The Art of the Devil

by John Altman

  Zane stretched until his back popped. He unfolded his legs, refolded them the other way, and sighed. Already he missed his wife. But, of course, this was the job he had signed up for. Exhaling again, clearing his mind, he focused on the lighted window across the farm.

  Watch and wait.

  NINE

  THE TREASURY BUILDING: NOVEMBER 18

  Chief Emil Spooner woke, following a short catnap at his desk, with throat aching and eyes grainy; an overflowing ashtray just inches from his face made his stomach execute a sickly roll.

  As he straightened, trying to collect himself, the telephone rang. Lighting another Winston mechanically, he reached for the receiver. His replacement secretary was young and inexperienced and, perhaps hoping to impress the boss with his resiliency, failed to modulate his chipper tone. ‘Agent Isherwood to see you.’

  Wincing, the Chief glanced at the clock on his desk. The time was four minutes past six a.m.

  Isherwood looked as wrung-out as Spooner felt, but a spark in his eye suggested progress. ‘Found our man,’ he confirmed, dropping a file onto the desk.

  Before opening the folder, the Chief lit another cigarette, forgetting the one already burning in the ashtray. Turning back the cover, he found himself perusing a military personnel file. The subject, one Richard Thomas Hart, was pictured in a black-and-white photograph clipped to the first page. The Chief absorbed the image, trying to learn something from the face. The uniformed young man was photogenic, his face boyish and unlined. Frozen in time, his gaze was steady and phlegmatic.

  Richard Hart had been born on September third, 1921, in Saint Clairsville, Ohio. Twenty years later, he had entered the United States Army at a recruiting station in the same small town. During the war he had served with distinction as a sergeant in Company B, Fifteenth Infantry Regiment, seeing action in Salerno and Lazio, and on the Anzio beachhead in Cisterna di Littoria. The Chief looked up. ‘How’d you manage this?’

  ‘I got a name from a janitor in Charlottesville. Then it was easy.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Spooner.

  ‘Since the war he’s apparently been drifting, mostly on the VA circuit. Worked an odd job here and there. But left precious little in the way of a paper trail. Never voted, or even registered, or owned any property. Never married, and hasn’t paid taxes since 1945.’

  Spooner flipped another page, to dental and fingerprint records. ‘We’ll Belinograph these to AFIS and ICPC. Put out an all-points with the photo and the name, see if he pops up anywhere.’

  Isherwood leaned forward, claiming the Chief’s forgotten cigarette. ‘Anything from Max?’

  ‘They’ve been putting questions to him all night. So far, he denies everything.’ Lifting the phone again, Spooner hesitated. ‘Ish: how long since you’ve gotten any shut-eye?’

  Isherwood only shrugged.

  ‘Going on forty-eight hours, I figure. Go home. Get some sleep. Meet me back here at oh-nine-hundred.’

  Isherwood let a moment fall away. Then he leaned back, favoring Spooner with a weary gaze, and nodded.

  ANACOSTIA

  Each time the bell over the front door chimed, Richard Hart twisted around in the tattered lime-green booth.

  The diner’s clientele was working-class and varied, of Italian and Jewish and Irish descent. Time and again Hart turned back to his newspaper without recognizing the customer and resumed searching in vain for mention of a body recovered near Denver.

  A peroxide blonde topped off his coffee without asking. He smiled up at her, sipped gratefully. The night had been long. His arm prickled; his leg ached. Scrabbling against the back of his mind was a thought he didn’t want to face: Perhaps the agent had forsaken a visit home, traveling instead straight back to Gettysburg. Behind the gates of the farm, Francis Isherwood would be all but unreachable …

  The bell over the door chimed again.

  Benny Lynch was dressed comfortably in gray slacks, white T-shirt, and scruffy green army jacket that had seen better days. He had snappish brown eyes and a narrow face that reminded Hart of a turtle. Five years ago, they had formed a brief partnership as pickpockets. Hart had been the less skilled member of the team, acting as steer and stall and duke man, while Lynch, quick and nimble, had handled the actual mechanics.

  Lynch slid into the booth. Lighting a cigarillo with a cardboard match, he shrugged. ‘Not sure.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Man showed up. Right address. But wrong car.’

