Checkpoint Charlie

by Brian Garfield

  Myerson came outside with me to watch. Sweat stood out on his forehead. The tour filed out toward the bus and Myerson tried to suppress a groan. Out of the side of his mouth he said, “It hasn’t got a prayer, you damn fool.”

  The tourists filed past the Marines and then the African soldiers moved in, intercepting the queue. Myerson’s handkerchief came out and while he scrubbed his face I said, “Look at something else, damn it. Don’t look so interested.”

  The soldiers were examining the first tourist, removing his hat and then tugging at his hair. They tested his mustache and examined his face with belligerent suspicion. He was one of the half-dozen tourists Myerson had recruited — roughly Brent’s size and build — and the soldiers’ eyes were narrowed with cruel determination. They knew what it would mean to them if they should let Brent slip through.

  They rolled up both the man’s sleeves — apparently they weren’t sure whether Brent had been wounded in the right arm or the left.

  They passed the man through, finally, and two women and a Japanese, and then they went to work on the next slight-built white tourist. Myerson’s breathing rasped against the damp silence. At the bus the tour guide helped the two women up the steps and stood aside by the bus door, bored, cleaning his fingernails, smiling with absent politeness as each tourist climbed aboard. The soldiers grudgingly let the second white through, glanced cursorily at an Oriental woman and two adolescents, and zeroed in on our third volunteer tourist.

  Myerson said under his breath, “I never should have let you talk me into this. We’re not going to make it. We’ll never get away with it, Charlie. You and I will spend the rest of our miserable careers in a basement decoding signals from Liechtenstein. They’re bound to catch him — they can’t help but spot him…”

  “Trust me, you bastard.”

  Nine tourists to go; then eight…

  * * *

  WHEN WE WERE airborne I unbuckled my seat belt and went jauntily past Myerson’s sour face to where August Brent sat peeling the phony hair off his cheeks. He beamed up at me and then winced when the spirit gum tugged at his flesh. I said, “Any plans?”

  “I’ve got a job waiting. Writing opinion columns for a chain of newspapers on African affairs.”

  “Sounds good.” Better than I’d expected for him. I went forward and loomed over Myerson, knowing it made him uncomfortable to think that one lurch of the plane could capsize my bulk into his lap. I said, “You need to remind yourself of this lesson from time to time. It always pays to trust old Charlie Dark.”

  “They had to tumble to it. I still don’t understand it.”

  “All those look-alike tourists, all Brent’s size — they had to assume he was one of those. I knew it wouldn’t occur to them to take a close look at a man they’d seen twice a day for years. Magician’s trick, you know — you make a quick move that draws the eye to your right hand while the left hand quietly pulls the switch in plain view but the audience never sees it. Nobody was going to look twice at that grey-bearded German tour guide with the shiny red nose. But put chinwhiskers on Brent and paint his nose…” I showed him my grin and pretended to lurch toward him. Myerson’s flinch elicited my laugh. I tweaked his nose and waddled toward the galley to see what they had to eat.

  * * *

  Charlie’s

  Vigorish

  WHEN I SAW the phone’s red message-light flashing I had a premonition — it had to be Myerson; no one else knew I was in New York.

  I rang the switchboard. “This is Mr. Dark in Fifteen Eleven. There’s a message light.” I tossed the folded Playbill on the coffee table and jerked my tie loose.

  “Yes, sir, here it is. Please call Mr. Myerson. He didn’t leave a number, sir.”

  “That’s all right, I know the number. Thanks.” I cradled it before I emitted an oath. Childishly I found ways to postpone making the call: stripped, showered, counted my travelers’ cheques, switched the television on and went around the dial and switched it off. Finally I made a face and rang through to Myerson’s home number in Georgetown.

  “Charlie?”

  I said, “I’m on vacation. I didn’t want to hear from you.”

  “How was the play?”

  “Dreary. Why don’t they write plays with real people in them any more?”

  “Charlie, those are real people. You’re out of touch.”

