Seven Silent Men

by Behn, Noel;

  Grafton went to the staircase and started up. Hushed voices could be heard somewhere above. He stopped, pressed back against the wall, drew the gun … Corticun’s gun. The voices moved out of earshot. Grafton continued up. Faint rapping came from afar. Again he stopped. The rapping repeated. A door opened. Urgent tones trailed rapidly off into the distance. He eased up and onto the landing, wondering if he’d been discovered. The hallway was empty. He started along it. A phone was being dialed. Sweat was running down his face and he knew why. He’d never executed a man in cold blood, let alone a comrade he’d long admired. He paused, tried to erase the slate, clear his mind. He told himself to concentrate only on what he had to do and how he’d go about it. He realized that time was working against him, that he mustn’t hesitate. Mustn’t allow Edgar so much as one word, one glance.

  He regripped the revolver, decided he would walk through the door firing. He moved down the hall. Quickened his pace. Raised the gun. Turned abruptly into the bedroom … and saw that he was too late. J. Edgar Hoover lay naked on the floor, dead from a heart attack.

  THIRTY

  The body of J. Edgar Hoover rested in state in the rotunda of the Capitol. Yates and Hennessy and Grafton were among the first of 50,000 persons to walk past the catafalque. Billy and Cub did not mourn.

  Grafton did.

  “He was a great man,” Grafton said as they descended the hill and hailed a cab. “Only he stayed in the game an inning too long.”

  On the plane back to Prairie Port with Cub and Yates he repeated the sentiment, then fell asleep.

  In flight Cub told Yates that after Sissy, for decent if misguided reasons, contacted Corticun to say Billy was en route to the Carbondale garage, he had tried getting in touch with Grafton.

  “I figured you needed some help,” Cub said. “I didn’t believe what you were saying any more than before, but I wasn’t going to let you be out there alone. I had no way of knowing Graf was already on your case … that’s why I couldn’t locate him. Graf told me later he was always suspicious over why he’d been removed from Prairie Port. Brew’s murder got him thinking hard. The deaths of Strom, Alice and Jez pushed him over the edge. He took a leave of absence and came down to Prairie Port. Kept out of sight and poked around. He began putting two and two together. Began looking for you while I was trying to find him. Well, he got hold of me, all right, and I filled him in on the parts he didn’t know. Then he knew it was time to ride the big white horse again. That’s what Graf calls a hot investigation, ‘riding the big white horse into battle.’ I apologize, Billy. I should have listened to you a long time back, only I was too pigheaded.”

  Yates assured him, “You did just fine.”

  “No. I didn’t. You spotted what was really going down and Graf smelled it. I should have too.”

  “I just kept on the trail out of my inveterate sense of skepticism,” Yates said. “Graf followed up out of his ego, on account of being replaced as senior resident agent. You approached the facts like a normal, sane person should, objectively.”

  “Which is just what the Silent Men wanted, wasn’t it?”

  “… After you and Graf got together, what happened?”

  “We started looking for you,” Cub said. “Graf had been tailing Tina Beth, and she led him to you. Then he followed you while I covered Tina Beth. When Matthew Ames turned up at your doorstep trying to scare Tina Beth into cooperating with the Silent Men, we were there and waiting.”

  “We?”

  “Happy de Camp and myself. Happy stayed behind with Tina Beth, and I lit out and joined Graf in D.C. Graf and I tailed you to Barrett Amory’s and on down to the shore. We thought of rushing them while you were still at Amory’s, only Graf was afraid they hadn’t done anything to incriminate themselves. Nothing we heard or saw, at least. We were listening in as best we could. Good thing we didn’t lose them when they drove you to the beach, huh?”

  “Good thing.”

  Cub pushed back a notch in the reclining seat. “I can’t get over Mormon State being dreamed up by Trask … being a looneytoon classroom exercise. It’s wild.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to tell you and Graf the last step,” Yates said. “Maybe that’s the wildest of all. It was the sixth requisite Orin Trask had for his model crime, the matter of the amount of money stolen. Trask realized that nothing intrigues the public quite as consistently as riches. Often, stolen riches. Pirate treasure. The perfect robbery, according to the model crime scenario, would have to rival the fabled wealth of yore, or at least beat the modern record-holder for cash stolen in a nonviolent theft. And it was this that took the Silent Men more than forty-eight hours to work out … two days from the time the robbery was discovered Sunday morning to the time Director Hoover made the announcement on Tuesday morning of how much was missing and that the FBI had joined the investigation. I’d always wondered why over two days had gone by before anyone realized how much money was gone. The answer is that the Silent Men had to implement the auxiliary plan for the sixth category.

