by Morris West
‘Thanks.’
Feldman poured the liquor with an unsteady hand. They raised the glasses to each other and drank the first mouthful in silence. Spada asked, more calmly:
‘You’ve read the transcripts on Mike Santos?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s your opinion?’
‘The same as yours. What are you going to do about him?’
‘Present him with the evidence – and fire him.’
‘You can’t just leave it like that. The man’s a criminal. He’s conspired in the murder of your family! There’s enough evidence there to put him behind bars for life.’
‘But I won’t be here to give it. I have more important things to do . . . So, I’m leaving Mike Santos to God.’
‘I don’t believe you, lover.’
‘You’ll be at the farewell party tomorrow. You’ll see for yourself . . . I’m going straight from the apartment to Kennedy. I’d like you to drive me if you would.’
‘Sure . . . Kitty told me you’d be meeting her in Rome. You have my blessing. It’s a good thing for both of you. Take good care of her, eh?’
‘You and Kitty are the only family I’ve got in America.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ said Maury Feldman. ‘We’ve been together a long time. We’ve seen a lot of bastards come and go . . . I hate the thought of breaking up now.’
‘I’ll send her back to you safely.’
‘She won’t want to come.’
‘I’ll see that she does.’
‘When I’m miserable, I feel hungry. Are you going to buy me dinner?’
‘Spaghetti and wine at Gino’s – for old times’ sake. How does that grab you?’
‘Right where it hurts,’ said Maury Feldman unhappily. ‘Let’s go.’
At five o’clock on the evening of Spada’s farewell party, a man called Ruiz Patino walked out of a massage parlour on Seventh Avenue. A gangling lopsided fellow, who looked as though he had been tied together with string, fell into step beside him and said, in Lunfardo:
‘Keep walking. I want to talk to you.’
‘Who the hell are you?’ Ruiz Patino was trained to be leery of casual contacts.
‘I’m from headquarters,’ said the lopsided one. ‘You don’t know me. I know you. Your name is Ruiz Patino. You have been employed by Marina Altamira. Your last job was at a place called the Bay House. Your assistant was Vespucci. You don’t have to say anything. Just keep walking . . . The woman Altamira has gone sour on us. She’s selling us out – and that means you and Vespucci as well. She and the American Santos are setting up a deal with the FBI.’
‘Mother of God! How can I believe that?’
‘If you don’t,’ said the lopsided one, ‘you end up in gaol . . . I’m going to give you an envelope. Take it and stick it in your pocket. Don’t open it until you get back to your room. It contains ten thousand dollars. Five for you and five for Vespucci. It also contains a photograph of Santos and an address on Park Avenue . . . Tonight, some time after nine-thirty, Santos will leave a party he’s attending at that address. One of you can deal with him. The other will eliminate Altamira at her apartment. Then you both get out of New York for a week or two. Where’s Vespucci?’
‘At his own place. We’re meeting at seven.’ ‘You’ve got plenty of time then. With silencers, it’s a simple job. No problems. Here’s the envelope . . . And make sure you split the cash down the middle. It’s headquarters’ money. They’re fussy about clean pay-offs. On your way now.’
He peeled off and went hurrying across town towards Fifth Avenue. Ruiz Patino stared after him in momentary puzzlement and then shrugged resignedly. In this business it didn’t pay to be too nosey. And ten thousand dollars was more than they’d got for the Bay House job.
John Spada’s farewell party was a subdued affair, very unlike the gatherings of the old days when Anna had presided, warm and affectionate, over her own domain. Then the drinks had flowed freely, the talk was high, the laughter open and free. The men had paid court to Anna, while Spada played gallant to the women.
Tonight, the whole tone was elegiac, a memorial rather than a celebration. Spada kept moving about the room, not lingering with any one group, lest his presence interrupt the flow of courteous irrelevances or revive the brutal memory of recent events. Once again he felt, as he had felt in Von Kalbach’s house, a fateful personage, an alien presence. He wished Kitty was there. Her brusque and bawdy good humour would, at least, have taken the chill off the occasion.
