by Bill Granger
“You say.”
“Jesus, Pat, you think I’m working a private scam? I don’t even know half this stuff in the note but I know some of it. I don’t deal in terrorism, honey.”
“Maybe it never paid this well before.”
“You don’t trust me.”
“Not from day one.”
He stared at her eyes. She was in the cold mood now, looking right through him. She was forty-four by the clock and there were small wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and at the edge of her mouth but they only made her look kindly. Except when her eyes were turned on to cobalt blue. They could laser through steel, the way they were now.
“I consult, I go-between, I grease deals. I’m in the business of making money, not cutting my own throat. Do you know how much I get out of the supply companies using the Haul Road? Do you want to know about trucking interests I’m involved in? The line has been very very good to me, like the black guy used to say on Saturday Night Live.”
“I know about your interests, Malcolm. I keep track of you in case you ever decide to keep track of me.” She let it rest between them. He stared at her, thinking that he had once wanted nothing better than to screw her. Desire was all shriveled in him when she let the words fall that heavy.
“I want to figure your angle, Malcolm, and I can’t unless it’s all on the square as far as you’re concerned. You could have set up ULU yourself but that’s not really your style, to leave those kinds of marks and that much vulnerability. You make your hits a lot cleaner now that I showed you how.” She shook her head. “Christ. An atom bomb. Is it the Russians?”
“Or the Chinese? Or the Indians? Or just some Middle East arms dealer? You want to play twenty questions? It’s eight in the morning and twelve hours from now, if we don’t play, we find out the hard way if we were calling a bluff.”
She bit her lip. She was figuring something out. Malcolm couldn’t help himself; his mood was swinging back and he loved the way her blouse formed itself around her. She commanded the room in that moment and everything in it. Terry was cute and even fun and a great lay but Patricia Heath had power. He thought about spreading the legs of power and it started to give him an erection.
“We do it,” she said. “The way you said it was. We find a suitcase with a bomb in it by eight tonight or you’re hanging, Malcolm. Not today or tomorrow but you’re hanging. I’ve got four years until the next election and I can repair my damage but you won’t have four years, Malcolm.”
“Don’t threaten me, Pat,” he said. He was annoyed again. She made his emotions swing back and forth like a teenage boy caught in a bus full of girls.
“No threats, Malcolm.” Soft now, a voice from a remembered weekend in Washington. “I just want to be careful and I want you to be careful, too.”
And he thought then that it was going to work.
18
THE MAN WHO WASN’T
The girl drove like a man. She rested her right hand on the top of the steering wheel and let her left arm ride the armrest. She kept her eyes on the road. She left her jacket unbuttoned because she wanted him to stare at her the way he had done yesterday.
Devereaux thought he understood and that is why he carried the pistol. It was the Browning automatic. He had tried it out in a shooting gallery in Santa Cruz and he liked the feel of it better than he wanted to admit. The action was fast and the recoil was reduced and he got to the point where he could put all thirteen rounds in a pattern inside the target most of the time. He thought he could kill with the pistol and so he could trust it; he wondered if he would kill anyone on this simple matter.
He thought of Rita Macklin as he stared at the young body of the girl. He thought of a matter that would take two or three weeks. That had turned out to be a lie. He lied to her all the time because he had to; but the one true thing in him could not speak to her.
He stared at Narvak as the car bumped over the unpaved road into the countryside north of Nome.
“This is the road to Teller but we pull in in a little while,” she said. “You got plenty of sleep.”
“Plenty,” he said.
“I like you, you know. I told you that.”
He said nothing.
She turned to look at him a moment and give him the deep-eyed look. She had a trick of wetting her eyes when she looked like that. He stared at her. She was a little girl and she played the game of vamp like a little girl. He remembered the little girls in Vietnam, wearing their microminis, their half-formed breasts straining against the cheesecloth sweaters. They were whores and they went through the paces as though they had copied their moves from old American movies. She was like them and it made him sad again, remembering the days in Vietnam when the world was coming to an end.
She had come into his room at the Nugget Inn as he lay naked on the bed. He had been waiting for something, a sound, the stirring of life downstairs at the front desk. When the hotel came awake, he still had been waiting, perhaps for Narvak to come to his room. If he had been right about Narvak, she would come for him; she was the purposeful link in the chain that might lead to Henry McGee. She had not surprised him any more than if Henry McGee had walked into the room or Rita Macklin or Colonel Ready. Ready had scared him once, almost to his own death, and in the night, he thought Colonel Ready was still alive.
She had smiled at his nakedness and began to take off her clothes.
He watched her take off her clothes, and when she was done, she slipped into the narrow bed and pressed herself against him. She opened her hand and touched him and held him there.
What stopped him? Perhaps the thought of the sad little girls turned into whores, working the streets of Saigon in those last years before the end of the world. Perhaps it was only his weariness. To end it, he had said, “Where is he?”
She had stared at him for a long time but the question lay between them now. She had let him go then and got up from the bed and put her clothes back on. He had dressed apart from her as though they might have been married for years.
“Do you know who he is?”
“I know his name,” she had said.
