One of Us Is Wrong

by Samuel Holt

  “For both of us,’’ I told him. “Ross, there’s a difference between being overly imaginative and being stupid.”

  “Not always.” His shirt, as usual, was open almost to the waist, showing tanned skin, gray hair, and gold chains. Fingering the chains, he came down the table, sat to my right, and said, “Sam, I’ve talked with the people. We understand each other now.”

  “You probably thought you understood them yesterday.”

  “They panicked, Sam,” he said, demonstrating a goodly amount of panic himself. “We had a deal, everything was going along fine, they thought they had total security. See, I never mentioned showing you the tape, telling you the story.”

  “The truth will out,” I suggested.

  “God, I hope not. Anyway, the point is, when you called the other day, you started talking about the tape—”

  “They were listening.”

  “Well, sure,” he said. “That’s part of the deal; they monitor the calls. They’re involved in a very tricky operation, Sam, you just don’t know.”

  “I want to know.”

  “Yeah, I was afraid of that.” He bit his lips, drummed his fingers on the table, watched himself drum, then sighed and shook his head and showed me a face full of furrowed brow. “I can guarantee, Sam,” he said, “that you aren’t in any more danger. You talked to Doreen, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So you know I can make it stick. I’m not their prisoner, Sam, we’ve got an arrangement, a deal, and they need me.”

  “How long?”

  “All the way through to the finish. Which is gonna be in just about a week from now. And the thing is, I told them to lay off Doreen and they laid off. Am I right?”

  “So far.”

  “So now I told them to lay off you," Ross told me, electric with sincerity. “And they will. I gave them the whole story, how I showed you the tape and you gave me advice and all, and how you wouldn’t go talk to the law because you’re my friend, and all the rest of it. They bought it, Sam, they honest to God did.”

  “Tell me what’s going on,” I said.

  “Aw, come on.” He fidgeted in his chair, rapping his knuckles now on the tabletop. “Don’t lean on me, Sam, okay? Accept it, they made a mistake going after you like that, and now they know it, and it won’t happen again. You want me to pay for the Volvo?”

  I stared at him. “Pay for the Volvo? Ross, have you lost your marbles? You’re playing around with killers, and you want to stay with them.”

  “It’s almost over.” Ross reached out and placed a trembling hand on my forearm. “Just wait for it, all right? Just trust me a little bit longer; I’ll tell you the whole story when it’s done.”

  A horrible suspicion crossed my mind as I looked at his straining face, and I said, “Ross, for God’s sake. Do you see a project in this?”

  His eyes slid away from mine. He said unconvincingly, “Who could think about work at a time like this?”

  “You actually do,” I said. “What is it you see, a mo vie-of-the-week? ”

  That brought him back, with a sudden expression of scorn on his face. “Television? You think all I know is television?”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  He considered, his hand still vibrating on my forearm like an electric eel. “Okay,” he said, and lowered his voice. “Sam, this is big, this is very big. This is foreign governments, this is— What this is, it’s a book.”

  “A book.”

  ‘‘A nonfiction book, from the inside of the whole experience.” His eyes shone now with visions of sugarplums and glittering prizes, panic all but forgotten. “A mammoth best seller,” he said. ‘‘Sam, it can’t miss.” ‘‘If you’re still around to write it.”

  ‘‘Oh, I will be,” he said with total conviction. ‘‘I know how to deal with these clowns, Sam, I’m in that house like a lion tamer in the cage. It’s tricky as hell, you don’t have to tell me that, but I’m doing it.” ‘‘What’s the story, Ross? What are they up to?”

  He withdrew from me; hand off arm, face closing up, body moving back against the chair, fingers touching the chains on his chest. ‘‘Don’t ask me that, Sam,” he said.

  I lifted my left hand from the piece of paper and rested it on the phone. ‘‘Somebody’s going to ask you,” I told him. “Either me, or a deputy sheriff named Ken Donaldson.”

  He blinked, he blinked, he blinked. The chains clattered quietly in his fingers. The yellow windowless room in the fluorescent lighting seemed to grow steadily smaller. At last Ross sighed, and shook his head, and said, “I can tell you part, okay? Enough to get the idea. Okay?”

