The Man Who Heard Too Much

by Bill Granger

  “I see,” Michael said.

  Silence on the line.

  “Michael,” Cardinal Ludovico began and paused. Michael had been picked precisely because the Central Intelligence Agency had made a liaison with the congregation and because the CIA said he would be a useful “watcher” for the congregation. And ultimately for the CIA, though Michael would never know that. Cardinal Ludovico had long before abandoned candor and truth in the pursuit of what was best for the church on earth.

  “Michael, do you suspect me of anything?”

  Another silence lay between them.

  “I have to go now, Eminence,” Michael said in a dull, distracted voice. “I have to think.”

  “Let me assure you, Michael—”

  The connection was broken. For a moment, the Cardinal held the receiver and then pressed the buttons on the old-fashioned cradle.

  “Tomaso? I must speak to our agent in Milano.… Yes. Quickly, Tomaso.”

  He put down the receiver and waited. Darkness filled the room with velvet shadows. He felt hunger and thirst but did not stir. It was stupid to have mentioned Rena’s name, he thought. If Michael does not trust, then the matter is lost. And his life is lost in the bargain. He grieved at both losses but did not make a sound.

  The telephone rang once. He picked up the receiver and heard the sleepy voice of the agent in Milano. He made his instructions simply and then hung up.

  There was no misunderstanding the instructions. They were brutally clear.

  25

  MALMÖ

  Rolf Gustafson sat in his underwear in the middle of the room. His chair was made of unpainted pine. The electrical cord torn from his favorite lamp was wrapped around both wrists and the back of the chair. The man across from him was staring into his eyes without any sense of curiosity. This was a matter of instilling fear. Devereaux did it in a lazy, natural way. He provoked fear by not seeing the object before him but by staring through the object to a point some distance behind, as though already foreseeing the future of the object. His eyes were bleak, as though the thought of Rolf’s future made them bleak.

  There was no one else in the apartment. Henry McGee was gone. To prove his need to make a deal, McGee had agreed to Devereaux’s terms. He was waiting for Devereaux to finish here, and then he would have an errand to run. It was an important errand, and they had both understood it.

  The car containing the two CIA agents was still parked on the snowy street. If they figured how to get out of the trunk before they froze to death, they would only be embarrassed.

  Devereaux had not spoken to Rolf until he had found the bug and dropped it in a pot of water on the stove. He had torn the cord from the lamp and tied Rolf without a word, though Rolf protested. The cord cut into Rolf’s wrists.

  Devereaux went through the rooms while Rolf waited. He found the address books and the photographs of his stable of prostitutes. He put these on a table opposite Rolf. He also found the cash sitting in a plastic bag in the back of the refrigerator, behind the milk and cheese.

  The snow was very heavy and wet flakes clung to the warmth of the windows until they melted.

  “Tell me what you want.” Rolf said it over and over. He also said his hands were growing numb because of the binding.

  “Listen to me. Tell me what you want. You can’t treat me this way.”

  Devereaux said, “Who are these women?”

  “Friends.”

  “Are they whores?”

  “They are respected women.”

  “This one? In the teddy and garter belt? Is that her wedding picture? Is this her working outfit?”

  “Look. It’s a sideline with me. The police know about it.”

  Devereaux stared at Rolf for a long time again. Then he put the photographs back on the table.

  “Tell me about the tape,” Devereaux said. He was very cold, without hope in his voice.

  Rolf had understood from the first moment.

  “I made a mistake.”

  Devereaux said nothing.

  Minutes passed. The snow fell. Silence filled the rooms until it was suffocating.

  “Tell me about the tape.”

  “I made a mistake.”

  Devereaux let it go. He stared out the window and said, “Tell me about Michael Hampton.”

  “I know nothing. He’s a translator… an interpreter as well. He lives in Stockholm.” The denial was too abrupt, too total. Even Rolf saw that as soon as he said it.

