by Ross Thomas
At seven o’clock that same Saturday morning, Hamilton Keyes, the courtly CIA careerist, had received a wake-up call summoning him to Langley for an emergency meeting at nine. When he arrived at 8:45, another caller informed him the meeting had been postponed until noon.
Keyes’s office phone rang again at 11:45 A.M., and yet a different caller told him, without apology or explanation, that the meeting wouldn’t be held until three that afternoon, or possibly even four. It was then that Keyes recognized the nearby sound of the woodman’s ax in the bureaucratic forest.
Just to make certain, Keyes made two brief phone calls and, once they were completed, began removing all personal effects from his 137-year-old rosewood desk and placing them in his own 105-year-old walnut wastebasket. With that done, he uncapped a fountain pen, wrote the date at the top of a sheet of personal stationery and began a letter of resignation.
The meeting finally took place at 4:07 P.M. just as the snow that had been falling on Berryville since before noon finally reached Washington and its suburbs. Keyes was confident that the forecast of six to seven inches of snow would not only shorten his meeting, but also ruin God knows how many carefully planned dinner parties, including the one his wife was giving.
The office Keyes entered was on the same floor as his own. But even though it was appreciably larger than his, it contained only a gray metal desk, a standard high-backed swivel chair, a telephone and a single visitor’s chair, which was armless. Keyes immediately understood the sparse furnishings were meant to alert him that he had indeed been summoned to the den of bad news.
A man in his late forties sat behind the desk, a telephone pressed to his left ear. As the man listened impassively to whatever the voice on the phone had to say, he flicked his eyes from Keyes to the lone visitor’s chair. Keyes took it as an invitation and sat down.
Although they had never met, Keyes knew the man’s background, reputation and, of course, his name, C. Robert Pall. He also remembered that the C. stood for Clair; that Pall held a doctorate in economics from Chicago and had served three terms as a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania until being trounced in 1986. Before serving in Congress, Pall had taught at Stanford and the Wharton School; summered at a number of prosperous think tanks; written a couple of The-End-Is-Nigh books; and, less than two years ago, signed on with the Bush campaign as what Pall himself had called its “token troglodyte.”
The man with the phone to his ear had one of those curiously sweet round faces in which almost everything pointed up—his nose, the corners of his mouth, the outer ends of the dark thickets that were his eyebrows—everything except his backsliding chin that was poorly camouflaged by a short patchy beard the color of ginger.
After nearly thirty seconds of listening, Pall finally spoke into the phone and ended the one-sided conversation with, “Sorry, Larry, but there’s not one goddamn thing I can do about it.” After putting the phone down, he smiled at Keyes without displaying any teeth and said, “You must be Hamilton Keyes. I’m Bob Pall, the FNG.”
Although the acronym was hopelessly inappropriate and dated back at least twenty years to Vietnam and Laos, Keyes nodded politely and said, “The Fucking New Guy.”
Pall enlarged the smile to reveal a top row of light gray teeth. “You wanta beat around the bush awhile or what?”
Keyes looked at his watch. “Not really. I presume the White House sent you out to do the deed?”
Pall stopped smiling and nodded, serious now, even grave. “We’ve got a whole lot of past-due bills, political stuff, and we need your slot and some others to pay ’em off with. Nothing personal. Fact is, everybody I’ve talked to says you do one hell of a job.”
After acknowledging the compliment with a slight smile that vanished almost instantly, Keyes removed the sealed envelope that contained the letter he had written and placed it on the desk.
Frowning at the unexpected, Pall picked up the envelope, used a thumb to rip it open, fumbled a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket and read the letter with a glance. His frown disappeared. “Okay. Great. You’re talking early retirement.” He looked up from the letter. “But, hey, there’s no big rush. Next week, the week after, that’ll be soon enough.”
“I see no reason to prolong things.”
“What about the hand-over?”
“Everything my successor needs is in the files and he’ll probably be ecstatic that I’m no longer underfoot.”
