The Infant of Prague

by Bill Granger

  “We don’t know it was them.”

  “No. There was a person described in this business by Chaser in Brussels whom we assume was Colonel Ready. Perhaps Devereaux was held by Ready. Perhaps this is a repeat of all that happened in St. Michel. Ready did get the girl and got Devereaux to do his bidding for a time. I know the agent.” He closed his eyes and saw Devereaux clearly, heard his voice, saw the arctic calm in his face. “I know the agent. He draws the line. He came in through regular customs when he could have gone through the Canadian or Mexican doors. So he knew the passport number would flash back to us in time. He doesn’t mind letting us know he’s out and that he’s here. He just hasn’t gotten around to giving us a jingle.”

  “Is that sarcasm?”

  “Of course,” Hanley said. “Whatever he is doing, we would not wish him to do. And perhaps he feels a bit misused. We never told him all the implications of conducting Miki to our station.”

  “We misused him. We should have told him all the implications of the train.”

  “There was no need for him to know,” Hanley said.

  “There was, in retrospect.”

  “I told him to be careful.”

  “Mothers tell their children to watch at street corners and not to talk to strangers. There are specifics in warnings and there are generalities.”

  “Mrs. Neumann, I—”

  “The world knew that Miki wanted to come out. And no one wanted to touch him because it smelled. It was too easy. And what could Miki do for us? He hinted and hinted and we thought he was worth a small risk, out of channels, to get him on our side, to hear what he had to say about our competition at Langley. To give us leverage today for the next budget battle tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Was it all worth it? We always put a price on things, don’t we, even when we don’t know what they are really going to be worth.”

  She said it the way she had said it before, almost in the same words. She said it like a dull child repeating a lesson she does not understand. She said it like an incantation, as though the words might change the result.

  Hanley waited for the words to end. The result was the same.

  “If he isn’t alive, then someone is very stupid using his passport,” he said.

  “Or smart. Perhaps it’s an illusion. Perhaps it’s a way of cocking a snook at us.”

  “Colonel Ready?” Hanley said.

  “Perhaps. He was the heart of the deal. At least, according to the description we got from Chaser about the man at Club Tres. And Mason—”

  “Yes. He’s kicked the traces. Chaser said he bollixed things up. Just brutality. He knew the rules, he knew the regs. But he was young,” Hanley said.

  “It’s no excuse,” she said. “Let the CIA fight their secret wars. We are in the business of intelligence. We are in the business of putting two and two together in all the combinations. We are not thugs, enforcers, hit men.”

  Hanley said nothing; Lydia Neumann came from order and computers and pure intelligence. She was not of this world, he thought. She would have to learn that sometimes they broke the rules because there are no rules when it comes down to it.

  “Perhaps he had no choice,” Hanley said.

  “What does Devereaux want here?”

  Hanley waited a moment for Mrs. Neumann to see the obvious. She did.

  “The girl,” she said.

  “Our little infant of Prague,” Hanley said. He was the prairie Protestant again. “And we don’t know where to find her. So we’re of no use to him. Or, perhaps, he might think we arranged the kidnapping ourselves. In any case, he doesn’t want to consult us for advice.”

  “We don’t have private operators,” she said.

  “That isn’t true, Mrs. Neumann.” Gently. “You think of this as a vast army because you are an orderly person with an orderly mind. You can speak to computers; it is your background and your genius. There is no order out there, Mrs. Neumann, only chaos. We sort through the billions of bits of chaos hurled at us and we try to understand a billionth part of it.”

  She said, “You are becoming a philosopher. There still have to be rules of procedure.”

  “There are no rules. Rather, there are rules that are always broken.”

  “He can’t do this. He’s making a run for the Czechoslovakian Secret Service.”

  “Yes,” Hanley said. Mrs. Neumann finally understood what Hanley had realized the moment he saw the passport number flash on his computer terminal screen two hours ago. It had been intuitive for him; Mrs. Neumann proceeded by logic. Hanley was the man who held the lamp until she could become accustomed to seeing in the dark.

  “I will not permit this,” she said. “I want him in. I want to notify the other agencies.”

  Hanley said, “This is our thing.”

  “No. Section comes before the man.” She stared at him. “The good of Section.”

  “Does the position change you?” Hanley said.

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” he said. “I still make my protest.”

  “Noted. The problem is too much secrecy. Agencies get in trouble because they get too clever. Devereaux is trouble for us out there. Bring him in and proceed with logic.”

  “How do we do it?”

  “Straight. We have reason to believe a man working for the Czechoslovakian Secret Service has entered the United States with the intention of tracking Anna Jelinak,” she said. The hoarse whispery voice was as neutral now as a government report. “Description. The usual. No. He is not with Section. We have an agent carried on the Mexico City morning report with Section named November. We keep this clear of Section.”

  “And that is a deception,” Hanley said. “He could point this out.”

  “Every person ever arrested claims he works for the CIA,” she said. There was a sadness to her voice he had not noticed before. Did the position of director really change you all that much? Or was it the prospect of facing chaos that changed you when you really longed to believe in the rule of logic, order, sanity?

