Checkpoint Charlie

by Brian Garfield

  Ross grunted and got to his feet.

  * * *

  LOOKING DOWN at himself he grumbled, “Do these phony blood capsules wash out? If not I’ve just ruined a good suit. Good grief, but I’m cramped. Couldn’t you have done it faster? I think I bruised a rib when I fell. Incidentally I didn’t take kindly to you calling me ‘punk’ and ‘oaf’ and all that stuff.”

  “Are you about out of complaints now?”

  He grinned at me. He was an awful sight. “Why, Charlie, I’ve barely started.”

  “Look at it this way, Ross. You’ve got something to tell your grandchildren about. You’ve just assisted Charlie Dark in pulling a brand new twist on the oldest con-game in the world — the blank-cartridge badger game. Now doesn’t that just fill your heart with pride and admiration?”

  “I believe you are by all odds the most infuriatingly smug conceited arrogant fat old man I’ve ever met,” he said, “and I thank you for the privilege of allowing me to work with you.”

  * * *

  Passport

  for Charlie

  MYERSON LIVES FOR THE DAY I fall down on the job. I suppose he thinks it will prove I’m no better than he is after all. He keeps throwing impossible jobs my way; the only way I can get revenge is to bring them off and show him up. One of these days I will come a cropper — or I’ll bring off a feat so incredible it will blow all his fuses. That’s the nature of the tug-of-war between us.

  Myerson said, “The van was hijacked between the printer’s and the Atlanta office. The Bureau traced the shipment to Miami. A day too late.”

  “How many?” I asked.

  “Four thousand. Genuine U.S. passport blanks.”

  “Uh-huh. Worth a bloody fortune on the illegal market,” I boseryed.

  “Not if you recover them. That’s your job. I don’t think you can do it — I don’t think anybody can — but it’s in your ample lap.” He blew smoke from his noxious Havana toward my face and favored me with his barracuda smile. “Bon voyage, Charlie. Don’t come back without the passports.”

  * * *

  THE FBI Agent didn’t resent the imposition; he was relieved to pass the buck and said as much — he was convinced the shipment had left his jurisdiction and that was fine with him; the headache was ours now.

  “It was organized. They weren’t two-cent stickup men. Two or three private cars were used to bring the passports to an assembly point here in Coral Gables. We nailed one of the hijackers, you know — blind luck but we’ve got him and he’s willing to testify. A deal for a light sentence provided we give him protection. The Bureau’s taken it to the Justice Department and I’m pretty sure they’ll agree to it. Trouble is, he doesn’t know enough to help you.”

  “I’ll talk to him anyway if you don’t mind.”

  * * *

  HIS NAME was Julio Torres and he was a sad man — a Cuban, down on his luck. He was heavy, nearly as fat as I am but not so tall. I guessed his age at forty-five. He had a black mustache and calloused hands. In the interrogation cell we both overlapped our wooden chair seats.

  “Who recruited you for the robbery?”

  “He calls himself Obregon. I never heard his first name.”

  “Cuban?”

  “No. I think Puerto Rican.”

  “What was your job?”

  “To follow the van and drug the crew.”

  “How?”

  “They stopped for lunch in a truckers’ café. I followed them in and put something in their coffee.”

  “Chloral hydrate?”

  “I don’t know. Obregon gave it to me and told me to put it in the coffee.” He gave me a wry look. “I’m not a pharmacist, you know.”

  “Then?”

  “Then I drove the car. When we saw the van pull over we waited a few minutes to make sure they were asleep; and then Obregon drilled into the van and one of the others got behind the wheel and started it up, and we convoyed it to the hiding place at the farm.”

  “Whose farm was it?”

  “I don’t know. Some sharecropper. I think it must have been abandoned for years. The driveway was all overgrown. Anyway I followed the van in my car and Obregon drove another car and there was a third guy in a third car. We transferred the cartons to the trunks of our three cars and drove away separately.”

  “So that if one of you were caught, it would only cost one-third of the shipment.”

  “I guess that was the idea, yes. I delivered my car in Coral Gables last night.”

  “To where?”

