Jim looked down at the name on the piece of paper; when he shook his head, Carl’s hands felt cold. ‘Sorry, don’t recognize it at all. And you know, it’s a hell of a long way from Nebraska to Manhattan.’
Carl just nodded, knowing he couldn’t say anything for a moment. He scribbled another name and passed it over. ‘All right, then. Does this name sound familiar? I’d like to meet rim before we leave. It’s very important.’
Jim didn’t look at the paper. He kept staring at Carl. ‘Important for your story, or for something else?’
‘Both,’ Carl said.
‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘Those guys outside, I don’t like dealing with them that much. They’ve got a lot of history behind them, a lot of people who’d like to see them dead.’
‘I’m sure,’ Carl said. ‘But it’s important. It’s important to something I’m working on, back home. And it might even be connected with what I said before, about the Brits.’
With distaste on his face, Jim unfolded the slip of paper, and briefly nodded. ‘Yeah, I know him. But I don’t know if he could get over here in time. Do I tell him you’re asking for him?’
Another scribble of the pen on paper. ‘No. Give him this name.’
He cocked his head. ‘You’re not going to hurt him, are you?’
‘No, I just want to talk to him.’
‘All right, all right,’ he said, sighing. ‘Jesus.’ He raised his voice. ‘Hey, Manny!’
The man with the sawed-off shotgun opened the door. ‘Yeah?’
‘Take our guest to conference room one, will you? And see if you can’t get me a cup of tea. And send Gordo in here, I got a quick courier job for him, uptown.’
The conference room was another concrete room, with a single table that was old and scarred with graffiti and cigarette burns. A collection of chairs—not a single one matching another—were grouped around the table, and on the near wall was a worn blackboard, an eraser, and some chalk. Another HE LIVES photo was also on the wall. Carl sat down in the chair and put his head in his hands, and he must have dozed off for a while, because he woke up when the door opened.
A thin man stood there, a gaunt look on his face. He wore patched jeans and a heavy workshirt and wool vest, and his few white hairs were combed sideways over his head. His eyes were wide and darted back and forth, as if he was terrified that at any moment, at any second, something bad might happen.
‘I’m sorry,’ the old man said. ‘You’re not the one I’m looking for.’
Carl stood up, suddenly conscious that his knees were quivering. ‘Oh, but you, sir, are who I’m looking for. That is, if you are Casimir Cynewski, and your nickname is Caz.’
The man paused for just a moment, swallowed, and then nodded.
~ * ~
TWENTY-ONE
Caz took another step into the room. ’But you’re not Merl!’ he protested. ‘I was told that I was meeting Merl Sawson!’
Carl stood up, hating what he was going to do next. ‘That’s my fault, and I’m sorry. Mr. Cynewski, my name is Carl Landry and I’m a reporter for the Boston Globe. I was assigned to do a story in Boston that led me to find out about you and Merl. Mr. Cynewski, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Merl is dead.’
The old man closed his eyes and wavered, as if suddenly out of breath after a very long race. He grasped the back of a nearby chair with a bony hand and said, ‘I was afraid of that.’ He opened his eyes, which were now tearful, and sat down. ‘How did he die?’
‘He was murdered,’ Carl said. ‘Shot in his apartment, just over a week ago. Soon after he gave me information about the Kennedy Administration members, the ones who were being eliminated, year after year. And soon after you visited him, I believe. Am I right?’
Caz moistened his lips and looked around the room, avoiding Carl’s eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Someone visited Merl just before he was murdered, and Merl’s neighbor heard voices coming from the apartment,’ Carl said, then added a lie. ‘And he also saw an older man like yourself leaving the building.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, carefully crossing his arms.
‘Sure you do, Caz,’ he said, remembering his search of the apartment. ‘In fact, you brought him a gift from here, didn’t you. A Yankees baseball cap, part of the uniform of PS 19. Correct?’
A slow and fearful nod. ‘It sounds silly, I know. But I told him if he came back with me, he’d be protected. All it would take for him was to wear that cap at a certain time and place in Boston, and he’d be brought back here. Part of the new underground railroad.’
‘To come back with you, right?’ he said. ‘You two were friends, back in 1962, back at the White House. You worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and he was a military aide to the president. You two were there, right up to the end, weren’t you?’
Caz chewed on his bottom lip, his eyes still wandering. ‘Oh yes, we were there, right in the thick of things. We were both New Frontier men, right to the bone. The best and the brightest. Fighting the communists, freeing the Negro, helping our South American friends. We intended to do a very lot, because we knew we only had eight short years to do it in; The sixties were going to be a great decade for the nation and the world, and we were in charge.’
His eyes finally focused on Carl. ‘You do understand, don’t you?’
Yes, he thought, remembering hearing those same words on a cold Washington day in 1961. I understand very well. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I do.’
Caz refolded his arms again, as if afraid they would grow brittle if they stayed in one place too long. ‘I remember the oddest things, you know, at the oddest times. Women. I think of women a lot. My mother. I don’t know to this day what happened to her. Jackie, at the White House. I only saw her a few times, from a distance. So graceful, so beautiful. She and her daughter Caroline, and that poor little boy, John-John...’
