by James Bruno
Glassman slowly lowered himself into the desk chair. He produced two shot glasses. “Where have you been?” he asked, still transfixed.
“Let’s just say that I’ve been on sabbatical.” He poured two glasses, presented one to Glassman. “Prost. Or should I say, lachayem.” He slugged back the potent drink. “And now I’m back.”
“You are one of the FBI’s most wanted. You are taking a big risk being here,” Glassman said.
“I have unfinished business,” Ferret replied.
“What?”
Ferret stared at the old German silently.
Glassman cringed.
“Don’t worry, Chaim. You’re my friend. I would never harm you.”
“Your family?”
“Betrayed.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why doesn’t anybody get it? Buckwheat Thompson reacted the same way.”
“You killed him.”
“I did not!” Ferret banged the desk with the flat of his hand.
Glassman jumped.
“Betrayal. The White House did him in. Don’t you see? And they’re pinning the blame on me. It’s clever. Just like the way they did in my family.”
Glassman shook his head, indicating he didn’t understand.
“Oh yeah. I didn’t do it.”
“Who then?”
“The Evil.”
Glassman furrowed his brow.
“The Evil System did it. CHASM. The program is evil. And I became the Evil. Don’t you see?”
“I see,” Glassman said as he focused on Ferret’s trembling lips and overearnest eyes. He really didn’t see.
“Do you have any snacks?” Ferret slugged back another slivovitz.
“What?”
“You know, chips, pretzels, stuff like that.”
“No, but there is a store around the—”
“Never mind. I came here because I need your help.”
“My help?” Glassman’s heartbeat doubled.
Ferret reached inside his coat. Glassman watched closely.
“Here.” He set a small box on the desk.
Glassman cautiously picked up the box and opened it. Inside were a half-dozen computer disks. He looked up at Ferret for an explanation.
“Hundreds of documents on CHASM,” Ferret said.
“And?”
“And, two things. First, it’s sound insurance in case they try to betray you as they did me. Second, in the unlikely event that you acquired a conscience, you could, you know, blow the lid, expose the Evil.”
“Indeed,” the old man said. He pondered for a moment, rubbing his white beard. “Why me? CHASM and PAPERCLIP have been good to me. My God, I would have been hanged, or jailed for many years, had your government not rescued me.”
“Chaim. How old are you?”
“Eighty-three, next month.”
“As a young man, you were responsible, directly or indirectly, for the violent deaths of, what? Thousands? Tens of thousands? You’ve lived a lie for the past sixty years. A Nazi murderer posing as a Jew. But you’ve been a quiet, law-abiding citizen, raised your kids here, your grandkids. Will you go to your grave loving Adolf Hitler?”
“Of course not!”
“Will you go to meet your Maker being proud of having massacred so many people.”
“I never—”
“Don’t lie to me, Chaim! Will you, on your death bed, tell your family how well you served your adopted country by caring for war criminals like yourself?”
“Stop it!” Glassman slammed down a ledger and stood up. He pointed an arthritic finger at Ferret’s face.
“You. You killed your own family! Slaughtered them like pigs! How can you…How can you…” Tears streamed down Glassman’s face. He fell back into his chair and covered his face with his hands as he wept uncontrollably.
Images, grainy black and white images, flashed in Ferret’s mind. Corpses at Auschwitz. Lynette’s dead eyes staring emptily back at him. The mass graves at Babi Yar, at Novi Sad. Win, Jr., Brandon and Jeremy sprawled, twisted like broken dolls on their beds, soaked in their pooled blood. Tito’s partisans hanging from street lamps. Cloris, mother, half her face torn away. The ovens at Dachau; the smoldering bodies of his family in a makeshift ditch. A melange of portraits: cold, unsmiling Heinrich Himmler, smooth, mendacious Radovan Karadzic, Ferret himself. Ferret clamped his eyes as tight as he could, vainly wishing the jarring images away.
“Ferret. Ferret!”
The women placidly watching TV. The minisledge swiftly coming down on their heads, in turn. The boys soundly asleep. Screams. The large hammer again falling down, repeatedly, like an ax. Anguished pleas. Stifled terror. Blood.
Glassman shook Ferret. “Are you all right?”
A cascading, train wreck-like screech along with a vast chorus of pathetic screams pierced Ferret’s brain. He could not bear it. He reached in his coat and pulled out a snub-nosed .38 revolver and pressed it hard against his temple.
Glassman charged at him.
Bang!
In the dead stillness that followed, Glassman did not know whether he lay atop a corpse or a 39-year old ex-athlete bent on counterattack. Either way, he was afraid to open his eyes and find out.
“Get off me, you old Kraut!” Ferret pushed the old-timer off of him. He sat up and shook his head. He looked down at an out-of-breath Glassman. “Why did you stop me? Why?”
“I’ve had enough blood on my hands for one lifetime. I do not need yours as well.” Glassman put his fingers to his lips. “Sshh.” He listened intently, then rose and peeked out the windows. “Apparently, no one heard. Now go. Leave, immediately.”
