“I don’t ask you to understand this, but what she feels for you is confused by her with other unfortunate things in her life and—as a result—and I am saying that as a direct result of knowing you—she has become very ill.”
“I never had a venereal disease in my life!” Kranak protested hotly, but carefully.
“Shut your filthy mouth!” Bart yelled at him. “My sister is dying. Doctors believe she is dying for the love of you.”
“Come on, Senator. This is nineteen seventy-six.”
“Yes. But that’s how it is. That is it. She is dying because she loves you and you hardly know she is alive.”
Kranak flapped his arms, letting the light plaster cast fall against his leg.
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” He shot a glance at the long mirror on the wall at his right and he had an indescribable urge to throw the robe off so he could see himself. He got a flash erection under the towel as he thought of looking at his body while someone else was in the room. He sat down abruptly next to a table and wrapped his arms around his middle. “It’s like a corny opera and the guy in the next seat tells me it’s all my fault.”
“There is something you can do. You can call her. That could be a kindness. You can invite her out to dinner twice a month. That would be an act of human compassion. I’m not asking you to love her,” Bart pleaded, “just that you acknowledge you care that she is alive.”
Kranak saw the combinations at his fingertips and he saw the vault door open. This guy was freaked-out on his sister. The guy was helpless. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for the sister, including taking him, Kranak, right up into the highest councils of FF/AFF movement and making him the same thing as a co-leader of everything this puling son-of-a-bitch wanted to happen. It was all a question of dominating him now, of twisting the knife in his sister’s belly so that the brother would do anything to stop the pain. But he had to be sure at the same time.
Kranak sneered at him. “I think you know how we met,” he said.
“You met in China. There is absolutely no need to talk about it.”
The wasp of revelation stung Kranak’s imagination. This was it! He was in! He was home free! There was no way, after the indoctrinations they got at those camps, for Enid to have told her brother about China and about him; therefore he was sitting in front of the power that had organized the camps and had put them all in there. All right. It was safe to make his first move. The leader needed him right now more than he needed the leader.
“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you and Enid,” he said as contemptuously as he could, “but I got a life to live myself and I can assure you it doesn’t include her.”
“Just for a few weeks,” Bart implored. “Just get her out of this downspin.”
“No,” Kranak said harshly.
Bart said, “Agatha Teel is my lawyer. She is also the lawyer for a powerful figure in the Mafia. If you value Miss Teel’s continuing friendship, and I have reason to believe that you do, I would advise you to reconsider my request.”
Kranak got up, or started to get up, saying, “Get the hell out of here.” Having the advantage of total surprise, Bart moved with wondrous agility, considering his stiff leg. Galvanized by jealousy and frustration, he pinned Kranak’s fractured wrist to the table, then, with a terrible blow from his stiffened other hand, rebroke the wrist, pulled the arm along the table toward him and fractured Kranak’s lower forearm.
He jerked on the broken arm and pulled the fainting Kranak out of the chair, onto his face on the floor. Balancing on his stiffened leg, he kicked Kranak’s ribs, smashing them on the right side, until eight were broken. He pulled a stool over beside Kranak’s head, face down on the carpet, sat down heavily, and grabbing the hair on top of Kranak’s head, as he had once grabbed the girl Louisa long ago, he spoke loudly to Kranak as he pounded Kranak’s face heavily and steadily into the floor. “If—Enid—dies—from—you—you—will—die—too.”
He flung Kranak’s raw head away, wiped his hands on Kranak’s towel, got to his feet with difficulty and left the apartment.
17
May 1976
Teel called Kranak the following night. She was curt. “Get over here at seven thirty,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“I have to leave at eight o’clock, but I want to talk to you first.”
“I can’t. I had an accident. I slipped in the tub and broke my arm and my ribs and my nose.”
“I know about that and I know who beat you up. Be here at seven thirty.” She hung up.
To defy her Kranak did not arrive until twenty-five to eight. Teel saw him into a small sitting room on her main floor. She didn’t offer him either a chair or a drink. She said, “You know about this. He told you. Well, get on that telephone now and call the girl. You’re going to take her to dinner tonight and you are going to be very, very nice to her because I am going to have someone on you.”
“What kind of a thing is this?” he said wildly. “You are my woman and you are supposed to be crazy about me so you send me out to stud with an insane broad.”
“I am not your woman,” Teel said. “You are a stud. You were my stud, but now I’m going to share you with the sister of a friend of mine. Dig, baby?”
“How can you talk to me like that?”
“Shaddap!” she said violently. “You are a little exporter named Shapiro who calls himself an Indian but who I personally think is one of the brothers trying to pass. My friend may be the next President of the United States—do you have any idea what that can mean to me?—and all my friend asks is that my stud take his sister out to dinner every now and then. So do it!” She looked at him with sudden frightening blandness. “And don’t miss the point here, Chandler Shapiro, about what will happen to you if you don’t do it.”
