The Zurich Numbers

by Bill Granger

  “Melvina, I’m not kidding. Not now. They’ve been after me for a year. If they want me that badly, they’ll have me. We’ll trade a few volleys. They’ll get me, we’ll get one of theirs. It’s a trade-off.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “Just the other side. I told you.”

  “I won’t let them kill you.”

  Devereaux turned then and stared at her. “Why, Melvina? Why does it make any difference?”

  She walked across the darkened front room. She spoke across the years. “Because it does, Red. It matters to me, it always did. I loved you, even if you never saw it. I loved you. I love you now. I’d give up my life for you. Anyone’s life. You matter, not me.”

  Devereaux didn’t speak. He kept staring out the window.

  For a moment, she thought she saw something in the hardness in his face, just a momentary thaw.

  “I’m sorry, Melvina.”

  What did it mean? Had he ever said it before? Why now?

  It didn’t matter. He turned away from her, back to the window.

  “Peter. You’ve got to get Teresa out of here. Before morning. I’ll leave the car in the alley. Just dump it off at the O’Hare lot when you’re done with it; they’ll find it eventually.”

  “I ain’t going nowhere.”

  “Tell him, Melvina.”

  “Peter,” she began.

  “There’s a place in Los Angeles. She’ll be safe. Stay with her two days, I’ll have arrangements ready by then.”

  “I can’t leave—”

  “Melvina is going to have to take her chances today. Someone will be here before night, Melvina. Someone I knew a long time ago.”

  “Not you, Red.”

  “No. I’m dead. I have to go away from here.”

  “Like the cat we had. It went away when it was sick. You found it.”

  “I told you that. I never found it. I just knew it was dying, it had to die. You couldn’t have stood not knowing.” Devereaux’s voice was low, even. “You always thought your projects had to be successes. But there aren’t any. You just try. You tried, Melvina.”

  “No. I won’t accept that.”

  He smiled thinly in the shadows. “You insist on there being more. But there isn’t more, Melvina.”

  “What if they come—”

  “Don’t answer the door. Call the police. I’ll send someone as soon as possible. He’ll call you, he’ll describe himself. Then he’ll come. You can trust him.”

  “Who will it be?”

  “I don’t know. It’s an arrangement I’ll have to make. You’ll be alone until then.”

  “I could call Monsignor O’Neill.”

  “Don’t involve him. This isn’t one of your games with him.”

  “All right, Red.”

  “I need money,” Peter said.

  “Give him money, Melvina.”

  “All right,” the old woman said. “You? Do you need anything?”

  He turned again away from the window. “I hated you for a long time. But that was over a long time ago, too.”

  “I know. It broke my heart,” she said.

  He was silent a moment. “And mine.”

  “Poor little Red.”

  “Not anymore. I’ll be all right. Until I work everything out. Then they can have me.”

  “No.”

  Her voice was so sharp they both stared at her. “Don’t give up like that.”

  “I’m tired, Melvina. The odds catch up with you.”

  “No,” she said. But could think of nothing more to say.

  Gleason was snoring. Frankfurter could barely keep his eyes open. It was nearly four in the morning and they had been watching the house since midnight after a hasty flight out to Chicago from Washington.

  Frankfurter nudged the other man.

  Gleason farted in his sleep. The smell filled the car. This time, Frankfurter hit him sharply in the side.

  “Jesus Christ,” Gleason said, suddenly bolt upright.

  “You’re stinking up the car.”

  “Oh. Jesus Christ, you didn’t have to do that. I didn’t even know I was farting.”

  “Christ. I gotta open a window.”

  “It’s freezing. We got the wrong clothes. How do people stand living out here?”

  “I dunno. A fucking nigger neighborhood, too. This gets weirder. The Polack broad drove up in the cab? Maybe they got a sex scene going on in the house.”

  “This is the most fucked-up assignment I ever been on. We tumble to that Russian in the apartment building in Bethesda, the guy is doing exactly what we’re doing, and we want to move in on him and they send us out here. What the fuck is going on? You tell me.”