When Mike Santos arrived, Spada was amazed at his self-assurance. He apologised for his lateness. The squash game had been tougher than usual. He offered greetings from his absent wife. He made the rounds of the guests, smiling and confident, the very image of a reigning prince of industry.
With Spada he was cordial and full of solicitous counsel. He should not worry about a thing. He should simply enjoy his vacation. Anything Spada needed, anywhere in the world, Mike Santos would supply it for him. He had even brought a gift – a pair of gold cuff-links, with Spada’s monogram in high relief. Spada thanked him with sober courtesy – and wondered at the man’s effrontery. Noting the incident, Maury Feldman moved in and drew Spada away to a safe spot near the bar. He asked in a whisper:
‘What’s going to happen?’
‘Nothing yet,’ said John Spada. ‘Enjoy your supper.’
‘It’s damn near choking me.’ Maury was outraged. ‘The nerve of the guy!’
‘To every pig comes his Martinmas!’ It was the same proverb he had used to the General in Buenos Aires.
‘I’ve heard you say that before. In twenty years, I’ve never known what it meant.’
‘Old Spanish proverb. In Spain pigs are killed on St Martin’s Day.’
‘You live and learn,’ said Maury Feldman and drifted back into the crowd.
Alison Hirchfield, happily vague, as always, ever so slightly crocked, tugged at his sleeve and said:
‘You’ve got more guts than I have, John. It’s turning out quite a nice evening – in a sad sort of way.’
‘I’m glad you’re enjoying it, Alison.’
‘Your Mister Santos is something again! All that charm and dazzle. Is he good at his job?’
‘Very good.’ Spada was carefully patient. Alison slurred everything and forgot nothing. ‘Spada Consolidated will be in very good hands.’
‘That’s good. That’s very good! . . . Do you think Carlos could make me another martini? I hate wine.’
‘I’ll make it myself, sweetheart.’
At least it was a relief from the tension of the masquerade. He was just mixing the drink when Mike Santos clapped his hands and demanded silence. As the murmurs died around the room he announced:
‘Ladies and gentlemen. I want to propose a toast! . . .’
Spada rammed his fists into the counter of the bar and battled to control himself.
‘… It’s a very simple one. No grace notes, no embellishments. To a gallant gentleman, John Spada! God speed and come safely home!’
They clapped. They cried ‘Hear hear!’ They raised their glasses and drank. They called ‘Speech! Speech!’ John Spada raised his hands for silence and responded:
‘Thank you, Mike. Thank you, dear friends! I know it isn’t like the old days. It never will be again . . . But I’m glad and grateful that you came. You shared the good times with me; you are still here in the bad ones. God knows when I’ll be back; but I trust to find all you girls just as beautiful and you fellows half as fat and twice as prosperous. God bless you all! . . .’
It was the right note to end on. They gave a little cheer. The women came to kiss him. The men shook his hand and clapped him on the shoulder and wished him all the good luck in the world. When the exodus began, shortly afterwards, Spada held Santos back.
‘Hang around, Mike. I’d like a last drink with you and Maury.’
‘Sure, John. Sure!’
When the door closed on the last of the stragglers, Spada said:
‘Let Carlos dear up in here. Bring your drinks into the library.’
‘It’s a quarter of ten, lover,’ said Maury Feldman. ‘We shouldn’t hang around too long.’
‘I’m all packed, Maury. We’ll leave in fifteen minutes.’
He sat them in the big leather armchairs, while he himself perched on the edge of the desk. He picked up a sheet of Spada notepaper and a ballpoint pen and held them out to Santos.
‘One last document, Mike. I need a signature.’
‘What is it, John?’
‘Your resignation, effective immediately. Sign it.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Santos looked from one to the other in puzzlement. ‘I’ve got a five-year contract.’
‘It’s cancelled,’ said John Spada.
‘You can’t do that!’
‘He’s just done it,’ said Maury Feldman. ‘Sign the paper, Mike.’
‘No!’ Santos heaved himself to his feet.
‘Then you’re fired,’ said John Spada.
‘I don’t accept that either. I’ve got a right to hear reasons.’
