Henry McGee Is Not Dead

by Bill Granger

  “What do you mean by that? We’re not spies, Karen. We’re ordinary civil servants in a very ordinary—”

  “The program is not ordinary. It takes all kinds. Redbird was a Soviet agent.”

  How the hell did she know that?

  “I asked for his précis on the computer before I came down—”

  “You’re not authorized,” Wagner began again.

  “I have an X clearance,” she said. “I could only go to the level of X in getting information about Redbird. But it was enough to see that he had been a Soviet agent and defected seven years ago.”

  “You’re not authorized,” Wagner said and let it go. “The point is, I’m in charge here.”

  “You sound just like that general sounded when the president was shot,” Karen O’Hare said. She said it without her gosh-whiz manner. She had somehow slipped her gosh-whiz manner on the trip down to Santa Barbara.

  Wagner stared at her.

  It had been a hard night after he left Pell in the bar of the Fairmont. There was the night flight south that turned out to be to Los Angeles because there was no plane available to Santa Barbara. He had rented a car and gotten lost on the freeway. At one point, he was headed for Disneyland.

  The scenery of southern California, so vaguely unsettled in smog-ridden daylight, was a frightening experience in moonlight. The endless freeways climbed hills, descended into tinseled valleys of light, climbed again past silent fortress homes. Each new neighborhood resembling the neighborhood past, each new town exactly like the one left behind. It was nearly morning when he had limped along Highway 101 into the heart of Santa Barbara.

  “All right, Karen,” he started again. He was sure his voice was reasonable. “What about the tap? Learn anything?”

  “Not at first.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He made two calls at night, both to the same number.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Touch-Tone,” she said.

  Wagner stared at her.

  “Beep, beep, bop, beep,” she said.

  “Why not speak English?”

  “I recorded the tones. I got a phone. I went through the combinations until I could match the numbers he called. It was the same number both times. Los Angeles area. I called directory and got an unlisted number so I pulled rank. The phone belongs to Karin Orgonov. I went back to our files and that’s a name we have.”

  “Did you sleep? I mean, the bed looks used.” He was being sarcastic and they both knew it, which made it ineffective. Karen looked at him for a moment with those innocent blue eyes and waited for the sarcasm to leave the room.

  “I checked her out in files. She’s a Soviet defector. They know each other, don’t you see that? Why does he call her when he’s feeling paranoid or when he really has seen someone who scares him? He called her, the last person I would have expected him to have contact with. So I called her. I got hold of her around three this morning. She has a heavy accent. I told her who I was.”

  “You have no authorization—”

  The cold blue eyes held the room and stopped his voice. “I told her the code she would have expected. She sounded relieved. I asked her some questions and then she put her guard up.”

  “You didn’t tell her about Redbird.”

  “No, Mr. Wagner, I’m not an idiot.”

  “You’re acting like one.”

  “Something is fishy,” she said. She used phrases like that all the time, as though she had learned everyday speech from a book.

  “So what were you going to do?”

  She caught the tense. She blinked at him. “I’m going to find out who she is. Get a picture at least. Then I’m going to talk to our client again.”

  “You’re going back,” Wagner said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I didn’t sit up in a plane and a car all night to make a joke. This thing has slipped up a notch or two in security terms. I’m taking over from you as of now.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m as cleared as you are.”

  “That isn’t the point. I’m assistant director and you’re a very novice operative and—”

  “Jesus Christ, this is shitty,” she said. He was surprised at the words and the tone of voice. Karen O’Hare sat very still and her face was dead white.

  Wagner was sweating. He had been sweating all night. Pell made him sweat, the whole stinking bag he was in made him sweat. His wife was a honey blond with a Dallas accent and the skin of a peach. She was also as dumb as a board. What could he tell her about guys who stand around in bars eating peanuts. Or about this one sitting in her blue bathrobe, holding herself in as if she was a nun confronting Genghis Khan? He was under a deadline they wouldn’t know anything about, even if he explained it to them. And the emphasis was on the word dead.

