Meehan and Bob got out of the limo to come over to the Jag, Bob immediately making a slow and suspicious circuit of the entire car, squinting, stooping, looking for the slightest scratch, while Meehan said, “That took a long time.”
“Well, I was supposed to keep them away while you did your work,” Jeffords reminded him.
“A long time,” Meehan said.
“Well, also, I have to admit,” Jeffords said, “I did do a bit more of a roundabout route. I just found that fellow fascinating to listen to.”
Bob stopped his inspection to glare at Jeffords. “You did what?”
“To watch a mind like that at work,” Jeffords said, and shook his head in admiration. “He processes the same information from the world that you and I do, and turns it into something from another universe. It's like listening to somebody from the Flat Earth Society, or those people who believe the moon landings were faked on soundstages in Hollywood.”
Meehan said, “It almost sounds as though you admire the guy.”
“I admire the effect,” Jeffords said. “If I could tap into the subtext of fears and prejudices and prides and misunderstood history the way he can, only with a little more self-awareness, bring it out a little smoother, a little blander, I wouldn't be a groundling in the CC, I'd be running for president myself.”
“You won't get my vote,” Bob said, and said to Meehan, “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” Meehan agreed.
Bob got into his Jag and roared off. Jeffords and Meehan walked over to the limo as Jeffords said, “I take it your expedition was a success.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You got the, um, incriminating material?”
Meehan pointed at the package in the limo, on the front passenger seat. “He kept it in his bedroom, to watch the tape.”
“Did he?” Jeffords laughed. “Well, wouldn't you be tempted?”
“Watch somebody in a bed, dying? I don't think so.”
“Well, give me the package, and let's be off.”
Meehan opened the rear door. “Climb aboard,” he said. “I'll give you the package when we get to the city.”
Jeffords grinned at him. “Francis? Don't you trust me?”
“Sure I do,” Meehan said. “I just wanna round it off with a happy ending.”
“I love happy endings,” Jeffords said, and got into the limo.
They headed south, Meehan wearing the chauffeur's cap—not Bob's nice navy blue one, but the brown one that came with this car—while Jeffords at the other end of the tunnel played with his cellphone, having the occasional murmured conversation, or leaving a message; all CC stuff, from what Meehan could hear, the logistics of a presidential campaign, the day job Jeffords had been skimping on recently.
At one point, with Jeffords off the phone for a second, Meehan called to him, “Give Goldfarb a ring, will you?”
“Sure. What am I saying to her?”
“We'll all meet at her place,” Meehan said. “That's where I'll give you the package.”
“Fine. You know,” Jeffords said, “we're gonna need to eat lunch along the way.”
The limo's dashboard read 1:17. “Sure. Tell her we'll get there late afternoon.”
“There's a diner in Hillsdale, New York,” Jeffords suggested. “That isn't really out of our way.”
“Fine.”
Jeffords played with his phone some more, then said, “She wasn't in, I left a message.”
Back at her day job, no doubt, at the MCC. “Wow,” Meehan said.
Jeffords, down there at his end of the tunnel, looked interested. “Wow?”
“I was just thinking about the MCC,” Meehan told him.
Jeffords' face wrinkled up. “For God's sake, why?”
“That's probably where Goldfarb is.”
“Oh.”
“I'm just out a week today,” Meehan said. “Wednesday to Wednesday. What a week.”
“For all of us, Francis,” Jeffords said.
At the diner in Hillsdale, they sat in a booth in the no-smoking section, by a window with a view out over route 22, and Jeffords told the blonde waitress he wanted pastrami on rye. Meehan said, “I'll have the cheeseburger and the side of onion rings and a side of pickles.” When asked, they both admitted to a desire for coffee.
She went away, and Meehan looked out at the limo and the gas station/convenience store across the way and wondered what his future was going to be, now that he was going to have one. Then their food was brought and they both dug in. Meehan had his chauffeur cap and the package on the bench seat beside him, by the wall, but he had to pick both up and put them on his lap when the two Busters joined them, one sliding in beside Meehan, one beside Jeffords.
