The Whisper of the Axe

by Richard Condon

  The plutonium was brought from Vermont to the huge triple basement of Agatha Teel’s house in New York in Jonas Teel’s station wagon, in slender, stainless-steel flasks, each holding two and a half kilograms. The flasks were held securely in locked wooden cages.

  Nuclear bombs aside, plutonium is one of the deadliest substances ever known. Breathing it causes certain death. A small amount of it dropped into the air-conditioning systems of the Pentagon, the White House, or the houses of Congress would eliminate American government. Teel placed highest value on her Vermont and New York plutonium stores.

  11

  January 1976

  Teel reached Bart Simms at the Senate office building. There was no delay. He came right on the line.

  “Your sister is coming over to visit me tomorrow and I know how much you want to see her, so why not try to get to my place at about ten fifteen in the morning?”

  The twins clung to each other and wept at the center of Teel’s enormous drawing room. After a while Teel brought Bart some legal papers to sign—she was Bart’s lawyer he explained to Enid—then they all took the papers to a bank at 34 East 34th Street. When the ritual of a safe deposit box was over, Enid and Bart said good-bye to Teel. Teel watched Enid with narrowed eyes as Bart handed his sister into a taxi.

  Bart took Enid to his hotel apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Sixties. They took a shower together, then they got into bed and made love until the late afternoon. After that he dressed her in his pajamas and sent down for some food.

  “You have changed,” Enid said, touching his face. “You have changed so much.”

  “Everything happened the way we planned. I am a senator now. I don’t know where it went wrong. It got confused. I got lost somewhere. The reason I say such ridiculous things is that not much has been real since you vanished.”

  “Before China, when I was here, that is the way it was for me. But everything is too real now. I get frightened. I wish I could go back to how it was then.”

  “We can’t go back.” Bart shuddered. “It is a river. We are downstream. Soon we’ll find the sea.”

  “But real isn’t good, Bart. Everything is too clear and too ugly.”

  “You have changed, too,” he said. “I can hear it.”

  “If only we could have stayed together.” Tears came into her eyes. “We can never be like that again. Not really like that.”

  “Who took you away from me?” he demanded. “Who took you into China?”

  “I can’t tell you that now,” she said. “I’ll tell you some day, I promise. But I can’t tell you now.”

  12

  February 1976

  The triple drawing room, each part having been a single vast drawing room in each of three houses before Teel bought them and knocked them together, was ablaze with jewels, military decorations, white shirt fronts, and the shine of silver wine coolers. Teel had beefed up her Thursday night list. She had brought the Vice-President up from Washington on a flying carpet of blandishments with the new Inspector-General of the CIA. There were Californian, Italian, and French movie queens—all three female. She had lured in the world’s most stultifyingly famous celebrity, the American Secretary of State. There was a prima assoluta and the chief executives of two oil companies. The Russian ambassador, the Spanish ambassador and a chief of state of a central African nation embellished the room. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, decorated like a bulky Christmas tree, dominated the center of the room near the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Senators moved like pickpockets through a stadium crowd. One of them was Hobart Willmott Simms, “our next President,” accompanied by his lovely sister, newly arrived from Bimini, Rimini or Oz.

  Jonas, Dawes, and Kranak came out of the silk-lined elevator that opened directly into the enormous, crowded third floor at a moment when the room seemed most dazzling. Twelve feet away they were faced by Teel’s spectacular beauty as she chatted with the Vice-President and the Joint Chiefs chairman. Teel was wearing a heavy silk dress of luminous amethyst and $237,000 worth of stolen but reset diamonds and sapphires, which created an unforgettable display of deeply burnt pink against satin-black, all of it set afire by the cold, shining aureoled gemstones.

  Jonas got their rented topcoats into the arms of a Victorian tweeny, uniformed with a white, starched cap, who hovered at the elevator door. Dawes looked sinister in a batwing black tie. Kranak looked like a cruel banker behind a black butterfly. Jonas wore a figured black four-in-hand by Cardin. All the men wore their new post-China names: Jonas was Anthony Jones; occupation, cricketeer. Dawes was Patrick Kavanagh; occupation, decorator. Kranak was, of course, Chandler Shapiro, importer.