  “I’ll send out the notification.”

  “Priority,” she said.

  “I’ll do it myself,” he said softly. The room was darkened and only the lights of the television monitors and a small lamp at the corner of the desk softened the darkness. The litany of disasters was repeated silently on the three monitors as the evening news unfolded in three gospels. Was there one truth at the heart of the three readings?

  Hanley sent the message to the agencies within twenty minutes. The alert was top secret but it was general so that all the agencies got the message in clearspeak.

  Which is why, shortly before midnight, people in Los Angeles and New York—and Chicago—knew Devereaux was coming.

  28

  THIS LITTLE FISHY

  Al Buck kissed wife number two good-bye and smiled at Nana, who was six, and frowned at Jeremiah, who was thirteen, and opened the door of Apartment 19H and walked into his world. The elevator hurtled down eighteen floors to the lobby, there being no thirteenth floor in the square glass-walled building at 1345 N. Lake Shore Drive. He crossed the lobby, picked up the Tribune waiting at the security desk and let the doorman do his job. He stepped into the back of the stretch Lincoln and settled into the black leather. The television set was not on.

  The fucking television set was not on.

  He threw the paper down on the seat and leaned forward and knelt across the rear-facing seats and knocked at the divider glass.

  The driver turned and opened the window.

  It wasn’t the regular driver.

  “I’ve got a standing order. The television is supposed to be on. You know who I am? You know where you’re taking me?” His face was a little red. It was a lousy way to start out the day.

  Then he saw the gun.

  The driver had the gun.

  “What’s this?” Al Buck said.

  “This is a gun,” the driver said.

  “Is this a joke?”

  “No. It’s a nine-m
illimeter Smith & Wesson with a thirteen-shot double-action automatic. You kneel on the seat and keep your face close to the window and we’re going on a little drive.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Shut up.”

  Al Buck held on to the back of the seat and the driver turned right at Division Street and Michigan Avenue. He went down Division past the shuttered nightclubs that looked shabby in bright daylight. He turned into an alley before they got to Rush Street and the car stopped. The driver said:

  “Get in the front seat. With me.”

  Al Buck got out of the car and the pistol was on him. He had never had a gun pointed at him. He thought of some situation like this. He could remember just about every television program he’d ever watched. There had been something similar in Mike Hammer, he thought. What did Stacy Keach do? Wasn’t it about rolling under the car? He shut the rear door and opened the front door. He slid onto the leather and slammed the door.

  The driver wore a black hat and a black jacket and a white shirt and tie. He pushed the stick into “D” and rolled heavily down the alley to the corner, turned left and headed back toward Michigan Avenue. The day was so bright and warm for November that the men and women surging up and down the avenue seemed to have light steps, as though it was spring after a long winter. Miss Humphrey would be waiting for him. In a half hour, she would call his home. His wife would tell her the driver picked him up a half hour ago. Then they would dawdle some. It might be an hour more before they called the police.

  The driver held the pistol in his lap. In Remington Steele—no, wasn’t it in The Enforcer?—Edward Woodward reached across and hit the driver hard in the kidney and dropped to the piece in one motion.

  Al Buck sat very still. The limousine reached Lake Shore Drive and surged into the six-lane highway that runs along the lake. The lake was shrouded in fog because the water was still warmer than the air. There were clouds on the horizon like a line of sailing ships.

  They went south, skimming the Loop and Grant Park. The driver turned off at Thirty-First Street on the South Side and meandered down side streets to an area of abandoned factories south of the Prairie Avenue historic district. Then they were bumping across open ground, south of Soldier Field and below the pilings that held up the roadway of the Drive. This was an abandoned place, Al Buck thought. And he knew he was going to die.

  The driver stopped the car.

  He turned to look at Al Buck and picked up the automatic pistol. He put the pistol in Al Buck’s face. “Open your mouth,” the driver said in a soft voice.

  Al Buck opened his mouth.

  The driver put the pistol on his tongue.

  “I’ll ask you questions and you’ll tell me answers. If you get all the answers right, you go back to the office and say you were delayed. If you get the answers wrong, I kill you and put you in the trunk and drop the car at Lot C at O’Hare. Those are the only two scenarios today, Mr. Buck. You understand?”

  Al Buck made a sound around the pistol barrel.

  “Answer this one: Who told you to pull Kay Davis off the story about the Infant of Prague?”

  Al Buck’s eyes went wide.

  The driver took the pistol out of his mouth.

  “What is this about? This is about some story? All this is about some story?” He licked his lips.

  “Are you that naïve?” the driver asked.

  “Easy. It’s just—well, it was Jules Bergen. He gave me a call the day we had our… misunderstanding… with Kay. He said he was getting hell from the Archbishop of New York about the story. You know the story was networked. He said the Archbishop said there were outbreaks of weeping statues in Queens. He said we should downplay the story, he said the Archbishop was a friend of his. That isn’t a secret. I told the FBI, they checked with the Archbishop, I think. I mean, that’s all there was to it.”

  The driver said, “Who is Jules Bergen?”

  “Are you kidding?” Al Buck smiled. “President of the network is who.”

