by Ross Thomas
“And the decision is to get Tavro out?” I said.
“That’s correct.”
“How?”
Coors shook his head sorrowfully, as if the star of the spelling bee had just stumbled over Cincinnati. “The decision is not how, Mr. St. Ives, but who.”
“Me?”
“Indeed. You.”
“How deep am I in?”
Coors looked at his watch, as if it would tell him. “Too deep to get out.”
“Because I now know about Killingsworth?”
“That’s mostly it.”
“What other pressure points have you got besides the Congressional investigation threat—just in case I still say no?”
“Four others.”
“As good?”
“Better. Much better.”
I nodded and looked out at the snow. It seemed to be coming down even harder than before and somehow that seemed only normal. “So I’m to work it out any way I can,” I said.
“You’re to draw upon your extensive experience which, you’ve given me to understand, has been mostly with thieves. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t feel quite at home with us.”
“I’ll need some help,” I said.
Coors didn’t like that and he shook his head to prove it “You can’t bring any outsiders into this. I thought I made that plain. They’d never stand for it upstairs.”
“They’ll have to stand for it,” I said. “I’ll let you explain why.”
“Thank you,” he said and drummed the fingers of his left hand on the desk. “Well, I suppose you needn’t tell them anything vitally important.”
“Such as the truth?”
“Yes,” he said. “There’s that.”
“I’ll tell them as little as possible.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
“Who are they?”
“Let’s just use their code names,” I said. “One’s called Expensive, the other one’s Costly.”
“Your fee’s already been negotiated.”
“Negotiations have just been reopened.”
“Three percent of a million is thirty thousand dollars,” Coors said. “That’s a great deal of money for what may not be more than a long weekend.”
“I usually get ten percent and I haven’t punched a time clock since Chicago.”
“Impossible.”
“I’ll settle for five percent since the million is mythical anyhow. That’s my last offer.”
“Four,” he said.
“In advance.”
“What’s your bank in New York?”
I told him and he wrote it down. “It’ll be deposited to your account tomorrow. You pay your own expenses, of course.”
“That’s something else I think we should discuss.”
“No chance,” Coors said and took an envelope from his inside pocket and handed it to me. “An outline is in there plus names, addresses, points of contact, and a suggested timetable.”
I put it away and we talked for another three-quarters of an hour until I said, “I think that does it.”
Coors glanced over his bare desk as though in search of some scrap of information that might have escaped him. “I don’t have anything else unless you have some more questions,” he said.
“One,” I said. “What if I get into trouble?”
He smiled for the first time in a long while and it may have been the same one he wore when they let him watch the Secretary sign the papers that imposed harsh new economic sanctions on some bankrupt country. “If you get into trouble, Mr. St. Ives,” he said, “do drop me a postcard.”
A small shivering light-brown man in a thin cotton raincoat got out of a cab at the State Department’s green-canopied Twenty-first Street entrance and held the door open for me and then trotted off before I could thank him. The driver twisted around in his seat.
“Now that was a goddamned decent thing of him to do, wasn’t it?”
“Very.”
“He’s from Samoa.”
“I was pretty sure he wasn’t from around here.”
“Where to?”
“The library.”
“You mean the Congressional or the main public one?”
“The public one.”
He was listed on page 391 of the current Congressional Directory under the Department of State section. First there was the Director of Intelligence and Research and then, thirteen lines down, was Hamilton R. Coors, director, Office of Intelligence for USSR and Eastern Europe.
It said that he lived at 3503 South Whitney Road in MacLean, Virginia, so I wrote it down in case I ever needed to send him a postcard.
6
HE WAS ABOUT MY height, a little over five-feet-eleven, and my weight, 160 or so, and he had my coloring with its sunkissed complexion, and he nearly had my green eyes that some girl had once called sensitive but which my ex-wife had always liked to describe as shifty. His hair also resembled mine in that it still seemed confused about whether to turn dark blond or light brown before it disappeared forever.
If you were slightly nearsighted, without glasses, and perhaps thirty-five feet away, you could have mistaken one of us for the other, but not if you moved much closer because he carried at least ten fewer years than I did and there were those who would have said that he was far better-looking. I was one of them.
The snow had followed me back from Washington and I was late arriving. He must have been waiting in the lobby of the Adelphi, but I wasn’t aware of him until he approached the desk where I’d stopped to see whether anyone other than the circulation manager of Time had bothered to write.
“Mr. St. Ives?” he said to my back.
I turned and said yes, I was St. Ives.
“I am called Artur Bjelo. I wonder if you would be so kind as to spare me a few moments?” His English was precise, as if he’d learned it carefully, but would never be able to get his tongue around the w’s.
“What’s on your mind?” I said.
He smiled and it came on boyishly, but he may not have been able to help it because he was not much more than twenty-five. I got some minor satisfaction from noticing that my teeth were almost as good as his. “Mr. Anton Pernik,” he said and stopped smiling. “He is very much on my mind.”
