The Monkey Handlers

by G Gordon Liddy

  Michael Stone, Pappy Saye, Arno Bitt, and Wings Harper launched themselves like F-14s from the steam catapult on the deck of an aircraft carrier. They entered the water several yards out from the pool wall with remarkably little splash, then glided at speed like so many porpoises, arms outstretched. They rose to the surface as one, Michael Stone slightly in the lead, then dug their arms downward into the water, hands cupped and whipping upward toward their chests as their legs, seemingly loosely hinged at the knee, whipped together to propel them forward with a smooth, froglike, repetitive power.

  Stone hit the far wall first, then pushed off in his turn. He was followed in quick succession by Arno Bitt, Pappy Saye, and Wings Harper. The four men stayed in the same relative formation through the first and second laps, Stone slightly lengthening his lead, their times causing rising comment from the small crowd.

  Stephanie leaned forward and addressed the young woman again. “What is it, what are they saying?”

  The woman held up a stopwatch so Stephanie could see it. It was electronically operated with a number of sets of liquid-crystal display numbers, some running, some motionless. The numbers meant nothing to Stephanie. “Look at those splits,” said the excited young woman. “They’re fast! I can’t believe it; those guys are old.”

  Up yours, kid, Stephanie thought, but said nothing.

  As the four men hit the far wall for the last time prior to the final lap, Michael Stone was pulling away by two body lengths, and Arno Bitt, perhaps still feeling the effects of his recent overindulgence in alcohol, had fallen slightly behind Wings Harper, who, sensing moral victory, started to pull farther away until he was even with Pappy Saye. It was proving to be one helluva race, and the crowd was cheering.

  At that critical moment, a young woman, fully dressed, burst onto the pool deck and shouted, “Michael! MICHAEL!” It was Sara Rosen.

  Sara’s shouting to Michael Stone, who was clearly winning the race, caused but a minor stir among the audience. It was engrossed in the drama of the finish, and the fact that a young woman was shouting what was taken as encouragement and approval to the apparent winner seemed not at all unusual. Sara’s cries did not penetrate to the hearing of any of those in the water, much less break through their concentration to register on their consciousness.

  Stone touched the poolside, the winner, and threw his head back, clearing his throat for more air. He was followed by Pappy Saye and a jubilant Wings Harper, who was enjoying payback for years of needling, and then a crestfallen Arno Bitt, who didn’t like losing bets, especially in public when he was a subject of the wager. The men moved to the lane edges and shook hands, stripping away their goggles. It was then that Sara Rosen registered on the crowd as rude and pushy.

  Sara pushed her way to the head of Stone’s lane, leaned over, and shouted at him. “Michael, I’ve got to see you right away!”

  Stone became aware of her presence for the first time. “Later, Sara, in my office, okay?”

  Oblivious to her surroundings, Sara shouted back at him. “Damn it, Mike, you don’t understand. Eddie didn’t come home last night. He’s disappeared!”

  Michael Stone sucked in more air. Shit, he thought, now I’m not only her lawyer, I’ve gotta be counselor for her love life. What he actually said was, “Not here, Sara. You know my car; it’s in the lot outside. Wait for me there.” To avoid argument, he pushed off to do a warm-down lap.

  Up in the stands, Stephanie Hannigan had been watching all this. She recognized Sara Rosen from her photograph in the newspaper, but this was the first time she had seen her slender young figure. Under her breath, but right from her gut, she said, “You bitch.”

  14

  “I dunno,” said Michael Stone. He was standing next to his car in the athletic center’s parking lot. “This is gonna look like one of those circus clown acts. Mustangs just aren’t built for five people.”

  “She can sit on my lap anytime,” Wings Harper offered hopefully.

  Sara’s tone was acid. “I have my own car, thank you.” She pointed to a vehicle in the opposite row of parking spaces, even with the Mustang. An old slant-six-engined Plymouth sedan, its rocker panels rust-digested, slumped between the white lines. Stone regarded it briefly. “Someone die and leave you a fortune?” he asked.