  “The first phase of that plan was removing Grafton and getting the cooperation of Wilkie Jarrel. Jarrel could see to it that the shipment of money would be duly recorded by his son-in-law, Emile Chandler, the bank’s president.

  “Alexander Troxel was in charge of this operation, and he did quite a job. Of course a good deal of groundwork had been laid before, like the recruitment of a high-placed Treasury Department official who could dispatch necessary funds to whatever location was needed … could also, if need be, contract a carrier for those funds. And he contracted and arranged for the shipment of thirty-one million dollars to Mormon State. More money than had ever been stolen before. A fabulous amount. Also a fictitious one. Not one cent of it existed. It was all done on paper, Cub. The Silent Men, through false documentation provided by the Treasury Department contact and the cartage company, had created a nonexistent transfer of funds. A record-breaking, but imaginary, shipment that the head of Mormon State National Bank, Emile Chandler, verified had arrived and was later stolen … verified on the express orders of his father-in-law and boss, Wilkie Jarrel.

  “All that was in the vault at the time it was robbed was sixty-five hundred dollars. The same sixy-five hundred dollars Grafton had first reported as being stolen … the same sixty five hundred dollars that caused Cowboy Carlson’s death when Mule thought he and the rest of the gang were holding out on him, not cutting him in on the additional millions. Of course the media wouldn’t have been all that interested in only sixty-five hundred dollars being gone, would it? The media and the public? A measly sixty-five hundred wouldn’t have brought the glory …”

  They drove through the wide metal gates and up the forest-choked drive and past the lodge in which Mule had raped and sodomized Alice Sunstrom, drove on to the great mansion on top of the hill. Grafton got out first, then Yates and Cub and Happy de Camp, led the way over to where Assistant U.S. Attorney Jules Shapiro waited beside a car.

  “Here they are, Graf.” Jules handed him the warrants.

  Grafton studied the documents, turned them over in his hand like a rare objet d’art. For him it was as prized a possession as could exist, one he’d been trying to obtain for many years … one that, in a way, had precipitated the tragedy known as Romor 91. Grafton looked up at Yates, held out the warrants. “You do the honors.”

  “No, sir,” Billy told him, “it’s yours, all yours.”

  Grafton replied, “I’m no longer with the Bureau. Better take this too, or I may use it.” He gave his service revolver to Happy de Camp. “Shag ass, Billy Yates.”

  Yates walked across the pebble driveway and up to the great manor house. Rang the bell. The double doors opened. Wilkie Jarrel himself came out. Behind him stood his lawyers.

  “Mister Wilkie Jarrel?” Yates said.

  The gnarled old man said, “Yes!”

  “I’m William B. Yates, special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I have here warrants for your arrest for the crimes of c
onspiracy to murder a federal officer, conspiracy to commit bank theft, conspiracy to commit fraud against the government, bribery and eighteen other federal violations. Will you please come with me.”

  The promenade ran eight and one-tenth miles on top of the riverfront palisade from just below Mormon State National Bank on down to Lookout Bluff and around to Steamboat Cove … ran through thickets and stands of trees and across parks and playgrounds and gardens and campsites and an athletic field and past the new sports stadium … ended at the not yet completed two-block replica of the main street of Hannibal, Missouri, being built on the near side of the cove.

  The promenade’s official name was Clemens Lane, and at least one recently published history of the area, bolstering the beliefs of numerous oral historians, maintained that Mark Twain once walked the entire distance while apprenticing as a riverboat pilot, may even have conceived the ideas and plots for his later stories here. Certain authoritative accounts held that the walk was an old buffalo path which later became an Indian trail, even though buffalo and Indians were seldom known to have traveled over solid rock for so long a distance. The CCC labor gang that actually laid down the walkway and did the landscaping back in 1933 hadn’t noticed any trails and paths, old or recent, in the area. Nevertheless, it was a lovely place to stroll. Had become Tina Beth’s most favorite place for early evening walks with her Billy.

