His lips pursed in a smile as he pretended to be amused. “So now, Mr. Heller, you’re suggesting the federal government concocted the ‘flying saucer’ hysteria themselves, to cover up testing of experimental aircraft?”
“That I don’t know. The saucer hysteria may have been a natural by-product of a nation exiting a catastrophic world war, and needing something new to be afraid of. Maybe the government fueled that hysteria for its own purposes; I just don’t know. But I do know, with so much talk of flying saucers in the air—so to speak—it provided the perfect cover-up for the Roswell crash.”
An invisible eyebrow arched. “Paranoid schizophrenics, Mr. Heller, see conspiracies everywhere they look. Tell me, have you been hearing voices?”
“Actually, I have: yours. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself, Doc. You see, the brilliance of this cover-up is that it substitutes a fake cover-up for a real one … leading people to believe that what the government is trying to hide is evidence of flying saucers and outer-space men. You feed, and feed off, the rumors that a flying saucer crashed in the desert; this plays into the witnesses who didn’t see much, or didn’t see anything, and probably a handful—perhaps Kaufmann—who misidentified the Japs as Martians or whatever. Still others, who saw the Japanese pilots and knew damn well what they were seeing, were warned and threatened into silence. Some of those who saw too much—Sheriff Wilcox, Mac Brazel, again maybe Kaufmann—were taken to the Walker base ‘guesthouse,’ and this is where you come in, Doc—and you, Maria.”
The mention of her name made Maria visibly uncomfortable.
Bernstein’s expression took on an air of patronizing disgust. “I’ve never been in Roswell in my life.”
“You were there last month, Doc,” I said. “But we’ll get to that. You, or somebody like you, managed that guesthouse, where—using a combination of drugs, hypnosis and what-have-you—you manipulated real memories into false ones. You worked your mind-control magic on them, Doc, the flying-saucer scenario being similar enough to their real memories to take hold. A few players like Maria, here, are meanwhile injected into the mix, disseminating disinformation, and lending credence and richness to those false memories various witnesses are ‘remembering.’”
Bernstein nodded toward Maria, curtly. “If Nurse Selff was an active player in this ridiculous ‘disinformation scenario’ of yours, what was she doing still working as a nurse at the Walker base, almost two years later?”
Maria smiled a little, her expression challenging me to get it right.
I shrugged. “Maintenance. Keeping an eye on the witnesses. Making sure your experimental methods had taken root and held, Doc, and keeping an eye out for anyone—like me—who might come snooping around. That’s my guess, anyway. Or maybe she’s just a nurse who occasionally gets pulled in on intelligence jobs. Care to enlighten me, Maria?”
Her expression suddenly rather sullen, Maria shook her head.
“Hey, well I’m doing pretty well on my own, wouldn’t you say, Doc?”
“I’d say you’re delusional; almost certainly a paranoid schizophrenic.”
“Sorry to hear that—that’s what Forrestal had, and look how he ended up.”
“You might want to keep that in mind.”
I gave him the most awful grin I had in me as I kept the gun trained on him. “Good for you, Doc. Getting cute like that’s the first step, in coming out from behind your mask. Where was I? Ah—the other brilliant thing about the saucer cover-up is that the witnesses—and their tampered-with memories—will fall into the lunatic fringe, and any reporters who cover the story—like Pearson—will look like saps. I mean, I’ve figured out what’s going on, but I still can’t be sure who’s a disinformation disseminator, and who’s a mind-controlled witness. Can’t tell the players without a scorecard, but then, of course, in the end it doesn’t matter.”
Bernstein’s voice was both soothing and condescending as he said, “A symptom of your illness, Mr. Heller, is the inability to differentiate between speculative fantasy and hard reality. In short, fascinating as this may be, it is as preposterous as, well, flying saucers … and there’s nothing here you can prove, and if there were, who would you prove it to?”
