I waved them in. “This is Hercules,” I said to Crystal Beth.
“I’m glad to meet you,” she said, holding out her hand for him to shake.
“You’re goddamn gorgeous!” Herk said, staring. He can do that—say something like that to women without a trace of a leer or a sneer—I’ve seen him do it before.
Crystal Beth flushed, mumbled something under her breath.
“And this is Clarence,” I told her.
“I am honored to meet you,” the West Indian said in his formal voice.
“The honor is mine,” she replied, on safer ground now.
“That’s the basement?” I asked, pointing to my left.
“Yes.”
The Mole walked past us without a word and disappeared down the dark stairs, Clarence right behind him, trusting the Mole to see in the dark. Crystal Beth gave me a look. I ignored it. “Let’s talk upstairs,” I said.
She started up the steps. I elbowed Herk out of the way before he could tell her what a beautiful butt she had and fell in right behind her, leaving him to follow.
In her room, Crystal Beth hit a switch and three separate lamps snapped into light. The place looked different in artificial light. Colder, more efficient.
“It’s gonna be tonight,” I told Herk. “This guy, Pryce, he’ll call here. And we’ll go to the meet. You’ll stay here until he has it set up.”
“Here?” Herk asked, smiling at Crystal Beth.
“In the basement,” I told him. “We’re gonna rig something down there.”
“There’s a toilet,” Crystal Beth said helpfully. “I think it works. And there’s a sink, and a—”
“Whatever,” I cut her off. “We’ll make it work. It won’t be for more than a couple of days, max.” Then I turned to Hercules. “You can’t come upstairs,” I told him. “Not for nothing, period. This is supposed to be an all-women’s joint, understand? Nobody else can see you. Got it?”
“I got it,” he replied, not bitching.
“We’ll take my car to the meet. Pryce has already seen it. And I’ll bring you back. By then, the guys will have it set up downstairs, okay?”
“Sure, Burke. Like you said.”
“You’ve been reading that stuff I left with you?”
“Yeah. It ain’t all that complicated. Just . . . stupid, like.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Jews run everything, right? That’s what the books said. They run the government, the newspapers, the TV, everything, okay?”
“Okay . . .”
“And these guys, they fucking hate the Jews, and . . . Ah, excuse me, miss. I didn’t mean to . . . curse, like. I’m an ignorant asshole sometimes.”
Crystal Beth’s laugh was a merry sound in the room. “That’s all right,” she said.
Goddamn Hercules. He probably could have been the world’s greatest pimp if he didn’t love women so much.
“Go ahead,” I prompted him.
“Okay, so I’m the Jews, right? And I got all this power, right? And these Nazis or whatever, they wanna wipe me out, right? So how come I don’t just wipe them out?”
“Good question,” I told him. “But not a question you want to ask these guys you’ll be with.”
“Oh yeah, I know. I was just—”
“Herk, this is no game. Don’t be wondering anything. No talking, all listening, got it?”
“I got it.”
The phone rang. Crystal Beth walked over to pick it up. Hercules watched her like a kid in an ice-cream forest.
“Hello.”
There was a long pause as she listened, brushing away her hair to get the receiver right against her ear.
After a minute or so, she said: “I understand. Nine-E as in ‘Edward,’ right? I’ll tell him.”
She hung up. Gave me an address on the East Side in the Seventies. “He said to ask for Mr. White,” she said.
“When?”
“Right now, if you want. Or anytime between now and four in the morning, that’s what he said.”
So Pryce didn’t know I had Herk with me, was giving me time to pick him up. Good.
I turned to Crystal Beth. “If I so much as hear a motorcycle . . .”
“I got enough bruises for one night,” she said softly, stepping close to me, sticking her nose into my chest. “Anyway, you have to bring . . . Hercules back, don’t you?”
“Stay put,” I told her, the warning still in my voice.
We all came downstairs together, walking silently past the closed doors on the second and third floors. Lights were on in the basement. We went down the stairs and saw an army cot with a full bedroll all set up. A folding table and matching chair were in place, plus a small TV set, a radio with a cassette player, a little cube of a refrigerator, a hot plate and a bunch of books . . . race-hate literature to comics. Herk’s duffel bag was standing next to the cot. Looked like my place.
“It’s great!” Hercules said.
I held out my hand to the Mole, palmed what he had in his. We all walked upstairs together, then out the back door. Crystal Beth closed it behind us.
“You got those keys made fast, Mole,” I told him in the street, slipping them into my pocket.
“Where are the Nazis?” was all he wanted to know.
The apartment building had a circular driveway in front with a drop-off area protected by a canopy. I cruised past it twice, just checking. Then I found a parking place about a block away and we walked back together.
The uniformed doorman wasn’t asleep. A bad sign, made me edgy. I told him we were there to see Mr. White in 9-E. He raised an eyebrow. I didn’t respond.
“Two gentlemen to see you, sir,” he said into the house phone, eyes never leaving my face. He was a tallish man in his fifties, built blocky, like an ex-athlete who hadn’t kept up the training regimen. His hair was buzz-cut, gone mostly gray. His eyes were small, porno-movie blue. They didn’t blink.
