by R.J. Ellory
“Federal authority supersedes any authority you might have, Sheriff Rourke.”
Rourke smiled. “Oh, I am flattered that you bothered to find out my name before you got here, sir. That’s much appreciated. Wouldn’t like to think I was just a nobody in the grand scheme of things you got all worked out here.” Rourke tightened his grip on the gun. He moved forward and nodded in acknowledgment as he passed Travis. “And as far as federal superseding local, I have no argument with that, sir, but I am sure that nowhere in your federal books does it say that your authority supersedes the law itself.”
“You know nothing—”
“I reckon I know enough, sir.”
“And what are you going to do, eh Sheriff? Arrest us?”
“I may just do that, sir.”
“And for what?”
“Some of those things that Mr. Travis here has been talking about. That would be a good start. Murder more than likely. If not directly, then at least accomplice. Conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding evidence, illegal and unauthorized removal of evidence, grievous assault against Mr. Slate, and then we’ll add a few charges of disturbing the peace for good measure, just so you understand that your coming down here and upsetting my town is not appreciated.”
“You are an idiot, Sheriff.”
“I may be an idiot, sir, but I am still sheriff and I still have a gun, and unless you back off right now, I will put a hole through your chest, so help me God.”
Warren looked at Greene, at Haynes, then at Travis.
“Time to leave us be,” Travis said. “Walk away, take Gale and Bishop and all the rest of them with you. File whatever report you want to file, but leave us be. This is over, Mr. Warren, and if you ever consider pursuing this, the entire town of Seneca Falls will stand and give evidence against you. You know what you did; we know it too, and there are just too many people now, too many voices, and we are not going to be silent.”
“This does not end here, Travis. You are no longer a federal agent. I have the authority to strip you of your rank, your position, your job. It’s all finished for you, you understand?”
“We will have to agree to differ, Mr. Warren. As far as I am concerned, it has only just begun. And I am sure that Mr. Hoover and Mr. Doyle are—”
As if cued, the rear door of the Continental opened and Warren turned to see Doyle step out. His expression was implacable. He merely nodded at Warren.
Warren hesitated for a second, no more, and then he hurried back to the car.
Doyle joined Travis and the others. He acknowledged Rourke and Lester McCaffrey, Larry Youngman and Jack Farley.
“What’s happening?” Travis asked.
Doyle smiled and shook his head.
Warren leaned in through the rear door of the vehicle. He was there no more than a minute, and then he returned to where Doyle and Travis stood with the others.
Warren glared at Doyle, at Travis, and then he held out his hand.
“Your ID, Mr. Travis,” he said calmly. “And your sidearm.”
Travis hesitated.
“Give them to him,” Doyle said.
Travis withdrew his wallet and handed it over. He also gave Warren his gun.
Warren paused for just a second, and then he told Bishop, Carvahlo, and Erickson that they were leaving.
Bishop looked as if there was something he wished to say, but Warren raised his hand to silence him.
“Now, Agent Bishop,” he said matter-of-factly.
Warren looked at Doyle once more, and there was such resentment and hostility in that expression it was almost tangible.
“Always a pleasure, Bradley,” Doyle said. “Safe journey, eh?”
Warren sneered and then headed to the car.
The assembled crowd in the marquee—Travis, Doyle, Oscar Haynes and Chester Greene, Sheriff Rourke, both Laura and Lester McCaffrey, Larry Youngman and Jack Farley—stood there in silence until the convoy of vehicles had disappeared along the highway.
Shortly thereafter, the sound of engines faded into silence, and still no one said a word.
51
Valeria appeared, in her hands a blood-soaked cloth.
“How is Slate?” Doyle asked.
“He’ll live.”
“Good,” he said.
“And they have gone?”
“Yes, they’ve gone,” Doyle replied, a sardonic smile on his face.
“Are we good?”
“We’re good.”
She leaned up and kissed him, and then she turned to the assembled crowd and told them that they were all leaving, that Doyle needed to speak to Travis alone.
No one said a word to Travis. Some did not even look at him, save Laura, who approached him, touched his hand, and then left quickly with her brother.
In less than a minute, the marquee was empty but for Travis and Doyle.
Doyle crossed to one of the tables and sat down.
Travis took a seat facing him. “That was Hoover,” he said.
Doyle smiled. “My old friend, John Edgar. Indeed it was.”
“And you spoke with him and he went away.”
“He did, and he took his own little carnival with him.”
“What did you say to him? What do you have on him?”
“Me? What do I have on him?” Doyle shook his head. “I have nothing on him, Michael. Nothing I could prove, nothing that isn’t already suspected, nothing that hasn’t been talked about many times before.”
“I don’t understand… Then how did you make him go away?”
“Sometimes things happen simply because you believe they will.”
“You wished him away?”
Doyle laughed. “Oh, I’m not talking about what I believe, Michael. I’m talking about what our friend Mr. Hoover believes.”
