The Whisper of the Axe

by Richard Condon

  “Oh, yeah?” Mr. Palladino said. “Yeah? Well, you’re a lot dopier-looking, so whatta you think of that?”

  “It must be the rented trunks,” Bart said.

  23

  April 1971

  Bart and Enid had a very nice time on the ship to Hong Kong. They took the ship in case there was going to be any routine surveillance by the agency. A sea voyage looked a lot more like a recuperative necessity than a plane trip. There was a good crowd aboard and Enid won an alarm clock for filling out the most correct answers to a zoology quiz that the steward had slipped under their door. They had perfect weather and the chance to play a blissful amount of bridge and to really catch up on movies.

  After four days of shopping in Hong Kong, an island that is really the world’s biggest cut-rate department store, Bart left Enid for a few days to visit his old friend, Lieutenant General Franklin M. Heller on Taiwan. The Agency’s de-briefings in recent years had cured her psychotic loneliness. He booked into the Park & Green House Hotel in Taipeh where a telephone message from General Heller was waiting for him. On the first night he went out to the Heller villa, happy to eat so well again.

  In Bart’s honor, as a Maryland man, the General had flown in a signal Maryland meal of black bean soup cooked with veal and seasoned with sherry. They had diamond-back terrapin from Crisfield, which was almost as rare as hummingbird steak and with a wonderful flavor.

  They ate oyster pie and crab cakes made with just the right amount of hard-boiled eggs and parsley, and ham slices that were striped red and green from having been stuffed with a mixture of chopped watercress, kale, cabbage sprouts and green garlic leaves wilted in ham liquor and then boiled in a cloth bag. General Heller said proudly that the whole meal had arrived from Andrews Air Force base that morning.

  After dinner they settled down with some good Cuban cigars and a bottle of Pelisson cognac. Bart said, “I’m leaving the agency, Frank. I just can’t hack it.”

  Heller belched. “The knee?”

  Bart nodded. “I’ve decided to go into politics. I’m going after the Senate seat in Maryland next year. Uncle Herbert is talking to the State Committee right now.”

  “You’ll be a fine senator, Bart.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But it takes a lot of money.”

  “Yes, it does. For openers we’re going to have to spread about a million six around the state among the boys. Old man Murray was offering nine hundred thousand so Uncle Herbert said, what the hell, we’ll just double that.”

  “He knows.”

  “He knows how to make things stick. But the fact is that was just for openers. I’ll still have the cost of the campaign and some sweeteners for the National Committee before I ever get up to Election Day. And that’s why I’m here.”

  “I see.”

  “I’ve made an arrangement with a New York organization, and with the Haitian government to find them a supply of raw opium. It will be processed into Number Four in Haiti and the New Yorkers will market it throughout the fifty states. So the fact is, I am here to ask you to ask the family here if they will sell me the opium I’ll need.”

  “Of course they will, Bart. I think I can tell you that right now. How much do you want?”

  “Ten tons to start. F.O.B. here or in Hong Kong for delivery to Haiti by Southern Air Transport.”

  The General made a note in a black loose-leaf book. “You want to talk price?” he asked.

  “New York wants to handle that.”

  The General seemed to study Bart then, his eyes far back in the dark pouches that surrounded them like catcher’s mitts. “I see,” he said.

  “But ten tons is just the opening order,” Bart said quickly, “so all this could run into a lot of money so we can’t fault him for that.”

  “Perfectly all right.”

  “Can you have someone contact him in New York?”

  “I’m due for some Stateside time myself.”

  “Well—great!” Bart gave the General Mr. Palladino’s address and telephone number. “When can you see him? He wants me to stay in Hong Kong until it’s settled.”

  “Actually, I can head out of here tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be at the Hotel Peninsula with Enid.”