He listened, no expression on his face. “Go on up,” he said. “Last elevator on your left.”
The walls of the elevator car were mirrored, with rows of tiny lights inset into the ceiling. A bell in the control panel pinged a greeting when the car reached the ninth floor.
The door to 9-E was right across from the elevator. It opened before I could knock.
“Come on in,” Pryce said, stepping to one side so we could.
Just past the foyer, there was an oversized living room with a broad expanse of glass facing east. Might have been a river view behind it but I couldn’t tell from where I was standing. The main furniture was one of those sectional leather sofa-chair combos, muted ecru, extending in a J-curve toward the window. A pair of complicated-looking chairs were positioned right across from it, strips of tan leather pulled taut over black wrought iron. A free-form glass coffee table sat between them, all set off nicely by the thick wine-colored carpet. The walls were bare except for some old movie posters from the Forties, framed in chrome.
Pryce waved his hand toward the sectional, taking one of the suspension chairs for himself. Herk and I sat down. I slid over a few feet so that Pryce couldn’t watch us both without turning his head a bit.
“This is your man?” he asked without preamble.
“This is Hercules,” I said.
He swiveled his head to Herk. “And you’re a Nazi?” he asked suddenly.
“I’m an Aryan warrior,” Herk said, no hesitation. I was proud of him.
“What does that mean?” Pryce stayed on him.
“It means I love my race. I would die for my people. And kill for them too.”
“Your . . . race?”
“The white race,” Herk said, trying to keep his voice calm like I’d schooled him, but unable to keep the juice bubbling out—he was proud of himself, a kid eager to show he’d learned his ABCs.
“Define ‘white,’ ” Pryce said.
“Huh? What’s so fucking hard? White.”
“So not blacks and . . . ?”
“And no
t browns and not yellows and not reds and not no other fucking shade, okay?” Herk told him, a step shy of aggressive.
“And Jews?”
“Jews? They ain’t white people. They ain’t people at all.”
Pryce went “Ummm . . .” like he was considering this newly presented wisdom. “Tell me about the man you killed,” he said finally.
“I don’t know nothin’ about no—”
“You first,” I interrupted, holding Pryce’s eyes.
“This is a leaderless cell,” Pryce said, like he’d never asked the homicide question. “A super-cell, in point of fact. It’s been in place just a few months. There are only a half-dozen or so members, and they all have conventional lives. Relatively conventional. The meetings are in various places, but they use a bookstore in lower Manhattan for an information drop. They’re only in New York until—”
“What’s a super-cell?” I asked him.
He nodded like a college professor who got asked a moderately intelligent question—one that showed the students were paying attention. Finally. “Each of them is a . . . representative,” he said. “From one of the original leaderless cells scattered throughout the country. Eventually, each of them will return to his base area to a pre-determined residence and await contact. Their home cells may have changed composition or personnel by then. Or they may have disappeared. But if they are contacted when they return, each member of the super-cell passes the word. The date for the unified action.”
“And you don’t know that date?”
“No. I don’t believe it is known. Yet.”
“Or the target list?”
“There’s no way to know that at all. Each of the local cells has that. The way it’s set up, the member they detached to the super-cell doesn’t know it either.”
“Why can’t you just shadow each of them when they split?”
“Do you know the kind of surveillance effort that would require? And without tipping them off? No, we need the date. Anything else we get would be gravy.”
I raised my eyebrows at the mention of gravy. If he noticed, Pryce gave no sign.
“Up to now, they’ve been taking their cues from the newspapers. The church arsons, that’s an example. One cell just goes out and commits an . . . action, they call it. Another reads about it, does the same thing. There’s no communication between them. None at all. But this one’s different.”
I looked around for an ashtray. Couldn’t see one. Lit a cigarette with a wooden match. A real one this time, no damn cloves. I watched Pryce’s face. Nothing. Okay. I took out a small metal box, the kind some cough drops come in, and opened it up. Pryce nodded approvingly. Good. Let him get used to me taking things out of my pockets.
“You telling me each of them has a home cell?”
“Yes.”
“So where’s Lothar’s?”
“Right here,” Pryce said. “New York City.”
“And he’s gonna give them up too?”
“He already has,” the colorless man replied, the muscle jumping under his eye.
“So they’re being watched?”
“He has no contact with them, I told you. And we don’t have the resources to do that anyway.”
I wondered who “we” was in that sentence. Whoever it was, it wasn’t the FBI. It has enough damn “resources” to watch anyone. Could they already be in custody?
I dragged on my cigarette, thinking. The whole thing was as snaky-shaky as a politician’s promise.
“Herk’s gotta be a member, right?” I put it to him. “Not some free-lance assassin—a card-carrying, true-believing member. He’s gotta be inside.”
“That’s true.”
“And his credential is that he did some . . . job for them, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you can cover that?”
“Yes.”
I got it then. “So Herk was in Lothar’s cell? From the jump, right?”
“Right.”
“And the guy he . . . took care of, that guy was in the cell too?”
“Yes.”
“An informant?”
