The Woman Who Knew Too Much

by Thomas Gifford

  “Ah, Charlie,” he said, glancing from his watch to the television image of Dan Rather’s serious, movie-star face and very serious blue pinstripe suit, then back to Cunningham. “Right on time. I daresay my lovely wife is even now straining to hear the shot… Come in, my boy, come in.”

  Cunningham looked around at the elegant study, a room with all the material goods he’d ever wished he could afford. The gun hung limply in his hand. The Director nodded to one of the leather wingbacks and Charlie went to stand beside it, massaging the blood-colored leather with his left hand, getting the feel of it.

  “Egad, I hope you don’t mind my saying it, Charlie, but you do look a little ragged.” The Director was thinking that, in fact, Cunningham and Mason had taken on the appearance of a pair of particularly unattractive bookends. Monuments to their own inefficiency, careworn; surprising in Mason, at least.

  “Ragged? You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through,” Cunningham said, his hand nervously checking the bandage on his ear. “Two dead men, did you know that? Did she tell you she killed a guy on the terrace at Sutton Place? Oh, that was beautiful. Guess who got to dispose of the body? She’s crazy … it was never supposed to turn out like this, never—”

  The Director raised a hand to interrupt, to stop the flow of self-pity. “Please, humor me, will you, Charlie? There are certain bits of information it’s better I don’t know. I’m bound to undergo some very stiff questioning over the next couple days and the less I actually know the better—”

  “So who’s gonna be questioning you?”

  “We’ll get to that in due course. The point is, in my role as innocent country squire beset by domestic tragedy in my own home this evening—”

  “What domestic tragedy?” Cunningham looked vaguely concerned—where, the Director observed, he should already have begun to look wary, were he as bright as he thought he was.

  “Wait and all will be made clear, Charlie. Suffice it to say it’s better if I am quite truthfully unaware of certain events—”

  “Sure, that’s all right for you,” Cunningham said, beginning to pace between the leather chairs and the wall of bookcases, “but there’s a dead man in my apartment—”

  “You don’t say! Well, we’ll go into that in due course as well—”

  “Look, this has all gotten a lot more complicated than I’d bargained for—”

  “In the immortal words of the late Mr. Jolson,” Bassinetti said, smiling his long, crocodile smile, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. However, first things first. My wife has no idea that you and I are now in cahoots, as they say—is that right? She still thinks you’re down here murdering me?”

  “Of course. The egomaniac she is, she’d never dream a plan of hers would go off the rails—”

  “Good, good. Now let me assure you, Charlie, you can put the body in your apartment entirely out of your mind. He’s caused you all the inconvenience he’s going to. Trust me.”

  Cunningham looked mollified, stopped pacing, leaned on the chair back as if it were a lectern.

  “Here, have a drink, Charlie. You look like a man who might know what to do with a drink. Name your poison.” He wheeled himself back over to the drinks table. “How does a double Tanqueray martini sound?”

  Cunningham came out from behind the chair, still holding the gun, waiting while Bassinetti made the drink, merely passing the unopened bottle of Cinzano dry vermouth over the cocktail pitcher. A pair of olives plummeted like depth charges into the martini, and Bassinetti held it out to him.

  “Here you go, my boy,” the Director said. “And Charlie? Your trousers, they’re unzipped. There’s a good fellow, make yourself presentable.” He lifted his own glass, clinked it against Charlie’s. “Confusion to our enemies,” he said.

  Cunningham swallowed deeply and shook his head. He sank down into the leather chair. “Confusion. Well, confusion to everyone. I’m so damn confused sometimes … all I know is, I want my money—”

  “Absolutely, you shall have it. And soon I have an even more appealing proposal to make to you—just trust me, Charlie. Stay with me while I ramble on.” He opened a carved box on the desk. “Cigar?” Charlie shook his head. The Director took one, clipped it and lit it, puffing slowly.

  All the frittering of time was getting on Charlie’s nerves. “Well, here I am,” he said. “I’ve sent you everything you wanted. All of her notes, everything that documents her plan to kill you, all the notebooks and photocopies of Palisades files, everything she used to research the book. You’ve got the floppy disks—”

  “Tell me, Charlie, what do you think of the book, now that the two of you have completed it? What do you really think?”

