One of Us Is Wrong

by Samuel Holt

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t.”

  “I have no idea, of course, what your contacts with Arab Moslems have been—”

  “Actually, none that I know of,” I said.

  He affected surprise. “None at all? Are you sure? For instance, there’s a great deal of Arab money in your American film business now.” And he gestured at the script of Salute the Devil in my seat pocket.

  Trying to imagine Danny Silvermine as a front for Arab money made me smile. “No,” I said. “So far as I know, this is the most extensive conversation I’ve ever had with an Arab.”

  “Well, well,” he said, seeming to relax a bit, “what a heavy responsibility I bear, representing a quarter of the world to you in my one person. I’m afraid I’ve been a bit too intense to make a completely good impression.”

  He had. “Not at all,” I told him.

  “In my position,’’ he said, “you must understand, I have dealings with these fanatics from time to time; they tend to dwell in my mind.’’

  “I can understand that,’’ I said.

  “I am Minister of Justice in Dharak,’’ he reminded me, “sworn to uphold our law. But these fanatics have no use for civilized law. They believe only in a cold and rigid law of their own devising, which they blame on God.’’

  “Hard to deal with.’’

  “They cannot be dealt with at all,” he said with great intensity. “They can only be guarded against, rooted out, isolated, defanged. Being a policeman in smalltown America is nothing like this, I assure you.”

  “I believe it,” I said, and then was glad to be interrupted by the stewardess wanting to open our tray tables in preparation for dinner. It made for a distraction that permitted me to keep from letting Tabari see that he’d made a mistake.

  Being a policeman in smalltown America. But that wasn’t PACKARD, a show, in any case, he claimed not to have seen. That could only be my own pre-acting job on the force in Mineola. This was not coincidence.

  This was something to do with Ross.

  22

  Had Tabari also noticed his mistake? Hard to tell. He didn’t at once pick up the thread of conversation, and in fact neither of us had anything to say during dinner. He ate some sort of vegetarian thing that looked mostly like a large scab, and I ordered, as I always do, the Chateaubriand, because that’s prepared on the plane and is likely to be a bit less awful than the other choices. Neither Tabari nor I had liquor, he asking for ginger ale and I club soda. He ate everything on his plate, including the roll and both crackers, while I just picked at my food, since I’d be eating a real dinner later on with Anita. Beyond his sharp-featured puffy-cheeked face the sky was already graying toward twilight, though it had only been one in the afternoon when we’d started. But we were flying away from the sun, losing three hours; it would be nine at night when we arrived in New York. A February night in New York; I shivered, thinking of it.

  But what I mostly thought about was Tabari. Who was he really? What game was he playing? And what should I do about it? He was important enough to have arranged to be put in the seat beside me and boarded before every other passenger; so was he actually who his card claimed him to be? And if so, what sort of principality or emirate was this Dharak? He had spoken passionately against what he called “outlaw nations,” but was that merely blowing smoke, the devil claiming to be an angel?

  If his approach had been more direct, I would probably have been far less suspicious. But he had come to me under a cover of lies. Still, thinking back over our conversation, I couldn’t figure out what it was he wanted. He hadn’t seemed to pump me at all, or even to be particularly interested in me. He’d given vent to some dubious political statements, that was about it.

  Should I brace him, tell him I knew this was no chance meeting? My instinct told me not to, that nothing would be gained that way. He’d simply deny it, of course, look at me as though I were crazy, ask me what I thought he was up to. And what would I say next, since I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was up to? Either I’d wind up telling him about Ross or I’d fade away into silence; and I was definitely not going to tell anybody about Ross.

  The only advantage I had, it seemed to me, was that possibly Tabari didn’t know he’d made that error. So, for the rest of the flight, I’d be polite and noncommittal, I’d chat with him and listen carefully to what he said, and try to figure out what he was up to.

