London Bloody London

by Michael Avallone

  "Wasn't a print of the photo Cursitor took of O'Connell ever found, Chief?" That had struck me right off the bat.

  "No. There were several rolls of film. Mrs. Cursitor turned them over to us. But no photo of any stranger or anyone she didn't know. She obviously didn't know this O'Connell, as her husband indicated."

  "Too bad. What's Cursitor's oblique remark about getting in touch with the Home Office mean? Do you know anything about that?"

  The President spread his hands, wearily, resignedly.

  "He became an American citizen years ago. What he could have had to say to a British arm is beyond me. Beyond all of us. Of course, he was known and highly respected by his old government, but it does put it all in a shaky light, doesn't it? England didn't have anything to tell us, either, when they were asked. Officially, naturally. It was all news to them. You see what I mean, Ed? Nothng but baffling enigmas all over the lot. We just can't decide what's happened to the man."

  "Just a few pages in a diary," I said, "and you're turning me loose again. I suppose I ought to be flattered."

  His smile was genuinely affectionate.

  "Be flattered. You're the best man for the job, and I think you always will be for this particular kind of employment."

  I nodded. We both had never regretted the circumstances which had brought us together in the long ago. It had worked out, somehow. I was still alive and he was still the President, give or take the coming election. Viet Nam and Civil Rights and Inflation might do him in in the long run, but he was a good man and he was my President. The Boss. I had to do what he wanted me to do. I had never thought of refusing him, as I had every right to, according to some of the Amendments. But I still made my living under and behind a gun. By choice, by profession, by sheer inevitability. And not because my sign in the heavens was in the Seventh House or something.

  He no longer tried to appeal to my patriotism. We'd been down that road, too. He knew how apolitical I was, almost as naive as a child when it came to international chess. It's just not my bag.

  Too many other things are.

  Like being your own man, like women, like real freedom.

  "I want to know only one thing," I said. "It's the only thing worth knowing. About Cursitor."

  "Yes, Ed?"

  "Is he one of us or one of them?"

  "Would it make any difference in your taking the assignment if I were to tell you?"

  "No," I admitted, "but it would make me a lot happier to just know. Give me kind of a rooting interest, you might say, one way or the other."

  The new silence wasn't very long, but it contained more weight and moment than many another I've gone through.

  The President's smile bounced off his smooth face as if it had never been there. His eyes retained the sadness. Like a mist over a sunny landscape that just won't go away. A Cloud that wasn't Nine.

  "That's why you have to go to London to find him," he said very slowly. "We don't know."

  "Oh," I said.

  Carefully, very carefully, I killed the Camel in the huge glass ashtray on the desk. It was shaped like the Pentagon and glistened like a rare jewel. The silence between us lengthened. The good, clean, air-conditioned atmosphere" was begging for an interruption. Something to knife it, to slice it apart and render it harmless. Make it less ominous and formal than it seemed. The President, far more accustomed to the Conference Table and Summit Meeting ordeals than I was, was the first to penetrate that false discord. He was a non-smoker who had never been blinded or dulled by smoke-filled-room brands of politics.

  "Do you know London, Ed?"

  "Not since Hallmark," I reminded him. "That was '66. The hotel near Piccadilly. I suppose it's still there."

  He scowled, as if angry with himself for forgetting an assignment which he himself had given me. One which had somehow turned me into an assassin on government pay. A hired killer deluxe.*

  "Of course," he muttered softly. "Strange. I'd almost forgotten."

  "I've tried to," I admitted. "I can't."

  "No. I don't suppose you could."

  The rain took up the slack of the new silence between us, beating the glass of the windows to a fare-thee-well. It was a nice sound, though. It always is when you are safe on the inside, looking out The President pyramided his fingers and stared gloomily at their graceful apex. For a moment, he seemed as far away as Tibet.

  "Where are you staying in Washington, Ed?"