  “Very funny. The engine’s reliable and it’s paid for, which is more than most people can say. Now listen. Eddie’s gone, and I think they’ve got him. I—”

  “Not here in the parking lot, for Christ’s sake. Follow us back to the house. We’ll talk there.”

  The clapped-out slant-six couldn’t hope to keep up with the Mustang, and Sara Rosen didn’t try. Stone and his friends were already in the house when she arrived. Stone and her brother let her in and ushered her into Stone’s office. “Take it from the beginning,” he said.

  “Eddie’s been acting funny—”

  “That’s a switch,” Saul interjected. Stone, annoyed at the interruption, waved him off. “Go ahead, Sara.”

  Sara glanced at her brother and continued. “As I said, he’s been acting funny; cross-examining me about what I saw inside Riegar; going over the Polaroids again and again—”

  “What?!” Stone moved rapidly to his desk and pulled the manila envelope out of the letter holder. From its weight, he knew it was empty. “If that asshole—”

  “Eddie had nothing to do with it, Mike. I slipped them out of there when you weren’t looking. I’m sorry.”

  Stone sighed in resignation, then shrugged his shoulders. “They’re your pictures. Why didn’t you just ask me for them?”

  “I didn’t want another hassle. It was on the spur of the moment, Mike. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  Stone shrugged again, dismissing the issue. “Anyway,” Sara continued, “Eddie made me keep trying to count the floors I ran up after I got out of the elevator that night, trying to pin me down about how many there were. He wanted to know the exact floor I was on when I was caught.”

  “Why?” Stone asked.

  “Look at this.” Sara passed Stone a piece of paper. It was a sales receipt from Paul’s Camera Shop, South Road Mall, Rhinekill. Stone squinted at the clerk’s handwriting for a moment, then recognized the words. “Minox!”

  “Right.”

  “Let me see that,” Saul asked. Stone gave him the paper.

  “Two hundred fifty bucks. The price is low.”

  “C model. Used. Hell, spies’ve been using ’em since World War Two. Price works. What else you got?” Stone asked.

  “Nothing. Just a hunch. Eddie’s impulsive. And he’s dedicated. I think he may have gone into Riegar to get photographs showing the animals actually in the apparatus in the labs. He’s been unhappy with the way things are going. I mean, we’re getting lots of press and all, but none of it seems to be affecting Riegar. Business as usual, you know?”

  “All right,” said Stone, “but we’re gonna need more to go on than we’ve got so far. Go back out there and talk to your movement people. They know you’re tight with Eddie. Ask where he is. Someone may know what he’s up to. We’ll do what we can to find out from this end.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “Whatever we have to. Now go on, get out of here.”

  “And, sis,” Saul said.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t you go disappearing, okay?”

  Sara gave a disgusted wave and left.

  * * *

  “Herr Kramer is aware of this development?” Helmar Metz was speaking in German.

  “No, sir,” answered Rudolf Letzger. “The capture was made by my people—yours really—not the building guards. I thought it best to come straight to you, especially after the fiasco when the woman was turned over to the police without the opportunity to interrogate her. And, of course, the disaster the night we lost Olaf and failed to catch the man who killed him; to say nothing of the fact that the killer must be assumed to have witnessed the disposal of the Mexican.”

  Metz rocked forwar
d in his chair behind what had been Kramer’s desk. “You were correct in coming directly to me, Herr Doktor. Where is he now?”

  Letzger remained at near attention in front of the desk. “We cleared out a small storage room on the primate laboratory floor. He has been in isolation there since capture.”

  “He was armed? I’d like to see the knife he used on Olaf.”

  “No weapon. But he was carrying this.” Letzger produced a small, black-finished, rectangular object. An eighteen-inch beaded chain was attached to the bottom end. He handed it to Metz.

  “Minox subminiature,” Metz observed. He pulled at both ends of the object and it extended, revealing a tiny lens. Metz snapped it shut and handed it back to Letzger, asking, “The film?”

  “We have already processed it. Nothing. He was intercepted before he could use it. You want him brought here?”

  “No. Take me to him. I don’t want him seen, and I certainly don’t want him heard when I interrogate him.” Metz rose, and the two men left the room.

  Getting off the elevator after traveling down from the eighteenth to the twelfth floor, Metz, still speaking German, asked, “This storage room, it is soundproofed?”

