A Death in Geneva

by A. Denis Clift

  The maid emerged to answer a gentle knocking at the door, the security guard, a few whispered words. “Hairdresser, signora.”

  “Oh . . . lovely. Well, Mr. Sweetman, the curtain falls on my bedraggled head. I don’t envy you, and I do hope that you are as capable as you look. . . . Helicopters terrify me.” Her eyes were wide; she had taken one of his hands. “This morning at Malta’s airport I saw two small children standing, gripping their father’s hands, enthralled by the sight of a bristly, noisy helicopter preparing to take off—those terrifying blades. We’re a resilient bunch, aren’t we? The young aren’t afraid. If only we could crossbreed courage and curiosity with greater love and humanity.”

  “I’m afraid you’re dealing with oil and water there, Mrs. Starring.”

  Still keeping a firm grip on his arm, she accompanied him to the door. “That precisely is my hairdresser’s problem. Do you know Italy? Your face says ‘no’—neither do I, and I want to know. A lady friend is going to show me one day—Ancona, Ravenna, Verona, Vicenza, Venice. You are invited.”

  “I’ll leave a couple of numbers with the front desk for Mr. Starring’s secretary. You’re a lovely lady, Mrs. Starring, not my place to say so. Thanks for your time today.”

  “My time? Ha ha. I thank you. You’re the one who is doing the important work, and,” she released him, “if you can’t do it in Italy, in two weeks, we have the return to the States on Tommie’s favorite toy, the flagship Octagon.” She followed him a step into the hall, watched him bypass the elevator and disappear at a silent lope down the hotel stairs.

  Like other American wars of the twentieth century, Vietnam and the U.S. military adjustments that followed had produced new bonds among the world’s fraternity of warriors, firmest among them within the secret societies of special forces—contingency planning, training—bonds based on formal responsibility and personal respect and admiration. Ze’ev Shostak greeted Sweetman with an expressionless nod and firm handshake, showed him into the worn, windowless interior of his cover air-shipping office tacked onto the side of a freight hangar on one extremity of Rome’s Ciampino Airport. Shostak was with Israel’s General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, part of the antiterrorist network his nation continued to build throughout the world, with the dual assignment of monitoring Italy and contributing to the security force’s responsibility for El Al flights transiting Ciampino.

  A message from Fisker via double-link communications in Jerusalem had alerted the Israeli to Sweetman’s coming. Shostak was eight years Sweetman’s senior; from the lines in his face he could as easily be twice those years. The U.S. experience in war could be studied in its separate chapters. For Israel, the first chapter of its history as a nation had begun almost forty years ago. The fighting had continued and would continue, he knew, long beyond the contributions of his lifetime. Israel—smashed schools, the broken forms of schoolchildren, including his own—was the eternal target. He was part of the shield. Any human being, any ship, aircraft, or vehicle moving to or from Israel was the target. With his expertise in the terrorist’s ways—the training, methods of attack, the flow of arms, false documents, laundered money, and laundered killers—Shostak was part of the shield.

  Together they reviewed the patterns of ingress and egress that terrorists on the attack in Switzerland, or using that nation as a sanctuary, had developed over the years. In clipped, carefully chosen words, the Israeli provided a neatly catalogued review of terrorist developments in Italy and the region, dwelling in particular on the theft of NATO munitions, given its implications for Israeli security. He tapped a wall-mounted air route map of the Mediterranean with a one-meter metal ruler.

  “Based on what has been pieced together so far, really just monitoring what you have underway with the authorities here, I believe we can anticipate a new base of operations . . . very special mines, and unless they are just to be discarded, a new base of operations specializing in their use. We have tracked the shipment to Naples. They could be enroute to Sicily, Palermo perhaps, could be enroute to Greece, to Syria, possibly Libya.

  “If they have these mines, they want shipping. Cyprus would have them at our throats, but they know that we know that. By the time you are out here”—the tip of the ruler was on Crete, jerking along the coast from Iraklion to Khania—“you are already at a point where the Mediterranean is so broad that you would have to mount a major seaborne expedition—really, beyond any known group’s capabilities—unless you are content to hunt the Aegean.” The ruler continued west. “They might be going here. These little islands, Malta, the historic choke point, but unless Maltese are actually in on the planning, a most unlikely prospect, there is not much cover for an extranational terrorist operation.”