She felt ashamed to have been naked and in bed with him and not to have fooled him. She felt she had failed the dark-faced man.
The cabin was at the end of a side road. She stopped the car and got out and walked up the slope to the door of the cabin. The logs were thick and roughly squared off and set into the mortar. The winter entryway door creaked open and Narvak opened the second door, which was made of planking bound with black metal.
Devereaux was behind her and he had the pistol in his hand when the door was opened.
The dark-faced man sat on the sleeping ledge in the windowless cabin. The room was lit by the kerosene lantern on the table and by the little glow from the heater. The cabin had no windows.
She started to speak to the dark-faced man but he was looking at Devereaux.
“Long time,” Henry McGee finally said.
Devereaux stepped aside from the girl and she saw the gun and she said something in her native language.
The dark-faced man spoke to her in the same tongue. It was a language composed of small sounds, delivered in a low voice, with little clicks at the edges of the words.
“You should have stayed buried,” Devereaux said. “You made a lot of people angry back home.”
“So they sent you along.”
“You killed the old trapper.”
“Me? She did. Look at her, not even seventeen yet and she kills as good as any grown man. Don’t you, Narvak?”
The girl balled her fists and glared at the old man and Devereaux saw it.
“Hell, that don’t matter to him. He’s not from the fucking state police, girl. Sit down, Devereaux.”
Devereaux remained standing and the pistol was just as pointed in his hand.
“Suit yourself but I don’t have any guns on me, if that’s what you want, a fucking shoot-out. Country’s changed some since you were up this way. Didja notic
e that parking meter on Front Street in Nome? Funny story about that. They were going to pave Front Street, make Nome look like it was a real city, and the guy who owned the paper said it was a waste of money, which it was, but who counts? So they paved the street anyway, despite the newspaper stirring up a fuss, and they get the bright idea of putting in a parking meter right in front of the newspaper office. Only fucking parking meter in the whole Seward Peninsula. I like that story, Devereaux, because it is instructive of the power of government. Government is about the only organization that can kill mosquitoes with a sledgehammer and get away with it.”
“The problem is how to get you down,” Devereaux said. “I suggest we start by going into Nome together. The girl stays here.”
“Who the hell are—” she began.
“It’s more complicated than that,” the dark-faced man said. “Shut up, Narvak.”
“We take the flight to Anchorage and we start with a fill. I really didn’t expect to find you, Henry; I just wanted to close the file so I could go home.”
“I found you, Devereaux, not the other way around.”
Devereaux waited. It was what he had thought in the predawn darkness, standing in the shower, feeling the warmth overcome the cold in his belly. It was what he had been afraid of.
“Why?”
“Lots of reasons. Started with that fool Otis Dobbins. I picked him up two years ago and worked on him, you know the way I can. He had some talent and I told him the stories. Most of the stories. I told him about Henry McGee.”
“Who were you then?”
“I forget. It was when I was working the first part of this plan, this great plan you have the honor of being part of. I suppose you went first to the guy down in Santa Cruz, went back over the trail to find out if the chasers had screwed up.”
“How did you find those guys?”
“Seamen, Devereaux. I work the sea. Seamen are all brothers under the skin, all dreamers caught up in their own nightmares. You work the sea for weeks or months, you shit, shower, and shave with those guys. You get close to them.”
“Otis Dobbins carved a ship,” Devereaux remembered.
“Otis was calling himself Tandy Stevenson then. We all got different names if we have to have them. Carver? Yeah, lots of the fellas whiled away the time carving, just like the natives. Bet you carve, Narvak, don’t you? Skin a caribou with your ulu?”
The girl blushed.
“Didja fuck her, Devereaux? I told her to go right ahead.”
“He can’t do it, he’s not much,” she said to the old man, but she was staring at Devereaux.
Devereaux did not take his eyes off Henry McGee.
“Is that right, Devereaux? Turn down a free piece of ass?”
“I don’t screw children,” Devereaux said. The girl blushed again, this time in rage.
“Kill him,” she said to Henry McGee.
Henry smiled at Devereaux, as though a child had said something clever. “Ain’t she hell on wheels? Time she gets to be twenty-one, she’ll be fucked out.”
“I hate you,” the girl said.
“Shut up,” Henry McGee said.
Devereaux broke in with a quiet, flat voice: “And you were Soviet all those years.”
“Me? Hell, I was born in Sitka, went to the Orthodox church, the one that burned down. I was Russian and English and grizzly bear. You think I figure it out like that, figure that today I’m a Communist and tomorrow I’m a capitalist? You’re talking about ideas, Devereaux. Never let ideas get mixed up when you’re thinking about real life. My friends on the other side of the water let me have a long lead because I’ve been very good for them. In many ways.”
“Come on, Henry.”
“Not yet, Devereaux. Sit down. Get some coffee going, girl.”
“I thought—” the girl began and stopped. She saw that look in Henry’s eyes.
“You don’t think, Narvak, you’re an action. Get some coffee right now and please shut up.”
“Come on, Henry.”
“Or what?”
Devereaux said, “They don’t care if you’re dead or alive, you know.”
