“Alas, no. My sales plan is cued to something I cannot control. It would require your presence in the city of Dallas, Texas—our expense, of course—from the nineteenth to the twenty-fifth. We’ll stay at the Adolphus—”
“A first-class joint.”
“Indeed, it is. I need a trusted fellow at my side while I deal with problems as they may come up. Someone smart, tough, fast. He’s not available, so I thought of you.”
He laughed. “They do keep James Bond busy these days, do they not?” James Bond was on everybody’s mind then.
“Never have trusted the Brits, Jimmy,” I said. “Wouldn’t take him if I could have him. Give me a son of the auld sod, with a twinkle in his eye and steel in his fists.”
He liked the compliment, even if we both seemed to be playing movie roles. “So, Dallas?” he said. “Not your usual sales area, Mr. Meachum.”
He was drinking Glenlivet on the rocks, myself Pinch and soda.
“Duty takes us where it takes us, Jimmy. I’d rather it were Paris myself. I do pay well, and if there’s hardship involved and some schedule shuffling, then I’ll pay for that; a kind of schedule-rearrangement bonus, as it were.”
“Well, Mr. Meachum, yours is my own favorite firm, and continuing in their favor is definitely in my interest, so aside from travel expenses, I’ll not charge more, and I will see you where you want me in Dallas at any time on the nineteenth.”
Simple as that, I got Jimmy, and as with Lon’s genius and talent for rifles, what happened could not have happened without his contribution. He was always a rogue and hero, the bravest of the brave, the truest of the true. You see, we weren’t monsters. I suppose that’s the lesson. You’ve been taught that if we existed, we were the vilest of the vile, snatching greatness from the young prince and sending our nation on its way to hell. But to us, we were professionals, patriots, and men of honor. We weren’t in it for the money, or to sell more Bell helicopters and McDonnell-Douglas fighter jets, but to save lives and lead the nation through the swamp to the hilltop. Besides, we were only going to kill a screwball right-wing general.
CHAPTER 16
As I said, Sergeant,” said Harry Gardner, “Dad was a man of literature, really. So his books, his private books, were all fiction.”
Swagger once again stood at the threshold of Niles Gardner’s office, that book-lined cave where the CIA’s famous Boswell had tried for thirty years to write novels and failed. He could see the Red Nine lying undisturbed on the desk and the four ceramic bluebirds and the illustration of the six green elm trees on the shelves.
“Well,” said Swagger, “as I say, it’s a long shot. But I noted that beside the pistol, which is sometimes called a Red Nine, there’s that collection of bluebirds, four of ’em, and that picture of elm trees, six of ’em. It occurred to me that somehow the phrases ‘Red Nine,’ ‘Blue Four,’ or ‘Green Six’ might have had some meaning to him, like in some private way he was commemorating them.”
“Wow,” said Harry, “you know, that’s remarkable. I noted those things too, and I thought them strange, but it never occurred to me to put them in a pattern. They were so unlike Dad. He was not a sentimentalist, and those bluebirds in particular are so kitsch that I can’t understand why they’re there. Let’s look at the picture.” He took it down from the wall, handed it to Swagger, then took it back. “Dime-store frame. Let’s see what the picture is.”
He turned it over, unfolded four soft copper flaps securing the mounting board, and shook the board free of the frame. The picture fluttered to the floor. Bob picked it up and discovered that it was folded in such a way to display the six trees, but it was actually an illustration from a Redbook short story entitled “Passion’s Golden Tresses.” Unfolded, it showed a handsome young man chastely embracing a beautiful young blonde against a forest backdrop. The subtitle on the story was “Her Hair Was Beautiful, But Was That All David Loved?” The author was Agnes Stanton Phillips.
“Good Lord,” said Harry. “Now, there’s your classic fifties kitsch!” He turned to Swagger. “You’ve introduced a strangeness to my father that not even I knew existed! What on earth does this mean?”
“It connects with nothing of your father, or his mind, or anything that you can think of?”
“Nothing. I’m astonished. Where’s this going?”
