“All right. But if anybody asks questions you’d better tell them the truth.”
“Nobody will,” she said. “Nobody’s going to know. Not from me.”
He knew it was an unwise thing but he folded her against him and when she tipped her face up he kissed her long and hard. The drizzle misted their skin. There was nothing extraordinary about any of it but it was one of those moments he’d never forget—a spark that would grow brighter whenever it was touched by its associations: the smell of the desert drizzle and of airplane oil, the pale impressionism of the afternoon’s color, the loneliness of the solitary aircraft asleep on dusty ground.
He stood beside his suitcase with his jacket billowing in the wind of the plane’s passage when it roared by him and lifted, steeply banking, wings waggling in farewell; then he picked up the valise and walked away toward the narrow highway beyond the hill.
– 17 –
THE ROOM STANK of yesterday’s tobacco. The silence was such that Ross could hear Myerson’s ballpoint pen scrape across the pad. Cutter merely sat in a placenta of patience. Ross kept looking at the door and finally it opened and Glenn Follett entered, burly and freckled and as dewlappy as a Basset hound. “Greetings.”
Myerson looked up. He held the ballpoint upright, bouncing it on the desk. “Now that Mr. Follett has graced the room with his presence perhaps we can get started.”
Follett sat down. “There was a traffic jam. I’m sorry.”
Ross recalled Cutter’s comment on the way up twenty minutes ago in the elevator: If it was up to me I wouldn’t hire Follett to carry out my garbage. Follett was definitely cast against type. He seemed always desperate to reassure himself that he was lovable, that he had buddies like other people. His face in repose looked eagerly ready at an instant’s notice to burst into tears. Perhaps to counter his appearance he had a lexicon of mannerisms designed to accentuate a sort of forced bonhomie. His voice was always too loud, he spoke with great heaves and lunges of his arms: his emotions were ebulliently on the surface, there for anyone to read.
“All right,” Myerson said. “Let’s have a rough Sit Rep. What’s the score as of this morning?”
Cutter said, “Score? We’re not even sure we know who the players are.”
“You’re talking about other countries now, Joe?”
“We don’t know where he is, do we.”
Follett said, “Hell let’s don’t get sour this early in the morning, Joe. So he’s gone under again. People have gone to ground before. They always turn up sooner or later, right?”
“Later in this case could be too late,” Myerson said. “Let’s have the Sit Rep.”
The situation report was Ross’s department and he cleared his throat. “All right. Here’s what we know.” He consulted his notes. “On the twenty-fifth a man who was probably our subject spent half a day in an office-copying shop in Mobile, Alabama. He paid extra to run the machine himself so that nobody else could get a look at what he was running off, but according to Tobin’s reports the general appearance conforms with our estimate of Kendig’s needs. The man ran off thirty-three hundred copies and collated the sheets into approximately fifteen stacks. That works out to two hundred and twenty pages per stack. If his entire manuscript runs two hundred and seventy-odd pages and we subtract the fifty pages or so that he’s already delivered, it works out just about right. He’s got fourteen publishers and the fifteenth copy would be for his agent in New York. He retains the original and the carbon.”
“Interesting to speculate on what use he’s got in mind for the carbon,” Myerson said. “All right—go on, Ross.”
“Right. On the twenty-seventh he bought a ’fifty-five Buick in Pensacola for a hundred dollars cash.” He felt the blood rise to his cheeks. “He had to use a driver’s license and other identification of course—automobile insurance card, that kind of thing. He used mine—the wallet he took off me in Georgia.”
“Cute,” Cutter remarked. Ross was surprised to see him smile.
Ross went on: “He spent the night of the twenty-sixth in Tampa, a motel. Leonard Ross, but it’s Kendig’s handwriting on the registry card. All this stuff is from Tobin’s people over at the Bureau.”
Follett said, “Jesus. They must have put a ton of guys on the canvassing job.”
“They’ve blanketed the South,” Myerson said grudgingly. “They’re pretty good at that.”