Meehan, the burger turning to demolition debris in his mouth, said, “Oh, Jeffords.”
Jeffords had the grace not to look Meehan in the eye. “Believe it or not, Francis,” he said, “I am sorry about this.”
“You're sorry!”
“I am. I'll have some troubled times, remembering all this.”
“I rescued you!” Meehan reminded him. “I saved your life. At the very least, I saved your fingers.”
“I know that,” Jeffords acknowledged, nodding, tapping those fingers on the Formica table. “That doesn't make it easier.”
“But why do it at all?”
Now Jeffords did look Meehan in the eye, and nothing Meehan saw there helped him. Jeffords wasn't vicious, or vindictive, or angry, or evil, or any of that. He was just a low-level clerk, doing a job. He said, “Francis, you can't be left out in the world.”
“Why not?”
“You're an anomaly, you're an entire bushel basket of questions just waiting to be asked. You're a forty-two-year-old man on probation at juvenile court. You're a recidivist felon, supposed to be in a federal penitentiary, out of the MCC with absolutely no good reason, no paperwork that would hold up to any serious scrutiny. And now let's say, just for argument, let's say, somewhere down the line, you get mad at us, or depressed, or drunk, or want to hold us up for money, or for whatever reason, you start to talk.”
“I've never talked,” Meehan said.
“There's always a first time,” Jeffords said, and Meehan hated it when people quoted the ten thousand rules back at him. “What it comes down to,” Jeffords said, and now he seemed almost embarrassed, “and I hate to say this, it's such a cliche from old movies and mystery stories, but the fact is, Francis, you know too much.”
Grimly aware that argument would get him nowhere, but having to try it because you have to try everything, Meehan said, “Whadaya mean, I know too much? You talking about killing me?”
“No, of course not,” Jeffords said. He sounded both appalled and insulted. “What do you take us for?”
“Then I'm still gonna know too much.”
“The whole purpose here,” Jeffords explained, being kind to him, “is merely to remove your credibility. If you were to decide to go public, and here you are on the loose when you shouldn't be, swathed in all these legal anomalies, people would listen to you, they'd be intrigued by you, they'd follow up and they'd find us. But if you're just one more disgruntled con, writing crazy letters from your prison cell, making wild accusations about respectable citizens, no one will give you the time of day. You see, Francis? It's the only thing we can do.”
Meehan saw. That was the worst of it, sometimes, being able to see the other guy's point of view. “I didn't think you'd do this to me, Jeffords.”
Jeffords sighed. “Oh, they never do,” he said. “It gets them all, though, sooner or later. They've been warned, they know better, they know all the bitter histories, but they just can't help themselves. They want to believe. Everybody, somewhere down the line, trusts a politician.”
47
“NOT QUITE EVERYBODY,” Meehan said.
He picked the package out of his lap, off the chauffeur cap, and placed it on the table beside the cheeseburger he'd never eat. With the tip of one finger, he slid it across th
e Formica toward Jeffords, who watched it coming with sudden mistrust. He looked at Meehan's face, and what he saw there he didn't like. He said, “What have you done, Francis?”
“You never for a second meant me to stay out of the MCC,” Meehan told him. “I could smell it on you, you and Benjamin, slumming a little because you needed an expert, an outsource. And you were doing me a favor, look at it that way, giving the little felon an extra bonus vacation out in the world before he gets to be locked away forever in—whadaya call it? A facility. Facile for you to say.”
Up till now, the Busters had merely been sitting there, two new ones very like the previous ones, but now they could both be seen to take an interest in that package, and the one beside Jeffords said, “Mr. Jeffords, you think it's rigged? You want me to take it outside and open it?”
“No no,” said Jeffords, and sighed. “That isn't going to be the trouble.” He looked bleakly at Meehan. “You won't tell me, will you? I have to open it.”
“Why should I spoil the surprise?”
Jeffords sighed again. He hefted the package. “A tape, and some papers.”
“Very good,” Meehan told him.