  Except it didn’t work that way. Tabari had apparently lost all interest in conversation. When the meal was over—I had coffee, he had more ginger ale—he actually offered me a choice of the magazines he’d squirreled away (I chose The Atlantic) and went back to his Scientific American to read about insect larva after all.

  We had another hour before landing. Full night spread across the world outside the windows, I leafed through Salute the Devil once more and had another cup of coffee, and Tabari folded his hands and closed his eyes. The pilot announced that we were crossing over Allentown, Pennsylvania. The Fasten Seat Belt sign went on. The No Smoking sign went on. The pilot told us the time in New York—eight fifty-seven, Eastern Standard Time—and the weather—twenty-one degrees, cloudy, some chance of snow by morning. The plane juddered as the landing gear was lowered. The pilot told the stewardesses to take their seats. I decided to follow Tabari when he left the plane.

  23

  One of the many contrasts between my New York and Los Angeles lives is that in L.A. I have four cars—or did, until one of them became It in that game of tag—while in the East I have none. Usually in New York my own feet or a taxi will do, but for special occasions I have an account with a small limousine and car rental outfit on West Fifty-sixth Street. My usual driver is a heavy set white-haired Irishman named Ralph, and he it was who stood waiting beyond the revolving doors at the end of the long walk from the plane. I saw him, and nodded, and saw Tabari behind me reflected in the glass of the doors, carrying over his shoulder his black garment bag.

  I had made my good-byes brief—Tabari hadn’t suggested a later meeting, or a shared ride to the city, or any of the continuations I’d been expecting—and had made sure to get off the plane ahead of him, moving as quickly as possible among the other passengers. When I reached Ralph, therefore, Tabari was visible but was some distance back down the corridor, having been forced through the same channel as the rest of us. Ralph grinned at me, pointed at the attache case, and said, “Will that be it, then?”

  “Yes. Ralph, there’s a fellow behind me, probably just coming through the doors, about fifty, hard-faced, three-piece pinstripe suit, carrying a garment bag. See him?”

  “It’s the well-dressed thug you’d mean,” he said, looking over my shoulder.

  “That’s the one.” I moved toward the exit, and Ralph moved with me. “We’ll keep in front of him here, but then we’ll follow him. I want to know where he’s going.”

  Ralph grinned at me. “So Packard rides again, does he?”

  “Come on, Ralph,” I said. “Don’t make fun. And as we go outside, glance back and see if he’s gone off to get any checked luggage.”

  The automatic door opened, letting frigid air in and us out. Ralph hitched up his overcoat, head turning left and right to ease the collar. “No,” he said. “Your fella’s coming right along behind.”

  “Good. Brrrr! Where’s the car?”

  “Just to our left here.”

  I was in the casual jacket and slacks I’d worn for my meetings with Ross and Danny, and the pilot had not been wrong about the temperature. I strode at a swift but dignified pace across the pavement to the limo parked by the No Parking sign, and clambered in to cozy warmth, Ralph shutting the door behind me. This car was merely a stretch Cadillac with good legroom, a pair of jumpseats, and ordinary upholstery. Only the tiny refrigerator echoed SSTAR 23.

  As Ralph went around the rear of the limo to the driver’s door, Tabari came out of the terminal and paused. A slender young man in a cloth cap and gray overcoat approached him, carrying another coat over his ar
m. They greeted each other as master and servant, and then the young man took the garment bag, handing Tabari the coat. It was heavy, of black wool, with a black fur collar. From its pocket Tabari pulled a dark fur hat, shook it, and put it on. The young man, carrying the garment bag over his arm as he’d carried the coat, led him off to the right, and as he walked, Tabari took black leather gloves from the other pocket.

  Ralph got behind the wheel, shut the door, and nodded at Tabari and the other man. “That’ll be the fella from the maroon Sedan de Ville,’’ he said. “I noticed him before, with the diplomat plates.”

  “We follow him.”

  “No problem at all,” he assured me.

  The young man held open the rear door of a maroon Cadillac, and Tabari slid in. Ralph shifted into drive, and we eased forward. He said, “Want me to stay in front till we’re beyond the airport?”