  “All I know is that I’m getting it right up to here. If our friend from Section walked out of that house right now, which wouldn’t surprise me, I think I’d just blow the son of a bitch away.”

  “You know what I was dreaming about?”

  “No.”

  “A hamburger.”

  “Where’s the beef? Where’s the beef?”

  “That breaks me up. That old broad. That breaks me up. Where’s the beef?”

  “You’re unfuckingbelievable, you know that? Dreaming about a hamburger.”

  “I was dreaming about eating it. Maybe that’s why I farted.”

  “You farted because you ate that fucking awful food on the plane.”

  “I farted because I ate that fucking chili when we were coming out here. I like chili but it don’t like me,” Gleason said. “It’s getting cold.”

  “I’ll roll up the window. Just don’t do that to me again. You gotta fart, get outta the car.”

  “I said I couldn’t help it. I was sleeping, for Christ’s sake.”

  Frankfurter did not notice Devereaux until he saw the pistol pointed at his head. It was between his eyes. He felt the steel against the skin of his skull.

  Devereaux’s face was very near. The muzzle of the .357 Colt Python short-barrel was nearer.

  “There wasn’t supposed to be anything like this,” said Gleason. “Nobody said nothing about this.”

  “Who are you clowns?” Devereaux said.

  “Same side, buddy.”

  “You know that, huh? You know me?”

  “Yeah. We been looking for you.”

  “Is that right?”

  “NSA,” Gleason said.

  “Is that right?”

  “That is fucking right,” Gleason said.

  “Don’t show me identification. I might kill you. I mean, thinking you might have a piece under your coat.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Frankfurter said. He had two kids. He thought of them for a moment. “We are the government.”

  “So am I. So why are you tailing me?”

  “We’re—” Frankfurter began.

  Devereaux broke his front teeth. He pushed the barrel of the pistol in his mouth. Frankfurter leaned away but he couldn’t get the barrel out of his broken mouth. He knew he was bleeding.

  “Tell me all about it, fatso, before I blow his fucking head off.”

  “We—”

  Devereaux cocked the revolver.

  “We’re listening on this girl—”

  “What girl?”

  “Your fucking girlfriend, who—”

  Devereaux’s gray eyes glittered. The cat watched, smiled, prepared.

  “I mean, we were watching her—”

  “Put the bug on her.”

  “Sure.”

  “And what happened?”

  “This afternoon. Yesterday, I mean. We tumbled. To one of the Opposition. He’s living in the same fucking apartment building, doing the same shit we been doing. Everybody tapping everybody else. It gets crazy.” Gleason talked too fast.

  “What happened?”

  “We wanted to move on the guy but we got marching orders. That you might be out here. We were told—”

  “What?”

  “Watch you.”

  “I’m going to put a hole throu
gh his throat, and his brains are going all over your face,” Devereaux said slowly.

  “Jesus Christ,” Gleason said. “We were fingering you.”

  “For who?”

  “I swear to God I don’t know. We just sit here, we tail you, we keep sending our reports in the clear, on the open line, like we were fucking newspaper reporters or something. I mean, nobody says finger someone. It’s just the way they tell you the assignment. I mean, someone is targeted, you’re just the guy selling the bullets. You know. I mean, it didn’t mean anything—”

  “And Rita? What about her?”

  “She’s okay. We were just watching her, trying to find out if you guys were getting kissy-kissy again.”

  “Nice.”

  Devereaux pulled the barrel out of Frankfurter’s broken mouth. Frankfurter was crying but didn’t realize it; the pain was too great.

  “Get out of the car.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Get out of the fucking car, assholes.”

  They climbed out.

  “In front of the car. Walk down the street. That way. When I put on my turn signal, you turn. You got me?”

  They walked down the deserted length of Ellis Avenue to 45th Street and turned right, toward the east, Devereaux following in the car.

  At Greenwood Avenue, Devereaux stopped the car. He opened the door and got out.

