Badger Games

by Jon A. Jackson

  “How long did you wait before you sent someone to find him?” Joe asked.

  The colonel shrugged. “Where would we send an agent? And to whom?”

  “Um,” Joe said, and held up a finger. “If I followed you, Ostropaki was not in the Lucani?”

  “He was a prospect, but,” the colonel said with a shrug, “I don’t think any of us really seriously considered bringing him in. He wasn’t … not to put too fine a point on it, one of us. I mean a federal agent. We all of us are in this for essentially the same reason, and somehow that didn’t include Theo. But I interviewed him in Athens, later on, when things got going so well, to get an idea of his attitude. I liked what I heard and saw—he seemed to share our feelings about the failings of the system—but there wasn’t any compelling reason, really, to open up to him, to expose ourselves. You see? And then he was gone.”

  He sat back and gestured with his hand, opening it with a little wave, as if releasing a bird.

  Helen did not see. “You mean, because he wasn’t an American? But it was okay to use him … sort of like … ?” She gestured at Joe and, by implication, herself.

  The colonel thought for a long moment, then said, “We don’t know if authority—the agencies we work for—is aware of us. I expect that someone may be curious why certain things happen that seem to have no firm explanation—disappearance of various figures, of goods. We try to provide adequate, plausible scenarios, usually premised on the notion that it’s internal, that crooks are ripping off each other, hijacking, protecting their respective turf. That’s about as far as we can go. An action has to be explained, you see, and it seems there is always some rival organization at hand who can be blamed. But at some point, someday, someone is bound to notice that quite a few events are not substantiated by interrogation of those who were thought to have been responsible. As far as I know it hasn’t happened yet, but we may not be aware of official suspicions if they exist.

  “So far,” he hastened to assure the two, “we haven’t detected even a rumor of the existence of the Lucani. Which is at least one reason why we’ve been successful, thus far,” he murmured.

  After a moment, he observed further, in a donnish manner: “The history of the Balkans is rife with secret organizations, of course—the Black Hand, the Brotherhood, and so on. They were generally associated with secret movements of national liberation, revolutionary groups. But it’s something that people are familiar with in that part of the world. In a way,” he mused, “it may have unconsciously inspired our own group. Unconsciously, let me emphasize. We have no political ambitions.” He dismissed any such vagrant thoughts that may have been conjured in the heads of Joe and Helen with a wave of his hand. He seemed a little surprised at the thought, himself.

  “But the point here,” he said, “is that security is Principle One in this kind of activity. Theo Ostropaki was an agent involved in dangerous business. We did not endanger him further, as far as we can tell. Indeed, by keeping him on the outside, as it were, we protected him from … contamination.”

  “Sounds like he got contaminated,” Helen said.

  “Well, we don’t know that, do we?” the colonel said. “That’s a corner where Franko could cast some light. If you find him. But—point two—your situation is not analagous to Theo’s. I, we, initiated a relationship with you, Joe. We saw that your services would be helpful to us and we could be helpful to you. Ms. Sedlacek, your involvement is a consequence of your relationship with Mr. Service.”

  He gazed at her pleasantly enough, but Helen felt that the colonel had barely stopped himself from saying something that might have been less amiable.

  “Wait a minute,” Joe said. “Back up here. First you said that Franko may have known about the Lucani. Then you said that Ostropaki didn’t even know about it. So what’s the prob? Franko is just a nameless source, now missing.”

  “Yes, it’s confusing and mysterious,” the colonel conceded, “but it’s not really a contradiction. It’s possible, from some intimations Ostropaki had made when I interviewed him, that he’d had some notion of the existence of a group like the Lucani. But I concluded that he knew nothing and I didn’t enlighten him. Still … you see, this is where it gets sticky … there was always the possibility that Franko was actually a probe from another agency, one that had heard rumors of the Lucani, and his approach to Ostropaki was part of an internal investigation. Wheels within wheels. I essentially gave up on that notion, especially when Franko began to provide such good information.”