  “Tell.”

  “What this is,” he said, pausing to lick his lips, tap the table, play with his chains, glance toward the door, “this is a government, okay? Middle East, all right? There’s a person, there’s a very important person, you could call world-famous— Not an American, I promise you that, okay?”

  “Tell,” I insisted.

  “I’m telling, I am. This government, they want this person, for like a show trial, you know the kind of thing? So they can never get to him, there’s always this extreme security around him.”

  “And you’ve invited him to dinner? Where do you connect with this, Ross?”

  “He’s going to be in a place, this person,” Ross said. “There’s a specific place he’s going to be, a specific time, and from my property is absolutely the only way anybody could possibly get through the security. See, the land, you know, the land and then the other land.”

  “Next door, or behind you, or something.”

  “That’s right. So when the person is there, they can go in and grab him, come back out through my place, take off. From there they get him out of the country and however they do it, I’m done; it’s all over for me. They just need to be in my house a little while, setting up, getting everything ready for when they go in. And they need me to keep a normal front, you know? A regular appearance, so there’s nothing wrong on this land that’s right by the other land.”

  “And in order to convince you to cooperate in a kidnapping,” I said, “they murdered three people.”

  He blinked at me, at a loss. “What do you mean?”

  “Delia, to begin with.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, impatiently brushing that aside, clearly not liking to be reminded. “They had to have a real good hook in me, didn’t they? And do you think I cry a lot over Delia?”

  “They killed her. They didn’t know her, or dislike her, or have anything to do with her at all. They killed a human being just so they could get a handle on you. And you want to be their lion tamer.”

  “I am their lion tamer! Jesus, Sam, I’ve been making it work, everything was fine, if you hadn’t called and started talking about tapes on the goddamn pho—’ ’ But then he stopped abruptly, and shook his head, expressing irritation at himself. “No, forget that. Now I’m acting as though it’s your fault. All right, these are very tough people, they’re from the army and the secret police, you know, in that country, and they aren’t exactly Boy Scouts.”

  “They’re exactly murderers.”

  “And kidnappers, don’t forget,” he said. “And I’ll tell you the truth, I haven’t yet seen one of them phone home to his mother. But I can handle them, Sam, and it’s just one more week, and I promise nobody’s gunning for you anymore.” He managed a shaky grin. “The fact is,” he said, “now they realize you’re not just some schmuck, you know? You’re not that easy to kill.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So they know you’re tough, and they have my guarantee you’ll keep quiet until they’re finished, and they need my cooperation, and they know if they took another shot at you and missed again, you’d have entire armies of cops swarming all over my place. So you’re out of it; absolutely, completely, and totally out of it.”

  “Ross,” I said, “maybe you have enough for the book now.”

  He stared at me. “What book? What have they done? A m
urder in the local papers, three days and it’s over. When these guys make their move, it’s going to be front page. Everywhere. Around the whole world they are going to make headlines, and those headlines are going to sell my book. ’ ’

  I sat back, trying to understand and believe this idiot. “Ross,” I said, “you are a certifiable lunatic.”

  “Granted,” he said. “But I know a commercial property when I see one, and I am sitting on one. And whether or not I am certifiable, it would take a close blood relative to certify me. You’re a good friend, Sam, I came to you with this problem in the first place because I like you and trust you and I know you’re a good friend. But you don’t have the right to pull the plug on me on this thing.”

  “I know about a murder,” I said. “Legally, I have to report it to the police.”

  “You’ve known about it since November,” he pointed out. “You didn’t report then, you don’t have to report now. Nothing’s changed. There was a little mistake, an error in judgment—’ ’

  “Jesus Christ, Ross!”

  “That’s what it was And it’s over, it’s over, it’s over! What do you want from me?” Then, struck by a sudden thought, he leaned closer and said, “Listen, how about this? I’ll phone you every day. Twice a day if you want. Let you know how things are going, everything’s all right. I don’t phone you, that’s when you bring in the cavalry.”