  “Thank God. What do you want?” I made it cold and rude.

  “Oh I just thought you might be lonesome for my voice.”

  “Has Hell frozen over?” Then I said, “If it’s an assignment you can shove it somewhere with a hot poker. You’ve already postponed my vacation once this year.”

  “Actually I’ve been thinking of posting you to Rekjavik to spend a few years monitoring Russian submarine signals. You’re designed for the climate — all that blubber insulation.”

  “The difference between us,” I told him, “my blubber’s not between my ears. You called me in the middle of my vacation to throw stale insults at me?”

  “Actually I wish there were some terrible crisis because it might give me the pleasure of shipping you off to some God-forsaken desert to get stung by sandflies and machine-gun slugs, but the fact is I’m only passing on a message out of the kindness of my heart. Your sister-in-law telephoned the Company this afternoon. Something’s happened to your brother. It sounded a bit urgent. I said I’d pass the word to you.”

  “All right.” Then I added grudgingly, “Thanks.” And rang off. I looked at the time — short of midnight — and because of the time zones it was only about nine in Arizona so I looked up the number and rang it.

  When Margaret came on the line her voice seemed calm enough. “Hi, Charlie, thanks for calling.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Eddie’s hurt.”

  “How bad?”

  She cleared her throat. “He was on the critical list earlier but they’ve taken him off. Demoted him to ‘serious.’” Her abrupt laugh was off-key. I suspected they might have doped her with something to calm her down. She said, “He was beaten. Deliberately. Nearly beaten to death.”

  * * *

  EDDIE ISN’T as fat as I am, nor as old — by six years — but he’s a big man with chins and a belly; his hair, unlike mine, is still cordovan but then unlike me he’s going bald on top. The last time I’d seen him — a quick airport drink four years earlier, between planes — the capillaries in his nose had given evidence of his increasing devotion to Kentucky bourbon. His predeliction was for booze while mine was for cuisine.

  This time his nose and part of his skull were concealed under neat white bandages and both his legs were cast in plaster. He was breathing in short bursts because they’d taped him tight to protect the cracked ribs. They were still running tests to find out if any of his internal organs had been injured.

  He looked a sorry sight on the hospital bed and did not attempt to smile. Margaret, plump and worried, hovered by him. He seemed more angry than pained — his eyes flashed bitterly. His voice was stuffed up as if he had a terrible head cold; that was the result of the broken nose.

  He said, “Been a long time since I asked you for anything.”

  “Ask away.”

  “I want you to get the son of a bitch.”

  “What’s wrong with the cops?”

  “They can’t touch him.”

  The hospital room had a nice view of the Santa Catalina mountains and the desert foothills. There was only one chair; Margaret seemed disinclined to use it so I sat down. “Who did it?”

  “This? Three guys. Border toughs. The cops have them — they were stupid enough to let me see their car when they cornered me and I had the presence of mind to get the license number. They don’t matter — they’ve been arraigned and I’ll testify. They’re just buttons.”

  “Hired?”

  “Ten-cent toughs. You can rent them by the hour. Somebody briefed them on my habits — they knew I’d stop at Paco’s bar on my way home. They were waiting
for me in the parking lot.”

  Margaret said, “They’re in custody but of course they claim they don’t know who hired them.”

  “They probably don’t,” Eddie said. “A voice on the phone, a few hundred dollars in cash in an unmarked envelope. That’s the way it’s usually done. It makes certain the cops can’t trace back to the guy who hired them.”

  I said, “The Mob.”

  “Sure.”

  “You know who hired them.”

  “Sure. I know.” Then his lids drooped.

  Margaret said, “You’re a sort of a cop, Charlie. We thought you might tell us how to handle it.”

  “I’m not a cop.” Around the fourth floor in Langley call us loose stringers, meaning we’re nomadic trouble-shooters — no fixed territorial station — but I’m by no means any kind of cop. Margaret and Eddie didn’t know my actual occupation: they knew I worked for the government and they assumed I was with the CIA but for all they knew I was a message clerk. I found their faith touching but misplaced.