  “Who is the colored girl with the giant brass?” Kranak whispered to Jonas.

  “Colored girl? Oh. Her! That’s my sister.”

  “Introduce us to her.”

  “Later. Not while she’s with the Veep. There’s plenty of people here you have to meet.” Jonas began to move them around the room, passing them like fire buckets from face to face and group to group. No matter where Kranak stood in the room he always seemed to be gaping at Teel and all those rocks. Jonas left Kranak standing alone. Jonas went across the rooms to join Enid and Enid’s brother. Dawes got something going with the Italian movie queen.

  Kranak saw Enid across the crowd. Three times their eyes locked, but he did not acknowledge seeing her. She stood this brutality as long as she could, then she took Bart by the wrist, excused them for just a moment, and led her brother through the crowd to where Kranak gaped at everything.

  “Oh, hello,” Kranak said.

  “Bart, this is Kranak. You know all about Kranak. Kranak? This is my brother, Senator Simms.”

  Kranak was horrified that she could endanger them this way. “There is some mistake,” he said. “My name is Chandler Shapiro.”

  She grinned like a malicious little bitch. This was the brother. Wait a minute! Was it possible? Had he just stumbled on discovering the leader of the whole fucking American guerrilla movement? A senator! A senator who was going to run for President! You know all about Kranak! She said it. She wouldn’t have had the balls to say a thing like that if he hadn’t given his okay. You know all about Kranak!!

  Bart was not able to speak. He held his hands clenched in his jacket pockets as if they were grasping single-shot Liberators. He radiated loathing from fish-like, gelid eyes. Kranak held out his hand to be taken. Bart ignored it.

  “I’m not feeling very well, Enid,” Bart said. “Will you stand out on the back terrace in the air with me?” He drew Enid away through the crowd. She looked back at Kranak in dismay, frightened that she would never see him again.

  Teel watched them as she moved from group to group. She watched Dawes talking to a rather drab woman whom she had never seen before. Dawes was talking intently; the woman concentrating as if she were making mental notes to be repeated. Jonas was at the far end of the room talking easily with the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The Chairman looked uneasy, even worried.

  Kranak was shaken. This man was the leader; there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt about that. He had no evidence but he didn’t need any more evidence. He knew. Out of the entire movement, he was the only one who knew and he was going to make that pay off, to get him some big edges. But the leader was a white man. Kranak couldn’t understand why there were so many niggers at this party. The hostess was blacker than anyone here but she seemed very, very different, which shows what a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jewels can do, he thought. She was no nigger. She was a gorgeous, rich, and famous woman and suddenly he wanted to fuck her. At that moment, she appeared at his elbow.

  “Enjoying yourself, Shapiro?” she asked absent-mindedly.

  “Oh. Yeah. Great.”

  “There is something I have wanted to ask you all evening. But it is so personal.”

  “That’s all right. Go ahead.”

  “I don’t know why I—of all people—should flinch at asking such
a question. There’s certainly nothing wrong with it. Episcopalians do ask Presbyterians if they are Methodists.”

  “It’s all right. I assure you.”

  “All right then. I will. Are you one of us?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Are you black, Mr. Shapiro?”

  He didn’t think he had understood. But he could hear the question over again quite clearly. He stared at her, appalled.

  “Oh, Mr. Shapiro! I am sorry!”

  He held himself stiffly. “I am a full-blooded Lipan Apache.”

  “You are? Well! There you are!”

  “Pardon?”

  “I am so relieved,” Teel said. “I thought I had made an awful gaffe. But even though you aren’t black you aren’t white either, are you? Shapiro is a wild name for an Amerind.” She pressed his upper arm lightly and moved away to a group near the door. Jonas and Dawes came up behind Kranak and said the time had come to be moving along.

