by Alan Furst
“Okay” I say, “let’s go.”
’Cause the wheels are really ratcheting now and what I want is time. If this is the FBI, and it must be, that’s a long stretch, Federal time. But I’m not going to turn Villegas for them. Maybe I can give them screwed up information. Maybe I can get a little running space. In the woods on a friend’s potato farm on Long Island, although he doesn’t know it, there’s $66,000 bucks of accumulated profits buried in a potato chip can and visqueeen plastic. My nest egg. If they let me off the string for a while, and I can get there, I can blow the country and cool down. Morocco, Nepal, Afghanistan. There are places where their arm doesn’t reach if you can buy in with the local people. But first, I got to have time.
Red and Byszka exchange a look and we get up and leave the room
We walk down the hall and Red motions Genelle to come along and I nod at her and she follows quickly with Robbie. This Red looks a little saggy around the middle, maybe I can muscle him, I think. But just as we get to the door there is another one. A big mean looking fucker in a metallic blue suit and a blue tie with a horse’s head on it. He looks to be a well past fifty, with thinning gray hair cut short and little gray hairs growing out of his nose, but he’s six feet six if he’s an inch, and wide, wide at the shoulders. They take Genelle and Robbie to a blue Ford and me to a gray Ford. Red produces plastic cuffs and does my hands up behind my back, then helps me in. I can see the other one putting Genelle into his car. She’s got Robbie gathered up real good. If I get out of this I’m gonna buy him a whole freightyard of electric trains.
Red starts up the car and, driving like a civilian, cruises through the downtown streets which, even at ten thirty on a Saturday night, ain’t real lively. We leave town and that surprises me because I keep thinking we’re going to the FBI office building or something. But here we are heading out the strip in the right lane, and this car has a plain old AM car radio in it, original equipment, and don’t tell me the Federal Bureau of Investigation does that for its agents. Pretty soon we’re just about in the countryside when Red cuts the wheel hard right and we go sliding right up to the Sleep-Tite Motel, Pool and Color TV, No Vacancy. He slams on the emergency brake, leans his arm across the seat in a friendly way, realizes that I’m cuffed and can’t shake hands. “Hi,” he says, “my name is Ed Roosevelt. I’m employed by an agency of your government the name of which I don’t care to mention right now.”
I practically gag, thinking, like my father, “I didn’t think it could get worse. It got worse.” I say, as firmly as I can manage, “Take me back to that cop station and bust me for dealing grass.”
“Too late now, baby,” says he.
We split up. The ogre in the metal suit, who’s introduced as Clyde Moss, takes Genelle and Robbie into one room, and Red takes me into the adjoining one. He cuffs me hand and foot to a big, heavy chair and goes out, and I just sit quietly ’cause I can hear Moss clomping around in the next room, and pretty soon Red is back with a giant bag of deathburgers from a fast food place down the road. I know now how it feels to be an animal with a nervous zookeeper, ’cause I've been cuffed and uncuffed so many times my wrists are beginning to chafe from the damn things being on and off.
He feeds me, a bite at a time. I’m looking directly at a print of the exhausted Indian hanging over the horse’s neck, “The End of the Trail.” I know how he felt, that Indian.
“Is it alright if I call you Jim?” he says.
“Yeah. That’s okay.
“You got to understand one thing: our department, the people we work for, believe that this country isn’t gonna survive unless certain measures are taken. Now I don’t think you really believe yet that you’re gonna do what we ask you to do, but I know that that’s exactly what you’re gonna do. Now I’m a nice guy, I really am, and Clyde over there with your girlfriend is real religious y’know? Basically a very ethical guy. But we believe, because the people we work for believe, and I know you understand this, that to achieve certain goals, you do whatever has to be done. You know what that means from your Poli Sci courses in college.”
“How do you know I went to college?”
