Everybody had ideas. A lot of them were no good. Too many of them were outright defiance and would end you up in the stockade, back to buck private. But some of the ideas were okay. You see, if Driscoll had a good officer team, we wouldn’t have had a prayer. But he was trying to operate with the same batch of foul-ups Captain Brevard had left him.
Arnie summarized it. “Okay, guys. Get the word around. Whatever you do, you do slow. Whatever can be dropped, you drop it. And follow every order right to the letter. The stuff everybody has been doing as routine, you don’t do it unless you’re ordered to do it.”
And within two weeks the company went to hell. We’d barely managed to scrape along the old way, without bringing the brass down on us. But now nothing worked. A sergeant would take six trucks down to the docks. After he was long overdue to come back with a load, an officer would go down in a jeep to find out what happened. He’d bring the sergeant back to the captain.
“Sergeant, Lieutenant Quinn reports he found the loaded trucks parked at dockside. Why didn’t you come back?”
“Sir, I was ordered to take the trucks down for the load. Nobody told me where to take the load. I waited for orders, sir.”
“Sergeant, I will give you an order. In the future, every time you go to the docks for cargo, you will bring it back here for warehousing.”
“Yes sir.”
And two weeks later he was on the carpet again. He had picked up a load in ten trucks and brought it back when he was supposed to take it directly to the sub-depot at Dum Dum.
“But, sir, the captain ordered me to bring all cargo back here, sir.”
Trucks weren’t gassed because nobody ordered them to be gassed. The mess ran out of chow because nobody ordered it be requisitioned. There was nothing Driscoll could use as a basis for courts martial, or even company punishment. Everybody obeyed orders—slowly and awkwardly. If it had been just a few guys, maybe Driscoll could have fixed it by transferring them out. But it was the whole company. He got the message all right. He knew that all he had to do was loosen up and we’d get back to our normal low level of efficiency. But he was too stubborn to quit. He tried to be everywhere at once. He couldn’t trust his own lieutenants to follow through. It peeled the weight off him, what little there was to start with. No matter how hard he tried, the battalion brass was on his neck every minute. Seven weeks from the day he took over, he was relieved of command.
It took only a week to break in the next guy, and by then Arnie and me were back in the money business. By the time we were rotated home on points for discharge in July of ’45, we had comfortable little balances back in the states and quite a load to take with us. I’d been able, through a lot of breaks and hard work, to get mine in U.S. cash. I carried it home in a hollowed-out wood carving from Java, packed tight. Arnie invested all his in perfect star rubies and sapphires, put them in the bottom of his canteen, poured melted wax on them, and when it had set, filled the canteen with water.
After they had turned us into civilians on the same day at Dix, we totted up the scores. I had a little better than thirty-eight thousand bucks out of the war, and Arnie had almost thirty-one. But I’d had a start on him.
We’d figured on going into business together, but he didn’t like the ideas I came up with, and I didn’t think much of his. So we split, and I started with the one parking lot, and he worked as a waiter until he found the place where he figured it would make sense to buy in. But we kept in close touch. He married a year before I did, and when I decided to marry Marie, the house next to his was for sale, and it was a nice neighborhood, so we moved in. Marie and Janice get along just fine.
And we’d spent a lot of hours out in his back yard drinking beer and talking about the old days. Lately he’d been trying to talk me into a new deal. He thought he could talk his partners into letting him go to Europe to line up new sources of supply for some of the fancy stuff they serve at his restaurant. He wanted to take a big wad of loose money over and open up two number accounts in Switzerland for us. He’d looked it all up.
“It’ll work like this, Jerry. With a number account, nobody can trace you. It’s against their law. And you can tell the Swiss bank what to invest in. They hold the securities in the number account and bank the dividends. By the time we’re fifty, we could have such a big slug of dough over there that we could quit and move to Spain or Italy and live like kings the rest of our life. What the hell’s the good of just blowing the loose money?”