He tightened his arms against his chest. ‘I remember another woman, you know. I don’t know her name, though. It was the last day of October, and I was giving up, I was surrendering. I could sense that everything was falling apart, and I had to leave the capital. I couldn’t stay, not for another moment.’ He looked up at Carl and said, ‘That’s abandonment, isn’t it? Running away? Do you think I’m a guilty man, Mr. Landry?’
Carl chose his words carefully. ‘I think you’re a survivor.’
‘Hah. That’s a good one. A survivor.’ Caz started to slowly rock back and forth in the chair. ‘This other woman ... I saw her the day I left the capital. I had been at the White House all morning. People were crying and scrambling around, screaming down the hallways. Merl was there, saying, we’re out of time, we don’t have the time, we’ve got to go, we’ve got to go. There was a fight over the helicopters, the ones coming to pick up the First Family, they were late, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I got in my car and drove away. I was driving like a maniac, just like everyone else, heading west into Virginia. People were going seventy, eighty, a hundred miles an hour. The radio was filled with the most awful news, about the invasion suffering horribly, the loss of San Diego, bombers being spotted on our radar, our own SAC retaliating.’
Caz was silent for a moment and then lifted his head until he was staring at a point on the far wall. ‘This woman. She was on the side of the road. Her car had a flat tire. It was a Chevrolet, an Impala. Light blue. She was frantic, waving at the cars, begging for someone to stop and pick her up. I think there might have been children in the car. I’m not sure. It could have been luggage.’ He rubbed at his chin. ‘Yes, I want it to be luggage. But of course, no one would stop. We were all looking at our odometers, thinking a mile a minute. At sixty miles an hour we’re going a mile a minute, and every minute, we’re one more mile away from ground zero. I looked at her, her crying eyes, the white handkerchief she had grasped in her hand, and my foot on the accelerator wavered, just for a moment. The briefest of seconds. And then I went on, Mr. Landry, I kept on driving. And
so did the others.’
Carl felt like he was looking at a man who had been dead for a decade, but didn’t know it yet.
‘You know what happened next?’ Caz asked.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
Another movement in the chair, back and forth. ‘She was at the base of this slight hill. The road went over the hill and when I came down the other side, there was this tremendous flash of light behind me. Everything was lit up, like the world’s biggest flashbulb had gone off. The back of my neck was burned, and so were the back of my hands. Bubbled right up to second degree burns, even with the hill shielding me from the rear. The car shimmied and shook, and other cars and trucks went off the road, but I dodged them all and kept on driving. And if I had stopped to pick up that woman ... Well, here I am.’
‘You did what you had to do,’ Carl said, horrified at what he had just heard.
Caz said, ‘Yes, yes, I did do what I had to do to survive, and look at me now.’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice. You know, of course, that I’m completely insane.’
Carl shifted in his seat, conscious that he was getting tired, and that in a few hours, he and Sandy would be leaving Manhattan. He didn’t have much time to spare with this man.
‘But you must be somewhat sane, Caz, to go up to Boston and to see Merl. What was that about? And who might have killed him? It has something to do with the list of names, right?’
Caz smiled, a rictus grin that gave Carl a brief shiver. Ah, but would a sane man leave the relative safety of this isolated island, to go back into the world of the truly insane, the national security state that is running things out there, with roadblocks and identity checks and midnight searches? Hmmm? A sane man would stay here. Would stay here underground and work on his memoirs and forget everything that’s out there.’
Caz nodded his head. ‘But I didn’t do that. No, sir. I saddled up and used some of my contacts here, among my fellow exiles, and I found myself back in Boston. A quaint little town, trying to become another New York City, and a pity it will never happen. You folks in Boston are like little boys, trying to run things in the family after the big, strapping father has died. You’re trying to fill some mighty big shoes, and it’s not going to happen.’
‘Why were you seeing Merl?’
Caz tilted his head, kept on smiling. ‘You. You say you’re a damn reporter. How do I know you’re telling the truth?’
Carl reached to his pants pocket. ‘I’ve got some—’
‘Identification, right?’ Caz interrupted, and then laughed, an unpleasant high-pitched sound. ‘If Langley was still there - and I guess it isn’t, because I heard some time ago about the mobs burning and looting it - I could have shown you a workshop where I could have made you any type of identification you desired. You could have been a reporter from Reuters. Or Agence-France Presse. Or Tass ... If there was still a Tass anymore.’
‘Then there’s nothing I can do to prove it, is there. Except for stating the truth, which is that I’m a reporter for the Globe.’
‘And you came here to see me, is that it?’ Caz said, disbelief in his voice.
‘No, not at first,’ Carl said. ‘I came here as part of an Army media tour with a reporter friend of mine who’s with the Times of London. We were ... Our Army escort was shot and killed in an ambush. We escaped and we’re trying to get out of Manhattan. When I heard about the ex-Kennedy folks still living here, I made a guess. And I got lucky.’
