by Dana Black
“One-fifteen. What are you doing there?”
“One-fifteen day?” He repeated the words in a tone of distress. “One-fifteen day?” He struggled to his feet, breathing whiskey fumes into the man’s face. “When’s ticket open?”
The man recoiled slightly. When he caught sight of the puddle where Groves had been sitting, his expression of disgust deepened. “Where are you going?”
“Wheeling,” said Groves. He ran the back of his hand across his mouth, scratching at his two-day stubble of beard. “Sister.” He blinked as though remembering something important, and then turned away, bending down to retrieve the empty pint bottle. Getting up again, he reached for the man’s hand, as though expecting help. The man lifted him with obvious reluctance, and then wiped his hand on the side of his pants.
“Wheeling, is it? Got any ID?”
Groves shook his head, staring at the empty bottle in his hand. “Got money, though. Tha’s all ya need on a bus, ’s money.” He reached into his pants pocket as though he were checking his roll of bills. When his hand reached the wet fabric in his pants, his face fell. “Aw, no,” he said softly, as though to himself. “Aw, no.” He stared at the moisture on his hand and then looked up at the man, shame in his eyes. He coughed more whiskey breath and drew himself up like a man trying not to lose his last remaining shred of dignity. “Mister, would you ’scuse me for a minute? I gotta go to the men’s room.”
“Yeah,” said the man, moving away. “You better clean up the act or they won’t sell you any ticket today. What time did you get here?”
“They were closed,” said Groves. He shuffled after the man. “Fella said I couldn’t drink in there. You know which way’s a men’s room?”
“Off to your right.” The man nodded at a doorway, and then walked away from Groves toward the bus, presumably to rejoin his partner and wait for the next bus to arrive. The driver, Groves hoped, would have long since gone.
Once through the door, Groves wasted no time. Moving with as much speed as would be credible for a just-awakened drunk—in case the FBI man was watching through the window—he headed for the men’s room. Inside he found an empty stall, opened the suitcase, removed the dead engineer’s shaving kit, and shaved at the lavatory stand.
Hair combed, tie tied, and coat on to cover the rapidly drying whiskey on his pants, Groves marched to the ticket counter and paid for a round-trip fare to Wheeling. A good thing too, because while he was at the coin-and-key baggage locker, stowing the suitcase, he saw the man from the parking lot push past the person at the head of that ticket line and talk briefly to the clerk on duty. Groves watched the man walk away, apparently satisfied. Now, for the time being, Groves was in the clear. The bus northbound for Wheeling was not due to leave for another hour and fifteen minutes.
That was another lucky break, for if the bus had been just about to depart, Groves would have had no choice but to ride it north at least one or two stops. As it was, he was free to check his bag and mosey around for a while.
He took a cab to the train station five blocks east, where he handed a claim-check he had been carrying for nearly three weeks now to a gray-faced baggage-claim attendant, and obtained a small valise containing a wallet, a Louisiana driver’s license and credit cards, a passport, four thousand dollars in fifty-dollar bills, and two other baggage-claim checks. He used one of those to recover a large suitcase, which he took into the men’s room. There he changed clothes, donning a tan summer weight cotton-cord suit, tie, shoes, and shirt to match, and a neat-looking straw businessman’s hat with a wide band. Into the now-empty suitcase he put his used clothing.
Then he emerged from the lavatory stall, rinsed his mouth, and strode purposefully over to the baggage-claim counter. The attendant took his last check and matched it with the number on a third suitcase, this one a large gray Samsonite two-suiter. Groves gave him a five-dollar tip. The man did not seem to notice that the crumpled bill smelled faintly of whiskey.
Using the Louisiana driver’s license, he rented a car at the Hertz counter and drove back to the bus station. He bought a Sunday Times-Picayune at the newsstand and settled down on one of the benches to read. When he saw that no one was paying attention to the baggage locker, he put in his key, lifted out the Cobor suitcase, and made for the exit without looking back. So great was his urge to get away that he swung the suitcase up onto the front seat of his rented Oldsmobile, forgetting that if he had to stop suddenly it would lurch forward onto the floor. He remedied that oversight at the first stop sign he came to.