Pall rose with a grin that displayed most of the light gray teeth. “After listening to sniffles all day from a bunch of crybabies, it’s a treat to run across a grown-up.” He held out his hand and added, “Anything else you’d like to mention?”
“I don’t believe so,” Keyes said, shook the offered hand, nodded a cordial good-bye, turned, headed for the door, then turned back. “There might be one thing not yet in the files.”
“What?”
“The Steady Haynes manuscript.”
Pall sat down slowly in the swivel chair and leaned back, his mouth now pursed, his small greenish eyes alert and wary. “Tell me,” he said.
It took the still standing Hamilton Keyes not quite three minutes to give a thumbnail sketch of the late Steadfast Haynes and tell of Isabelle Gelinet’s initial blackmail call; the burial at Arlington; Gelinet’s death; and of his own and someone else’s subsequent attempts to buy all rights to the Haynes manuscript from the dead man’s son.
“Sit down, fella,” Pall said.
Keyes resumed his seat in the armless chair.
“Okay,” Pall said. “Once again, nice and slow, step by step, from the beginning.”
Keyes led him through it again with a still precise but much more detailed summary that left Pall pink-faced, smoldering and reminding Keyes of some just-lit giant firecracker that might or might not go off.
After completing his second account, Keyes asked, “Any questions?”
“Questions?” Pall said, snapping the word in two. “Well, yeah, friend, I’ve got a couple or three. You offered this kid, Granville Haynes—”
“He’s thirty-two and scarcely a kid.”
“—this kid fifty K for his old man’s memoirs, but he turns it down because he’s already turned down a hundred K from God knows who and thinks he can raise enough foreign money to produce a flick about his old man’s life with him playing the lead?”
When Keyes remained silent, Pall said, “Well?”
“Was that a question?”
“What the fuck did you think it was?”
“A rather pithy recapitulation.”
“Is that what happened?”
“Essentially. Yes.”
“Okay. You believe any or all of it?”
“Without evidence to the contrary, I don’t disbelieve it.”
“Let’s go back to the French broad, what’s her name, Gelinet? Was she killed over the Haynes manuscript?”
“I’m not positive,” Keyes said, “but it seems sensible to assume she was, which is why I had that offer made to young Mr. Haynes.”
“What were you going to use for money?”
“Discretionary funds.”
“Who’d you clear it with?”
“Nobody.”
“Why the hell not?”
“There was no need,” Keyes said. “If our offer was turned down by Haynes the younger, as, in fact, it was, then we were dealing in imaginary money. In other words—”
Pall cut him off. “Okay, okay, I’ve got it.”
Rage again surfaced in Pall’s green eyes as he leaned forward, rested his arms on the desktop and clasped his hands together so tightly that they turned pale from lack of circulation. He also locked eyes with Keyes, who stared back calmly, taking note of Pall’s barely suppressed rage and, just below it, something else, which Keyes quickly diagnosed as fear.
The stare-down was ended by Pall, who gave his watch a quick glance and asked a question. “It ever occur to you that somebody might be trying to run a shitty past us?”
“My very first thou
ght.”
“Then why’d you fold so quick and ask DOD to bury him at Arlington?”
“One, because I knew Steady well. Very well. And two, because I know a bargain when I see one. The blackmail price was cheap—a plot of land. The blackmail threat was grave because if Haynes’s memoirs do exist, and if they reveal what he actually did, their publication could cause serious political embarrassment. Extremely serious. So that’s why I folded and asked DOD to have the Army bury him with a bugler blowing ‘Taps’ over his grave.” Keyes paused. “If you don’t like it, of course, you can always dig him up.”
“We’ll leave him lie for now,” Pall said. “But let’s go back to the mystery offer—the one for a hundred K.”
“We have only young Haynes’s word on that.”
“You believe him?”
“I have no reason not to.”
“Next question: who else wants to buy ’em and why?”