“We had one piece of blind luck,” Ross continued. “On the twenty-seventh a Florida state trooper issued him a warning because the car was throwing smoke. Safety check, you know. But he was still being Leonard Ross—the cop got it down in his book. That was near Plant City—it’s roughly due east of Clearwater, maybe halfway down the Florida peninsula. So he was definitely headed south. Tobin sent his people into south Florida on the twenty-ninth to drag the net. They found out Leonard Ross had spent the night of the twenty-seventh in a motel near Sarasota.”
“He wasn’t in any hurry,” Cutter said. “It’s not that far from Tampa to Sarasota. Even in an old oil-burner he could have gone three times as far in in a day’s drive if he’d wanted to.”
Ross said, “Well of course he was staying off the Interstates, that would slow him down. There’ve been FBI spotters along the big highways but he never showed on any of them. He’s using back roads.”
“Or was,” Cutter said. “This was a week ago. He could be in Hong Kong by now.”
Ross felt heat in his face again. “He stopped using my ID at that point. He mailed the wallet and the badge back to me on the twenty-eighth from Sarasota. I received them two days ago.”
“He’s very funny,” Myerson said.
Glenn Follett shot his arm into the air. “Did you check them out for fingerprints?”
“Naturally,” Cutter said.
“And?”
Cutter only shook his head in disgust: disgust with Follett, not with the predictable results of the lab tests.
Follett was oblivious. “I still don’t understand how he could have used Ross’s driver’s license to buy a car and fool a state trooper. How old are you, Ross? Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Hell Kendig’s nearly twice your age. How’d he get by with it?”
Ross said, “The cop described him as thirtyish.”
“He used to be pretty good with makeup,” Cutter said. “He could be an Arab one day, a Swede the next.”
Ross went back to his notes. “On the thirtieth that bootlegger’s Oldsmobile turned up in Mobile—he left it on a pay lot there. That was the car he used to bust out of our trap.”
“The one you had a little ride in,” Cutter said.
“Yeah.” He hurried on. “But that didn’t help—we already knew he’d been in Mobile. Okay, the last item is this—my wallet wasn’t the only thing he mailed from Sarasota on the twenty-eighth, He shipped out fifteen copies of chapter four as well. Ives got his copy yesterday. Desrosiers hasn’t reported yet. They’ll be showing up in the next day or two, I expect.”
“What’s it about?” Myerson asked.
“It’s the one about Duvalier being assassinated on White House orders.”
“Wonderful,” Myerson said. It was close to a groan. “Why doesn’t he pick on the other side for a change?”
“That comes next. The Nasser chapter.”
Cutter said, “On the twenty-eighth he dropped out of sight. Sarasota was the last fix we had on him. That was a week ago today. He’s taken cover.”
Follett said, “I don’t get it, Joe. If the bastard’s still in south Florida what am I doing here? Florida’s not my bailiwick.”
Myerson said, “Joe thinks he may turn up in Europe next. That’s why I called you in from Marseilles.”
“What the hell makes you think that?”
Cutter smiled, not friendly. “He’s playing cat-and-mouse with us. He’s not trying to disappear into a hole. He only goes to ground when he needs time to do this or that. He hid out on that Georgia farm to finish w
riting the tract. Well he’s got that done now, he doesn’t need to hide in one place any more. He’s on the run—but he needed a head start. That’s why he dropped out of sight. Now he could turn up anywhere but it’s most likely he’ll show himself on familiar turf—someplace where he, knows the workings. Europe, the Near East or southeast Asia. Unless he proves me wrong I’m going to rule out southeast Asia for the time being. Kendig’s too tall, too Caucasian—he’s too noticeable out there. He can’t disguise himself as a Cam-bode or a Thai. He was all right working there when he was Second Secretary and not pretending to be anything but an American, but this is something else. He’s going to be somewhere between Scandinavia and the Med—somewhere where he can stir up the Russians and some of our other opposite numbers. He wants to watch a whole gang of us trip all over each other trying to run him down. That’s his idea of fun.”
