‘Not much.’
‘Bull. Why’d Shaw risk his life to revenge a three-year sentence that would have seen him on the street in two? Why’d he want you so badly?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re not going to tell me.’ He watched Cassidy for a moment and then nodded in acceptance. ‘Okay. But I’d like to get you on film when you feel up to it. Whatever details you want to give. How you knew where he was. What happened in the building. How you got out. It’ll be a good follow up to the program we did on Shaw’s arrest and the experiments they were running. Will you do that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you ever going to tell me the rest of it?’
‘Maybe when we’re old and gray.’
‘Deal.’ Brian patted him on the shoulder and left.
Rhonda came the next day. She knocked tentatively on the door frame, because his head was turned away, and she was not sure if he was asleep.
He wasn’t. ‘Hey, come in.’
‘Hi. How are you?’ She seemed nervous.
‘I’m okay. A little tender in places, but they keep me doped up.’
She bent down to kiss him on the cheek. When she straightened, she touched the dark red-and-blue scarf she wore on her head. ‘Want to see?’
‘Sure.’
She pulled the scarf off. Her skull was bare of hair and patched with small, white dressings. ‘They shaved parts to get at the burns. I figured, what the hell, we might as well do the whole thing and let it all grow in together. What do you think?’
‘Only you could pull it off.’
‘Liar.’ She stole a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table. ‘Did you see my story?’
‘No. I haven’t seen a paper.’
‘It tells how I carried you down the ladder in the elevator shaft and out onto the street. I decided to let you have the credit for shooting Shaw.’
‘It’s the kind of accuracy in reporting we expect of the Post.’
‘They moved me to the Metro desk.’
‘Congratulations. And it’s about time.’
She smiled. ‘Thanks.’ She stubbed out the cigarette she had just lit. The nervousness was back. ‘I want you to meet someone.’
‘Sure.’
She went out into the hall and came back trailed by a tall, thin man with curly dark hair. ‘Michael, this is Bill Long. I told you about him.’
What had she told him? She said she met someone, but that was all. Maybe there was no need to say any more after that. The rest was just details. ‘Bill, good to meet you.’
Long shook his hand and then stepped back from the bed. ‘Good to meet you. You’re a hero in my book, what you did for her. Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’
Long smiled. ‘Rhonda, I’ll wait for you out in the hall. Take your time.’ He nodded to Cassidy, and left the room.
‘Michael,’ Rhonda said. ‘I …’ She trailed off.
‘Rhonda, it’s okay. He seems like a nice guy. I’m happy for you.’
‘Thanks.’ She kissed him on the cheek, looked back once as she left the room, and then she was gone.
Shit. Well, that’s that – leaving Cassidy sad and just a little relieved.
Orso came by and brought a box of chocolates and a police stenographer to take Cassidy’s report of what happened in the building on Bethune Street. He ate half the chocolates while he listened with a hint of a smile to Cassidy’s truths and half-truths. When they were finished, he patted Cassidy on the shoulder and said, ‘Good story,’ and followed the stenographer out of the room.
Dr Farrow decided he was well enough to get out at the end of the week. Cassidy, without much reluctance, allowed himself to be chivvied by his family into accepting his father’s invitation to stay for a while in the apartment in the St Moritz with its stunning view north over the length of Central Park. His father’s play was days from opening, and he was rarely there. His stepmother, Megan, understood instinctively that Cassidy did not want company. She taught him some dancer’s exercises that would strengthen the areas the bullet had pierced and left him to his own devices.
Kay Lockridge came by one day. She had meetings with money people on Wall Street and then an appointment with Mayor Robert Wagner in the afternoon. She brought him an expensive bottle of single malt Scotch. They talked mostly about family the way people do when they’ve been worried and need to feel close. When it was time for her to go, Cassidy walked her to the door. While they waited for the elevator, Kay said, ‘I saw Allen Dulles the other day. He wanted me to give you a message.’
‘What?’
‘He said, “Tell him the offer still stands. Tell him, I like winners.” What does that mean?’
‘He offered me a job with the CIA when I met him at your house. I said, no. I killed Shaw, so now I look like a useful replacement.’
‘Are you going to take it?’
‘Will you give him a message from me?’
‘Of course.’
‘Tell him to go fuck himself.’
She smiled. ‘I’ll do that.’ The elevator arrived. She kissed him on the cheek, and went away.
After a week the apartment closed in on him, and he had to get out.
