Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  “Has to be,” said Wes. “You’re who’s left.”

  HEARTBEAT

  Jud pulled off the blue jacket’s hood when he reached the house. The rain beat down on his head. He stared at the white door for a long time before he rang the doorbell.

  The man who answered the doorbell lost his smile. He was a squat man, with gray brush haircut and flat brown eyes. He wore a green cardigan sweater over a white shirt, dark slacks, and ratty black bedroom slippers. Uncertainty flickered across his face. Then the smile returned, and his eyes hardened.

  “Jud Stuart.” He had a deep voice. “Good to meet you.”

  Varon’s hands hung by his side; strong, empty, hairy.

  The hall behind Varon was empty. Somewhere in the house a radio orchestra tinkled through an elevator rendition of “New York, New York.”

  “It’s wet out there,” said Varon. “Come in.”

  “Just like that?” whispered Jud.

  “You rang the bell, I answered. I’m alone—are you?”

  “I know who you are.” Jud didn’t move from the stoop.

  “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be worth the trust I gave you. Your training. Your scars. Now come in out of the rain, soldier.”

  Varon gave Jud his back and walked away. Jud hesitated, then obeyed. I came here for this, he told himself.

  “Don’t push any buttons,” warned Jud, shutting the door.

  He heard it lock.

  Varon laughed. “Who could I summon? I retired.”

  “Bullshit.”

  They walked past stairs to a silent second floor.

  “Yes, bullshit.” Varon’s nod directed Jud toward an open room, couches. Jud smelled wood burning in a fireplace. “Pentagon paper-pushers. Shoe clerks at the CIA—though I still have friends out there. Politicians at the Justice Department running scared of idiots in Congress. They pushed me out.”

  “What about the White House?”

  “They’re useless these days. The old people developed amnesia and the new ones embrace ignorance.”

  The unseen radio played Theme from A Summer Place. Jud’s head spun with 1960s’ celluloid images of a blond girl, not blond like Nora, not as beautiful as Lorri—

  He blinked and was back. An open door in the hall showed him an empty sitting room; another door revealed an empty bathroom.

  Step by slow step, Varon led Jud deeper into his home.

  “Last report,” said Varon, “you effected an E&E from a CIA ambush in the desert near Las Vegas. How’d you get here?”

  “Stole a car,” said Jud.

  “Appropriated,” corrected the general. “A soldier in the field does not steal, he appropriates.”

  “I’m not a soldier anymore.” Jud’s hands trembled.

  “No one has relieved you of your duties.”

  The hall led to a sunken living room where couches and easy chairs circled a coffee table. A battered leather briefcase yawned beside the table; file folders and yellow legal pads waited on its dark wood surface—as did glasses and a bottle of Scotch.

  The fireplace crackled.

  “I love a fire,” said Varon. “This might be the last one of the season.”

  He strolled down into the sunken room.

  “I’m having a drink,” said Varon. “Want a Scotch?”

  Light from the fireplace danced off the bottle of amber liquid. Jud could taste the liquor’s burn. Somehow he shook his head no.

  The wall beyond Varon was glass. Spotlights illuminated grounds sloping down to a treeline. Beyond that, the night seemed to part: out there, through the rain, Jud saw a long, dark shimmer.

  As he poured a drink, Varon followed Jud’s gaze. “The river’s down there. If the rain weren’t so thick, you could see the blue light at the end of my neighbor’s dock.”

  One wall was covered with plaques and signed pictures of Varon with presidents and kings, Iran’s former shah, TV evangelists. There were more than a dozen military and combat citations: Korea, Vietnam. Award certificates from patriotic groups. Pictures of a younger Varon, in the bush.

  “To live this good,” said Jud, “you must have appropriated a shitload from the field.”

  “I’ve never gotten half of what I’m owed!” snapped Varon.

  “Who owes you?”

  “Everybody who sent me into combat,” said the retired general. “Everybody I ever sent good men out to kill and die for. Everybody I ever took shit for. They all owe us—you, and me.”

  “How much?” whispered Jud.

  “How much can we get?” said Varon.

  Jud shook his head. “How much did you do?”