It sounded pretty good, but I hadn’t made up my mind yet. I was up to about twenty-six thousand in the wall safe, and I didn’t feel exactly easy about turning it all over to him. If he decided to get funny, I couldn’t yell cop, could I?
But the idea of a number account or any other kind of account had gone pretty sour. I lit another cigar, but it tasted so bad I threw it into the darkness of Arnie’s lawn. I knew I should be hungry, but the thought of eating made my stomach knot up. It was a little after eleven when I heard Arnie drive in. My house was dark so I knew Marie had gone to bed.
Arnie came out into the back and said, “Hi, Jerry? Where the hell are you?”
“Over here.”
“Janice said you wanted to see me about something.” He fumbled his way to a chair beside mine and sat down.
“How are things going?” I asked him.
“Fine and dandy. Fine and dandy. And you?”
I knew I was going to tell him. I didn’t know how to start. I had to tell him how it was at six o’clock when I was helping out at the biggest lot on account of the rush. And a guy came in and I didn’t look at him, just held my hand out for the stub, but he didn’t give me one, and then I looked at him and nearly sat down on the asphalt. He hadn’t changed as much as I’ve changed and Arnie had changed. He hadn’t put on the pounds like we have. He was smiling, and in our past relationship I hadn’t seen him smile much.
“Hello, Captain,” I said.
“Hello, Sergeant. Got a minute?”
“Sure, Captain. Sure. My God, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” I took him back into the cubbyhole office that’s part of the shack on the front of the lot.
He sat down, still smiling, and said, “A little over sixteen years since I made my mistake, Thompson.”
“Mistake, Captain?”
“I made the mistake of trying to take the company over and run it. I made the mistake of trying to take it away from you and Sergeant Sloan.”
“I don’t know as we were running it, Captain.”
“Just mister, Thompson. Mister Driscoll. You know, Thompson, I’ve never considered myself a vindictive man.”
I didn’t know what he was driving at. I didn’t know why the way he was smiling should make me so uncomfortable. “What do you mean, Ca … Mr. Driscoll?”
“You boys really took me over the jumps, didn’t you?”
“You know how those things are.”
“You taught me how they are. Good business you have here, Thompson.”
I shrugged. “Three lots. I make out.”
He turned and looked through my dusty window at the beat-up office building across the street. “Suppose, Thompson, a man wanted to find out just exactly how well you’re doing. Suppose he rented desk space near a front window over there and used a mechanical counter and took the trouble to check all your traffic in and out?”
My smile felt as if I wasn’t wearing it straight. “He’d have to be … pretty curious, wouldn’t he?”
“And have a lot of time on his hands, too.”
“I … guess so.”
“Cat and mouse isn’t my game,” he said. “I’m enjoying this, I suppose, but not as much as I thought I would. So I’ll leave out the routine and cut it short. Here. This is for you. I don’t generally deliver these myself, but I made an exception in this case.”
I picked it up. It was a subpoena. As I stared at it blankly he stood up and said, “We’re scheduling you at two P.M. tomorrow, Thompson. Bring your books and records for all of
last year, the duplicate of your return, and you might be well advised to bring your attorney.”
“I don’t understand,” I said in an empty way.
He placed a card on the corner of my desk. He paused in the doorway and said, “Give my regards to Arnold Sloan. I expect to see him soon.”
I picked up the card. Richard E. Driscoll. Treasury Intelligence. Federal Building.
Arnie said, in a nasty way, “Look, buddy, are you just going to sit there and sigh at me? I put in a long day. I’m ready for the sack. If you’ve got something to spill, let’s start hearing it.”
But I still couldn’t find the place to start. So I did it another way. I took the captain’s calling card out of my pocket and handed it to him.
“What’s this?” he said.
I didn’t answer him. He took out his lighter. I watched his face as he read the card. I watched him real close.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The Straw Witch
Lately Williamson found himself remembering all those weeks he had spent in that Dutch cellar with the old man named Gulligan. He wondered why he should think of it now, after twenty years, why he should dream of it.
