O'Farrell's Law

by Brian Freemantle

  “Been busy,” said Ellen. She spoke looking down, her bottom lip nipped between her teeth, and O’Farrell recognized the expression from when she’d been young and been caught doing something wrong.

  “Darling!” he said, perfectly in control but trying to sound outraged despite that, wanting to get through to her. “On at least one wheel, possibly two, there are scarcely any brake shoes left at all. Which is hardly important anyway because there was no fluid in the drum to operate them anyway. Two plugs aren’t operating at all, your engine is virtually dry of oil, and the carburetor is so corroded the cover has actually split. Both your left tires, front and back, are shiny bald, and your alignment is so far out on the front that any new tire would be that way inside a month.”

  “Intended to get it fixed right away,” Ellen said, head still downcast. “The brakes are okay, providing you know how to work them.”

  “That car’s a deathtrap and you know it!” O’Farrell insisted. “So when was it last in the shop?”

  “Can’t remember,” Ellen said, stilted still.

  “It hasn’t been serviced, has it? Not for months!”

  “No.”

  There was a loud silence in the tiny kitchen. Remembering something else, O’Farrell said, “What about Patrick?”

  “What about Patrick?” his daughter echoed.

  “You told him about this scare at Billy’s school?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s all it is, a scare,” Ellen said. “Nothing’s happened to Billy.”

  Don’t be sidetracked, thought O’Farrell. “Patrick’s got visitation rights, hasn’t he?”

  “You know he has.”

  “Tell me the custody arrangement.”

  “You know the custody arrangement!” Ellen said angrily.

  “Tell me!”

  “Alternative weekends,” Ellen said. “Vacation by arrangement.”

  “So Billy was with his father last weekend?”

  “No,” Ellen admitted tightly.

  “And the time before that?”

  “No.” Tighter still.

  “Why not?”

  A shrug.

  “Why not!”

  “Patrick’s got problems; he got laid off.”

  “From the loan company?”

  Ellen shook her head. “That was the job before last. He was working on commission, with a group of guys, trying to sell apartments in a renewal development downtown.”

  “But he got laid off?”

  Ellen nodded.

  “When?”

  She shrugged uncertainly. “I’m not sure. Three months ago, maybe four. I’m not sure.”

  Jill had been listening, her head moving backward and forward like a spectator’s at a tennis match. She said abruptly, “Honey, we’ve been up here twice in the last four months! Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “My business,” Ellen said, little girl again.

  “No, honey,” Jill said gently. “Our business.”

  “It was all right at first. He kept seeing Billy and …” she trailed away.

  “And what!” demanded O’Farrell, guessing already.

  “And the payments,” Ellen finished.

  “How much is he behind?”

  There was another uncertain shoulder move. “Two months.”

  “Alimony and child support?” O’Farrell pressed.

  Ellen nodded. “Actually it’s three months.”

  “And when did he last want to see Billy?”

  “It’s not that he doesn’t want to see him! He and Jane have two kids of their own now; he’s got a lot of priorities.”

  “You and Billy are his prior commitments!” O’Farrell insisted. “He married you first. He had Billy first. He owes you first.”

  “He asked me to give him a little time, just to sort himself out. Jane’s still jealous of me, he says.”

  “She’s jealous of you, for Christ’s sake!” Jill erupted. “She was his mistress for a year before she became pregnant to make him choose between the two of you. And you’re doing her favors! Come on!”

  “Leave it, Mom. Please leave it!”

  “You could have died in that car,” O’Farrell said. “Been badly hurt at least.”

  “I was saving, to get it done. But I didn’t want to fall behind with the mortgage.”

  “Have you?” O’Farrell asked. He’d put up the down payment for Ellen for the apartment, believing she could manage the monthly installments.

  There was a jerking nod of her head. “Only this month.”

  “You still make the same?” O’Farrell asked. Ellen worked as a medical receptionist; she’d cut short her training to be a physiotherapist like her mother in order to marry Patrick. Billy had been born nine calendar months later.