“There’re two possibilities,” Keyes said. “The prospective buyer could be someone—and by that I mean an individual, a group, even a country—who feels that publication of the memoirs would cause unacceptable repercussions. Or it could be someone who simply wants a club to beat the administration over the head with.”
“The fucking Democrats maybe?”
“That hadn’t occurred to me.”
“I bet,” Pall said, frowned and asked, “You claim Steadfast Haynes never worked for us officially and was always paid in either cash or gold, right?”
Keyes nodded.
“Well, if there’s no record, why don’t we just say we never heard of the son of a bitch?”
“Because I must assume that Steady had acquired proof to the contrary.”
An almost wistful note crept into Pall’s voice when he asked, “Isn’t it possible that the Haynes stuff isn’t nearly as bad as you think?”
Keyes conceded the point with a nod, then promptly obliterated his concession. “You can probably measure the damage it could cause by the one-hundred-thousand-dollar price somebody’s apparently willing to pay for it. Then there’s Steady’s rather curious behavior just prior to his death.”
“Curious how?”
“He reserved a room at the Hay-Adams for the next three months and was all over town, calling in old markers to get himself a permanent seat at the North trial.”
“Jesus,” Pall said.
“Of course, it could’ve been mere advertising.”
“For what?”
Keyes shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe his manuscript. Or he even may have been hinting that he knew something awfully juicy about North, Poindexter and company—or perhaps about other White House residents, past and present, whose names needn’t be mentioned.” Keyes paused. “Unless you want me to, of course.”
Pall swiveled away from Keyes to stare at the top left corner of the room behind the desk. Still staring, he said, “The Haynes kid turned down your offer of fifty K and that other so-called offer of a hundred K. So what’s his asking price?”
“I understand it to be seven hundred and fifty thousand.”
Pall spun around to face Keyes. “Buy ’em.”
“The memoirs?”
Pall nodded.
“With what?”
“With any currency he wants, in any bank he chooses.”
“You’ll arrange the money,” Keyes said and succeeded in not making it a question.
Pall again nodded.
“But suppose,” Keyes said, “just suppose that the memoirs turn out to be nothing more than a rehash of wicked deeds done long ago and very far away—in the Congo, for instance?”
“You believe that?”
“No, but it remains a possibility.”
“Buy ’em,” Pall said again. “Once they’re bought, you get a ten percent finder’s fee. Seventy-five thousand bucks, cash in hand.”
Keyes sighed and looked away as if faintly embarrassed.
“This is extremely awkward, but I do feel I should mention that my wife is rather rich and awfully generous.”
It took a moment or two for Pall to erase his surprised look and replace it with a knowing gray smile. “I get it. You want your old job back.”
“Not really.”
“Then what?”
“Ambassador.”
First came a pained expression, then a sigh and, finally, the question. “Where?”
“I rather fancy the Caribbean.”
“The Caribbean,” Pall said, staring at Keyes with a mixture of wonder and dislike. “Okay. You’ve got it. But let me spell out what else you’ve got. And that’s exactly one week to get ahold of the Haynes memoirs. If you’ve got ’em by then, we’ll announce your nomination as ambassador to the democratic island republic of Rumandsun or some such.”
Pall fell silent for a moment, leaned forward, bared most of the light gray teeth in a snarling smile and said, “But if you haven’t got ahold of ’em by then, we’ll leak it that you’ve been fired from the agency for gross incompetency or worse. Probably a lot worse.” He paused to let the awful smile vanish. “Did I make all that clear?”
“Yes, I do believe you did,” said Hamilton Keyes.
Chapter 20
Erika McCorkle gave up eighteen miles out of Berryville when she saw the Tall Pine Motel’s blue neon vacancy sign winking at her through the snowfall.
She and Granville Haynes had left his dead father’s farm shortly before 5 P.M. It was now 6:07 P.M. and dark, but they had managed to drive only eighteen miles, their progress impeded first by the snow, which gave no sign of letting up, and then by four wrecks, the last a Chevrolet pickup that had spun out on a curve and flipped over, killing its fifty-two-year-old driver and his thirty-seven-year-old girlfriend.