  "I'm a creature of habit. The Arva again. I've grown accustomed to the place." I had. It was a neat, off-the-beaten-track, modern motel, within reach of D.C. proper, just beyond the Iwo Jima Memorial and Arlington Cemetery, within rifle shot of the Potomac River at the foot of the city. I had registered there the last time as Sam Spade.

  "Good," the President murmured. "Stay there until tomorrow morning. You'll be receiving a package from me. Complete set of details and materiel. All you'll need to know about Cursitor before you start on this. Expense monies, too. Take all the time you need in London. More money can be had if you need it."

  "Check."

  "Are you registered under your own name this time?"

  I nodded. "Sometimes it pays to play it straight. Nobody gets suspicious that way. A Noon by any other name——"

  He nodded, and again we must have looked like a vaudeville team.

  "Ed, I will tell you one thing more about Cursitor. Something you can't find in the newspaper accounts or even any of our file data. A lot of his activity the last twenty-five years is still classified Top Top Secret. So this is from me to you and you won't have to verify it. Cursitor stepped down right after our Moon Program began. But he has been ex officio ever since. Everything we've done up there, he's been part of."

  "Sure. I get it."

  "You can see what it means. His disappearance, whatever the reasons, can not be abided. Or dismissed too casually. What he has in his head alone would be worth incalculable millions to interested parties. Including most especially our Red Chinese friends." He sighed. A thin sigh. "We can't guess about Cursitor, you see. It would be far too dangerous. A defection or a kidnapping—whatever it may prove to be—has to be explained away to our satisfaction. The Joint Chiefs are in an uproar about this. And that's all I'm going to tell you for now. It's all I can tell you. I did want you to know I'm not sending you on a sight-seeing tour. You understand?"

  I smiled. "You have never been trivial since the day we met."

  "No," he said quite seriously, "I suppose not. We've never even had a cup of coffee together. Or gone a round of golf. Worse luck."

  Again the rain filled in the silences between our conversation. The September downpour with all its rhythms, half-remembered sounds, and pulsating tempo. The green beyond the windows grew greener, almost luminous. I tried not to think about the importance of the new assignment.

  "Ed?"

  "Yes, Chief."

  "Take care of yourself in London."

  "Will do."

  "You're my secret weapon, you know. The only one I have. I'm afraid I'd be lost without you, somehow. You're the only presidential whim I've ever indulged myself with. You know that. I lose you and it would be like losing an arm. Or a leg. You're my edge over the FBI and the CIA. And my household Security. I want to hang onto you."

  "Don't worry. You will."

  "Amen," he said, quite seriously.

  We shook hands after that, and he walked me to the elevator to the left of his lavish but somehow comfortable office. The quiet door hissed open, a green light winking. A stone-faced, unblinking, uniformed man, .45 automatic strapped to his hip, waited for me to step in. The President's eyes didn't lose their sadness, even though the smile he gave me in farewell would have lit up the skies over the Mall.

  Nothing had changed in Washington, D.C.

  There was still the monuments, the imposing buildings, the heavy leaden atmosphere that seems forever charged with tension, tightrope nerve ends, Potomac fever, and world-shaking decisions. Lincoln on his chair.

&nbs
p; I went down in the plush, soundless elevator with the zombie security guard. Neither of us spoke to the other. We had nothing to say or to share. We were both faceless, voiceless cogs in the machinery that ran a White House. Ran a country. With and without Colt .45 automatics.

  When I reached the ground floor and found my way out to where the front of the building faces Pennsylvania Avenue, for all the world to see and wonder about, it was still raining. A driving rain slashed downward.

  I tugged my porkpie brim lower over my forehead and looked around for a cab. And thought about Cursitor. The headline story of hot July.

  Desmond Allan Cursitor. The English physicist who loved America.

  Who had taken the Queen Elizabeth II to London with his wife Nan and his children Stephanie and Stephen and kept a diary up until the day he reached Southampton. Cursitor, who had straddled a nuclear fence for years.

  He had disappeared on his first morning in London.

