The Doomsday Bag

by Michael Avallone

  "She even glitters when she walks," I said. Cornell nodded and waited until she had disappeared around a red-draped alcove where a bartender in a white coat was busily mixing a cocktail shaker.

  "Ed, I'll make this fast. Before she returns." He leaned across the candle-lit table, his patriarchal face with its full shock of gray hair as serious as death and taxes. "No accident my picking you up."

  "I gathered as much. How would you have known where to find me?"

  He toyed with the Silver Star emblem in his left lapel, the one his son William had won losing his life in Vietnam. His eyes were still on the direction Felicia Carr had gone.

  "I was with the President when the Bureau made their call. I do know what happened to you today out there on the highway. And I know about Satchel. Thing like that is bound to leak out. Too many people know of his existence."

  "Did the Man tell you about me?"

  He scowled. "Not in so many words. What is there to tell? I know you. I've seen you in action. If the Man is using you in some confidential manner—or matter—that's his business and all to the good. For the country. He's in a bad way, Ed."

  "How do you mean?"

  He concealed bis exasperation about something, and his fine old eyes narrowed in a cold stare.

  "We'll talk more later. After we take Felicia home. She doesn't live far from here. I feel we ought to pool our talents, what we know. A mutual exchange of ideas. It isn't just Satchel missing, though that's bad enough, the Lord knows—"

  He halted, breaking into a wide smile and loudly slapping the table top as if I had just told him something funny. His guffaw was polite, though contained, and several amused eyebrows rose around the room. It was a quiet, dimly lit room, thanks to tall red tapers at each table and no electric lighting. I didn't have to turn around to know that Felicia Carr was on her way back. While the male and the female diners in the room cased her, I cased them. There was nobody outwardly suspicious. An elderly couple in one corner, a group of three middle-aged men across from them, and off in the two back corners, two young-love couples were paying no attention to their food and staring into each other's eyes. It all seemed perfectly normal. And right. They all seemed to be Washington types. But Cornell had identified none of them for me.

  "I missed something," Felicia Carr said with mock regret. "Soon as my back is turned you dust off all your great jokes."

  Cornell was a fine actor. He pawed at his eyes theatrically, giving me my cue.

  "Now, Felicia—there are some things that only men—"

  "Spoilsports and killjoys. The two of you. Come on. The food was fine, the champagne just simply exquisite, and I demand equal time." She stared at me boldly. With a challenge in each snapping dark eyeball. "Please tell me, Mr. Noon."

  I shrugged. "The Congressman is right. It is kind of a man's joke. Slightly blue—"

  "The bluer the better. I'm no prude. Try me."

  That time I bowed, sitting down. "Delighted to. All right—do you know what they call a married man who won't let his wife use the Pill?"

  She rested her chiseled perfect chin on her tapering right hand and stared back at me, smiling mischievously.

  "No, Professor. I fully give up. What do they call such a man?"

  I reached for my champagne glass. "Daddy," I said.

  Cornell laughed again for effect, but I had updated an old joke and somehow I knew she wasn't fooled. She smiled but her nose wrinkled in disappointment.

  "Pshaw. That's clean enough to be used in my column."

  "Be my guest," I offered grandly.

  "You're on," she said quickly.

  "I wish I was."

  She had the decency to blush, lower her eyes, and stare into her champagne glass. Charles Cornell chuckled and changed the subject, veteran diplomat that he was.

  "Would you like more coffee, Felicia?"

  After that, we drifted into more small talk and Cornell signaled our waiter, meanwhile looking around the room. His keen eyes, which had never needed glasses in spite of his age, were thoughtfully aware. I noticed his interest and mentioned it.

  "Odd thing," he muttered. "Thought I knew just about everybody in Washington. Not to mention this club. New bunch in tonight. They've let down the bars, I expect. Things are never as exclusive and esoteric as the Government likes us to think."

  "Big Brother is watching you?" I asked.

