The Woman Who Knew Too Much

by Thomas Gifford

  He bent over the hulk, who lay still in the water. “Are you dead or anything?”

  “I don’t think so. But I’m gettin’ there.”

  “I’ll get somebody here. You got a quarter? I haven’t got a piece of change.”

  “Pants pocket,” the big man groaned.

  He felt in the pocket, came out with a quarter, showed it to the big man.

  “Hey, it’s okay. Hurry.” The big man groaned some more.

  The one-eyed man went to the corner, where he found one of the few public telephones in the city that actually worked. He walked across the street and waited in a dark doorway until the paramedics arrived and began sorting out the wounded. A cop car arrived, siren dying as it slowed to a halt.

  The one-eyed man waited until the street was empty again. Then he walked toward an all night coffee shop at the edge of the Village, had a cheeseburger and a cup of coffee and made small talk with the waitress until it was time to go home.

  Chapter Six

  THE GENERAL DIDN’T KNOW what the hell to make of it.

  But, then, everything had been horseshit all day. Admiral Malfaison had caught him kicking his Titleist out of the rough on eleven and neither of them had known what to say. Sticky. Then he’d discovered that his wife had lumbered them with a dinner party at an outgoing under secretary’s godforsaken farm. Farm! Pretentious little bastard. The whole evening was incredible because the courier from New York had brought the goddamned floppy disk with the urgent request from the Director at the Palisades Center to attend to it as quickly as possible.

  The courier, chap named Friborg, had said of the Director, “He’s up to something, General. He’s playing some weird angle. Says somebody’s trying to kill him, won’t elaborate, just whispers oblique threats.” The General had not found Friborg’s observations particularly enlightening.

  The dinner party had been even worse than he’d expected, and with absolute predictability his driver had gotten lost in the dark coming home. Farm! The under secretary had once served time in New Delhi, where he’d acquired an Indian wife whose curry was causing the General a good bit of remarkably audible discomfort now that he was back in his library. It was well past midnight, closer to two o’clock, and he’d turned the last of the hundred-odd pages of typescript the printer had derived from the floppy desk.

  He filled his pipe for the third time. And he still didn’t know what the hell to make of it.

  Friborg was right, Emilio was up to something weird.

  The hundred pages was like … like what?

  An MX missile shoved up your ass—that was as close as he could come to the mot juste.

  The Palisades Center would become the biggest, nastiest toxic waste dump in the history of the nation’s intelligence gathering if any of those pages became public. There would be all the standard, tired old stonewalling and dragging out of the principles of deniability, but nobody believed all that shit anymore. Nixon had seen to that. Post-Nixon, you were guilty until the TV networks declared you innocent. Nixon had ruined it for everyone who came after him. That was his crime, the bastard—screwing it up for all the guys who had to do the dirty work.

  But there was no point in picking through all that again. It always gave him the runs when he dwelt on Nixon and that bunch. Spoilers. They’d spoiled everything. He felt his intestines twitching ominously, and he shut Nixon out of his mind.

  Why in the name of God had Emilio sent the fragment of manuscript to him?

  Well, it was a threat, and not a subtle one.

  But why? What did Emilio want him to do about it? What were the implications? What responses were possible? What inferences did the Director want him to draw?

  And who could have written the damn thing? Who could have such access?

  Or had Emilio himself written it?

  Whoever wrote it, what could it be but blackmail?

  Suddenly the General had to make a run for the bathroom.

  He sat on the toilet smoking his pipe. His thinking was always best while installed upon the commode,” as his sainted mother had always called it.

  The leakage, the publication of such a manuscript, would blow them all into something his cat could swallow without chewing. All of them. The President, the General, all of the Eye-talians, the spics, and Emilio too. That’s what the General couldn’t figure out.

  What good was a threat if the fella making the threat would face the music too?

  Who would benefit?

  Nobody but the goddamn do-gooders who didn’t know their ass, that was who … and the author of the best-seller.