It was a cold, clear day. High clouds drifted through the blue sky above the city. Cassidy waited for a break in traffic to cross Central Park South. He went into the park and found the place where Leon Dudek’s body had lain on the first cold night of fall. There were a few discolored patches on the pavement. Maybe they were Leon’s blood and piss, but probably not. In the past months tens of thousands of people had walked across this spot without knowing what had happened here. He walked out to Fifth Avenue and caught a cab going downtown. He had the driver drop him on Delancey Street and walked the last couple of blocks to Freddy’s shack under the Williamsburg Bridge. The door was open. The bed was gone. The clothes were gone. The stove was gone, and so was the shelf that held the straight razors. There was no more evidence of Freddy’s presence here than there was of Leon’s in the park.
Cassidy walked to Houston Street and caught a cab back uptown. He settled back in the seat and watched the city pass by. His wound ached. His legs were tired. He felt kind of – what? – used up. The thought jerked a bark of laughter out of him that made the driver check him in the rearview mirror.
He paid off the cab at the Plaza Hotel and walked the last long block. As he approached the St Moritz, he saw Orso walking toward him from the west. He raised a hand, and Orso nodded in response and waited for him at the entrance.
‘How are you doing?’ Orso asked.
‘Fine.’
‘Yeah, I can see that.’
‘How are you?’
‘Not so hot. Amy gave me my walking papers.’ He tried to throw it away, but his pain was clear.
‘How come?’
‘She said she met someone.’ He shrugged.
‘Huh. I’ve heard that song recently.’
‘I thought we could go have a drink.’
‘Maybe have couple,’ Cassidy said. ‘Let’s walk down and see if Toots Shor is still selling booze.’
HISTORICAL NOTE
At the end of World War Two in 1945, a covert operation originally dubbed Overcast and later renamed Operation Paperclip brought roughly sixteen hundred German scientists to the United States to work for America during the Cold War. The program was run by the newly formed Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA). The goal was to harness German scientific resources to help develop America’s arsenal of rockets, and biological and chemical weapons, and to make sure those same scientists did not end up working in the Soviet Union. President Harry Truman sanctioned the operation but forbade the agency from recruiting any Nazi members who might be suspected of war crimes. Officials within the JIOA and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, feeling the scientists’ knowledge was crucial to the country’s Cold War efforts, often ignored this directive by rewriting or eliminating incriminating ev
idence of war crimes from the scientists’ records.
After World War Two, the CIA, and the US Army Biological Laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland, did work with industrial partners such as the pharmaceutical concern Merck & Co. to develop bioweapons.
The MK-Ultra project, known also as Project Artichoke, and earlier as Project Bluebird, was started on the order of CIA Director Allen Dulles in April 1953. It was a program to develop mind-controlling drugs for possible espionage and military uses in response to Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind-control techniques on US prisoners of war in Korea. One of the major aims of its research was to determine the efficacy of LSD as an interrogation tool. It was hoped that it would be a useful ‘truth serum’ for the interrogation of suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War. It was additionally hoped that the drug would induce amnesia in the subjects questioned so that the spies would have no memory of the interrogation and would, therefore, have no reason to warn their masters about the secrets betrayed. Dulles approved MK-Ultra with an initial budget of $300,000. Under its auspices LSD was administered to CIA and other government employees, doctors, prison inmates, mental patients, and prostitutes and their clients, often without their permission or knowledge. The program was reduced in scope in the 1960s, and was terminated in 1973. That year, Richard Helms, then Director of the CIA, ordered the records on MK-Ultra and similar projects destroyed.
In the mid-fifties an American biological warfare scientist working for the CIA went out a window of a New York City hotel after being covertly dosed with LSD by a CIA superior. It was not the Astor Hotel.
The CIA’s MK-Ultra project did set up safe houses in Greenwich Village and later San Francisco where prostitutes brought their johns and covertly fed them LSD while operatives watched through one-way windows.
The rest of the story is fiction.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Night Watch is the third novel in the Michael Cassidy series. While the story works by itself, there are references in it to events and people from the first novel, Night Life. Spencer Shaw’s half brother, Russell Crofoot, was a CIA agent killed near Cassidy’s apartment two years before the events of Night Watch. Dylan McCue, Cassidy’s lost love, was also a significant actor in Night Life.
Night Life was followed by Night Work, whose story takes place two years after the events of Night Watch, so the strict chronology of the books would be Night Life, which takes place in New York City in 1954, Night Watch – New York City and Washington, DC in 1956, and Night Work – Havana Cuba, in 1959, at the time of Fidel Castro’s successful revolution and his first visit to New York.
Each book stands alone, but there may be some advantage to reading them in this chronological order. It was the author’s own peculiarities that led him to write them out of the proper order, and the characters in the books should not be penalized for his failings.
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