  “Enough. Damn!” Varon swore at the glass in his hand. “I forgot you didn’t want a drink. I already poured that one on the table.”

  Amber liquor swirled in the glass Varon held. “Once it’s out of the bottle, you can’t put it back.”

  “Tell you what,” he continued. “I’ll drink this one, and leave that glass there. In case you change your mind.”

  Jud smelled the booze all the way across the room and …

  And Varon had moved, was over by the wall to the left, his back to Jud, reaching toward a table …

  “Don’t!” yelled Jud.

  Varon froze. Jud focused on Varon’s hands: one held his drink, the other rested on an FM receiver. Varon turned a knob. The radio died.

  “That’s better,” said Varon. “Maybe the music was why I didn’t hear you drive up.

  “Did you come straight here from Nevada?” asked the master of the house, moving back into the circle of sofas and chairs. “That writer: have you talked to him since then?”

  “He’s not a player,” muttered Jud.

  “Nick Kelley.” Varon settled on a couch. “Does he know you’re here?”

  “Why did you send someone to kill me?” asked Jud.

  “I never sent an operative to kill you.”

  “That man in the L.A. bar.”

  “Mathew Hopkins.”

  Hopkins: Jud remembered the name from the driver’s license he’d taken off the dead man behind the bar. “You sent him.”

  “Yes,” said Varon. “But that was your fault.”

  “What?”

  “You’d failed to answer repeated activation notices. Horoscope alerts. I was concerned.”

  “I opted out of your fucking bullshit!”

  “You never had that choice.” Varon shrugged. “It was a mistake to send Hopkins, but my resources these days are meager.”

  “He was on the old team.”

  “Like you, but from the Navy. Retired. Took a disability pension—payout contract like you refused.”

  “Why did you send him?”

  “To find you. To make sure you were all right.”

  “My error,” said Varon. “Last few years, Hopkins began requesting clarifications. He’d developed paranoia, his own agenda, whatever. But he was the only asset I had on the West Coast, so … If he tried to kill you, he was acting on his own. I didn’t dare try to clean up after him, make him seem important.”

  Fire swirled through Jud’s brain. He was dizzy; leaned on the arm of a chair.

  “His mission was long-range observation,” said Varon. “No contact. If he was close enough for you to kill—”

  “I didn’t kill him.” Jud sank into the chair. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Getting close to you, I don’t know what he wanted.”

  In the mirror of his soul, Jud realized the truth.

  “He couldn’t stand it anymore,” whispered Jud. “Not knowing who he was and what he’d done, why. You wouldn’t give him any answers. Gave him me. Enough data for him to figure out we were both on your string. Like family. He didn’t want to kill me. He wanted to talk to me. Wanted me to help him find answers.”

  “Then he was a liability instead—” Varon stopped short.

  “Instead of me?” Jud shook his head. “The poor lost son of a bitch. Another one I … Another one.”

  Jud picked
up the glass of Scotch.

  “Why all of a sudden did you care about me?” he asked.

  Varon watched him take a long drink.

  “We need to be sure we’re secure,” said the ex-general.

  “Not we: you.” Jud downed all his Scotch. He leaned across the table, took the bottle, and refilled his glass.

  “You’re in somebody’s gunsights,” said Jud.

  “These fucks don’t use guns! If they did, I could—”

  “So it’s the law.” The Scotch warmed Jud’s blood. He felt his brain go clear. His heart went calm—and cold.

  “You’ve stepped on your dick, General. Iran-contra.”

  “They came to me!” shouted Varon. “Nobody better for the job, and they damn well knew it! Forget about that Inspector General’s report that squeezed me out of the Pentagon, they needed me! I was running covert ops when those White House namby-pambies were in prep school! I knew Iran—even that peanut farmer Jimmy Carter knew enough to tap me for the second rescue mission! Nobody can do it like me: not Dick Secord, not Ollie North, Poindexter—Casey, he knew! He knew I could get the job done!

  “So what if I made money? I don’t come for a whistle and a song like some cherry schoolgirl!”

  “What did you do?”