  Devereaux said, “Rolf. There are two possibilities. The first is that you will tell me everything and then I’ll decide about you. The second is that you will tell me everything, but the decision about you will have been made along the way.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Tell me about the tape.”

  Rolf started to say he knew nothing. Devereaux grabbed his nose and twisted it until it broke.

  Blood streamed down his nostrils and filled his mouth. Rolf screamed and tried to rise, but he was tied to the chair. He kept screaming.

  Devereaux said, “No one will hear you. The bicycle shop is closed.”

  “Blood,” he said in a sobbing voice. “My God, you broke my nose.”

  Devereaux sat still and let the man taste his own blood.

  Rolf said, “I was given the tape to give to Michael.”

  Devereaux got up and went to the kitchen and found a cotton towel. He soaked it with cold water, wrung it, and brought it into the other room. He pressed the towel against Rolf’s nose and freed his left hand. Rolf held the towel, still sobbing, his thin shoulders shaking.

  Devereaux sat down again and waited.

  The tears ebbed at last, and Rolf looked at Devereaux while holding the bloody towel.

  “For five hundred kronor. I am to give this tape to Michael, to pack it in his bags.”

  “What man gave you the tape?”

  “I really can’t say, sir.”

  Without a word, Devereaux took Rolf’s left hand in his own. He broke the little finger.

  Rolf stared at his hand, felt the throb of pain from his finger through his arm to his brain, linked to his broken nose. He thought to scream but only managed a strangled sob.

  “You are a madman. They’ll kill me or worse.”

  “No, Rolf. I’m the worse, not them. I’m here and that is real pain, isn’t it, Rolf?”

  “My God.”

  “Not God or them is in this room, only me.”

  “My God.”

  Devereaux waited. Tears filled Rolf’s eyes again. He tried to wrap the wet bloody towel around his hand and hold it to his nose.

  “A man I do not know. A man came to me, and I thought he was Russian. Certainly not an American man. Although I cannot be sure of this. A thin man with a limp. An older man, very distinguished, dressed very well. He gave me the tape. It was unusual, but I have done unusual things. It’s not easy to make a living in a place like Sweden. They take all your money away. I have to do things to make a living.”

  “Did you listen to the tape?”

  “No, sir.”

  Devereaux considered this.

  “Five hundred kronor is not worth that much curiosity?”

  “No, sir. It was done quickly on the last morning of the conference, and I had to pack the bags. I took the tape right away with his bag to the hotel. The Savoy. To her room. The man said he would be there. He was getting it off with her, very pretty woman, I can tell you. They were in bed, I think, when I arrived. I tried to see her.” His voice changed. “She was naked, I think.”

  “That’s not important. Why were you supposed to bring the tape to Michael Hampton?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Is that true?”

  Silence.

  “Don’t hurt me, sir.”

  “I don’t want to. But you compel me.”

  “Please. If I can understand what you want.”

  “I want everything, Rolf. Didn’t I make that clear when I broke your nose and your fi
nger?”

  “But how will you know when I have told you everything?”

  “Trust me, Rolf.”

  “Sir, I don’t want any more pain, sir.”

  “I know, Rolf. No one wants pain.”

  “If I had known, I would not have involved myself. Not for the money.”

  “No. I’m sure you wouldn’t, Rolf. But you are involved now, and that’s the problem.”

  Rolf thought about it while the gray-eyed man watched him. “I will tell you everything. The same man said to me to go to Evelyn Jaynes so that he would go after Mr. Hampton. I didn’t understand any of this. The man gave me a thousand kronor this time, and this Evelyn Jaynes was a British journalist.”

  “What did you tell Evelyn Jaynes?”

  “I told him about the telephone record. The record of calls by the journalists. The record of calls by Michael Hampton.”