“But you must have done something. You must have said something. If he is so afraid of what you can expose about him, then why didn’t he kill you a long time ago?”
“Because I am protected, just as I told you before,” Doyle said, and touched—once again—the small badge on his lapel.
“Do you know how many Freemasons were murdered during the Holocaust, Michael?”
“I didn’t,” Travis said. “I spoke to someone about your badge. Someone who told me that the Freemasons had been persecuted, but she didn’t tell me about their being murdered.”
“Well, they were. They say that as many as a quarter of a million were killed in the concentration camps. Think about it… the Freemasons, the Masons of the Temple of Solomon. They were a Jewish organization in the beginning. And good people, so many of them, and yet—as with all organizations—there are those who seek to use that authority for their own ends, and not all of them good. My friend John Edgar—let’s say my once-friend John Edgar—was a man who took a different route.”
“The last years of the war,” Travis said.
“The last years of the war, absolutely,” Doyle said. “Larouche, Lepage, the French-Canadian Resistance network. The German anti-Nazi movement. British military intelligence, the OSS under Bill Sullivan… what were we doing out there? We were bringing the engineers and doctors, the scientists, the bureaucrats and ambassadors, the teachers and judges and anyone else who might have a place in rebuilding the new Germany out of there before the Nazis rounded them up and killed them. And they were Freemasons, so many of them, and we saved thousands of lives, and for that, among other things, I earned a place of favor with those who our Man of the Year, Mr. Hoover, wants so much to impress and please. Like I told you before, even men like Hoover and Dulles have those before whom they kneel. J. Edgar Hoover cannot kill me, Michael. He would not dare.”
“And Varga?”
“Varga was a ploy. Somewhere in amidst all of Hoover’s paranoid delusions and imaginings he thought he could perha
ps sully my reputation, and thus be forgiven if he dealt with me the way he wanted to. If he could prove I was a murderer, then perhaps he would be granted a pardon for making me disappear. He wanted me gone, Michael, has wanted me gone ever since I walked away from Unit X and everything they were doing. I am you so many years ago. That’s all there is to it.”
“And Varga was Hungarian? He was Fekete Kutya?”
“Andris Varga was a hired gun, a paid killer, and he upset enough influential people in Hungary to make his position there untenable. He got out of Hungary, arrived in New York, was arrested in ’54, and then he went back to Budapest in ’56 to take care of some things that would serve US interests.”
Doyle leaned forward. “I’ll tell you something curious about Hungary. Up until August of 1956, the US ambassador was a man called Christian Ravndal. He knew that Hungary needed help. He knew they wanted US credit and imports. They needed American wheat and cotton. Ravndal appealed to Eisenhower. Hungary was willing to lift travel restrictions, to make concessions, to be more accommodating to the United States. The Hungarian Ministry of Internal Affairs got wind of this and slowed everything down to appease the Soviets. Eisenhower took complete advantage of it by doing nothing at all. Eisenhower recalled Ravndal and sent in his place a man by the name of Edward Tailes. Tailes arrived in Budapest on November the second, just forty-eight hours before Soviet tanks rolled into the city to crush the revolution. Tailes was there to make sure that Hungary failed in its attempt to overturn Soviet rule. Why? Because it would bolster the growing sense of paranoia about Communism, the international condemnation of Soviet political occupation of Eastern European countries. And Tailes? He was gone just three months later, in February of 1957.”
“And Varga was there with Tailes?”
“Yes, I’m sure he was, though I doubt there’s any record of it. Tailes needed someone, maybe even more than one, and they would have gone as native Hungarians, able to take care of cleanup operations, able to infiltrate anti-Soviet resistance units in Budapest, whatever was needed to undermine that revolution. The Americans wanted the world to hate the Communists, to fear the possibility of Communist invasion in South America, Southeast Asia, Europe, even Britain. In that way, America could continue to do whatever it wished in the name of fighting Communism. Even Joe McCarthy has ingratiated himself into the favors of the Kennedy family and the Catholic majority, and the witch hunt goes on through every strata and level of society. They have everyone looking under their beds for Commies.”
“And when Varga came back, they needed to make sure he never spoke of it.”
“Of course, just as they need to make sure that a thousand other people never speak of a thousand other things.”
