw the way it was. He’d get this guy, there was no question of that. But there had to be a little room to do it. And the guy sure had dropped Jerry. Jesus Christ, he’d dropped Jerry without even thinking about it.
There are slums in Washington very nearly as bad as those in cities like New York or Chicago. They are the best places in the country to conduct business without interference from people in authority.
Or people who might be looking for you.
It is true that most urban slums are inhabited by blacks and that the presence of two white men—like the two white men who now entered the house on Eleventh Street N.E.—might appear odd to the neighbors. But one of the men—the man with the graying hair and the hard face—that man had already turned the right color. He was green. He had green and it came up front. And he was Syndicate, there was no doubt about that. You can tell the Syndicate because those boys look right through the back of your head. So don’t mess with the man—this was the advice of Junius Falkner to his nephew—don’t mess with the man, let him have the room he wants, just you go ’bout your business and you sa
y none to him. Even if the other white man was blindfolded.
It was not what Sellers had expected at all.
Devereaux tore off the blindfold. The room was illuminated by three lamps fed off a single outlet. The single outlet looked like an octopus with streams of wires running from the core. There was a television set and a linoleum floor and a single bed with a swayback mattress covered with dirty sheets. There was a second mattress on the linoleum itself. There was a wooden table, painted green, and three chairs. Rooms like this always have three chairs. The single window was bolted with burglar bars and there were roaches above the sink on the far wall. The far wall was only eleven feet from the entry door.
The room smelled of neglect, dirt, and fear.
Sellers thought, for the first time, that the fear might be coming from him.
The gray man indicated one of the straight chairs. Sellers sat down. He was still blinded. He blinked and his eyes teared.
“I suppose you can’t see very well. Do you want me to describe the room?”
Devereaux’s voice was flat but it was not heavy. It was the voice of a doctor asking a patient how he felt and not really caring because the doctor already knew the diagnosis.
“Where the hell are we?”
“Where people don’t look for other people.”
“But we’re still in the District?”
“Perhaps.”
“Man, you made me ride around in a trunk. That’s shit, you know, man?”
“Sellers. What do you do?”
“I drive an ambulance.”
“That isn’t what I asked you.”
“I drive an ambulance.”
Devereaux hit him very hard, probably as hard as he had been struck by Captain Boll on that warm spring morning in the Lausanne police station. The difference was that Devereaux had expected the blow; the room was bright; Devereaux knew where he stood with Boll… there were so many differences. And this blow came down hard on the bridge of Sellers’ nose and broke it. They both heard the crack.
Sellers made a fuss. The blood broke down both nostrils and he tasted his own blood and his eyes teared because of the pain. He held his face, and when he tried to get up Devereaux shoved him back down on the chair at the table. He finally began to sob. When you taste your own blood, the reality of the situation penetrates.
Devereaux waited without a word for a long time. Sellers was such a small part of whatever it was that was happening. He was the corner of a package that had come unraveled and had to be worked loose before you could get to the rest of the wrapping.
Devereaux’s code name had been the last name on the sheet of paper in Hanley’s desk. Why the question mark? And what did the other names mean? They were obviously the names of other R Section agents—but why were they listed together? And what was Nutcracker?
The questions nagged while he waited for Sellers to think through the pain. The questions made Devereaux impatient.
He pulled Sellers’ oily black hair up until Sellers almost had to rise out of the chair.
“Oh, Christ,” he screamed.
And Devereaux banged his face on the edge of the table again, breaking again that which had already been broken.
Sellers passed out.
When he awoke, he was on the floor, bathed in blood, and the swimming image of the other man remained. It was as horrible as the endless nightmare he had once floated through during a long and terrible acid trip.
“All right,” he said. “Jesus, man, don’t do that again, I can’t even breathe, I’m breathing my own blood.”
“Who do you work for? What do you do?” It was the quiet voice.
“I work for Mr. Ivers. I swear to God about that. I just work for a guy named Ivers who comes around every day and he tells me what to do. Sometimes it’s a straight pickup. You know, an old lady in a nursing home finally stops straining the family budget and we pick her up—old ladies are light, you know, like birds—and we take them to the funeral home. Sometimes we do funeral work. You know, a pinch. All over the place.”
“This isn’t getting me anywhere,” Devereaux said. His voice was very soft and it frightened Sellers to hear it.
“All right. All right, man, lay off, will you? Sometimes. Sometimes we get a pickup order.”
“What’s a pickup order?”