  Frowning, Hart reached for his crutches. ‘Hold the fort.’

  Two minutes later he was out on the street, moving carefully on the icy sidewalk. En route to the Isherwood address he passed another man he’d recruited from the waterfront the previous day – a union buster named Morgenthau. Sitting inside a Hudson Commodore parked outside a Queen Anne-style rowhouse, the man held a military-grade AN/PRC-6 walkie-talkie loosely in his lap. Stationed around the block, five other men sat in similar circumstances, awaiting Hart’s order. Where subtlety had failed, brute force would succeed.

  Drawing near to Isherwood’s home, Hart slowed. If the target saw him, the element of surprise would be lost. But beneath the low, even light of dawn, he perceived no sign of his prey. A petite young woman walked a dog; a courtly gentleman moved on and off the balcony of his rowhouse, dabbing at his nose with a tissue, bringing plants inside before the cold front arrived. Otherwise, the block slept.

  Parked directly in front of Isherwood’s porch was a spiffy late-model Mayfair. Across the street sat Hart’s own Buick, in which Lynch had spent the night. Warily, Hart positioned himself behind a telephone pole near the Buick. A light burned inside Isherwood’s rowhouse: a side window.

  Hart watched. For a few minutes, the only movement he saw was that of sunlight gradually moving across porch, where ice shone. But at last a figure appeared behind the side window: Isherwood, opening cans on a counter as cats wound eagerly around him.

  Hart scowled. While the hunter was bruised and broken, needing to hire out his dirty work, the quarry appeared to have come through the ordeal without so much as a scratch – and driving a smart new car to boot. The rowhouse looked cozy and warm. Inside would be a clicking radiator, a wallpaper pattern of spray roses, an upright piano in the parlor with sheet music open on its stand. Not just a house, thought Hart bitterly, but a home.

  For another instant he watched, frowning. Then, using the crutch, he worked his way halfway back to the diner. He paused, took out his walkie-talkie, depressed the send button, and gave the order.

  GAITHERSBURG, MARYLAND

  For as long as the oblivion lasted, Max Whitman felt almost content: floating through a landscape of featureless white, revisiting his memories of Betsy Martin.

  Every once in a while, however, a hole poked through the soft nimbus of insensibility. Then he became aware of less pleasant phenomena: a moist, moldy cellar, and blue-tinted cigarette smoke, and a burning lamp, and men beating him with brass knuckles and baseball bats, and clips attached to his nipples and testicles, sending jolts of agonizing electricity coursing through his body at regular intervals.

  But after the shocks and the beatings came more comforting oblivion, which he wrapped around himself like a blanket. In this hazy netherworld, he was always a teenager and Betsy Martin was always on his arm, nibbling on his ear, whispering sweet nothings only he could hear. I love you, she said, and:

  We’ll always be together, and:

  Who did you tell about your meetings with Agent Isherwood? and:

  I don’t bite, slugger, and she squeezed his biceps, which he flexed agreeably, grinning.

  Then she whipped the back of his legs with piano wire and he cried out in agony; and the clips sent another thousand volts coursing through his body, making him jitter and jive; and Betsy lit a new cigarette and talked in low voices with the men surrounding her, coming up with new strategies to get him to tell what he knew. Sometimes he surfaced enough to realize that she existed only in his mind. In reality she w
as married to a haberdasher in Connecticut, and he was in the cellar of a safe house somewhere outside Washington, being interrogated – often enough he had picked up the phone to send others to this same fate.

  Who’s in on it, Max? What are they planning? You may as well tell us; the game is up.

  But those voices were shunted aside easily enough. Ironically, it was the very methods used by the interrogators which opened the escape hatch. After enough pain, Max was learning, the body threw a sort of interior circuit breaker, drawing numb senselessness close on every side. The worst these men could do was kill him – but they could never rob him of his memories. The blue-and-white plaid rayon dress, the kohl pencil, and hair like a fall of autumn dusk …

  How did you communicate with them? How do they make contact? Why did you do it, Max?

  Let them do their worst. Even if the interrogators threatened to put a bullet through the heads of his little girls, Max would not break. Because Emil Spooner would never allow that to happen.