  Maybe it was Woodward and Bernstein again, and the goddamn commie Washington Post.

  Back at his desk he stared at the manuscript.

  This wasn’t going to be another Pentagon Papers fiasco, no way, Jose. Not this time. One of those was enough. Something could be done. What exactly would come to him later. Maybe they’d have to turn the Psycho Branch loose again. Okay, so be it.

  Damn it to hell. So Emilio said someone was trying to kill him. Now what was that supposed to mean?

  The General hated puzzles almost as much as he hated Democrats.

  There was a knock on the library door and Friborg appeared, yawning, his tie pulled loose, a bottle of scotch in his hand. “Drink?” he said.

  Friborg was a good listener, so the General talked for quite a long time, smoked three more pipes, and together they finished off the scotch. The sun was coming up on a green and dewy Virginia estate, not a goddamn farm, when he stood up and went to the window and surveyed his domain.

  “It always amazes me how people think our little outfit knows everything,” he said. “When the truth is we seldom know nearly enough. We have to act on crummy little scraps of information that are wrong more often than not, but we act because we have to. We have to do something. Anything. And that’s where people always get their heads fucked up. They mix up action with knowledge. Stupid bastards don’t think it through. Because we’re ruthless, they assume we must know something.”

  He threw the window open after unlocking the security sensor lodged in the wall. The fresh morning breeze rustled the draperies, filled the room with the grassy sweetness.

  “In fact,” the General said, turning back to Friborg, pointing with the stem of his corncob pipe, “it’s exactly the opposite. The more you know, the harder it is to act at all. With ultimate knowledge comes complete paralysis of will. The less you know, the clearer it all seems. The less you know, the more decisive you can be. You can be confident, you can be ruthless. It’s the real lesson of our business, Friborg. I kid you not.”

  Friborg stifled a yawn. “You mean a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, sir?”

  “Hmmm. Well put. You grasp the essence, I see.” The General looked at his watch. “My biological clock is all out of whack, young man.”

  “Mine too,” Friborg said. “What do you want me to tell the Director, sir?”

  “Not a goddamn thing,” the General said. He knocked the dottle out of his pipe, into a large cut-glass ashtray the President had given him for saving the republic or something, a long time ago. It had been Carter, of all people. “Let’s surprise the Director, he wants to be so cute. Somebody wants to kill him … so fine, we’ll let ’em, whoever it is, kill him. Who needs him? Hey? We’re better off without him … but we’ve got to find out about this manuscript. It’s part of a book, sure. Well, who wrote it?

  Where is it going? Somebody gonna publish the damn thing? Well, they can’t! I won’t let ’em. His wife’s the writer in the family. Let’s ask her. …”

  “Can we ask her hard?”

  The General shrugged. “I leave matters of degree to you lads, surely. You won’t find me poaching on your preserve. I’m merely a policy maker.” He stretched. “I’m going to bed. I’ll sleep well, knowing he’s a dead man. But you, you just make sure nobody gets in the way of whoever’s gonna kill the bastard. For once, just once, we have somebody doing our dirty work.�
�

  He was chuckling when he left the room.

  Friborg sat in a half stupor for a while. He wished he knew what the Palisades Center really was. For that matter he wished he knew who Emilio, the Director, really was.

  He yawned, stood up, dropped the empty bottle into the wastebasket. Christ, he wondered what the hell was going on. Any of it. But Psycho Branch didn’t have the license to know. Psycho Branch was strictly Operations. Not Policy.

  Chapter Seven

  CELIA HAD BEEN AWAKENED early by a call from a man who said he was Peter Greco. He sounded sleepy and disinterested but had just gotten a call from Hilary Sampson, who told him it was important that he call Celia. Well, yawn, here he was, and she could buy him breakfast if she wanted because it would definitely take a bribe to get him abroad so early. She was underwhelmed by the offer and said so, and Greco told her that that was certainly all right with him. She could tell he was about to hang up. He couldn’t have cared less. The problem was, she did. She couldn’t stand this guy already, but the morning wasn’t making the letter any easier to take.