“I guessed.” And it’s hard to tell whether he’s being sarcastic and he really “knows all about me” or whether he just guessed, like the jelly beans in the jar. He goes on;
“Now the people I work for, who believe in what they are doing, they are very smart people. They’ve read everything you have and maybe more. They know about Clyde being religious and me being nice. But they have this incredible personnel department. Jesus, I don’t know how these guys do it. They find, ’cause I’ve worked with them a time or two, some of the most miserable fucking people, people who have real bad problems, kinky type people, who like doing some of the things that have to be done. We’re only human, nobody even likes these people where I work, ’cause you’re always on the edge with them. So they make a very good wage, these people do, you’d be surprised, and they mostly keep to themselves. Now you’ve seen Clyde, he’s a big strong fella, comes from a farm in Montana originally and he can make a sculpture out of a beer can with three fingers, just like that. And I don’t mean these aluminum beer cans, either. Now even Clyde, when he worked with these people, was impressed. “Mean as cougar shit and twice as nasty.” That’s what he said about them I really like that.”
“Okay, okay. So you know some terrible people.”
“It’s just I don’t want you to know them, ’cause then I’d always have to think about that. You like that girl in there and the kid. You don’t want anything to happen to them, I know you don’t. You aren’t that hard to read y’know, and I can tell you like them a whole lot.” “Will you for shit sake say what you want me to do? I got the message quite a little while ago.” But did I? I’ve been thinking CIA, of course, for a while. Who wouldn’t? But maybe they are from the Treasury Department, Secret Service. Maybe the Justice Department. Maybe special White House investigators. The DIA, though they don’t seem military. Department of Agriculture? Grass is, after all, a cultivated crop. The zap squad from the Department of Agriculture? No, that doesn’t sound right. Commerce? Labor? HEW? Bureau of Indian-fucking-Affairs? Some department nobody’s ever heard of???
The idiot light is practically on fire it’s glowing so bright, and the paranoia wheels are grinding so hard I can almost hear them. A little man inside me says: “Breathe deeply, you are an ant in a limitless universe, look through the wrong end of the telescope, stress kills,” all the things you say to yourself on an acid bummer. A long sigh slides through my nostrils and things quiet down a little in my head.
“Yep,” says Roosevelt. “I can see you’re beginning to understand me. And there isn’t any place to run. We are very very international type of people. You’re going to walk out of here if you agree to what I say. You’re going to walk right out of here with nobody around you but you aren’t going to be free again until we tell you you’re free.”
I take a long look around the room, but there’s no inspiration anywhere. The green-stamp renaissance decor just looks right back at me and says “I am America. If you fuck with America, America fucks right back with you.”
“And if I don’t agree? I go back to jail?”
“Now that you know about this, jail isn’t an alterative. And if you refuse, really refuse, jail is gonna look mighty good to you.”
“What happens?” I’m stalling.
“Well, this is my job, and I got to call people and say ‘This person won’t do what we ask of him’ and my job is to wait for them to make a decision. Now my boss, or one of them, might say ‘Ahh, what the hell, he’s a good kid, let him go, give him his pot back.’ But he is a boss and that isn’t how you get to be the boss where I work. That isn’t results. No production there. No, he’ll probably say, ‘That’s too bad. Guess I’d better call the special people and send them down there.’ And you know a funny thing?”
“What’s funny?” I manage to get out. By now I’m completely gray inside w
ith fear.
“What’s funny is that he doesn’t even know those people. Doesn’t want to know them, ’cause he has to make the telephone call.”
“Okay, okay. I’m convinced. What do you want?”
He takes a sip of Coke from a straw he’s got punched through the special hole stamped into the plastic lid. I hate people who always use things the way the manufacturer tells them. And I am beginning to hate this carrot-topped prick.
“Good. First I want you to confirm that you know Anthony Villegas.”
“Yes, I know him.”
“And he knows you.”
“Yes.”
“And he trusts you.”
“Up to a point.”
“You have been alone with him in a protected setting.
“What?”
“The two of you have been alone somewhere away from other people.”
“Once.”
“But it could happen again.”
“Maybe it could, I’m not sure . .