  The clips sent more voltage churning through his ruined body; and his bladder released, and he vomited convulsively, resoaking a chest already sodden with blood and sputum; and in his mind’s eye, Betsy beckoned him closer, a knowing smile on her lovely face. Ignore these goons, Max. They don’t get it. But we don’t need them. It’s just you and me now.

  A blow rocked his head on his neck. He spat out a tooth. And despite everything, he grinned.

  CIUDADELA, BUENOS AIRES

  The Cessna 310 sailed from a turquoise sky onto a tiny runway at Aeropuerto Ciudadela.

  Taxiing to a stop near a cluster of weather-worn Quonset huts, the plane discharged Senator John Bolin onto sun-kissed tarmac. Moments later a 1950 Chrysler Crown Imperial limousine rolled up. A back door opened, and Bolin climbed into air-conditioned shade. Two men sat across from him. One was about the senator’s age: dark where Bolin was fair, smelling powerfully of Aqua Velva, wearing heavily-decorated military epaulets where Bolin wore his travel-rumpled white suit. The other was ten years younger, tall and fair and blond, wearing pale linen, dabbing regularly at his temple with a balled-up handkerchief.

  ‘Senator,’ said the darker man formally. ‘It is my great honor to welcome you to Buenos Aires.’

  The blond gave only a slight, cryptic smile, and again sopped perspiration from forehead with handkerchief.

  They drove along poverty-stricken streets, past small mossy cottages. Heat shimmered in a faint milky cataract over low gray mountains. Looking through his window, Bolin impassively watched Argentina roll past: a pathetic garden, a rotting fence, an empty and filthy bird bath, children playing on an overgrown lawn. A set of wind chimes hanging from a peg gave a bitter-sweet jangle. Even through a miasma of cheap aftershave, the air inside the limousine smelled vibrantly of jacaranda and ficus.

  At length they turned onto a road flanked by spider-like mangroves and humble bungalows, terminating in an abrupt dead end. Tucked into the farthest remove of the cul-de-sac waited a small house surrounded by leafy croton. The limo pulled into the driveway, and the passengers climbed slowly out.

  The grand tour took all of three minutes. On a modest patio hidden from neighbors by a raw plank-board fence, then, Bolin sat with the men as a fat maid served a lunch of lobster empanadas, cinnamon alfajores, and yerba maté. Afterwards, they shared his Viceroys and listened to the sounds of the neighborhood: children yelling and crying, dogs barking, distant engines revving and falling. As they smoked, Bolin stole glances at the German. The handkerchief made endless ineffective movements to and from sweaty, sunken temples. The cheeks had the burst-vessel look of low-grade heatstroke. After ten years in Buenos Aires, the man looked no more accustomed to the climate than if he had arrived just yesterday. And he had relative youth on his side …

  Bolin suppressed a sigh; a muscle leaped in his jaw. He removed his spectacles, polished them carefully against one sleeve, and replaced them. He had known, upon extending himself to get the Wulff brothers’ operative onto the farm, that he was opening himself to the possibility of exile. In taking the calculated risk, he had expected as a worst-case scenario luxurious German chalets high in the mountains. But this was dangerously near squalor.

  Misreading Bolin’s expression, the dark man gave a predatory smile. ‘Never fear, Señor.’ He lowered his voice to a melodramatic whisper. ‘They say she never fails.’

  Bolin looked at the man evenly. He considered suggesting that, considering the support his organization had given this man’s cause – supplying funding, materiel, and planning for the coup d’etat – he might have expected better lodgings. But surely the relics of the Third Reich, with their nearly-illimitable wealth, had received the best the Argentinians had to offer. And apparently, that wasn’t much.

  Bolin finished his Viceroy, dropped it to the patio beside a goggling plaster frog, and ground the butt beneath one heel. A plump buzzing fly landed on the back of his left hand. With an irritated flick, he dislodged it. After a few seconds he shook his head, compressed his lips, and reached wordlessly for another cigarette.

  Only a few days, he told himself. Then his own coup d’etat would be implemented; his allies would be installed in the White House, ready to pull strings on his behalf, and he could safely return home. Only a few days …

  He could almost hear Vera laughing.

  TEN

  ANACOSTIA

  Isherwood hung up the phone with more force than he’d intended.