  “Nice night for a walk,” he said.

  Frankfurter turned. The moment of fear was past; he felt humiliated. “You’re dead, asshole. Not today but you’re walking around waiting to die.”

  “So’s everyone,” Devereaux said. He suddenly turned his pistol and aimed at a house across the blackened street. It was just after four; dawn was hours away. He fired once and the shot reverberated down the dark, quiet streets in the heart of the black ghetto. He fired again. Lights flicked on yellow in squares of windows. He slid back into the car. He drove away, east, his lights flashing brakes at the corner. Then he was gone. For a moment, in the silence in the middle of the street, Frankfurter turned to Gleason and said, “Why the fuck did he do that?”

  In a moment, they knew.

  A man leaned from a second-floor window with a .12 gauge pump-action shotgun and fired, destroying the windshield of a car behind the two men.

  “Motherfuckers, shooting up my house, fucking honky—”

  “Jesus Christ,” Frankfurter cried, pulling his gun.

  “Got your piece, motherfuckers? I got mine.” Now the face at the window had some sort of handgun. More flashes of fire. And then, suddenly, more fire from other windows.

  Lights from windows up and down the street.

  “Call the poh-leese!” a thin female voice cried.

  “Fuck the motherfucking poh-leese. Ahm all the poh-leese I needs!”

  Frankfurter and Gleason started running east. At Lake Park the two men—out of breath, Gleason’s mouth bleeding—turned south, dodging the early morning traffic, pointed to by people in windows and chased by packs of black dogs. One dog got lucky and bit deeply into the flesh of Gleason’s thigh. He shot it. Nine minutes later two police cars cornered the frightened men at 47th Street. Cops tumbled out of the blue-and-whites, guns drawn.

  “Freeze, freeze,” one of the cops cried. Frankfurter and Gleason threw down their guns and threw up their hands.

  Devereaux parked the rental Lincoln town car in a no-parking zone at 31st and State streets. He left the keys in the ignition and the door unlocked. He hailed a State Street bus at the corner and shortly after four thirty, he arrived in the empty, predawn Loop.

  The Lincoln was stolen five minutes after he left it. It was never recovered, but the motor was found in a chop shop in Muncie, Indiana, ten months later.

  Devereaux boarded a United Airlines flight at five forty-five A.M. He fell asleep before it taxied to the runway.

  14

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Sixteen hours after Devereaux left Chicago, Rita Macklin turned the key in the lock of the front door of her apartment in Bethesda. They were waiting for her. Two of them.

  Before she could speak—her hand was still on the key in the lock—the first one, seated in a straight chair next to the table she used as a desk, held up his four-color plastic identification card.

  “That’s not good enough,” Rita Macklin said. She removed the key and dropped the chain in her purse. She closed the door behind her. She faced them. The second one sat on a ledge by the window that looked out over the parking lot behind the four-story apartment building. There was a grassy knoll beyond, decorated with sad young spruce trees naked for winter.

  She was frightened. She glared at both of them. Her face was flushed, adrenaline surged through her. Her green eyes were shining. She wouldn’t show them how frightened she was.

  “Good enough?” said the one at the desk. “If you want a court order to search the premises, we can get you a court order. Honey, we can get you anything you want.”

  “How about a court order for breaking and entering? Is that a new clause in the Constitution?”

  “Shit,” said the second one at the window ledge. He was lanky and sallow. His clothes hung on him as though they were permanently wrinkled.

  Rita Macklin caught her breath and pressed her back against the front door. She tried to breathe deeply. Don’t show anything.

  “Who are you guys?”

  “From Uncle,” the one at the table said. He was meanly handsome with black hair and Irish blue eyes. He tried a smile.

  She thought: This is about Devereaux. He’s dead or they want to kill him and they’re going to use me somehow to do it.