“It could happen again.”
“Yes, if I . . ”
“It could happen again.”
“YES, goddamit.” I know I’m not in control any more. The little people inside my head who usually help me have gone to the beach for the day, and there aren’t any lights on the dashboard at all; there isn’t even a dashboard.
“Good. We know Villegas is a dealer, that doesn’t concern us. We know Villegas is organizing the Chicanos who live in the valley, that doesn’t concern us; we know he’s using money from the dealing to hire Jew lawyers to protect these people and that doesn’t concern us. What concerns us, and I mean it really bothers us, is that he’s involved with people much heavier than he is, oh much much heavier, and they are using him for their special purposes.”
“So you want me to turn him for you. He takes a fall, goes in the slam, I go free. That’s what you want.” “No, that isn’t what we want.”
“Then what?”
“Well, you see we really aren’t permitted to operate here. Our guidelines, guidelines can be such a pain in the ass, keep us away from domestic operations. So you have to do some things for us, and if you get stopped, ’cause there’s so much enforcement around they keep tripping over each other’s feet and we can’t cool everything, then it’s just two dealers getting in each other’s way. We’re clean.”
“If you can’t cool things, how’d you get all this past Byszka?”
“Well, old buddy, don’t go whispering this around, but Byszka is my brother-in-law. He’s doin’ me a favor, ’cause he sees me as real successful and there’s maybe a little advancement in it for him. Like a new job maybe.”
Shit, I made this guy for somebody’s brother-in-law an hour ago. A few of the little men start coming back from the beach. Sunburned, but okay.
“So you don’t want him in jail. What do you want me to do?”
“We want you to kill him.”
It’s like a huge wave sweeps over me: nausea, dizziness, pain in the chest and a powerful need to take a crap. The whole room is tilted sideways. Roosevelt keeps going:
“Y’see he’s a real hard guy to get close to, to get isolated with. And we want this done quietly and we don’t want any publicity or investigations or anything. We want him dead and vanished and we don’t want any of his friends involved. We just want him gone.”
“Kill?” I say weakly.
“Aw Jim, you can do it. I’ve seen guys five times more pussy than you’ll ever be grow up to it. They have to, and they do it.”
Suddenly I’m feeling very weird indeed. This guy doesn’t know me at all. One minute he seems to and the next minute he’s way out in left field somewhere. I’m suddenly reminded of a joke: This Jewish guy is in the army and his company is in battle. He’s firing his gun up in the air and the Sergeant comes running over and says “Not there, you asshole, over there.” The Jew says “What are you? Crazy? There are people over there.” I’m not killing a bunny rabbit, much less a human person. Let him sic the blue meanies on me, I’ll hide under the bed. I’ve got fourteen driver’s licenses stashed in New York and three passports and eight birth certificates in that potato chip can with my nest egg. I’ll be so goddamn many people they won’t know where to look.
“Well,” I say, looking for an opening, wits miraculously restored, “you want him to disappear.”
“No, we want you to kill him and bring the body to us.”
“How am I gonna kill him?” Even talking this way gives me chills, but I’ve got to rip this fool off somehow.
“With this,” he says and takes a gun out of his inside pocket. “It’s a Police Special .38 calibre revolver with six bullets in it. It’s a very dependable, very untraceable weapon. You are going to use it from less than six feet away and you are going to use it six times and on that sixth time he’s going to be lying on the ground and you are going to put number six right in his brain by inserting the muzzle of the gun in the hole in his ear.”
“Can’t I get a sniper rifle with a scope? One that goes in an attache case?”
“Jim, Jim, you see too many movies. No, you are going to get next to Anthony Villegas somewhere where nobody will see and nobody will hear and you are going to shoot him to death with this pistol.” He puts it on the table next to him.
“How long do I have?”
“As soon as possible.”
“I have to set up a meet and make sure everything is cool; better say two weeks.”
“We’ll be around during that time. You won’t see us, but we’ll be there.”