  Eddie said, “If you were a cop you couldn’t do me any good. I don’t want somebody to read the bastard his rights — I want somebody to nail him.”

  “I’m not a hit man, Eddie. I don’t kill people.”

  “I don’t want him killed. He didn’t kill me, did he?” His eyes glittered. “I just want him to hurt.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Calls himself Clay Foran. I doubt it’s the name he was born with. What he does, he lends money to people who can’t get it from the bank.”

  “Loan shark.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Eddie, Eddie.” I shook my head at him. “You haven’t grown up at all.”

  “Okay, I can’t move, I’m a captive audience if you want to deliver yourself of a lecture.”

  “No lecture. What happened?”

  “An apartment house construction deal. I ran into cost overrides — rising prices on building materials. I had to come up with another fifty thousand or forfeit to the bank that holds the construction mortgage. I figured to clear a four hundred K profit if I could complete the job and sell it for the capital gain, and of course there’s a whopping tax-shelter deduction in that kind of construction. So I figured I could afford to borrow the fifty thousand even if the interest rate was exorbitant.”

  “Vigorish.”

  “Yeah. Usury. Whatever. Trouble is, I was already stretched past my limit with the banks and the building-and-loans. Hell, I was kiting checks over the weekend as it was, but I was in too deep to quit. I had to get the building completed so I could sell it. Otherwise the bank was set to foreclose. So I asked around. Sooner or later somebody steered me to Clay Foran.”

  “And?”

  “Very respectable businessman, Foran. Calls himself an investment broker. Of course he’s connected with the Mob. Arizona’s crawling with them nowadays, they all moved out here. For their health,” he added drily.

  “How big is he?”

  “Compared to what?”

  “Nickle and dime, or million-dollar loans?”

  “In the middle. It didn’t pinch his coffers to come up with my fifty K but he did it after I offered him a little extra vigorish on the side. Mostly I imagine he spreads it around, five thousand here, ten thousand there — you know, minimize the risks. But hell, those guys get five percent a week; he’s rich enough.”

  “Two hundred and sixty percent annual interest?”

  “You got it. I know, I know. But I was in a bind, Charlie, I had nowhere else to turn. And I figured to sell the project inside of a month. I figured I could handle it — ten grand interest.”

  “But?”

  “You see what they did to me. Obviously I came up short. It wasn’t my fault. The building next door caught fire. My building didn’t burn but the heat set off the automatic sprinkler system and it ruined the place. Seventy thousand damage — carpets, paint, doors, the works. The insurance barely covered half of it, and the damage set me back more than two months behind schedule. I had to bail out, Charlie. What choice did I have? My construction company went into Chapter Eleven. It’s not my first bankruptcy and maybe it won’t be my last — you know me — but I’d have paid them back. I tried to keep up the payments. I was a few days late a couple of times and we got threatening phone calls, so forth — you know how it goes. Then it wasn’t a week any more, it was three weeks, and you see what happened. They took out their vigorish in blood. I guess they wrote me off as a bad debt but they figure to leave me crippled as an example to other borrowers who think about welshing. Nothing personal, you understand.” His lip curled.

  Margaret took his hand between hers. Margaret was always there to cushion Eddie’s falls: good-humored, fun-loving, careless of her appearance. She had endured all his failures; she loved the real Eddie, not the man he ought to have been. If I ever find a woman like Margaret I’ll have won the grand prize.

  Eddie said, “I know the ropes, I had my eyes open, I’m not naive. But they’ve crippled me for life, Charlie. Both kneecaps. They’ll be replaced with plastic prosthetics but I’ll spend the rest of my life walking like a marionette. Two canes. I figure they hit me too hard, you know. I almost died. Maybe I still will. We don’t know what’s bleeding inside me.”

  “You knew those guys played rough, Eddie. You knew it going in.”

  It sounded lame and self-righteous even as I said it. Eddie’s eyes only smiled at me. He knew I’d pick up the baton.

