The Infant of Prague

by Bill Granger

  “Yes.”

  “Did he say anything about… leaking this to… to his girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Why do you bring it up?”

  “Because I put him on a train nearly three weeks ago and I didn’t tell him everything. I didn’t tell him the FBI wanted to talk to Miki. I didn’t tell him that Miki had been flogging himself for months with no takers. I didn’t tell him that this might be extremely dangerous. I said to him, ‘Be careful.’ It is something your mother might say to you. He got caught in the middle and it nearly cost him his life, not to mention costing us his services. He has made the best of a bad deal. He has repaired some of the damage.”

  “You call killing four men in cold blood repairing the damages?”

  “They were nothing, Mr. Director. You know that and so do I. Let’s stop dancing.” Hanley flared and it was as rare as an earthquake in Kansas. “The girl wanted to go home to Prague. He told me that. He talked to her a long time on the plane.” They did not know about the Section plane. There were matters they had no need to know.

  “That still doesn’t justify—”

  “You are talking like a Philadelphia lawyer,” Hanley said, though he had never met one. “I assure you of the resourcefulness of this agent. If you cut his string and put him outside, he won’t run away. He’ll wait for you. He has Miki and by now he has more information than Mrs. Neumann was able to give you in the last hour. Miki knew everything about the operations. He was a gossip and a gossip is inquisitive. I can assure you that this matter can be handled two ways: directly, quickly, by us; or you can bleed to death with a thousand cuts.”

  NSC did not speak. FBI frowned but was silent. For a long time the four of them were silent.

  “I can reach the President at Camp David,” NSC said. “I’ll have to explain it to him. Jules Bergen is one of his friends.”

  “You don’t have to tell him about that part yet. Just about the CIA and the operation,” Hanley said.

  “Yes. I suppose so. When do you make contact with your man?”

  “He makes contact with me. I will have to see the paper.”

  “You can take my word for it.”

  “I’m afraid—”

  “Hanley, are you questioning my integrity?” said the director of the NSC. He had seen them all, Hanley thought, they come and go and for a little time, they strut onstage as though there were no more elections.

  “He is,” Hanley said.

  “Damn him. Did you ever think of just lying to him?”

  “Yes,” Hanley said. “But that’s what started the trouble, isn’t it?”

  37

  TARGETS

  “This is very bad,” Jules Bergen said. He had said it once before, at the beginning of the meeting. No one pointed that out.

  It was very late and the cleaning women were moving through the executive offices in their gray uniform dresses, polishing and emptying and wiping things down. The three men were in Jules Bergen’s suite at the northwest corner of the forty-ninth floor.

  Jules was away from the other two men. He stood, small and precise, at the window wall and stared down at the narrow crosstown street. The yellow river of cabs surged up Sixth Avenue and a private scavenger truck was making a noisy collection of trash from the bowels of the network building.

  Jules turned and looked at Willis and Ben Herguth.

  “The President called me,” he said. “He said he had received a disturbing report about me, about the CIA, he said he called out of friendship.”

  “What are we going to do?” Willis said.

  “Anna Jelinak is on her way to Prague,” Jules said. “That’s because of you, Ben. I am really disappointed in you. That’s a terrible thing. Do you know what I got by messenger three hours ago? A jewelry box from our friend in Prague. It contains a finger with a ring on it. A finger as token that Miki is no more. Except I don’t think that’s the case. Do you think that’s the case, Ben?”

  Ben felt utterly miserable.

  “Julie—”

  “Stop calling me that, Ben,” Jules Bergen said.

  “I’m sorry. Four guys got whacked in Chi. How do I know this guy is gonna knock over the place? I told you I got on it right from the start, told everyone to button down because this Devereaux guy was coming into the States. Then I got this guy who knew Devereaux in the old days, this guy Ready, he’s after Devereaux now, I told him two hours ago the guy was holed up in Paris. All we gotta do is find out where. If he’s—”

  “Who is Ready?” Jules asked.