  “You’re out of that house now,” I told him. “I’d like you to stay out of it, stay away from it, let the law go in there and clean them out.”

  “And the book?”

  “Oh, come on, Ross, you want it published posthumously?”

  “Depends on the advance,” he said, then shook his head and his right hand, saying, “Sorry, no, bad joke. All I can say is, I’ve told you everything I can, I’ll make constant phone calls to you if you want, I guarantee you’re not in any danger, and all I ask is you don’t bring in the law just yet. Please, Sam. No cops, not before they make their move.”

  How could I agree to such a thing? It was completely crazy, wildly dangerous, and probably illegal. Ross clutched my arm, bent forward, staring at me, straining with every pore to force me to go along with his conviction.

  But how could I? These people had already murdered three times. They had done their best to murder me. They were blackmailing Ross, planning to kidnap some world figure, and three of them had casually raped Doreen en passant. How could I just walk away from it, think about something else?

  “Listen, Ross,” I said. “I can understand the way you’re thinking now, I see you’re all full of this book idea, but these people aren’t research. They’re alive, and they’re mean, and they’ll kill you like blowing their nose.”

  “No,” he said. “They need me, and I understand them. Sam, for Christ’s sake, you always told me I was a good writer, you liked the scripts I did on PACKARD, you thought they—”

  “What has that got to do with anything? This isn’t PACKARD!”

  “This is people.” His palms were pressed flat on the tabletop, he was leaning toward me over them like a gymnast, as brittle as an ice sculpture in his intensity. “Sam,” he said, “you’ve written stories, what the hell do you think a story is? Is it just ‘and then, and then, and then’? That’s for the bricklayers! Stories are people, who they are and what they’re doing and what they’ll do next. If I’m any damn good at what I do, it’s because I know the tools of my trade, and the tools of my trade are people.”

  “Oh, come on, Ross, how can—”

  He made an abrupt hurling motion, pointing up and away to his right with a trembling rigid arm, as though aiming at some castle on the hill. “Those are people up there, Sam,” he said, “and I know them, and I’ve been tiptoeing through them like Tippi Hedren in The Birds, and if you don’t go making some fucking loud noise, I’ll be all right!”

  “Ross, this doesn’t make any—

  “Let me tell you something,” he said. The pointing finger came around to vibrate in my direction. “You blow the whistle here, I’ll tell you what happens next. I’m out, you said so yourself, but Doreen is still in. If I don’t come back, the very first thing they do is turn Doreen into cold cuts, and I am not kidding.”

  “The police could—”

  “Bring the mayo. There’s no way to stop it, Sam. There’s no way to stop them packing that girl into a suitcase and leaving. I don’t know where they’ll go. You don’t know where they’ll go. But they can always find us, fella, and don’t you forget it. And they’ll still work out some way to do what they want to do. So what will you accomplish, except to kill three people, including yourself?”

  “And your book.”

  “You’re goddamn right, and my book!” he yelled. “I’m going through fucking hell in that house, and I want my reward at the end of it!”

  “A bullet in the back of the head.”

  “That’s up to me, Sam,” he said. “That’s my choice.” How could I leave it to Ross’s judgment when he’d spent his entire life proving he had no judgment? How could I trust him to really understand what was going on in his house?

  He leaned farther and farther forward, his face straining toward me, eyes trying to burn inside my head and rewire what they found there. “Sam, Sam,” he said, half-whispering. “I’ll never get a shot like this again.” If I were to call the deputies, could Ross’s friends be gone before they arrived? Probably. Would they do something atrocious to Doreen in revenge? Absolutely. Would they go to ground somewhere unknown and scheme some other way to pull their kidnapping? Of course.

  If I did nothing, at least Doreen and Ross were safe for the moment, and we knew where to find those people. If I did nothing, Ross himself might finally get scared enough of the situation to come out and give the full cooperation that would be necessary; the name of the country behind this, the place where the attack was supposed to happen, the name of the intended victim. At this moment, if I called the deputies, Ross would clam up solid.