  “Yes, sir. This floor and everything on it, even the closets.”

  “Good.”

  The two men reached a door and entered. It was the outer room of Dr. Letzger’s office. A woman sat behind a desk with a computer and a telephone in front of her. Letzger nodded to his secretary and, without speaking, took from her hand several proffered messages. After a quick glance, he stuffed them into his pocket, turned, and, Metz still in tow, went back out into the elevator hall. He passed several doors, then entered another that led to a hallway, walked down it, and nodded to Metz at another door. Letzger fished a key out of his pocket and was approaching the door when Metz stopped him. “Careful,” Metz said. “He could be waiting to attack the first person to enter.”

  Letzger smiled coldly. “We used the primate restraints. I assure you, he is secure.” Using his key, he unlocked and opened the door.

  The supply closet was six by ten feet in area, but that was reduced by shelving that extended a foot inward from each wall. The shelves were empty. The room was not. A single overhead fluorescent light fixture cast a cold light on the figure of Eddie Berg. He was on the floor, dressed in unfaded blue jeans and a dark blue turtlenecked shirt, an old jacket, black basketball shoes on his feet. Eddie was lying on his side, cap fallen off his head to the floor beside him, his hands secured behind his back at the wrists and his legs fastened at the ankles by tapered yellow plastic strips with a series of zigzag projections along both edges. The strips diminished to a point at one end. The pointed end had been slipped through a slit in the broad opposite end, in a manner similar to the fastenings that accompany plastic trash bags to seal them after filling.

  As Letzger and Metz entered the room, Eddie was in the process of rolling over onto his other side to ease the strain on his muscles. His thinness made for little padding between his bones and the hard floor and, coupled with his height, made him appear even more awkward in his bound state. Eddie looked up and said to Letzger, indicating Metz with a nod of his head, “He the police?”

  Letzger laughed. “There is plenty of time for that, Mr. Berg.” Then, in German, he said to Metz, “He had no wallet, but my men recognized him immediately. He has been outside the gates for days with a loudspeaker, inflaming the crowd.”

  “Inflaming the crowd your ass, schmuck. Yeah, I know what you said, it’s close enough to Yiddish for me to make out. Verstehen sie ’schmuck’?” Eddie didn’t wait for an answer. “The crowd was inflamed before they even got here by what you guys are doin’ to the animals. That’s why they’re here. Now quit fuckin’ around. I know my rights. Turn me over to the cops or let me go. And I want a lawyer.”

  “Ah,” said Metz, “Mr. Stone, perhaps?”

  “Stone!” Eddie Berg’s contempt knew no bounds. “I want a real lawyer!”

  “A wise position for a murderer, Mr. Berg.”

  “Murderer! What the hell’re you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the employee you killed making good your escape from here the other night. So, you are returned to finish the job. You are incorrigible, Mr. Berg.”

  “And you’re a fuckin’ lunatic. I’ve never been in here before! I’ve never killed anybody in my life. I was a conscientious objector, for Christ’s sake!”

  “We shall see,” said Metz, “we shall see.” He motioned to Letzger to accompany him, then withdrew, leaving Eddie Berg alone on the closet floor.

  “Hey!” Eddie called after them. “I told you. I want a lawyer!”

  Outside, in the corridor, Metz turned to Letzger and asked, “How many from the last shipment left unused?”

  “Two, sir.”

  “Put our prisoner in with them. It is more secure. I want to wait a bit. It is possible he told someone where he was going. I want to be able to produce him unharmed if necessary. If no one comes soon, we can assume his whereabouts are unknown and proceed with the interrogation.”

  “With your permission, the reason I put him in the closet instead of with the Mexicans immediately was in case you did decide to release him. If we put him with the Mexicans, he will know about them, and they might tell him how they got here, and so forth. He will be quite safe in the closet until you take a decision on his fate.”

  Metz had a low tolerance for suggestions from underlings that his might not be the best way to proceed. It crept into his voice as a hard edge when he said, “Those Indian peasants speak neither English nor German. They can tell him nothing. He will assume it is a workman’s dormitory. Do as instructed.”