10
When Sharon made her decision not to use the tape of Alec Conroy’s exit from Helen Bates’s hotel room, she did so for a variety of reasons.
To begin with, seeing the tape Sunday night had depressed her. When the tape was run, Sharon had seen hurt and fear on Alec’s face in the monitor. In the pit of her stomach, she felt as though she were watching someone kicking a pet dog.
Also on Sharon’s mind were political factors—something she had become sensitized to after the Russian documentary. To run the tape would look like an attempt to throw Derek Bates off his game. Sharon envisioned newspaper columns and magazine editorials decrying an American attempt at emotional sabotage, and felt her reluctance increase.
A third reason, Sharon decided on Monday morning, was to avoid lawsuits against UBC. Alec Conroy had threatened to take legal action even if the tape was not aired. Rachel Quinn was keeping him pacified—claiming that Max had set up the camera outside the wrong door on the seventh floor, where four wives were staying who had agreed to participate in the documentary.
Some people at UBC wanted the tape to be aired. Some on the crew—Max especially—saw the piece as a live-action drama that was rarely filmed. Wayne Taggart and several others pushed the ratings angle. The tape would get Americans excited about more than just the U.S. team—so they’d tune in UBS on nights other than those following a U.S. game. To this argument, Taggart also added a final touch: Alec’s presence, he said, would add that air of continental decadence that the folks in Podunk loved to feel smug about.
“Sure-fire box office,” he kept repeating.
In the end it was Taggart’s enthusiasm that made Sharon decide to scrap the tape. She knew that was as unprofessional a basis for judgment as her own personal response had been, but she really didn’t care.
At the Monday lunch planning conference, she announced that they would forget the Conroy tape. They would run the documentary on the other women, and just make believe that the incident in the corridor of the Ritz never happened.
It was at this point, many of the UBC people were later to say, that Sharon should have destroyed the tape, while she still had it under her control. At the time, however, no one thought of that; the cassette was filed with others of that day and placed with them in the archives, available later for documentary footage.
The next day, Tuesday, June 22, the United States team won its game with Zaire. Again the victory was a shutout, though this time the game was not as close as the one against the Czechs. The American offense caught fire in the second half and scored three times. Keith Palermo was again a hero, with sixteen saves, some so spectacularly difficult that the stadium crowd in Seville actually fell silent for a few moments before erupting in cheers.
Immediately following one of those saves in the second half, Jack “Fireball” Farber hurried from the U.S. locker room, where he had been on hand to personally give Keith a cup of Gatorade at halftime. Farber had been watching on the TV inside the locker room, and was elated. He went directly to a pay telephone, where he placed a credit-card call to his public-relations consultant in New York.
About the contract they were getting ready for Palermo for August 1, Farber said. Make it a three-year instead of a one-year. And triple the cash.
On the same day, Czechoslovakia and Uruguay played to a tie in Malaga’s La Rosaleda Stadium. That outcome left the Czechs with one loss and one tie, Zaire with two losses, and Uruguay with one win
and one tie. The American team’s two victories thus placed it at the head of its group, and ensured that whatever the outcome of the game with Uruguay on Friday, the U.S. team would qualify for the second phase of the tournament.
Overnight ratings for Tuesday night’s UBC broadcast were just under twenty-three: 22.8. A fine performance, considering it was up against the baseball All-Star game on one network and a first-rerun James Bond film on another. Everyone at UBC was happy—even Wayne Taggart, though he said the audience share could have been still higher, and worried that if the U.S. team stopped winning, the audience would dry up.
Seeing the 22.8, NBC executives decided it might be a good idea to send a team to cover the World Cup story for the seven o’clock world news program. The team of reporters and technicians arrived in Madrid at ten o’clock Wednesday evening, Madrid time. In order to start with the benefit of an experienced viewpoint, NBC reporter Bill Brautigam decided to try a time-honored ploy on someone he had worked with before, who was now at the games. He called Wayne Taggart and asked him to have a late dinner with him.
