Hopscotch

by Brian Garfield

  There was no one around and no one had been there; the telltales he’d left had not been disturbed except for the string at the bottom of the screen door and that likely had been a squirrel or perhaps during the night a raccoon.

  He brought his purchases inside and retrieved the boxed unfinished typescript from its hiding place in the rusted wreckage of the DeSoto. For the next two hours he sat still, reading what he’d written.

  The book was a brusque account of facts assembled in chains. It struck him now for the first time that what he was writing was essentially a moral outcry and that impressed him as a curious thing because he hadn’t had that in mind. Yet it was unquestionably an outraged narrative despite its matter-of-fact tone. When he made this discovery it caused him to realize that he must add something to the book that he had not intended including: there had to be a memoir, a self-history (however brief) to establish his boná-fides—not his credentials or sources but his motives.

  The book had become more than a gambit; it had been born of him and now claimed its own existence. In no way did that negate the game itself; but he saw that in order to maintain the illusion of freedom he had to complete the book not as a means but as an end. Otherwise it was only a sham—toy money, counters on a game board. It had earned for itself the right to be much more than that; and if he failed in this new responsibility it made the game meaningless.

  He put a new page in the typewriter.

  – 11 –

  THEY WERE RANKED in three lines, the back row standing and the middle row kneeling and the front row sitting down with their arms around their calves. They were all grinning because they’d survived Basic Training. Three of the four corners had broken off the four-by-five print and it had faded with age.

  The second print was a grainy enlargement of a small section of the first. It showed one young face and parts of the adjacent two.

  Ross said, “Kendig all right. But you’d have to know him to tell. This was a nineteen-year-old kid.”

  “It’s the only picture of him we’ve got, so far,” Cutter said.

  “Where’d it come from?”

  “Myerson went through the Army personnel records division in Saint Louis. This belonged to some guy who went through boot camp with Kendig. Then they shipped out to different outfits. This guy never saw Kendig again.”

  Ross put the photographs down and went back to packing things into his attaché case. “Doesn’t he have any friends? I mean everybody’s got friends.”

  “With the possible exception of Kendig. Well there was me for a while. And there was a woman.”

  “Would he get in touch with her?”

  “He might, if he knows a medium,” Cutter said drily. “She’s been dead for three years.”

  Ross looked at him sharply. “Three years. That was about the time he got his cover blown, wasn’t it?”

  “Around then, yes.”

  “One thing have anything to do with the other?”

  “I don’t know. You’d have to ask Kendig.”

  “I will.”

  “Sure,” Cutter said. He was smiling but there were subtle vibrating signs of great controlled pressures in him. “Look, don’t leave yourself absolutely wide open, will you?”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “All the time I knew him I never saw him sleep more than four hours at a stretch. Kendig’s got a consummate control of time. And he knows how to pace himself. If you ever get close to him you’ve got to intercept him, you can’t chase him—he’ll outrun you every time.”

  “You make him sound like some kind of four-minute-miler.”

  “He’s fifty-three years old but I imagine he could run the shoe leather off you, Ross, if he had a hundred yards’ head start.”

  “But he’s no sprinter?”

  “He doesn’t let himself get caught in a position where he needs to sprint.”

  Ross picked up the attaché case and hung his jacket over his shoulder by one fingertip. “I guess that’s everything. My bag’s down in the car.”

  “Good hunting,” Cutter told him. “I guess I ought to say something like that.”

  “You’re just absolutely convinced it’s a blind alley, aren’t you.”

  “Sure. But it may give us a lead. Get it all on tape and we’ll all go over it when you bring it back.”

  Ross swallowed that without a retort and went out. He threw the attaché case in the back seat and pulled out on the highway to Dulles.

  On the plane he read the copystats of the fifty-one pages they now had of Kendig’s exposé. The latest sixteen-page chapter had arrived at the French publisher’s office four days ago, having been posted in Charleston on the day after James Butler had set sail from that port. The typescript was double-spaced, which made it easy to read between the lines. You had to give the bastard credit for effective understatement. Another few chapters like these and he’d blow the lid off every capital that counted.