‘I’ll give you four,’ said Maury Feldman. ‘Anna Spada; Teresa and Rodo Vallenilla; two million dollars’ worth of investment in Nassau, Bahamas, which was your price for setting up a murder.’
Mike Santos went white. He stood speechless, rocking back and forth on his feet. John Spada said:
‘Take a look at yourself in the hall mirror, Mike. I hope you can live with what you see. I hope your father will still smile at you when you meet him.’
‘This . . . this is madness!’ Santos found voice at last. ‘You’re bluffing. If you’re so sure, why don’t you call the cops and have me arrested right now?’
‘We have the evidence,’ said Maury Feldman wearily. ‘Copies of the trust deed from Nassau, identification of Marina Altamira as a long-time Argentine agent in New York, transcripts of some of your conversations with her, an identification of the two men who burned down the Bay House – their names are Patino and Vespucci . . . Satisfied?’
‘Why did you do it, Mike?’ asked Spada coldly. ‘I can’t believe it was for the money.’
‘I admit nothing.’ Santos stood up. ‘So you’ve got two choices: either you make a citizen’s arrest which I won’t resist, or I walk out of here free.’
‘Our man has spirit,’ said Maury Feldman.
‘Our man is a Judas,’ said John Spada. ‘A greedy, ambitious hypocrite . . . a killer for gain – two million lousy dollars!’
‘It’s still a bluff,’ said Mike Santos. ‘I haven’t seen a document yet – not a goddam line!’
‘Here’s your copy.’
John Spada tossed a bulky envelope at his feet. Santos picked it up and weighed it contemptuously in his hands, then he laughed.
‘So, that’s the game! You don’t dare file charges because I know about Proteus, and I can spread that story across the world and compromise a lot of your people. Instead, you want me to cut and run or blow my brains out like some right honourable Victorian hero. No way! You pull me down and I’ll pull Spada Consolidated and the Proteus organisation down with me.’ He tossed the envelope back to Spada. ‘I’ll be at my desk in the morning, Maury. I’ll expect you for coffee. Have a nice trip, John. Send us a card from time to time. Good night, gentlemen!’
He turned on his heel and walked out, jaunty as an actor with a juicy exit line. As the door closed behind him, Maury Feldman said:
‘I wonder what he’ll do now?’
‘I have no idea,’ said John Spada. ‘But let’s you and me have the record straight. We three had a final drink together. Mike left. He didn’t say where he was going. That’s the truth, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a truth I can handle,’ said Maury Feldman.
As the aircraft headed north, still climbing to cruising altitude over Martha’s Vineyard, the Scarecrow Man slid into the seat beside him.
‘The job’s done.’
‘Confirmed?’
‘Yes. Henson was watching the house. I followed Santos from your apartment. He stopped to make a telephone call from a booth on Seventy-first Street. Patino shot him inside it. Henson was watching Altamira’s apartment. Vespucci went in and came out four minutes later. Henson and I drove out to the airport and waited. So far as we could see there was no surveillance on you.’
‘Where’s Henson now?’
‘He’s on the British Airways flight. We’ll meet in London and work out the European operation from there. Then I’ll go down and organise the South American setup. I’ll be in New York when you get back.’
‘The merchandise?’
‘Henson’s got some. I’ve got some. This is yours.’ He handed Spada a leather cigar-case containing four cigars. ‘The phials are inside the cigars. Each one is wrapped in a paper on which are written the directions for reproducing the cultures. It’s very simple. It can be done in a household kitchen . . . Any change in your plans?’
‘None.’ said John Spada. ‘You’ll hear from me when I’m ready to move. The important thing is that everybody understands what is to happen if my communications are blacked out.’
‘Our people will understand. I can’t speak for the others.’
‘That’s the purpose of the exercise. The others must answer for themselves.’
‘I wonder,’ asked the Scarecrow Man, ‘I wonder if you understand what is in store for you? Every city needs a rat-catcher to go down the sewers; but none of the citizens will invite him to dinner.’
‘I know what you mean. I find myself quite calm about it.’
He spoke the simple truth. He was quite calm; in the real sense of the archaic phrase, he was at peace – even though the peace was the quietude of despair.
