Foxcatcher

by William H Hallahan

  McCall pulled the silver bullet from his pocket and stared at it. A corny little trick from childhood. This time it didn’t work.

  He felt spent. He was supposed to pick up his son and take him for a weekend sail on the Chesapeake. But his body was so sore that he was not sure he could safely drive home, let alone raise the sails and manipulate the sheets of his yacht.

  Today should have been his death day. Only a groping error had saved him from that terrible fall down, down, down in pitch darkness. He could never again accept the gift of each future minute of life as casually as he had accepted the previous ones. How could he insouciantly go for a weekend sail? More to the point, how could he have casually planned the murders of three arms merchants?

  Most wondrous of all, with his new awe of death, how could he continue to plan the three murders? For he certainly intended to.

  McCall dreaded the onset of nightfall and sleep. And nightmares. He wondered what the rest of his life would be like.

  Rooley Attashah arrived that evening at JFK Airport on Long Island. Wearing an ill-fitting wig and equipped with a forged Turkish passport, he passed through customs unnoticed.

  An hour later he was registered at a residential hotel in midtown Manhattan. He stood at a window and looked out over Manhattan and the Hudson River at the sunset of a very hot day. Somewhere between his hotel and the Pacific Coast three thousand miles to the west was the matériel his country needed.

  He knew exactly how he would get it.

  Black-and-blue, stiff, and still haunted by the memory of the stairwell, McCall took his son sailing on the Chesapeake. The heat wave persisted and the winds on the water were flaccid, but the boy enjoyed himself enormously and the light airs required very little sail-hoisting or other movement. So McCall slouched in the cockpit of his sailboat and rested his stiff muscles and various pains.

  Mostly he spent the weekend brooding about Wainwright.

  McCall knew that Wainwright had gotten away from him. If he was going to change that man’s mind, he needed to do two things quickly.

  First, he had to make the three arms dealers real to Wainwright. The three had to be men with characteristics and reputations and histories and predictable futures. And he had to make Wainwright hate them.

  Second, since Wainwright didn’t accept Operation Zealot’s assessment of the Iranian danger, McCall had to find another assessment that Wainwright would accept—one that would scare the hell out of him. It had to be a sobering, valid, historical assessment. So he turned to an historian.

  The following Monday, McCall went to see a man who was known to his peers by the sobriquet of Cassandra. And he brought a votive offering: food.

  Cassandra was housed in one of the State Department’s oldest office buildings in Washington, down in a subterranean labyrinth—a hodgepodge of secretaries’ cubicles, executive offices, mail rooms, closets, winking computers, file areas, and twisting hallways that led nowhere. It was like walking through the grid of a crossword puzzle.

  People were talking on phones, rattling typewriters, wrapping packages for waiting messengers, huddling in hallway conversations, and hastily disappearing down corridors. Everything was done with murmuring voices and a sense of quickstep urgency. The flavor was exactly that of a coronary unit in an emergency ward: patient fibrillating, heartbeat below 20/minute, blood sludging, the doctor inserting the long needle of a transthoracic catheter right through the chest wall, straight into the heart to pump in 20 cc of a lovely mauve-colored heart medicine. Quick, quick, quick.

  Many times over the years McCall had visited this section of the State Department—which always wore its air of crisis—yet he still wasn’t sure what all those people were doing. Indeed, if pressed he could not have told you with any fullness what Cassandra did.

  Cassandra’s real name was Harry Hollis, and officially he was a State Department research officer. He had a Ph.D. in Middle East history and culture, and his specialty was Middle East military affairs. But he was involved in much more than that.

  Bearing his box of deli sandwiches and coffee, and limping slightly, McCall followed the maze along a memorized route. It was like dialing the combination to a safe: two turns to the left, a turn to the right, twist, pause, where the hell is it?, turn again, and finally a sign looming over a doorway: ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER HERE.

  McCall stood in the doorway with a knowing smile. “How about just a pinch less despair today, Harry?”

  “You look a sight,” Hollis said. “Where’d you get the shiner? He pushed his eyeglasses up onto his forehead and sat back from his computer screen. “Don’t tell me. Wherever you got it, you deserve it.”