“Special stuff. It’s a government order. Got stamps on it. You know, all that tiny print and them pictures of eagles on them.”
“Where do they come from?”
“Orders from all over. Orders from Defense, orders from Treasury. You’d be surprised.”
“And what are the orders?”
“Man, I don’t want to get in trouble, you know?”
Devereaux said, “If you tell me everything I want to know, and it’s the truth, then I won’t kill you. If you don’t tell me everything, or you try to lie to me, then I will kill you but it will take a long time. And in the end, you’ll still tell me everything I want to know.”
“Who are you, man?” Sellers was sniffling because of the blood and the fluids in his mouth and nose. His sinuses hurt; that was the least of it.
“The last man you ever wanted to see,” Devereaux said.
They waited. The building was full of sounds. There were children running in the halls, shouting and threatening; there were television sets full of canned laughter.
“We get pickup orders. They use our service. We take them where we’re supposed to take them.”
“Where’s that?”
“Couple of places. There’s a place in Virginia, down near Roanoke, called the U.S. Center for Disease Isolation Control and Rehabilitation. That’s for ones that got contagious diseases, you know. The ones you don’t send to Atlanta. We got to wear masks and rubber gloves when we handle them. We don’t get many of them but I don’t like those cases.”
“And who are these people?”
“I don’t know.”
They waited.
“I really swear to God I don’t know. I mean, I got guesses, but I don’t know.”
“Go ahead and guess.”
“Man, it’s plain, isn’t it? They fucked up with the government, man, didn’t they? You got to get rid of people sometimes. I mean, nobody says that to me but what the fuck do you think it would be about? You gotta be a genius to see that or what?”
Silence. This time the waiting was exhausted. There was no menace to it.
“Tell me about the other places,” Devereaux said. In another part of the building, someone was listening to a very loud rendition of The Cosby Show. The children were laughing. A warm spring night in the capital of the United States.
“St. Catherine’s. That’s out beyond Hancock in Maryland? You know where—”
But Devereaux knew suddenly. He was listening but he knew. The R Section had its training base in the rugged mountains of western Maryland, the same line of Appalachians that ran down from Pennsylvania and the deep mining valleys, down through the panhandle, down into Virginia and North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. He had heard vague rumors then about government contracts with various hospitals, to take care of mentally unhinged agents. And now, their directors.
Places that were secure.
Places that were under control.
Hanley was a director.
There are no spies. Hanley’s words suddenly surged into consciousness from wherever they had been buried and floated like a leaf.
“You went to a building about five or six weeks ago. It was in northwest Washington. There was a pickup. A man about fifty-five or sixty, man was bald, had big eyes. A man with blue eyes.” He began the careful description of Hanley, creating the photograph from memory.
Sellers waited again. “Is that what this is about?”
“Yes,” Devereaux said.
“This is about that one old man?”
“Who gave the order? And where did it come from?”
“Mr. Ivers. Like always.”
“Where did it come from?”
/>
“I don’t remember that.”
“You see. That’s where you fail me. You fail to tell me exactly what I want to know.”
He saw the other man rise. He felt the pressure of Devereaux’s foot on his left hand.
“No, man,” Sellers said.
“Where did it come from?”
“All right. Let me think. Just give me a damned minute, will you? Let me think about it.”
He closed his eyes and tried to see the order.
He opened his eyes.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” Devereaux repeated.
“I didn’t remember because I never heard of it before. Is that okay?”
“All right.”
“Department of Agriculture,” said Sellers. “Isn’t that a kick? How the hell does the Department of Agriculture have any secrets? Can you figure that out for me?”
“What section in the Department of Agriculture?”
“Man, gimme a break. I don’t read the whole damned thing. It goes on for pages. You know, name and judgment and all that jazz. I just look at the place I’m supposed to take him and if I’m gonna need to use restraints. We had to use restraints.”
“I suppose you did,” Devereaux said. It was broken. At least the part of it that would involve Sellers. The problem was what to do with Sellers.
Sellers lay on the floor, blinded and gagging on his own blood. He never realized that Devereaux was deciding his life in that moment of silence. Sellers thought it had all been settled.
Devereaux counted on his own survival—alone—once. And there was now that unfinished conversation in mind with Rita Macklin. She would say:
And you want to go back to that?
And he would say:
I protect myself. I make decisions for my own survival.
And she would say:
The good agent. (He knew her tone of voice.) Well, maybe it’s not good enough for me. No, not good enough at all.