  “A private house a couple blocks off the Tamiami Trail. I gave the FBI people the address, they already checked it out. I don’t think they found anything. It was just a drop, you know, I guess Obregon or one of the other guys picked up the car from there. I left the keys under the mat and walked away after I collected my money, which was in the mailbox like they said it would be. Then the next day I was arrested because one of the van drivers saw me on the street and recognized me from the truckers’ café — see, I tripped against one of the drivers in the café and spilled a little root beer on him, that was how I distracted them when I dumped the drug in their coffee, so the guy noticed me then and he recognized me the next day. An unbelievable stroke of bad luck, you know, but that’s been my life. But I guess you don’t want the story of my life, do you.”

  “Who does Obregon work for?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Describe him.”

  “Well, he’s thin, let’s see, sort of bald, no chin. Thirty, maybe thirty-five. A mustache — not bushy like mine, a thin neat mustache. He looks like an Indio.”

  “Did he speak to you in English?”

  “Spanish. His English is poor.”

  “Puerto Rican accent?”

  “Yes. I think he must live over there. Something he said, I can’t remember what it was, it made me think he only came over to the mainland for this job.”

  * * *

  I CHECKED into the Condado Beach in a rainstorm and had a big meal in the Sheraton’s Penthouse restaurant with a lovely view of the sprawled urban lights of San Juan. From twenty stories high at night you don’t see the poverty.

  In the morning I went through the ancient walls into Old San Juan down to the harborfront Federal Building and met for half an hour with FBI and customs men after which we trooped over to police headquarters and I went through mug files with the help of a San Juan detective lieutenant. We turned up a sheet on a man named Jorge Ruiz Orozco, a/k/a José Raoul Obregon, a/k/a Juan R. Ortiz, so forth; his picture met the description I’d had from Julio Torres in Miami and his rap sheet seemed to fit: he’d been arrested several times for smuggling and receiving stolen goods and had taken two falls in prison, once in Florida and once in Mexico.

  We sent a bulletin out via the Burea and Interpol and the Agency. There had been no public announcement of the Torres arrest and there was a chance Orozco-Obregon-Ortiz might not have gone to ground; if he felt he was safe he might be out in public somewhere. The Puerto Rican police had copies of his mug shot in their cars but when he turned up four days later it was over in Charlotte Amalie and I went there to visit his cell before they extradited him to Florida.

  He was sullen and not very talkative. I had to make a few threats. We can be testy about that sort of thing because the Agency doesn’t concern itself with courts and appeals; I didn’t care if they convicted him or not — I wanted information from him. He had a sister in Ponce and a brother in Mayaguez and an elderly mother in San Juan. I mentioned a few things that might start happening to them: the sister could lose her driver’s license, the brother could lose his taxicab in an accident, the aged mother could learn that her social security payments and Medicare were being discontinued because of irregularities in her records — a thousand little harassments like that. After a while Obregon gave me a name.

  * * *

  FROM St. Thomas I flew back to San Juan on a twin-engine Islander and made the connecting flight to Washington with an hour to spare — t
ime to eat a fair meal between planes. I was in Myerson’s office by half past four.

  I said, “Obregon was hired for the job by Parker Dortmunder.”

  Myerson blew Havana smoke at me. “Obregon actually gave you Dortmunder’s name?”

  “No. Dortmunder wouldn’t be that stupid. Obregon gave me a description and a name. The name’s one of the aliases Bertine has used before and the description fits Bertine. Bertine works for Dortmunder, or did last time I heard. I think if we find Dortmunder we find the passport blanks.”

  “Find Bertine,” Myerson said. “Leave Dortmunder alone, Charlie.”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head. “Need-to-know.”

  I was a little angry. “Bertine’s just a gopher. Look, Dortmunder doesn’t paint himself into corners. He’s a broker, not an inventory dealer — he doesn’t steal things on spec. He wouldn’t have run this caper if he didn’t have a prearranged buyer for the passports. They were stolen to order. Now the fastest way to find them is to pull him in and find out who he sold them to.”

  “I’m sorry, Charlie. We’re using Dortmunder at the moment. We need him.” He jabbed the cigar toward me. “Don’t touch him. Find the passports but don’t annoy Dortmunder.”

