by Bill Granger
“You are out of it. You were never in it.”
“I know that. I appreciate that. So you people could let me get out of it because what do I know about anything? I know nothing about anything.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“Just I want to get out of it.”
“I already told you.”
Wagner had thought about it all the way to the hotel. He wanted to catch the trolley on Powell on his way to the hotel but it was jammed with tourists as usual. The whole city was one gigantic adult amusement park and the residents had become backdrop providing local color. Wagner felt like the guy who wears the Goofy costume down at Disneyland. He got a cab instead and felt sick all the way up Nob Hill. It had started to rain as he walked into the Fairmont.
“You’re out of it,” Pell said. He poured the German beer out of the green glass bottle straight down the middle of the glass. The head formed as he poured and was exactly right when the glass was filled. Pell took a long swallow and had foam on his lips. He ate another peanut from the collection in the palm of his left hand. “I could even make a joke about how out of it you are. You just got to finish up and finish up means getting your girl to come home to San Francisco. Would make a song, don’t you think?”
“I can’t do it right away. I got my own restraints, you know. Everything is taped. They don’t trust anybody, they tape everything. I wonder what the hell they do with all the tape, whether they reuse it or trash it or where they keep it. I even wonder who listens to it. Who is out there watching us? I wonder that sometimes.”
“I know. You wouldn’t be wired right now, would you?”
Wagner looked shocked. He hadn’t even thought about it.
Pell saw the look. “It doesn’t matter. When we get done here, you go to the men’s room. There’s a guy in there is gonna feel you up, to make sure you don’t have any wires.”
“I will not—”
“Sure you will,” Pell said and popped another peanut in his mouth. He looked around the room, his back against the bar. “Fucking Japs and their cameras. What do you suppose they do with all the photos? I mean, they must have trillions of them by now, they been taking pictures like crazy people for the past forty years. You ever been to Tokyo? Very crowded city. I can’t imagine where they put the photos.”
“I don’t give a shit about photos. I want to—”
Pell broke him off with a look. He held a peanut poised. “You got two days from this morning, which means one full day and two nights. That line is clear by Wednesday morning nine A.M. or you are in the deepest shit you ever saw in your life.”
Wagner didn’t want to hear it. He shut his eyes a moment in lieu of plugging his ears.
“Go down to Santa Bee,” Pell said in a more reasonable tone. “Talk to your girl, talk to Redbird, tell her you’re making a field evaluation and then get her ass home and give her what-for about tapping that guy’s phone.”
“It’s legal. She got an order. She’d never do anything illegal.”
“I had a sister like that once. She could only afford to live like that because she lived in Iowa. She’d have been dead meat in L.A. in two days.”
“I guess I gotta go down.”
“ ‘I guess I gotta go down.’ Fucking A you gotta go down.”
“Pell,” Wagner said in his miserable voice.
Pell looked at him. The peanuts were gone. So was the beer.
“I feel like shit,” he said.
“You look it, too,” Pell said.
“When do I get out, really get out?”
Pell smiled. “You don’t really get it, do you?” He looked for peanuts in the bowl but it was empty. “You were never in it, like I said. You ever want to become a larger part of the picture, you just fuck up. Then you will be very important. For about twenty-four hours or however long it takes to ice you. You are not part of anything right now. The next time we want something, I come to see you and give you money. You take the money and you give us what we ask for. You spend the money discreetly. No Porsches, no house in Pacifica. You be cool and we be cool, like the tutsones say.”
“I never should’ve started.”
“No. You were a lousy poker player and even worse at blackjack. You never should’ve started. But what the fuck. That’s the fun of gambling. And now you can really afford it, not like before.”
The third Stoli just numbed him—tongue, throat, belly. He wasn’t tasting a thing when he drank it.
“I’ll go down,” he said at last.
Pell tried out a small, blond smile. “Good. You better go down tonight before Redbird makes it deeper. All I know, Redbird has got his own scams going, make it harder to get Miss O’Hare to give this up and go home.”
“What is this about really? I mean, what do you want with this guy? Who wants him?”
“You’re finished now. I’ll take the check, Wagner. You might want to take a leak. Bathroom is down there. Don’t be shy when the guy cops a feel. Like they tell the ladies, just lay back and relax.” Pell wasn’t smiling at all when he said it.
13
THE REALITY OF DREAMS
Rita Macklin sat at her vanity and brushed her hair. She was going to have dinner that night with Mac, her editor. It would be the usual thing—gossip about other journalists, and savage and funny observations on the politics of the city.
She was thirty-four years old today.
Her eyes were changing, she thought as she stared at herself in the vanity mirror in the bedroom. She stopped brushing her red hair and leaned forward to inspect her eyes in the soft light.
She wore a black slip and nothing else. Her skin was soft and warm from the bath and she smelled of flowers.
He always said she smelled like flowers, even when it wasn’t true, when she knew she wore no perfume at all.
There were little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She would not have noticed them three years ago. Three years ago was the threshold of her thirties and things were still possible and everything could be accomplished in the future.