  “It averages around a thousand a month; sometimes I work overtime and it comes to a little more.”

  “You can’t afford to live here on a thousand a month!” Jill said. “You can’t afford to live anywhere on a thousand a month. You’ve got to get Patrick’s payments going through the courts, like you should have done in the first place.”

  “You can’t get what’s not there.”

  “How do you know it’s not there?” O’Farrell asked.

  “I know.”

  ‘Tell me something,” Jill said. “You surely don’t think there’s a chance of you and Patrick getting back together again, do you? He’s got two other children by her!”

  The girl’s shoulders went up and down listlessly. “I don’t know.”

  “Would you get back together if he asked you?”

  Another shoulder movement. “I don’t know.”

  O’Farrell and Jill frowned at each other over their daughter’s head, shocked by the lassitude. Each tried to think of something appropriate to say and failed.

  It was Jill who spoke, with forced briskness, trying to break the mood. “Why don’t I make supper?”

  Without asking either woman O’Farrell fixed drinks for all three of them. Jill took hers without any critical reaction and didn’t comment or even look when he made himself another before they sat down. Largely for the child’s benefit, they made light conversation during the meal, and afterward O’Farrell played spacemen with Billy while the women cleared away. The boy was allowed to watch an hour of television, and while Ellen and Jill were bathing him before bed O’Farrell made a third drink, a large one, and kept it defiantly in his hand when Jill came back into the room. She didn’t appear to notice it.

  By unspoken agreement Ellen’s problems weren’t raised again during the evening, but the subject hung between them, like a room divider, all the time.

  That night, in Billy’s bed, lying on her back in the darkness, Jill said, “Christ, what a mess!”

  “It’s not too bad, not yet,” O’Farrell said, trying to be realistic.

  “It’s not too good, either.”

  “I tried to talk to Billy at lunchtime about drugs.”

  He felt her head turn toward him in the darkness. “And?”

  “He spoke about it,” O’Farrell tried to explain. “This little kid tried to speak about it like he knew what we were talking about and all the time he was playing fucking Star Wars!”

  “She’s got to go to an attorney, get the proper court payments set up,” Jill insisted. “I don’t give a damn how bad his own situation is. I don’t see why Ellea and Billy should suffer because of it; he created it all.”

  “Yes,” O’Farrell agreed.

  “She married too young,” Jill said abruptly.

  “The same age as us.”

  “I got you; she got a bastard.”

  What words would she use if she really knew? O’Farrell said, “Maybe we were wrong, making it possible for her to buy the apartment. It’s a hell of a drain on what she earns.”

  “What can we do, apart from pressure her about a lawyer?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted O’Farrell.

  “What about mon
ey? Couldn’t we make her some sort of allowance?”

  Not if he went to Petty and said he wanted to quit. “Yes,” O’Farrell promised. “If we can get her to accept it, we could make her an allowance. We’ll definitely do that.”

  “I love you,” Jill said.

  Would she if she really knew? he wondered again.

  CIA surveillance picked up the Cuban ambassador the moment he left High Holborn. The alert that he was probably making for London airport was radioed from the trailing car when the official vehicle gained the motorway and confirmed when it turned off onto the Heathrow spur. The observer risked following closely behind Rivera at the check-in desk, to discover his destination, but it was the driver who took over to purchase a ticket and board the plane to Brussels, to avoid any chance recognition. Before the aircraft cleared English airspace watchers were already assembling at Brussels, waiting: the CIA officer from London headed back immediately upon arrival, again to avoid possible identification.

  Rivera took a taxi into the center of the capital and went through an effort at trail clearing that earned the professionals’ sneers, it was so amateurish. They kept him easily under observation until he entered Pierre Belac’s nondescript office. The Agency had not risked installing any listening devices there. Had they done so, they would have heard Belac ask for a downpayment of thirty-five million dollars and Rivera agreeing without any argument, with an added, entrapping assurance that if Belac had any additional expenditures in excess of this advance sum he would be immediately recompensed. Even with a listening device, they could not have picked up Belac’s reaction, a repeat of his earlier and intense irritation at not having pitched the demand higher at their embassy meeting.