“I found the pistol odd too, in its way. I noted those other things, all with the numbers attached to colors. I thought: Radio call signs, agent names, map coordinates, some kind of color code, all of which could have some connection to intelligence work and might have some bearing somehow on the fake name he cooked up for Hugh Meachum.”
“In other words, if you can decipher the pattern, maybe it’s the same pattern that connects to Hugh. Or the same principle of pattern, is that it?”
“Something like that. I know it’s thin, believe me.”
“Thin or not, it’s fascinating but way beyond me, Sergeant.”
“It could also be nothing. He liked bluebirds. He liked trees. He liked Mausers.”
“But he didn’t like trees. He didn’t like Mausers. He most certainly didn’t like bluebirds, that I can guarantee you, particularly ceramic ones. So maybe you are on to something.”
“If so, I ain’t smart enough to figure it out.”
“I’ll tell you what. You feel free to dig around here. As I say, I’ve been over it all, and I can guarantee you: no porn, no hidden notes from mistresses, no decoded instructions from his secret masters in the Kremlin, no movie scripts, nothing that anyone but a son would find interesting, and even his son didn’t find it that interesting. I am going to leave you alone with Niles Gardner, and if you find anything, more power to you. Do you need coffee, beer, bourbon, wine, a sandwich, anything like that?”
“No sir.”
“The bathroom is down the hall. Feel free to use it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Gardner.”
Bob turned and faced the mind, or at least a portion of it, of Niles Gardner. He found it intimidating. It was all books, and most of them Bob had never heard of. But starting at the top left-hand corner of the top left-hand bookshelf—the book was A Death in the Family by James Agee—he began to methodically pull each one out, flip the pages for inserts, bookmarks, underlines, whatever, and work his way through the shelves, going from the As to, finally, the Zs.
It took over three hours, and from the well-thumbed, well-worn condition of the volumes, Swagger could tell that Niles Gardner was a man who loved his novels. Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Orwell, Dickens, Wolfe, Wells, Bellow, Friedman, Golding, Brautigan, Pynchon, Fitzgerald, Crane, Flaubert, Camus, Proust, Wharton, Spillane, Tolkien, Robbins, Wallant, he read passionately and catholically. A classic in a Modern Library edition was apt to be found next to something by Jim Thompson. Kurt Vonnegut and James Gould Cozzens and Lloyd C. Douglas and Herman Wouk and Bernard Malamud and Robert A. Heinlein and Norman Mailer and Anton Myrer and Nicholas Monsarrat and John le Carré and Howard Fast and Irwin Shaw and Robert Ruark and Franz Kafka, all were equally displayed and beloved on the long feet of floor-to-ceiling shelves. On and on it went, and there was no relief from the weary task of unshelving, flipping the pages, reading the comments, then replacing. Occasionally, something would fall to the floor, some kind of long-ago bookmark, like a dry cleaner’s slip or a folded index card or someone’s business card or whatever, and each would indicate a stopping place or a passage of brilliance that Niles had awarded an exclamation point.
Finally, Bob was done. He had come across no oddities, no irregularities, no anomalies. It was just a serious reader’s collection of the best his species had done at the ridiculous effort of telling a long story in prose.
“How’re you coming?” asked Harry, leaning in the doorway.
“I suppose it was a game try, but I didn’t learn a damned thing I didn’t already know, except that the world is sadly full of books I’ll never read.”
“This room makes me feel the same way. I—�
� He paused. “This probably has nothing to do with anything,” he went on, “but I did find one book hidden away when I was searching. It was nonfiction, old, a first edition. It was strange for Dad to have, and he’d hidden it in the bedroom, in his nightstand, under a pile of magazines. What did I do with it?”
Swagger waited as the internal drama played out in Harry’s head.
“I thought it might be valuable, so I set it aside for an appraisal and then never—” He snapped alert. “Wait here. I put it in the attic, where I have some of Dad’s old suits that I’ve been meaning to give away.”
He turned, and Swagger heard the echoes in the old house as the man bounded up the stairs two flights, then bounded back.
He walked in with his trophy.
