by Ross Thomas
Bartak nodded again, nothing but good humor. “You led us quite a chase,” he said.
I nodded. A blind man might have had some difficulty in following the trail I’d blazed across a good section of Yugoslavia. A four-year-old child would have had no trouble at all. The only thing I hadn’t down was to drop bread crumbs in the snow.
“It’s the way I had to operate,” I said and looked again at Hamilton Coors who returned my gaze, a slight smile on his face now. It could have meant anything or nothing at all.
“I was wondering if you heard the news of your death?” Bartak said, even chuckling a little.
“I heard it.”
“Yes, it was simply a matter of wrong identification. The person at your embassy, a Mr. Lehmann, identified the body as being yours, but then he said that you two had only met casually. I must say that the dead man did bear you a striking resemblance.”
“Who was he?” I said.
“We’re not yet sure,” Bartak said, “but we suspect that he somehow may have been involved in the kidnapping.”
“Because of where he was found?” I said.
Bartak dropped a little of his early morning good humor. “Yes, because of where he was found, almost directly across the street from Tavro’s house. A cottage really. He grew roses.”
“So he told me,” I said.
Hamilton Coors eased into the conversation, smooth as greased marble. “I really should talk to Mr. St. Ives about several matters, Mr. Bartak,” he said, taking my arm and steering me toward the castle before I blew the whole thing.
“There’s a dead man upstairs,” I said. “A friend of mine.”
“Really?” Hamilton Coors said. “We’ll have to do something about that, won’t we?”
Coors stood at the window of one of the small, bare upstairs rooms and looked out over the meadow. He rocked easily up and down on his toes, his hands clasped behind his back which was turned toward me.
“You didn’t want me to get him out, did you?” I said.
“Tavro?”
“Who else?”
“Your question’s hardly germane,” he said, “since you never had the slightest intention of trying to.” He turned around. “However, it worked out most satisfactorily, don’t you think?”
“What was Tavro’s real pitch.”
“Oh, he had information all right.”
“Was it any good?”
“Why do you ask?”
“He parted with it too easily. He handed it over to Killingsworth and then asked for help. After he handed it over it didn’t leave him any leverage. That’s why I say that he seemed more interested in peddling his information than he was in leaving the country.”
Coors turned away from me and walked over to a wall. He inspected it to see whether it was clean enough to lean against. It was and he leaned against it, his arms folded across his chest. He had on a suit different from the one that I’d seen him in last, a dark green one with pale gray stripes. The search that he had made for a tie had been worth it.
“What did he tell you about his information?” he said.
“That it could bring Russian tanks into Belgrade. Could it?”
Coors frowned and walked back to the window and let me look at his back again. “The CIA thinks so.”
“And you don’t?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But Tavro wanted the information broadcast.”
“Tavro and the people behind him. They wanted somebody else to do it, of course. Preferably the Americans.” Coors turned around again. “Why did you go through with it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You must have known that the CIA was mixing in. You must have known that early on.”
“It was. They tried to bribe me.”
“How much?”
“Ten thousand pounds.”
Coors shook his head. “They like to spend money. It does something for them.”
“They first approached me in New York, but I didn’t know it was the CIA then. They even arranged a phony hit-and-run.”
“The same chap?”
I nodded. “Your security wasn’t too good. He was waiting for me in the lobby of my hotel when I got back. He was playing at being Artur Bjelo then.”
Coors tugged at his lower lip. “We saw that it was leaked to them just after you left Washington. We wanted to see how fast they’d move.”
“They met me at the airport in Belgrade.”
“The Tonzi girl?”
I nodded. “She accidentally shot my friend. Bartak doesn’t have to know about it though.”
“No,” Coors said, “he doesn’t. Have you—uh—tried to arrange things?” I nodded and there was a brief silence.
“Who killed Stepinac?” I said.
Coors shrugged. “Tavro’s people, I assume. They thought that he was going to tip you off about Tavro.”
“You mean that Tavro really didn’t want out of the country?”
This time Coors only nodded. “That was all part of his sales pitch, of course—to give his information a dash of authenticity, although it really didn’t need it”
“He added another touch when he got an old friend of his killed,” I said. “An American.”
“I heard about him,” Coors said. “Was his name really Bill Jones?”