  At least, Belac reasoned at once, he had the authority to buy in addition and in excess of his thirty-five-million-dollar advance. Which he resolved to do; he would purchase a vast amount of Czech small arms and ten of the fifty tanks that were not coming from America but from a German arms dealer who had them available for sale. They were far cheaper than he’d have to pay for the American vehicles; Belac guessed $10,000 a tank, although, of course, he wouldn’t tell Rivera that. Belac reckoned that as he was taking the risk, by using his own money, then his should be the unexpected and unshared profit.

  Rivera remained with the arms dealer for less than an hour, walking back to the center of town, where he caught a taxi to the airport, boarding the midafternoon plane to London. There he was followed back into the city. He did not go to his Hampstead home but to a mews house in Pimlico that was already logged on the CIA’s watch list. It belonged to an aging, self-made English newspaper magnate named Sir William Blanchard. Inquiries showed that he was in Ottawa negotiating fresh newsprint prices with Canadian manufacturers. Lady Henrietta Blanchard, twenty-three years her husband’s junior, was at home, though.

  It was nine A.M. the following morning before Rivera left.

  SIX

  THE HEAD of the CIA’s Plans Directorate was a barrel-chested, bull-necked Irishman named Gus McCarthy. He was thickly red-haired and had a heavily freckled face, with freckles on the back of his hands as well; they were also matted with more red hair. He looked like a barroom brawler—and was able to be—but his looks belied the man. He was a strategist capable of intricate and manipulative schemes, never concentrating upon an immediate operation to the exclusion of how it could be extended and utilized to its fullest advantage. He was perfectly matched by his deputy, Hank Sneider, a precise, slight man who had the ability to recognize the direction of McCarthy’s thoughts almost before the man completely explained them, and correct and improve upon the details. Their nicknames within the Langley headquarters were Mutt and Jeff. They knew it and weren’t offended; there were benefits to being underestimated.

  “So what have we got?” McCarthy demanded, not seeking an answer. “One of the largest arms dealers in Europe, a Cuban ambassador who likes the good life, and a British newspaper owner.”

  “I think to include the newspaper owner is confusing,” Sneider said. “Blanchard isn’t involved. Rivera’s just humping the wife is all.”

  “Maybe not all,” McCarthy mused. “Couldn’t we use that? Blanchard’s got a hell of an empire: television stations and newspapers and magazines here as well as in Europe. Get ourselves a corner there and we’d have an incredible outlet for whatever we wanted to plant.”

  They were in McCarthy’s seventh-floor office in the CIA building, high enough for a view of the Potomac glistening its way through the tree line. Sneider ignored the view, pouring coffee for both of them from the permanently steaming Cona machine. McCarthy consumed a minimum of ten cups a day. Sneider carried McCarthy’s mug back to the man’s desk and said, “It’s worth thinking through. But we could only achieve that by pressuring the old guy. The shit we’ve got is on the woman.”

  “How much of a lever does she have on her old man?”

  “Get things published the way we want, darling, or hubbie gets to know all the sordid details?” Sneider suggested.

  “Something like that,” McCarthy agreed, appreciatively sipping. “Be nice to get a picture of her with her ass in the air.”

  “Rivera’s too, in tandem.”

  “They discreet?”

  “Don’t appear to be, particularly. Rivera shacked up at the family home when the old guy was in Canada and she often accompanies him to polo matches. That’s his sport, polo.”

  “So what’s that?” McCarthy asked, another rhetorical question. “Sheer couldn’t-give-a-damn carelessness? Arrogance? What?”

  “Maybe Blanchard knows and doesn’t mind either,” Sneider speculated. “You know how it is with some old guys: all they want is a decoration on their arm and maybe an occasional feel in the sack to make sure it’s still there and working and the rest of the time the bimbo can party with whom she likes.”