  “I was taking a flying lesson,” McCall said. He put the cardboard box of food on the computer table.

  “Bless my soul, Bobby. Are those sandwiches from the one and only Belly Deli?”

  “They are.”

  “Praise the Lord. And might one of them be a corned beef on Jewish rye with coleslaw and Russian dressing?”

  “The very same,” McCall said.

  “That’s what I call a very proper bribe.”

  “It is.”

  Hollis looked down at his own huge girth, wiped a pudgy hand over his fleshy face. “I don’t need it. But—I’ll take it.” He unwrapped a sandwich, took a large bite from it, and sighed as the juice of the coleslaw flowed down the back of his hand. “I’d kill for one of these any day—and I’m talking about shooting my own mother in Garfinckel’s window. Eat, eat.”

  McCall tried to eat. But the memory of the stairwell was still racing around the edges of his mind and he chewed without pleasure.

  “Deli food always reminds me of the uncertain positioning of moral values in our society,” Hollis began.

  McCall had heard this before. Food made Hollis loquacious. “You’re talking about relativism,” McCall declared flatly.

  Hollis shook his head. “I’m talking about life’s salami tactics. Life steals your soul a slice at a time until it’s all gone. Then the gods abandon you.”

  McCall’s ears were shut. As he chewed mechanically, he heard the Masked Tumbler’s fading cry down the stairwell. Down. Down. Down. McCall heard it with unending horror.

  While the man talked, McCall’s eyes roved over Cassandra’s office. It had grown worse since his last visit, a chronicler’s nightmare: Piled in tilting stacks on tables and chairs and spilled across various floor areas were columns of computer print-outs, flanked and supported or endangered by pile upon pile of odd-size books with such titles as Strategies and Tactics: The Arab Way of War; Egyptian Idioms; On the Causes of War and the Madness of Man; Cairo, 1942; an eight-volume set of Benoit’s History of the Arab; a copy of the third volume of The Mid-East Year Book 1963; an outdated calendar in English and Arabic taped to the wall with the bottom right corner half furled; a bust of the historian Gibbon, set upon a radio; abandoned take-out coffee containers; soda bottles; two blue-and-gold boxes of Grandma’s Kountry Kookies—contents looted; three rifled jumbo-size potato chip and pretzel cans; a cavalry saber wrapped in an unidentifiable black-and-red pennant peeking out from under two unmarked brown cardboard cartons.

  On the wall next to the calendar was a poster: CANABIS. A STUDENT’S GUIDE. EVERYTHING YOU SHOULD—AND DON’T WANT TO—KNOW ABOUT MARIJUANA. Below the headline were two columns of staggered type outlining a full-color photograph of the plant itself.

  Piles of Foreign Affairs magazine, monographs, reports in clear plastic covers, manila file folders, coffee cups, shoes, a dried-out half lemon, neckties, a dilapidated umbrella—all formed an uprising, an outbreak, an insurrection of undisciplined parts.

  On the open office door was taped a sign: DO NOT CLEAN THIS ROOM ON PAIN OF DEATH.

  Someone had written in ballpoint pen below it: Thank God.

  Hollis had a considerable reputation among Washington’s prognosticators, futurists, think-tank people, and various what-if forecasters—those identified as the Mirror Mirror on the Wall crowd
. He was labeled the Cassandra of the State Department because he was said to be constructing a computer model of all of man’s wars in history and their causes. Rumor had it that he had already finished it and had now predicted the time and outcome of the ultimate war between East and West.

  “They say your model’s finished,” McCall said.

  “I neither confirm nor deny, Bobby, my son.” Hollis emitted his famous mocking laugh. “These idiots are so afraid of my model they are now announcing that history is no longer repeating itself. We’ve run off the charts and into unknown territory, they say. The last time I heard that kind of talk it helped get us into the Vietnam War, and oh boy, did history repeat itself then.”

  He took another bite of the sandwich and bolted it. “The trouble with the American people is they despise the past and believe they are somehow exempt from history. They suffer from the arrogance that precedes a great fall. Hubris is the correct term.” He hooted his mocking laugh again, making his large body tremble.