“How do I know you won’t bag me for murder?” “You don’t.”
“Fuck it then.”
“We don’t want you in jail. We don’t want you talking to people. We want you out of the country. We’ve arranged a neat little job for you as an administrative assistant in an oil company in Mozambique.”
Sure, I think. It happened to Jerome Johnson, the guy who shot Joe Colombo at the Italian-American Day Ralley. It happened to Lee Oswald. Set up your target and set up the assassin immediately afterwards. Mozambique my ass.
“What about the girl and the kid?”
“Their destiny and yours, baby,” and he holds up two fingers tight together.
“Okay.”
“We’re all agreed then.”
“Yes.”
“Here’s a number.” He hands me a piece of paper with a number typed on it. “When you do the job, put the body in the car, drive to a phone and call this number. Somebody will tell you what to do.” I stuff the paper in my pocket without looking at it. “I’m going to leave this gun on the table. It’s loaded. When you’re ready to use it, just pull this little thing here back, three clicks, see that?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Clyde and I are going to walk out to our cars. We are going to have the girl and kid with us. We’re going to drop them off a block away just so you keep that gun pointed where it belongs until we leave.” He unsnaps the cuffs and puts them in his side pocket. I rub my wrists. Suddenly, he smiles his beautiful smile and sticks out his hand: it’s freckled on the back among the little red hairs: “Kid, it’s been good talking with you.” I am shaking his hand, though I can hardly feel anything with mine. “I won’t ever see you again. Please don’t have too many hard feelings about this. It’s my job, and business is business and I know you understand that.”
“Yeah,” I say vaguely, and he walks quickly out the door, slamming it behind him. “Business is business, you’re goddamn right” I say out loud, racing to the window. I push the curtain aside a hair and thank somebody or other that his car is at an angle where I can see it. Virginia BGS-244. I hear the cars starting up as I run over to the California Modeme night table and start searching frantically for a pencil. I find one next to the Bible and start, out of habit, patting my pockets where I feel the slip of paper he’s given me. Out it comes and I carefully print the plate number on the blank side. Then I turn it over. And when I turn it over I sit down on the edg
e of the bed real fast.
’Cause it’s the number of my little old lady in Dayton, Ohio.
"I’d rather light a candle and curse the darkness.”
Roger Levin
I don’t live anywhere.
No address, no place to find me, no knocks on the door in the middle of the night—more important, no thinking about knocks on the door in the middle of the night.
In a general sort of way, several kinds of police know that someone named Roger Levin deals dope in the East under a whole gang of names. This is a cost of doing business. A few times my parents have been visited by cops. They really don’t know where I am, so they don’t have to lie. We aren’t estranged. I see them about four times a year, calling them at friends’ houses (their phone might be tapped) on Saturday night. I just check with baby-sitters until I find whose house the gang is gathered at, call them there, and ask them to meet me for week ends in the Berkshires or Las Vegas or somewhere. We all stay at a hotel when they come and I pay for everything except their tickets to wherever it is we get together. They know I’m an outlaw of some sort, but I think my father must be hip to things, ’cause he’s very indirectly told me about his own problems: IRS, unions, political contributions to both parties, payroll taxes, a little bit of this with the books, and a little bit of that. He considers us both self-employed businessmen. So when one of my customers gets picked up or some stoolie is trying to play past a beef and whispers my name in somebody’s ear, all the police get is shrugs from my father. They think the shrugs mean “Ah the younger generation, where did they go wrong?” but I know they mean “Officer, who the fuck are you to me that I should tell you anything about my family?”
So I live here and there. Friends’ apartments, couples’ summer houses, girls’ places. And for their favors, for holding whatever permanent crap I might want to acquire and leave some place, I keep them in beautiful dope. It works out. But when I really have a problem to think out, or want to be alone, I always call Henrietta. Henrietta runs an agency that specializes in subletting nice furnished apartments to corporate types that the company brings into NYC for six months or something. It cost about $150 a week but it beats motels solid.