Ferret, head bowed, picked up the gun, stared at it for a brief moment, then tucked it into his coat. As he reached the door, he looked at Glassman. “Chaim. Expose the Evil,” he said intently. “I, uh, lack credibility.”
“And I do not?” Glassman said.
“As an act of contrition. It’s not too late for you.”
“Please go.”
Ferret disappeared into a heavy, spring downpour.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“You didn’t kill him? Who did then?” the reporter asked.
“We told you already!” Lisa implored.
Gallatin squeezed her hand, and signaled her to hush.
“A man with a foreign accent. He shot the intruder in the back of the head—,” Gallatin began.
“While you slept,” the reporter rejoined.
“The gun had a silencer.”
“The police say that it’s your gun.”
“How can it be my gun? I don’t—”
“Your employer says you’re licensed to carry a handgun.”
“Not a Glock! And certainly not with a damn silencer! My God, my fingerprints weren’t even on the gun!”
“The police say you rubbed them off.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because this particular weapon was unlicensed and in the District of Columbia, that’s a felony.” The reporter held his notebook, still unopened.
“I don’t believe this!” Lisa interjected. “We went to the Post first. We thought you guys would run with a story like this.” She rubbed tired eyes.
“We did.”
“Yeah. A two paragrapher on page three of the Metro section as a local crime story,” Gallatin said.
“Okay, okay,” the reporter, Jason Tealy, said calmly. His youth and utter self-confidence lent an air of arrogance to the Post’s most junior political affairs reporter. “What evidence do you have of a…’secret program’ to bring war criminals into this country?”
Lisa sat with her legs crossed in the small boarding room Gallatin had rented. With one elbow on her knee, she propped her head at the brow and looked exasperatedly at the floor.
“How many times do we have to tell you? The intruder—”
“Which one? I’m losing track,” Tealy interrupted.
“The second one!” Lisa shot back. “He took the d
isks.”
“Of which you had made no copies.”
“Right! Stupid move on our part,” Lisa hissed.
“So, it’s your word against the White House’s.”
“At this point, yes,” Lisa said.
“I’ll let you in on something,” Tealy said, full of himself. The President’s Chief of Staff told Howard Chumley — our editor-in-chief — that there is no such program, that you didn’t have the clearances to know about one, had one existed and that, well…”
“Well what?” Lisa demanded.
Tealy let out a long breath. “That you were asked to leave the NSC staff because of, what they termed, ‘moral improprieties.’”
“Moral improprieties?! Like what?”
“It’s really not for me to say, Miss Valko. Just look at it from our perspective. Here we have a young ex-NSC staffer, recently dismissed from her job, shacking up with an AWOL insurance investigator from Cleveland. You live in a high-crime area. A thief breaks into your apartment while you two are—. Well, anyway, Mr. Gallatin here, described by his employer as hard drinking and increasingly paranoid, grabs his unlicensed handgun and pops the burglar in the head. The cops arrest you, Mr. Gallatin, for keeping an unlicensed weapon and using undue force against an intruder. Now you are out on bail. And, Miss Valko, your landlord throws you out.
“You claim that the government is harboring war criminals from a number of countries, but you possess no evidence, not to mention a logical reason why the government would be doing so. The White House tells us that you’re making it all up to get back at them for having fired you.”
“What about my car getting blown up?” Gallatin demanded.
“Ah, yes. Well, my sources tell me that you’ve pissed off a lot of people. Could be some personal vendetta stemming from one of your insurance investigations. I hear it could even be the IRA. Now that could be a different story.”
“Then you don’t believe a word we’re saying,” Gallatin said.
“It’s not that. Uh, remember when President Reagan met with Gorbachev the first time? He said, ‘Trust, but verify.’”
“What’s that got to do with us?” Lisa asked.
“I’m trying to trust and I definitely need to verify. I mean, we’re talking journalism 101 here. If we weren’t careful, we’d be running every latest conspiracy theory on the Kennedy assassination, every Elvis sighting. We’d be no different from the Enquirer.”
“Sounds to me like the Post has lost its edge. You’re in bed with the White House. Just another Old Boy in the Power Establishment,” Lisa said, the edge in her voice now razor sharp.
Tealy got up. “If you’re ever able to back up your story with anything solid, give me a call.” He proffered his card. Neither Lisa nor Gallatin made a move to accept it. Tealy left it on a small side table and showed himself out the door.
Lisa stood with her arms folded, staring out the window onto busy North Capitol Street.
“Mike, what do we do now?”
“Try the New York Times?”
“Forget it. We’ll get the same treatment. You have to understand, these people all went to the same schools, they play squash with each other, they intermarry. They rock the boat only when they have it in for somebody. Everybody hated Nixon. They went after him like a mob after Frankenstein. Merriman is a different kettle of fish. He may be feckless, but he puts on a good face. The media haven’t been so taken in by a sitting president since JFK.”
“So, then we try other papers, TV, radio, till somebody bites.”
“Mike, you’re so naive. Don’t you see what’s happening? Tulliver and Haley have planted stories about us that effectively paint us as the Slut and the Nut.”