  “And it’s just on the basis of Ostropaki,” Joe said, “that you want us to go to Butte?”

  “Well, you know, there have been some refugees who have shown up in Butte,” the colonel said. “And I know that you two have some connections there, some reason to be there. I thought it serendipitous, and it might be convenient …” He let the idea drift in the air. “There is no very pressing urgency about it, you know. Take your time. At present, things have turned somewhat more positive, politically, in Serbia. As far as we can tell, the NATO war disrupted the drug traffic, as did the revolution that brought down Milosevic.”

  “What is this guy supposed to look like,” Joe asked, “according to Ostropaki?”

  “Theo said Franko was about thirty-one or -two, but he could be much older, maybe as much as forty. He’s about one point seven five meters, weighs about seventy-five kilos or so … say, five-eight or -nine, about one sixty-five pounds. Dark hair, worn medium length, the usual mustache but no beard, no glasses. Dark complexion, brown eyes. Looked like a Kosovar, you might say. Dressed neatly, in the style of those hills. Good sturdy shoes, slacks, a sweater, an old tweed wool jacket. No hat. I mention all this not because he’d still be wearing those clothes, but because it gave him a local look, though you wouldn’t mistake him for a farmer. Theo said he looked like he could be a schoolteacher, maybe, and talked like it. Spoke Serb and the local Albanian dialect well, if not quite like a native, but also English like an American.”

  Joe Service sighed, but said nothing.

  The colonel said, “Thin-lipped, lean face, no prominent cheekbones, dark eyebrows but not particularly heavy, ears small and close to the head, which is round, not elongated, hair close but not dense or wavy or crimped, prominent brow and large, smooth forehead but no widow’s peak. Walks like a city dweller, confident stride, knows where his feet are landing, but doesn’t choose to stride rapidly. That sort of thing?” He raised an eyebrow at Joe.

  “Not very helpful,” Joe said, “and I try not to get too firm an image. By now, he could be limping, or had an ear shot off. Probably no mustache, but maybe a full beard. Who knows? It sounds like, if he’s alive—in Butte—that he was blown but managed to escape.”

  “Not an unreasonable assumption,” the colonel agreed.

  “You said something about Ostro’s notion of what Franko was doing up there,” Helen said.

  “Yes, the agency didn’t buy it,” the colonel said, “and it didn’t amount to much. He thought he was a scholar.”

  “A scholar?” Helen said. “What kind of a scholar? You mean an ethnologist, or something? Some kind of social scientist?”

  The colonel made a slight grimace, almost a frown. “No,” he said, “maybe something more in the way of an amateur, a fellow who is just looking at things, a man of curiosity. I can’t say I bought it, either. I just don’t know. Maybe he was—or is—a bird-watcher.”

  The colonel was amused to observe Helen rolling her eyes.

  Joe was thinking about Butte. It was a city of about twenty-five thousand, he thought, and maybe another five or so in the surrounding valleys who might show up from time to time. He was supposed to hang around and hope to see someone he couldn’t really identify if he did see him.

  “What the heck,” he said, “it can’t be that hard.”

  Frenchy’s Forque

  Joe Service owned property down in the Ruby Valley, thirty-five or forty miles south of the city of Butte, as the eagle flies, fifty by hig
hway. The nearest town was a village called Tinstar. Joe’s property was situated on Garland Butte. The Garland family had ranched a sizable spread there for at least three generations, but the Garlands weren’t there anymore. Old Mrs. Garland, a widow, had died in a tragic run-in with a crazy woman she’d befriended.

  A couple of years before her death, Mrs. Garland had sold a section of her property to a young man named Joe Humann. This was one of Joe Service’s aliases. The turbulence surrounding Joe Service had caught her up, though only a few realized that Mrs. Garland’s death was linked to Joe’s problems.