“Some kind of obscure Victorian science book, though the author’s name is slightly familiar; I can’t remember from where.”
He handed the heavy volume to Bob. It was The Visions of Sane Persons by Francis Galton. It weighed about three tons.
Swagger turned to the title page and saw that it had been published in 1884.
“It’s got a bookmark,” said Harry.
Swagger cracked the old volume to the page that, sometime in the distant past, Niles Gardner had designated as of special meaning, and found himself at the intersection of pages 730 and 731, where he began to read Frances Galton’s comments on numbers and colors.
I’ll spare you details on the weekend and the pitch I made to Lon and his eventual acceptance. As you may have gathered, I would make a later, tougher pitch to Lon, and that was the dramatic one. I’ll detail it at the proper time.
To sum up, Peggy and I got there around 5, had cocktails, and took him to dinner at his country club, where all knew and loved him. The food was excellent, and he was in good spirits. I could tell the intellectual exercise of solving the problem had energized him. The next morning, he and I went out to his range, and he showed me the rifle he had prepared and the ammunition, and convinced me that it was fine, that it would work. I suppose he knew what would come next. He displayed no surprise at the course the conversation took.
Lon was a big man. That’s why he played fullback; ask the Harvard pansies, they know him well. He watched his weight and worked out his upper body with dumbbells regularly, but he was always fighting the pounds; they seemed to creep on him like fog and cling like putty. He had a square American face, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and kept his hair short, like all of us did without question in 1963. He favored corduroys, chinos, and crewneck sweaters, all well worn, so that he looked like an English professor—again, like we all did in those days. You were an English professor in a rumpled sport coat or an IBM salesman in a sharp dark suit and black tie. That was all there was.
His face was so lively and intelligent that people oftentimes didn’t realize he was moored in that hateful steel chair, S4 forever. He’d gotten awfully good with it over the years, and he may have been the one who invented the wheel ring of smaller circumference than the rubber tire he used to propel himself. He could probably climb a mountain in the thing, or rob a bank, or go up or down stairs. But it got to him, I know it did. His vitality crushed into that metal framework, his liveliness anchored by the great dead wastage of his lower body, his talent frustrated by his immobility.
It took a bit, as it always does when you recruit a solid citizen to go against all that he’s been taught, but I had advantages. I knew he read Lippman in the Post and admired Murrow on CBS and had what might be called “enlightened” social ideas about Negroes and Jews, and while he wanted to destroy communism, he didn’t particularly want to kill anyone doing it, especially not millions of innocent Russian peasants. We all felt that way. And he hated, as did most Ivy League people, General Walker, who seemed part of a long tradition of recent American troglodytes, from Martin Dies to Joe McCarthy to Richard Nixon to the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan, men who saw Commies everywhere and made it much tougher on those of us charged with fighting real Commies, men who hated Negroes and wished them to stay backward and pathetic and never equal under law or in opportunity, men who still hated Jews and thought they secretly controlled everything, men who just hated because that was all they had been taught to do.
When I explained my fears that Walker’s right-wing pressure might force the callow and decadent JFK into doing another stupid thing, this time a stupid tragic thing, and assured Lon there was no chance whatsoever of being caught and laid the plan out for him, he finally agreed. Let it be known here and now that he never asked for a cent, he never got a cent, he never discussed a cent. He did it because I convinced him that it was the right thing to do, and he believed in me.
There was some logistics planning to be done, but that’s always a task at which I excel. I got a big chunk of operating funds out of the black budget by my usual means, bought each of the tickets at a different travel agency, paying cash, booked rooms for us from the nineteenth to the twenty-sixth at the Adolphus under fake names—easily done in those precomputer days—used a fellow in the gray economy who did a lot of intelligence trade work to put together fake driver’s licenses for the three of us, and made sure everything was delivered and nothing was written.