This mission was going smoothly. The one with Gulligan had gone wrong, all wrong. Their security had been compromised, and there wasn’t damn else they could do but hide in the cellar blackness and try to talk the timid girl who brought the food to them into taking a message to Ostlund, assuming he was still alive and hadn’t sought other cover.
Gulligan, like an old hound, had caught the whiff of death. In the darkness his mind wandered, and he talked on and on. Gulligan was a sour old hulk, an Irish murderer, a lifelong saboteur and conspirator, just the sort of malignant riffraff they sent on missions like that one. They never sent their clean young men to assassinate civilians.
Gulligan had muttered away in the darkness, talking of death. The wounds and the whisky and the women had not killed him, but they had readied him.
It seemed odd to Williamson that after all the years Gulligan’s voice should come so clearly into his mind. “I don’t know how they summon all the others, Billy boy, but for the ones like you and me, for us they send one of the straw witches. Now not that I mean to be telling you they’re made of straw, lad. It’s a habit they have, known to my father’s father and way back to before the Romans built their walls of stone. On the nights when the moon rises full and yellow they gather where there’s a black pool, and quaggy ground so no fool can approach them. You can hear them on a still night, making their little singsongs of laughter, sitting with their pale beautiful feet in the black water, all of them with silver needles knitting straw in the moonlight, fashioning it into wee gallows ropes and dainty shrouds.”
“For God’s sake shut up, Gulligan!”
“No, they’re not of straw. Not at all. They are the fairest you could find in a day’s journey, lad. Dark-haired lassies with skin satin fine, eyes of a tilt, full of dark secrets and half laughter. Colleens for the taking, lad, all heats and softness under a black dress, and pale arms bare in the moonlight.
“When yours comes for you, lad, you won’t be thinking she’s a straw witch. No, you’ll have your mind on but one thing, and she will take your hand in hers and be in such a sweet hurry to take you to a private place. But when you reach to her, her thighs will be as smoke, her breasts no more than the wind passing, and it is only her lips you will find, with a snow taste to them, cold as pebbled snow, and with a quick and clever suck she takes your wind away and your murderer’s soul.”
“Shut up, Gulligan.”
“Now don’t I know as certain as my name it was a straw witch came for McClure and for Donovan? Leech and Fitzroy and McGuire? And more beyond remembering. And one will come for me because that is the way it has always been for us and always will be.”
But no straw witch had come for the old man. Gulligan had taken sick in the dampness and burned with fever. When he began to rave and call out, Williamson had felt for the socket at the base of the skull and done it quickly. Still, he kept remembering the sound of those last words, “Darlin’, darlin’.”
He had left the cellar three nights later, holding that same knife against the back of the plump, terrified girl until he was out on the streets and clear. And then his luck had been good. Those days had been simpler. An official pardon and the occasional medal. In those days everyone was agreed on the identity of the enemy. Now it was all a confusion, and easiest to stop thinking about the right of it or the wrong of it, and do what was paid for, do it neatly and professionally.
Memories of Gulligan could not spoil this present mission. The fee was high. Two blunderers had made a try at the assignment and failed to kill. So now the man was hard to reach. This time they were in no hurry to have it done. They wanted to be certain. The target was an ambassador. As with so many others, this was assassination for political advantage.
Williamson had been moved into the area and provided with a job and false identity. The ambassador’s big country house was floodlighted at night. There was an electronic intercept system and guards around the clock. When the ambassador left the house, it was in a limousine with bulletproof glass, and the automatic garage doors did not open until he was in the car.
It took Williamson a month to find a way to do it. He found a safe night place from where he could watch with the powerful binoculars. He saw that the routine with the house dog was what made it all possible.