“I’ve proved it to myself,” I said. “To my own satisfaction. The certainty is in my head and my gut. I have no doubt that you worked your sick magic on me. I left Roswell, having heard ridiculous stories about spacemen from all sorts of people, Maria included, yet came away with a strong conviction that what I’d heard was true! After my stay at the guesthouse, I believed in flying saucers, all right; I even had a sort of vision of a pale, benign spaceman, in my dreams, soothing me with his suction-cup fingertips. But then it finally occurred to me, Doc … I admit to being a little slow on the uptake, here … but outer space creatures don’t usually have German accents.”
Bernstein didn’t have anything to say to that—no perfect clipped English response at all.
Now Maria was looking Bernstein’s way, as she said, “Mr. Heller says that Forrestal was murdered.”
“That’s his most ludicrous statement yet,” Bernstein snorted. “Why would the upper echelons of the United States government murder a celebrated former Secretary of Defense?”
I said, “The government didn’t kill Forrestal—you did, Doc … or rather, we did, you and I.”
He laughed, once. “Did you help me, or did I help you?”
“James Forrestal was a threat because he was feeling guilty about sanctioning our government’s collaboration with Nazis; further, he was genuinely mentally ill, and capable of either disintegrating in public, or going public with what he knew, neither of which was particularly desirable. Jim Forrestal was one of your classic men who knew too much, a nightmare of a security risk. Various steps were taken, including leaking forged Majestic Twelve files to Drew Pearson to throw the press off the trail of the real Majestic Twelve, which apparently had to do with saucer experimentation via Nazi collaboration, not unidentified objects from outer space. But however you cut it, Forrestal had to go—not in the government’s opinion, though I’m sure there will be as much relief in private as there is mourning in public. No, this was your call, Doc, protecting your own Aryan ass. Exposure of the extent of our government’s Nazi collaboration could lead to a second series of Nuremberg-like trials; your cushy new life, your Caddy, your house, your prestigious position, it would all go up like so much smoke out an Auschwitz chimney.”
“Nurse Selff,” Bernstein said, his tone temperate, the gaze he gave her radiating reasonableness, “please know these are the ramblings, the ravings, of a very diseased mind.”
“Like me, Maria,” I said, “you were this bastard’s unwitting accomplice. You were still working the Roswell disinformation project, not realizing the good doctor was putting the Forrestal kill in motion.”
Bernstein snapped, “I was nowhere near that hospital when Mr. Forrestal took his life!”
Gun steady on him, I said, “Neither was I, Doc, but we killed him together, just the same.”
Confused, Maria asked, “How is that possible, Nathan?”
“The doc here was well aware that I was a veteran of hypnosis therapy, that my battle-fatigue amnesia had been cured by hypnotherapy, in fact. So he knew I’d make a good subject, easily controlled, by a combination of, well … sex—that’s, uh, your role, Maria … and of course a visit to the base guesthouse. Either before or just after my guesthouse stay, back at Bethesda the doc prepped Forrestal to be receptive to posthypnotic suggestion; how exactly the doc achieved that, narcosis, hypnosis … well, he’s the magician, not me.”
Maria asked, in a hushed voice, “What do you think happened to you in the guesthouse?”
“Well for one thing—and this much you do know, Maria—I was a guest at the base longer than I’d been led to believe … don’t play dumb, baby, that doesn’t become you, either. You told me, when I fell asleep at your bungalow, that I’d slept straight through, losing a day … but really I’d only
slept through that one night. Right?”
Chagrined, she nodded.
“You even gave me a posthypnotic suggestion yourself, didn’t you, Maria? Per the doc’s instructions, when you said, ‘You must be very tired, very tired, very tired.’”
“That is true,” she admitted, sending an accusing glare Bernstein’s way.
“That had nothing to do with Forrestal,” he told her emphatically.
I shook my head. “It had everything to do with him, Doc. You had, what, a day, a day and a half to work your magic on me, in that guesthouse? Including giving me the posthypnotic suggestion to buy that book of poetry for Forrestal. I vividly remember, Doc, you repeating the phrase on the phone, twice: ‘A book of poetry would be comforting.’ As if that wasn’t enough, you advised me to tell Forrestal that I, his trusted associate, had been secretly working for his nemesis, Drew Pearson, making a damn good case for that being a good idea, while in reality anticipating that my disclosure would help create in Forrestal the right suicidal mind-set.”