  During their brief Rome meeting, Sweetman was to make a deep, extremely favorable impression on the Towerpoint chairman. A week later, Starring recounted the conversation to Oats Tooms on the owners deck of the Towerpoint Octagon in the Grand Harbor. The agent had made no promises, but he had shown confidence, the mind of an expert. He had told Starring that people too often magnify the skill and operations of the terrorists, that they are criminals, nothing more, that they leave a trail of clues like every other criminal.

  “A powerful man, Oats; he gave the impression he wanted Connie’s killers physically in his hands, to wring the life out of the bastards there and then.” Starring picked up the deck telephone, rang Sullivan, and dictated a message to the White House, let the president know he thought he had a good man on the job.

  Tooms had just returned from his hastily arranged trip to the United States, and reported to Starring that key pieces were falling neatly into place. They would be set for crew, set for gear, vehicles, habitat, and full political support from the Chesapeake Bay research community. “They snapped at it faster than a blue can hit cut bait. Research money is scarcer than hens’ teeth. The folks back there are half starved, a mite overwhelmed by your generosity. And, best yet, our mermaid, Leslie Renfro—you remember, the reception a few days back—and her partners, two good young divers, have taken the research crewing offer.”

  “Confirmed? Superb work, Oats.”

  “Confirmed.” He checked the calendar on his watch. “Today’s the eleventh of June. They’ll be tying up a few loose ends and should be aboard by the sixteenth or seventeeth. If the Maltese tugboat and yard unions will oblige, we’ll already have the habitat swung aboard and set to work.”

  “When did the Pacer arrive?”

  “She’s in French Creek, over yonder, came in Friday. We’ve been promised action by the middle of the week.”

  Starring went to the rail, studied the distant, distinctive, hollow-box fantail of the long, clean-lined trans-oceanic barge carrier Towerpoint Pacer. The canvas-shrouded habitat cylinder was barely visible aboard one of the big ship’s barges. “I wonder what the Russian trawlers must have radioed when the Pacer went by?” The corners of his eyes wrinkled in amusement. “I hope, my friend, they reported a dangerous new development on their hands, a strategic plot, new missile, new size, new shape, on the move in the Med—Goddam ’em, Oats. I can’t help thinking they had a hand in Connie’s murder!”

  His gray eyes stayed fixed on the Pacer. “We’re missing a simple bet, Oats. Her barges are too wide for the catamaran’s well. We’re wasting time, dependent on an overage port, unions who would rather be on the dole than work. We should be free, able to make this transfer with no outside help. We need to build on the barge concept, continue to refine it—some half-width units, pre-position them in multiples, the home ports, and regional transfer hubs.”

  “It’ll be a new chapter, Tommie, but you’re the leader”—Tooms waved a heavy hand toward the Pacer—“taken the technology and built it into the entire fleet.”

  “The rest are deaf and blind, Oats. It’s a tragedy, the rest of the pack. But, mark my words, Oats, no matter how hard any of them try to fail, the United States is too good! Somewhere, some kid, eight, ten, twelve, still a youngster, is beating al
ong in a dingy, the play of that small craft in his hands, his arms, his entire body—some kid a hell of a lot smarter than either you or me who is going to splice it all together, take up where we left off, and send the United States another thousand miles ahead of the pack. Tell me, Oats, who were you dealing with on the bay project?”

  “The fates were with me. I touched down at Dulles, made a few calls, twigged to the fact that Senator Darcy Parsons had a day’s hearings scheduled for the successor to the Corps of Engineers’ Chesapeake Bay model. I chugged over there, Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and settled in for an afternoon and evening with the good senator and a cross section of competing power elites.”

  “Parsons has been helpful, hasn’t he?”

  “More than helpful. The upper bay would never have been dredged—no coal-port expansion. We wouldn’t have had the channel depth for the Partner and the Mayan. Beyond that, you owe him on the entire LNG project. He’s not blind to environment, not by a long sight, but he’s pushed hard for development. He’s made some enemies, is up for reelection this fall and feeling exposed, the reason for the hearings.”