  Gone out to see the hall porter about tickets for that evening's performance of a play in West End and never come back. Never been seen again. According to the papers, his wife had been in a private hospital ever since. The loving and devoted wife, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The kids were back in their schools in the States, cared for by relatives, for it was September and the blackboard waits for no one. The perpetual question mark as of the moment was, where was Cursitor? Foul play or peccadillo? Had he been kidnapped or had he run away with another woman? No one knew. Not Scotland Yard, the CID, Interpol, or the FBI, CIA, and whoever else had been put on the trail.

  Why Cursitor?

  Who was he? Besides being a man who had helped build big bombs.

  Why was he important? Especially since he had retired years ago.

  I didn't know. Not knowing was the whole ball of wax.

  But the President wanted to know. The Chief was interested.

  That was all that interested me.

  I was on my way to London from the moment I left his office and stepped into the private elevator. A regular wind-up doll of an employee.

  The fate of all cogs everywhere.

  When the buttons are pushed, you move.

  Especially if you are a well-trained cog with a .45, a license, and the personal endorsement of a President to use all your virtues.

  And most of your faults.

  London seemed a million miles away when a cab stopped to pick me up in front of the White House.

  It was, actually.

  I was leaving one world for another.

  The Statue of Liberty for Big Ben. Times Square for Piccadilly.

  It was a journey I had never expected to take again.

  Hello, Piccadilly.

  Hello, Leicester Square.

  Both a long, long way from Tipperary. And old Broadway.

  Somewhere on another planet. The universe of St. James, the cosmos of King James English. The island where they still had to have their tea at four o'clock in the afternoon, come hell or megaton bomb.

  And all because the man called Cursitor had disappeared.

  Whoever the hell he was, in his forty-ninth year of life.

  Whatever the hell he was up to.

  I was thoroughly drenched when a blue and yellow cab sloshed through the teeming raindrops and splashed to a stop in answer to my waving arm. Behind me, the White House glistened in the deluge.

  It seemed to shimmer and dissolve like jello, as if my leaving were the one last act required to make it collapse and spread out over the watery landscape. The rain was like a special-effects trick.

  Then it was gone from the moving picture screen of the cab window, and I was on my way. Back to the Arva and the preparations for the sudden and crucial flight to London town. There was no time for QE2's.

  I began to think very seriously about Desmond Allan Cursitor.

  The hot potato all dressed up in academic honors and nuclear credits. The spotlight of the Moon Program was blinding enough.

  The vanished Cursitor whom a President wanted me to find.

  That Cursitor.

  Curse or blessing?

  One of Us or one of Them?

  There was only one way to know that.

  Go to London and find him.

  And ask him.

  I SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE

  □ When you go from one world to another, the view somehow gets distorted. It's a trick of time and place, I suppose, but it always happens. The blocks of Washington, D.C., tidy and geometrically anti-jumble, disappeared under the sleek airborne body of a gleaming BOAC jetliner, dissolved into the flat, nearly painted panorama of an ocean seemingly going nowhere, and then fanned out and broadened into the sprawling wasteland of brown and green earth that makes Heathrow Airport seem like one of those disguised B-29 bases which made England their home a lifetime ago. From Twelve O'clock High, we zipped down without a noticeable break in stride and hummed lovingly across the biggest apron of runway since Howard Hughes was a kiwi. The flight had been rapid, serene, and unbroken by hijackers, accidents, or suspicious characters. In fact I'd managed to jam onto a passenger list that included a returning-home championship team of cricketeers who had been in D.C., strutting their stuff, showing the solons what made British sporting blood boil so merrily. Everybody else seemed labeled Tourist. Me included. The only extraordinarily interesting S.O.B. of note was a peaches-and-cream strawberry blonde, something like six feet high and packed for pleasure, who answered to the name of Maralee Mitchum. She, it seemed, was a movie star who had been knocking them dead at Pinetree Studios and had just made her American debut, on lend-lease, in a ten-million dollar epic somewhere out in Nevada with Paul Newman's independent film company. From my window seat about four chairs behind her, she looked like the Promised Land for all boys everywhere. But she was hiding behind sunglasses no smaller than desk lamps, and all I remembered of her was the hair, about ninety-two white teeth, and a chest and hip line that would have beached the Spanish Armada. Or shipwrecked the Navy.