“You’re awfully sure of that, aren’t you, Joe? What if he heads for Latin America instead?”
“He won’t. Not for long anyway.”
Myerson said, “I think we’ve got to go with Joe’s judgment for the time being. He knows Kendig better than you do, Glenn.”
Follett shook his head. “I know Kendig this well—I know you can’t depend on him to conform to a pattern.”
Cutter made a face.
Myerson said, “Let’s not get disputatious at this point. Right now we need all the cooperation among ourselves we can get. All of you are booked on a flight this evening to Paris. Joe Cutter will be running the operation, Glenn, and you’re to give him complete cooperation in all your departments over there. This thing takes priority over every operation you’ve got in motion. If Joe tells you to pull people off other jobs then you’ll have to do it immediately and not complain about it. Understood?”
“I understand your intent. But I’ve got people working on sensitive jobs that are in process. Some of them can’t be yanked out just like that.” Follett was miffed because he ranked Cutter in seniority and the regular chain-of-command. “You can’t just disrupt the priority operations of my whole department to go chasing after one man. You know as well as I do what kind of jobs we’re working on over there.”
“Joe’s not going to tap you for anything more than he needs, isn’t that right Joe?”
Cutter grunted.
Ross thought, This is not going to be fun.
– 18 –
THE TRAIN WAS due at nine in the morning and he didn’t arrive at the depot until half-past ten but even so he was among the first; even the station-master hadn’t arrived yet. If the train had been on time nobody would have caught it but this was Mexico and the passengers began to drift in by bus, taxi and foot around eleven o’clock and the train wheezed in with a scrape of sighing brake-shoes at eleven-twenty. Kendig went aboard in the midst of a crowd of mestizos carrying chickens, goats, a small pig, a goose and various baskets of produce for the market town three stops hence. Kendig’s second-class ticket did not entitle him to a seat on the long bench; he stood against a window, resting his elbow on it, trying to breathe while the train lurched into the mountains. But the air was like coarse wool, too hot for relief even at forty miles an hour. Children and animals made a din; the faces were as stoic as those of Auschwitz.
He had no liking for Latin America and he had said as much at least once in Cutter’s hearing; in part that was why he was here. But he’d kept moving for three days and he’d be out of Mexico by tonight.
Sometimes it surprised him a little that everything south of the Rio Grande hadn’t gone Communist by now, It was only because the Cubans had set such an inept example and because Ché had been such a visible idiot. They had the temperament for it, though. Tyranny suited them. You could be put up against a wall for nothing more than having a smudged passport or a suspicious face. Cynicism and defeat were their religions. It was not accident that the fugitive Nazis had found their best refuge in Spanish America. They believed only in macho—not courage but merely the surface appearance of courage: like the Oriental concept of face, the value of which also had always eluded him. He was a prisoner of his belief in realities rather than appearances. He had never cared what anyone thought of him, only what he thought of himself.
He was thinking better of himself now. For a time he’d fallen into the trap of conceding the validity of the Agency’s judgment on him: from their point of view he’d been of no further use to them. It had not occurred to him before that he could prove them wrong. He was proving it now. It was possible his actions might save the career of the next middle-aged expert who began to look obsolete to them. Perhaps even Cutter. The thought amused him. He didn’t dwell on it; it was also possible they’d carry their innate nihilism to its logical extreme and neutralize the next one rather than risk another Kendig on the loose. But the most likely probability was that he wouldn’t change anything at all. They’d regard him as a fluke and it would have no bearing on their future decisions. They were not the sort of people who learned from history. No: the game had to be played on its own terms, not the terms of its speculative consequences.
Zacatecas at five-fifteen; he made it by taxi to the little airport by six and was on the evening flight to Mexico City. He was traveling light, just the one suitcase, not carrying the fifteen heavy copies of the manuscript. At the big modern terminal he booked onto the morning Aeronaves 707 to Madrid and paid for the ticket with travelers’ checks he’d bought for cash in Miami under the name Jules Parker. He’d spent nine hours on October second in a Coral Gables motel forging Parker’s passport and driver’s license, the last blanks he’d had from Saint-Breheret. He still had the French passport, unused, which he’d made out in the name of Alexandre Vaneau.