I looked at my mail. It wasn’t from Time after all. It was from Harper’s. I put it away in a jacket pocket to savor later.
“Pernik, the poet,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “the poet.”
“How about a drink?”
“In some private place?”
“The Adelphi bar,” I said, “is about as private a place as one can find.”
I never thought of the Adelphi as run-down—only neglected by both management and the public. It was primarily a residential hotel patronized by show people, retired brigadier generals and above, their widows, a few of the older call girls, a mysterious gentleman from Karachi, and a host of middle-aged men in dark suits who carried attaché cases, smoked cigars, and talked to each other in the elevator about how the weather was in Miami last week.
I had been living there in a deluxe suite (which meant that it had a Pullman kitchen) for nearly five years, but I had yet to eat a decent meal in its Continental Room whose chef boasted of having smuggled his secret recipes all the way from Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Still, the bar wasn’t bad if you ordered nothing more complicated than a Manhattan. We settled at one of the dark oak tables and I asked for a Scotch and water while Bjelo called for a Margarita which meant that we wouldn’t get our drinks for another few minutes because Sid, the bartender, would have to send out for some Tequila. It was that kind of a place.
“What about Pernik?” I said, reaching for a pretzel.
“He is to be exchanged for your ambassador to my country who has been kidnapped.” He must have caught my expression because he added quickly. “Already it is on the Associated Press service.”
Coors had said the story would be released tha
t afternoon and because of the snow it had taken me three hours to get back to New York so I couldn’t find much wrong with the time element. “They have an AP service where you work?” I said.
“At the United Nations,” he said.
“The story wouldn’t have mentioned my name.”
“It did not.”
“Are you with the UN itself or with the Yugoslav delegation?”
“I am a very minor and very junior member of the delegation, primarily because of my fluency with languages. Our embassy in Washington naturally informed us immediately that you will serve as the intermediary in the exchange.”
“I don’t see how this could be an official call then.”
“It is entirely unofficial, Mr. St. Ives.”
“I see.” I didn’t, of course, but it was a comment that would help fill the time before the drinks arrived.
“Pernik’s granddaughter is to accompany him,” he said.
“So I understand.”
“Do you know her name?”
“Yes.”
That didn’t stop him from telling me anyway. “Gordana Panić,” he said, making the a in Panić broad and pronouncing its c like the ch in church. “Pernik is her maternal grandfather.”
The drinks came a few moments later and I noticed that Sid had even salted the rim of the Margarita glass. I offered Bjelo a cigarette, but he shook his head in refusal and drank half of the Margarita. I don’t think he noticed the salted rim.
“What’s she to you?” I said.
“We were to be married.”
“I see,” I said again, this time because it’s a useful enough phrase when you wish to indicate a sympathetic ear, but not an overactive curiosity.
“We were engaged.”
“Mmmm,” I said.
“A month ago she tore it off.” He looked up quickly from his glass. “Tore is not correct, is it?”
“Broke.”
“Yes, broke,” he said and finished his drink. “She broke it off.”
I couldn’t think of any more comforting phrases so I asked Bjelo if he would care for another drink and when he nodded that he would, I signaled to Sid.
“There is another man,” Bjelo said.
Ah, Killingsworth, you sly dog.
“An older man,” he said.
About twenty-five years older than you and a few million dollars richer. It had to be Killingsworth’s money; it couldn’t possibly be his personality.
“A friend of yours?” I said.
“No.”
“Sometimes it is.”
“No, if it were a friend of mine, I would know his name. And if I knew his name, I would kill him.”
I studied Bjelo for some indication of sardonic humor or even the hint of overdramatization. There was none. He gazed at me steadily with eyes that I could almost match in color, but not in resolution. He could kill a rival all right, if he got the chance. I decided that it was his Balkan heritage.
“Well, maybe when Miss Panić gets over here you can run down to Washington and patch things up.”
Bjelo didn’t reply until the second round of drinks was served. “It would be a pleasant world, Mr. St. Ives, if things were so simple.”
“They’re not, I take it.”
“No. I am returning to Yugoslavia shortly—within the week. But I am afraid Gordana will already have gone.” He paused. There was nothing for me to say.
“Days are important,” he said, frowning into his new drink.
I had nothing to add to that either.
He quit staring into his drink and swallowed half of it. “She would not be coming to this country unless it were for that old fool who is her grandfather. That one lives in the past. Have you read him?”
“Not recently,” I said.
“He is the only poet who improves in translation. He is unreadable in Croatian.”
“Well, they did give him a Nobel Prize.”
“Politics,” Bjelo said, almost spitting the word. “He boasts of having tried to make peace between Mihailović’s Cetniks and President Tito during the war. But he was a Croat and Mihailović hated Croats worse than he hated Communists. Besides, Pernik was a Royalist and Tito and his Partisans despised Royalists. So the old fool was rebuffed by both sides and because he had nothing else to do, he wrote that disaster of a poem.”
“It was called an epic,” I said.