  “Listen.” He shook his sandwich at McCall. “You don’t have to make a computer model of all of man’s wars to predict the future. Man’s history hasn’t stopped repeating itself. Why? Because man’s nature hasn’t changed. Even if he gets his hairy little ass to the nethermost galaxy in the universe, he will find his own nature waiting there for him. And his same brainless, selfish, incompetent little history will continue to repeat itself there until the end.”

  McCall grinned. “It’s that optimism that has made you famous.” He pointed at the screen. “Who’s winning?”

  “Not the human race, I can tell you.” Harry Hollis chuckled. “I’m doing a paper on Assurbanipal for our office in Turkey—640 B.c. Change this ancient idiot’s name to our esteemed President’s and it reads like today’s newspaper. The same plot, the same characters as today: the bird-brained congressman, the corrupter in the Senate, the greedy Secretary, the blindly arrogant general.” He tapped the glass face of the screen. “They’re all here and they’re all working to bring disaster on themselves. In ancient Assyria and modern Washington. It’s the same old script.” He reached for another corned beef sandwich. “I’m very lucky I found the computer. You know why?”

  McCall shook his head.

  “Because,” Hollis said, “I’m a born klutz. Can’t hold a bat, too fat to run, too flat-footed to soldier. I walk into furniture, drop things and fall off curbs. Ergo, I stayed home to be near the cook and filled in the time with reading. See? I have a gift for failure. Even my father could see that. And that freed me from enterprise. There was no question I had no career. Can you picture a brain surgeon with these klutzy hands? So my father paid for my Ph.D. in hopes I might thereby feed myself—a large responsibility, as you can see.” He wheezed with muted laughter. “My gift for failure thereby left me free to spend my life reading and speculating on the madness and the magnificence of man. Being a klutz has its advantages. And when klutz meets computer, the whole town quakes with fear.” He laughed his whistling, wheezy laugh again. “It’s called Cassandra’s Revenge.” He held out his hand. “What have you got?”

  “Listen, Harry, I have something here—”

  “I know. I know. I never saw this paper, I never heard of you, and this meeting never took place.” Hollis fitted his eyeglasses down over his eyes and thumbed through McCall’s report. He absorbed it with great speed, running an index finger down the center of each page.

  He looked up at last. “Three layers down I detect the fine hand of Pentagon Intelligence in this.”

  “You think it’s true?”

  “Is what true?”

  “That Iran can cause an East-West war?”

  “Do you want Iran to cause an East-West war? Okay. I can accommodate you. You want me to? All right. Here’s a scenario. I did one on this subject a couple of years ago.”

  “I remember. Scared the hell out of everyone.”

  “Okay. Here’s the way it plays: The biggest danger of war right now is this. There’s a faction in the Kremlin that feels Russia is falling below parity with the U.S.—particularly in sophisticated technology. That makes them vulnerable, and vulnerability makes them nervous. So it’s panic time in Moscow. See what I’m saying? Iran is like a knife tucked up against Russia’s soft underbelly. If Iran gets that surveillance equipment operating, it can be used against not only the Arab countries and Israel, but against Russia too. Snooping against a paranoid nation can tip the balance in Moscow’s eyes, and voilà! We’re off to the races.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  Hollis snorted. “Believe? Listen. Moscow’s got problems that are so bad even Washington’s worried. Their system mitigates against them ever coming up with a high-technology capability—like our Silicon Valley. So they’re having a tough time keeping up with us in computerized warfare. Furthermore, each year the Russian minority is becoming smaller in a sea of other ethnic groups. The place is crawling with alcoholism, corruption, industrial incompetence. Agriculture keeps laying eggs. Nobody gives a shit. The whole economy is rickety; it’s in constant trouble and the people are so dispirited they can’t even raise a decent revolt. They are falling behind the West and now the Third World nations are on the move. And on and on. You understand? What I’m saying is they may figure the only way to stay in the game is to hit us before we get too far ahead.”

  While he talked he pulled the hard disc from his computer disc drive and rooted through a file drawer of floppy discs. He shoved one in a disc drive and snapped it shut.