  “Well,” Willis broke in. “He’s a contractor, very independent, his files are washed in the Firm and I can’t get everything on him.…” Willis hesitated. Files on Ready were deliberately incomplete. “He knew about Miki, he knew all about him, I put him onto Ben and he said he would put the hit on Devereaux and Miki for five figures.”

  “Is this the way it’s done?” Jules said.

  “You gotta understand,” Willis said. “Nobody at that end of the business advertises in the Yellow Pages.”

  “Anna Jelinak was trade,” Jules said. “Devereaux got Anna and gave her back to the Czechs in exchange for Miki. I got Miki’s finger but the fucking government has got Miki’s story. Your government, Willis, the one you guys are supposed to be in charge of. The FBI is on to our case and National Security is on your case. We are going to take the count together because of the incompetence of your agency, Willis. Why didn’t you get Anna back to Prague in the first place? Why didn’t you sanction Miki the moment he wanted to come across?”

  “Nobody thought it would get this far,” Willis said, echoing the words used by scores of his predecessors suddenly caught in the middle of a scandal.

  “This was business. And you didn’t take care of business. You had the contacts with Henkin,” Jules said. “And you helped us get favored treatment in exchange for ‘muling’ a few hundred arms every time we packed up our movie equipment and headed home from Prague. Henkin was greased, Langley got its arms to ship to Afghan rebels and we were… compensated. The money was cleaned very nicely in Prague. And now the FBI is going to want to know about casino gambling revenues and where they went. And the National Security Council is going to want to know what Langley knew and when Langley knew it about trading in arms with a Communist country. What a stupid idea, to take Czech arms and send them to the Afghans.…”

  “Not so stupid,” Willis said. “The rebels knocked over an arsenal twenty-nine months ago, all kinds of Soviet and Czech weapons. The Soviets just don’t have any idea of how many because they’re nearly as fucked up as our own quartermaster corps. So we give the rebels Communist weapons. And Henkin makes money. And you get a chance to clean a lot of money while you’re making movies. Don’t bring this all down on the Firm, Jules. We can all share a little blame for letting this go so far—”

  “Where is Miki?”

  Jules never shouted.

  Ben Herguth grabbed his own mouth and squeezed it until it hurt. When it really hurt, he let go. He said, “Look, Julie, this is a bombshell, no doubt about it. But we know the source. It comes out of one guy. This guy Devereaux. All we do is whack him.”

  “All we do is whack him,” Jules mimicked. “That’s what you said about Kay Davis in Chicago. Is she whacked?”

  Ben Herguth said nothing.

  “She is not. If there had been no Kay Davis, there would have been no ‘miracle’ and there would have been no defection of Anna Jelinak and—”

  “Look, Julie, you want her whacked, I’ll whack her myself. And right now, I got the guy going in after Devereaux. He’s in Paris, it’s a matter of time, he hasn’t come out yet. So just wait a couple more hours and—”

  “What if we cover this up?” Jules said. “Henkin sends me a finger. But it’s Henkin who is going to get the finger because we can’t use him anymore, we can’t go into Prague, we got twelve million dollars in contracts going down the toilet because we can’t start shooting Napoleon in January and
there isn’t any snow in Spain. So if we eliminate the man in Paris, if we silence Miki, there’s still going to be a lot of covering up to do.”

  “But you get the source,” Willis said in a quiet voice.

  “You guys,” Ben said. “Why don’t you whack Devereaux?”

  “We’re not involved in those things,” Willis said. “The agency does not authorize sanctions.”

  Jules made a face. He felt impaled by incompetents. “I reminded the President of my support for him. He’s a sly old devil. He said he was a friend and would always be a friend but if there had been illegal… he said ‘shenanigans,’ by someone working for me, then I should be the first to know it.”

  He stared at Ben Herguth and Ben felt cold all over, even colder than he usually felt just coming to New York.

  “Ben,” Jules said. “You were in charge of production on this. If you look at the matter in the right way, it’s because of you that so much has gone wrong.”