  It was cleverly conceived and executed; there was no innuendo, every statement was flat and factual. A government could deny it or confirm it but nobody could accuse Kendig of slanting it or getting things out of context. He simply didn’t go in for interpretation.

  The matter of the Hammarskjöld assassination—chapter three—was a raw exposition of meetings, decisions taken at specific hours on specific days by named individuals and then a day-by-day trace of itemized actions by individuals, again named, effecting the mechanics of the event. There were no suggestive interpolations, no sub-text. Pages 47 and 48 were missing, withheld by Kendig; page 46 ended with the line, “Documentary evidence to support these facts, and witnesses who took part or observed these events, are as fol-”

  Of course it was unsupported testimony but there’d been so many people involved and once the thing was published they’d all be on the defensive, details would be demanded of them, sooner or later one of them would crack and spill his guts out of guilt or disgust or desperation.

  In a fine sense it was history and didn’t matter any more but to discount it on that basis would be absurd and specious. Kendig had them over a barrel and the barrel was headed right over the falls. Coming on the heels of the Nixon spectacle a book like this would wreak unimaginable damage because the structure of human faith was so weakened already; at least Ross saw it so, his own convictions having undergone severe questionings and doubts in the past few years. But in the end it came back to the same thing for him: there was still something worth preserving and worth fighting to preserve.

  Casablanca was new to him but he’d been in Tangier and the ambience was the same—the startling juxtaposition of unspeakable poverty and first-class modernity. It was a resort city and a capital of commerce and there wasn’t anything in common with the Warner Brothers sets of the old movie that everybody knew. A Mercedes diesel taxi took him to the Hilton and he ate a big dinner and slept the clock around, trying to overcome the glaze of jet lag. In the morning he paid his call on the Agency’s stringer, a beefy sweating backslapper named Ilfeld who was Assistant to the Commercial Secretary at the consulate. Ilfeld brought along a couple of goons in wilted seersucker when they went down to meet the Cape of Good Hope. The port was shallow and not very big and there wasn’t much nautical traffic; Rabat was only a little way up the coast and that was most ships’ preferred port of call.

  Ilfeld gave the customs people on the pier some double-talk and the four of them went aboard before anyone was allowed to disembark. The First Officer was a ruddy squat Englishman who told them the way to James Butler’s cabin.

  Ross was startled by the closeness of the resemblance when James Butler opened up. It wasn’t Kendig but from a distance it might have been. The eyes were too close together, the hairline was a little wrong, the mouth too thick, the real Kendig was a little taller and less full in the hips and had longer legs.

  Butler didn’t seem surprised. “Well come on in, gents.”

  Ilfeld said, “You mind a whole lot if we search you for weapons, old buddy?”r />
  “Go ahead. I’m not armed. But go ahead.”

  The two goons spread him out in the frisk position with his hands against the top bunk and his feet splayed well out. They went over him meticulously and Ross waited until the ritual had been observed. Then he said, “I suppose you know who we are and why we’re here, don’t you?”

  “I know why you’re here. I don’t know who you are.”

  Ilfeld flashed an ID wallet and gave him time to read it. “I’m with the consulate staff here. This gentleman is from the State Department in Washington.”

  “Sure he is.”

  Ross said, “Here’s my identification,” but James Butler didn’t give it more than a glance and Ross put it away feeling a little foolish.

  Butler said, “You gentlemen are out of your jurisdiction here.”

  “A regular sea lawyer,” Ilfeld said.

  Ross said, “You want to come along with us, Mr. Butler?”

  “Actually I’m rather enjoying the voyage. I wasn’t planning to go ashore here at all.”

  “And if we insist?”

  “Then I’ll stand on my rights. You can’t hijack me off this ship if I don’t want to go. Not legally.”

  Ross said, “Perhaps you three gentlemen wouldn’t mind waiting outside while I talk with Mr. Butler.” In his pocket he had the recorder running.

