by John Lawton
I must have passed out. When I came to it had begun to rain. Another of those short torrential summer downpours, pounding onto the roof, the wipers clicking rhythmically back and forth. Nobody spoke. We were on a deserted two-lane blacktop, and pretty soon we pulled up at a cheap-looking motel.
My legs gave and I sat on the edge of the bed with my head in my hands.
‘Clean yourself up,’ the man said. ‘Go to the bathroom. Take all the time you want.’
I took more than he wanted. I’d barfed up breakfast, stripped off, wiped the gore from my face and was examining the wound to my cheek—not too bad, I’d have a nasty bruise rather than a scar; he’d biffed me with the barrel not the butt or I’d be out some teeth as well—when the man came in and sat on the can.
He said nothing. I spat blood and rinsed, then said, ‘Who was he?’
‘CIA. We figure he killed Kissing.’
Fine—so did I.
‘And who are you guys?’
‘They’re CIA.’
‘So,’ I muttered through swollen cheeks, ‘I just leapt from the frying pan to the frying pan.’
‘They’re CIA. I’m not. And I’m in charge.’
‘Let me guess . . . the Andrew Carnegie Foundation for Repatriation and Reconciliation of Wayward Hippies?’
‘Close. I’m with that five-sided building down by the Potomac you hippies tried to levitate a couple of years back. I was inside while you tried. Name’s Hammond.’
I stopped looking in the mirror and turned to him. Neat-looking guy, about forty or so, good suit, button-down shirt, thick-set, tan, healthy—looked a damn sight better than I did.
‘You’re with the Pentagon?’
He nodded.
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘Notley?’
‘I’ve been of some assistance to Mr Chapin. And he to us.’
‘He tell you I was coming?’
‘No. Maybe he felt you’d made your bed . . .’
‘Dug my grave would be more apt.’
‘You’re alive—the other guy isn’t. That’s what matters.’
‘I know. The dead are dead. That’s all that matters. How long did you know I was up there?’
‘We found out yesterday.’
‘Yeah . . . well thanks.’
‘Raines. We saved your life.’
‘I needed it saving yesterday too.’
I turned my back on him and stepped into the shower. Let him talk to my ass. I saw the door open through the scummy nylon curtain. I let the water stream over me for minutes, I didn’t move, I didn’t scrub, I just re-baptised myself in this motel Jordan. A hand came through the door and laid a clean white terrycloth robe on the lid of the can. I took it, slicked back my hair and stepped into the bedroom.
Hammond was going through my bag—the notes, the photographs—just as Feaver had. He fanned out the photographs, made a face, said, ‘I sent out for food. Won’t be anything special, there’s just a diner down the road.’
‘Well, as I already lost breakfast and seeing as how the soft shell crab season is over I’ll join you in brownies and a burger.’
‘I know you’re pissed, kid, but we have things to do. Let’s just cool it now. It could be a long night.’
Who was I to argue?
My savior, the guy who’d fired the rifle with the telescopic sights, came in with coffee, French toast, fries and overcooked sausage for three.
Hammond let me eat my fill without any questions. I was on the last bite of greasy French toast when he said, ‘Tell me about it.’
‘No. You tell me. You expect me to talk to the CIA, you better give me a good reason. And don’t tell me how you just saved my life. I heard it already.’
Hammond, sitting on the bed, turned to the other guy, upright on a chair right by the door, and said, ‘Wallace?’
Wallace swallowed, coughed into his hand.
‘Mr Raines. I’m Wallace Craig. I’m with the Agency. I appreciate you might not want to believe this, but it is as factional an organisation as any other. There are some of us who know this war cannot be won and are anxious to prevent it being pursued further. It is not in the national interest.’
‘We’ve got common cause, huh?’
Hammond said, ‘You’ll find you have more in common with us than with the people running Phoenix. You know who William Colby is?’
I shook my head.