  “So you fired Kay Davis.”

  “Are you a friend of hers? Look—”

  “And why did you hire her back?”

  “What is this?”

  Devereaux shoved the barrel against his cheek and Al Buck’s eyes went down, trying to see the barrel below the level of vision. His eyes were wide again.

  “You keep forgetting about the pistol,” Devereaux said.

  “I won’t forget.”

  “Why did you hire her back?”

  “Because. Because Jules called me at home. He said he got my message that Kay was terminated and he said he didn’t want that, he said he didn’t want anyone to lose his job because of a private favor, and besides, it would make the network look bad if it came out. He said I was to make sure that she got her job back. So I got her job back. I thought that was really decent of Jules. He’s that kind of a guy. A decent guy. He’s on all the committees in New York. His wife has been very sick for years but he still takes her out.”

  “Swell,” Devereaux said.

  “Can you take the gun—”

  “Does Jules call you up a lot? Asking you to change stories, drop stories, add stories?”

  “He does not,” Al Buck said. “He’s a busy man. He runs the network, he’s got production to run, he’s always between Los Angeles and New York, he doesn’t have time.”

  “But he made time,” Devereaux said, not to Al Buck.

  “What is this about?”

  “Who was the man who tried to kill Kay Davis after you fired her?”

  “We didn’t fire her. It was a misunderstanding.” And he felt the barrel push into his cheek. “I don’t know who he was, swear to God, no one does, the police don’t. I offered a reward. The station offered a reward, I mean. We stand behind Kay a thousand percent.”

  “Swell,” Devereaux said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Someone interested in weeping statues,” he said. “When did Jules call you? The second time?”

  “It was late. Late at night. Real late. I don’t know how late.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I told you. He said he got the message from me and he felt terrible about Kay and he said to get her back.”

  “What did he say exactly?”

  “How do I remember what anyone said exactly two weeks ago?”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he got the message. He said to get Kay back.”

  “What did he say about the statue or about the story?”

  Al Buck blinked. He stared at the driver.

  “Now, that’s funny. I forgot about that.”

  “About what?”

  “He said not to worry about the story.”

  “He said that?”

  “He said it’s silly making a fuss over something like that. Something about let it run, let it die a natural death.”

  “Let it die?”

  “He said the story would take care of itself.”

  “What did that mean?”

  “He was saying maybe we shouldn’t get so excited after all.”

  Devereaux waited and stared at the sweating man and then removed the pistol from his cheek. Al Buck rubbed his cheek with his left hand. He kept his eyes on the driver.

  “All right, Al,” Devereaux said. “You did good.”

  “What is this about?”

  “You don’t really want to know, do you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “We’ve been at this about thirty minutes. You figure you can explain thirty minutes at the office?”

  “Yes,” Al Buck said. He shivered. It wasn’t going to go bad. He was going to stay alive.

  “I’ll drop you off,” Devereaux said. “You tell them what you want. But you don’t mess with Kay Davis ever again. Ever. In fact, the best thing would be to get her promoted out of Chicago to New York. Do you think that would be the best thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. That would be the best thing. And
the other best thing would be not to talk about this. You call up your friend Jules and Jules will wonder about you. He’ll wonder if you are a person who should stay alive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You get in your office, you shut the door and sit down and turn off the television set and you just think. Think about someone who is up here talking to someone who is down here and telling him to do a little thing that would make the network look like shit if it came out. You think about that and think about some gorilla coming around to Kay Davis’ apartment and trying to kill her. And you think about Jules calling you up in the middle of the night and telling you to retract the thing he told you to do less than eight hours before. Then, if you can connect the dots, Al, you think what it would mean to you if you called up Jules and said you got a visit from a man with a gun who wants to know about Kay Davis and Al Buck and good old Jules. Then you think of Jules connecting the dots and maybe deciding that you think too much. Do you get it, Al?”

  Al Buck wasn’t dumb. He was merciless and he had been in television a long time and he did things he didn’t like to do, but he wasn’t dumb. He saw it. His eyes got big and his face went white.

  Devereaux saw that he saw it. And it would be all right for Al because he wouldn’t tell anyone anything.

  Devereaux put the pistol on the dash and almost sighed.

  It would be all right.

  And he wouldn’t have to kill Al Buck after all.

  29

  COMPETITION

  They sat in the old tavern on the great square in Bruges in the afternoon. The tavern had tall, mournful windows and no bar, except a serving counter where the large women made their orders and carried them to the long, wooden tables. The walls were the color of spoiled mustard and there was a dampness in the place that reeked of age. Mason and Ready ate large sandwiches made on rough local bread and drank liters of Jupiler beer. The beer was cold and the cheese sandwiches were tart with strong mustard. The two men did not talk to each other because they were both waiting.

  Cernan came into the tavern alone.

  It was just after four and the rain had stopped. The square was full of shoppers again. There were restaurants and shops on two sides of the square. The third side was occupied by an ancient city hall and the fourth side was dominated by the ancient battlements and the great clock tower. Because this was Flemish Belgium and not French Belgium, the clock worked, even though it was centuries old.