  Butler sat down patiently. Ilfeld ducked his way out behind the two goons and the bulkhead door rang when it closed. Ross walked two paces—the width of the stateroom—to the porthole and hooked his elbow in it. “Okay, let’s cut the shit. What’s your name?”

  “James Butler.”

  “Traveling on a false passport is a serious offense.”

  “No. Not if I stay aboard this ship until it returns to the United States. I haven’t tried to sneak into any foreign country on a false passport. And I haven’t defrauded anybody out of anything. I paid for my passage in full, in cash. I’m clean—you can’t touch me.”

  Ross looked out through the open port. A dark rainbow rippled in the patch of oil that drifted on the water thirty feet below him. A quarter of a mile down the waterfront a tanker was pumping its cargo into tank lorries drawn up in a row along the dock. The sun was bright, fierce; when he turned inward to look at James Butler he could hardly see him for a moment until his vision adjusted. “You’re in a lot of trouble nevertheless.”

  “I don’t see how. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Then you’ll have no reason to refuse to cooperate with us, Mr.—Butler?”

  “Go ahead, ask your questions.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dwight Liddell.”

  “Vital statistics, Mr. Liddell?”

  “Fifty years old. Divorced. Unemployed. I was living in Bala Cynwyd for a while but my residence is in Trenton now. By profession I’m an aeronautical engineer. What else do you want to know?”

  “Who gave you James Butler’s papers?”

  “James Butler.”

  “He said that was his name, did he?”

  “He had the passport to prove it.”

  “Mind if I have a look at it, Mr. Liddell?”

  And suddenly there was a ball of excitement in him because there had to be a photograph in that passport—and Kendig had used it to get into the States a month ago.

  But Kendig had thought of it of course. The photograph was Liddell’s.

  “How much did he pay you to take us on this little wild goose chase, Mr. Liddell?”

  “Call me Dwight,” Liddell said. “I don’t think it’s any of your business how much money changed hands.”

  “But he did pay you.”

  “Sure he did. What else would have induced me to put up with this grilling?”

  “I haven’t even reached for a rubber hose, Mr. Liddell.”

  “You won’t have to.” Liddell spread his hands and smiled. “My life’s an open book.”

  On the twentieth he flew back to Washington and Liddell went on his way aboard the Cape of Good Hope. Ross had been a little worried about that but Cutter set him at ease: “No point making waves when it doesn’t prove anything. You did the right thing letting him go. Provided you milked him first.”

  “I’ve got six hours of tape. He was pretty dry by the time I finished with him. He didn’t hold anything back except the size of the money Kendig paid him.”

  “The man doesn’t want to have to pay taxes on it, does he. All right—I’ll listen to the tape tonight but tell me what’s significant on it in your estimation.”

  “Not a hell of a lot,” Ross admitted. “Kendig dropped him off in Charleston by taxi in time to catch the boat. From what the FBI tells us Kendig turned the rental car in about an hour before the sailing. So we might get something from taxi companies or the airlines or whatever, but I’m sure the FBI’s working on that.”

  Cutter nodded. “When it comes to that kind of drudgery they do as good a job as anybody.”

  “The taxi they took to the pier in Charleston was a Yellow Cab.”

  “Naturally.”

  “I just thought I’d mention it. I happened to ask Liddell and he happened to remember it. Yellow Cab, he thinks it was, and he remembers the driver was black but he couldn’t tell me fat or thin, tall or short, bald or short hair or afro. He’s not lying, he’s just a typical witness.”

  “We’ll pass it on to the Bureau. But either Kendig paid off the cab right there at the pier or he got himself dropped off downtown on a street corner. Didn’t you get anything at all out of Liddell?”

  “Nothing that looked interesting to me. Maybe you’ll find something I missed.”

  “Maybe I will at that.”

  Q. Then you drove from Trenton to Charleston together in Butler’s car on the twenty-seventh, is that right?

  A. Yes.

  Q. That’s a long day’s drive. Did Butler make any stops on the way?

  A. Well sure, we stopped for gas several times. We had lunch in a service area, one of those Hot Shoppes or Howard Johnson’s, whatever they are. We had dinner in a Chinese place in a shopping center outside of Norfolk. Oh, and he bought some typing paper in a discount store there.