Bjelo snorted and used both his mouth and nose to do it. “If ten thousand lines of doggerel can be described as an epic then, yes, that is what it was. But its imagery was fatuous; its narrative redundant; its meter impossible; and its theme naive to the point of mawkishness.”
“Apparently, you’re something of a critic,” I said.
He shook his head slowly. “No, Mr. St. Ives,” he said and there was nothing but ingenuousness in his tone, “I am something of a poet.”
Over the years I have met a number of persons who have described themselves as poets. Some lied when they did it. Some boasted. Some murmured it a little dreamily, some blushed, and some mumbled it as if they hoped I wouldn’t hear. But none said it matter of factly, as did Bjelo, and I almost believed him.
“But you’re not here to discuss if poetry should be, not mean,” I said.
“I’m here to make a request, Mr. St. Ives,” he said.
“All right.”
“First, I must ask a question.”
“All right.”
“When will Gordana and her grandfather be ex-changed for your ambassador?”
“That’s up to the kidnappers,” I said. “I have no idea.”
“I am going to make a strange request.”
“Go ahead.”
He looked at me and that hint of resolution was back in his eyes. “I am going to ask you—no, that is too weak a word. I am going to implore you to delay the exchange for one week.”
“To stall it,” I said.
“Yes, stall it.”
“Why?”
“I must see Gordana.”
“Write her a letter.”
“I have written her dozens. There is no answer.”
“Call her.”
“She refuses to answer.”
“I’m sorry I can’t help you,” I said.
“You refuse?”
“Yes, if you want to put it that way, I refuse. I’m a go-between, Mr. Bjelo, not Cupid. A man has been kidnapped and you’re asking me to postpone his release while you patch up a lovers’ quarrel. You don’t have a good enough reason. In fact, you don’t have much of a reason at all.”
“You won’t reconsider?” he said. “I ask only for a week.”
“No.”
He nodded and played with the stem of his empty glass, moving it this way and that. “Then,” he said softly, “I have some bad news for you.”
“That’s the kind I’m most familiar with.”
He looked up at me and I realized why I didn’t quite believe him when he said he was a poet. Poets don’t have eyes like that. “The news is this,” he said. “If you go ahead with the exchange without granting me the week’s delay, then neither Gordana Panić nor her grandfather will leave Yugoslavia.”
“That’s not news,” I said. “That’s a warning.”
He nodded thoughtfully and then rose. “Yes,” he said. “It could be called that.”
I rose too. “That’s all?”
He picked up a tweed topcoat from a chair. “That’s all, Mr. St. Ives, except that I believe this is your coat.” He handed it to me and picked up the other one which could have been the twin of the one I held. “Yes,” he said, “see—yours does not have this rip in its neck.” He put the coat on, buttoned it, and looked at me. “I’m sorry if you expected something more dramatic.”
“Not at all,” I said. “I thought you were swell.”
He smiled slightly. “I wish I could thank you for your time, but—” He made a small gesture.
“That’s quite all right,” I said, damned if he’d win the politeness p
rize.
“You can reconsider.”
“Yes. I can, but I won’t.”
“That’s a pity,” he said, turned and walked from the bar. I followed him into the lobby and because I had nothing better to do watched him push through the revolving door, duck his head at the snow, and then pause at the curb before jaywalking Forty-sixth Street.
He stepped out into the street and the white Impala, hitting forty by the time he took three steps, still had to swerve if it were going to do it and that made its rear wheels skid just enough to slow it down and give Bjelo the bare split second that wouldn’t have been enough for most people, but seemed plenty for him. He leaped back and to one side and the Impala’s right front fender may have brushed him but it didn’t stop to find out. The car skidded a little again as its accelerating rear wheels grabbed for purchase in the slush and snow, straightened, and then sped east.
Bjelo didn’t bother to look at the disappearing car. He gave his gray tweed coat a perfunctory brush, turned quickly but still calmly, and began walking west at a pace that was little faster than a casual stroll and with the air of a man who finds it pointless to dwell on either near-misses or hits.
I rode the elevator up to my ninth-floor apartment and made a phone call and the young lady with the Yugoslav delegation at the United Nations sounded disappointed when she couldn’t connect me with Artur Bjelo because no one of that name had ever worked there.
I made two more phone calls, long ones, and then I stood by the window and looked out at the snow and tried to decide whether the driver of the Impala had been a professional or an amateur. But even professionals can’t see too clearly at forty miles per hour in twilight snow because it tends to make all men who are about five-eleven with brownish blond hair and pale complexions and identical topcoats look very much alike.
7
THEY BOTH WORE BELTED trench coats and the shorter one had covered his head with a dark blue beret while the taller one sported a high-crowned pale gray fedora with the brim snapped down both fore and aft. They stood near the Pan Am counter at Kennedy International, their eyes protected from the dark February night by sunglasses, and talked to each other without moving their lips like a couple of tired old cons in a prison run by Warner Brothers.