  When they got out on the street, the enormity of what she had said to him began to suffocate him. He shook Jonas off and hailed a cab. He leaped into it alone, slammed the door, and snarled at the driver to move it.

  It had been a terrible night for Kranak. A woman for whom he had been willing to overlook certain things he had never tolerated in his life before, for whom he was beginning to get a terrific feeling, had asked him, very matter of fact, if he happened to be a nigger. Jesus! That was as bad as he would have thought anything could ever get. Then he had happened to discover who was the absolute leader of the entire FF/AFF movement—a United States Senator, a Presidential candidate! He couldn’t believe that what had been so absolutely fail-safe had opened right before his eyes, and then—just when he had the biggest edge of anybody in the entire Western Hemisphere, just when he had real information for once in his fucking life which could really move him to the very top—he suddenly remembered that this man—this leader—was the brother of the girl he had beaten up and thrown out on her ass. He had cut his own throat. He had cut his own throat, fahcrissake. The brother—the leader of the entire FF/AFF movement—wouldn’t even shake hands with him! He could have him thrown out some fucking window. If he wasn’t careful his life wouldn’t be worth a dime.

  13

  April 1976

  On the morning of April 1, 1976, Teel held her monthly dividend meeting with Binchy Dawes and Colonel Pikow aboard a chartered round-Manhattan bus, which Colonel Pikow had hired from 10 A.M. until noon. Three armed men sat in seats in the forward area of the big bus. Two armed men sat in the middle area. The driver mouthed words into a microphone but no sound came out. Teel sat in the center aisle position of the long cross seat. Dawes and Colonel Pikow sat turned to face her in the row in front of her.

  It was necessary to hold monthly declarations of dividends because, like American oil companies, their profits were so inordinate it would have unhinged observers were they known publicly.

  The projected income for 1975 had come to $409 billion in gross receipts. Of this, mules, pushers, processers, dope houses, dealers, distributors and wholesalers had taken an override of $295 billion. Of the remaining $114 billion, after operational, sales and overhead expenses, it had been necessary for Teel to pay out $107 billion to political leaders and functionaries on international, federal, state and local levels; to international, federal, state and local police; to heads and cabinets of governments in several countries; to armed forces for their requirements; to customs, immigration and narcotics officials; to educational authorities, and to the piece men Dawes had to maintain in every neighborhood to protect the organization from all of the above when the various narcotics “scares” made openly advertised “enforcement necessary.” There were large fees to the overcommunications industry and to the judicial system as well as to a huge camarilla of separate law firms all over the country, whose fees and expenses had to be channeled through O’Connell, Carnaghi, Levin, Zendt & Sweeney (necessitating their own share), plus deductions for bonding, fines and for the serene cooperation of prison authorities.

  Remaining for Binchy Dawes and the enormous organization he had inherited was the fair share of gross profits of four billion dollars for a year’s hard work. Teel and her revolution won the remaining three billion dollars. The monthly dividend to Teel, thanks to heroin’s ever-growing popularity in the United States, for the month of March, just passed, was $250 million. The annual total would exceed the needs of even an urban guerrilla war—by about two and a half billion dollars. That excess belonged to Teel. Try that on, Rocky, Mr. Getty, Shah-baby, Mr. Mellon, Howard Hughes, Mr. Ludwig, Mr. Hunt, and Henry Ford, she thought with intense satisfaction.