  Rolf paused, daubed his nose with the bloody towel. There were tears in his eyes. “Sir. I told him that Michael Hampton was employed at the conference by an agency in Rome. This is the Congregation for the Protection of the Faith. I suppose this is a Catholic group of some sort, but I don’t know. He called the number in Rome seven times during the conference. I told Mr. Jaynes this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was told to tell Mr. Jaynes that Mr. Hampton had taken this tape recording that everyone attached importance to.”

  Devereaux stared at him until Rolf dropped his eyes. His undershirt was bloodstained. “I am telling you the truth, all of it, but how will you know when I have told you all I know?”

  “Is this all the truth?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who does Mr. Jaynes work for?”

  “Several newspapers in Great Britain. I can get their names. He is… what do you call it?”

  “Free-lance.”

  “Yes. Free-lance.”

  “What do you think is the reason they wanted this journalist to go after Mr. Hampton?”

  “I have no idea, sir.”

  Devereaux used the silences to stare out the window at the snow. He might have been passing time. The silences worked on Rolf Gustafson.

  “Sir, I am telling you the truth, and I wish I never had seen that damned tape recording.”

  “What do you think was on the tape?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “I believe you, Rolf. What do you think was on the tape?”

  “I think it was a secret, sir.”

  Devereaux stared through him until Gustafson felt shards of ice pierce his heart.

  “Please, sir.”

  “Tell me about the man who gave you the tape.”

  Rolf tried to describe him. Gently, Devereaux led him back over the ground of his description. He tried to see the eyes, the shape of the face, the color of the hair. But Rolf was a poor witness. He only remembered the limp. The man had limped.

  “And no one at the conference seemed to know him.”

  “No, sir. He contacted me one night in my bar. I was drinking beer, and I was… making an arrangement with a visiting German.”

  “You were pimping.”

  Rolf stared at the floor.

  “He contacted me,” Rolf said.

  “Rolf. What do you think was on the tape?”

  “A secret, sir.”

  “A secret for whom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Devereaux watched the snow on the rooflines across the street with the same detached, peaceful feeling he had once had as a boy watching the snow cover Chicago and make the city full of magic. The thought of snow comforted him.

  “Rolf. You’ll have to leave for a little while.”

  “Leave, sir?”

  “You have a passport.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “I think you should catch the next plane to London. Someone will meet you at the airport. Do you think you can do this?”

  “But I have work, sir, at the city hall—”

  “Make some excuse. You might suggest you had an accident and fell and hurt your hand and face.”

  “Why must I go, sir?”

  “Because I say it. You understand, Rolf? If you go, you’ll be met by a man in London, and it’ll be all right for you. If you disobey me, then your life is ended.”

  So flat, so soft, so overwhelming.

  Rolf closed his eyes.

  Snow covered the city, covered the old Peugeot parked downstairs. The bicycle shop was closed because there were no customers for bicycles on a snowy morning in Malmö.

  “I have no money—”

  Devereaux opened his wallet. He put the krona notes on the table. “Take the rest from the bank where you keep your legal money. Or from the illegal money you keep in the refrigerator. People always keep their illegal money in the refrigerator. It’s a strange thing. Maybe a refrigerator is like a safe in the mind’s eye.”

  Devereaux untied him and stared at him. Rolf looked miserable and battered. His nose and finger were swelling.

  “You didn’t have to break my nose,” Rolf said.

  “Yes, I did,” Devereaux said.

  26

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Twenty-one hours later, they sat on a bench in Lafayette Park across from the White House. The park also was occupied by two men who said they were homeless and wished to protest their homelessness. They had constructed a crude shelter for themselves using three wire shopping carts stolen from supermarkets and some sheets of plywood. The two men were very drunk on vodka.

  The men on the bench stared at the homeless men. They were not interested in the homeless; it was just a place to rest the eyes.

  “The next liberal platform will be the right of every person to have his or her own shopping cart,” said Vaughn Reuben, who still resembled a professor at an eastern college but whose voice was now full of a deep, utterly black contempt. “Then, for the handicapped homeless, we’ll have motor-driven shopping carts.”