“But you don’t shoot me dead. Not for nothing. Not till you figure out why it was you.”
Devereaux thought about it. He never bluffed. A bluff is always called, usually by a fool who doesn’t know any better. He was careful about what he said, about what he would do if it came to it.
He sat down at the table in the middle of the room and put his gun down and let his hand cover the gun. The girl went to the heater and took the empty coffeepot and went outside to the water cache.
Henry McGee said, “I’m nearly as dark as I was when you first came across me.”
“That was a trick, too, right, Henry?”
“Sure. You take a certain number of doses of this stuff and it turns you yellow or brown, whichever you prefer. Little while from now, I’m gonna be a white man again.”
Devereaux waited.
“Take Captain Holmes. It’s attention to detail that I’m very good at. Captain Holmes is a detail. When my little girl here wastes poor old Otis Dobbins, how long is it going to take to trigger the files in CompAn back in Section? That’s a matter of timing. The name Henry McGee sets the bells off and here you come out of the block because you and me had our first dealings with each other—what was it, fifteen years ago? I know you, Devereaux, I know the way you think. One room leads to another. Like watertight compartments on a submarine.”
“You came back on a submarine.”
Henry McGee grinned. “Quietest submarine in the world. The kind the Japanese made for the Russian navy. Want to know how many there are? What class? Want to know where they are? Let’s start with Wrangel Island. Got a gulag there as well as a submarine base. I don’t mind telling you that because the boys in naval intelligence think that’s what’s there already but they don’t have any eyewitnesses or bona fides or even a storyteller like me to tell them they’re right. They got their spy satellite and I suppose they think they see this and that but they can’t see through solid rock yet and that’s where the Russians keep them. I know a lot of things about a lot of things, Devereaux.”
“Why me?”
“I needed someone who could follow a trail.”
“Was it all intended?”
“Everything.”
Devereaux felt ill. The cold thing in his belly chilled him again and he felt drained by it. Henry was right. He moved from box to box, room to room, watertight compartment to compartment. It was the way he thought about things. It had to do with mathematics and a cold way of calculating the human factor in everything. He was a very good watcher, which made him a good agent for Section because the watcher is reliable if he is cold enough. The watcher lies naked on a narrow bed in a room at the top of the world and waits for a girl to come to him to lead him to the next room and the next, and in all of it, the watcher fears that he is too logical or that a god is watching him for his own amusement.
Everything had been intended.
“What about Captain Holmes?”
“He was on the beach in Seattle, I had him where I wanted him, and he got signed on that freighter just when you found him. I wanted you to go north with him and meet up with Nels Nelsen. Christ, Devereaux, you know people. They have lives as slow and predictable as three-legged elephants. I could put my finger on Nels Nelsen and Captain Holmes and all the—”
He had to break the words. The words were starting to fill up the emptiness. He had to keep the emptiness because Henry McGee could talk and talk and when you were finally filled with him, you had nothing.
“Nobody is that good, Henry, even if you stack the house with sycophants like her.”
The dark eyes narrowed a moment. There was just a hint of the hatred behind the childlike eyes. She had stripped, climbed into his bed, and he had rejected her. He was going to pay, all right.
“I want to show you something.”
Devereaux picked up the pistol just as H
enry pulled aside the blanket over his lap. He held a scatter-gun against his thigh with his finger curled on the trigger.
“Come here, honey,” he said to Narvak.
Devereaux said, “Don’t.”
The sound filled the room. Narvak’s face was covered in blood splattered up from the gaping wound in her chest. The force of the blast had blown her against the far wall and the wall was splattered with blood. She was completely flattened against the wall for a moment before she started a slow slide to the cabin floor. There was no sound in the aftermath of the shotgun blast. The sounds of wind ceased. The world lost its voice.
Then Henry McGee threw the scatter-gun on the floor. He got up slowly and looked at Devereaux to see the effect in Devereaux’s eyes. Devereaux’s face was the color of ashes. Henry McGee went to the body and picked it up easily, the way a young man heaves a sack. He had blood on his shirt. He took Narvak outside and propped her body against the wall of the cabin in a sitting position.
He reentered the cabin and poured himself a cup of coffee from the blue metal pot on the stove.
He sat down at the rough wooden table across from Devereaux.
“Narvak was going to be a problem. Not today or tomorrow but in a week or so and I told you I got to travel light. It’s the way to go when you don’t want to leave marks.”
“Maybe you’re crazy.”
“Maybe I just don’t give a shit.”
Sound began to creep back into the world around them. Devereaux listened to the wind beyond the walls.
“Why did you kill her?”
“I wanted to get your attention.” Henry McGee smiled.
“What’s it about, Henry?”
“Five or six million dollars. You figure I want to end up on a Moscow pension? You figure I was gonna do better in D.C.? Send me down to Florida to that retirement village for elderly spooks? Shit, man.”
“So what do you want?”
“Security in an insecure world.” Henry smiled at that and his teeth glared brightly in the darkness of his face. “You got to look to your future, Devereaux, because nobody else is going to do it.”