  Wagner knew he wasn’t a bad guy in this, it was just out of his hands and it had to be out of Karen O’Hare’s hands by today.

  Karen stared at him without a word.

  “Look, honey,” he started. He stopped when he saw the eyes turn from cold to ice. “Look, Karen, we’ve been together, what? A year? Year and two months? I’ve looked out for you at the program, I can see you’ve got what it takes, very bright, I’ve put you in for two commendations.”

  She really wasn’t going to say anything to help him.

  “I think this is just a… bit more complex than you realize, maybe more than any of us realize.… This wasn’t just my idea.” He thought of the lie, thought of how she could check it out back on Powell Street, decided she couldn’t. “Got buzzed from NSC direct on this last night, they want my input. I do have contact with NSC, you know, I gave them liaison when I was with GAO in D.C.” He felt better with the alphabet jargon. He even smiled. “They asked me direct to look into it. I don’t want to take your play but the point is: They know me, they don’t know you.”

  “So I was right,” she said. “There is something going on.”

  “It could be. Maybe it was your wiretap request that interested them. I think I would have handled that differently. The point is: You set off all kinds of bells when you start making requests like that, they get interested more in finding out what you want to know than in what is really out there. You see?”

  Karen said nothing for a moment and then let out a long sigh. “I’m using a secure room at the local FBI office, the tape is set up there. I’ve got the only key.”

  She reached in the pocket of the robe for the key. He looked at her. She really did believe she had the only key. It was just another complication, he thought, but he supposed the local FBI types were more concerned with tracking down dangerous radicals set to blow up the oil drilling rigs in the harbor than with something like this. He was sure they listened to the wiretap when Karen was not there.

  At least Karen said she was going back to San Fran.

  16

  THE HUNTER

  Devereaux woke four hours after dawn and turned on the light. It was 5:03 in the morning. He threw his bare feet on the floor of the small old-fashioned room on the second landing of the hotel. There were only two hotels in Nome and neither was filled because the white school buses that brought tourists in summer from the airport were only just beginning to run for the season. The rooms were very expensive and bare and clean.

  Sometime in sleep he had begun to figure it out, from all the stories.

  He stared at the floor of the room and the worn carpet. In the very thin yellow light of the single lamp, he saw only his thoughts.

  Nels Nelsen snored in the next room. He had been awake when Nels came out of his drunken sleep around midnight. Nels had only wanted another drink or two to get back to sleep but Devereaux had forced him to stay awake a while longer.

  There was only one question left for Nels in the long trail of questions that had started in the 201 file in Washington and led to the man called “Captain” Holmes in Seattle.

  “I don’t know where he came from” is the wa
y Nels Nelsen had answered it. “Man from Dutch Harbor asked me the same question. I answered every damned question he gave me. I ain’t trying to hold out on you, not on anyone. I wish to hell I never had met Henry McGee, he’s given me a god-awful lot of trouble since he got himself killed.”

  “Did he know the traplines?”

  Nels stared at him. Nels had a heavy face to start with. The last few weeks, since the death of his partner, had added weight to it. He had dried out in the psychiatric hospital where they had taken him after he brought Henry McGee’s body into Nome. That had just made him thirstier. His nose was veined and his eyes were always bloodshot and he thought he was going to die nearly every morning when he woke up.

  “What about Narvak?”

  “Catherine? You mean the Indian girl?”

  “Eskimo, I think.”

  “Native girl anyway. Yeah, I met her yesterday or the day before, I don’t remember. Lots of them start coming around in summer, looking for the tourists and dredgers. Lots of money and not a lot to do. Same for the girls, I suppose. They’re not all whores but a lot of them are. They just want something interesting to happen. She was a nice girl. I gave her a tumble, she has a nice little bottom on her, always working.”