I nodded. “Jones’s house was bugged. He was supposed to set up a meeting between me and Tavro. He wasn’t able to get in touch with Tavro, but the meeting came off anyhow. That puzzled Jones a bit before he died. It also puzzled me for a while.”
There was a brief silence and then I asked, “What are you going to do with Tavro’s information?”
“Sit on it.”
“What’s the CIA want to do?”
Coors looked up at the ceiling and pursed his lips. “That’s really the crux of the matter, I suppose. That’s why Tavro died. If Tavro had found out that we weren’t going to use the information, he might have peddled it to someone else. The French perhaps. The CIA didn’t want that, of course. If they couldn’t have it themselves, they didn’t want anyone else to have it. It’s their dog-in-the-manger attitude really.”
“But you’ve got it,” I said. “Or at least Killingsworth does.”
“Ah,” Coors said. “But they know that we won’t use it, so it’s just as if we really don’t have it. It’s quite a subtle point, don’t you think?”
“The CIA wouldn’t have used it,” I said. “They wouldn’t have brought tanks into Belgrade.”
“Of course not,” Coors said. “But they would have bargained with it. They would have gotten something they wanted. That’s why they tried to delay the exchange. They wanted time to try to get the information from Tavro. Failing that, they had him killed so nobody else could get it.”
I shook my head. “You had him killed really. You set him up.”
Coors decided to inspect his fingernails. “We don’t operate quite that way.”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “Tavro was trying to give authenticity to his information by lying about how bad he needed to get out of the country. So you obliged him. You turned him over to me. You might as well have killed him.”
“If you had tried, you might have succeeded.”
“But I had no intention of trying. You knew that. That’s the real reason you hired me. You wanted something to happen to Tavro. It did.”
“Yes,” Coors said. “I suppose it did.” He looked around the room. “How did Killingsworth take his ordeal?”
“He’s over his romance.”
Coors smiled a little. “A passing fancy, I suppose.”
“I want the girl out,” I said.
“The granddaughter?”
I nodded.
He shook his head. “I don’t think that can be arranged.”
“Find a way,” I said. “She’d like to go to New York. You can also find a way to pay for it for a year or two.”
“What’s she to you?” Coors said.
>
“Nothing. It’s just that she should be something to someone.”
He again shook his head.
“Find a way,” I said, “or Killingsworth finds out how you’ve played him for a fool. That’s my ace.”
“I was wondering what you would want when you played it,” Coors said.
“Now you know.”
He looked at me curiously. “Don’t you grow tired of blackmail?”
“Sure, I said. “I’m sick of it. But it doesn’t make me as sick as it did to watch a friend of mine get killed for no good reason that I can think of, unless they’re the ones that you’ve just given me and they’re worse than no reasons at all. Watching my friend die made me really sick. So blackmail doesn’t bother me much anymore. It doesn’t even make me queasy.”
“All right,” Coors said. “I’ll take care of the girl.”
“Thanks.”
“But don’t blame me for your friend’s death.”
“I’m not blaming you,” I said. “I’m blaming the stupidity of your system. It doesn’t have to work like that.”
Coors began to pace up and down. He paced quite a while before he said anything.
“You can’t blame the system,” he said slowly, “if that’s what you want to call it, because we’re all products of the system. But that doesn’t excuse some of the mistakes it makes out of sheer inadvertence or carelessness or—as you say—stupidity. It doesn’t excuse them at all.”
He paused to look at me carefully. “Still, the system protects us and that’s why we have to protect it. If we start tinkering with it, messing around with its insides, then we might change it so radically that it would no longer protect us—couldn’t even if it wanted to.”
He nodded then, as if making the next point to himself. “We have to change it, of course, from time to time. It’s far from perfect. But we mustn’t be stampeded into it. Careful, systematic development is the answer, not radical improvisation. Otherwise, we might destroy it, imperfect though it may be, and replace it with something far worse.”
When Coors was through he looked quickly around and then chuckled, almost as if he were a bit embarrassed. “Quite a little lecture, wasn’t it? Although I’m not at all sure that it did you any good.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think it did either. Not me anyway. But I know of someone you should try it on.”
“Who?”
“A guy called Carstairs,” I said. “He really likes crap like that.”
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1971 by Ross E. Thomas
978-1-4532-5969-6
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