  14

  June 1976

  By June 2, 1976, the government efforts to turn up the leaders of the guerrilla movement had grown desperate, and then frantic. Each Thursday for twelve weeks the Army agent had reported to the clandestine unit of Army Intelligence and FBI agents, analysts and technicians in New York at alternating addresses. Each week the agent reported the growing waves of extraordinary preparation that the guerrilla organization was undertaking in terms of personnel, materiel, strike plans and intelligence for the first three weeks of war in the Thirty Cities. Army staffs whose two hundred years of experience had taken them into every kind of terrain on the planet with the exception of the streets, sewers, roofs, tunnels and alleys of their own cities sat mutely into long nights staring at their secret agent’s reports, projecting nuclear strikes in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, San Francisco and Los Angeles to give the urban guerrilla war an impetus that would take it past any possibility of adequate defense by government forces, and in the course of so doing account for the deaths of at least a million and a half Americans. The population of cities that had never faced a war of any consequence were certain to react with generated panic and irrationality, the psychological analyses reported, which would send them out into the streets to be in the vicinity of troops for the illusion of protection. His reports responded to this estimate with the guerrilla outline of plans that included gasoline cannon and bacterial gas to be poured into any civilian assembly of more than thirty people. In New York, where the greatest problem of staying alive and healthy had always been one of a continuity of supplies because each of the five densely populated boroughs, except the Bronx, was an island, the guerrillas planned to destroy bridges and tunnels and to mine the rivers and harbors, then to do a little light poisoning of the water supply system, mostly for the propaganda value. There would be no food except accumulated canned goods, and they wouldn’t last long. The Army would have to divert men and materiel to land the food on outer Long Island with heaviest protection along mined parkways and roads while under constant attack.

  Every week the Army agent met an interrogation squad at a different, and entirely natural place, such as a dentist’s office, an upstairs barbershop, a tailor’s or a doctor’s office. Every second meeting the agent faced a frosty-eyed frightening admiral named Adler.

  The agent kept adding minutiae of almost useful details of overall guerrilla intention. But the agent, under the guerrilla system, had been denied (because of the “need to know” rule) the actual times, places, methods and personnel to be used in each form of attack, and the agent’s knowledge did not go beyond the first three weeks of the war nor did it apply to the six cities in the far western action area. When Army staffs multiplied all of this vague information by the dread number of thirty intensely populated cities, all of the action to happen simultaneously, they were overwhelmed by hopelessness and by a driving despair that caused a loss of eleven officers to mental breakdown and suicide.

  That was not, however, the reaction of Admiral Adler. Adler was a fattish man with a black claw for a right hand who had commanded destroyer flotillas.

  He had been called out of retirement especially to tear the agent apart.

  “You say the first day targets will all be hospitals. Why? How does such a strike plan originate and how is it executed?”

 
“I don’t know,” the agent said dully. They had been over this four times. It was a quarter to two in the morning.

  “You know!” Adler yelled. “Who tells you that the hospitals are the first day target?”

  “I meet with four men on what the guerrillas call their General Staff,” the agent said. “I have been told that the General Staff is fourteen men and women but I have never met more than four, always the same four. These men convey the orders which it is my job to make operational.”

  “Make operational!” Adler snorted. “You don’t even know when or how they are going to happen. You are a top commander, for Christ’s sake, stupid, but you don’t know what your troops are doing.” Admiral Adler glanced at the other three men on the interrogation team, shaking his head. Of the three men one operated a tape recorder. Another operated a lie detector apparatus. The third followed the agent’s present statements by checking them against a type record of his previous statements.

  “I pass orders and confirmations of logistics from a warehousing system to the city caches to five Army Corps Commanders below me,” the agent answered patiently.

  “But you don’t know where these warehouses are or the location of the caches?”

  “No, sir. But I know the five Army Corps commanders who do know. And I know how, when, and where to locate them.”

  “Stupid, stupid! We can’t touch them yet. If we go near them, the leaders will go even farther underground. We want the leaders! How many times do I have to tell you over and over again—we must find the leaders!”

  “Admiral—may I say one thing?”

  “Speak up.”

  “Fuck you, admiral. Like double. I took all the risks. All. You were playing bridge in some fifth-rate country club when I was being shot at in twenty-six degrees below freezing on a fucking side of a high mountain in western China. And right now—what? Who lives with the people who kill by preference—you or me, you little shit? Who can’t sleep for worrying about being under surveillance by the smartest commanders you or the United States Army ever saw? You? No, not you. I know better than any of you that the fourth of July is getting closer and closer. But I can’t do anything to save my country because they’re too smart for all of us.” The agent got up and said, “I’m going home.”