Now some desperation had found its way into Bernstein’s voice and his demeanor, as he turned to the nurse. “Maria, do you realize how preposterous all of this is? Do you see now that Mr. Heller is suffering from a complete mental breakdown?”
Maria said nothing.
I said, “Funny thing is, Doc, after I looked the crime scene over? I figured somebody had sneaked in and murdered Forrestal … and I was right: I did. I was the murderer who sneaked into Bethesda to kill Forrestal—I just didn’t know it. I didn’t know that that book I handed him was as lethal as poison gas.”
Bernstein said, flatly, “Forrestal threw himself out a window. Nothing changes that.”
“Yeah, I gave Jim Forrestal my thoughtful gift, that book of poetry, and I must’ve also passed along a posthypnotic suggestion to him—when was that, Doc, when I said, ‘I thought you’d find a book of poetry comforting,’ something like that? Anyway, thanks to the doc’s manipulation of my meager subconscious, I passed on the posthypnotic suggestion that made Forrestal get out of bed in the middle of the night, read that uplifting suicide poem you’d programmed him to read, Doc—and when Forrestal hit the crucial, guilt-inducing word—nightingale—he followed doctor’s orders and got some fresh air, trying to hang himself but succeeding instead in just throwing himself out the pantry window.”
Maria frowned, the big dark blue eyes tensed with curiosity. “Why ‘nightingale’?”
“Well,” I said, “in the original German, it’s Nachtigall, right, Doc? A guy named Teddy Kollek told me about it—you ought to get together with him, Doc, with your mutual interest in Palestine. Anyway, Operation Nightingale was a particularly ugly act of collaboration that Forrestal approved, subsidizing Ukrainian anti-Communist guerrillas who during the war were a Nazi execution squad, responsible for the mass slaughter of thousands of Jews. Not a bad guilt trigger for a man who felt he’d betrayed his country through such associations.”
He sat erect; chin up. “My name is Dr. Joseph Bernstein. As a Jew, I deeply resent these implications and accusations.”
“You know, Doc, as a guy who fought in the trenches on Guadalcanal, as a half-assed Jew myself, I find you just about the lowest-life piece of shit it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter. But what I really resent, Doc, what really annoys me, what really puts me in a bad place right now, is being used as your murder weapon. Jim Forrestal hired me to find out if somebody was trying to kill him; and, like everybody, I told him he was crazy. Then I wind up helping the guy who wanted him dead make that happen. Funny, huh? Ironic, even.”
I lifted my arm from the table and leveled the nine-millimeter at Bernstein’s head.
“Probably a tactical error on your part, Doc,” I said, “making a murderer out of me.”
Maria reached over and touched my shoulder, gently. “Nathan—don’t do it.”
“Don’t tell me I’ve convinced you that the doc, here, has been a bad boy….”
“Yes you have. I believe he’s been a very bad boy indeed. If you leave this to me, Nathan, I’ll handle it. The government will handle it, clean up their mistake—discreetly, but decisively.”
I shook my head. “Can’t do that, baby—but here’s what I will do. I’ll take the doc into custody right now—citizen’s arrest, if you will, of a war criminal.”
“All right,” she said guardedly. “But what then?”
“Then you and I, Maria, will hand his ass over to Chief Baughman of the Secret Service. I’ll tell Baughman my story and you’ll corroborate it. What do you say, baby?”
But she didn’t answer; she didn’t have a chance to.
Bernstein lurched across the table with a savage suddenness and in less than an instant his hands latched onto my fist, which clutched the nine-millimeter, swinging the gun’s muzzle away from himself, one of his hands tightening around the trigger and trigger guard and the gun went off, in Maria’s direction.
The bullet caught her in the forehead and I saw the terrible immediate emptiness in the dark blue eyes as the back of her head emptied in a horrible spray of red and gray and white, and I screamed in horror and reflexively loosened my grip on the gun, for a fraction of an instant, and then she had gone backward in the chair, sprawled onto the floor, vacant eyes staring up at the ceiling, red spreading in an awful pool on the linoleum, and the nine-millimeter wasn’t in my hand, anymore.
