by Ross Thomas
I’m not sure why I bothered to play my word games with Killingsworth because all he’d said was, “Yes,” nodded his big, square, blond head in thoughtful agreement, and added, “I guess that’s the right word for it.” Then he’d started to leave, but turned back to say, “By the way, if you can’t boil me down to three pages, Phil, three and a half will do just fine.”
I think the only person with more space in Who’s Who the following year was Douglas MacArthur.
Killingsworth had been thirty-seven when he was named managing editor of the Post and his autobiography (which modesty kept him from writing until he was forty) could have been called I Was There, Charlie, because he had been. Instead, he called it The Killingsworth Story and it sold 619 copies. An untroubled cynic on the Post once remarked that the only thing Killingsworth had missed during World War II was the line at an army induction center.
He had been at Pearl Harbor, of course, on December 7, 1941. He was on his way back from the Moral Rearmament oratorical finals for college seniors in Manila and when the attack came, Killingsworth was delivering an abbreviated fifteen-minute version of his speech over a Honolulu radio station. After the staff announcer panicked, a quick-thinking engineer hustled Killingsworth up to the roof, handed him a microphone, and told him to start talking. He was good at that and so by shortwave Amfred Killingsworth gave one of the first eyewitness accounts of the Japanese attack, describing everything he saw and a hell of a lot of what he imagined—such as the Japanese landing at Waikiki.
An hour after the radio networks had transcribed and rebroadcast his description in the States, Killingsworth received six job offers. He picked the one from the Chicago Post because his father had bought it every Sunday morning for seventeen years on the strength of its comic section.
After that, Amfred Killingsworth’s by-line topped warm, often soggy human interest stories from Corregidor, New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, Washington, North Africa, London, Normandy, Leyte Gulf, Chungking, Iwo Jima, Rome, Rheims, Berlin, and from aboard the U.S.S. Missouri on September 2, 1945. He usually managed to get either a dog or a cat into his stories.
When the war ended, Killingsworth was made editorial page editor of the Post where it really didn’t matter whether he could write or even spell. He was twenty-five years old. A year later, with his eye on his future if not on his bride, he married Norma, the thirty-three-year-old daughter of Obadiah Singleton, editor and publisher of the Post. Singleton was then seventy-three and obsessed with his antivivisection crusade, his paper’s annual National Junior Wrestling Tournament, the Communist conspiracy (both international and domestic), the machinations of Wall Street, and the welfare of his daughter—in just about that order. Norma suffered occasional mild seizures, endured a bad case of postadolescent acne, and lusted after bellhops, delivery men, cab drivers, and bartenders. “The best time to catch her,” a cab driver had once told a mildly interested Post reporter, “is when she goes into that fit. I mean it’s a real tough ride.”
Killingsworth quickly got his new bride with child and then left for a three-year assignment in Europe as roving correspondent. He especially liked to cover the tulip festival in Holland. When he came back to Chicago, he again took over the editorial page and that’s where he stayed until one night in early 1957 when old man Singleton wandered down to the city room and found the managing editor drunk. He wasn’t as drunk as usual, but Singleton couldn’t tell the difference, so he fired him. When he was through with that, he turned to three reporters and a rewrite man and fired them for, as he later put it, “just standing around gawking.”
The next day Singleton named his son-in-law managing editor and three days later Killingsworth hired me to replace one of the fired reporters. He’d said, “I like the cut of your jib, St. Ives; welcome aboard,” and thus acquired himself a lifelong enemy.
There was no reason to tell Hamilton Coors any of this as we sat in the third-floor State Department office that seemed to belong to no one in particular. I was watching it snow; Coors was watching me watch. Neither of us had said anything for twenty or thirty seconds.
“Tell me more about the dirty linen,” I said finally.
“Killingsworth’s a fool, of course,” Coors said without rancor, but not without a trace of sadness.
“How do the Yugoslavs rate him?”
“Unofficially, they’ve asked that he be recalled.”
“Are their complaints general or specific?” I said. “Or both?”
Coors’s eyes left me and wandered around the room, but there wasn’t much to see, so they finally settled on the flag. “Do you remember Alexander Rankovic?”
“Just the name,” I said. “He was once something or other in the Yugoslav government.”
“Vice-president,” Coors said, “until five or six years ago when Tito kicked him out.”
“I remember now, but I don’t remember why.”
“Rankovic wasn’t only vice-president, he was also head of the UDBA, its secret police.”
“Well, they did give him something to do.”
Coors frowned and said, “Mmmm,” to let me know that he didn’t regard my remark as substantive. “There were charges and even countercharges for a while,” he said, “but the real blowup came when Tito claimed to have found a hidden microphone in his own house.”
“That could well cause a rift.”
From behind closed lips Coors gave his opinion of my remark with another “Mmmm,” and then said, “Rankovic was charged, stripped of his public office, and finally forced into obscurity. He was never tried publicly.”
“Then what?”
“Rankovic had a confidential assistant who’d been with him since the war. His name is Jovan Tavro. What Rankovic knew as head of the secret police, Tavro also knew. A few weeks ago, Tavro started to meet secretly with Killingsworth.”