  Devereaux waited, staring at the blotched face, at the small, red-soaked eyes.

  “You always get lucky like that?”

  Nels Nelsen stared at the government man. He would have told the government to go to hell ten years ago. That’s what the country was all about. Would have said the same thing six months ago. Before Henry McGee got himself killed. But the psychiatric hospital had frightened him very much. They said the man he had lived with was Otis Dobbins. The man from Dutch Harbor had asked a lot of questions after that. He had seen the way it was, that he had to go along with them if he wanted to be left alone.

  “I had my share of luck,” Nels Nelsen said. He tried to say it with dignity.

  Devereaux stared at him the way the wolf stares at the prey on the trail. There is no fear in the eyes of the wolf, only this vague chill hostile look that is the beginning of a question. The answer to the question is death, for one or the other.

  “She surprised me,” Nels said at last.

  Devereaux said nothing.

  “She’s a good-looking thing. I wasn’t throwing money around. Tell you the truth, by the time breakup comes, I’m usually getting along toward short. I got some furs to sell and that’ll flush me out, but I haven’t done it yet. So I was surprised she was so friendly. She picked you up all right down at the dock?”

  “She mentioned Henry McGee?”

  “Well, not in so many words. Maybe I brought it up, come to think of it. Everyone in Nome knows about the day I brought in poor Henry. I beg your pardon, this fellow Otis Dobbins what told me he was Henry. Someone in Nome probably told her—”

  “She know a lot of people?”

  “Pretty thing like that can get to know as many people as she wants to know.”

  “She know many people?”

  “She kept to me.”

  “She came in and saw you and it was love at first sight.”

  Nels frowned at the outlander. He had the manner of the fellow from Dutch Harbor. They had soft voices and they didn’t come across hardcase like the cops on Fourth Avenue in Anchorage when they wanted to wade into a bar and bust up a few Indians. They just sat there and waited and asked smart-ass questions.

  “I didn’t say nothing about love. You asked me a question.”

  “Who is she, then?”

  “Well, ain’t that what they pay you for?”

  He had sent the message through the Dutch Harbor station house this time. The message to Hanley was not the one he had intended. He had wanted to say that the trail of Henry McGee was cold and dead and that he was coming home. But the girl in the car had changed that. Was it by accident or design? He began to feel trapped by the stories of Henry McGee, as though he might be nothing more than a flat folk character in one of them and Henry was deciding how the story would come out for him. He remembered her hand on his crotch and the way it had fluttered and struggled free when he mentioned Henry McGee. If she had not reacted, it would have been dead and over. Was McGee that clumsy, to send a girl to him? Or was it really very clever? He could not decide.

  He stared at Nels Nelsen and plodded on: “Why do you go down to Anchorage? Why didn’t you go to Fairbanks to blow off steam?”

  “I know people in Anchorage. I knew people at the Elmendorf Air Base there. Worked in Anchorage a year after half the city slid down into Cook Inlet in the quake Easter Sunday ’sixty-four. Why the hell shouldn’t I?”

  “Otis Dobbins say he came into Anchorage to sell furs?”

  “He did not. Wasn’t the time to sell furs anyway.”

  “He didn’t say what he did?”

  “You know now what he did.”

  “We don’t. That’s why we ask.”

  “Man came out of nowhere.”

  “No. He came from someplace. We just don’t know where.”

  “Why’d you come up here by ship? There’s faster ways.”

  “I had to talk to a man. For a long while.”

  “About Henry.”

  “About Henry. He knew Henry in a past life.”

  “You talk like Henry is a ghost.”

  “What do you think?”

  Nels thought about Henry McGee sitting on a little hill, sitting straight up with two bullets in him, frozen and smiling. Damn Henry McGee to hell.

  Devereaux waited, large hands held together between his knees, his forearms resting on his thighs, leaning forward, watching.

  “Ship, thinking of something just now when I asked you why you come by ship. Ship,” the old trapper said once again.