‘He runs the Phoenix Program in Saigon. Or he did until a matter of weeks ago. But now the agency’s in retreat from stuff like Phoenix. Every time the press mentions it they take a step back from it. If Colby can whitewash Phoenix then one day soon he’ll come back and run the CIA—it will be like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. I’d rather that didn’t happen. If Phoenix isn’t blown soon . . . then it’s conceivable it never will be. Exposing Jack Feaver is a good place to start.’
‘So, what do you want from me?’
‘I want to deny them their deniability.’
I had the feeling that it was a phrase he’d worked out well in advance. Polished it like haiku. I gave him what he wanted as neatly as I could.
‘It’s a circle jerk. What goes around comes around. Feaver set Mel Kissing to find him. If Mel had completed the circle and found him he’d have picked up all the evidence Feaver wanted along the way—or he probably wouldn’t have found him. Feaver didn’t know Mel was dead. He was still expecting Mel when I showed up. When I realized what I’d blundered into I expected him to destroy the evidence, and half-expected him to kill me too. I could not have been more wrong. He’s fighting a one-man campaign against the way the war is run. Unlike you he thinks it can be won. He’d given all his photographs of the massacre to the Phoenix Program. I don’t know what he expected. Maybe he got what he expected. He shook ’em up and the program was kicked back into life. Maybe he thought his own fate was a price worth paying.’
‘What changed his mind?’
‘Chicago—people like Notley, people like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. He decided he needed a platform. Wasn’t enough to warn his own people anymore, he had to warn America. But, like I said, he’d given the photographs to Phoenix. He needed the roll Mouse had kept. He couldn’t leave Vermont without a tail, so . . . I found it for him. And then he threw it all back at me and said “publish.” ’
‘Why?’
‘Took me a minute or two to work that one out myself. But it’s obvious. He wants his day in court.’
Hammond seemed to want to take this in for a while, then he said, ‘Let’s give it to him.’
‘Sure,’ I said, sarcastic as a teenager, ‘I’ll send the photos to the Voice if I’m ever in New York again.’
‘Nah,’ Hammond replied. ‘Think big. Send ’em to the New York Times.’
Wallace yawned. Just the cue I needed.
‘Could I get some sleep now?’
Hammond said, ‘Why not?’
Wallace prised himself put of his chair, shook himself like a waking dog, and said, ‘There’ll be someone outside all night, Mr Raines. You can sleep easy.’
Right.
§
I spent most of the next day going over it again. It is what I believe is called a de-brief. I annoyed the shit out of Hammond, but then I was trying very hard to do that, and at the end of a long, deeply dull afternoon, he seemed to feel he’d had enough and I hit him with the question that bugged me the most.
‘How long have you known?’
He didn’t bat an eyelid.
‘There were rumors. Almost at once there were rumors. But it was well-contained. They didn’t just discharge the squad that Feaver led, they buried their records. It was impossible to find them. I didn’t have that kind of clearance. In the end they came to me in the shape of Notley and that was only at the end of March this year. Of cours
e he knew the names of everyone involved, but Notley tells you only what he feels he has to to get what he wants, and short of knocking on the door of every Puckett in Kentucky . . . well we never had the man power for that.’
‘Mouse. Notley could have told you where Mouse was.’
‘Could but wouldn’t. He’s protective of Mouse. Everybody seems to be. And can you see Mouse talking to us?’
‘Probably not. So what you’re saying is you waited for a sucker like me to come along?’
‘We waited. That much is true. For a couple of months we just regarded it as a watching brief. We knew where Jack was—for a while that had to be enough. To have made direct contact with him might have been to blow it all—they were watching him, and who knows what his reaction would be if we got to him. But, no, the sucker we were waiting for turned out to be Mel Kissing.’
‘How did you get to know about Mel? Mel wouldn’t even tell the Voice what he was working on.’
Hammond looked at me, kind of quizzical, as though he thought I could guess. I did. I traced it out in the air as much for myself as him.