  “No. It’s possible he’ll be going to another plane, or an airport hotel, or almost anywhere.”

  “Would I know who this fella is?”

  “No more than I would,” I told him. “I was preboarded, and he was already there, in the next seat. He pretended he’d never heard of me, pushed a conversation, and then let it slip that he knew I was an ex-cop.”

  “Planted there. National Enquirer, do you think?” Ralph was a constant reader of the Enquirer, and from time to time would bring me up-to-date on the rather rackety life I led in those pages.

  “Not this time, I don’t think,” I said. “I don’t know what it’s about at all, that’s why we’ll follow him.”

  The maroon Cadillac pulled away from the curb, and Ralph moved us out after it. Leaning forward, I could see the red, white, and blue New York State diplomatic corps plates: DPL and a set of three numbers. Unfortunately, snow and grime obscured all three numbers. Another coincidence?

  There was a stop sign where the feed from the airline building’s arrival area led into the main airport road. The car ahead stopped, its red brake lights gleaming. Ralph said, “We’ve had a good amount of snow, as you can see.”

  Dirty mounds of gray snow topped by a layer of black soot flanked the roadway. Again I remembered my last limo ride, through glaring sunlight, five hours before.

  The maroon Cadillac’s brake lights winked off, and the car moved smoothly out into a very light flow of traffic. Ralph pulled up to the stop sign, stopped, and a black Buick Riviera on the main road came to a halt directly in front of us, no more than a yard from our front bumper, blocking our exit. “Well, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Ralph said, and honked his horn.

  The Buick’s interior light went on. The driver, a bundled-up middle-aged man, was alone in there, studying a roadmap. Ralph honked again, and lowered his window to shout a few unfriendly comments into the cold night, and the man in the Buick just kept frowning at his roadmap. Cars behind us honked.

  It was only a minute, maybe a minute and a half, but it was enough. Tabari was gone. Then the man in the Buick looked up, saw us with complete astonishment, switched off his interior light, and drove on. He had ordinary New York State plates, gone too fast to be read.

  Ralph eased forward and gave me an ironic look in the rearview mirror. “Your friend didn’t want to be followed, did he?”

  “Apparently not.”

  A little farther on we saw the Buick turn left away from the airport exit, on a loop that would take him back deeper into JFK. We didn’t follow him. What was the point?

  24

  It was easy to avoid talking with Anita about Ross’s problems and my strange seatmate on the plane; I held up my end of the conversation instead with Danny Silvermine and the comic book lawsuit. I hadn’t told Anita last November about Ross, when he’d showed me the tape, and I saw nothing to be gained by opening that story now. In the first place, I was still ambivalent about my own part in it, and didn’t want to have to justify my continuing silence, my agreement not to go to the police. In the second place, Bly’s reaction when I’d finally told her had been enlightening; she hadn’t cared at all to know I’d kept a secret from her so successfully for so long, even though the secret had nothing directly to do with her. Maybe the rule is, if you’ve succeeded in keeping a secret, don’t spoil your record.

  There were still several tables of customers in Vitto Impero when I got there at quarter to ten, coming directly from JFK. Anita stayed at her post at the cash register and I sat by myself at the round corner table in the back where we’d had dinner with Brett Burgess the night his play opened. (It had closed again long since.) Marcie the waitress brought me a number of things Angelo the cook thought would restore me after my journey, and I washed it all down with San Pellegrino and Pinot Grigio, taking my time, because by my own body clock it was barely seven in the evening.

  When the last of the regular customers left, Anita came over to sit with me and help finish the wine. I told her then about Danny Silvermine, and she asked to see the scripts, which were in the attache case on the empty chair beside me. I handed them over and finished eating while she skimmed The Man Who Was Overboard. My meal and her reading were finished at the same time; Marcie took away the plates, I said no to coffee, and Anita said, “What’s the point?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “You already did this, right?” She tapped a sharp fingernail on the script’s blue cover. “I mean, you already wrote it, you already played it.”