  “If I nail Bertine does that come under the heading of annoying Dortmunder?”

  “Yes. You can shadow him but don’t touch him.”

  “Tell me, how many more obstacles do you intend to toss in front of me?”

  “Just get the passports back, Charlie.” I think it was his grin that infuriated me to the point where I resolved to do it — just to show him up.

  * * *

  DORTMUNDER WAS a free-lance espionage middleman; he bought and sold secrets as well as international arms and various clandestine goods like bullion, slaves and narcotics. His stomping ground was the Mediterranean. Despite my anger I could understand Myerson’s point; Dortmunder was a pill but he was a useful one. He sold information to us that we wouldn’t otherwise get. Therefore we tolerated him and let him run. Such is the cynicism of the trade; such is the mechanism by which the Dortmunders survive. All his customers have a vested interest in his survival.

  I didn’t care about Dortmunder one way or the other but Myerson’s stricture made the job much harder than it had to be — that was what annoyed me. It would have been a simpler matter to harass Dortmunder into selling out the passport buyer to us; it wouldn’t have hurt Dortmunder to do so but Myerson didn’t want to ruffle his feathers so I had to do it the hard way.

  I ran a trace on Bertine and the computers sent me to a forty-two foot diesel cabin cruiser the registry of which drew me along a course from San Juan to Tortola to St. Maarten to Nassau. She was tied up in a marina in the Bahamas when I arrived there and I disassembled her bewildered captain in a hotel room on Paradise Island with the help of two Agency stringers.

  The captain was a hired charter operator who ran the Matthews boat for a Swiss company that belonged to Gerard Bertine. After a few hours’ defiance and ridicule he eventually saw the light and admitted the cartons of “ledgers” had been collected from him out at sea: a refurbished PBY Catalina flying boat had landed on the water and the transfer of cargo had been made by dinghy. Bertine had gone aboard the airplane with the cargo. A neat dodge, professional — it had the Dortmunder stamp. All this had taken place about 200 miles due east of Nassau four days ago.

  Back to the computers. I dug up the registries of half a dozen boats and freighters that tied in with Dortmunder in one way or another. During that time-frame in question one of the boats had been in the Atlantic about halfway from Trinidad to Casablanca; another was a half day out of the Azores; and a third was off the Canaries. It suggested a possibility: midocean refueling for the flying boat. At low cruise a PBY has a range of nearly 2,000 miles. Plotting a course from ship to ship I found that it pointed toward the mouth of the Mediterranean. It persuaded me that the passports were somewhere between Gibraltar and Istanbul.

  That was a bit of a help; it was a start. It still left a lot of ground to cover. A PBY can land anywhere on the open water; the passports could have been transferred to a fishing boat off any port in the Med — no customs inspections.

  But I thought I knew where they’d gone.

  Algiers is where the runaways go. Fugitives from politics and justice are drawn there because of a governmental no-questions-asked attitude. But it’s a drab bureaucratic place with little romance or comfort; if you’re not rich it’s oppressive. After a while the exiles begin to hate it. The place becomes their prison. That’s when they begin to inquire into sources of false passports. The trade in high-priced documents is brisk in Algiers.

  Four thousand genuine U.S. passport blanks would be worth more than two million dollars on that market.

  * * *

  THE STATION STRINGER in Algiers was a passed-over veteran named Atherton who had no image left to polish. He was contentedly serving out his last hitch before retirement.

  In Atherton’s travel-agency office I went through the station’s files of known dealers in black-market documentation. After several hours of it Atherton gave me a bleak look. “Is this getting us anywhere, Charlie? There’s just too damned many of them.”

  “We can rule out the small ones. Whoever bought the shipment had to put up cash. Probably half a million dollars or more. It’s got to be a big dealer.”

  “That still leaves a dozen names or more. You want to pin the list on the wall and throw a dart at it?” He made a face and pushed the files aside. “It won’t work. Hell, we’d do as well to canvass the fishing docks. The shipment had to come into Algeria somewhere — if it’s here at all. It could just as easily be in Marseilles or Alexandria or —”

  “If I don’t tumble the goods here I’ll go to Marseilles next and then Alexandria and then etcetera. But my nose tells me it’s here. The odds are on Algiers.”