  His expression was rueful as he plucked a ball-point from his inner pocket with which to sign the tab he was about to be presented with. I had reminded him in my own subtly plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face way of the months of unrelenting toil he had gone through putting his current investigational proceedings into operation. The Big Business Invasion.

  "All too true." He nodded toward Felicia. "And you may quote me, wench that you are."

  Her laughter rippled over us and the waiter murmured something to Charles Cornell about how well he was looking and the old Congressman added some mutually complimentary remark before the man took off, going quietly and unobtrusively toward the rear of the dining room.

  "At least they haven't changed waiters on you, Congressman," I said.

  "Emil? He's been with the club since Truman's time. We both ought to be put out to pasture. With the rest of the monuments around here."

  "This club have a name?"

  He shook his head. "No. It is simply The Club. Original, eh? A nice homey touch, I think."

  "It's a nice place to dine," I agreed. "Food excellent, drinks A-1, and the company magnifique."

  Felicia Carr frowned at Charles Cornell.

  "He speaks French, too. You didn't tell me—"

  It was her way of accepting the compliment without blushing. The Congressman snorted. I lit up a Camel and lit Felicia Carr's filter-tip Salem. Cornell didn't smoke.

  "You young people," he rumbled. "Always beating about the bush. Dodging direct talk. Playing the old flirting game. Hogwash. If you both like each other, stop fencing. You sound like two people in a bad Victorian romance. In my day, we got to the point. It was understood when a man set his sights on a woman—"

  "Why, Charley," she said, aghast. "I've just met the man!"

  "I've heard that before, too." He rose from his chair and held hers out. "Come on. We'll drop you off. I think I've given the press enough of my valuable time."

  He had. If she only knew. But I hadn't minded a bit. For about two hours all bad dreams and mental pictures had dissolved into thin air. Now his remark brought most of them back. I started to rise, still keeping my eyes on the room at large, thanks to his odd remark about the new faces in his favorite watering hole. It pays to keep up with the latest in information. Experience had taught me that in the long ago. A few bullet holes about various portions of my anatomy were the price I had paid for learning.

  That sixth or seventh instinct that cop-types the world over have to have (it comes with the job, the twenty-four-hour alert that sets up an alarm clock in the mind) was now going off like a dinner gong in the wilderness of my subconscious. Something wasn't quite right in the dining room. Midst a blur of Cornell taking Felicia Carr's arm to guide her out and the murmured conversations going on in the place and the clink of a cocktail glass and the distant low rhythm of music playing somewhere, which I had become conscious of for what seemed the first time, I knew something was wrong. My eyes or my ears had picked up a blip and my brain was trying to identify it. For a full moment I paused, not yet ready to tag along behind Felicia Carr and Congressman Charles Cornell. My attention swept over the nestling lovebirds at the separate corner tables, the elderly couple quietly attacking their steaks, and the trio of middle-agers huddled in conclave, spooning parfaits out of tall conical glasses.

  And then I knew what it was.

  Charles Cornell had taken the gold ball-point from inside his coat pocket, signed the tab, and then Emil had borrowed the pen from him to initial the bill on the pad before returning the pen to the Congressman. How many times do you see a waiter do that? The answer is
never. A waiter without a pencil or pen is like a baby without a wet diaper. Nearly inconceivable, certainly improbable. What was even worse, my eyes had registered the fact that Emil had held his napkin up, the one folded over his arm, and in that split second the Congressman's pen had been hidden from my view. It had almost been a conjuring trick, and I remembered Clayton Rawson once showing me something like it at his home out at Mamaroneck. I had seen the whole thing and it had registered, but out of context it hadn't bothered me. Now it did. Clayton, who invented the detective character the Great Merlini, had demonstrated his trick as an example of switching something right under a subject's nose. From a distance of scarcely a foot away. That was all I had to remember to do what I did next. It had been a day to confound Solomon, let alone a private detective.

  I couldn't wait to be polite.

  I couldn't stop to say "Excuse me" or offer explanations. If the race is to the swift, staying alive is certainly the privilege of those who substitute action for speech, even at the risk of making utter jackasses of themselves.

  I reached Charles Cornell and Felicia Carr just as they gained the low three-step carpeted threshold of the main dining room. Felicia was rising in a graceful flash of white legs and undulating hips. The Congressman was right behind her. Making some small talk. I could hear her chuckling again, that light, rippling sound of hers that I had come to like so much.

  I spun the Congressman around like a top, anchoring my left arm on his right shoulder. Surprise was on my side; he revolved like a swinging door, facing me, one foot still on the first step. Before he could catch his breath, I had pawed into his inner pocket, found the gold ball-point and dug it out. I didn't even stop to look at it or make a spot check of my suspicions. Like I said, apologies would have to come later. Even horselaughs. Felicia Carr had whirled at the sudden explosive grunt of the older man. I saw her surprised eyes, the abrupt transformation of her lovely face, now only inches behind the Congressman's shoulders, contort into an unforgettable mask of beauty. But there was no time to count the Renoirs or Rembrandts we all live with sometimes if we're lucky.

  I turned around in a diving sprawl, raised my arm, and tried to find in a damned few seconds the proper place to make my best pitch. At least, the big dim room was lightly filled. There are some compensations. Later when it was all over it was easy for me to say that I could hear the gold ball-point ticking in my fingers.

  Mercifully, the bartender was not behind the short polished stand that served as bar. Nor was anyone standing there to get a refill. No waiter, no customers, no drunks. Without a second thought, I flung the pen in that direction, far above the startled heads of the elderly couple interrupted in their meal by the temporary disturbance on the stairs of their fashionable dining place. Felicia Carr let out a low moan behind me. Moans from her were still far more feminine than they had a right to be.

  Time seemed to hang in the big dim room as the gold ball-point turned end over end before it reached the bar setup. I don't suppose anyone in that club was looking at anything else. I didn't even have time to shout, though everyone was already ducking out of sheer reflex action. Dishes clattered, one of the female diners screamed, and behind me, Charles Cornell was beginning to sputter, "Ed, what in the name of time—"

  He never finished the rest of the question.

  There was a burst of sound, an amalgam of all the terrible things that accompany an exploding bomb device. A fierce thunder and mushrooming of destruction, violence, and terror. A great white and black and red fireball of flying glass, wood, metal and plaster and cement. For a long hideous interval, the only noise in the universe was the bar of the club yielding to the chemical forces of devastation.

  The ugly smells, the stench of cordite and nitrate, sense memories of Thomas Miflow and the afternoon highway debacle, caught me up in one instantaneous roar of things better left forgotten.

  And then clouds of dark smoke rolled out from the destroyed corner of the room, women were screaming in earnest now, and all the males in the place were adding their two cents' worth of fear and bewilderment to the upheaval.

  As I rose to my feet, shaking, ears ringing with a cataclysmic overture of symphonic slaughter, I found Charles Cornell and Felicia Carr doing the same thing. It could have been funny but it wasn't. There was an almost primeval dullness and glassiness to their shocked eyes.

  "Good God," Felicia Carr murmured incredulously, ". . . somebody meant to kill the Congressman . . ."

  "You," I said, "said a mouthful, lady."

  The bar was a shambles.

  There but for instinct, and luck, and hunches, went we all.

  The Congressman who was conducting a highly important hearing on unfair methods as practiced by the Big Business complexes of the country. The Honorable Charles Cornell.

  The lovely newspaperwoman from the Washington Post who had been granted an interview with that man. The beautiful Felicia Carr.

  And the special private investigator assigned for expert testimony in the same hearings. But also the man personally picked by the President of the United States to locate a missing bagman before he became a cause for international griefs and headaches. One Ed Noon.

  The Washington merry-go-round had just started, obviously, and it was proving to be a carousel not to my liking. Give me the Rodgers and Hammerstein version every time. With love, heart, and good music.

  Not hate, coldness, and the sound of slaughter.

  My dear Mr. President had somehow gotten himself into a deadly situation that was making Dr. Strangelove look like Mary Poppins.

  And where, oh where, was that man with the black metal bag that weighed about thirty pounds? Leonard Kanin.

  Defected, derelict, or dead?

  I didn't know.

  About seven hours had ticked off the clock since he had vanished; nine hours between Convention Hall and an exploding gold ball-point pen.

  Capital Chaos

  Remarkably, nobody was killed. More astonishingly and worth an old Ripley's Believe It or Not cartoon, not a single diner in the secluded club sustained an injury. The closest anyone came to being a casualty was one of the middle-aged trio spooning tall parfaits. One of them had conked his head diving under the table. Miraculously, the veritable hailstorm of flying debris had missed everybody. Later on I learned that the entire clientele of the club had included the mother and father of junior Senator Keyhoe from Idaho (the elderly couple) who had planned to join his parents a little later, two naval lieutenants on thirty-day leave from the U.S.S. Maine, whose commander had treated them to a special dinner at his favorite eating place. Those would be the two young couples in the corners. Being out of uniform and in mufti is something I'll leave to practicing psychologists. As for the trio of middle-agers, they proved to be a banker, an industrial magnate, and a lawyer, all from the city of Boston who were in town to help lobby a bill for the National Rifle Association crowd. When Cornell learned about that, he almost canceled his membership in the club.

  But all that came a day later when the FBI and interested circles of investigation moved in to make some sense out of what had happened. Which was, ostensibly, an attempt on the life of Congressman Charles Cornell. They would like to have kept it out of the papers but news is news, the public had the right to know, etcetera, and Cornell being the sort of man he was wanted the whole thing aired. So Felicia Carr got a scoop before the AP, UPI, and the Washington Press Club moved in. It would seem that interested parties with schemes had been busy.

  I wasn't interested in any of that at exactly nine o'clock the night of the exploding ball-point pen. All I wanted was to get Charles Cornell out of the place, and Felicia Carr, too. There was no time to count noses or seek explanations or wait around for the police to put in an appearance. I had too many things to do, not the least of which was ultimately examining Leonard Kanin's dossier. But there was one primary thing I had to take care of. No matter what. The only lead I had.

  Emil, the quiet waiter who had switched pens with his
old pal and customer, the Congressman.

  I had to work fast. So I did.

  I hustled Charles Cornell and the lady with a lucky scoop out to the big Lincoln where Jimmy was excitedly jabbering with some white-smocked personnel from the club's kitchen. Cornell was still dazed a trifle and Felicia was a big help, keeping her cool in spite of nearly being blown out of her high heels.

  The rain was still coming down, though considerably lighter, and the volcanic uproar of the demolished bar had caused a considerable flurry of local excitement. I heard the old familiar banshee of a siren in the dark Washington night. There wasn't any time to lose. I corralled Jimmy, ignored his demands for some explanation, and shoved him toward the wheel of the Lincoln. When he saw that Cornell was okay and Felicia seemingly unruffled, he nodded and started to act like a faithful chauffeur all over again.

  Just as the Secret Service had acted in the minutes immediately following the murderous rifle shots from the Texas Book Depository Building in Dallas, I wanted to clear out of the area with the Congressman before there was a follow-up attempt on his life. When you haven't got all the facts, and you really aren't sure just what is going on, your very first instinct is to run. Flight. Away from the scene of the carnage.

  Second guesses and theories and deductions would have to come later.

  I got my very first break of the day.

  Even as Jimmy got the Lincoln's big motor throbbing, ready to leave, I spotted Emil in the small knot of hired help standing around helplessly in the rain. He was a short rotund man with wispy gray hair parted in the middle and plastered down to his skull. He looked goggle-eyed and confused, shaking his head from left to right as if he didn't understand how a ball-point pen could be a time bomb. The rest of the waiters and kitchen help must have told him what had happened if he hadn't seen for himself.

  I didn't waste another second. I stalked over, grabbed his coat sleeve, and shoved him away from the group before they could protest. Like all meek citizens around the world, they literally let me drag their friend and co-worker away without a murmur. If Emil was involved in something, they obviously wanted no part of it.