  “How can I help?”

  “By not changing a thing. Your research project is the ticket he’s been looking for. It’ll be all you can do to keep him dry and out of the habitat. That bay, for all its one hundred ninety-five miles, is one of the most fragile ecosystems on the entire globe, shallow and vulnerable. And, even though it’s been studied to near-exhaustion, the data is never up to snuff when a new problem comes along. The bay stays under a magnifying glass twelve months out of the year. The Federal boys and girls are obsessed with the bay. Why? Because they swim there; they boat there; they eat its catch.

  Tooms helped himself to an ale from the tray, just delivered. “Sometime back, we had the Kepone scare, down around the James and York rivers. The first, you remember, wiped out the blues, the striped bass and rocks, wiped ’em off the table—carcinogens, raised hell in the gentry’s minds about everything else, turtles, oysters, shad, catfish.

  “Each year, there’s a new scare. Last year, the menhaden, alewives ran into trouble. The spotter planes went up for the purse seiners; the schools weren’t there. Then, they showed up, millions and millions dead, stinking up twenty miles of shoreline. The cry went up again. ‘The Bay is dying,’ and the cry spread: ‘Keep Starring and his goddamned ships out of here—too many ships, too much shore runoff, too much, too much.’ Well, there had been an oxygen imbalance that had caught the menhaden at the wrong time. The bay was healthy enough, and this year those skippers stand to get rich.

  “But, this spring, they’re at it again. A research team on the upper bay has discovered, or rediscovered since we’ve been finding them for the past decade, different traces of chemical compounds, polynuclear aromatics, and the name alone has whipped up a whole new wave of fear—a wave that has come splashing down around the good Senator, steamy politics.”

  “Environmental, EPA, his opponent the most vocal?”

  Tooms growled affirmatively, lit a cigarette. “In the lead, but not alone. Wading into the middle of all of this, I laid it on the line. I told the folks that if they were worried about your new tankers, it was time to dispel some of those worries, that they didn’t have to believe me, you’d help to prove it for them, and prove it now. I told them proof costs money, plenty of it, that you were set to underwrite an across-the-board subsurface, surface, atmospheric objective research program led by an international team, with a full and open invitation to each of the marine research institutes to participate over the course of two seasons, and to share in all data.

  “Well, Tommie, a lot of fleas started hopping toward this hound’s back.” Tooms swatted at a fly buzzing around his calves. “I invited their nominations, said we’d be prepared to accommodate them aboard the Octagon this August first, and I suggested that we get together the following morning to share some thinking on the best public presentation of their institutes’ roles in the project. At that point, Darcy Parsons’s smile was only a mite larger than the one you’re wearing now.”

  “You’ve done well, my friend. Those taxiboats dart around the harbor like water bugs, don’t they?” Starring gave a wave to the passengers of the dghajsas passing beneath the Octagon’s bow. He brought their conversation to an end, crossed to the door of his suite. “See to it that I have an early meeting with our young team of divers. I do remember the girl—what was her name?

  “Leslie Renfro.”

  “That’s right.” The door closed. Tooms stretched, rubbed the trans-Atlantic fatigue from his face, took a fresh ale, and headed to his cabin.

  Leslie Renfro placed three telephone calls on June 10, the first to Oats Tooms to confirm that she, Head, and Tonasi would sail with the Towerpoint Octagon. The second was to Smith & Kalkara Commercial Ship Chandlers, Ltd. The third was an unlisted telephone number in Naples; her message, without salutation or identification, was brief. “Xavier is twenty-one. Fishing party Saturday night. Xavier is twenty-one.” That weekend, the Matabele left harbor to keep a 4:00 A.M. rendezvous with the Palermo faction.

  On Monday, June 13, the Matabele motored to the chandler’s wharf to take aboard four twenty-man, self-inflating life rafts, paid for in cash. They were heavy, each packed into a hard, white fiberglass cylinder two meters long, sealed with breakaway banding, the most modern shipboard rescue equipment in Malta. The ketch again left Valletta for the privacy of the Gozo anchorage.

