by Samuel Holt
Ignoring me, he went out and shut the door, and I heard the scratch of the key. All over again, locked in. I can’t go through it all twice, I thought.
But I shouldn’t have to. These were legitimate people, not terrorists; sooner or later they would connect me to the authorities. In the meantime they quite understandably wanted to keep me on ice, and all I should do at this point was, as the man had said, wait.
In a small and nearly empty windowless office. A small metal desk bore a telephone, a blotter, and empty In and Out trays. A wooden swivel chair behind it, a square metal wastebasket beside it, and a leatherette chair with wooden arms in front of it completed the furniture. When I opened the desk drawers, they were all empty. An office not in use at the moment, that’s all.
How long would I have to wait? Long enough to think about what had happened outside, certainly. I’d been walking along and all at once the earth had shrugged, knocking me down the way Sugar Ray is knocked down in the back of the station wagon when I make a sharp turn. I hadn’t heard anything—or I didn’t remember hearing anything—but what could that have been other than an explosion?
The dynamite in the tunnel. The mosque was still here, obviously, so they mustn’t have had the dynamite in the right position yet, but surely that was what had gone up, with who knows how many of the men of Barq Cyrenica trapped inside it by the van with which I’d corked the entrance.
Was I responsible? Was something I’d done with the van the cause, several minutes later, of the dynamite blowing up? That was an uncomfortable idea, and I was just settling down to study it, pacing back and forth in the small room, when the sound of the door being unlocked was followed by its opening, and the entrance of Hassan Tabari.
I stared at him. This was the last thing I’d expected. “By golly, you do get around!’’ I told him.
“So do you,’’ he said coldly. Two more men came in after him and shut the door. These were a very different type, obviously Americans, in slacks and sport coats, white shirts and modest ties. “These men,’’ Tabari said, gesturing to them, “are from your FBI. Perhaps now you will answer the question you wouldn’t answer when we talked on the plane.’’
I didn’t get it. “What question? I could never figure out what the hell you were up to. You didn’t ask any questions.’’
“I asked you what your relationship was with Arab groups,’’ he said. “Not in so many words, of course. But that was the question.’’
Thinking back to our conversation on the plane, I could see that he had in fact been fishing for an answer to that question, but of course at the time I’d had no relationship with Arab groups, at least none I knew about, so his subtlety had got him nowhere. “All right,’’ I said, nodding. “My primary relationship with Arab groups is that one of them, called Barq Cyrenica, tried to kill me and then later on kidnapped me.’’
One of the FBI men said, “How long have you known about Barq Cyrenica?”
“I learned the name less than an hour ago. Their try at killing me took place on Monday of this week, only I didn’t know who they were then. I reported the attempt to the Los—”
“We know about that.”
“This makes no sense,” Tabari said. He was angry and baffled, and didn’t like to be either. None of us had taken either of the room’s two chairs, but while the FBI men and I stood facing one another, Tabari paced back and forth beside us, from time to time throwing me discontented looks. Now he stopped and said, “Why were they interested in you in the first place? That was the question, that was why I traveled with you. Here is a group of extremists, operating in this part of the world for the first time, and we have information that they are taking a great interest in one television actor named Sam Holt. Why? Is Sam Holt a sympathizer with these ruffians? Is Sam Holt a person connected to some other part of Islam, opposed to the terrorists? We search Sam Holt’s background, we come up with nothing, we have no idea if he’s someone we should protect or someone we should guard ourselves against. Why is Barq Cyrenica so interested in this person? What do these people have in mind to do in California? I traveled with you and learned nothing, but the next day Barq Cyrenica people were found in your house in New York, and of course you insisted you knew nothing about them.”
I said, “So that was you in the cab! I saw you going up Sixth Avenue.”
Ignoring that, Tabari said, “And now, accompanied by an explosion, you climb the fence and walk into our arms, in the middle of the night.”
“I’ll tell you the whole story,” I promised him. “Some of it I’ve already given the L.A. County Sheriffs Department, but the rest I didn’t know until after I was kidnapped.”
“If you have a story to tell,” an FBI man said, “now’s the time to tell it.”
“Wait,” Tabari said, moving toward the door. “I wish this to be recorded.”
“We both do,” the FBI man told him.
While Tabari opened the door and spoke briefly to somebody outside, the FBI man took a mini-cassette recorder from his pocket and placed it on the desk, saying, “Why don’t you sit there?”
