Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  “It was a terrible movie. Whoever wrote it had the sense to use a pen name. The screenplay was written, it says in great big flaming red letters, by Fred C. Dobbs.”

  It took him two seconds and then he laughed. She looked hurt and petulant. Lime did a Humphrey Bogart snarl: “Liften, nobody putf nuffin over on Fred Fee Dobbf.”

  “I didn’t think you’d get that one. I really didn’t.”

  “Somebody really used Fred C. Dobbs for a pen name?”

  “Scout’s honor.”

  He laughed again. Dobbs was the Bogart character in Treasure of the Sierra Madre—the greedy one who would do anything for gold.

  They took the dishes out to the sink. Lime trapped her against the counter. She gripped his tie and pulled his head down; her tongue was very hot. They left the candles burning, went into the bedroom; Lime sat down and began to unlace his shoes, watching her. Since she disdained underwear she was unclad before he was; she unbuttoned his shirt and pulled him by the hands to the bed. He made love to her slowly and knowingly.

  They shared a cigarette. “Ça va mieux?”

  “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

  “Say it with conviction, darling.” She had a bright hard shiny-eyed look.

  Lime inhaled the smoke fiercely; it made him dizzy. “Yeah,” in a tone laced with anger.

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

  Her feet were tangled in the twisted sheets; she kicked free. “Just hang in there, man.” She disappeared into the loo. Lime lay on his back, belly rising and falling with his breath, smoke hovering around him.

  She came back and sat on the side of the bed and stroked his hair. He said, “I apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “Mein weltschmerz, I guess. I don’t mean to play Hamlet all the time.”

  “You’re going through a bad patch, that’s all. The bombing didn’t help.”

  “You could say that. It didn’t help anybody.”

  “Well what’s the answer to it then?”

  He shook his head back and forth on the pillow. “It’s sheer innocence to believe there’s an answer for every problem. There’s no answer to this one short of eliminating all terrorists on suspicion.”

  “That’s farfetched.”

  “Not really. It’s standard procedure in most of the world. Here we still pretend totalitarian solutions are unacceptable, but we’re learning.” He smiled vaguely. “Revolution doesn’t self-destruct automatically. You have to kill it.”

  “But you’d rather not have to.”

  “I committed something to memory a few years ago. A quote that’s kind of revealing. Verbatim—‘The earth is degenerating, there are signs that civilization is coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are rampant, violence is everywhere. Children no longer respect and obey their parents.’”

  “A Russian bigwig?”

  “Not even close. It’s from an Assyrian tablet that’s about five thousand years old.”

  She came into the bed and snuggled close with her fists together against his chest, one knee hooked over his waist. Her hip was mounded high, her hair spread on the pillow. “My darling Oblomov.”

  “All right.”

  “You’re too cautious, David. You’re a big tragic bear, but it’s tragedy not from what you suffer but from what you don’t feel.”

  “Then you shouldn’t bother with me.”

  “You were born believing in things, but everything you were taught seems beside the point now.”

  “Yes Doctor,” Lime murmured.

  “Nothing really matters, is that right?”

  “That does seem to be the problem, Doctor.”

  “That’s my point,” she said. “It matters to you that nothing matters. That’s the point David—that’s a beginning.”

  MONDAY,

  JANUARY 10

  10:15 A.M. Continental European Time The sky was weak lemon in color and Perdido loomed above the hotel, powder snow blowing off its peak in little gusty clouds. Eleven thousand feet of mountain and nothing to do but ski. The lodge was huge with a heavy-handed massiveness that failed to create the kind of rusticity it was evidently intended to provide. The Germans had built it just last year—the Germans, who built everything in Spain. They had hacked a road up the mountain and built Perdido Spa out of Krupp steel and Hilton plastic, and endeavored to give it the quaint appearance of logs. It was an abomination.