At first he thought it might be possible to do it with a rifle when the ambassador let the dog out. But the distance was too far. It was a night shot and too chancy, and the man had been scared into the habit of caution. He would open the front door at some time between ten and eleven each night, just wide enough to let the dog out. It was a big red setter. About fifteen minutes later he would open the door and whistle for the dog.
The answer was, of course, the dog itself. His best place was a little over two hundred yards from the house, on a wooded ridge. Fifty yards behind him, just off a small suburban highway, was a good place for the car.
The dog ranged well in the night, but even so, Williamson had to wait many nights before it came close enough for him to risk whistling to it. It barked, came closer, whined softly as it smelled the liver. He had cut it into small chunks. The dog was wary. He talked to it steadily in a low tone.
After a week it was in the habit of coming to that spot, with woof of greeting, to eat the fresh meat, have its ears scratched, listen to the friendly voice in the night. Williamson brought along a pencil flash and, shielding it with his body, got a good look at the collar the dog wore, heavy and half buried in the silky red hair. Two days later he had found a collar sufficiently like the one the dog wore
Fortunately the animal was obedient. When he heard the whistle, he would lift his head, then turn and lope back toward the house. He would go directly to the door and be admitted, and it would close. Williamson began bringing a stopwatch. The best time from his accustomed spot was thirty-three seconds. The slowest time was forty seconds. The median time seemed to be about thirty-six seconds. When he was certain that it could be done that way, he made his contact and told what was needed. He stressed the fact that the timer had to be extremely accurate, and that the entire pack—timer and explosive—could not weigh over twelve ounces.
When it was delivered, he found that the total weight was almost fifteen ounces, but he decided that would do.
Sweating slightly, he disengaged the timing device and tested it for accuracy. Between forty and fifty seconds it was accurate to within two seconds. He finally decided that he would set it at forty-four seconds. The additional weight might bother the dog. Once inside the door, it would very probably give its master extravagant greetings and expect to be petted. It would not really matter whether or not the man was bending over it. If he was within six feet of the dog, he would die. If he was within ten feet of the dog, he would probably die.
He reassembled the packet, set it
for forty-four seconds, and affixed it to the collar he had purchased. A small thumb switch would activate it, and it made no sound to bother the dog.
They wanted to know when it would happen so that they could take maximum advantage of the incident. He gave them a date that would provide three more nights of test. On those three nights he removed the dog’s collar and replaced it. And, being thorough, he waited until the dog heard the whistle, pressed the imaginary switch, and watched it hurry off toward the white brilliance of the house.
On the target night he was in position at nine o’clock, with the lethal collar and the bits of meat on waxed paper laid out. He waited with all the endless patience he had learned.
At twenty of eleven the dog was let out of the house. He saw it come prancing through the brightness. He knew it would stop briefly among the trees and then head out to the familiar place. As the dog gulped the liver, he removed its collar and put the other one on.
The dog twisted and whined at the unfamiliar weight. He had to keep it close by. He took out the second packet of liver and fed it a bit at a time. The dog pranced and woofed. This was a new game.
Williamson was ready for the whistle. When it came, he reached quickly, found the switch, and activated it. The dog started toward the house. Williamson had decided that the roads might be blocked very quickly, and it would be better to deny himself the satisfaction of seeing the white front door blown outward.
So before the red dog had gone twenty feet, he jumped up and began to go swiftly down the slope. He turned and looked back and saw the dog standing in the moonlight, looking back at him, its head cocked quizzically.
“Go home!” he said. “Go home, dog!”
He started down the slope and saw it come after him. This, too, was a new game with the new friend. Now he knew the dog could not make the house in time, so he began to run. He tripped on the slope, fell and rolled, and scrambled up. He ran down to the road and began to race along the shoulder toward his car. He suddenly heard, to his horror, an excited woof close at his heels, and then the sleek hard shoulder of the dog nudged against his leg as he ran, almost tripping him. He looked down and saw the delighted dog running easily along with him, grinning up at him in the moonlight.
End of the Tiger Page 13