‘Fulton. Barclay Fulton works at the Pentagon. Mel phoned him. The old pals act. I know. I called him myself. Fulton found Marty Fawcett for him. He must have “clearance” as you put it, and either Fulton told you or he let it slip or you spied on the guy.’
‘He told me. In confidence and in panic. A secret that burst inside him and just had to be spewed up. Kissing’s death really shook him. Once I knew there was someone looking for the New Nineveh Nine—someone with more chance than we had . . . well, we put a tail on you, didn’t we?’
‘And I lost it.’
‘Like I said, kid. You never knew when you were well off.’
§
I’d managed to ruin another set of clothes. The blood and the brain would never wash off my jeans and shirt. Hammond asked me my size and went to a store. ‘I can hardly turn you loose looking like that, can I? You look worse than a Moondog.’ The only convenient store had hunting as its specialty. I got kitted out in a baseball cap advertising engine lube, a heavy, red-check shirt and blue jeans cut so big in the ass they hung off me like empty potato sacks. All I needed was a furry waistcoat clipped from roadkill and rabbit and I’d of looked like Elmer Fudd. I felt like Elmer Fudd. He drove me to Rennselaer and put me on a train for New York.
‘You OK with this, kid?’
‘You mean I have a choice?’
‘No.’
The conductor nudged me awake at Penn Station. I hailed a cab and went home to Front Street. It was just getting dark. Another hot August evening. I let myself in. The kitchen was fragrant, a hum of spice and action. Rose was at the stove clearly in one of her rare, much-hyped domestic moods. A voluminous blue dress, a big wooden spoon and her hair up. If the hair went up I always knew she was serious about something.
‘Good bloody grief! What do you look like?’
Then she noticed the bruise on my left cheek.
‘Been in the wars, eh? Mummy kiss it better.’
Even the kiss hurt. I stood rigid for the embrace. More than perfunctory. I had to conclude she’d missed me.
‘Now, darling, are you hungry?’
What had I eaten in the last two days? Diner breakfast and diner lunch. Coffee so thin you could see through it. I could eat Rhode Island.
‘You doing something special?’
‘Chicken and chickpea tagine.’
‘What’s a tagine?’
‘Stew. Moroccan stew with lots of spices. My sister was home for Wimbledon week too. I must have told you about Lucy—you know, inveterate traveler, lives out of a backpack. Just back from Morocco. She insisted on showing me some of the local nosh. Trust me, it’s divine.’
‘I’ll trust you. Just let me change first. I don’t feel right like this.’
‘You look like . . .’
‘Yeah?’
‘A good ole boy.’
‘I was born a good ole boy, Rose. Come a long way from Bubba.’
I found Levi’s that fit me like a holster, a clean white shirt. My Tony Lama’s were spattered with blood and crud—but they’d clean up with a little saddle soap—besides I had eight more pairs in the bottom of the closet.
I fell into the couch. Rose set a feast out on the coffee table. Stuck Jefferson Airplane on the turntable—the new one, kind of raucous for my taste, ‘up against the wall, motherfucker!’ I was not one of America’s ‘Volunteers’, I’d just been coerced. By the time I’d muttered my compliments on her cooking and listened to all the gossip of two weeks in London—‘Biba’s has opened a much bigger shop . . . I spent the earth . . . the Arts Lab was a bit of a washout . . . everybody’s too stoned these days . . .’ she had worked back to the second album, Surrealistic Pillow—I’d always liked that. It had, still has, an elegiac feel that suited my mood—Marty Balin lost in melancholy on ‘Comin’ Back to Me’, Grace utterly lost in the craziness of ‘White Rabbit’. It hit the note.
Rose didn’t ask me any questions—she was on one of her London highs. I was glad. I really didn’t want to talk about it. Any of it.
She cleared away—I wasn’t moving, and she wasn’t complaining—put a plate of what looked to be fudge on the table.
‘Have an Alice B, darling.’
‘A what?’
I ate one before she answered, about the size of a walnut, sort of nutty, buttery and spicey.