‘Ah, I see. Such luck, too, that you’ve gotten the attention of our nation’s real rulers, haven’t you. Not a good feeling. I’m fearful of them and Merl was afraid as well. Some time ago I told him he should come live here. Not a comfortable life but at least if you’re careful, you don’t have to be afraid of that midnight knock on the door. But he was a stubborn old man, said he wanted to grow old in some measure of comfort. My last visit to see him ... I tried to convince him to leave. But he wouldn’t. He said he had one more mission to accomplish, one more task to finish. You said he showed you the list of names?’
‘Yes, he did. He handed them over, said more killing would happen. That something had to be done.’
More quick nods of the head. ‘Yes, yes, always something to be done. Missions to be accomplished, secrets to be kept. My boy, I know so many old secrets that my head buzzes at night, when I try to sleep. That’s what my job was about, you know, finding out secrets and meeting with JFK and his boys, and then—like we were kids in a treehouse in a fun neighborhood—planning what we would do. Problems in Laos? Send some M-1 rifles. Problems with Castro? Try to kill the son of a bitch. Problems in South Vietnam? Send some advisers. Then break for a three-martini lunch at Sans Souci or sandwiches at Duke Zeibert’s. Then... well, then came Cuba. So much for being the best and the brightest. Tell me, Bundy, is he still in prison?’
‘Yes. He won’t be up for a parole until next year.’
‘Pity, I rather—’
Carl interrupted in frustration, knowing important minutes were slipping away. ‘You know, your brother was right. You’re a snob and a pain in the ass.’
Caz’s eyelids fluttered, then closed, and slowly reopened. ‘You saw my brother Tom?’
‘Good try,’ Carl said. ‘I saw your brother Marcus, or Mark. I saw him last week, when I was trying to find out more information about Merl.’
‘Mark...how is he?’
He shook his head. ‘Tell me about Merl, and then I’ll tell you about Mark.’
Caz stayed silent for a moment, and then Carl saw that his hands were trembling at his sides. Then Caz clasped his hands together and placed them in his lap. ‘We became friends out of the oddest circumstances. We were in the Rose Garden attending some damn function, waiting to see the President when he was free. I noticed a ruby-throated warbler in the bushes and made mention of it, and Merl heard me. It turned out that we both had a passion for birding. We started talking and became friends, which is unusual, him being in the military, and the fact that they’ve always loathed those of us in the CIA. When we got to know each other, we learned that we were both quite similar, quite the same, under our skins. We were patriots and honorable men in the truest sense of the word, trying to help our country through some difficult times.’
‘Difficult times, like right now?’
Caz rubbed his hands together. ‘We ... we face certain decisions, the next few weeks, don’t we. Decisions that will affect where we go, whether or not we abuse this second chance that we were given, a second chance at living. We were so close to world destruction back in ‘62. Millions died but the world got another chance when the war ended so quickly, when it didn’t spread to Europe and beyond. And Merl told me he would not let this second chance be threatened. He told me what he was going to do.’
‘What was that? And why Merl?’
Caz seemed to hunch up in the chair, like he was trying to reduce himself as a target.
‘Because Merl was important. Merl had the key. Merl had it all.’
‘The key to what?’
Caz nodded to the picture up on the wall.
‘To him,’ Caz softly said. ‘Mr. Landry, he lives.’
Carl took a deep breath. ‘You mean to say that John F. Kennedy is still alive, and Merl knew where he is?’
Caz said, ‘Documents. Merl had very important documents, the key to it all. The key to stopping the killing. I’ve told you quite enough. And that’s all I’ll say.’
Carl remembered his interview with Merl’s landlord, Andrew Townes, who had said something about paper and ink. Merl worked with important papers back at the White House. ‘So who killed Merl?’
Caz shook his head, pursed his lips, his voice now crisp. ‘My brother. How is he?’
He wondered if he could keep on pushing the old man, but something had happened, like in that conversation he had had with Two-Tone, weeks ago. The trembling old man had changed somehow, like he was now back to his previous self; Casimir Cynewski, of the former Central Intelligence Agency.
/> ‘Your brother ...’ he started, wondering what to say, and then decided to tell the truth. ‘Mark is hanging in there. He’s been arrested twice for seditious activities and has been sent to decon camps, and has been treated for cancer. When I saw him last, though, he looked old and crusty, like he had some rears left in him. He talked some about you—’
‘He did what?’ Caz asked, his voice tinged with amazement.
‘He talked about you. He said that he regretted the harsh words that you shared, and he said if it hadn’t been for the bomb, that the two of you might have become friends.’
Caz put his hands together again and resumed the slow-motion rocking back and forth. ‘That’s what it must have been like, back in the Civil War. Brother against brother, friend against friend. Instead of the question being slavery or states’ rights, it was the bomb, the bomb, the all powerful and holy bomb. Mark and his folks wanted to dump them all in the ocean and say, fine, we’ll all be peaceful and happy forever and ever. Of course, forget about the divisions of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe and the Chinese and Russians raising hell in Laos and Vietnam. Those problems didn’t exist in their minds. It was either us or them, the bomb or no bomb. If you weren’t one of them, you were evil, you were doomed, you were a murderer.’
Resurrection Day Page 35