  The false bulkhead was dismantled, reopening the forecastle, the crates knocked apart, the boards taken ashore, smashed and burned in several small, separate fires under cover of daylight. The gunmetal-black-and-bronze shapes, still half swathed in protective packing, were winched up by the jib halyard, from the cabin floor, through the forward hatch, each placed in a separate life-raft container. The length and circumference of the cylinders were right, but the fit imperfect. Strips of the rafts and pieces of the crating which had only partially burned were exhumed and retrieved from the beach. When the cylinders were resealed with metal bandings the shapes were packed tightly inside. Additional hours slid by. The three carefully hand-painted the identification—FRAGILE—SCIENTFIC INSTRUMENTS—RENFRO RESEARCH—on each cylinder and tagged them and a metal sea chest for transfer to the catamaran. When the Matabele returned to Marsamxett Harbor two days later, the white cylinders were on deck as before, carefully lashed. They were much heavier now, sixty kilograms each.

  Acrid diesel exhaust from the idling engine of the Towerpoint Octagon’s workboat hung in the still harbor air as the gear was transferred from the ketch. Diving equipment, clothing, and personal belongings, such as they were, were packed in new, blue nylon duffels, with names already stenciled in gold, a gift from Starring.

  Leslie Renfro was below reinspecting the ketch from stem to stern, cuddies, lockers, the bilge, and engine spaces—clean. She blotted the film of sweat on her temples and upper lip. “The yard is expecting one month’s storage in advance; you have it?” Tonasi touched his hip pocket, nodded. They moved out into the cockpit, stood close together, their words masked from the workboat crew by the deep gurgle and sputtering of the engine outtake. “There should be no questions. The yard has been told that an Italian diving club is chartering the ketch for the summer. The club should arrive to take her in two weeks; her documents have already been forwarded to the club’s officials. Remember that, a diving club, nothing more. I will send this crowd back to pick you up in three hours.” She crossed into the workboat, which pulled away and threaded its way back out through the yacht basin to the Grand Harbor.

  Tooms led the way along the Octagon’s main deck, guiding his discoveries into Starring’s suite. They were a fine-looking trio, young, tanned, trim, the men well muscled, each wearing one of the new blue windbreakers with a circular patch on the left breast showing the contours of the Chesapeake Bay in pale blue with the yellow Towerpoint habitat superimposed, the words CHESAPEAKE DIVEQUEST INTERNATIONAL arching across the top, and RESEARCH,
KNOWLEDGE, PRODUCTIVITY along the bottom.

  “Sit down, my friends; consider this ship your home. Welcome! You are honored guests and partners in what I know will be a thoroughly rewarding adventure.” He watched them absorb the surroundings, oiled oak paneling extending from the deck to the rub rail halfway up the bulkheads, met by a robins-egg-blue silk wall covering, richly hung oils and wall sculptures, illuminated by recessed lighting.

  “I have been careful to be correct with this ship. She is, after all, a working ship; I’d like to show you.” He led the way to a semicircular bannister, its newel a white-robed maiden, face averted, bearing an earthen water urn, the railing curving down to the next deck. He stood aside, inviting them to take the lead. “When I was very young, my father traveled to Europe each summer. The family went with him, always on a French ship, at my mother’s insistence.”

  The stairway opened onto an interior, bordered garden, trimmed in pink marble, with a centerpiece bronze dolphin spouting water into a bronze sea scallop shell. “We’re on the second deck now; you’ll get your bearings. For years, we sailed on the Ile de France, a magnificent four-stacker, clumsy exterior. Then we sailed the Normandie, a masterpiece of naval architecture. The trans-Atlantic ships were still climbing toward their peak of glory. The Normandie, Oats will know this, had medals struck for each of her passengers, commemorating her new record, medals loaded into her holds before she left France on her first run! There was pride then, confidence. She was brilliantly engineered, clean lines—a tennis court between her funnels.

  “Now,”—he gestured around him, the oiled teak floors, mirrored walls with cascading crystal wall chandeliers—“we cut away a section of the main deck. This saloon is two-decks high—but, enough. I am departing for the United States later this afternoon. Nothing can be more important to me than your work this summer. Tell me, how have you been doing since your arrival?”