“Don’t call me naive!” Gallatin rejoined. “I may not be some hot shot Washington know-it-all, but this backwoods baboon isn’t as dumb you think.”
“I didn’t call you dumb. Just naive. Look at what Tulliver and Haley have accomplished. They’ve successfully planted stories that I was ‘fired’ for having carried on an affair with a Romanian known intelligence officer — of all things — and that, after I was reprimanded, I went on a nymphomaniacal binge by sleeping with the entire diplomatic corps. You, they paint as a booze-swigging, gun-crazy conspiracy theorist become half-mad over his wife’s death. Who’s going to believe us — without some real evidence to back us up? Tealy was right. If we’re lucky, maybe some sleazy tabloid will take our story and run it next to the latest UFO fantasies and Paris Hilton’s love life. That’s exactly what Tulliver and Haley want. It would nail us once and for all as fringe fruitcakes.”
Gallatin picked up the phone and began to punch a number.
“What are you doing?” Lisa demanded.
“Calling the New York Times.”
“Are you crazy?!”
“No. I’m not naive, and I’m not crazy. I believe in fighting back.”
Lisa went over to Gallatin, snatched the receiver out of his hand and put it back in its holder.
Gallatin grabbed her arm hard and threw her down on the floor.
Lisa sprang back up. “That does it!” She rushed across the room, threw her suitcase on the bed, opened a couple of dresser drawers and proceeded to toss her clothes willy-nilly into the bag.
“What are you doing?” Gallatin asked.
“What’s it look like, lover boy?”
“Where are you going?”
“Back to Wheeling. Away from Cloud Cuckooland. Back to normal folks. My family. I’m retiring to my brother’s farm to keep company with a lot of farm animals for the next sixty years. At least they don’t lie and don’t push me around.”
Gallatin sidled up to her, reached his hands out to touch her, but couldn’t bring himself to do so. “Look, I’m sorry. The pressure on both of us has gotten way out of hand. Let’s just talk this out—”
Lisa swung around. “Mike. I’m sorry. I really am. But I need time to get my head on straight. I’m afraid that if I stay here, I’ll…I’ll become just like Mr. Ferret. I just can’t risk it.”
“And us? What about us?”
She shut the suitcase and struggled with the zipper. She rose, put her face close to Gallatin’s, placed one hand gently on his cheek. “Oh, Mike. I don’t know. Just give me time. I just don’t know.” Lisa heaved her suitcase around her shoulder by the strap, opened the door and rushed out to the street to hail a cab.
Win Ferret’s favorite radio talk show host was Cy Lauer which he used to tune into every morning as he drove to work. It was one of his fantasies to host such a show. Ferret was always ready for “Say It Louder” Lauer. But, on a slow early Monday morning, was Cy Lauer ready for fugitive Ferret?
The topic of discussion was “Do you hate your spouse, and what are you going to do about?”
“Oo-k-a-y. It’s Win Ferret from…where’re you callin’ from?” Lauer crooned.
“Up north.”
“Uh, right, sure. Whatever. So, Win, do you hate your wife — we’re talkin’ wife here, are we? Not ‘partner,’ ‘companion,’ ‘life mate’?”
“I’m straight.”
“Damn straight, I’ll bet too. Ha, ha, ha! So, Win, do you and the missus get along? I don’t care how lovey-dovey couples are, there’re times when you’re tempted just to haul back and let ‘em have it. Don’t deny it, Win. What d’you say? Ever feel like it?”
“Yes.”
“And how do you deal with it?”
A radioman’s worst enemy, silence on the air, hung in the ether like a radioactive cloud.
“I…I…”
“You what?”
“Killed her.”
“Huh.” Another pregnant pause as Lauer sought his bearings. “Right, Win! What’d you do? Fantasize the whole thing in your sick little brain? Mental release is what the shrinks call it,” he said, valiantly stuggling to maintain a lighthearted atmosphere amid panicky doubts about this caller.
“No. I really killed her.”
“Heh, heh.” Again silence. �
�Okay, Win. I’m game. You knocked off the old lady. How’d you do it?”
“With a hammer. A small sledge, to be exact.”
“Yeah?” Lauer’s verbosity was drying up. “When and where?”
Seven weeks ago. In Bethesda.”
“Wait a minute. There was a murder. A multiple murder. Are you, my friend, claiming to be that guy?”
“I am ‘that guy.’”
“Right! Well, thanks for calling, whoever you are. Next caller is Fred, from Phoenix! Take it away Fred—”
“Wait! I can prove it!”
Lauer hesitated. “Yeah? How?”
“The…the pajamas my sons were wearing. Win wore striped ones, Brandon had red, solid red — no buttons; and little Jeremy had on a single-piece job with Mickey Mouse’s face on it. None of this appeared in the papers. Check it out.”
“Uh-huh. Let’s assume for a moment you are who you say you are. Why’d you do it?”
“I couldn’t take it any more.”
“Take what any more?”
“The evil I was forced to carry out on behalf of the White House. Operation CHASM. A program to sneak war criminals into this country and settle them in normal communities — like the FBI’s witness protection program.”