  Mr. Palladino and General Heller haggled for some time over price but it stayed at $6,000 a kilo. They agreed that a 50 percent deposit of $27,272,727 was just and necessary and that the rest of the money would be paid on delivery to Haiti. Mr. Palladino wrote the deposit check on the Surrey & Berkshire National Bank, in Zurich, which was owned by the Mucelli Family. While General Heller put the check in his wallet, Mr. Palladino began to apply the lock on Bart. “You know Simms long?” he asked.

  “God, yes,” General Heller said, adjusting his corset so that it didn’t cut so much into his waist. “Bart is one of my dearest friends. I’ve known him since about the day he arrived in Asia. That must be three years ago; about the spring of sixty-eight.”

  “Then he is a pal of yours?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Look—you and me are in a tricky business. Simms isn’t really in this business if you know what I mean. You know what we’re up against. It’s a tricky thing, this business. I mean—I certainly hope and trust you and me will be doing business for a long time. I mean—you are the source and I am the merchandiser. We have to depend on each other to make the good times roll, if you know what I mean. But, in a certain way, I mean where does that leave him—you know?”

  “I see,” General Heller said.

  “I think, like we have the right to have a handle on him. He is free and clear. We are involved. We are the producers. What is he? Just that he is free and clear. I can’t even get a tape on him.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Well—I think in terms of an obligation. I’m a Sicilian, you might have guessed. He has a sister. This sister is out there with him now. Maybe you know her. I can see where we would have a lock on him if maybe the sister was kidnapped or something out there and he had to come to us for help to get her back, you see what I mean?”

  “I see.” General Heller’s eyes, deep within their sooty bags, were like the shiny backs of beetles and equally filled with expression.

  “The first thing he does when he gets news like that is he goes straight to you because you are the man on the spot with the connections. When he goes to you, you tell him the whole thing could be my idea because I had talked like that. When he comes to me I’ll tell him the whole thing was your idea because you said your people wanted to have some kind of a lock on him. Then I go out there and we all have a meet. Then we tell him we think we can get the sister back if he signs this paper.”

  “What paper?”

  “A paper which tells how he originated the entire deal, how he is the sole source and operator of this dope combine. And we will tape him.”

  “Are you taping me now?”

  “Of course.”

  “I want the tape.”

  “You got it.”

  “Except you are probably making two tapes.”

  “Why not? Who knows except me? Maybe four. What’s the difference? I don’t have you in writing. You are the source. I need you. How could you be safer?”

  “Keep the tape.”

  “But the thing is—Simms will know we were willing to pick up his sister just as a warning, therefore he will behave himself because he knows if he doesn’t we will really pick her up and maybe hurt her. Therefore, we will have a lock on him.”

  There was a knock at the door. Mr. Palladino gave permission to enter. Angela came in. “Mr. Simms is calling from Hong Kong, Mr. Palladino. He is very upset.”

  “I’ll take it.” He grabbed the phone behind his desk.

  “On two,” Angela said.

  He punched a button. “Hello, kid?”

  Bart’s voice sounded pushed across his sanity into a far corner like a loose piano lurching across the ballroom of a ship during a storm at sea. What came
through was a kind of hoarse scream. “Palladino! My sister! I—Jesus—they kidnapped my sister!”

  Mr. Palladino looked across the desk blankly at General Heller.

  “They kidnapped your sister?” he said incredulously into the phone. “Who kidnapped your sister?”

  “Palladino—I have to talk to Heller. Where is he? Do you know where he is staying?”

  “He’s right here! He’s in my office right now. Just a minute.” Mr. Palladino put his hand over the phone and spoke with awe. “Did you have his sister snatched in Hong Kong?” he asked, his eyes popping.

  General Heller got up and took the telephone. “No,” he said. “This is very bad.”

  “Whatta you mean—bad?” Mr. Palladino was shattered by the idea that the fucking kidnapped sister might have the power to ruin the whole deal. General Heller spoke into the phone.

  “This is terrible, terrible news, Bart,” he said.

  “Frank! I have a letter. It was here on the bed when I got back. I haven’t called the police. I want to do the right thing. I need your help. I need advice.”