  Joe Service certainly knew it. He was not big on remorse, but he’d liked Mrs. Garland. She was the best kind of neighbor, helpful but not nosy, rarely to be seen or heard. His chief regret, however, was for his hideaway in the mountains of Montana. It was the ideal retreat, a place he could flee to after his typically hectic forays into the affairs of the mob, in Detroit or Los Angeles or points in between. The colonel had exploited Joe’s unabashed affection for the place when he’d offered the Butte mission. But now, the closer they got to Butte, the less attractive it seemed.

  There had been some excellent moments on the road from Detroit—not a straight road by any means. The weather was good. They had a new vehicle, an SUV that Helen had insisted on buying. Joe had preferred a Toyota 4-Runner, or a Range Rover … but Helen had put her foot down. There was no way she was buying anything but Detroit iron—the very thought! She opted for a powerful Dodge Durango, a take-no-prisoners four-wheel-drive outfit—hardly a useful feature on the interstate. But at least he’d talked her out of the red one. Cops stop red cars at least 50 percent more often than black ones, was his theory. They got one in bottle green, although it was called something else. And, after all, they had driven some “blue highways,” through Wisconsin and Minnesota, and even gotten onto some fairly rough tracks in back country in the Dakotas and eastern Montana … just lollygagging, sightseeing.

  Helen thought that as long as the colonel wasn’t in any hurry, neither should they be. Joe’s initial eagerness to get back to what he called his “Hole-in-the-Wall” had begun to modulate into a classical approach/retreat syndrome by the time they got to the Yellowstone River.

  He discussed the matter with Helen. “The colonel says we’re secure,” he observed, “but what does that mean? Do you trust him? I’m not even sure what we’re supposed to do with this Franko when we catch up to him. As for the Hole-in-the-Wall, the last time I was up there was after that deal in Salt Lake. I was kind of riding a high, you know what I mean? And I was just there for a few hours. It was fine—the place was a mess, the house burned down and all—but the hot pool was nice.”

  Helen had been thinking, too, and especially about the hot pool. It was an idyllic spot, a beautiful little thermal spring just over the ridge from where Joe’s house had been. But her memories of the pool weren’t entirely pleasant. She had been attacked and almost murdered in that pool. In the event, she had overcome her attacker. But it would never be the same. She didn’t know if she could bring herself to plunge into that pool again, certainly not with the same blithe confidence as before.

  She realized that she’d been avoiding thinking about it. It was good that Joe had brought it up. “What are you thinking?” she said. “Just forget about the place?”

  They were in a hotel in a small town in central Montana, an hour or so west of Billings, no more than a three-hour drive to Butte. They were sprawled naked on the queen-sized bed in a room on the second floor. It was the oddest hotel Helen had ever stayed in, or even heard of. It was an old cowboy hotel, they decided. There was a sink and a toilet in their room, but the real bathroom was across the hall. This wasn’t much of a privacy problem: nobody else seemed to be in the hotel. It was clean and decorated in an amusing mélange of cowboy chic and 1920s moderne—cane furniture, Charlie Russell prints on the walls, but art deco slipshade chandeliers.

  The great draw here was clearly the restaurant downstairs. It was reputed to be great, and it certainly had been occupied for one seating at least. Good rack of lamb, excellent wines. They were told that movie stars stayed here when they were filming nearby, which was fairly often. Hunters and fishermen also kept the place booked, but they were just between seasons, it seemed—“Come November you couldn’t get a room here for five hundred dollars,” the desk clerk had claimed. Besides elk hunters, a movie was scheduled in a few months, when Redford was due in town.

  But for Helen’s money, the thing that would bring her back was the massive bathroom with its enormous shower and the sauna. This was as modern as it could be, showers with jets at all angles, heat lamps, great fluffy towels on heated racks, lots of mirrors, and good lighting. She was grateful to the movie stars, if they were responsible for the decoration. The sauna was brilliant, with its aromatic cedar paneling and benches.

  “There’s no place to stay there,” Joe said, idly stroking her back. “I have bad feelings about it. The folks around there may not be so friendly. Maybe we should just avoid it. Find somewhere new. It’d be all right to take a run up there, clean out some stuff I’ve got stashed.” He was thinking about an abandoned mine, above the house site, where he’d stored a few useful things, like money, some guns, and—he had a vivid flash—the desiccated corpse of an unknown man.