  “The damn job! I raised money! Put together arms deals! Met with some damn Iranians—never trust camel jockeys—I—”

  “No,” said Jud. “I’ve been drunk for years, but I can figure that score. You weren’t a top man, so you won’t take a hard fall. Not just for following orders.

  “It was the project I turned down,” said Jud.

  “Their idea,” insisted Varon. “Not mine. I just told them it could be done, that I thought I had a way. An asset.”

  “Me.” Jud shook his head. “You thought I was dumb enough to help frame the Nicaraguan government for coke smuggling?”

  “You had that area of expertise,” said Varon. “Contacts, the bona fides. If you were half as good as you’d been before …”

  “You would have burned me,” said Jud. “Fronted me out. You would have had to. I’m a drunk: usable, expendable. How would you’ve worked it? Busted, gunned down in an alley? A car wreck?”

  “They wouldn’t have gone for that,” said Varon.

  Jud drank half a glass of Scotch. “I bet that’s true. They’d probably started to back away from your horror-show games before I said no.”

  “Give a guy a big desk, he starts to forget what it takes to get there and do the job.”

  “Why did Mathew Hopkins have to check me out?”

  “The grand jury and special prosecutor are still out there,” said Varon. “They still want blood—mine or yours.”

  “There’s a loose end,” said Jud. “Something a nickel-dime government gumshoe might find that could lead to me. A loose end of yours—in North’s notebooks or computers, somewhere.

  “If I talked, you’d be guilty of cocaine conspiracies as well as Iran-contra. Hell, if I really flipped: Laos, Watergate, Chile, Monterastelli … Bad on their own and reason enough for the feds to hunt down your appropriations. Remember the coke money you had me send? Bought these walls, right? I could help a prosecutor drive a stake right through your medals.”

  The room was warm around Jud. He felt soft, fluid.

  “They must really want you,” he said. “And you know it. But you didn’t know what kind of shape I was in, so you sent poor, hurting Mathew Hopkins to find out.”

  Jud laughed. “The lost seeking the lame.”

  “He wasn’t supposed to whack me,” said Jud. “But if he’d reported me as anything but a gutter drunk with no credibility …”

  Varon’s hands straightened file folders on the table. An open briefcase waited by his chair. File folders, yellow pads, pens on the table. A tray of glasses and a bottle of Scotch—three glasses. Jud blinked.

  “You’re expecting somebody,” he said. “You’re killing time, waiting for somebody.”

  “Some people who can help us.”

  Jud threw his glass across the room; it shattered above the fireplace.

  “Save your dramatics,” said Varon. “You had to come here for help. The Agency’s on your trail, the L.A. police. Hopkins made you a murderer. Who knows what else they can pin on you from the last few weeks. You need me.”

  He poured Scotch in another glass, pushed it toward Jud.

  “Just like you need this.” Varon laughed. “Give me any shit and I’ll feed you to the Marines.”

  “Chandler,” muttered Jud. “Wes Chandler.”

  “How the hell do you know that name!”

  Jud scooped the fresh drink into his steady grip. “You got people, I got people.”

  “You got nobody!”

  “Then what are you worried about?”

  * * *

  Nick kept the Porsche’s motor running, headlights off as he sat parked in the shadows where the paved public highway met Varon’s gravel road. Nick’s Jeep waited deeper in the woods. Rain fell through a cone of yellow light from the pole high above the crossroads. Cool, wet air and the chug of the Porsche engine flowed over him through the open windows. He could smell the rain in the trees, the damp earth; he could smell his own sweat.

  Time had lost proportion: he’d been there three minutes, he’d been there a heartbeat, he’d been there forever.

  They’re all right. I’m fine. I’ll be home soon. Safe. Sylvia, Saul: who’ll teach Saul that—

  Car lights silently knifed through the rain on the public highway to Nick’s right, a narrow beam that widened, brightened …

  Turned.

  Gravel crunched beneath the wheels of a Cadillac as it rolled onto Varon’s road. That long, dark car passed through the streetlight’s cone in an instant, but time had lost proportion, and in its elasticity Nick saw the Caddy fishtail on the wet gravel, saw its brake lights flash red, its driver countersteer and fix the hood down the tunnel where Jud and Wes had gone.