  “You know damn well what I think! It’s utterly devastating …”

  “Yes,” the Director mused, nodding his massive, shiny head. He studied the smoke from the cigar. “It’s a shame in a way that it can never be published—”

  “You’d be destroying yourself, of course—”

  “Of course,” the Director agreed, kept on nodding, watching the curling smoke. “But then, who am I? In the vast scheme of things? A nobody. Mr. Nobody. A trusted functionary, sufficiently corrupt, suitably paid for his services, just another soldier in the great war. My departure would go largely unnoticed … but think of all the others! Well, the mind reels!” He smiled at Charlie, who sank more deeply in his chair and chewed on an olive. “Everyone would go down if the book were published. Everyone … the White House and its complement of idiots would sink like stones … the list of casualties is endless … and that’s where my power now lies, Charlie—not in what I know, what I carry around in my head. I’ve known all that from the beginning—kill me and all that would die with me. But now! Kill me now,” he chuckled, a moist, rolling sound, “and the trouble just begins … because of this instrument of destruction, this book Zoe and you have written.” He smiled expansively, beatifically. “With this instrument I can destroy them all, and that’s what I’ve now …” He looked at his watch “Yes, right about now, informed them of. The fact that I, too, would be destroyed is immaterial. You might try to think of me now as the Mad Bomber, clad in a vest of dynamite, holding the magic button that can blow us all to smithereens. The fact is, Charlie, to all these mighty people I’m the single most important man in the world. It’s a good feeling. Anything happens to me, they all go up in smoke. I’m the safest man in the world, and they know it. If my attorneys open the package in their vaults upon my death, boom! It’s over for everyone … kablooey!” He smiled at the sound of the word.

  Charlie grinned. “Exactly. You’ve got ’em right where they don’t want to be. The end of a job well done. You’re safe. You’ve done a helluva lot to ensure your safety—”

  “Oh, I’ve done far more than that. Don’t you see?”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t. But that’s all right. I’d just like to get my money and get out. Zoe’s not gonna like it when you turn out not to be dead, but she’s your problem again, I’m out of it. If I’m lucky, I’ll never see the bitch again—”

  “You’d have to go to Brazil, change your name, live in the jungle … and Charlie, chances are she’d still find you and make you wish you’d never been born. That’s just the way Zoe is …”

  “I’ll take my chances,” he said, but his face was suddenly shadowed by the doubt that had been just beneath the surface all along. They both knew Zoe too well.

  “Will you, at that? I’d say that’s not much of a plan, Charlie. Now, consider my position for a moment. I needed the instrument, the book. But how to create it? And I needed to rid myself of a troublesome and—you’ll excuse me—unfaithful slut of a wife who was responsible for turning me into a pile of fat who can’t walk. How to do it? Then, in a flash, stretched out on my back trying to decide if I wanted to live or not, I knew how to do both. First the book—I made sure my wife, the writer, found out all about Palisades … how Palisades is the clearing house for all CIA and Mafia joint ventures, how the CIA
and Psycho Branch and the Mafia worked hand in glove, shoulder to shoulder, even sharing command of operations, all to control the drug traffic coming out of Central and South America … how Palisades was the banker and money laundry and coordinator for all these group efforts … how the CIA and Psycho Branch used the drug money to prop up puppet governments and guerilla movements, without ever having to seek official funding.”

  The Director passed his cigar over a ferocious-looking cut-glass ashtray, and the gray cylinder of ash dropped off. On the television screen a friendly, rather puckish man was asking if a Tums had ever tickled your nose like an Alka-Seltzer. Dan Rather would be back in a moment. “I let her see these things, I tempted her with files, reports, computer printouts, I left the odd memorandum conveniently—but not too conveniently—here in the study … oh, after I had her interest, I made the stuff harder to find. But I knew she’d keep after it because she couldn’t resist—she wanted to believe what she was on to. I even confided in her one night, told her the one thing I could never afford was a leak from Palisades, a Pentagon Papers fiasco repeated in the matter of Palisades … and I let her vicious nature take its natural course …”

  Cunningham had finished his martini and went back to the table, poured the rest of the mixture into his glass. It was diluted by melting ice, but he’d never heard the Director open up like this before. He didn’t want to distract him by mixing a new batch. He’d never met anyone quite like Bassinetti. There were bound to be a few Zoe’s around, but Bassinetti’s were something else again. He came back and sat down again. The gin was doing his ear a world of good. The fire flickered, and a breeze nibbled at the room’s warmth.

  “Of course,” the Director went on, as if he were glad for the chance to talk about his own master plot, “I knew she’d taken you as a lover. The perfect collaborator on her magnum opus. In thrall to her sexually, you’d do whatever she wanted you to do. Now remember, this has been a two-year project of mine. I managed with relative ease to infiltrate your life and hers electronically—yes, I have my own collection of tapes too. Once I knew she’d taken the bait, had done the book and decided to murder me—have a prowler murder me, that is—well, it was all so perfect. Kill me, she inherits, but if I live, there might be some problems with a divorce, sympathy for the cripple being dumped by the beautiful hot number, all that.

  “So all that remained was for me to entice you into my camp. One thing I could be sure of, the woman’s abrasive nature and chain-mail personality would make you hate her eventually, and I had plenty of time. In that event, you’d think it over and decide to throw your hand in with me. But if you hadn’t, I’d have summoned you and given you this chance of a lifetime. Oh, yes, it’s been one of those picture-perfect plans. Now, you see, we will be free of my wife, you will be very well off indeed, and I have the leverage to make myself truly wealthy, simply by suggesting that an increase of my remuneration would be a sure way to keep that book from ever being published—”

  “Hold on,” Cunningham said, swilling gin around his mouth, and waving the gun in front of him. “You’re slipping a couple things past me here. In the first place, I wouldn’t describe myself as coming off very well indeed, and so far, in the second place, you are still stuck with your wife.”

  “Cogent points,” Bassinetti admitted, “but perhaps we can … listen, what am I paying you this evening for your services?” He smiled, smacking his thick lips, stroking his smooth chin, nestled in its setting of fat.

  “You know damn well. Twenty-five thousand in cash.”

  “Ah, you remembered! Well, why don’t you take a peek in that Vuitton suitcase over there. Yes, it’s not locked. Open it, have a look.”

  Cunningham snapped the locks, opened the lid, and nearly fainted. “Jesus!”

  “Well said, Charlie! How much cash would you estimate you’re looking at?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know—”

  “Have a guess, Mr. Mystery.”

  “A hundred thousand?”

  “Oh, no, more than that. All freshly laundered too. No way to trace it at all. Guess again.”

  “I don’t know, what’s the game here?”

  “Humor me. Guess.”

  “Quarter of a million? How do I know?”

  “Half a million, Charlie. Cold, very cold, cash. And it’s yours. Shows how much I think of you … you’re quite a chap, y’know. You’ve been a great help. But there is one more thing—”

  “Half a million in tax-free cash.” Cunningham sighed, looked up at the Director. “One more thing? Name it.”

  “Aha, Charlie, I knew you’d see it that way! What a good sport!” The Director chuckled, his vast gut shaking. “All you have to do is kill our abominable Zoe. On the whole it should be a most enjoyable way to earn half a million dollars, what?”

  Chapter Thirty

  GRECO LEANED AGAINST THE wall and wondered if he’d heard what he thought he’d heard.

  Palisades overseeing CIA, Psycho Branch, and Mafia drug interests, presumably an enterprise so enormous that neither the Mafia nor the Feds could handle it themselves. It was all so superbly logical, yet immensely daring because of the risk of discovery. Somehow they’d all gotten into bed together, with Palisades fronting the operation, coordinating all their efforts, which had to include dealing with Washington as well as all the individual Latin American countries. It was logical, sure, but the complexity must have been incredible … and worth it. And that was what Celia, the cough-syrup fairy, had wandered into. He realized even in that instant that they would probably never know what kind of difficulty she posed for Palisades, because it was all mixed up with the husband/wife mess, the book exposing the whole thing, the attempt by the Director to blackmail everybody…

  If he’d heard what he thought he heard, he wanted to burst out with the biggest, longest, loudest laugh of his life. It was priceless! Bassinetti wasn’t talking about a few agents free-lancing in the drug business with the Mob: that had been going on for years, it was part of the culture, almost a CIA perk when it came to dicking around in scary southern climes. No, this thing was policy, with Palisades as a huge, essentially legitimate front. This was a mainline organization. This came with approval from the top. It was the way around begging Congress for money to work the presidential will south of the border. It took heavy foreign entanglements out of the advise-and-consent category. What it did, in fact, was create a second, secret government within the one you saw on the TV news every night … and the second government was funded by getting into the drug business with the Mob.

  It was the story of a lifetime. Teddy Birney would have killed for such a story. And then there was poor Celia! All she’d wanted to do was keep Zoe from knocking off her poor crippled husband.

  If Greco lived a thousand years, which seemed increasingly unlikely at the rate his head was being bashed open and generally maltreated, he doubted if he’d ever get it figured out.

  The General! That had to be General Cates, once Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, now officially retired and overseeing most of the intelligence and security services, a kind of czar, reporting to God only knew whom. And the manuscript—well, now he knew what they were talking about.

  The thought of trying to explain it all to anyone, even Celia, left him weak. The problem was, he really was feeling weak and crummy and lightheaded.

  Then the tickling began deep in his nasal passages, like an army of killer ants setting out, tramp-tramp-tramping, marching toward his sinuses. He fought back a sneeze, but they kept coming on like gang-busters, raping and pillaging and burning. He grabbed for his handkerchief to clap over his nose but it was too little, too late.

  He sneezed so hard his head smashed forward into the wall, making a sound that sounded like an explosion in an echo chamber, racketing on and on.

  “God bless you,” a voice said.

  Greco tried to focus through the tears running from his eye. His head whiplashed again with a second brain-rattling sneeze and a fit of sputt
ering and coughing. He wiped his nose.

  “You must be Mr. Greco,” the voice said.

  “If you say so,” Greco sniffed. He looked down into the black eye of a snub-nosed .38, held in the pink, pulpy fist of a very fat man in a wheelchair. Greco shook the cobwebs out of his head, but could only glimpse spiders. He wished he could do a Bogart impression to get things off on the right foot.

  “My name is Emilio Bassinetti. Please, do come in.” He wheeled backward, keeping the gun trained on Greco. “You look terrible too. Why is it that everyone I see around here tonight looks as if they’d come directly from a mugging by Hulk Hogan?”

  “Do you want an answer, or is that a rhetorical question?”

  “Rhetorical, I suppose. Come in, come, come. Have a drink … take a load off your feet.” The broad beefy face, slightly flushed, wore a grin that made it look very friendly. “To be honest with you, I heard you bumbling around in the hallway some time ago, but I didn’t want to interrupt my final seduction of Mr. Cunningham—you are familiar with our Mr. Cunningham?”

  “By reputation only.”

  “Yes. Well, you have been very swift on the uptake, you and Miss Blandings—”

  “Mason tells you this stuff, right?”

  “I have a variety of sources. In any case, I’m afraid Mr. Cunningham’s concentration is rather fragile at the moment—intrigue is not a field in which he naturally shines, of course—and he really needed time to pull himself together. Please forgive this gun, Mr. Greco, it’s nothing personal, but I always feel at a disadvantage with my … my infirmity.”

  “You seem to do pretty well,” Greco muttered, edging into the study, feeling cold, tired, and a lot like the man in the nasal spray commercial who seems to have drawn his last breath through a clogged nose.

  “Over here by the fire,” Bassinetti said. “Goodness, you’re soaking wet. Sounds to me as if the flu’s got you in its grip.”

  Greco went to warm himself at the fire, felt it attacking the clammy chill that had worked its way deep into his bones. “Hey!” He looked around the room. “Where is Cunningham anyway? I heard the two of you talking…” His head was hot and his eyes burning. He had a fever, and his hair was matted with blood where the gun butt had split his scalp.