  “Hate to give up the hot springs,” he said. “When I was there I took a long soak and didn’t give a thought to the problem of returning, or rebuilding. I was too out of it. There’s some cops around, too …”

  “You mean Mulheisen,” Helen said. “He’s in Detroit.”

  “He knows about the place,” Joe said. “The colonel might be able to head off the other cops, but I don’t think he can do anything about Mulheisen. And there are some local cops, sheriff’s deputies. I’d bet Mulheisen made some good contacts there. They’d sure give him a buzz if they find out we’re back … and they’ll hear, probably within hours. Hell, I don’t even know if we ought to stay in Butte, though it’s not so likely that we’ll be noticed there.”

  There was also a woman in Butte, but he didn’t mention her to Helen. He was pretty sure that Helen had no knowledge of the nurse, Cateyo. She’d been a useful ally when Joe was extricating himself from his problems. He wasn’t eager to encounter her again. He’d made a few promises …

  Helen saw his point about the place, all right. Mulheisen was a real cop, a detective on the Detroit police force. Seemingly a simple, not too bright fellow, just a precinct sergeant, but somehow always in one’s way. “We can find someplace,” she said. An idea occurred to her: “Maybe we could stay here.”

  “You mean rent this room?” Joe thought about it. “It’s too far from Butte, almost two hundred miles. Quite a commute.”

  “How much time do we actually have to spend in Butte?” she asked. She suddenly didn’t have much appetite for this. It had seemed like fun, in the beginning, but now she felt an uncertain dread. Maybe she was picking up Joe’s vibes.

  Joe considered. A few days poking around, maybe another few days following up leads. If they weren’t going to fix up the old spread down in the Ruby Valley, maybe they wouldn’t be spending so much time in Montana, after all. But if not, why had they come? He had plenty of money. Helen was loaded as well. They could go to … South America. He’d never been to South America. Brazil seemed suddenly attractive, maybe Argentina. Buenos Aires? Chile?

  “What about the colonel?” Helen said.

  “Gotta say good-bye to him someday,” Joe said. “Funny, but the farther I get from that guy, the less I look forward to seeing him again. Let’s just bag it … fly to Hawaii.”

  Helen was game. But for some reason, they didn’t go. Neither could be accused of conventional attitudes toward duty, but … perhaps it was nothing more than curiosity. Instead, they wrestled.

  In the morning, they lingered over the remains of their elegant breakfast of omelettes and toast and fruit, gratefully restored from the exertions of the night. At last Joe said, “Well, if we
’re going to find our wandering scholar, let’s do it.” Some three hours later, the fancy Durango swept around a curve coming down off the Home-stake Pass, and the entire Silver Bow Valley opened up before them, a thousand feet below.

  Butte was unlike most cities: from any of its approaches you could see the city laid out across an enormous canvas before you. It sprawled from the mountains in the north down into the valley. A Detroit or a Los Angeles was just endless habitation and industry, stretching into a haze, even when you approached from twenty thousand feet. They were vastly larger cities, of course, and that’s the problem: one can see no end of city. It can seem to be an inescapable trap to its citizens.

  Joe Service considered that one attractive aspect of Butte was that you could see it all in its physical setting, the city in the frame around the canvas. The mountains and highlands on either side, especially the great, craggy ridge of the Continental Divide to the east, which they were now descending. But there was no ignoring the enormous abandoned pit mine, smack in the heart of the town. And now there were extended terraces of a new, active pit.

  The golden dome on Holy Trinity Eastern Orthodox Church gleamed in the sun. The rest of the city sprawled up the great hill, surrounding the monstrous open-pit copper mines. A few old gallows frames—old hoists left over from more than a century of underground mining—also caught one’s eye from the highway, and then the chalk-white towers of Immaculate Conception Catholic church, and beyond that the extensive brick campus of the state technological university—the “School of Mines,” as it was inevitably known.