  Where they were unaware.

  Nick didn’t know how or why the Caddy was there, but he knew it meant danger for the men he’d left down the tunnel, danger rippling out to him, to his family. He knew so in a heartbeat, because in that elastic eternity the streetlight showed him the Caddy’s driver:

  Jack Berns. Renegade private eye. Who’d touched Nick with cold hands he thought Nick wouldn’t feel: shadows, bugs.

  Beside Berns in the Caddy: a man whose face was a white-bandaged blur. Nick’s recognition was instant, intuitive, and absolute: the ambushed man from Union Station whose revolver was now gripped between Nick’s trembling thighs.

  There’d be other guns: in the Caddy, in later time.

  In the second heartbeat, Nick knew what he had to do.

  The Cadillac slid down the tunnel road.

  A Porsche pulled out of the woods at the crossroads and accelerated into the Caddy’s slipstream.

  Nick. Running dark. Red taillights in his eyes.

  Perhaps if he’d been a poet, Nick would have been filled with a sense of inevitability, of karma. He would have remembered the abstract manhood dreams of his Michigan cruising nights; the schooling of a hundred drag races down open highways; the razor thrills of teenage games of chicken, hunching over the wheel of his father’s ’64 white Chevy Impala as he hurtled down a country road toward headlights racing straight at him under the command of an equally crazed teenager. A poet might have appreciated this final link in the chain Nick forged when he’d sought magic in the shadows, a chain that now meant if he did nothing, he doomed his allies and left himself and his family at risk. He could have experienced wondrous transcendence, the greater truths of heroes and villains; the purity of ultimate choice; the irony of doing a wrong thing for the right reasons.

  But what filled Nick was the great weight of fear.

  Fire raged in his mouth, lava surged in his bowels, and electricity shook his whole being. The world existed simultaneously at high speed and in slow motion. A monster roared in his head. His n
eck and shoulders ached like steel; he could smell and taste fumes and metal from the Porsche. His shirt was soaked. Through the open windows, raindrops hit his face like icy machine gun bullets. His engine whined, gravel crunched beneath his tires. And as the Caddy’s blurred red taillights raced closer to his windshield, Nick clung to wordless prayer.

  Faster, he drove faster.

  The gun: he sucked in his gut, jammed it in his pants. Pulled the shoulder belt across him and locked it in place.

  Taillights, like two red eyes staring back at him, a quarter mile ahead; three miles to the house.

  Running dark, heavy rain: even if Berns checked his mirrors, he wouldn’t see Nick.

  An eighth of a mile. Berns and the man from Union Station were silhouetted behind the Caddy’s headlights and the glow of their dashboard. The Caddy drove right down the middle of the road.

  Maybe they’d hear the growl of Nick’s engine; maybe they wouldn’t: talking, radio on, windows rolled up.

  A hundred yards, one football field.

  Seconds later, fifty yards. The Caddy was a solid shape, dead in front of Nick’s hurtling ride.

  The Porsche drifted right with Nick’s touch, a smooth machine. Obedient. Powerful.

  The Caddy lined up off center to Nick’s left at forty yards. At thirty. Twenty. Two car lengths away.

  Nick cut his wheel to the left and floorboarded the gas pedal.

  The Porsche surged, a compact mass of rolling metal muscle that slammed at an angle into the left rear bumper of the bigger, heavier Caddy.

  Physics ruled.

  The Cadillac fishtailed, its crumpled rear end swerving away from the impact, it’s headlights swinging to the right until it skidded sideways down the gravel road at forty-four miles per hour and …

  The Porsche shuddered with the crash, bounced back—tires slipping over wet rock, the rear end sliding to the right, the passenger’s side …

  Slamming into the side of the Cadillac, two steel hands applauding in the night.

  A crash of metal.

  The night spinning, flying past Nick’s eyes, the steering wheel ripped from his hands, the Porsche whipping around, zigzagging backward down the road, hitting the barrow pit, rear axle snapping, high centering—rolling. Windshield exploding, glass shreds showering Nick. Rolling: pop up and crash down on all four tires, inertia diving toward China as …