He went to the phone table, opened the drawer under the phone and took out the phone book. Teel told him the name of the hotel. He dialed the number slowly, his face like a bronze mask. He would not take this from anyone. This woman knew the lifetime of training his mother and his tradition had put into him and yet she was able to humiliate him directly with flat orders that no one would even ask a nigger slave to do. Well, fuck that, he thought. I am not taking that. And I am also finished with this broad who would give up the kind of relationship they had just to turn a political advantage. Well, she is through. She is finished he thought as he dialed the number slowly.
Enid wasn’t there.
18
January 1976
As each of Teel’s national and regional commanders landed in the United States from China, some in San Francisco, some in Seattle, some in Boston, some in New York, and some in Miami, she put them under twenty-four-hour surveillance. The news Captain Maas had brought her four years before, that the American government knew a group of people had been taken into China for training in revolutionary warfare, had sharpened her reactions to all her own people until, one by one, they could be proved otherwise, until, one by one, as they were proved otherwise, there would remain one traitor.
Within one week after Enid Simms arrived in San Francisco, Teel had isolated her from the rest of the commanders as the American government spy. From the moment Enid had left the plane, a team headed by the wiliest of Teel’s Area Corps Commanders who had been standing in and preparing the organizations for the native commanders trained in China, Enrique Jorge Molina, a Uruguayan Tupamaro leader on loan to Teel, had photographed her at the pancake restaurant with the trendy man, had photographed Dr. Weiler, and, within four days, every technician who had worked in the wing isolated for Enid at the King de los Reyes Hospital in O’Farrell Street. They had gotten a floor-orderly and lab-technician rumor that Enid had had a faked appendectomy and had placed all the evidence in Teel’s hands.
In the subsequent two weeks, the Molina surveillance team had followed Enid to the same “safe” apartment on the northwest corner of 82nd Street and Park Avenue, had successfully bugged the apartment with transmit
ting wall limpets, recording four days of Enid’s testimony under relentless inquisition, in which she had expanded upon a few details of the Teel organization but was unable to tell much more than that she was in charge of Intelligence operations for a movement called the Freedom Fighters/American Freedom Fighters and knew four members of its General Staff, said to comprise a total of fourteen people. She did not know the names of the American leaders who were over the General Staff. She was able to repeat the names of the people with whom she had studied at the War College in China and cite the Area Commands assigned to them, but those names had been changed, their passports changed, just as her own name and passport had been changed, so that she could not state who or where they were now. She only knew whom she got her operational orders from.
Teel telephoned Senator Simms, the former CIA agent who had been so long and so intimately involved with the agency, and asked him urgently to come to her house in New York that evening. That she would be asking him to pass a death sentence upon his beloved twin sister did not so much as occur to Teel. She wanted a few pieces of evidence confirmed so that she could be sure about which part of the government machinery had penetrated past her several shields. She had already decided, after San Francisco, then after she listened to the tapes of Enid in the “safe apartment” at 969 Park, that Enid was guilty, but it was equally important for Teel to know who Enid had been working for, because whoever they were, they were laughing at Teel. They had used Teel as their cat’s paw, as if she were a fool, a simple-minded dupe who could be guided to do whatever they planned for her: to have the Chinese kidnap their own agent, to insure the safety of that agent inside China. Teel had done it all for them.
She and Senator Simms sipped Kirs. She said she was deeply interested in having him try to identify some photographs for her. She showed him photographs of the ranking technicians who had been with Enid at the King de los Reyes hospital and at the “safe apartment” at 969 Park Avenue.
“Why—they are all CIA, all three of them.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure. The tall one with the happy face is Youngstein. He is the Chief Psychiatric Officer in CIA Operations Division. This one with the Edward the Seventh beard is Dr. George Pappadakis, who is an astonishingly skillful neurosurgeon, and the man who looks like Benito Mussolini if Mussolini were to be played by Charles Boyer is the greatest living Pavlovian psychologist, the authority on reflex conditioning, Georges Ethilda Marton.”
“I can’t tell you how helpful that is, baby,” Teel said, flashing the pearlies.
“How did you ever get pictures like that?”
“I can tell you this. In my kind of work, I get crazier clients than almost anybody can imagine. Come on! Let’s get over to San Marco on Fifty-second Street and scarf up some of that osso bucco like the Queen of Italy used to make.”
“I’m dead tired, Agatha. I thought maybe you might run up something here.”
“Well—you bet yer bewts! What style—Italian, Japanese—maybe some Brazilian or Swedish?”
“Anything you think of that’s light.”
“You got it. Senator, I’ve been thinking about those papers we have in escrow at the bank. They must be a heavy weight on you.”
He shrugged hopelessly, looking haggard.
“I want to be fair. Really—I do! Lookahere—I have a very big client who pays me a fortune of money every year and there is one vital thing that client has to know.”
“What’s that?”
“You find this out for me, Senator, and I am going to hand you those papers back.”
“What, Agatha?”
“You been in on any meetings at the White House about a revolutionary movement that trained some convicts in China?”
“Yes.”
“My client put a ‘Must Know’ on this. Must know from the highest possible source who the government agent was they planted with those convicts. You know?”
“I am on the Armed Services Committee. I think I can get that,” he said quietly.