  There was no time for horseplay, at any rate.

  There was the attache case in my lap and all the dynamite it held. That and the curious importance of what the bureaucrats call missions and operations. Find Cursitor was my business in London. What the President had delivered to my room at the Arva Motel just before I shoved off for Dulles Airport was enough to keep me busy for the duration and six. Desmond Allan Cursitor's dossier and IBM history was longer than the Mississippi River. As such, there was enough homework for a team of agents.

  Let alone a single operator.

  No matter how extraordinary he was supposed to be.

  The jets whined and wheezed with finality, and the jetliner slowed and wheeled to a full stop, facing the bright sun flooding the field. I unbuckled, climbed up out of my chair, lifted the attache case, and gave my porkpie fedora another crimp down lower. In essence, I filled the bill of an American in London. No-nonsense suit and artless appearance. Just another reasonable facsimile of that touring series of open-faced, fairly attractive homo sapiens, the youngish Yankee modern who still had managed to avoid a corporation at the belt-buckle and just might be able to climb several flights of stairs without asking for an inhalator. Europe seems to expect us to look like that, thanks to the motion picture industry. From Fairbanks, Sr. to Steve McQueen.

  Or so I thought. Self-deception is a game everybody plays.

  As we all streamed down the airstair, past the nice smile of a trim, wholesome, Mary Poppins stewardess, the cricketeers were noisily guffawing and Miss Movie Star was doing her best to make a humble stepdown to her homeland. It was quite an act all the way. On cue, a small battery of newspapermen materialized, armed with cameras, steno pads, ball pens, and shouted admiration. Ready to pay homage to a returning queen of the Mazda lamps. Maralee Mitchum lifted her shades with theatrical surprise and magnanimity and did a Little Me? gesture of high-class humility. De Mille would have been proud of her.

  Flashbulbs flashed, strobe lights clicked, and posterity and t
omorrow's newspapers were served. The rest of the passengers paused to be awed.

  I elbowed out of the way just in time, ploughed through the milling and gawking cricket team, and steered for the terminal entrance, about a football field away. Behind me, the uproar continued, ascending the scale of time-honored ritual. Like Mary Pickford's very first arrival at Grand Central Station way back in the Dark Ages or Marilyn Monroe's leaning from a brownstone window to the plaudits of an admiring Manhattan crowd of streetwalkers. Fans, not hookers.

  Yet, there was a motor in my brain, oddly at the ready.

  Poised for something. Anything.

  It is at times such as that when I can always feel the weight of the .45 holstered against my left armpit. Old habits are hard to break. It's like the prickling of your scalp when a chalk is scraped across a blackboard, or the phone ringing when you expect a call. That and that eerie sensation of something you're just not sure of, something you can't see but know is there.

  Maralee Mitchum was probably all she seemed and would just as probably never be anything more than that. But in death games, you just don't take anything for granted. Not if you want to stay alive.

  "Just one more, Maralee Love—"

  "Hold that smile, darling—"

  "How was America, puppet? All you expected—?

  "There's a good girl now—"

  I pushed on, the thunder ebbing. The passengers had lingered.

  The terminal entrance loomed ahead. Yards away, now. Customs—

  I was still tingling, feeling something—I didn't know what, nor could I pin it down to the slightest variation of the norm.

  The attache case in my hand suddenly seemed heavier.

  So did the .45 against my armpit.

  Lumpy, alien, but far from foolish.

  The stakes as they say, were pretty high.

  "Don't rush off, sir——"

  I kept on moving, looking straight ahead at that terminal door.

  "Here, now, you call that being polite——?"

  The voice was very British, high-pitched; and suddenly, the smooth and easy path to the airport terminal for a cup of coffee was blocked.