  * * *

  MY LONG-DISTANCE CALL to Myerson was lengthy and exasperating. He kept coming back to the same sore point. “You’re asking me to commit Agency facilities to your private vengeance scheme. I can’t do it.”

  “The Company’s got no use for it. Never will have. The press blew its cover in 1969 and it’s been sitting there ever since, gathering dust. They’re carrying it on the books as a dead loss — they’ll be tickled to unload and get some money out of it. From your end it’s a legitimate transaction and the profit ought to look pretty good on your efficiency report. And one other thing. If you don’t authorize it I’ll have to apply for a leave of absence to help my brother out. The Agency will grant it with pleasure— you know how eager they are to get rid of me. And of course that would leave you without anybody to pull your chestnuts out. You haven’t got anybody else in the division who can handle the dirty jobs. You’d get fired, you know.”

  “You fat bastard.”

  * * *

  FORAN WAS slight and neat. The word dapper is out of fashion but it fits. He had wavy black hair and a swimming-pool tan and the look of a nightclub maître-d’ who’d made good.

  It took me a week to get the appointment with him, a week of meeting people and letting a word drop here and a hint there, softly and with discretion. I’m good at establishing the bona fides of a phony cover identity and in this case it was dead easy because the only untruth in the cover story was my name: I didn’t want him to know I had any relationship with Eddie.

  His office on the top floor of a nine-story high-rise had a lot of expensive wood, chrome and leather. The picture windows gave views of the city like aerial postcard photographs. It was cool inside — the air conditioning thrummed gently — but you could see heat waves shimmering in the thin smog above the flat sprawling city: the stuff was noxious enough to thin out the view of the. towering mountain ranges to the north and east. I felt a bit wilted, having come in from that.

  Foran had a polished desk a bit smaller than the deck of an escort carrier; it had a litter of papers and an assortment of gewgaws made of ebony and petrified wood. He stood up and came affably around this display to shake my hand. His smile was cool, professional: behind it a ruthlessness he didn’t bother to conceal.

  He had a deep confident voice. “Tell me about the proposition.”

  “I’m looking to borrow some money. I’m not offering a prospectus.”

  “If my firm authorizes a loan we have to know what it’s being used for.” He settled into his swivel chair and w
aited.

  “What you want to know,” I said, “is whether you’ll get your money back and whether I’ll make the interest payments on time.”

  “I don’t know you, Mr. Ballantyne. Why should I lend you money?”

  “I’m not being cute,” I said. “If I lay out the details to you, what’s to keep you from buying into the deal in my place while I’m still out scrounging for capital?”

  “That’s a risk you have to take. You’d take the same chance with anybody else, unless you’ve got a rich uncle. At least give me the outlines of the deal — it’ll give us a basis for discussion.”

  I brooded at him as if making up my mind. I gave it a little time before I spoke. “All right. Let’s assume the government owns a small private company with certain tangible assets that are of limited value to any domestic buyer, but might be of enormous value to certain foreign buyers to whom the present owner is not impowered to sell. You get my drift?”

  “An arms deal?”

  “In a way. Not guns and ammunition, nothing that bald. The way this is set up, I’ll be breaking no laws.”

  “Go on.”

  “You’ve had a few days to check me out,” I said. “I assume you know I work for the Government?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m about to retire. This deal will set me up for it. I need money to swing it, and it’s got to come from somebody like you. But let me make it clear that if you try any odd footwork on me you’ll find yourself in more trouble than you want to deal with.”

  His smile was as cold as Myerson’s. “Did you come here to threaten me or to borrow money?”

  I sat back. “The CIA founded, or bought, a number of private aviation companies fifteen or twenty years ago. They were used for various purposes. Cover fronts for all sorts of operations. They used some of them to supply revolutionary forces, some of them to run bombing missions against unfriendly countries, some of them to train Cuban exiles and that sort of thing. It was broken by the press several years ago, you know the story.”