At that meeting, Brautigam mentioned a series he would be doing for NBC’s weekly news-magazine show in the fall and also mentioned that he would be needing a director. Possibly Wayne might like to be considered for that position? Also, possibly, Wayne might have some leads to good stories here at the World Cup?
Not long after that meeting, a copy of the tape of Alec Conroy on the seventh floor of the Ritz Hotel was in Brautigam’s possession.
When inquires were made later, Brautigam followed the journalist’s practice of protecting his source of information. Wayne Taggart, naturally, did not step forward to admit he’d copied the tape. Responsibility for the loss would have fallen on the guard at the UBC studio truck, if there had been a guard. But Larry Noble had decided earlier that the heavy security around the stadium was enough, and Sharon Foster had not amended that decision.
So Sharon took the blame. As producer, she was in charge of overall operations, people said, and so she ought to have seen to it that precautions were taken. In any case, no one else was around at whom to point the finger. And Sharon, being only a newly appointed producer and a woman besides, made a convenient scapegoat.
At the time the tape was copied, however, no one was blaming Sharon. Not until late the following day did anyone at UBC besides Taggart know that the tape had been disturbed.
At about ten Thursday morning Madrid time, Bill Brautigam followed yet another time-honored journalistic practice. He called Derek Bates to get a “reaction story.” Bates’s comments would, he said, accompany excerpts of the tape on the American news.
At about ten-thirty that same morning, Derek Bates left the hotel where the British soccer team was quartered in Alicante, a seacoast resort town on the Mediterranean Costa Blanca. In the hotel parking garage, Bates took unauthorized possession of a team automobile, a Rover sedan. Bates drove north to the Valencia airport. There he paid cash for a one-way ticket to Madrid.
11
Along the ninety-four mile drive to Biloxi, Mississippi, Groves recalled his vow to make this one his last job, and it struck him that he had had the same idea before, back in Utah. Stay put, he had told himself, without knowing why. Now he knew. No more jobs.
But the thing was, he wasn’t free to stay put. Ever since he had been forced to kill a laboratory guard while on a job in Chicago, the Patrón had had a hold on him. From that day until now, he had worked whenever the Patrón wished. True, between jobs he lived well, far from the inquiries of American police, in his beachfront home on the Costa del Sol. But was that kind of luxury enough to compensate him for the kind of fear he had just been through? And the knowledge that at any day in the future he might be called on to endanger himself once again?
The only solution he could see was to expose the Patrón to the authorities. Considering that Groves knew nothing of the man’s looks or whereabouts, it would not be easy, but Groves did have one advantage. He knew that the Cobor was destined for the final World Cup game in Madrid.
Of course, they had not told him, but he knew it had to be; there was no other possible reason for bringing it back to Spain. Groves was to rendezvous with the Thin One on the night of Friday, July 2, no later. The final game was scheduled for Sunday, the eleventh. Nothing else in Spain at that time was of enough importance to justify this kind of risk, and the kind of money the Patrón had promised him.
So. He would make his rendezvous, collect his pay, and then, a day or two before the final game, when he had had time to get a new passport and new ID, Groves would call the Madrid police. Look for poison gas in Bernabeau Stadium, he would say. The police would find it, and a disaster would be averted. More importantly for Groves, the Patrón would be removed from the picture. The police would not get him, unless someone had made a very uncharacteristic mistake that the police could trace. But whoever was employing the Patrón would be most displeased at the discovery of the Cobor. And such people, Groves knew, did not tolerate failure.
Thus, Groves would have his freedom.
The prospect of betraying the Patrón gave Groves new spirit. When he stopped at the Biloxi Harbor Club to pick up the twenty-four-foot cabin cruiser he had bought on his last visit, his step was jaunty. He tipped the boat attendant ten dollars over the three weeks’ maintenance charges, verified that he had a full tank of fuel and a fully stocked refrigerator, and then started the engines, cast loose the mooring ropes, and steered carefully past the other boats into the Mississippi Sound. He stayed within sight of land, heading east, the sun at his back and the warm Gulf winds in his face.