  “You have a lot of sympathy,” Douglas Court said. He held up the hickory cane and sighted down its length as though it might be a rifle. The tip of the cane was pointed at the larger of the two homeless men. Douglas Court was assistant secretary of state for intelligence liaison. That title, typical of the overstated titles rife throughout the bureaucracy, was the reason for his curious friendship with Vaughn Reuben.

  Vaughn Reuben lightly rubbed his plumpish belly and fiddled with his bow tie. Both gestures, mightily affected, were his ways of dealing with tension, along with sucking at the dry stem of his pipe. He was very nervous and very tired. He wasn’t even supposed to be back in Washington, but in London, “riding Hanley’s ass,” as the National Security director had put it.

  The other man was older, more patrician in appearance. Having shot the two homeless men with his cane, he now put it point-down on the sidewalk and leaned on it with the weary security of the longtime lame. He needed his old cane, and it showed in the familiarity of his gesture. As always, the federal city surged with life and Pennsylvania Avenue crawled with traffic. There had been too much traffic for at least thirty years. Across the street from the park, the broad lawns led to the White House. Antiterrorism concrete barricades surrounded the lawns, as well as an elegant black fence, but it was the absurdity of the wide lawns holding back the shabby density of the rest of Washington that made it seem the White House was as isolated as a farmhouse suddenly surrounded by an interstate cloverleaf.

  “What’s gone wrong now?” Douglas Court said.

  “Two case officers in Malmö. They were watchers on our Swedish friend, and they nearly got iced. Rather, they caught pneumonia. Seven hours locked in the trunk of their own car. It was the man from R Section and a passerby, which doesn’t make sense at all. He is a murderous son of a bitch. He killed two men in Brussels. They deny it, of course. But the Soviets know. They know it was him. I saw to that.”

  “That’s terrible, Vaughn, simply unacceptable.”

  “It gets more unacceptable. Rolf ha
s disappeared. The bug was drowned in his apartment and there was blood, and our two watchers think the man from R Section did that, too.”

  “Brilliant,” said Douglas Court. “I must say you’ve handled this brilliantly so far.” His lame leg ached.

  The two homeless men sat under the plywood boards and stared at the two officials in long, dark wool coats. The day was washed out like an Impressionist painting done in thin watercolors.

  “You spare a dollar for some coffee?” It was the second homeless man, the bigger one, and he was standing about ten feet from Vaughn Reuben. Vaughn stared at him. The homeless man shrugged and turned back to his shelter. A bumper sticker that urged a vote for the last liberal candidate for president was stuck to one of the shopping carts.

  “We’ll assume that our friend talked to the man from Section. So we’ll assume we have to go at this from another end. The point is to get that tape usefulized.” The final, bureaucratic word lay between them.

  “The secretary doesn’t want a fuckup,” Douglas Court said.

  “The secretary is ready to shove the Firm down the toilet. I give a fuck about the fucking secretary,” Vaughn Reuben said. He used the obscenities with elegance, as though reciting a bawdy but ennobling sonnet. “The fucking secretary called this on by himself. The point is to get the fucking secretary to find the right villain when the shit hits the fan. The fucking secretary is supposed to be looking at Section, not across the river at Langley. The fucking secretary is supposed to think this is all an R Section fuckup from beginning to end, but Section sends this son of a bitch in and he’s fucking us up.”

  “You said fucking about sixty times.”

  “I am so pissed off with that whiny rat Hanley. And that goddamn Devereaux.”

  “Is that his name? What kind of a name is that?”

  “What do you mean what kind of a name is that? How do I know? I just know that name. That son of a bitch was fucking around back in Vietnam days when he was there. That son of a bitch is smart, I give him that, and he’s tough enough—but he’s only one son of a bitch. I got a whole agency, and what do I get out of it? I get two assholes locked asshole to asshole in a trunk in a car in fucking Sweden who got to go on sick leave and maybe even disability because they caught pneumonia.”