“Behind the desk?”
“Yes.”
So I sat down, and he adjusted the recorder so its built-in mike faced me, a tiny round black ear eager to know all. A somewhat larger recorder had been handed to Tabari, who put it on the desk next to the first one and started it recording. One of the FBI men, clearly for the benefit of the record, said, “You’re telling us your story of your own free will, Mr. Holt?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good.” Then my audience of three stepped back, arms folded, to watch and listen.
I looked at the tapes turning in the machines. “Well,” I said. A strange place, this, for an actor to have stage fright. “All right,” I said. “The beginning of this story is last winter, in New York, when an old friend of mine named Ross Ferguson phoned ...”
50
A he first thing,” Deputy Ken said, looking very earnestly into my eyes, “it didn’t blow by accident.”
“Meaning they did it on purpose?”
“Meaning it wasn’t your fault,” he said, and showed a trace of grin. “I had the feeling you were worried about that.”
“Okay. I was.”
“Also, yes,” he went on, and nodded. “They did it on purpose.”
“How can you be sure?”
Chuck said, “The technical people can be sure. From the way it blew, and where we found the bodies.”
I looked out across my pool. It was a sunny warming day in early March, two weeks since Barq Cyrenica had blown itself apart in its tunnel under Al-Gazel. Bly paddled around in the clear water, decorative in her peach bikini, giving me privacy for my talk with the deputies, who’d arrived unannounced, so that I sat with them in my pale blue terry-cloth robe. We three were around the table near the pool, Sugar Ray watchfully asleep beneath and Max patrolling the far side, on the alert for enemies and disturbances.
But the enemies and disturbances were all gone, most of them dead on that night, the rest captured when the police finally swarmed onto Ross’s property after the explosion. Bly and Robinson, after Ross’s phoned message from me, had called Deputy Ken and managed to interest the police enough so that they were watching Ross’s house by that time, but they’d been maintaining a low profile—to protect me—waiting for something to come out of there, and if they’d stuck to their original script, they wouldn’t have intervened until it was too late. The explosion, of course, had made them rewrite.
The explosion. Only about half the dynamite had been moved into the tunnel when I’d come along to interrupt the process, and not all of that had been shifted into final position. The tunnel, nearly a quarter-mile long, was less than four feet tall and three feet wide, shored up where necessary with boards and sheets of thin paneling, illuminated by flashlights, and running very gradually uphill to a widened-out room just beneath the mosque. Perhaps a third of the full store of dynamite was in position there, and fourtee
n men in the tunnel, when it blew, killing them all.
That explosion had been echoing in my mind for two weeks, and no point denying it. I brooded about it by day, and dreamed about it at night, when I was usually one of the men inside, struggling along in the grave-smelling semi-dark, dragging the heavy cartons, sweating but chilled, bent almost double under the low earth roof. In my dream I was following some antlike compulsion to do this work, without understanding why. I would do it, and then I would see the red ball flashing toward me down the tube, I would feel its heat, and I’d wake up sweating, panting for air.
Had it been my fault? In crushing the entrance, packing the van down into it, had I created the circumstances that made the dynamite down there blow fifteen minutes later? I didn’t see how it could be a direct result of what I’d done—if it were, wouldn’t it have gone off right away?—but I couldn’t be sure, and the uncertainty had left an opening for nightmare.
Until now. If Ken was right, if indeed the “technical people” did know what they were talking about ... I said, “I have trouble believing it, that they did it to themselves.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time, the political suicide, with people like that,” he said. “You’d trapped them down in there. Sooner or later the law would come along and dig them out.”
“Humiliation,” suggested Chuck. He was mostly watching Bly swim.
“That’s right,” Ken said. “Public shame. Failure. And maybe even exposure of whoever finances them.”
“And the point from the beginning,” Chuck added, “was to blow up the mosque.”
I said, “Which they didn’t even manage to do.”
“Well, they hurt it,” Ken said, giving them their due. “There was some structural damage.”
“But you’re right,” Chuck told me. “They didn’t bring it down.”
“But they tried, right?” I wanted to hear that again, to be certain about it. Looking at them both, I said, “That’s what they were doing? Turned it into a suicide mission, on purpose.”
Ken nodded. “Said their prayers, burned their incriminating documents, gave each other the secret handshake, put their detonators in place—”
“That’s one way we know it wasn’t an accident,” Chuck said.