  “Difficult to turn that into an advantage,” McCarthy complained.

  “What about cutting the deck a different way?” Sneider asked.

  “Rivera?”

  “Not exactly leading the life of José the Cane Cutter, is he?”

  “What’s the objective?”

  “Spy in the court of King Castro?”

  “To be that Rivera’s got to be back in Havana,” McCarthy said. “Won’t work. To maneuver his recall we’d have to spread the word about his high life. So he goes back in disgrace and wouldn’t be in a position to give us anything anyway. And when we show him the pictures of himself and the lady, he says, ‘She was a good lay, so what?’ “

  “So?”

  “We divide it,” McCarthy decided. “Let’s message London to get as much dirt as possible on the two of them but not to spook Rivera. And run him and Belac quite separately.”

  “Parallel surveillance is going to tie up a lot of manpower.”

  “Belac’s big; the biggest. It could be worth it.”

  “We going to seek British help?”

  “No,” McCarthy said at once. “If it’s going to be big, let’s keep it nice and tight, just to ourselves.”

  “Then the way in is through Belac,” the other man said. “There’s already a bunch of stuff on the guy; we’ve got a good handle on his sources. If we can find out what he wants, then it’ll give us an idea what Rivera could be ordering.”

  “Belac’s the biggest?”

  “Yes,” Sneider said, trying to tune in to the direction of McCarthy’s thinking.

  “So logically whatever Rivera—whatever Cuba—wants is substantial,” McCarthy said. “If it were just the usual run-of-the-mill stuff, there’s a dozen smaller guys they could have bought from. Belac means it’s a huge order and that it’s the latest state-of-the-art matériel.”

  “You talking Apocalypse?”

  McCarthy got up to pour his own coffee this time, looking inquiringly toward his deputy, who shook his head in refusal. McCarthy returned to his high-backed chair and said, “The days of missile crises are over. I think Havana’s looking south, not north. We won
t know until we get some idea just how substantial, but it’s got to be more than continuing support in Nicaragua; much more.”

  Sneider gestured to indicate the building in which they were sitting. “Time to start spreading the news?”

  “Not yet,” the Plans Director said. “There’s not enough news to spread; just speculation. But it’s definitely worth expending the manpower.”

  “Most definitely,” agreed Sneider, all doubt gone now.

  “And when we get it, we make the most extensive possible use of it,” McCarthy said. “Ripples upon ripples upon ripples.”

  O’Farrell had expected his offer of financial support to meet a stronger argument from Ellen and decided with Jill that their daughter’s almost immediate acceptance showed just how desperate she had become. They agreed on $400 a month, and Billy had clung to his mother’s leg and wanted to know why she was crying. The car repairs cost $550, and before they left Chicago Jill went grocery shopping again, stocking up the cupboards and the deep-freeze. During their last conversation, after Sunday-morning church, Ellen said she’d sec her lawyer before the month was out.

  They wrote as well as telephoned now, and that first week O’Farrell sent a long letter to John, in Phoenix, aware that the boy would not be able to offer Ellen any financial support but suggesting that his sister might like support of another kind, like a call or a letter. He didn’t say it outright but hoped his son would infer that the occasional checks would not be quite as much as they had been in the past. There was a reply practically by return. John said that what was happening in Billy’s school was nothing unusual and that they weren’t to worry. Jeff had actually come home one day and talked about being offered marijuana; he and Beth were pretty sure he hadn’t tried it but couldn’t be one-hundred-percent certain. John promised to write to Chicago every week, the way they were doing now, and added a postscript that the checks had always embarrassed him anyway and in the future he wouldn’t expect anything at all from his father.

  To establish—and hopefully to go on improving—his great-grandfather’s archive, O’Farrell had written to still-existing newspapers throughout Kansas that had been publishing during the man’s lifetime and even wrote further afield, to papers in Colorado and Oklahoma. In addition he approached as many historical societies and museums as he could locate, asking them to publicize his on-going search for information about his ancestor in any newsletter or publication they issued.