  I sighed. I folded the piece of paper and put it in my pocket. Ross sat back, trembling, grinning from ear to ear, letting out long-held breath. “It’ll be all right, Sam,” he said.

  It was already all wrong, and I knew it. “I could change my mind at any second,” I said.

  “You won’t have to, Sam,” he promised me. “From here on, from here on, it’s a coast, all the way.”

  19

  The exterior of the limousine was silver, with black windows and the license plate SSTAR 23, its owner (and the chauffeur’s employer) being Star Car Service, with whom CNA has an annual contract. The interior was an egg carton for Faberge eggs, each cup (or seat) lined with thick silvery blue plush, the floor and most other surfaces covered with hairy shag carpeting in the same color, so that riding in it was like being in a science fiction movie’s idea of a symbolic womb.

  There were four low roomy seats in the passenger area, two facing forward at the two facing back. The tiny refrigerator between the forward-facing seats was filled with splits of many different liquids, while the small TV screen between the rear-facing seats was dead black when not in use. The chauffeur’s—I nearly said “pilot’s”—compartment could be closed away by electrically raising either a clear glass or a black plastic partition.

  Our arrangement in the limo lent itself to a discreet form of psychological pressure. I was in the right rear seat, left forearm atop the refrigerator, while the other two sat facing me, flanking the TV’s square black doorway. Danny was directly opposite, demonstrating his respect by giving me lots and lots of legroom, his own legs twisted out of the way as though to say that mere producers don’t need such things. The partitions between us and the chauffeur were left down, the space open, because, of course, none of us had anything to hide.

  We had boarded this air-conditioned vehicle in the cool shadowed parking level of Zack’s building, where it had been waiting for us near the elevators, and then we went out to the traffic and the bright day, muted by the sheets of black on s
ide and rear windows. As we drove along, Danny talked and Zack talked and I tried to listen, but after my conversation with Ross—and particularly after what he had browbeat me into agreeing to—it wasn’t easy. My eyes kept straying to the surrounding traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard and then on the San Diego Freeway, where no swarthy men peeled out of the jumble in Chevy Impalas.

  Belatedly, it had occurred to me that I hadn’t managed to tell Ross about the deaths of the actor and the makeup man. I’d started to, I’d said there’d been three murders, but then we’d been sidetracked by the outrageousness of his intentions and I’d never gotten back to it again. Would it have made any difference? Probably not. Ross, whose overdeveloped sense of drama had led him into this mess in the first place, could see nothing now but the drama—and the success—of the book he was going to write.

  Why had I let him talk me into it? Was it because all he was asking me, as all I was asking Zack, was to be permitted to work? At some point in the discussion with Ross it had seemed to me that I didn’t have the right somehow to keep him from his career, as though the job were more important than the life, as though threats to the life were irrelevant if the job could get done; like the German director Werner Herzog risking himself and his crew in South American jungles to get a movie made. Was all that as stupid as I now thought it? Did my identification with Ross’s plight as a worker get in the way of my common sense? Should I reneg on our agreement?

  “Of course,” Zack was saying, “Sam will have a clearer picture of all this once he reads the scripts.”

  “Oh, sure, sure.” Smiling, Danny Silvermine looked at me and massaged his knees. “I hope you won’t mind the liberties I took,” he said. “Just to fit it on the stage, you know. But the heart of the material was already there, and I left that alone. It’s not often you meet an actor who’s a real natural writer too.”

  “It didn’t feel natural,” I told him. The world seen through the tinted glass beside me was blue-tinged, watery, but beyond Danny’s compact head, beyond the dispassionate chauffeur and out through the windshield, the day was bright and washed-out and glaring, like an overexposed print. Lying in submarine shadow on the empty fourth seat beside me, beyond the refrigerator, were the two slender scripts, both in baby-blue folders imprinted in gold. The Man Who Was Overboard was on top. Remembering my earlier curiosity as to which was the other script Silvermine had thought adaptable, I reached over to pick them up, shuffled the bottom one onto the top, and read Salute the Devil. Oh, the military school. But how could that work onstage?