“Right,” Ken agreed, and finished his sentence. “Put their detonators in place and went to talk it over with Allah.”
I sighed and smiled. The day was getting warmer and brighter. “Then it’s done,” I said.
Done. Finished. Nothing left over. I had, of course, backed up Doreen’s self-defense story about killing Ross, and her doctor father had provided heavyweight legal help before taking her back to Santa Barbara, so she was out of it. Besides, nobody much cared how Ross had died. His file on Fire Over Beverly Hills was enough to make him a co-conspirator in official eyes whether he’d been coerced into it in the first place or not.
Given the various newsworthy elements in the story—a twenty-seven-million-dollar mosque, an underground mass suicide, a tunnel full of dynamite, a shootout in a Beverly Hills mansion, the presence of a former TV star— the Al-Gazel people and the authorities between them had done an amazing job of smothering the flames of publicity. There had been newspaper stories and television reports about the explosion immediately after it happened, and the phone here had rung off the hook for a couple of days (everybody being referred to my PR outfit for a handout full of vagueness and generalities), but the follow-up was astonishingly meager. The mosque wanted it kept quiet, their enemies had no reason to trumpet this failure, the city always tries to downplay the growing Arab presence here, and the federal authorities feel understandably nervous about public reaction whenever foreign disputes get fought out on our turf, which does sometimes happen, so the story merely faded and died.
Ken made as though to get to his feet. “We just thought you’d like to know,’’ he said.
I said, “Duty calls?”
He grinned. “We’re late for our break, actually.”
“Then take it here. Dive in the pool.”
Ken laughed as though I were kidding, and Chuck said, “Not in uniform.”
“I keep spare suits in the poolhouse there,” I told them. “Top drawer on the left.”
“Thanks for the offer, Sam,” Ken said, rising, “but we’ve really got to get—”
“Why? I’m serious. It’s a warm day, you’ve just brought me peace of mind, I think you ought to have a nice swim.”
They looked at one another, considering the idea, surprised at themselves that they were considering it. Beyond them I saw Robinson coming this way from the house, carrying the phone. I said, “An invitation from an ex-cop. How can you turn it down?”
They grinned at one another, and Ken said, “You’re right. Top drawer on the left, you say?”
“That’s it.”
Robinson, arriving, put the phone on the table and politely waited. Ken and Chuck went off toward the poolhouse, and Robinson said, “Mr. Novak.”
“Ah-hah.” Could this be work at last? I took the phone and said, “Zack?”
“Danny Silvermine—”
“No, Zack.”
“Just listen,” he said.
“No. I told you almost two weeks ago, when Silvermine said no to the idea of me doing an original. I don’t want it. His scripts were adequate, but—”
“Sam, darling, listen.”
When Zack Novak calls me darling, it means he’s nearing the end of his rope. “All right,” I said. “I’m listening.”
“Forget the dinner theater,” he told me.
“I already did.”
“Good. Our good friend Danny Silvermine has come up with a brand new— Oops!”
“Oops?”
“Hold it! Don’t go away!” And here came the unmistakable woolly sound of hold.
“Not again,” I told the dead phone, then hung it up and handed it to Robinson. “Take this away,” I said. “Of course,” he said.
“When Mr. Novak calls again, tell him I’m not interested in anything Danny Silvermine thinks.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Tell him I’m not interested in recycling Jack Packard in the theater, in bubble gum cards, in needlepoint pillows, or anywhere else.”
“Very well,” he said.
“Tell him I want work, real, honest-to-God, legitimate acting work”
“I shall,” he said.
“And tell him I said, ‘Don’t put me on hold!’ Direct quote.”
“Quote don’t put me on hold unquote,” he said.
“Exactly. Oh, and bring my guests a couple of Tabs. Chlorine makes people thirsty.”
“Will that be all?” Robinson asked, and arched a stem brow at me.
I didn’t feel like being browbeaten right now. “For the moment,” I said.
Robinson nodded, accepting the inevitable, and departed. I stood, shrugged out of the robe, and went over to the edge of the pool. For just an instant, I saw again that other pool filled with dirt, imagined again the distorted bodies in the black tunnel, blood coming from their ears. But then the images faded for the last time. It was better to be up here, where I could stretch myself and feel the sun getting warmer every day.
Dancing water sparkled shards of sky in my eyes. Bly drifted through it, head raised, grinning up at me. “You’re smiling,” she said.
“Why not,” I said, and dove in.