Bernstein was seated across me, and now the nine-millimeter was in his hand, and leveled at me…. Only he didn’t shoot.
“Sit down, Mr. Heller. Relax.”
Slowly, I sat back down.
“There are advantages to knowing the ways of the human mind,” he told me calmly. “If I had struggled with you for this weapon, I might be dead now. But by helping you squeeze the trigger on the lovely … late … Nurse Selff, I created the only circumstance that would cause you to loosen your grip on that gun, however momentarily.”
I said nothing, wondering why I was still alive.
“You’re wondering why you’re still alive, aren’t you, Mr. Heller? Maybe I’d like a few moments to gloat. You certainly subjected me to enough humiliation.”
“Gloating can be dangerous.”
The dazzling white smile flashed in his pale handsome face. “Yes. Look where it led you. Now you’ve helped me kill two people. We make quite a team. Or I should say, ‘made.’”
“Better kill me with the first shot.”
The scorched odor of cordite was mingling with the smell of blood. I didn’t dare look at her, afraid of what the rage might make me risk; I needed just the right opportunity….
“I appreciate the friendly advice, Mr. Heller. I must admit, you displayed a remarkable ability to gather disparate information and form an unlikely, albeit largely accurate, whole. There are tiny aspects you’ve misunderstood, or gotten incorrect—but yours is an extraordinary, if limited, intellectual capacity.”
“Fuck you, you sick bastard.”
“You were right before—I’m not a Nazi. I was a party member only because it was a political necessity; all of us, von Braun and the rest, were ushered into the SS only as a formality … I wore the uniform a mere handful of times, at official functions.”
“Too bad. I bet you looked spiffy as hell. What else did you do as a political necessity? Suck off Adolf?”
The psychiatrist shook his head. “What a sad, pathetic man you are. Do you really think it was my choice to see Jew and Russian prisoners treated as subhumans? But once these creatures were marked for death, their destinies decided by those above me, why not use them for research, for the furtherance of science, and medicine? Why not give these pitiful martyrs some purpose for having lived and died, some meaning to otherwise meaningless existences? The things we discovered, because of having disposable specimens, will make life better for all the rest of us, and our children, and their children.”
“You should be getting that Nobel Prize in the mail any day now.” I grinned at him, and it unsettled him, I co
uld see. “You’re trying to figure it out, aren’t you?”
“Figure what out, Mr. Heller?”
“How to stage this. How to kill me. It’s got to look right to your superiors. If they think you murdered Maria and me to cover something up, you’ll have some fancy explaining to do. I mean, there’ll be suspicions about Forrestal’s convenient exit, already. How do you explain two corpses in your kitchen?”
His mouth formed something that was half smile, half sneer. “Maybe the bodies won’t be in my kitchen. Maybe you’ll drag Nurse Selff out to my garage and put her in the trunk of my car.”
I nodded at the wisdom of this. “Yeah, then you could shoot me, push me in there, dump us both somewhere. Maybe make it look like a murder/suicide … lover’s quarrel. Not bad for a beginner, Doc.”
Bernstein stood. Gestured at me with the gun. I came around the table, on the side where Maria wasn’t, and he stood facing me, leveling the gun at my chest, maybe eight inches separating us.
“You know, Doc, you may know a lot about the human mind, but you don’t know jack shit about guns.”
“I know how to squeeze a trigger.”
“Not with a broken finger you don’t.”
And I grabbed the muzzle of the nine-millimeter and twisted it, hard; his howl of pain as his trigger finger broke, jamming against the metal trigger guard, was music to my ears. But he hadn’t let go of the weapon, so I jammed the slide back.
Then his hand loosened and I snatched the gun away as he fell to his knees, clutching his hand, the finger bent at an impossible angle.
“You see, the Browning nine-millimeter is a recoil-operated weapon, Doc. Everything has to be locked together for it to fire, everything has to be lined up perfectly—kind of like the human brain.”
By grabbing the nine-millimeter’s slide and pushing it back, I’d made a jammed weapon out of it. So I slapped its magazine, racked the slide and the weapon was good as new again. Ready to fire. But I had a better idea.
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