  “At once, sir.” Letzger peeled off toward his office to carry out his orders. Metz took the elevator back up to his office.

  Within minutes, two of the Germans Stone had seen in the railway-receiving hangar entered Eddie Berg’s closet, gagged him, freed his legs, and lifted him to his feet. The circulation in Eddie’s legs had been impaired, so they buckled. The two men walked him in circles until his legs were secure under him again, then led him out and down the hall, through a series of doors, until the three of them entered a windowless, fluorescent-lighted dormitory with bunks, shower, and toilet facilities for twelve men. The gag was removed from Eddie’s mouth and the plastic binder from his wrists. Then he was shoved down on a bunk and left there.

  As soon as his guards left and locked the door, Eddie Berg looked about him. Two men in rough work clothes lay listlessly on bunks. The rest of the bunks were empty. The room was curiously empty of any personal property belonging to either man. “What’s it like in this joint?” Eddie called over to his fellow prisoners. There was no answer. Eddie got to his feet and went over to the nearest man. He looked young, strong, but worn and defeated. In his career as an activist, Eddie had seen the inside of some local and county jails. He had been in a lot worse than this place, and to have three men sharing space for twelve was unheard of in a nation of overcrowded jails. “Hey,” Eddie asked, “when’s chow in this joint?”

  “No habla ingles, señor.”

  Eddie Berg, a native of Imperial Beach, California, had no problem with that. In fluent Chicano dialect, he launched into conversation. “What is this place, a private prison? What are you two in for?”

  The young man let out a bitter laugh. “On the Virgin Mary, I wish this were a prison, señor. We two are all that is left of six. We paid the coyote to smuggle us into the United States and get us jobs so we could send home money to our families. We traveled in the dark a long way—there was no way to count the days—to this place. When we got here, Pablo, my cousin, said he wanted to go home, is too far away here. I pray to God they let him go, but I do not know. The rest of us they put in here. The food is good. We are warm. They take us one by one through that door over there.” He pointed to a door at the opposite end of the room from that through which Eddie had entered.

  “Yes,” joined i
n the other Mexican, lying on his back and not looking at Eddie, “we leave one by one. But no one ever comes back.”

  “What happens to them?”

  “I do not know, señor, but sometimes, late in the night, when it is very quiet—my ears are very good, you know?—I hear sounds.”

  “What kind of sounds?”

  The young Mexican sat up and looked penetratingly at Eddie. “When I was a little boy, the priest told us all about the damned souls in hell. He was a very talented storyteller, our priest. When I was little, I had nightmares about hell. I could hear the damned cry when the devils tortured them. In my sleep, the cries were very clear. One never forgets something like that. Now, when I lie awake at night, I hear cries, very faint, from in there. They are the same as I heard in my dreams.”

  “You’re sure it’s not another nightmare?”

  “Then,” said the other prisoner, “we are both having the same nightmare, señor. I hear them, too.”

  “Animals,” said Eddie. “That’s what you hear. That’s what they do here. Torture animals to make money.”

  “No, señor,” said the first Mexican, still sitting up, his eyes boring into Eddie’s. “When I was a small boy, I had a puppy. A truck ran over his hips. It took him some time to die. I took him to the priest for burial in consecrated ground so he could go to heaven. The priest said animals cannot go to heaven. Neither do they go to hell. I heard my puppy scream as he was crushed. And in my dreams, I have heard the damned in hell. The puppy was the better off, señor. God was merciful to him. Where there is no God, there is no mercy. And there is no God in hell.”

  The other prisoner finally sat up. His face was gaunt, his eyes hollow. “Yes,” he agreed, pointing to the far door, “and there is no God in there.”

  * * *

  At 1:00 P.M., Stephanie Hannigan nosed her yellow Prelude into a parking space in the lot of the new Rhinekill Holiday Inn, got out, and entered the lobby. Brian Sullivan was waiting for her and, with Continental flair, escorted her into the dining room to the table he had reserved. It was in an ersatz solarium, a greenhouselike extension of the front of the building, abundant with hanging asparagus ferns. Their table was at the very front, with a view of the mountains to the south and west.