  So now she was sitting in the window at Homer’s, on Tenth where it turned between Sixth and Greenwich. He was already fifteen minutes late, and she was on her second cup of burned coffee, when she saw this guy about her height but built like a ticket booth come in. He was wearing a Yankees warm-up jacket. She should have guessed. It was just perfect: she’d always been a Mets fan.

  He was the type who passed a witticism from the corner of his mouth to the girl at the cashier counter, making her laugh. Probably very big with waitresses and meter maids. Cool. He made straight for her, dropped the Daily News and his sunglasses on the table, shrugged out of the jacket and sat down. “Hi, toots,” he said. “What’s new?” He signaled to the swarthy, mustachioed Greek waiter for a cup of what Celia just knew he’d call java.

  “How did you know me?” she asked. “Or is there some hope you’re just a masher and not the man I’ve been patiently waiting for for half an hour—”

  “Hey, hey, take it easy on a man with only one eye. Hey, Demetrios, is this the fresh pot or the crud you’ve been giving her?”

  “Fresh made, Mr. Greco, just for you.”

  “Way to go, my man. Write this down, cheese and onion omelette, toasted bagel, and a big smile. How about you, honey?”

  “Two poached eggs—”

  Greco interrupted with a moan. “And dry whole wheat toast, don’t tell me. Diet doesn’t make any difference, you know. When your number’s up, your number’s up—”

  “And dry whole wheat toast,” she said through gritted teeth.

  He shook his head. She found herself staring at the eye patch and the tracery of scars across his forehead and nose. It wasn’t disfiguring, just interesting, like seeing a vintage car that had been used hard. He had thick black eyebrows, and the lone eye glittered like a chip of hard shiny coal.

  “Some kind of face, right? Been around.” He poured sugar into milky coffee.

  “Looks a little the worse for wear,” she said.

  “You should see the guy who was standing next to me. You’d have to dig him up, of course. They buried what they could find in a shoe box. It was the cough candy.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I had this cough last winter so I tried the stuff I saw on TV. The pretty cough-candy fairy. Hilary said it was you. That’s how I knew you, the cough-candy fairy.”

  “Did the stuff work?”

  “You gotta be kidding. So, what’s the story on this murder thing?” He enjoyed his coffee. She could tell by the amount of noise he was making.

  She told him the whole story, and by the time she had finished, his omelette and bagel were gone and Demetrios had refilled his cup three times. Her eggs were cold and untouched. She took a deep breath and broke off a corner of toast, popped it into her mouth, and prodded an egg. “So what do you think?”

  “Hilary was right. The cops would say you were wasting their time.”

  “What do you say?”

  “I think you’re an actress with a flair for dramatizing things. Chances are there’s no murder being plotted. Somebody’s making notes on a book. For a review maybe. I don’t know. Forget it, that’s what I say.” The eye kept raking her face like a searchlight. He lit a cigarette.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Smoke. At least wait until I’m through eating.”

  “Wonderful.” He ground out the butt.

  “Hilary was wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “You. She said you were smart.”

  He laughed. “For that, lady, I smoke.” He lit another Lucky. “And cut out the sweet talk. You’re not my type. Cute little blondes for me—”

  “How disgusting!”

  “Don’t be absurd. Most of them turn out to be perfect ladies. But once in a while, just often enough to keep me interested, I find a disgusting one. Whatsa matter, you don’t like Homer’s eggs?”

  “What I don’t like is too involved to go into—”

  “Your ears are getting pink. Can you do that whenever you want?”

  “No, I need help—”

  “Look, your ears are cute. Cutest thing about you so far.” He grinned and winked his good eye.

  “This is all so funny, why don’t you just go away? I don’t need this schoolboy aggravation—”

  “Okay. But I’m telling you, you’ve just seen me at my best. You still want me to hold your hand on this murder thing?”