“But what about Hoover himself? You know something about him, don’t you? Something important—”
“No more than many other people, Michael, but I was part of Unit X because of what I could read and understand about men, you see? What Hoover thinks we know and what we actually know don’t even have to be the same thing for Hoover’s paranoia to be fed. Like why was a birth certificate not filed until after the death of both his mother and his father? You know, Hoover was forty-three years of age before he was even registered as having been born. And why did that birth certificate say he was born in January of 1895 in Washington D.C. when his baptismal record states he was born in June? And who were J. Edgar’s parents? I mean, who were they really? His mother, Anna Marie Scheitlin, the niece of the US Swiss Honorary Consul, his father one Dickerson Hoover of Washington D.C., or was he really the son of Ivery Hoover, descendant of the Pike County, Mississippi, Hoovers, themselves no more than plantation slaves? There are many who say that Hoover was actually born in New Orleans, and then he was taken to D.C. to be raised by Dickerson Hoover and his wife, that he even had a stepbrother. And if that’s the case, and he was the son of Ivery Hoover, then his paternal grandmother was instrumental in establishing an Underground Railroad movement that integrated light-skinned blacks into white society after the Civil War. And there we have J. Edgar, part of the Kappa Alpha Order at George Washington University. And his mother, if this Anna Marie Scheitlin was in fact his mother, was an honorary guardian of that fraternity, well known as a college auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan. And how did Hoover avoid conscription in the First War? He was made a clerk at the Justice Department under John Lord O’Brian, special assistant to the attorney general for war work. And who was O’Brian? Mentor and law partner to Bill Donovan, head of the OSS. It becomes even more complex the deeper you go, but the simple fact is that Woodrow Wilson reinstituted segregation throughout the entirety of the federal service network, and had anyone taken the time to dig a little into John Edgar’s past, well, there would have been no place for him in the Justice Department, and he would never have been appointed to the Bureau of Investigation, and he would never have been permitted entry to the Freemasons, for one condition of membership is that you are freeborn, neither a slave nor a descendant of slaves.”
Doyle looked away for a moment, and then he smiled sardonically. “The truth of who you are is in your blood, right? You can never escape your history, and your past will always find you.”
“He has given you power that you don’t have,” Travis said.
“He has given a great many people power they do not have, and never will,” Doyle replied. “Your own fears are the only thing that ever give people power over you, and Hoover has more than all of us combined.”
“And what you are saying is true, about Hoover’s ancestors? He wasn’t the son of Dickerson Hoover and this Scheitlin woman?”
“Hoover knows the truth, Tolson too, I’m sure. It is Hoover’s fear that we know more than we do that builds a cage of shadows around him.”
“And he cannot risk harming you because of what you did in the war, the fact that there are those above him who won’t sanction it?”
Doyle did not reply. He merely looked at Travis, a half smile on his lips.
“Something else,” Travis said. “There is some other reason, isn’t there?”
“A man such as this sees danger when there is none. He sees rumors and hearsay as the worst kind of threat, Michael. Fear is strong and pervasive. It possesses the power to override anything so simple as the truth. Why do you think he has spent all these years amassing so much evidence of others’ wrongdoing? Offense is the best form of defense. He was a lawyer, first and foremost, and that is one of the oldest adages in the book. And a man like that does all he can to surround himself with men of like minds, and if he cannot find them, then he tries to make them.”
Doyle sighed and shook his head. “No, our friend Mr. Hoover has nothing to worry about but his own shadow. As is the case with most men.”
“And that includes me,” Travis said. “As you said, a man cannot escape his own past.”
“And sometimes a man can find out that his past was not what he believed it to be.”
Doyle took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it.
Travis smiled ruefully. “Hell of a thing, Rourke and the others showing up when they did. Might not be so lucky next time.”
“You still believe in luck, Michael?”
Travis didn’t answer the question, but said, “So, what do you think made them do that? Why did they rally together like that? They didn’t owe you that, did they?”
“They didn’t, no.”
There was silence for a moment, and then Travis said, “Did you make them come and help us?”
Doyle didn’t reply.
“Did you do that, Edgar?”
“Sometimes people do things that you can’t so easily explain,” Doyle said. “Like getting up in the middle of the night and typing words that they don’t even remember they knew.”
Travis’s eyes widened.
“And before you ask, I had nothing to do with that one.”
“Really?”
&nb
sp; “Really. The subconscious can be a very powerful thing, Michael. All of this, everything we experience.” Doyle smiled ruefully. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
“Thoreau,” Michael said.
“You know Thoreau?” Doyle asked.
“Not personally, no.”
“I am suitably impressed.”
“That I can read?”
Doyle laughed. “That you read something so subversive and antiestablishment.”
“I read everything I could get my hands on at one time, and then time seemed to run away with itself.”
“Then we shall chase it down and capture it once more.”
“And now?” Travis asked.
“I will do what I always do,” Doyle said. “I will keep on moving. More important, I feel sure that you will not be welcome in Kansas. I think you might just be a little unemployed, eh?”
“Yes,” Travis said. “Unemployed and probably unemployable.”
“So what will you do? I would ask you to come with us, but there’s nothing you can do, and I don’t have the time to teach you card tricks and fire-breathing. Besides, I don’t think the life of a gypsy is one that would suit you.”
Travis laughed, just briefly, and then the expression on his face was strangely nostalgic.
“There’s somewhere I need to go,” he said, “and I need to get back to Olathe as well. I cannot stay in the apartment now, and there’s something I have to collect from there.”
“And what would that be, Michael?”
“A letter.”
“Just a letter?”
“I don’t think it’s just a letter, no. It’s something that I have not faced, something I have not dealt with for many years, and if I am starting my life again, then I need to face it.”