  “I’ll turn Asia upside down, Bart. You know you can count on that. And I am going to get out to Hong Kong by some time tomorrow and direct this little operation myself.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

  “Bart! Bart, get a grip on yourself. You’ve got to do a lot of thinking. What did the letter say?”

  Bart was sobbing. He made himself speak. “It said—WE HAVE KIDNAPPED YOUR SISTER WAIT WHERE YOU ARE.”

  “I think you must inform the police immediately,” the General said. “I’ll be at my desk in Taipeh in two days and in the meantime my people there who are THE people there will be on the other end of this phone in ten minutes and they’ll really stir up a storm.”

  Bart had hung up. Heller turned his moleskin-wrapped eyes on Palladino. He said, “My people have been at this kind of thing longer than you people have but I am almost certain that they didn’t do it. But—if I were a realistic man I would think, from the way you talked before his call, that you did it.”

  “I wish I did it but I didn’t know how to organize it out there,” Mr. Palladino said. “But you’re gonna have a very tough job convincing me and him that you didn’t do it.”

  The two men sat silent for some time. Then Heller said, “An American woman is kidnapped in Hong Kong. There could be two reasons. The obvious one would be that she was taken for ransom. But if the reason had to do with opium, then some entirely new organization has sprung up which I don’t know about. And, if so, then the new people took Bart’s sister to tell him not to do business with us. But neither reason is likely. The Simmses haven’t got the money to make a ransom interesting and I am the source. No one else has a source. The others are all wholesalers and dealers working out of Hong Kong and they don’t want any boats rocked.”

  Bart flew from Hong Kong to San Francisco to Washington, then took a taxi directly to Langley where he asked to see the Director of Special Operations, Brom Keifetz. He pleaded for the agency’s help.

  Keifetz seemed shocked by the news. The agency would do everything in its power to get Enid back but he urged that Bart seek the help of General Heller and the Kuomintang families because their influence with the Asian criminal cartel was total.

  “I know that,” Bart said. “But if Heller and the Taiwan people took her, then the agency’s influence with them is total. The agency is the source of everything they have.”

  “I am going to put the entire thing to our analysts and see what they come up with. You look terrible, Bart. Are you going to be able to get back to Hong Kong?”

  “Yes. I’ll be at the Peninsula.”

  Bart felt as if he had died. He had taken four downers since finding the letter but they changed nothing. The fear was on him that someone might hurt Enid. Keifetz gave him a government first-class travel voucher to save him a little money on the trip back to Hong Kong and called for a car to take him to the airport. He and Bart shook hands and Keifetz was able to smile at him sincerely.

  24

  March–April 1971

  Senator Karp had that inner vision of gifted politicians. He was able to smell who was going to have the power. He never questioned what he sensed, he just moved toward it and did his best to surround it with service and friendship. When he met Agatha Teel on the Presidential Commission to Stabilize Taxation Security Through Added Fixed Charges for the District of Columbia, he sensed the overwhelming attraction of power and moved in to cement a friendship. Teel had uses for all senators, so she welcomed him aboard.

  For four years she had been building up the values of her soul food salon at her expanded brownstone in New York. Every Thursday night she entertained, by invitation, a small, widening list of people whose places in the national and metropolitan order had grown more and more glittering. The Thursday night invitation to Teel’s had come to have the highest social value because one never knew who one might meet there but one knew that whoever one did meet there would be able to do one some considerable good. Every Thursday night Teel just “cooked for the folks,” in her emeralds or saphs: people from the arts, very oral, always eating or talking. The arts were Hollywood if one could say Visconti was Hollywood; or Russian, if Nureyev ever was really Russian. One Thursday evening a (filled) belly dancer arrived from Iran because the Shah could not or would not make it. The arts were the bait at the beginning but, as time went on, Teel’s regulars were mainly White House staff, Pentagon high brass, key committee chairmen from The Hill, most of the best of the Senate who were still able to walk, FBI executives, New York police inspectors, National Guard colonels and generals and the overcommunications industry.