Jeffords squeezed open the end of the package and looked inside. “A tape, and some papers.”
“Still the same.”
“Not the same, though,” Jeffords said. “No, I doubt that. Not at all the same.”
He tilted the package, and out came the folded sheets of Burnstone Trail letterhead stationery and the videotape in its brightly colored box. Turning the tape box with one finger, like a laboratory sample, he spoke the words of the title: “The Green Berets.”
“John Wayne,” Meehan told him. “Wayne directed it, too. Produced by his son Michael. Talk about your deathbed confession.”
“You gave it to one of your friends,” Jeffords said.
Meehan lifted an eyebrow at him. “Friends? Who would that be?”
“Those two you did the, the thing with,” Jeffords said, waving vaguely and irritably at route 22 outside the window. “The white one, and the black one.”
“They're not my friends,” Meehan said. “The black one I never met before we set up this job. The white one I worked with a couple times over the years. Mr. Jeffords, in my line of work, you don't hang around with the other guys like your friends. Those are people, and I'm one of them, the law could show up at any second, in Kevlar. Unless you're working with those people, you stay away from them. You don't all live in the same neighborhood, like cops or jazz musicians, your wives in the same reading group, kids in Little League together. You don't help out, hold things for one another. We are what we are because what we are is solitary.”
“You did something with it,” Jeffords insisted.
“Sure I did,” Meehan said. “While you were driving around Massachusetts, fascinated, listening to one of the finest minds of the thirteenth century.”
“Oh, God,” Jeffords said. “I left you alone too long.”
“It's up to me now,” Meehan said. “If something makes me unhappy, that package is gonna show up like a summer movie. If nothing makes me unhappy, maybe nobody will ever see the thing again.”
Jeffords said, “Maybe? You want more money?”
“Sure,” Meehan said. “Everybody wants more money. But it isn't money's gonna keep me quiet, Mr. Jeffords. You gonna give me money, and then throw me back in the MCC? I don't think so.”
Jeffords said, “So what do you want?”
“I've got it,” Meehan said, and spread his hands as much as he could, being tucked in between a Buster and a wall. “My freedom.”
Jeffords thought it over. Then he shrugged and offered Meehan a weak grin, and said, “Well, I can certainly tell Bruce I tried.”
“I'll give you a note, if you want.”
“No, that won't be necessary, he'll see the situation.” Jeffords shook his head. “You see, Francis,” he said, “what it comes down to, what we want, the people like Bruce and me and the president and all the rest of us, and that oaf Burnstone and his candidate, what we want is control. We wanted to end this with the evidence in our hands and you back in the MCC, and everything under control.”
“But no,” Meehan said.
“It disturbs us,” Jeffords said, “something being out of our control. It makes us uneasy.”
“In case you think,” Meehan said, “that it would make you so uneasy that maybe you should have these fellas here take me down the road and lose me, let me just tell you, my turning up disappeared will bring out that tape.” A lie, but so what?
But Jeffords was waving that away, saying, “No, don't even think about that, Francis, that's for the melodramas. It's tough enough to keep your footprints unnoticed when you're doing a simple little dirty trick on the Other Side. If we already knew we couldn't successfully pull a burglary on our own, trust me, we know better than to think we could pull off a murder.”
“Get another expert.”
Jeffords' laugh was bitter. “Are you kidding? Look at the trouble we've got from the first one. Besides, every professional hit man in America is actually an undercover FBI agent, as every schoolboy knows, and as is demonstrated regularly in headlines in the newspapers. No, you're free, goddamit. You gonna finish your lunch?”
“No. You made me lose my appetite.”
“Sorry.” To the Busters he said, “We're going now.” They stood, and Jeffords said, “I'll take the check here.”
“Thanks. And leave me a hundred, will you? Walking around money.”
Jeffords pursed his lips. Reaching for his wallet, he said, “I should've left you in the MCC.”
“Whoever else you got would've been worse.”
“Christ, and that's probably true, too,” Jeffords said, dropping greenbacks next to the onion rings.