  Tonight the stroll was longer than usual, had begun at Steamboat Cove and gone upriver many miles and come back down again, with Billy recounting in relentless detail the conspiracy of the Silent Men … and their fate.

  “Wilkie Jarrel doesn’t as much as bat an eyelash when I read off the counts and arrest him,” Yates told Tina Beth. “The guy looks a hundred years old and has trouble standing up straight and walking, but he’s built of cold steel. I arrest him and he says, ‘Take me where we have to go and don’t waste time.’ I take him on out to my car. When he passes Grafton, cold steel meets cold steel. Those two guys have a hate-on for one another like you’ve never seen. But Jarrel doesn’t stop when he passes Graf. He just gives a fast look. And Grafton gives it back. I thank God that Grafton didn’t get in the car with us. For a minute I thought he was going to, but then he walked off with the assistant U.S. attorney. So I take Jarrel in and turn him over to the U.S. marshals. He was arraigned and got out on one million dollars’ bail. But he’s finished, Tina Beth. They got him good. He’s going to do some time.”

  Tina Beth asked, “What about Mr. Grafton?”

  “He went back to the office and cleaned out all his stuff. I never realized it before, that he had never come back to Prairie Port after getting relieved of command. What Strom had done was seal Grafton’s desk as it was and move it into the storage room. He sealed Graf’s locker too. So Graf went through all his stuff. Donnie Bracken and Pres Lyle gave him a hand. He threw out damn near everything. By this time I was back in the office and we had a conference call with A. R. Roland over what happened to Corticun and the other Men. Roland was pretty teed off we all left Washington without permission. We told him the truth, that Grafton told us he had cleared it with headquarters. What we didn’t know was that Grafton had quit the Bureau before we got back to Prairie Port. That letter he was carrying, he sent it in to Clyde Tolson. Tolson is the acting head of the FBI now. Grafton told me to tell Roland exactly what I saw him do to Corticun, and I tried to, but Roland wouldn’t listen. He just said they’d handle it their own way. Cub and Happy think that means Grafton is off the hook, that no charges will be brought against him.

  “Anyway, Grafton waited around the office until he heard what was happening to the Silent Men and Barrett and Patricia Amory, then said good-by to all of us. Shook every hand and then hugged each one of us. It was real touching, Tina Beth. He cared about each one of us. I got tears in my eyes while he was saying good-by. The last thing he told me was he was putting the great white horse out to pasture, then he left. Donnie Bracken drove him out to the cemeteries. Grafton put flowers on all the graves, Strom’s, Alice’s, Brew’s, Jez’s. Then he went to the airport and got on a plane to Montana. At the airport he didn’t say what his plans were, just turned and walked away.”

  Billy and Tina Beth were at Lookout Bluff now. Had stopped at the railing. The Mississippi River lay beneath them, whirling past a delta island. Beyond the island bubbled the midstream current called the Treachery.

  “What happened to Patricia and Barrett Amory?” asked Tina Beth.

  “They’ve been arrested. The arraignment’s in the morning. Their lawyers and friends will put up one hell of a battle for them. And do some fancy bargaining. They might even get off with suspended sentences. At the worst, Amory will plead so Patricia can go free. It’s the Men who are in the soup … Quinton, Ames, Troxel, Esper, Daughter. They’ve been turned over to the Justice Department. Hoover’s gone. There’s no way to protect them. They’re going to pay the price for everyone.”

  “You don’t sound too happy about that.”

  “They’re FBI men, Tina Beth.”

  “Guess that answers my next question.”

  “What question?”

  “Your intentions ’bout staying with the FBI or not.”

  “I haven’t made up my mind.”

  “Sure you have, Billy Bee, only you don’t know it yet.” With a giggle she turned and leaned back into the railing. Rearranged her skirt. “Billy Bee, when Patricia said I was being held a prisoner and would be killed if you didn’t do what she wanted, what was it you did again?”

  It was a question he had hoped would not be asked. “Want me to be honest?”

  “Cross your heart?”