It was still possible to become pregnant at thirty-four.
She sat up straight on the bench and picked up her brush again. She stared very hard at her green eyes in the mirror.
Kaiser. She never thought of Kaiser anymore but she had loved that old man, her first mentor in Washington. Then Kaiser killed himself one day and the pain of it tore into her again and again for months. She dreamed of Kaiser and could hear his cigarette-rough voice and his endearing cynicism. He called her Little Rita and he had been as kind to her as her father.
In the end, you could stop dreaming about everyone. You could lose your brother and father and stop dreaming of them; and you could lose old Kaiser, the crusty editor of the two-bit news service who had hired her and trained her to the kind of bloody journalism that wins prizes, and in time, you would stop thinking of him or hearing his voice.
She stopped brushing her hair. She looked at herself. Why the hell love Devereaux?
He was not her first man. It wasn’t that. He had used her once, betrayed her once, led her into danger more than once. He could not speak to her of the secret things in his life. He was a constant enigma, even to himself. He never said he loved her.
He never said it; he said words lied.
She was thirty-four today and alone. He had been gone three weeks. Another lie to explain. But he wouldn’t even explain. Did he love the trade so much that he had to leave her from time to time and descend back into that maelstrom of secrets and spies and wash himself with brutality and deceit and all the things he said he despised?
She shivered suddenly.
The afternoon was cool and full of clouds, and pink light streamed through the bedroom window. She went to bed alone and wanted him next to her. He had left her before, packing the single bag, making certain that she did not see the pistol he always carried. Did he understand he was killing it between them, every time he went away?
That was it, she thoug
ht.
He was killing it. You could only stand so much of it. It was dying day by day. He might be dead or in Russia or in prison or back in Asia or merely a block away, listening at keyholes.
And when he came back to her, there might be a wound or not. Sometimes, she could guess at what it had been by the look in his eye. When it had been very bad, he tried to make his eyes stop seeing. Sometimes, literally, he would almost be blind for days. He would walk around in the house in the darkness of three A.M. and bump into furniture and never make a sound or curse.
He never told her. He might tell her where he had been but he would never tell her all of it because it was a secret.
Even when they swam together in love in a secret pool of their own, he had this other secret, tucked away in mind, never to be spoken of.
She looked at herself in the mirror and she was crying because it hurt her so much. She thought she would have to leave him, to have one final hurt and get rid of it. Cut the arm off and feel the pain and the absence of the limb but, in time, learn to live without it.
She was thirty-four today. When would it be dead between them? Would it take another three years? She would be thirty-seven. Would it last five more years? She would almost be forty. When would she be best able to start her life again with someone else or alone?
Damn him, she thought. She took a tissue and wiped her eyes. She was going to get good and drunk with Mac tonight, and if he made a pass at her, she would let him.
14
NARVAK
The old man was waiting for her.
She came into the single-room cabin from the winter breezeway and took off her fur coat and hung it on a peg by the front door. The place was very warm because the old man had turned up the kerosene fire. It was true spring outside.
The spring was spectacular and it broke your heart. When you were certain the ice was permanent and the darkness was all there would ever be and the snow would finally bury every living thing, then spring came. It was incredibly light and the sullen snow retreated and the ice cracked across the sea like thousands of pistol shots. The sun felt good all day long.
Now the old man looked at her. Narvak held out her hands at the stove and her back was to the old man.
“What did you do?”
“I tried to do what you said. I really did what you told me to do.”
There was a moment of silence. The dark-faced man said, “So it didn’t work.”
“It worked in part. I talked to Nels Nelsen and he got drunk and I went down to the harbor to pick him the American. He was a good-looking man, not pretty to look at it, but he was a good-looking man. He was looking at me, too, I could tell that.”
“Everyone likes to look at you, honey. They like it almost as much as you do, you little tramp,” he said.
She turned to him and looked annoyed. She rubbed her buttocks and pouted and stood in front of the stove. “You told me to fuck him.”
“So did you?”
“I think he’s a queer,” she said.
“Honey, if he was a queer, I woulda sent him Noah, Noah’d take a dick up his ass for the cause.” He was smiling at her and his teeth flashed in the darkness of his face. “What happened?”
“He asked me about Henry McGee. He wanted to know if I knew Henry McGee. He knows I killed him, I swear he does,” Narvak said. She remembered the look of the gray man and the strength of his hand squeezing her hand.
“He said that?” the dark man said. “He asked you about Henry McGee just out of nowhere?”
“Well, he wanted to know how I knew Nels Nelsen. He wasn’t very nice. He could’ve been nice.”
“Why you think he asked you about Henry McGee?”
“Because that was who got killed. That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”
“Bless you, honey, that isn’t what this is about at all. You’re a cute thing and you like to do it about as often as I do, but you don’t really have a clue, Narvak, honey,” the dark man said.