“No!” he said sharply. “There can’t even be the hint of such a thing. They would instantly disband if they had any reason to believe they’d been infiltrated. Just fold their tents and go.”
“But not drop the plan?”
“Of course not. But there’d be no way to pick them up again.”
A thought crossed my mind. Something I’d never asked. But it could blow the whole thing higher than Timothy Leary. “This guy you . . .” I asked Herk. “He was white?”
“Uh, yeah,” Herk said. He hadn’t thought about it either.
“No he wasn’t,” I said leaning forward, flushed with relief. Elbows on knees, looking only at Herk, shutting Pryce out of my vision. “He was a Jew. His mother, or his grandmother, whatever, was a Jew. That makes him a Jew. That’s the way they do it in Israel. He’d changed his name, but the cell discovered it. That’s when you got the word to—”
“That’s when you volunteered,” Pryce interjected, with me now.
I shifted my eyes back to the colorless man. “They have some kind of mail drop?” I asked him. “I know they can’t contact the old cell, but is there some way for the cells to reach out to them?”
“Yes. They use a P.O. box on—”
“Okay.” I spun it out. “Lothar gets word that . . . one of his cell buddies was rotten, okay? Now listen, he tells the other guys in his unit that he got this word. He can get the details, but, to do it, he’s gotta meet with someone from his old cell. That’s Herk.”
“They might panic and—”
“And that’s the game,” I said flatly. “If they run, they run. But if they want to hear what really happened, calm themselves down, make a decision whether to abort or not, they have to meet with Herk. And once they meet with him, he’s gotta stay with them until it’s over, right?”
“Yes,” Pryce said slowly. “That’s the way they would behave. Once he was there, he couldn’t go back. But it’s a risk. . . .”
“Any other bullshit way you try and stick Herk in there is a risk too. Only question is, who takes the risk? And here’s the answer: it’s not gonna be us.”
“It’s my decision,” Pryce said. “Not yours.” He scratched the tip of his nose with his index fingernail. “Unless you can guarantee that this divorce business will be dropped.”
“I can’t do that,” I told him. “My way’s the only way. You can get a meet with Lothar, right? That’s when he meets Herk. He wouldn’t necessarily know all his cell buddies that good anyway. This is the way to do it, and you know it.”
“We’ll need good information, very good information about the . . . Jew.”
“I can get all that,” I promised him.
“How fast?”
“Twenty-four hours, max.”
He took a shallow breath. “You have complete control? Of that woman?”
I knew who he meant. “Total,” I promised him.
“Get the information,” he said. “We don’t have much time. You two stay together. Wait for my call. I’ll call her. Two, three days at the most.”
“Done,” I said. To remind him about the money.
I called Crystal Beth on the cellular to tell her we were on our way. As soon as I tapped lightly on her back door, it popped open. If she wondered how I could get past the padlock on the outside gate, she kept it to herself.
“Everything went fine,” I said to her. “Let me get Herk established in the basement and I’ll come back here and tell you about it.”
“I’ll help,” she said, starting to go downstairs.
“Go on up,” I said. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“I’ll wait here,” she said firmly. “If you don’t want me to go downstairs, I’ll wait right here. You can’t wander around upstairs by yourself. If Lorraine saw you, it would be—”
“Okay,” I agreed, cutting off the speech.
In th
e basement, I went over everything with Herk again. Then I palmed the cellular and left a message for Wolfe.
As Crystal Beth and I walked past the doors, I noticed one of them was open just a crack, a yellow band of light outlining the frame. Lorraine’s room?
“Tell me,” she said as soon as we got into her room.
“There isn’t a lot to tell. We’re going to try to do it. Depends on a bunch of things that have to happen in the next day or so. Pryce, he’s going to call here. You reach out for me and—”
“You’re not going to be here?”
“Not twenty-four/seven. There’s people I have to see.”
“I could come with you.”
“No. You couldn’t.”
“Because—?”
“Because I fucking said so,” I told her, my voice as tired as I felt.
“You don’t have to snap at me.”
“And you don’t have to pout like a spoiled brat,” I told her. “This is business. My business, not your business.”
“I thought you trusted me.”
“I do trust you, bitch. That’s my risk. I don’t make my people take my risks, understand?”
She didn’t say anything, just stood there facing me squarely, one hand pulling idly at her hair. Then she said, “Why do you use that word like that?”
“What?”
“ ‘Bitch.’ You say it like some other man would say ‘honey’ or something.”
“I don’t know. I just—”
“You do know,” she said. “People know why they do things, if they would just think about them.”
“Okay, I guess I never thought about—”
“Do it,” she said. Then gave me a sweet smile. “Please.”
I sat down in the easy chair and closed my eyes. Crystal Beth came around behind me, put her hands over my eyes. Little hands. Soft. Smelled like purple lilacs and dark tobacco. Her nose nuzzled gently against the back of my head. I let myself go into it.
“When I was a kid, I had a dog,” I said, thinking and talking to her at the same time. “A fox terrier. A walking death warrant for rats. She was my great pal. I loved her. When I went to one of those foster homes, they took her away from me. I never saw her again.”
Safe House b-10 Page 17