  “Not bloody likely—”

  “You’re gonna have to cut out the begging. I’ll do it, I’ll do it. You’re drooling egg down your chin, honey.”

  She wiped her chin. “A little of you goes an incredibly long way.”

  “About as far as Twelfth and Broadway, how’s that?” He was amused by her in all the wrong ways. She hated that.

  You never knew what you might find at the Strand.

  The man standing behind the counter where you brought books to sell looked like he’d been kidnapped from the real world. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, had sandy hair cut short and neat, and wore a tie. He listened while Celia described the books she’d bought, rattling off a few titles and suddenly the man nodded. Peter Greco was browsing nearby, half watching, half listening.

  “That must have been Charlie Cunningham, he’s a regular around here. Nice fella, Charlie. Been coming in for years.” The memory of what a prince Charlie was caused a smile to spread across the buyer’s bland face. “Y’know, I think he brought those books you found the same day, just around lunchtime. I put ’em right out on the tables.”

  “So who is this Cunningham character?” Greco didn’t look up from the lavish book about luxury ocean liners of long ago.

  The buyer shrugged. “Charlie Cunningham. Just a guy who gets lots of mysteries in his mail, I guess. I never asked him, he never told me. What can I say? Why do you want him, anyway?”

  “It’s not all that important,” Celia said. “He left some papers in one book and I’d like to return them. You don’t know where I could reach him?”

  He shook his head. “He’ll be in again one of these days, he’s a regular. I’d be glad to hold them for him, if you like. Best I can do.” He stroked his chin. “Maybe he’s in the book. You could try.”

  “Thanks. We will. You’ve been very helpful. And strangely normal,” she added with a grin.

  “I know,” he said, not grinning. “I’ve heard that before.”

  Peter Greco went to the corner, patted his pockets, and came back to Celia. “You got a quarter? I’m out of change.” She gave him the quarter and he called Information, but there was no listing for Charlie Cunningham. “Who the hell does he think he is, anyway?”

  “Charlie Cunningham,” Celia said as they walked along in the morning sunshine. “C.C. is not M.M. But for some reason C.C. had M.M.’s book. Why?”

  Greco shoved his hands into the pockets of his faded jeans. “So M.M. i
n your view is a murder conspirator. This Miles Warriner—”

  “If Miles Warriner is his real name.”

  Greco looked at her in exasperation. “Look, all we know at the moment is the name on the book, so let me call him Miles Warriner without correcting me each time, okay? Jeez, really. This Warriner autographs M.M.’s copy of the book. But somehow this book, this whatchamacallit—”

  “Review copy.”

  “Is sold to the Strand by Cunningham. Now how the hell did Cunningham get M.M.’s autographed copy? Or, other way ’round, why would Warriner sign Cunningham’s review copy for MM.? Doesn’t make sense.” He scowled at her as if it might be her fault.

  “Well, it looks to me like Cunningham probably knows both Warriner and M.M. And Z is still a blank.”

  “I don’t like it,” Greco said.

  “Don’t be petulant. Are you quitting on me?”

  “I’ll give it until lunch, okay? Lunch which will be on you.”

  “What a guy.”

  “This isn’t a date, Blandings—”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “Are we walking this direction on purpose?”

  “I still think we should find Cunningham, the guy who had the book immediately before I did. Technically the letter is his. Maybe we can find him and tell him what’s going on—”

  “He knows what’s going on. He must have read the letter.”

  “Look, I want to find him. You can take a hike. I’m still going to find this man.” She threw him her best defiant glare, dredged up from a bad production of Agnes of God.

  “Sure, sure,” he said. “Where are we going?”

  The logo looked amazingly like the flying red horse that had once been the symbol of a huge oil company with gasoline stations everywhere. Now the flying horse was white against a black background. It decorated the spines of all the books in the reception foyer. It hung on the wall behind the receptionist’s desk. It was woven into the carpet. Peter Greco said: “Get a load of all the horses. Looks like Mr. Ed and his whole family.”