“Don't forget your hat,” Meehan said, extending the chauffeur's cap.
Jeffords took it. “The next time they catch you,” he said, “you'll be on your own.”
“No, I won't,” Meehan said.
The first time he tried to call, from the diner, he hung up just before the answering machine would have come on. Then he spent some of Jeffords' hundred—ninety, Jeffords had given him, actually—on a cab from the diner the twenty miles westward to the railroad station in Hudson, along the Hudson River, where he tried calling again, and again avoided the answering machine.
He had time then to sit for a while, on the platform, looking out from the station at the wide slow river and all of America beyond it, and to think that, if he cared about it, he could probably decide the upcoming presidential election right now, all by himself. But that would mean looking at those people, those candidates, getting involved, studying their histories and their programs, making an informed decision; so screw it. Let the Americans work it out for themselves. How bad a choice could they make?
After the third failed phone call, he sat on a bench inside the station, just waiting it out, and was there when the two guys walked in, looked around, looked at him, and then walked straight toward him. Oh, come on, he thought. Enough is enough.
The two guys were not quite twins. They were both bareheaded, with thick black hair heavily piled all over their skulls. Both had smoky skin with darker beard-shadow and rich black moustaches. Both wore dark vinyl zip-up jackets zipped up, and creased clean blue jeans, and short black boots. Both were a little bigger than necessary, and so were their noses. One of them wore aviator-style glasses, clear, and the other one didn't.
Meehan sighed and waited, and the two came over to sit on the bench, one on either side of him. The one on his right, with the aviator glasses, said, “You will stand and come outside to our car now, or we will shoot you. We don't care.”
Meehan frowned, leaning toward him, listening. He said, “Would you say something?”
They gave each other surprised looks. The one with the aviator glasses said, “I already said it. Do you want to die?”
“Ah,” Meehan said, working it out. “So you're Mos
tafa.” Pointing at the other one, on his left, he said, “So that makes you Yehudi.”
Yehudi shook his head. “Why do you say that?”
“Sure, that's it,” Meehan said, agreeing with himself. “You're the one talked to me on the phone.” Turning back to Mostafa he said, “I never saw either of you guys, but I heard you talk.”
Mostafa scrinched the eyes up behind the aviator glasses. “You heard us talk?”
“Sure. I was in the closet at Goldfarb's when you showed up, with the electric tape on the door so it wouldn't lock? That jacket you're wearing, you put that in the closet, you keep some kinda pistol in that pocket there. I touched it.”
They both stared at him. Mostafa said, “You touched my pistol?”
“Listen,” Meehan told him, “I'm not the one you should worry about. I left the pistol there. I just wanted to see you two, no confrontations, but when I was going to go take a look at you in the kitchen, drinking tea there—”
“This is craziness,” Yehudi said. “What are you making up here?”
“I'm the one left the ladder in the elevator,” Meehan told him. “Remember? Mostafa told you there was a ladder in the elevator.”
“I did,” Mostafa said. He sounded awed.
“So,” Meehan said, “I'm gonna go take a look at you, just a quick peek, and Goldfarb comes out of the bedroom with your handcuffs on one wrist and carrying a pistol of her own. She was gonna shoot you two, no kidding.”
They looked at each other past him, frowning, and Mostafa said, not to Meehan but to Yehudi, “It was the woman who had the pistol, at Victor's.”
“Oh, Reader, you mean,” Meehan said. “Yeah, that's the point I'm making. I talked her out of it at her place, killing you, with cleaning all those bloodstains off her kitchen, but she's the one you gotta look out for, not me. And by the way, the job's over.”
Neither of them liked that. Mostafa, apparently trying to be tricky, said, “What job?”
“The job you wanted to know about,” Meehan explained. “The package, some kind of evidence could make some kind of trouble for the president. I got it, I don't know what it is, I don't wanna know what it is, and I gave it to Jeffords just a couple hours ago, which is why I'm here, waiting for the train. But the point is, you do something to me, Goldfarb'll tear your hearts out. This is just a friendly warning.”
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