I had my own career to tend to, so I worked extra-hard in the meetings and at appending notes to reports and keeping Cord up-to-date on PEACOCK and the like. I was busy, or at least I gave the impression of being busy. My one worry was that Kennedy would make another mistake and we’d find ourselves on crisis footing and stuck in weeks of eighteen-hour days while the grown-ups at State worked out ways to prevent him from ending the world in fire. I guess those midweeks in November, he was busy screwing Cord’s ex-wife, Marilyn, Angie, and everybody except poor forlorn Jackie, when he wasn’t plotting his next campaign. He didn’t seem to do much except think about his career and wait for things to happen. It was that hunger that killed him: the trip to Dallas was strictly politics and had nothing to do with his actual job as president.
In any case, I sold Cord, who had seemed hazier and more morose of late and perhaps was drinking more than he should, as his nose was turning into a big red blob, on another PEACOCK trip—this time, to make it easier on myself, to the south. The idea was to hit the prestige North Carolina schools, like Duke and Wake Forest and the University of NC, and spend a week trolling for talent down there. For some reason, North Carolinians always did well in prestige journalism circles, possibly because, although they were Southern, they weren’t too Southern. From my point of view, the hop to Dallas from Raleigh and back was much easier and less exhausting or time-consuming than the one to Dallas via Cambridge.
The night came when Lon, Jimmy, and I met as a team for the first time. It was November 19, 1963. I had rented a Jeep Wagoneer, and the three of us drove from the Adolphus, a grand hotel that bathed in the red glow of the neon pegasus atop the Magnolia Petroleum Company next door, out to the Patio and got acquainted, first with one another and second with the field upon which our operation would transpire. It was a good trip. Jimmy and Lon bonded instantly, and it was understood, without having to be explained, that Jimmy would be the action guy, the assister, Lon’s special friend. Lon would shoot; he was the artist, the special talent, who made the thing work. I would supervise, though discreetly, more by studiously considered suggestion than direct order; I would also handle everything organizational, logistically and strategically. It was a good healthy dynamic. There is no I in “team,” or so they say, and for the three of us, it was true.
I drove, Lon was in the back where he’d be a week hence, and Jimmy sat next to me. We had not much trouble negotiating the Dallas traffic. I can remember only a little about the drive over to the neighborhood: the colors of the early 1960s. Somehow, in the soft air of that time and place and season, they were lighter. I can’t put my finger on it, and no words may exist, at least within my reach, to describe it, but everything was less urgent, less hard-edged, and more light filled the air. The great Nabokov could probably conjure it
in two or three words, but I grope and babble. It was as if America was too comfortable for primary colors; they would come later, after the event I engineered, during Vietnam, during the huge change in demographics as the ignorant generation whose fathers had won the war took over. But not then, not yet. Everything was softer, lighter, quieter. I don’t know how else to make you feel it.
Speak, memory. Now I remember pulling into a parking space about forty yards down from the Patio and sitting there for a bit, letting it soak in.
“This is where we’ll be?” said Lon. “Suppose we can’t find parking.”
“The two nights I visited, there were ample spaces,” I said. “I can’t imagine we’ll have trouble late on a Monday night.”
“Where’ll the other guy be, Mr. Meachum?” Jimmy asked.
“See the alley directly across from the restaurant? I’ve told him to take up a position, entering from the rear. We’ll place some wooden crates there so he can get a good braced position. We’ll have to walk the range, but I’m guessing it’ll be about seventy yards.”
“And you want me there?”
“This guy is such a jerk, I’m not sure how he’ll do. If someone confronts him, if he gets confused, if he loses confidence—in all those circumstances, you may have to intercede. You’ve got a slapper?”
That was a cop’s blackjack, a flat, flexible piece of leather with about a pound of buckshot sewn into it; a master could whack a man to unconsciousness with one quick blow.
“I do, and it’s saved my bacon more times than I can remember,” Jimmy said.
“That would be your move. It’s messy, but we can’t kill any private citizen; we just have to get Alek out of there cleanly. Do you see any problems, Lon?”
Lon grunted. “This is sort of like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I’m John Wayne. I do the real killing. I must say, Hugh, I never thought I’d get a chance to play the John Wayne role.”
We laughed. We were all John Wayne fans.
The Third Bullet: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel Page 28