  She took a step into the room. She sat down suddenly in an armchair that hadn’t been there six months before. The furniture was minimal. There would have been less except that her mother had visited during the summer and ordered this armchair because she said the place was too cold. “You live like a monk,” her mother had said. Rita Macklin’s dark red hair seemed to become redder as she waited for them. Her eyes were angry.

  “My name is Morgan,” the black-haired man began. “You know the arrangement so I won’t bore you by repeating things you already know.”

  “No,” she said. “Bore me. I may know something you don’t know.”

  Morgan grinned easily. The cadaver at the window didn’t.

  “Okay, honey. Devereaux. Remember him? And you? Remember why Devereaux came back to Uncle? You were targeted, right? Uncle takes care of his own. And we watched over you in case the nasties forgot that you were under our protection.”

  “It was his arrangement, not mine.”

  “Is that right? You went along with it.”

  Her eyes never left his face. She didn’t speak. She sat quietly. She still wore her light green coat, a striped wool scarf over her shoulders.

  “Where’s your boyfriend?”

  She watched his eyes. He wasn’t lying. He didn’t know. Devereaux was gone.

  She suddenly felt tired.

  “Something wrong?” Morgan said.

  “No. Funny. Ha-ha funny. You’ve lost him? I don’t believe my government sometimes.”

  “Not funny. Wrong. Not funny.”

  “You’ve lost one of your spooks.”

  “We were pretty sure we knew where he went. We sent a couple of watchers after him. You could help us, tell us where he is now. Save yourself, save him, save us. Nobody wants grief.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Shit,” said the cadaver. “What a mouth on her. How’d you like me to wash it out with soap?”

  Morgan ignored him. “We watched you. He contacted you?”

  “If you watched me, you’d know.”

  “We weren’t here twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Inefficient.”

  “Listen, honey.”

  “Why do you keep calling me ‘honey’? Did you pick that up in a fag beauty shop?”

  Morgan flushed. “I asked you a question.”

  “You mean by ph
one or in person? He said that he’d be put on ice for a while. I suppose you guys didn’t run out of ice.” She talked tough, afraid. Her slight overbite made the words seem tougher than she felt. “Your tap on my phone gone bad? I expect a degree of competence in my government’s spook agencies. I expect your wiretaps to work.”

  “Nobody said anything about wiretaps. We watched you to protect you. You’re still a target.”

  She knew that. He had told her that. She’d be safe, he said. She had told him she didn’t give a damn about that, only about him. But it wasn’t true and they both knew it. God, she didn’t want to die. So he had left her. To save her. Save himself.

  “You think you’re so fucking smart,” said the cadaver.

  “No. Except I didn’t lose him, did I? I’m not the one asking questions, am I?” Rita Macklin said. Dammit. She wasn’t going to let them make her afraid. A couple of spooks. Nothing would hurt her now. He slipped the traces after all. Was he out there? Was he watching this place now? “When did he get out?”

  “Get out? You think this was involuntary on his part?”

  “I know it was. He didn’t have a choice.”

  “He left you out there. You’re the one in trouble now, honey.”

  “You’re cute. I bet you wear lace panties.”

  “Shit,” said the one at the window. He didn’t move.

  Morgan spread his hands in a gesture of sincerity. “We pulled the watchers off you yesterday. We knew where he was. He slipped them.”

  “So you don’t know where he is.”

  “We know he’s in trouble the longer he’s out there. They’ve got hitters out there. They’re going after him. After you. And you don’t want us to help you. Help him. That leaves you holding it.”

  “Fine. You hold yours and I’ll hold mine. I’m not one of your goddam spooks. I don’t want you in here. Get out.”

  “Is that right? Tough, huh?”

  “Tough, huh,” she mimicked him.

  “Fine.” He was getting mad. She could see it in his eyes, in the way he shrugged now as though loosening his shoulder muscles. Did she want to make him mad?

  Rita smiled.

  “What if we go over to your editor someday, show him transcripts? What if we tell him about Helsinki?”

  “He knows. He reads the papers.”

  “Not everything. You were working for us. A journalist. You were working for us.”