  “I tried not to think about you, Tina Beth. I tried to …,” his voice cracked, “tried to forget you … and what I was doing to you. And I couldn’t, Tina Beth. All I thought about was you after that. All I could see was you. I was screaming inside. Even when Corticun had me out in the chair, even when he was getting ready to fire, all I saw was you. And know what, Tina Beth?” He crossed his heart again. “I think I was just about to tell him, ‘Okay, don’t shoot. I’ll do anything you want if you let Tina Beth off. Let her off and I’ll be your puppy and you can kill me later or I’ll kill myself.’ Only we don’t really know if that’s what would have happened, do we? Grafton showed up first.”

  “I know.” She kissed him and started sashaying down the gaslit promenade. “See that bench right over there, Billy Bee?”

  Yates, as he began to follow her, looked over at the wooden bench under a shade tree. “What about it?”

  “Nothing, ’cepting that’s where Mark Twain sat and wrote The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Sue Ann Willis.”

  “How would Sue Ann know? She can’t read.”

  “Sue Ann is third vice-chairperson of the Samuel Clemens Restoration Society. She knows all about those things. He wrote it in 1889 sitting right there. Or do you want to defy known truth?”

  It wasn’t the truth, he knew, but his eyes were on revealed truth … her swinging hips, and below. “Whatever you say, Tina Beth.”

  “I feel sorry for Patricia.”

  “Sorry?”

  “She lost Edgar.”

  “My God, Tina Beth, she was a Lucretia Borgia!”

  “I think she was sweet. And Edgar too. I told you that about him way back.”

  “He was a lunatic.”

  “No, he wasn’t, Billy Bee, no, he wasn’t. Like you told me Ed Grafton told you, Edgar liked pretending he was crazy so he could get away with more. Edgar was as sane as you and me, Billy Bee. And just as much in love. Don’t you see, Edgar loved Patricia. He was her love-slave. He had to obey her. He let her believe she was helping him because he loved her so much. He didn’t want to disappoint her and hurt her feelings by telling her to stop helping him the way she was.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “’Course I am.”

  “That’s the next thing to saying Hoover condo
ned the actions of a monster like Mule—”

  “Maybe when you looked at Mister Mule Corkel, or I looked at Mister Mule Corkel, we saw a monster, but not Edgar. He saw who Patricia told him to see. She like cast a spell over Edgar, gave him a secret potion. Dear child, Edgar would have fallen in love with Mister Mule Corkel if Patricia had so wished, just like in William Shakespeare.”

  “This isn’t a play, Tina Beth. It’s real life.”

  “And love, Billy Bee. Oh yes, love. Why can’t you understand that? Edgar did it all for love. Isn’t that romantic? A man of his age being so amorously inclined?”

  She had stopped under a path lamp and was smiling at him. He was, for the moment, bewildered.

  “How amorously inclined is a man of your age, Billy Bee?”

  She turned before he could answer, began walking down the path, walking and sashaying … discarding clothes as she went.

  … The call went out on the park patrol’s radio band at 9:07 P.M. as 122 and 188 offenses, a disturbance of the peace as well as a violation of the city’s decency code. A follow-up alert revealed that all cars should proceed to the sports stadium, where, reportedly, a stark-naked man was observed scrambling across the infield in pursuit of a fleeing stark-naked woman. The witness, who declined to be identified, said he had never …

  About the Author

  Noel Behn (1928–1998) was an American novelist, screenwriter, and theatrical producer. Born in Chicago and educated in California and Paris, he served in the US Army’s Counterintelligence Corps before settling in New York City. As the producing director of the Cherry Lane Theatre, he played a lead role in the off-Broadway movement of the 1950s and presented the world premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Behn’s debut novel, The Kremlin Letter (1966), was a New York Times bestseller and the inspiration for a John Huston film starring Orson Welles and Max von Sydow. Big Stick–Up at Brink’s! (1977), the true story of the 1950 Brink’s robbery in Boston, was based on nearly one thousand hours of conversations with the criminals and became an Academy Award–nominated film directed by William Friedkin. Behn also wrote for television and served as a creative consultant on the acclaimed series Homicide: Life on the Street. His other books include the thrillers The Shadowboxer (1969) and Seven Silent Men (1984), and Lindbergh: The Crime (1995), a nonfiction account of the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr.