by Bill Granger
He had a .32 because his house was in a neighborhood where burglary was not infrequent. He had never been burglarized, though his car had been broken into twice. He knew how to shoot a pistol but he had never shot anyone.
He was going to kill Karen O’Hare, he thought. The thought was absolutely amazing to him.
“Eat your spaghetti,” he said and smiled. “Drink some more wine.”
When they were finished with the meal and the wine, she thought she knew what it was. She had an instinct and it usually was right. He was going to make a pass at her. It was going to be an office romance, that’s how he was going to win her over, she thought.
Bob Wagner thought it would be best in her neighborhood. She lived in a creepy neighborhood and anything could happen in a place like that. He would make it happen when he drove her home.
She insisted she didn’t need to be driven home. He insisted it was on his way to his own house. It was.
The streets were dark and it was raining again and he pulled up to her block. She lived at the end of the block. He stopped the car and turned to her.
“Look, don’t do this,” she said, reaching into her purse. “You’re a married man.”
“I hate to do this,” he said.
“Don’t then,” she said.
“I don’t want to kill you, believe me.”
“Kill?” she said.
She processed the word and then brought it back up on the screen: “Kill?”
He had the pistol in his hand.
He squeezed the trigger once.
Nothing happened.
He looked at the gun in his hand.
She didn’t scream at all. She pulled the squirt gun out of her purse.
“It’s the safety,” he said to himself. Then he saw the squirt gun.
“What are you going to do with that?” he said.
“I carry it for protection,” she said.
“A squirt gun?” He unclicked the safety.
She squeezed the squirt-gun trigger three times and three stinging sprays of ammonia caught him in both eyes. He couldn’t see a thing then but he heard the sounds of his own screams.
Kools said, “Motherfucker.”
Peewee said, “Mai-Lin.”
Henry McGee said nothing. Then he took a step toward the door and grabbed Kools by the shoulder and pulled him into the room.
Peewee stared at Mai-Lin. He had imagined what she would look like naked and here she was. She looked really good. He stood in the doorway and stared at Mai-Lin. There was surprise on his face and a little pain. She was in a bed naked for this man who had her price when all Peewee ever had for her was himself.
Kools crashed against the light stand and hit his head on the edge of the window ledge. Henry McGee roared up behind him and Kools felt the movement and ducked and McGee swung against the window. The safety window held without cracking.
Henry turned again and swung but Kools was very fast, much faster than Henry expected. The old man stopped a moment, catching his breath, figuring on the move.
“You motherfucker,” Kools said and he was on his feet still, waiting, arms out, waiting for the old man, the crazy old bastard who had tried to get him killed.
Henry pulled the knife. The knife was curved, with the handle on top, and Peewee stared at the knife in the hand of the old dark man.
Same fucking knife, Peewee thought. Ulu knife.
All the thoughts were the same, all the frustrations were the same. He remembered the spring night in the soft rain standing beneath the stairs that led up to the public market, waiting for the crazy old seaman to come down the stairs. Was pretty then. And the seaman had this crazy knife, crazy enough to cut the back of his hand.
Henry McGee brought the knife down and Kools danced back the way Peewee had not been able to do that spring night four weeks ago.
Mai-Lin screamed and tried to pull a cover over her breasts.
The room was small, and the action was too large for it, like the court of a pro basketball game. Another piece of furniture crashed. Henry snarled something and Kools smiled.
Kools smiled: “Fucking old man, I grew up using that knife. You the big ULU, you shit.”
And Kools had a knife, a straight knife, the kind he knew how to use and not an old Eskimo woman’s knife used to clean out caribou hides.
Henry turned and Peewee had his knife out as well, the knife he had not used since four weeks ago. They had the edge, the two of them, and they knew it. Peewee saw the old dark man knew it, too.
Henry backed up and Kools came to him and Peewee moved to the side wearing his bellboy’s uniform with a big blade in his hand. It was ridiculous, exactly like grown men in shorts crowding each other under a basket, trying to block and tip the ball. Except this wasn’t a game and the room smelled full of fear as well. No one wanted to move for a second.
“Put it down.”
The voice was very quiet, nearly as powerful as the pistol in the gray-eyed man’s hand. Peewee saw it, saw the gray-eyed man. It was making him crazy, this was the sonofabitch smashed his face. This was making him absolutely crazy.
Henry saw it, too, but he smiled and said, “They drop theirs, I drop mine. I don’t go in for knife fighting.”
“This is for you to do,” Denisov said to Peewee and he had a gun, too.
Guns and knives.
Kools saw the way it was. He dropped his knife and Henry made a move toward him. Devereaux hit him very hard in the face with the muzzle of the pistol and Henry looked surprised for a moment. Then he dropped his ulu on the soft carpet and it didn’t make a sound.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Henry McGee said. “You didn’t have to hit me in the face.” There was blood on his lips and on the bright even teeth in that dark face.
“You should hit him in the face again,” Mai-Lin said in a thin voice that hissed now. “You should cut his balls off.”
Devereaux looked at her.
“I been here three days,” Mai-Lin said. “He hurt me. I wanna make charges. I got a suit here.”
Devereaux waited for someone else.
“That’s Mai-Lin,” Peewee said. “She works here.”
Devereaux stared at him. “What does she do, leave the chocolate mints on the pillows?”
“Hey, man.”
“Put the knife down,” Devereaux said.
“You the police?” Peewee said. “I put the knife down, you smash up my face again.”
Devereaux recognized him then. He almost smiled. “Put the knife down, kid. I won’t hurt you.”
Peewee believed him then, though he could not explain why. He put the knife down carefully on the carpet and then stood up.
“You work the hotel?” Devereaux said.
“No, man. This was a scam, him and me, my buddy Kools—”
Devereaux turned at the name and looked at Kools as though he knew who he was.
“Shut up, Peewee,” Kools said.
“We were robbing rooms,” Peewee said because he trusted this guy with gray eyes now, he trusted him to see the way it was.
Mai-Lin said, “I got to get out of here.”
Denisov had a smaller pistol. He stared at her and she did not move off the bed.
“Kools,” Devereaux said.
“I ain’t done nothing,” he said.
“You know this man,” Devereaux said.
Everything was said very softly, almost as prayers.
“I know him, I maybe seen him around.”
“You worked for him,” Devereaux said.
Very softly still, the words turning over like clumps of spring earth full of worms.
“You know about this, I want to see my attorney.”
“Take her out of here, Peewee,” Devereaux said. “You didn’t see anything and she didn’t see anything.”
Peewee nodded then. He went over and picked up Mai-Lin’s silky little dress, pretty thing that he had imagined her without sometimes. He gave it to her and she looked up at him and
didn’t say anything. She carried the dress with naked dignity to the bathroom and put it on. She came back and paused a moment to pick up the $400 in hundreds on the bed.
Peewee said, “I take you home, Mai-Lin.”
She stared at his broken, punk’s face. “Okay,” she said.
“You be all right,” Peewee said, trying to make his voice bigger for her. His eyes were shining and she started to smile at him the way she smiled at the boys in the fish market but she stopped. She took his hand instead and let him lead her out of the suite.
“Very nice,” Henry McGee said as they walked out of the room. “I like that story. I like love stories. That boy is in love with her, ain’t he? I like the sentimental touch. You got a sentimental side?”
“On the floor, flat, spread them,” Devereaux said.
Kools and Henry McGee got down. The carpet was soft against Kools’ cheek. He couldn’t figure this one out, not like the other time in Fairbanks.
And then he was being picked up by the hair and it hurt. He struggled to his knees between Henry McGee on the floor and the gray-eyed man with the gun and the look of death on his drawn face.
“He killed Narvak.”
Kools went very cold. He looked at Devereaux to see the truth in the wolf eyes.
“Put two shots in her, just the way she killed Otis Dobbins. She was in the trunk of a rental Dodge at Anchorage International.”
Kools thought about the little girl. She was his sister and he remembered her as a collection of faces seen at various ages and the smell of her as they slept beneath the furs. Why did Henry have to kill her when she never did nothing to him?
Kools blinked and felt a tear. He never cried, not for himself, not for anyone or anything. It was just thinking of Narvak dead. It wasn’t fair for Henry to kill her. She wasn’t even seventeen.
“You knew all about his plans,” Devereaux said to Kools.
“Sure. Not as much as him. But I was in on it. Went to Siberia three times.”
“Good,” Devereaux said. “As long as you understand—you talk to us, it’s all right.”
“Shut the fuck up,” said Henry McGee. “This guy don’t know nothing, you just shut up, he ain’t gonna do you any favors.”
“You killed her,” Kools said. “Motherfucker.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Henry said.
41
THE NEXT STORY
Henry McGee told them everything in excruciating detail. He sat at a table with the tape recorder running and started from the beginning. The only thing he denied was having any part in the murders of an oil pipeline security worker and a terrorist code-named Noah. And, of course, he knew nothing about the murder of the agent from Dutch Harbor in the parking lot of the Arctic Circle Lounge in Anchorage.
Across from Seattle-Tacoma International is a boulevard full of motels. They were in two rooms of one of the motels. Kools was eating and waiting, the handcuffs very tight now and no question of breaking out of them. The cuffs were around his ankles, which made it easier to eat but hard to run.
Henry McGee only held back on one thing—penetration of the Witness Protection Program. But it was the part Devereaux really needed.
Devereaux insisted. In the eerie bed-table-size light of the hotel room, Devereaux’s face was just as wintry as it had been by the gray Bering Sea light in Nome. Henry McGee said, for the third time, that he was not a killer.
“You got that boy confused in there, Devereaux. I just tell my stories. The girl was alive; maybe he killed her.”
“He didn’t kill his sister,” Devereaux said.
“He fucked her. He might have. Incest they call it.”
“Don’t dance me—”
Up until now, it had been easy enough, but for some reason, Henry had now decided to play. It was still an urgent matter. Section was the prize and it was being destroyed hour by hour in Washington.