For the first time in three days he felt really hungry. He put in and dropped anchor about thirty miles east of Pascagoula, in Alabama waters. There he made himself scrambled eggs, sausage, and toast in the galley. When he had cleaned up his dishes, he transferred the Cobor cylinders from the engineer’s suitcase into his gray Samsonite, packing the rest of the gear around them. There was plenty of room—that had been one detail he had checked out earlier. Then he raised anchor and headed east again. When he was out of sight of land, he opened the engineer’s suitcase and the spare from the train station, and threw them both overboard.
At nine-fifteen the next morning, at the mouth of Mobile Bay, he signaled the Benghazi, a sixty-thousand-ton Libyan tanker that had emptied her “light and sweet” Libyan crude into the Gulf Oil refinery tanks in Mobile, twenty-one miles north, and was now heading home. The Libyan captain of the vessel saw Groves’s signal and lowered a dinghy with a man inside. The man watched as Groves hefted his gray Samsonite suitcase into the dinghy, and held the ladder while Groves climbed down to stand beside it. Without saying a word, the man then climbed up the ladder onto Groves’s cruiser and signaled the crane operator to winch up the dinghy thirty-four feet above the water to the Benghazi’s deck.
Dangling in mid-air, Groves watched his cruiser roar away. To where, he did not know, but the cruiser had been part of the payment for his voyage.
On board, he paid two thousand dollars to the Benghazi’s captain. Then he was shown to his quarters: a small, gray-painted cabin with a narrow bunk and washstand, one level up from the main deck and far astern. No one spoke to him. From his suitcase Groves removed the book he had brought along for the voyage—Holbrook’s The Age of the Moguls— and settled down on his bunk.
12
At seven-fifteen that evening, Alec Conroy was drinking a scotch and water in the bar of his hotel, the Palace. To drink at the Palace Bar, a civilized haven mentioned in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, had become one of Alec’s Things to Do several years previously, when he had found himself with time on his hands and decided to fill it with what one of his women of the period described as “super reading.”
The actual Palace Bar was something of a disappointment to Alec at first. It was full of tourists in the evenings, and appeared to have been redecorated in the fifties with fake oriental tables and barstools. The ebony stools were too small, a
nd tended to tip over. So did the chairs, which had orientally low backs. A massive dark wood carving of an oriental hunting scene hung on the wall like a tapestry, dominating the room. At first glance he thought the carving was artless; to Alec, the faces all had a sameness, the oriental equivalent of American Barbie dolls. Mass-produced rot, he thought. His days in the haberdashery had given Alec a sense of style and elegance, and the Palace Bar did not have either.
In time, though, he came to like the place. He would go there—before he met Helen—at six-thirty or so, ahead of the tourist crowd, and perch at the end of the bar and sip a scotch. Sweet and melancholy thoughts would come to him. The failed effort of the Palace Bar to modernize with proper grace seemed to take on larger proportions. Spain’s failure to defeat England hundreds of years ago. Spain’s failure to modernize after World War II. Alec’s own records, now unsold and unappreciated.
At times, sitting at the bar with his whiskey and ice, he thought of writing his own songs, and hummed snatches of melody when no one else could hear.
Thursday evening, Alec had come into the bar to think ahead, to make up his mind about something. As he liked to do before starting heavy brain work, he had taken a good snort of cocaine upstairs in his room before coming down. As he sat at the bar, he felt ten feet tall. He had plenty of energy to mull over what he ought to do about Helen—in fact, it seemed absurdly clear, not even worth coking up for.
He would just have to find another hotel room. If he was going to convince Rachel that he had given Helen up, he couldn’t go to her room anymore or have her come to his, for Rachel would be certain to find out. On the other hand, if he wanted to drop Rachel, take the money Farber had given him, and try to start a new life, he could not very well expect to stay in an adjoining hotel room that she was paying for. So either way it meant a new room.