The murder of his family had thrust him into a new dimension, beyond law, beyond reason, beyond guilt, beyond all philosophic or religious speculation. He was, simply and absolutely, there. No one could recall him. He could not retreat, even of his own volition; because his intellect was held, like iron to a magnet, his will, frozen, like that of the dead, in the disposition of the last living moment. Without so imperative a certainty, the act which he was planning now would have proved impossible.
The rats were too many and too savage. The sewers in which they lived were too dark and too complicated. Besides, the city and the citizens thereof were, in a strange fashion, allies of the rats. It was as if they desired them to flourish, to justify their own secret fears, the cruelties they inflicted one on another. ‘It is not we who are vicious,’ they said. ‘It is the rats who force us to be so. It is not we who throw our brothers into hell-holes and Bedlams It is the fault of the rats who infect them and force us to destroy them to protect ourselves.’ So, the ratcatcher might be an honourable servant on paper; but in the end the burghers were unwilling to pay him. If they would not pay, then they must learn the same rude lesson that the Pied Piper had taught the citizens of Hamelin town: the hills would open up and swallow their children, so that they would never be seen again.
It was an operation worthy of Proteus, God-like in its simplicity, enormous in its consequences. The blue-print had been prepared long ago as a strategic exercise. The means were at his disposal. Each of the four phials in his cigar-case contained cultures that could be multiplied indefinitely. They would produce enough toxin to contaminate a dozen major cities. All Spada needed – and it was implanted in him now by surgical procedure – was the courage and the conviction to carry out the design. As he flew through the starlit darkness over the Atlantic, he contemplated the reasons which had brought him to this millennial decision.
Most people were, at heart, well-meaning but, in action, hypocrites. They would weep tears of blood over a child killed in the street. They would accept, without a pang, the deaths of hundreds of thousands from malnutrition. The loss of a life-boat was an epic tragedy; tribal genocide was a paragraph hastily read, lightly dismissed. Sixty dead in a train crash was a disaster; six million dead in the camps and gas oven
s was an historical statistic. The charitable would airlift a thousand tons of food to the victims of an earthquake; they would not raise voice or hand in defence of twenty thousand swept into the oblivion of the disappeared dissidents.
They did not understand, they said. The world with its political traffic was too complicated. Was it, hell! . . . Now they would learn how brutally simple it could be. And if they damned him for a fanatic, why did they kowtow to a dictator with an army at his back, or an arms pedlar crying havoc in the name of trade . . . The strongest weapon in the tyrants’ armoury was fear. Now he would turn the weapon against them – not in single combat, but by a universal revulsion.
He would hang over them the threat of a creeping death and dare them to ignore it. He would proclaim a simple brutal fiat: ‘Open your gaols and your Fun Palaces; let the prisoners out into the light; or I, John Spada, who have nothing now to lose, will turn your cities, one by one, into cemeteries.’
From the moment he landed in London, he began to cover his tracks. Once through Immigration and Customs, he crossed to Terminal 2 and, using the name of Erwin Hengst, bought himself a ticket to Zürich. From Zürich he flew to Rome, entered the Republic on Hengst’s passport, rented a car at the airport desk and drove straight to Uncle Andrea’s villa in Frascati.
The old man and Aunt Lisa gave him an emotional reception. He had to relive with them every detail of the events since Easter Day; but there was a kind of therapy in the telling. These were the anziani, the elders of the tribe, his links with the past, his most proper counsellors and comforters. With these two, at least, he could tell the truth and they would judge him, not by codex and commandment, but by the precedents of a long and violent history. Because he was family they would protect him from pursuivants and inquisitors; they would give him safe sleeping, help him on secret journeys, and, at the end, plead for his merciful judgment by an understanding Deity.
When the long tale was done, Aunt Lisa dried her eyes, and bustled out to order dinner and impose a silence on the staff. Signor Giovanni was not here. He never had been. He was stricken with grief and must be left in peace. Uncle Andrea took his arm and led him out to walk on the terrace and watch the sunset. Spada took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to the old man.