Haynes and Erika McCorkle reached this fourth accident just after state troopers had set out warning flares. Two patrol cars, bar lights flashing, aimed their headlights at the wreck. Haynes rolled down his window and talked to one of the troopers briefly while waiting for him to wave them on. When the trooper did, Haynes stared at the dark pool beneath the upside-down pickup and decided it was blood and not engine oil after all.
As the Cutlass slid to a stop on the packed snow in front of the Tall Pine Motel office, Erika McCorkle said, “See if you can get two rooms. If not, try for twin beds. But if all they have left is a double bed, we can work it out.”
“There’s nothing to work out,” Haynes said.
“Like hell.”
“If there’s only one bed,” he explained, “I’ll sleep in it. You’re welcome to join me, of course. But if you feel that’s too intimate, there’s either the floor or the bathtub.”
“Just get the room, prince, before a two-man line forms with you at the end.”
Haynes got out, brushed snow and ice off the car’s Virginia license plate, memorized the number and entered the motel office. He came out five minutes later, carrying a paper sack full of something. Back in the car with the sack on his lap, he said, “We got the last room left—down at the end on your right.”
“Twin beds?” she asked as she put the car into reverse and backed up.
“I didn’t ask.”
They drove to the room in silence. The Tall Pine Motel formed a curve that bowed back from the highway. There were eighteen units, nine on each side of the office. The motel was built of used brick and covered with a sharply pitched shake-shingle roof. Each unit had a window, a door and space for a single car. Haynes looked for the tall pine but couldn’t find it and blamed his failure on the snow.
After she pulled to a stop in front of their room, Erika McCorkle ended the silence with a question: “What’s in the sack?”
“Dinner,” Haynes said. “Four Cokes, two Baby Ruths, four almond Hersheys and four packets of things that look like peanut butter between Ritz crackers.”
“Those peanut butter things aren’t bad,” she said.
Erika McCorkle came out of the bathroom after a ten-minute shower, wearing her camel’s-hair polo coat as a robe. H
aynes sat near the double bed in one of the room’s two chairs, watching a rerun of The Scarecrow and Mrs. King.
Erika McCorkle stood, watching the program and running a comb through her damp hair. When a commercial came on she said, “I never understood the premise of that show.”
“James Bond meets Erma Bombeck.”
“Let’s eat,” she said.
She traded him her Baby Ruth for one of his almond Hersheys because she said Baby Ruths always tasted like Ex-Lax. They divided the packets of peanut butter and Ritz crackers evenly, washing everything down with Coke. They ate and drank in silence, Haynes in his chair, Erika McCorkle now on the bed, leaning against its headboard.
After another commercial came on she said, “You watch TV a lot?”
“No. Do you?”
“I like disaster reruns. A president or a premier gets shot. A shuttle blows up. A crown prince falls off his horse. A cardinal checks into Betty Ford’s. Why accept substitutes when you can watch the real thing?”
“You may have a point,” Haynes said, leaned forward and switched off the set.
She finished the last of her Coke, carefully crushed the can, aimed it at the wastebasket, made the shot and said, “When you were a cop, did it ever happen to you—the real bad shit?”
“Once in a while, but with homicide I usually got the residue—the leavings.”
“Ever shoot anyone?”
“No.”
“Anyone ever shoot at you?”
“Twice.”
“Did you like it—being a homicide detective?”
He thought about her question. “I got to be good at it and most people like doing what they’re good at.”
“You like acting?”
“Not yet, but it’s a pleasant way to meet women.”
She swung her bare feet off the bed and reached for the telephone. “I’d better call Pop and tell him not to worry.” After she picked up the telephone, she looked back at Haynes as if to reassess his harmlessness.
He gave her his inherited smile and said, “You’re safe.”
“Too bad,” she said and tapped out the long-distance number. After McCorkle came on the line, she told him they were snowed in at the Tall Pine Motel eighteen miles east of Berryville.