“Who never could keep anything to himself.”
“He didn’t tell us.”
“Who did.”
“The Yugoslavs. It upset them so much that they became, well, insistent about Killingsworth’s recall.”
“But he got kidnapped before you could fetch him home.”
Coors hooded his eyes again and once more set them wandering around the room in search of something to light on. He had to settle for the flag again. “Not exactly,” he said finally.
“What do you mean not exactly?”
“We recalled him immediately.”
“And?”
“Killingsworth refused to leave,” he said in a voice so low that he almost mumbled it, as though hoping that I wouldn’t bother to listen.
“Amfred Woodrow Killingsworth,” I said, “Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary as well as Dunce Designate. Let me guess why he refused to leave. He’s in the thick of a monarchist plot to restore Peter to the throne?”
“No,” Coors said.
“It’s worse?”
He paused for a long time as though he were silently trying out some phrases to determine how bad they would sound when he finally had to say them. “Jovan Tavro was in possession of information that could be extremely valuable to whoever possessed it.”
“And Killingsworth’s now got it.”
Coors said nothing. It was, I suppose, a diplomatic silence.
“So Killingsworth is blackmailing you.” Coors blinked his eyes at that.
“Either you keep him on as ambassador, or he’ll spread Tavro’s information all over page one of the Chicago Post under a copyrighted by-line.”
Coors sighed. “You left out his syndicated news service.
“And you’ve left out something,” I said.
“Oh?”
“You’ve left out why Killingsworth really doesn’t want to come home.”
“That,” Coors said.
“That,” I said.
For the first time a really pained expression appeared on his dour face. It was a look that could have been caused by either acute embarrassment or a sudden migraine attack. They bot
h hurt. He gently massaged his temples with the tips of his fingers, looking at the top of his desk.
“He won’t come back,” he said to the desk top, spacing each word carefully, “because he says he’s in love.”
Well, it can happen at fifty as easily as at fifteen, but it wasn’t at all what I’d expected so I got up and walked across the room to where the picture of the flag hung. I counted the stars and there were still fifty of them. Then I counted the stripes and felt relieved when there were only thirteen. But since it was a State Department flag, I counted them again to be sure.
“He’s in love with a slinky Eurasian from the Hanoi embassy,” I said to the flag.
Coors’s voice seemed tired when he spoke. “We could handle that,” he said. “Who does he think he’s in love with other than the face he shaves every morning?”
“With Anton Pernik’s granddaughter.”
“She must be either pretty or sexy, because she couldn’t be smart. Not if she’s fooling around with Killingsworth.”
“She keeps house for Pernik—looks after him,” Coors said.
I sat down again and looked at Coors who once more was giving his fingernails a close inspection. First the right hand, then the left.
“How old’s the girl?” I said.
“Twenty-two.”
“You don’t need me. You need some agony column writer. Someone like Ann Landers. When do you let the press in on the kidnapping?”
“This afternoon,” Coors said.
“What do the Yugoslavs say?”
“They’ve agreed to free Pernik.”
“What if you don’t?” I said.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t hand over the million and Pernik.”
Coors merely shrugged and looked somewhere else. At the flag probably.
“What does that mean?” I said. “That they’d kill Killingsworth?”
“They could threaten to,” he said.
“But you’d figure it for a bluff?”
“I’m sure it would be.”
“Call it then,” I said. “You can’t possibly lose.”
Coors’s large eyes deserted the flag and darted quickly around the room as if in desperate search of some less hallowed place to light. But finally they gave up and once more settled on the flag. It may have given him reassurance or even a sense of purpose. He seemed to need one. “We can’t do that,” he said and there was only finality in his tone.
“Why not?”
“Because,” he said and chewed on his lower lip before continuing. “Because we are the kidnappers.”
5
I WAS HALFWAY TO the door before Coors spoke again and when he did, it stopped me in midstride. It was only one word, but nobody had used it yet and probably wouldn’t again because they thought it cost too much. Coors said, “Please.”
I turned and said, “Was it yours originally?”
He shook his head. “Not mine. They gave it to me to finish. They do that sometimes.”
“There’s no million dollars.”
“No,” he said.
“No ransom demand.”
“It’s false,” he said.
“Faked, just like the snatch.”
“Killingsworth doesn’t think so. He thinks it’s real. So do the Yugoslavs.”
“Who pulled it?” I said.
“They’re from Trieste. A pair of them.”
“Italian or Yugoslavian?”
“Half and half. They won’t talk to anyone. They can’t afford to.”
“What about the girl?” I said.
“She goes with her grandfather.”
“Then what?”
“You furnish them with the documents that’ll get them out of Yugoslavia and to the States.”
“And Killingsworth?”
“With her here, he won’t want to stay there. He’s in love, remember? When he returns for consultation, he’ll be allowed to resign. Quietly.”
“What about Pernik?”
“What about him?”
“What happens to him?”
There was only indifference in Coors’s voice. “I suppose we’ll give him a house out in Hyattsville and he can write some more poetry.”
“And the girl?”
“If Killingsworth balks, she goes back to Yugoslavia.
“It’s neat,” I said. “Someday I’d like to meet him.”
“Who?”
“Whoever dreamed this up.”
“His name’s hardly a household word.”
“Neither is shit in some households.”
Coors did frown at that, but erased it quickly and asked, “Shall we get on with it?”
“All right.”
“When you arrive in Belgrade you’ll be met by someone from our embassy. As far as the embassy knows, you’re exactly what you are, Philip St. Ives, professional go-between whose services have been requested by Anton Pernik.”
“That’s a bit thin, even for someone like Myron Greene who dotes on things like that.”
Coors’s tone grew starchy. “Your Mr. Greene has a strong streak of patriotism which I found rather admirable.”
“You mean naive, don’t you?” I said. “If Pernik did ask for me, it was only because you had someone tell him to. But Myron doesn’t expect you to lie. I do.”
I suffered through Coors’s glare until he continued. “Your embassy escort will take you to the proper Yugoslav authorities who’ll furnish you with the pieces of paper necessary to permit Pernik and his granddaughter to leave the country. Then the kidnappers will contact you and you’ll set up the place for the exchange. The Yugoslavs have agreed not to interfere in any way. After the exchange, you escort Killingsworth back to the embassy and we’ll take over from there.”
“And that’s all?” I said.
Coors rested the palms of his hands flat on the desk and looked at me steadily. “Yes. That’s all.”
“There must be something else—an odd loose end or two.”
“No.”
“Haven’t you forgotten someone?”
“Who?”
“Jovan Tavro. You know, the aide to the deposed vice-president. The one who had all the embarrassing information.”
“No,” Coors said. “I haven’t forgotten him.”
“Isn’t he in some kind of trouble?” I said. “I don’t think Tavro would voluntarily hand anything over to Killingsworth unless he was in trouble. Nobody who knew Killingsworth for five minutes would tell him anything either important or confidential, unless he was desperate. So Tavro must be desperate—almost as desperate as you.”
I watched Coors as he increased the pressure of his palms on the desk. “I’m not sure that I follow you,” he said in a special tone that he might have been saving for some Senate investigating committee.
I shook my head. “You follow me fine,” I said. “You’re even a bit ahead of me and your only mistake has been in estimating my catch-up time.”
“Really, St. Ives—”
I rose and leaned over the desk toward him, trying to keep most of it out of my voice, but not succeeding too well.
“What the hell do you think I’ve been doing for the past five years? And who do you think I’ve done it with, a clutch of choir boys? I’ve dealt with thieves, Coors, the professional kind who’ll lie and cheat and sometimes kill just as quickly as they’ll steal, and they’ll steal anything that’ll bring a dollar and even things that won’t. So I’ve had to outthink them at their own line because every last one of them has wanted to steal something and sell back nothing. The only reason they didn’t is that I somehow stayed one jump ahead of them which isn’t as easy as it sounds because a lot of them, were smart. Even clever. That’s not bragging. That’s just how I make a living off professional thieves, who’re as rotten a bunch as you can find, but there’s not one of them who’d dream of trying to con me with the crap you’ve been pushing here this morning.”
Coors sat through it all patiently enough and even looke
d as if he had listened to part of it. When I was through and sitting back down and smoking another cigarette, he locked his hands behind his head and regarded the ceiling.
“I told them, of course,” he said.
“Told who?”
“Upstairs.”
“What?”
“That you’d tumble, that it was all too thin without Tavro.” Coors sighed at the ceiling. “They wanted to wait.”
“Until when?”
“Until you got there.”
“They were wrong.”
“Yes, they were, weren’t they?” Coors quit looking at the ceiling and used his fingertips to massage his temples again. “I’ve told you no lies. Tavro did go to Killingsworth. He thought Killingsworth might help him, but Killingsworth instead used the information he got from him to pressure us. When love comes late in life to some men, it often affects their judgment. It’s affected Killingsworth’s.”
“So he was kidnapped,” I said.
“Only because we couldn’t trust him. Would you?”
“Not far,” I said.
Coors’s palms were back on the desk again, but they no longer tried to press through it. “By using the Pernik girl and her grandfather as bait we get Killingsworth back to the States and that problem is resolved—no doubt a little melodramatically, but melodrama is often no small part of diplomacy.” He paused and seemed to think about what he had just said and for a moment I half expected him to jot it down.
“That still leaves us Tavro,” I said. “Why didn’t you get him out?”
Coors gave me a thin, almost bitter little smile. “Some forget, I’m afraid, that the Department of State is a large and cumbersome bureaucracy, perhaps only slightly less wieldy than that of our friends in the Pentagon across the river. In such a bureaucracy nothing gets done until it is too late—or virtually too late. If it is actually too late, then obviously nothing should be done and the bureaucracy sighs its collective relief and returns to its beloved routine.”
Coors paused to give me another small, wintry smile. “In Tavro’s case, we are only virtually too late, and through a process of pain with which I won’t bore you, a course of action has been decided upon. In a bureaucracy such as State, I’m sure you realize, there is nothing more difficult than reaching a decision, unless it is reversing that decision once it has been reached.”