  “Trouble with you, Harry, is you’re a pessimist.”

  “No. No, I’m not. But the Russians are. And they’re getting more pessimistic every day.”

  Hollis watched the menu come up on his screen and tapped out a file number. “Here it is. Three years old. But it’s pretty good. This is my assessment of the Iranian surveillance equipment and its impact on the Mideast. In fact some of the stuff in your paper was lifted from mine. All this part in here is right out of this computer. Practically verbatim. See? The kicker here isn’t just Ivan’s goosey asshole, although that’s bad enough. Here’s an assessment of Israel’s reaction to Iranian surveillance. It could sabotage their military communications. See? Very dangerous. And here’s the Saudis. See? Very unhappy. Then there’s Egypt. She is not going to love Iranian eavesdropping. See? And more and more. The main problem is Iran is looking for anything that can make trouble. And that surveillance equipment is a dream come true. So I’d mark this all down in big red letters. D-A-N-G-E-R.”

  Harry Hollis took another half sandwich and bit off half of it. He chewed joyfully. “Dear God. You corrupter. I see you brought cinnamon buns.” He waved the decapitated sandwich at McCall. “Listen, Bobby lad. I can put this same bleeding assessment on anything in the world today. The truth is we are all inside this jerry can filled with gasoline, and any idiot including the Iranians can strike a match and immolate us all. Remember the sign over my door.”

  McCall said, “I’d like a copy of that report to show to a big fan of yours.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Wainwright. How about a copy of it?”

  “How about another sandwich?”

  “How about a nice piece of German apple cake?”

  “My God. You brought that too?” Hollis’s fat fingers rooted through the food box. “Jesus. Four of them.”

  Armed with Harry Hollis’s White Paper and other materials, McCall called Wainwright. Before he could do more than identify himself, Wainwright said, “The answer’s no. Forget it.” McCall said, “I have something to show you.”

  “It won’t do you any good.”

  “How about tonight around nine?”

  “Okay. But it won’t do you any good.”

  Wainwright lived in a compound of magnificent town houses in historic Alexandria, complete with a colonial gatehouse and a security force. His home was considered the chef d’oeuvre of that showplace.

  A houseman admitted McCall. He was enormous, with legthick arms f
illing the sleeves of his white jacket. As he led McCall to the study, they passed a dining room where a dozen people in formal dress were having a lively meal.

  Wainwright’s study was one of the most celebrated rooms in the house. It was done entirely in Federal-period fruitwood paneling, hand-carved in China, which had come from the Danforth mansion on Long Island and had been willed by Wainwright to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City; the museum had eagerly accepted it. Included in the will were a number of rare books and four priceless Windsor chairs.

  Wainwright sat with rolled-up shirtsleeves at a Duncan Phyfe desk, working on his stamp collection.

  “McCall’s magic lantern show,” he said with a smile when he saw the slide projector that McCall carried.

  McCall held up the projector plug. “Paid your electric bill this month, Mr. Chairman?” The houseman put the plug in an electric outlet.

  Wainwright looked at the two dozen slides in the carousel tray. “What are we going to see?”

  “The Who’s Who of International Arms Trading.”

  “Hmm.” Wainwright looked displeased. “Is this going to take long? I promised to have dessert with my wife’s dinner guests.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” McCall said. “It’s a background briefing on the arms dealers Attashah is most likely to approach. We don’t have much time to stop him.” McCall projected the first slide. It was a photograph of a man with a bull neck and a round pink face. McCall said, “Mr. Chairman, I’d like to introduce Peno Rus.”

  McCall let the man’s face remain on the screen for a few moments. Then he clicked to the next frame.

  Slide: photograph of a huge mansion, done in a white stucco Spanish style with orange roof tiles.

  McCall: “These are his modest digs on the Riviera. Beyond them at anchor you can see his yacht. No one knows how rich he is. But we do know what he sells. Arms. And for that purpose, he uses computerized direct-marketing techniques right from Madison Avenue. The key piece in his program is this glossy catalogue.”

  Series of slides shown ad lib: pages and spreads from the four-color catalogue.