In one part of the methodology developed over fifty years of intelligence interrogation, there is the school that says all interrogation must be nonadversarial, no coercing of answers through infliction of pain. This school argues that all information gained from hostile sources is suspect, and that information gained from hostile sources through infliction of pain is even more suspect because the hostile source will lie with a real, immediate purpose—to stop the pain.
The principle is ignored at times in war zones, in cases where inept interrogators let themselves go, in cases where time is a factor.
Devereaux thought time was a factor.
He explained this to Henry McGee.
“I see,” Henry said. He sat and thought about it a moment. “I can take pain for a while.”
Devereaux shook his head and hit Henry McGee in the face. He broke his nose and one of the perfect teeth in his mouth. Henry’s mouth was filled with blood and his nose bled and he went over backward onto the soft blue carpet of the motel room. The television set was on and there was a rerun of an old Baa Baa Black Sheep program.
Devereaux picked Henry up by the hair. Henry’s hands were cuffed in front of him and he tried to raise his arms. Devereaux slapped him on the right ear with an open palm and then on the left ear. Then he hit Henry again in the mouth. Then he began to slap him, left and right, across the face. When he thought Henry really felt the pain, he put him down in the chair again. The tape recorder had been running. Devereaux backed it up to the place where he considered the various theories of interrogation.
The blood dried on Henry’s shirt.
Devereaux asked a question.
Henry said, “We didn’t make the discovery of a weak link in the program. A certain figure in organized crime in San Francisco put a certain guy in Witness on the wire. The guy in the witness program was vulnerable, the usual shit, I don’t remember if it was gambling or women. So this crime guy offered a trade-out through our consulate in San Francisco. Nobody knew what to do with it. It was rattling around inside the committee for six months. Russians just got no imagination when it comes to positive counter, you know that.”
Devereaux said nothing.
“We gave the guy dope. Best stuff. Cocaine. Lots of it. I got my plan approved.”
“What was the plan?”
“I know you know now. You want a name? Heartland. We called it Heartland. First I got to get Denisov on the move, off the dime, and I get two names from the people in San Francisco. Alexa and Denisov, complete with code names, addresses. We knocked over Denisov’s apartment three months ago, came across a book that had the code in which you and him corresponded and he was William Schwenck and you were Armistice Day.” Henry grinned with a broken, bleeding mouth. “That’s cute. I liked that code, you could make a story with a code like that.”
“And why Alexa?”
“To scare Denisov. She wasn’t important. The important thing was to get Denisov to do what we wanted him to do. That would tie him in with you and the whole thing would be so much more plausible. Alexa didn’t matter.”
“Women aren’t very important to you, Henry.”
“Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.”
“You killed Narvak.”
“Look. I am helping you some because I want to stay in one piece until I can talk to someone in reasonable power so they can start making a trade with Moscow.”
“What have you got that we want?”
“We’ve always got someone. If we don’t have someone, we’ll snatch someone, like that professor that time doing his two-week holiday in Red Square.”
“Who is the mob figure in San Francisco?”
“I never met him.”
“Who is he?”
“I never met him,” Henry said.
Devereaux hit him on the ears with open palms. The blows were hard and they started the ringing again in his ears.
“You could make me deaf.”
“We’ll get you a hearing aid.”
“The contact is Pell. Rudy Pell. He works for someone called Mr. Anthony, whoever the fuck Mr
. Anthony is, if that’s more than a name. And the guy in the office is Wagner.”
“Keep talking.”
“We spring Denisov and he links up with you while you’re on my trail in Alaska. And then, at the same time, we’re winding up ULU. The windup is an atomic device.”
“Would you have blown up the line?”
“Sure,” Henry McGee said. He smiled. “You know you can’t bluff in this business, you either do a thing or they call you on it. It would have worked either way. It was best working through Malcolm Chowderhead and the cunt senator. Not blowing up the pipeline. Story fits more logically like that. But if it had to be the other way, it would have worked, too. We do our homework, that’s one thing Russian intelligence is about. We knew about Patricia Heath, knew her right down to the size of her panties. And everyone knew about Malcolm Chowderhead.”
“She knows.”
“She knows some. She was going to do it for a half million at first. Now we pinned all that on Chowderhead so she’s out a half million but she’s getting ten million dollars worth of publicity and power. She might really make it as the next woman president, you know. All she has to do is keep tearing R Section apart, looking for the mole who set off the agent to become a terrorist, who defected to the Soviet Union with another well-known former Soviet agent named Denisov. You see how each part fits nice against the other part? Like a piece of carpentry, piece of cabinetmaking. They don’t teach much about cabinetmaking anymore. Not in wood, not in intelligence. Everything is so damned sloppy.”
Devereaux stared at him for a long time.
“I would be baited into going to Alaska because I was assigned to find Henry McGee,” Devereaux said. “And it would all be very logical, the crooked intelligence agent and the defector named Denisov, who was really a double agent.”
Henry smiled again.
Then he spoke: “Who was the mole, then? The one who let me run free as a terrorist? Who helped me penetrate the witness program and spring Denisov to the Soviet Union? Who blackmailed the pipeline?”
Henry McGee smiled at that. “Who runs counterintelligence?” he asked. “Who is the director of Operations?”