  Liam McNeely stood outside the lodge on a wooden deck the size of a football field, open to the sky. Ordinarily it would be crowded with little tables occupied by lunching skiers but today there were no tourists. Premier Perez-Blasco had shelled out of the Spanish treasury enough to hire Perdido Spa for the duration of President-elect Fairlie’s skiing visit. The tables had been removed and Fairlie’s Navy helicopter squatted there on its skids, motionless rotor blades drooping.

  Fairlie had originally planned to ski here but he had no interest in skiing now—not after the bombing. Yet the Spanish plans were not easily or quickly changeable. Fairlie was waiting here, resting, en route.

  Early this morning Torres, the Foreign Minister, had arrived from Madrid in a black Seat limousine. As Fairlie’s aide-de-camp and chief factotum McNeely had met Torres’s party at the car-park steps and ushered them quickly into the banquet room which the hotel had set aside for Fairlie’s meetings.

  Torres had with him his interpreter and two underlings and a squat brigand named Dominguez who turned out to be the director of the Guardia Civil. McNeely produced the aides and Meyer Rifkind, who was head of the Secret Service detail assigned to Fairlie, and they had all sat down in a little group near one side of the enormous empty room. Stiff and hesitant, as if they were the only people left from a crowded party that had broken up an hour ago.

  But Torres was congenial and they had ironed out the schedule for Fairlie’s visit to Madrid. Dominguez had done most of the groundwork; it remained mainly to coordinate Secret Service operations into the Spanish security arrangements.

  These visits always required intricate and voluminous preparation. The precise time of arrival, the precise spot where the helicopter would land and be met by Perez-Blasco and the civil guardsmen, the motorcade route from helicopter to palace. Dominguez went over the maps for more than an hour with Meyer Rifkind. Here—a stubby finger jabbed the map—Perez-Blasco and Fairlie would make an “unscheduled” stop to pop out of the limousine and shake hands with members of the crowd. Guardianos were clearing the block in advance, screening every storefront and window and rooftop, posting themselves to enfilade the area.

  Here, television cameras would be posted along the boulevard to cover the motorcade. There would be good camera shots of Fairlie and Perez-Blasco when they made a “spontaneous” stop to accept roasted chestnuts from a street vendor.

  It was all contrivance, the game of personal diplomacy.

  A Guardiano would drive the limousine and a United States Secret Service agent would sit beside him on the front seat. Two more, similarly paired, on the limousine’s jump seats facing the dignitaries. Guardianos in their taut uniforms and hard tricorner hats would ride the running boards. Cars ahead and behind would carry security men.

  At three-fifteen the motorcade would arrive at El Pardo palace; Fairlie and Perez-Blasco would dismount, the Guardia would form a flying wedge around them, they would enter the palace with Secret Service agents following in a fan.

  There would be a midafternoon luncheon. Perez-Blasco and Fairlie would share the dais alone; was that acceptable to McNeely? Perez-Blasco would introduce the honored guest—here, a copy of the brief welcoming speech Perez-Blasco would deliver. Then Fairlie would make a brief address; was it possible for Torres to obtain a copy of that now? Then the dignitaries and reporters would be ushered elsewhere; Fairlie and the Spanish chief executive would retire with their aides for private discussions.…

  On cue, Clifford Fairlie came dow
n the wide stairs in his lounging jacket, the one with elbow patches, all smiles; shook hands warmly all around, sat down and chatted.

  The protocols were observed and finally Torres was leaving. They all emerged from the hotel onto the deck and McNeely smiled vaguely at the chopper pilot when they walked past the helicopter toward the steps. The Secret Service men were scanning the corners, the shadows, the mountainside, even the sky; they were paid to do only one thing and they did it professionally.