  “What ship?”

  “No ship. Just a carving he did out of a caribou antler. Was Christmas that year we were in the bush and he give me a little ship. Wasn’t an old-fashioned thing with sails but it was a ship and a smart piece of carving. Said to him what did he know about ships and he said he had seen it in a book and liked the look of it. I think I must of lost it. When I got… put away.”

  “Why would he carve a ship?”

  “I just told you, didn’t I? He saw a picture of it.”

  “Why didn’t he carve something else?”

  “Maybe a ship was easier.”

  “Lot of white men carve?”

  “No. That’s native stuff. Go down to the Board of Trade down Front Street, whole shop full of stuff. The Eskimos come down and they got a piece of ivory all carved into a polar bear or something, something like that go for two hundred dollars or more down in the outside but the guy down to the shop give them twenty bucks for it. Got a whole shop full of stuff. They carve on everything. Carve on whalebone, carve on walrus tusk, carve on each other when they get drunk enough.” Nels smiled at that. “I sure would like a whiskey if you could.”

  Devereaux gave him the vodka bottle he had in the single canvas bag and Nels drank it like whiskey, made a face, and splashed water in it. Devereaux asked him more questions but there didn’t seem to be any connections to the answers. All the stories about Henry McGee—the stories he had poured into the beach bum in Santa Cruz, into Captain Holmes, into Nels Nelsen through the bogus Otis Dobbins—the stories were vignettes that brightened the stage, played, and faded out. Where was the connection to Henry McGee?

  And now, in the light of sullen, weak morning, Devereaux thought he saw it.

  He went into the small, old-fashioned bathroom and turned on the shower. The water groaned in the pipes for a moment and then splashed down into the tub. He stepped into the shower and felt the warmth cover his body. Warmth was comfort in this country; it was sex and enough food and drink and the smell of flowers in a mountain meadow. Devereaux comforted himself beneath the water and saw what even Hanley had not seen the day Henry McGee triggered the files in the bowels of R Section in Washington.

  Devereaux was the connection.

&n
bsp; 17

  THE SECOND CONNECTION

  The telephone call and the written message came within ten minutes of each other.

  The servant shook Malcolm Crowder’s shoulder for a moment and he came instantly awake. He blinked in the dim light. The curtains on the French windows were drawn, but here and there, bright sunlight peeped through. It was long after dawn, which meant nothing in an Alaska spring when dawn comes so early. He could see Terry’s form next to him on the vast bed, twisted beneath the covers, her blond hair arrayed on the pillows. The wind howled against the thick windows and moaned around the chimney. Everything was all right; everything was secure; Malcolm Crowder blinked again at James standing next to the bed.

  He nodded to the servant to show he was awake and then lifted his legs from beneath the down comforter. Terry grunted in sleep and turned. It had been a long evening. Terry was on the committee seeking to restore historic Anchorage. Some argued that Anchorage had very little past and almost none worth restoring, but that did not stop the cream of society from feting itself at luncheons and dinners in the Captain Cook Hotel while it sought ways to make its work meaningful to the people of the city. The ball had lasted until past midnight and Crowder had drunk too much. It was all damned nonsense but Terry was twenty-nine years younger than Malcolm Crowder and she was a nice, warm thing to have in your bed.

  James was the odd name chosen by the native servant who now led Malcolm Crowder downstairs. James had attached himself to Malcolm in the old days, before power and money, and was the only living memento of Malcolm’s past, which he had consistently reinvented over the last thirty years.

  The large house was all paneling, braided rugs, bits of carved ivory, and photographs of wildlife. The large fireplace was crowned by a giant moose head with antlers. It was a man’s idea of a house and even Terry could not change it. Malcolm Crowder’s first wife had grown tired of the house and of Malcolm, so she took a flight south one day and never came back. Now she lived very happily in Seattle with the lawyer who had filed her divorce papers. Malcolm could not imagine such a dull existence.