  Karp became a regular. He was impressed deeply by the small and large pools of money and power that bubbled all around Teel. Why, the woman was a wonder! She didn’t fool around with getting you things wholesale, he told his (elderly) secretary, “she goes out and gets it for you free.” Senator Karp had no idea that the new Lincoln he was driving had been stolen for Teel from a depot in Terre Haute, Indiana. He tried to repay her, here and there and now and then, with fresh information which he thought she might like to know.

  “A CIA man is going to file for the Senate in Maryland shortly,” he said one night after he had outstayed the others at a Thursday cook-out.

  “No kidding? How come?”

  “His uncle is Herbert Ryan Willmott.”

  “I didn’t think Herbert had that kind of money for a nephew. Say, that’s quite a connection—the CIA and politics. Was he CIA a long time ago?”

  “Hell, no. Right now. He ran Air Opium for them in the Golden Triangle.” Teel was sharp. She didn’t miss much. Her reading on Karp now was that Simms had him scared shitless and that he was really trying to back into some way to do Simms in. Some day it would be useful to know why, she thought.

  “Well, fascinating,” she said. “I’d like to help him all I can.”

  “Help him?”

  “Maryland is a border state. There’s lots of black layers between the white layers on that cake. Maybe I can get the brothers to give him a hand. When the time comes.”

  “Well—frankly—Simms won’t need it. He’s spread more than a million and a half around with the boys all over the state so he’s got the nomination in his pocket. Since he has more of that kind of money, that will settle the election, too.”

  “Where does the money come from?” Teel asked playfully. “I’d say that’s a whole lot for a government employee to be spending.”

  “You could be right,” Karp said. “But he’s no government employee anymore. He quit the job and took off with his twin sister for Hong Kong. Maybe that’s where he keeps the money. It’s his old stamping ground, you know. That kind of money has to come from somewhere off-limits.”

  Teel eased Karp out of the house and settled down on the fur rug in the bathroom with her feet propped up on the tub to have a good think. She liked the opportunity of the combination of a CIA man
who would be a senator because of big, new money. If he was going into the Senate the CIA would see the opportunity too. What was good for them was good for Teel, if not the reverse. Then too, there had to be somebody else standing far, far back of Simms, somebody who knew they could get something back if they put that kind of money up. It made Simms all that much more valuable to Teel. This Simms cat could be a great big power station if she could get a lock on him. She settled down to thinking quietly about what kind of lock.

  The People’s Republic of China allowed Hong Kong to be called a British Crown Colony, but China controlled the unloading of every ounce of food Hong Kong ate and, until China had given permission to build the reservoir, China had controlled every drop of water imported into Hong Kong because the territory had no water of its own. The managers and the labor force, rich and poor, knew that they were living by the sufferance of the giant next door. Therefore, the real—if unofficial—resident governor of the People’s Republic Crown Colony was a Mr. T’ai-shan, the Chinese government’s security forces representative.

  He was based in the Bank of China, an arsenal of small arms and grenades, which had a four-month supply of rice on hand in case of siege. This building stood on the near corner of Statue Square across Jackson Road from the Hong Kong Cricket Club ground. The Bank of China, which was in charge of all Communist financial affairs and exchange control in Hong Kong, symbolized China’s chief source of foreign exchange, 50 percent of the total obtained from the world, amounting to $800 million a year, and explained why the People’s Republic allowed Hong Kong to exist as a British Crown Colony.

  The bank guards wore carbines across their shoulders and had disciplined military bearing. Somewhere in the building were the anonymous offices of the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam. The Bank of China was China’s party and diplomatic headquarters in Hong Kong as well as its financial and espionage center. On behalf of Peking, Mr. T’ai-shan also controlled the movements of Hong Kong operations (for informational, and even financial, reasons) such as gold smuggling, opium and heroin traffic, organized crime like the Five Passports operation, and gambling. Despite dozens of daily preoccupations, Mr. T’ai-shan was a wholly amiable man who enjoyed the violence of power.