  Fairlie and Torres and the entourage descended to the pavement. The limousine drew up, Guardianos coming to attention. Later, trying to recall the exact sequence of events, McNeely had a great deal of difficulty sorting out the movements he had seen. The press car drove up behind Torres’s limousine; the aides and guards got inside while Torres and Dominguez said goodbye—this after the usual nonstatements to the press pool: the discussions have been very useful, everything is going smoothly, we look forward to a frank exchange of views in Madrid.…

  Several hotel employees had come along to the edge of the deck to watch. The chopper pilot and copilot were there, smoking cigarettes, looking at their watches, somewhat bored. Now Torres and his people were inside the stretched-out car. It was a vehicle designed for its times. Two-way radios, bulletproof glass, door locks that could be opened only from the inside. In the era of political kidnappings the technology of security was elaborate. A hard glass screen ascended from the top of the front seat and sealed itself shut with a click against the ceiling; Torres, leaning forward in his rear seat, waved and smiled and spoke through the open door before it chunked shut and the stately car slid quietly away down the mountain road.

  The Navy pilots were wandering back to the chopper on the deck when McNeely and Fairlie reached the platform; McNeely later remembered that much. The pool of journalists was dispersing after unsuccessfully trying to pump the President-elect.

  Fairlie was heading for the stairs inside the hotel, the Secret Service agents clustering around like sheepdogs. No, McNeely thought, like barnacles. That was going to try Fairlie’s patience: Fairlie liked room, he liked to spread out, he didn’t like people being in his way. He was a man to whom occasions of solitude were important. He’s going to have to learn.

  McNeely stood on the deck near the helicopter. What if, he thought, and began to envisage a sniper with a high-powered rifle peering through a telescopic sight from one of the high timber patches.… Assassination was always so easy. If a man really intended to murder you there was only one way on earth to stop him: kill him first. And if you didn’t know who he was, didn’t even know of his existence—you had no chances at all.

  Morbid thoughts. It was a place that gave rise to them: the mausoleum atmosphere of the huge empty hotel; the yellow-gray sky with sunlight hardly filtering through; the chill dry breeze, the immutable detachment of the mountain.

  Later he wondered if he had been experiencing a premonition gone slightly awry: some sort of ESP, prescience, an unusual sensitivity to the portentousness of that day. He was never to give it very much credence; after all there was no sniper.

  He turned toward the door, minding the chill, thinking about going into his room for an hour’s work. But solitude was not McNeely’s milieu; he worked best in the midst of noise and confusion. The great empty rooms would depress him and he would only fling himself outdoors again, and so he did not go inside at all.

  Instead he engaged the two chopper pilots in small talk. They were Navy officers—easy to converse with; they had been chosen for their mannerliness and appearance as well as their aeronautical skill. McNeely himself had started building model airplanes at the age of nine and the fascination had never left him.

  “… forty-five-foot rotor. Horsepower? Close to a thou, she’ll cruise at one-thirty. We’ll make Madrid easy this afternoon, hundred and thirty-five minutes, forty-five minutes’ fuel to spare.”

  “Usually they use the Thirteen-Jay for this kind of thing, don’t they?”

  “Usually. But that’s a smaller machine, it hasn’t got the ceiling of this bird.” Anderson spoke with proprietary pride.

  The chopper was a Bell Iroquois, HU-1J, with VIP accommodations for six passengers in comfort; she had the Navy’s blue paint job and stenciled Sixth Fleet markings. McNeely ignored the nibblings of his conscience while he killed nearly an hour chatting with Anderson and Cord about choppers and missions.

  The two pilots were ten-year veterans whose seams and creases were not in their faces but in their worn leather flight jackets. They said “hep” for help and “thank” for think and they talked in a technological jargon that annihilated human communication; they had the kind of minds which McNeely despised in the collective sense—the Silent Sophomority, Muddle Americans—but they were good likable men and McNeely was not a man to let philosophical principle get in the way of human pleasures.

  Guilt finally goaded him toward the papers in his room. He left the pilots on the deck drinking coffee out of thermoses.

  He made the final cuts and changes in the speech Fairlie would deliver this afternoon and then he showered and changed into a gray Dunhill suit and walked along the mezzanine to Fairlie’s room.

  Fairlie was on the phone with Jeanette; he waved McNeely to a chair.

  When Fairlie rang off McNeely said, “My God that’s disgusting.”

  “What is?”

  “All that billing and cooing at your age.”