‘Something else from Morocco?’
‘You don’t know what an Alice B is? Good Lord, Turner, perhaps you’d better put your Elmer Fudd outfit back on and ne’er call yourself hippie again. An Alice B is named for the late Alice B. Toklas, cook, companion and, for all I know, lover of Gertrude Stein, and author of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book.’
‘So?’ I ate another, they were delicious. Coriander and cinnamon.
Rose got up and took a cookbook from the shelf of cookbooks she kept handy between the kitchen and the living room and read to me.
‘Haschich Fudge—note the odd spelling, lots of Cs like a German surname—Haschich Fudge, which anyone could whip up on a rainy day. This is the food of Paradise, of Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradise . . . euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter, ecstatic reveries and extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be expected. Almost anything Saint Teresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by un évanouissement révéillé.’
‘You mean it’s a hash brownie?’
‘Absofuckinlutely, darling, a brownie with knobs on . . . but so much more than a hash brownie. Stronger, sweeter . . . cures the munchies as soon as it starts them. Alice advises not to eat more than two.’
I’d already had two. I had a momentary flashback to that lunatic Notley springing his culinary surprise on me and then I thought what the heck, it’s only smokey the dope and I needed the release, I needed un évanouissement révéillé. Rose ate two, then we both ate thirds. And the storms of laughter, hers far more than mine, followed, along with the euphoria and the ecstatic reverie. She ran through half her record collection, a thousand hours of chatter, and as an unnameable record—they’d achieved a seamless blur and hum to me—spun idly in the final groove, she peeled off her dress and took me to bed. In all the years we’d known each other we’d never done that. I had thought of it as a house rule, a way of surviving together in that apartment—no sex. I began to wonder what exactly it was Saint Theresa got up to.
§
A hammering at the door woke me. Rose stirred but didn’t wake, one huge, brown-nippled breast breaking cover as I slipped from the bed and pulled a blanket around me instead of a robe. I stumbled down the stairs, that feeling of too much dope and too much sex making me weak and benign all at the same time.
It was Nate Truegood. He knocked the benign out of me with
a single blow. Suckerpunched me, straight left to the jaw and I sat down on the raised stoop, my ass bumping on the wooden boards, wide-eyed and legless.
‘What was that for?’
‘That’s for lying to me, hiding things from me and the next one’ll be for the visit I got from the Company this morning at seven fuckin’ thirty!’
If he was going to hit me again I wasn’t going to stop him. He was a big man but he was slow and he was pudgy and his punch lacked the weight of his shoulder behind it.
‘What company?’
Nate seized an edge of the blanket and spun me off the stoop like a kid’s top. I found myself sitting on the cobblestones bare-ass nekkid with Nate still up on the stoop looming over me.
‘The Company. That’s what! The CI fuckin’ A. How come I get the Langley spooks calling on me at Sunday breakfast, givin’ my wife a case of the jitters and tellin’ me Mel Kissing is a closed case? I’ll tell you why, one reason. You, motherfucker! That’s who.’
‘Yeah. Right. It was me. I was wondering how to tell you.’
He swung at me with his foot, missed by a yard, lost his balance and sat down with a thump far harder than the one I’d made. He howled out loud.
‘Jesus Christ!’
‘Nate, can we stop this now?’
‘Who’s gonna hear? It’s Sunday. The fishmarket guys are off work, your neighbors are probably all upstate or out at the beach. Nobody’d hear if I was to beat your brains out with my bare hands.’
He picked up the blanket and threw it to me.
‘Cover yourself up. I seen bigger cocks on a roach.’
He was spent. I’d seen this moment too often not to recognize it. I wrapped myself in the blanket and sat down next to him.
‘So,’ he said. ‘You found the guy who offed your buddy.’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘And he’s dead.’
‘You kill him?’
‘No—that was your friends from the Company.’
Nate weighed this up a little.
‘Should I close the case?’
‘I don’t know. Is that legal? Is their word enough?’