  Ben stared at Jules and hoped he wasn’t hearing it.

  “Ben, we will engage the best counsel for you,” Jules said.

  “I don’t want to do no time,” Ben said. “I’m old and fat and I can’t do time.”

  Willis stared at him with professional coldness. The atmosphere of the meeting had changed.

  “It is not a question of that,” Jules said. “Someone has to be out front on this. If you have to be out front, then so be it. The FBI will take years trying to put this together and we have lawyers, Ben, dozens and dozens of them. There can be motions and writs and when it comes down to it, it’s going to fall a lot harder on Langley than it will on us.”

  Now it was Willis’ turn. He looked at Jules. “I followed orders. I did what I was supposed to do. We’ve been supplying arms to the rebels for years.”

  “But you haven’t been doing it with laundered money. And they haven’t been Czech arms.”

  “Who can prove that?”

  “Miki,” Jules said.

  “Ben is going to get Miki and Devereaux,” Willis said.

  “Words,” Jules said. “I want to see results, Ben. So you sit here with Mr. Willis and make things happen. Find ways to make things happen between you. I have a board meeting tomorrow at eight sharp and I’m going home. I think you should think about how you’re going to stop Miki from talking and stop Devereaux. Remember, you both have something riding on the results.”

  38

  THE SICK MAN

  “He’s in rooms 503 and 504 at the Hilton in Paris. It’s next to the Eiffel Tower.”

  “I know where it is,” Colonel Ready said. He sat in the telephone booth in the lobby of the Edouard VII Hotel on the Avenue de L’Opéra. Late-night traffic pounded outside the lobby doors. He had been waiting in the bar for the call, drinking very large gin and tonics. His eyes were clear and he did not need to write the room numbers down. The bar had been a hangout for a long time for former Legionnaires and those who had been in the Army in Algeria. It’s how Ready had first known the place, a long time ago, when he had been posted in North Africa.

  “He reconfirmed with Air France a little while ago.” Ben Herguth’s voice was so clear he might have been in the next booth. “The priority is Miki. Take Miki out first.”

  “I understand. How did you trace him?”

  “He booked the flight in Brussels and he booked the rooms in Paris at the same time. We ran it down. Rather, we had our friends run it down. You can do anything when they use credit cards. They still think it takes months to trace down credit-card charges overseas. We checked with the hotel and got the room numbers. We checked with Air France and got the reconfirmation. Whatever happened, the administration bought it in Washington and they’re going to let Miki come in. So you hit them. I mean, you fucking hit them.”

  “I will,” Ready said. He replaced the phone on the green cradle and got up. He opened the booth and dropped a few francs on the switchboard for the operator. He went back into the bar. It was just after eleven and Paris was beginning to come out of the theaters and go to the clubs for a late supper. He paid his bill and did not finish the last gin and tonic. He pushed through the side door to the narrow street and felt the breeze. It was warm for the end of November, he thought.

  He was in time to talk to the night concierge for the fifth floor. The woman was flattered but a little afraid of the policeman with the scar on his face and the strange blue eyes. Yes, the sick man was in Room 503. Yes, he was bandaged here, on his hand.

  So Devereaux was in 503.

  The police officer smiled at the night concierge. The night manager asked him if there would be any trouble. He said he hoped there would not be but the man was a notorious hotel burglar and it was a pretense to check in with his hand bandaged so that no one would think he could have committed the burglaries. He stole jewels and took them out of the hotel in the bandaged hand. You see, he was in Nice and Antibes in the summer; now he has come to Paris for the season. Ready explained it all in his very good French, flavored with the Parisian accent. The night manager wrung his hands and the concierge was quite excited because nothing exciting ever happened on the fifth floor.

  When they were gone, Ready looked up and down the hall. The corridor was carpeted in red and the walls were papered with Paris scenes done in line drawings. It was a very American hotel with bright lights and strong doors.