  Fairlie just grinned. He was in the chair beside the phone in a Madras dressing gown; now, when he began to get out of his seat, he seemed to go on rising for an incredible length of time—a tall multijointed man unfolding himself hinge by hinge.

  They talked while Fairlie dressed: about Perez-Blasco, about Brewster, about the Capitol bombing, about the U. S. Air Force bases at Torrejon and Saragossa and the Navy base at Rota.

  Perez-Blasco was the Messiah, the Judas; the beloved savior of the people, the despot they were learning to despise; the liberal genius, the stupid tyrant; the incorruptible protector, the racketeering gangster; the Goddamned Commie, the Goddamned fascist. He might raise the nation’s standard of living; he might spend everything on palaces and yachts and a numbered Swiss account. “You just don’t know, do you. You just can’t tell. I wish he’d been in office longer.”

  “He could say the same about you.”

  Fairlie laughed.

  McNeely waited for him to knot his tie and then handed him the speech. “Nothing out of the ordinary. One of the standard variations on harmony and friendship.”

  “It’ll do.” Fairlie was looking it over carefully, committing blocks of it to memory so he wouldn’t have to speak with downcast eyes glued to the page. He liked to eyeball his audiences. In this case it hardly mattered; the speech was short and it was in English and at least half the people in the room wouldn’t understand one word in ten.

  “Sometimes,” McNeely said, “I wonder if we really need these damned bases at all. They’re like sores on the earth, they keep festering.”

  “We’re all developing a conscience, aren’t we? This revulsion toward the idea of global power. We’d all like to return to simple times and unload these responsibilities.”

  “Maybe they’re responsibilities only because we think they’re responsibilities.”

  Fairlie shook his head. “I’ve been tempted that way but it doesn’t hold water. It’s an emotional isolationism—anti-militarism. We like to vilify our own military power but you know it’s created a balance of sorts—not very satisfactory, I guess, but at least it’s given us conditions where we’ve got some chance of success negotiating with the Chinese and the Russians. We’re a stabilizing factor, we make our presence felt and I imagine it eases the crises a lot more often than it aggravates them.”

  McNeely replied with enough of a grunt to let Fairlie know he was listening, without interrupting Fairlie’s train of thought.

  “It’s not the power that festers, I think. It’s the inconsistency of its use. You can’t be effe
ctive in foreign affairs without some philosophical direction—otherwise your actions are unpredictable and the other side is going to miscalculate all the time.”

  A knock: it was Rifkind at the door.

  “Something wrong, Meyer?”

  “A little trouble, sir. It looks like the helicopter broke down.”

  McNeely sat up. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Cord explained it to me, sir, but I couldn’t make much sense out of it.”

  McNeely poked an arm into his coat and strode out onto the deck. Cord and Anderson were on top of the fuselage poking into the engine. They had grease all over them.

  “What’s wrong?” McNeely was sharp; time was getting tight.

  “Beats shit out of me,” Anderson mumbled. Then he looked over his shoulder and recognized McNeely. “We started to warm her up, we were going to top up the tanks, and all of a sudden she starts letting go like a banshee. Man what a racket. Didn’t you hear it?”

  Fairlie’s room was at the back; McNeely hadn’t heard anything. He said, “What does it look like?”

  “I ain’t sure. Oil pressure checks out, but she’s sounding like she got no oil in there. Everything scraping. Like sand in the works, you know?”

  “You don’t see anything?”

  “No sir.”

  “How soon can we get another machine up here?”

  The Sixth Fleet was off Barcelona—that was a little more than a hundred miles away. Anderson said, “About an hour, I expect.”

  “Get one.”

  He went back to the suite and reported to Fairlie. Rifkind trailed along and said, “Of course there’s a possibility of sabotage, but right now we don’t even know what’s wrong with the machine.”

  “See what you can find out.”

  “Sir.” Rifkind went.

  Cord arrived to say they had radioed a request to the Fleet and a replacement chopper was on its way. Fairlie checked the time and said to Rifkind, “You’d better call Madrid.”