  “That’s what I keep thinking,” I told her. “But on the other hand, it’s work, isn’t it? It’s doing something as opposed to doing nothing.”

  “So do something else.”

  “I’ve been trying to, honey.”

  “No, I mean with this guy Silverman.”

  “Mine, Silvermine. In what way, do something else?”

  “Write a play,” she said.

  I just looked at her. She finished her wine and said, “You want more vino?”

  “No. What do you mean, write a play? Write play?”

  “Whatever you want to appear in. Maybe another detective story, where you’re not Packard, but it’s still the same kind of form. Maybe you could be the murderer.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Write a ? I’m not a writer!”

  Another fingernail tap on the scripts. “You wrote these.”

  “For television!”

  “They’re still plays. Silvermine—is that really his name?—he just changed them over for the stage, that’s all. Dialogue, plot, characters, it’s all the same, and here’s two times you already did it.”

  “But—” I was stymied by this brand new way of looking at things. I said, “But that was just PACKARD, I already knew the setting and the characters and the whole thing. I had people to help me—”

  “People could help you,” she said. “What if you went to Whatsisname and said, ‘Look, I don’t want to do Packard anymore, but I’ll write you a brand new original play and star in it, and you can promote it as Sam Holt, the star of PACKARD.’ I mean, you’re saying the guy’s gonna pay peanuts anyway, it’s just a stunt for dinner theater—’ ’

  “Yeah, but—”

  “But,” she said, “why wouldn’t he say yes to a whole new original play on the cheap? You’ll let him have it for no advance or anything, the same deal as if he used these PACKARD scripts. In fact, he could help you; he’s good at this kind of thing. Do you like the guy?”

  “Well, actually, he makes my flesh crawl,” I said. “He’s one of those people where you can’t say exactly anything he’s done wrong, but he just tries too hard or something, and he comes over very creepy.”

  “So you wouldn’t want to collaborate.”

  “No.”

  She shrugged. “You could do it on your own. You did it before.”

  “But I don’t have a story, I don’t— I wouldn’t have the first idea how to write a play.”

  “You’d figure it out. What about that writer friend of yours?”

  Did she mean Bly? Neither of my lady friends makes much mention of the other. Warily, I said, �
�Who?”

  “The guy who did the scripts for your show, helped you—’ ’

  “Oh, Ross!” But now I was doubly wary. Did Anita know? How was that possible? “What about him?”

  No, Anita didn’t know. She said, “He could help you, show you the format, explain how it works. The same as he did on these,” tapping the scripts again.

  “I could ask him,” I said doubtfully, because who knew how much longer Ross would be around to ask anything of. And as I said that, I found myself wondering if Ross's story could be a play. The double on the videotape. Instant Replay, was that a title? Was there any way to show that on a stage? Who would I play? Maybe Ross himself.

  But that was awful, to turn a friend’s trouble into a story to advance your own career. Trying to turn my mind away from the idea, I said, “I’ll think about it, anyway. It just might be the solution.”

  Anita grinned. “Ask me anything,” she said.

  “Okay. What are you doing after dinner?”

  “Going to bed with you, I believe,” she told me. “Your place or mine?”

  “Well, we’re here.”

  “And your place is all shut up,” she pointed out. “Will you stay the night?”

  My meeting on the lawsuit wasn’t until ten in the morning, and my New York place was, as Anita had said, closed up. Robinson was still back in L.A. “Love to stay the night,” I said.

  As it turned out, that was a very lucky choice.

  25

  Anita owns that four-story-high corner building on Abingdon Square, facing the little park full of preschoolers by day and homeless drunks by night. The restaurant, Vitto Impero, takes up the ground floor, with two apartments on each floor above, Anita’s being in the rear one flight up, accessible either through the public hall and stairway or via the circular staircase up from the restaurant’s kitchen to her living room.