  For a moment he considered dialing again. Instead he turned, climbing the stairs, nearly tripping over a cat as he came off the top riser. A quick rest, shower, and change of clothes, and he would be on his way back to Treasury.

  The thing to do, he told himself as he stripped off his jacket and unstrapped his holster, was make the most of the separation from Evy while it lasted. He was angry – that she wouldn’t even answer his goddamned telephone calls, after all they’d been through, beggared the imagination – but she would come around in her own time, if she came around at all. Meanwhile, he could use the break to get some more sobriety under his belt. He could find a better bottle of perfume – Moonlight Mist, ‘worth its weight in romance’, might not do the trick – and he could give some serious thought to just how much more he had to offer. Once upon a time, they had talked seriously of starting a family. If he could bring up the subject again and convince her that he meant it, that might make all the difference …

  Just as he was starting on his belt, the doorbell rang. That would be Matilda Thorndike, from down the block, who had been caring for the cats. She must have seen the Mayfair parked outside and wondered if her services were still required.

  He was already two steps down the stairs when he decided to turn back and fetch the Colt – a reasonable precaution, all things considered. Looping the holster over his head, he took a moment to swing it around so that the revolver lay in the small of his back – the better to spare young Matilda Thorndike any nightmares tonight – before thudding down the stairs again and answering the door.

  Standing on his front stoop was a man decidedly not here to feed the cats. Thirtyish, about six feet tall, he had a boxer’s broken nose and a sailor’s tattoos encircling a thick forearm—

  —and in his meaty right hand, aimed at Isherwood’s heart, he held a small silver automatic.

  Isherwood slammed the door; at the same moment, the automatic spoke harshly.

  Fragments of wood peppered his chest and neck. Ignoring the flaring pain, he tried to work the bolt; but the sailor on the doorstep was smashing a piledriver foot into the door. In the same instant, glass shattered from farther back on the first floor, from the dining room, and Isherwood thought wildly: Incoming!

  Moving on instinct, he found the gun in the small of his back, firing two shots through the flimsy buckling wood of the front door even as he became aware of a flickering shadow to his left, beyond the window of the living room. He threw himself down, thudding heavily onto the floor. One out front, he thought frantically,
one out back (if not inside already), and one coming in from the west—

  Glass shattered from the direction of the den.

  The house had been surrounded.

  Rocking up onto his knees, he saw from the corner of his eye the man who had broken the living room window, caught in the midst of climbing over the sill. Isherwood steadied his right hand with his left and fired, taking the intruder in the throat, spinning the man backward.

  Gaining his feet again – his knees popped hollowly – he dashed forward, through the living room, toward the kitchen, with broken glass crackling underfoot. In a diamond-shaped mirror hanging above the bar he saw the front door burst open behind him. Turning without slowing, Isherwood snapped off a ragged shot, making the sailor withdraw.

  A semi-automatic pistol was lying on the living-room floor, surrounded by broken glass. He scooped it up, barely slowing. The gun’s previous owner sprawled half-in and half-out of the window, blood pulsing from his throat in a weakening freshet.

  Isherwood’s perception had again slowed to a combat-crawl, attaining the consistency of treacle. He felt a strange elation. Here, then, was his peculiar curse: under fire he was his best and worst self simultaneously. Heart pounding, mouth dry but electric, knees rubbery, eyes bulging from their sockets, he became the only Francis Isherwood that didn’t crave a goddamned drink.

  Skidding into the kitchen, sending cats scattering in all directions, he seemed able to gather a huge amount of information at once—

  (two men were moving through the study; and one more, he deduced from a groaning floorboard, came through the dining room as well – plus another came behind the one he had shot in the living room, and the sailor at the door was pressing forward again)

  —and his body decided before his brain that the bathroom was the place to be.

  Thudding into the lavatory, he set the two guns on the edge of the sink and then closed the door behind himself, turning the lock, extremely aware of the thinness of the plaster walls. But he didn’t plan on staying here long. He clawed the cigarette lighter out of his shirt pocket. Clutching the Zippo between clenched teeth, he popped the top off the toilet tank and took out the bottle of Jack Daniels he had stowed months before in anticipation of a very different circumstance. Setting down the bottle, he tore a jagged strip from the bottom of his shirt.