He boarded the flight in the morning and was in Madrid at half-past eight that night, European time.
The next day was Monday, October the seventh. He ticketed Jules Parker onto the afternoon flight to Copenhagen by way of Paris. During the morning in Madrid he went to the huge central post office and identified himself as Parker and collected the airmail parcel from Miami at the general delivery window. He took the parcel to his hotel, opened it on the bed and separated seven stacks, each containing fifteen copies of a single chapter of the book.
He slid the copies of chapter five into fifteen of the manila envelopes he’d bought in Birmingham and addressed the first to Ives, the second to Desrosiers and the rest to his publishers in New York, London, Tokyo, Rome, Ottawa, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, West Berlin, Melbourne, Johannesburg and Leningrad.
Of the six remaining stacks none was more than an inch and a half thick; the longest chapter, the last one, ran 23 pages in length and made a 345-page stack. He doubled the stacks and laid them three abreast into his suitcase—a flat padding of paper; it took half an hour to stitch the false bottom into place above them. Then he carried the fifteen envelopes back to the post office and airmailed them.
The stop at Orly gave him a three-hour layover between planes. He took a taxi into Paris, paid the driver at the Pont St. Michel and walked across the quai into the medieval narrowness of the rue Seguier. Sooner or later they’d find out he’d withdrawn money from the bank in Zurich; they’d put that together with the fact that he’d begun the operation in Paris and returned to Paris on his way from Madrid to Copehagen. They’d conclude he had cached his money in Paris and at that point they’d begin to cover the commercial and savings banks. That was why he hadn’t put the money in a bank.
The proprietor of the diamond exchange was heavier than he’d been when he’d bought his blue pinstriped suit; it stretched over rolls of fat. The blond hair was stretched over his pale scalp in thin strands. “Ah, M’sieur Vaneau!” With marvelously feigned pleasure he escorted Kendig to the basement vault. Two subtly armed men sat guard on the chamber. It was as impregnable as anything in a bank. Only M. Strauss and his partner M. Losserand had the combinations.
The vault was vaster than it needed to be. Diamonds did not take up much space. The walk-in int
erior was sectioned into compartments and each was a small safe in itself with its own lock; when you rented a compartment you set your own combination into it so that no one—not even Strauss or Losserand—could get into it. There was a great demand for such safe-deposit services among businessmen and politicians who were willing to pay high for discretion.
M. Strauss opened the vault for him. Kendig unlocked his compartment and slid the heavy black metal box out of it; carried it into the private cubicle, shut himself in and opened the box.
He’d withdrawn substantial funds from Zurich two weeks before he’d started the game with Desrosiers; he’d made a dent in it but when he refilled his money belt now it still left more than two hundred thousand dollars in American, English and French currency in the box. He wasn’t going to have to forfeit the game on account of poverty.
He took the Alexandre Vaneau passport from his coat and placed it in the black box with the hoard. It would be a risk traveling without it but it wasn’t wise to carry all your weapons on your person. If he needed it he’d come back for it.
He carried the box back to the compartment, locked it in and went upstairs with Strauss, who understood him to be an arms merchant who dealt in cash purchases. He walked out past the display cabinets of glittering stones, flagged a taxi in the boulevard St. Germain and returned to Orly in time to make his second flight of the day.
A chill drizzle muffled the purported gaiety of Copenhagen. It had never been a favorite of Kendig’s; beneath the Hans Christian Anderson image of Tivoli and frivolity it was as grimly brooding a city as Hamburg and the phony cheer only made it more depressing. He thawed himself with an aquavit in the hotel bar before he retired.
In the morning he made the call from a telephone kiosk in the cavernous railway station; he kept the door of the booth ajar so that the phone would pick up the sounds of the trains and announcements.
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