  He had a pass card—the hotel did not use keys—and held it in his left hand. His right was now filled with a pistol of Italian make, fitted with a silencer. The automatic carried nine rounds. He thought of killing and his eyes glittered in the light of the empty corridor.

  He pushed the card in the lock and the door swung open. The room was dark. He stepped into the narrow hall that led to the dressing room and bath and held out his pistol. He saw the dim form in bed.

  “Devereaux,” he said.

  He fired two quick thumps and the body in the bed leaped under the covers and there was no other sound.

  He stepped into the room and pulled back the cover.

  Miki’s mouth was open in death.

  He said something and turned. There was no other sound. He went back to the passage door and removed the pass card. He stepped to the next room and inserted the card in the holder. He pushed the door open slowly with the barrel of the silencer. He went into the room, which was identical to the other but in reverse layout.

  He pushed the light switch this time.

  The bed was turned down with two mints covered in green paper on the pillows. The room was empty. There was no luggage, nothing. The room was not in use.

  39

  SAFE CONDUCTS

  He called at dawn. It was just past one in the morning in Washington, in the apartment on Massachusetts Avenue at the juncture with Wisconsin.

  “Is it safe?” Devereaux said.

  “Yes.”

  “You have the paper?”

  “Signed by the Man. It’s an executive order, they had to put it in legalese, but it’s safe. All your sins are forgiven you,” Hanley said.

  “Was there reluctance?”

  “Yes. Not by Mrs. Neumann. But the administration was reluctant. They saw, in the end, the way it was.”

  “The way it was,” Devereaux repeated. “How will they handle it?”

  “Quietly. Do you think they intend to call a press conference?”

  “They have to handle it, Hanley. They really have to follow through, you know.”

  “They will. We are the nudge. I don’t think the FBI director thinks well of you either. He wonders how you found the girl so quickly.”

  “They were in Chicago, I told you. I was born there. You know about me, Hanley. I have friends in unsavory businesses there. The FBI talked to the wrong people. If they were really trying to find her, I mean.”

  There was a long silence after that. Hanley yawned into the receiver. “We buy arms from our enemies and give arms to our friends. I really don’t understand.”

  “You’re getting old. Or you bel
ieve too much.”

  “Yes, perhaps that’s it. Both of those things. I never turn out to be as cynical as I would like to be.”

  “I milked Miki yesterday. He has all sorts of interesting stories. He’s still a bit woozy. I bedded him down at the Hilton.”

  “You’re not at the Hilton? I thought you were at the Hilton?”

  “No. I have perverse tastes. I like small and noisy French hotels.”

  “Is Miki all right?”

  “Yes,” Devereaux said. “Why?”

  “Colonel Ready,” Hanley said. “Our passport surveillance said he was a step behind you. He came into the States through O’Hare Airport thirty-six hours after you.”

  Devereaux felt the cold again in himself. It was like passing into shadows. He said nothing.

  “We’ll be in Dulles by one,” he said at last.

  “I’ll be there.”

  He replaced the receiver and went back to the bed. He looked down at her. Her eyes were closed and she breathed softly. After living on the edge all these days, they had made shuddering love in the large, soft bed. All of the lovemaking had rushed out of their bodies, released into each other. When he made love to her, he discovered her all over again. He never said a word to her, except to say her name.

  Rita opened her eyes now. She smiled at him, reached for him.

  “What time is it?”

  “Seven-thirty.”

  “The days get short.”

  “It’ll be warmer in Washington,” he said. He sat on the bed next to her. She reached for him. He was naked and she was naked beneath the covers. She put her hand between his legs and touched him. There and there. He sat for a moment and looked at her hand. Each part of her was examined as a part: her mouth, the line of her upper lip and the line of her lower lip; the slight hollow of her cheeks; the eyes, cloudless and wide and very knowing. He studied her sometimes in the morning light as a painter studies his model, to see the beauty of the lines, with no more desire than a child yet with a child’s delight at the appearance of beauty. In those moments—now—there was no reserve in him.