  Q. You remember the name of the store?

  A. … No, I guess I don’t. But I remember the paper all right. It was Southworth Bond.

  Q. How come you remember that, Mr. Liddell?

  A. Well he wanted a heavy grade of paper. He really wanted twenty-four-pound paper but the heaviest they had was twenty-weight. See, the reason I noticed was that my wife writes children’s books. My ex-wife. She always buys twenty-four-pound paper because it duplicates better in copying machines. You know, it feeds easier, doesn’t get rumpled up. And she always buys this Southworth Bond paper, so I recognized the package when he bought it.

  Q. What was it he bought, a ream of it?

  A. They only had it in one-hundred-sheet packets. That’s what he bought. A pack of a hundred sheets and a pad of carbon paper.

  Q. And this was ordinary letter-size? Eight and a half by eleven?

  A. Well yes, sure. It wasn’t legal size or anything like that, if that’s what you mean.

  Q. Okay. Then what happened?

  A. After we left the shopping center? Well it was getting dark but we went right on, all the way to Charleston. It must have been after midnight when we got there. We put up in a motel.

  Q. What motel?

  A. I don’t remember the name of it. It wasn’t one of the big chains, I’d remember that. I mean you stop in a Holiday Inn or something, you sort of recognize the surroundings. This was just a motel, you know. It was just off Interstate Ninety-five but I couldn’t tell you which interchange—there’s four or five along there, exits for Charleston. We just got off the highway and stopped at the first motel we came to that had a vacancy sign.

  Q. You stayed in the same room with him?

  A. No. We had adjoining rooms. Not connecting, adjoining.

  Q. So it was late and you went right to bed?r />
  A. I did. He didn’t.

  Q. What did he do?

  A. Well he had his portable typewriter along, you know. I heard him typing away in there.

  Q. For how long?

  A. I have no idea. I went to sleep, he was still banging the damn typewriter.

  Q. How about when you woke up in the morning? Was he still typing?

  A. No. He called me on the room phone, that’s what woke me up. He was all dressed and ready to go when I came out. We got in the car and drove in toward the city. We stopped for breakfast in one of those pancake houses. Then he went over to a drugstore next door, it was one of those places that sold school supplies and paperback books and stuff—a big drugstore, a Rexall I think. He bought a whole bunch of those big manila envelopes with metal clasps. Then we drove on a ways and he stopped in a post office and bought a bunch of stamps.

  Q. But he didn’t mail anything there, did he?

  A. No. How did you know that?

  Q. Because we know what he mailed and it wasn’t postmarked until the next day. He couldn’t have mailed it in a post office that early that day. All right, Mr. Liddell, what happened after he bought the stamps?

  A. Well we went downtown and he parked the car at a meter and he went into a bank. He got me a cashier’s check and some cash.

  Q. How much was the cashier’s check for?

  A. I don’t think I can tell you that.

  Q. All right. How much cash did he give you?

  A. Let’s skip that one too, all right?

  Q. What did you do with the money?

  A. Well I put some of it in my wallet and I put some of it in various pockets. The cashier’s check and some of the cash I put in separate envelopes and I mailed them somewhere. I’m not going to tell you where.

  Q. Okay, okay. You don’t want to talk about the money, all right. What happened then? Did he do anything else in the bank?

  A. I don’t know. When he got the cash and the cashier’s check he was with an officer in the back, I wasn’t with him, I was waiting out front. I don’t know what he said or did. Anyhow we left the bank and I mailed what I had to mail and then we got back in the car. He dropped me off at a coffee shop and I had lunch, and about a half hour later he picked me up again. He didn’t have the car any more. We took a taxi down to the waterfront and I shook hands with him outside the customs door. That was the last I saw of him. He wished me good luck, I thanked him, the porter took my bags and went inside. Then I got on the boat and here I am.