  “If I had four thousand blanks to sell I’d bring ’em here,” he agreed. “But it would require an impossible amount of legwork to find them in this maze. The population of dealers is too big, Charlie. We haven’t got a hundred investigators on this staff.”

  “What about Bertine? Has the trace come up with anything?”

  “Bertine flew out of Gibraltar two days ago. By now he’s in Zurich.”

  “Gibraltar — that’s another clue in favor of Algiers,” I said.

  He sighed. “Twelve, fourteen, maybe sixteen dealers big enough to handle it. Well, I guess we can go to the cops and start having them tossed.”

  “Canvassing won’t do it,” I said. “After we hit one or two of them the rest will get the word. They’ll all go to ground. No — we’ve got to hit the right target with our first shot.”

  “That calls for fancy shooting.”

  I said, “We’ll need a Judas goat.”

  * * *

  I WENT through all the station’s Immigration Surveillance Reports for the past week and selected a card from the stack:

  Andrew Grofield — entered Algiers 10/17 via GibAir #7415, carrying U.S. Passport #378916642393 in name of Alan Kelp. Passport presumed forgery. Inquiry forwarded to Washington to dip bag 10/18. Algeria authorities not informed. Ident Grofield made by Peter McKay, personal observation airport. File #78BV8.

  Atherton said, “Grofield. Yeah. Ran some small arms into the Philippines while I was on station there. We had to chase him out. He was supplying guerrillas with AK-47s. He’s a petty crook, not a big shot.”

  “Does he know your face?”

  “We never met. I know him from photographs.”

  “He ought to do,” I said.

  * * *

  ATHERTON SENT four men out in two cars to look for Grofield. On the second day one of them found him. Atherton said, “It’s a girl’s flat in the casbah.”

  “Has he got a hotel booking?”

  “No. Staying with the girl. She’s a professional. He’ll be paying for the time. It suggests he doesn’t plan an extended stay in town.”
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br />   “Good. If he’s got appointments in another country he’ll be anxious not to be delayed.”

  “When do we hit him?”

  “After I have my dinner.”

  * * *

  WE SENT the two stringers around to cover the rear and posted ourselves in a cramped 2CV at the curb across the street from the stucco warren in which the Turkish call girl had her flat. Lights burned in her windows and I was hoping they’d soon emerge to go somewhere for a late supper; it was about ten o’clock. The street was emptying of pedestrians: burnoused bedouins, besotted beggars, business-suited bwanas. We were on the edge of the casbah, its tortuous passages winding away over cobblestones. The smells were pungent, the air heavy. One wonders if the Arab cities attract miscreants and evildoers because of their rancid foetid atmospheres or whether it’s the other way round.

  They didn’t come out that night. We wasted it in the car, talking about the old days. Another team took over during the day and we were back the next evening at sundown.

  Finally the girl and our mark emerged from the narrow dark entrance. Atherton said, “That’s him. Grofield.”

  The man was burly in white seersucker; he walked like a sailor, a belligerent thrust to his shoulders. The girl had the opulence of a belly dancer: she’d soon be fat.

  We gave them a lead and I got out to follow them on foot. Atherton trailed along at a distance in the car in case they snagged a taxi.

  * * *

  WE WERE at the bar when Grofield came away from his table to seek the men’s room. He was a little drunk; that was an aid to me. I stepped back from the bar talking heartily to Atherton with wide gestures: “So would you believe the lousy crook tried to sell me Cianti for Bardolino?”

  My gesticulating arms made Grofield hesitate and then Atherton stepped out from the bar toward me: “Come on, Joe, you’re blocking traffic.” In reaching for my arm Atherton lost his balance and blundered against Grofield. I steadied Grofield and leered at him drunkenly, brushing him off. “S’all right, buddy, sorry, these freeways are murder, ain’t they.”

  Atherton blurted apologies to Grofield in French and English. Grofield brushed us off with a stony glare and squeezed past and went on toward the gents. I had my hand in my pocket; I turned and walked out of the place. A few minutes afterward, having paid the tab, Atherton followed me out. “Okay?”