Teel was being thorough. She was sure about Enid but she had to be equally sure she had no other traitors in her revolutionary army to flush out.
Simms got up slowly, with exhaustion. “I don’t think I can eat,” he said. “I think I have to get over to my sister’s and try to get a night’s rest.”
“You do just that, Senator. You got to stay strong. This country is going to need you safe and sound in that White House.”
Senator Simms left.
The team Teel had assigned for surveillance of the returnees from China had missed the U.S. Army Intelligence agent altogether. After Teel had cornered Enid, she set all her other commanders into free, unwatched movement. Her team had missed the agent because Army Intelligence was not as arrogant as the CIA. The Army had debriefed their man in his own hotel, assigned to him by Teel’s people. Then he was free to come and go, every subsequent de-briefing taking place in a different, always normal setting: a dentist’s surgery, a tailor’s fitting room, a public swimming pool, the barber’s; not only different places, but always different interrogators, many of them brought in from Army and Air Force installations abroad and from ships at sea.
19
June 1976
In the morning of the twenty-seventh of June, Teel put out a Gr-1 on Enid Simms through Pikow, who passed the order directly to her executioners, by-passing all Area Command.
Pikow chose a brigade commander, a Princeton man with a very expensive habit, and his aide-de-camp, to carry out the operation. They were quiet, well-dressed men who could have been accountants making a house call. They were not jagged junkies but the sort of composed addicts one passes all day every day on the streets of any big city. They were in a state of perpetual fix, which was what had made them such efficient guerrillas. They had developed the Gr-1 into a science.
They flowed smoothly into the large hotel lobby, chatting an Ivy League sort of chat, and moved to the bank of elevators, which was out of sight of the main desk. They pushed the button for the floor that was two above the Simms apartment, went down the fire stairs to her door. Enid answered the door without delay. She didn’t know the men, but if she had, she was given no time to object. The shorter man was upon her instantly with his hand over her mouth, moving her backward into the room while the other man shut the door and fastened the chain lock.
The taller man hurried across the living room to a window that faced the courtyard at the center well of the hotel. He opened the window, remaining well behind the glass curtains, then he turned to stare into Enid’s horror-filled eyes; she knew the Gr-1 well as a training exercise. She straggled to find a leverage point to throw her attacker but he had been successful in keeping one foot, then both of her feet, off the ground.
The taller man grasped her wrist and ankle. The shorter man kept a grip over her mouth and one high on her thigh until the last moment before release from the swaying, swinging style which children use when they are about to douse someone in the lake from a boat dock at a summer camp.
They flew Enid far backward in an upward arc, then swung her smoothly forward to sail through the air, through the broad space of the opened window from the twenty-ninth floor. Her body followed her terrible scream down and down until it crashed upon the concrete pavement of the areaway.
The Central Intelligence Agency had lost their hold upon the country’s leading candidate for the Presidency; the Freedom Fighters had lost a commander; but most of all Bart Simms had lost the only important part of himself.
20
June 1976
The government was torn into fragments of policy that split the implementation of its directions, but the President held strongly to what he determined must be done. The Pentagon wanted to arrest, then have Dr. Baum interrogate the six guerrilla army commanders and the four General Staff officers whose identities and whereabouts were known and who—all of them—were now under surveillance, but the Pentagon did not want to attempt to separate the rotten apples
from all the apples in the barrel of the National Guardsmen because they said it was an impossible task, would require a gigantic diversion of effort and men at a time when every single moment had to be spent trying to run down the guerrilla ringleaders. If the separation had to be made, they said it would be done in a purge that would last from July 2 through July 4.
The Senate Armed Services Committee, the opposition party and the Vice-President wanted an immediate isolation and separation of the National Guard traitors but were wholly opposed to the interrogation of the guerrilla Army Corps commanders because, they were convinced, it would render impossible any conceivable likelihood of uncovering the leaders before the Fourth of July.
The President, his Cabinet, the Supreme Court and the House Armed Services Committee opposed vehemently any of the actions so favored. The President told a combined secret meeting (and by some miracle of fright secrecy was maintained) that if the Army’s own secret agent didn’t know who the leaders were, the subordinates surely wouldn’t know, that any disturbance at that command level would jar the national leaders, that there was still time to interrogate those people, if all else failed, and to discover where demolitions and attacks were planned specifically, in time to prevent them. It was the leaders who had the money and the resources of organizing genius. They must get the leaders. Was that understood? They must get the leaders before July 2! The President agreed to fullest surveillance until the leaders were picked up.
At that combined meeting at the White House a compromise, as such, was accepted. The date for the arrest of anyone known to be a part of the movement of revolution was moved up from July 2 to midnight June 27. The arrests scheduled for that compromise date would include the National Guard insurrectionists, those Army Corps commanders who were known, the four General Staff officers and the Action Area commanders.
The White House compromise meeting was held on June 23, 1976. The President wanted to hold off arrests as long as possible until the Secretary of State delivered the ultimatum to the Chinese government, not only to keep the American guerrilla leaders from being alerted and escaping, but because of the dire consequences that could follow such accusations as would be made.
The Whisper of the Axe Page 25