“This is about ULU, about the pipeline—”
“Not at all,” the dark man said, still grinning. “Honey, I told you once you killed me and you couldn’t figure it out from that. Why do you think this man comes up here to talk to Nels Nelsen? About a murder? Hell, he isn’t interested in the murder of that fool Dobbins. Otis Dobbins and I were shipmates and he really thought all he had to do was to be Henry McGee for about a year and then I would give him the twenty-five thousand dollars. Hell, he did a good job, and if I didn’t have to have him killed, I would’ve paid him. He was a good shipmate. Honey, I’m Henry McGee. I’m the guy he’s come up here to find.”
She really didn’t understand. She stopped rubbing her buttocks. The dark man could scare the hell out of her sometimes. You get coke into you and your head is turning around and he’s on top of you and then he says something or does something and you don’t realize it at the time but later you figure out that he hurt you.
“Don’t scare me,” she said.
“Come over here, honey, and let me soothe you. So Devereaux turned you down, huh?”
“He said his name was Wilson.”
“Wilson Shmilson. They sent the right man. It would have worked with someone else but I guessed it would be Devereaux.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Bless you, honey, I know that. Take off your clothes and crawl in beside me,” the dark man said.
She took off her jeans. She didn’t wear underwear. She slipped in beside him. His hands were on her. She felt his warmth beneath the furs on the sleeping shelf. She closed her eyes and said, “Nels Nelsen was drunk when we got back to Nome and he wasn’t going to be able to talk to him. He took Nels up to a bedroom in the Nugget and I helped him. I was going to try him again but I saw that look in his eyes, like he was looking through me. Who needs that shit? I still think he’s a queer.”
“Well, anything is possible but I don’t recall that was his problem exactly. His problem is he’s one cold sonofabitch, and when he decides he has to go outside, he don’t try the door, he goes right through the wall. Only bastard I ran into who seemed to know what the hell he was doing. Admire that. Thought those dodos would finally decide to go with their strength when I tripped the signal.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” she said.
“You only understand this,” he said.
She made a sound.
“And this,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“That’s the way you think,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Thing I like is you killed Dobbins, didn’t ask me why or twice. I like that, I like the way you show off, too. This thing is over one way or another in a week or so and then I get rich.”
“You buy me something then?”
“I buy you everything, honey.”
“Where we go? To Anchorage?”
“Fuck Anchorage, fuck Alaska, fuck this cold. We go down to Tahiti to start with.”
“Is that like Hawaii?”
“It’s French Hawaii. You’ll like Tahiti and then we go up to Hong Kong, buy you some shiny dresses. You’ll show off well in Hong Kong. We’ll sort of go around the rim, down to Shanghai, maybe Saigon. Have a good time, be warm all the time, make lots of fuck-fuck.”
“I be your girl.”
“Soon as those two fuckups, your brother and that other fuckup, do their thing and I get to do my thing. In a little while, we see if this plays or not. Reminds me of this dumb beggar I picked up in a sailor’s bar in San Fran, he thought I wanted to do a sexual act with him. Well, instead of that, I bought him and put him down in Santa Cruz for a year to fuck around and drink his brains out. He did, too, because he was waiting for the golden payoff at the end, which was twenty-five thousand dollars. The funny thing is, chump money never seems to inflate. You can still buy all the chumps you need for about twenty-five thousand. It’s something about a chump’s brain, it doesn’t think much beyond twenty-five thousand dollars.”
<
br /> “That’s a lot of money.”
“No, honey, three million is a lot of money. Three million buys you warm and it buys warm water to swim in and a private beach to be naked on.”
“I can’t think about that much money,” she said.
Henry McGee smiled and the smile broke across his dark face like sunlight. “You don’t have to think. You’re just an action, honey.”
“I be your girl,” she said.
“You be my girl,” he said, thinking about when he would have to kill her. Down the line a ways.
15
CALL TO A SPY
Karen O’Hare left the door of the motel room open. They could hear the beat of traffic on the boulevard beyond the courtyard. It was just seven in the morning and she wore a robe over her pajamas and Wagner looked as if he had not slept all night.
“I’m in charge here, Karen,” he had begun.
She had left the door open and gone to the coffee machine in the courtyard and put in a dollar in change to get two cups of coffee, one ostensibly mixed with cream. It was paler than the other. She gave Wagner the cream and sipped at the black. She did not sit on the edge of the unmade bed.
“I don’t understand how you can exceed your authority this way,” he said. His face had a hangover and his nose was large and red. The cup shook in his hand. “A wiretap? What the hell do you think we are?”
“There’s authorization for this. In the field manual. In the event the agent feels the witness program has been compromised and—”
“You got the same case of paranoia Redbird has?”
“I’m being careful, Mr. Wagner,” Karen O’Hare said. She put the coffee on the plastic nightstand. She sat on the straight chair that went with the Formica desk cum dresser. He sat in the vinyl easy chair with the broken arm. It was a crummy motel room for sixty-two bucks a night. Still, it was cheaper than staying up the way at the Fess Parker.
“I ordered the wiretap because there is something peculiar about this. Redbird is… well, he’s morose. He seemed disappointed… in me. I mean, I think he was looking for more action from higher-ups. I thought he knew what was going on.”
