Deadline (8 page)

When a working week had passed and Craig still hadn’t called him back, Donovan decided to press. But gently.

He called the New York office.

“Virg, Al Donovan here.”

“Oh…yes.”

Donovan caught it at once, a funny edge to Craig’s voice. “You okay, Virg?”

“Sure I am.”

“Can you talk?”

“Sure. I just feel bad, that’s all. Haven’t got anything for you yet on those pictures.”

“Running into trouble with them?”

Craig paused, then said, “I’m not sure what it is.”

“Maybe I ought to get across the river for lunch. We could talk face to face.”

“No need for that. We’ve been busy as hell this week. You know how some weeks are.”

“Tell me about it. Look, Virg, I’m not pushing you.”

“I know that. It’s just…”

Donovan waited, but Craig let the sentence drop there.

“I think I’d better come to town,” Donovan said. “It’s been too long since we had lunch anyway.”

“If you want to,” Craig said. “But not today.”

“You call it.”

“How’s Monday?”

“Monday’s fine. Same time and place.”

“Good. Maybe by then I’ll have something for you. And I’ll see if I can get a few of the Boys together.”

“Let’s leave the Boys out of this one. Just you and me this time, okay, Virg?”

“Sure, Al, fine, if that’s how you want it. I’ll see you then.”

Still they didn’t hang up. Each seemed to be waiting for the other to finish something, something Donovan felt had never quite begun. He said, “Everything all right at home?”

“Wife’s a bit under the weather,” Craig said.

“Nothing serious?”

“When you get our age you worry, whether it’s serious or not.”

“Not me, old man,” Donovan said. “I never worry about things I can’t help.”

“Maybe because your wife’s thirty years younger than mine,” Craig said, faking sarcasm. “If I had a young wife like that, maybe I wouldn’t worry either.”

“You’d find something to worry about. That’s how you are. You’d probably spend all your time worrying about who she’s sacking out with while you’re slaving away at the office.”

“I didn’t say a thing, Al.”

“On the record, then, for all those things left unsaid. On the record, I don’t worry about that either.” Donovan let an awkward moment pass. “Listen, Virg, about those pictures. If this is something you’d rather not do…”

“Now you are making me feel like hell. I’ll see you Monday. And I’ll try my damnedest to have something for you by then.”

“Good enough,” he said, but Craig had already hung up.

Strange, Donovan thought. Damned queer.

He wondered if he should call Walker and try to dig out more facts. He knew that would be a waste of time. Walker had told him what he had told him, and that was all he would get. The Baker woman was the mother of the little girl who had died in the circus fire. The Gunthers were her friends. They were selling their homes. It wasn’t exactly a federal case.

He decided to call it a day.

Donovan’s home was near Great Neck, about a forty-minute train ride from the Prospect Park center of Brooklyn where he worked with another Special Agent, a secretary and a girl who answered the phones. The trip gave him time to think. Maybe it was just his imagination, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had dumped something on Virgil Craig’s back that was giving his old friend trouble. Just outside Forest Hills he gave his mind a rest, and let his thoughts drift into the past for a few minutes. In the seat across from him, a man was reading the New York
Daily News,
folded over so that Donovan, without straining too hard, could read the headlines on the facing page. A new study had come out. Life expectancy was up again. Seventy-four for women, sixty-eight for men. He could expect to live another seven years, maybe a few more, since he had come this far with no serious problems. Kim, exactly half his age, would probably survive him by thirty-six years. She would live longer after he had died than she had lived already. He would be a brief but, he hoped, important interlude in her crowded life. He wondered how she would remember him in the decades to come. That brought depression, which only compounded the worry of Virgil Craig. Growing old was such hell, and here he was, doing just what he told Virg he never did. Worrying. He hadn’t quite lied to Craig. He seldom worried, but when he did he made up for lost time. He tended to drink and brood about growing old, and think too much about the long-gone past and the too short future.

He even worried about the Bureau. He had never wanted the goddamn FBI to mean as much to him as it did. He told himself it was just a job. He’d been telling himself that since his first day in his first post. April 1, 1939: a small resident agency near the Indian town of Nowater, somewhere in central Arizona. He had shared a room with an older agent behind the post office. His partner hadn’t been that much older, a few years at most, but already he was disillusioned with the FBI and the building Hoover image. Now Donovan couldn’t remember the guy’s name. He hadn’t lasted long: no one who hated Hoover lasted long in the old days. The things Donovan remembered best about that time were the heated arguments in their room late at night. Even at twenty-two, Donovan was hoeing the hard Bureau line. He remembered yelling at the guy, “For Christ’s sake, Barney, if you hate the Director that much, why don’t you get the hell out?” That was the guy’s name. Barney Southworth. And Barney Southworth had gotten out, a few months later. One morning he had packed his bags and said “Fuck the FBI.” Then he had loaded his car and driven away into the desert.

Much later Donovan learned of Barney Southworth’s great transgression. Nowater, Arizona, had been used for two things. For young Al Donovan, it was solid training ground. For Barney Southworth, it was Siberia. Southworth had been an up-and-coming agent in the Washington office. A plum assignment. But he had been too impatient, too eager to leapfrog over people and bypass channels. Once he had written to Hoover himself, bypassing his next-in-command, and suddenly Barney Southworth was on the way out. Donovan couldn’t even remember Barney’s face now. Forty years will do that. But his own voice came back at him like an old echo. That line about “the Director.” Had he really said that, or had all the years—all the tens of thousands of hours spent in a job where thinking like that was not only encouraged but commanded—modified what he had actually said? He must have sounded pretty stuffy to a guy who had been around a bit.

Donovan had been weaned on the book and had never regretted it. In those days the FBI meant something. First there had been the Nazis and the japs to fight, and later on the Commies. Some people believed foreign spies were everywhere, all through the war and into the 1950s. Kids thought he was some kind of superman. Women, when they found out who he was, got that look in their eyes that telegraphed sex. Radio dramas played up the “counterspy” theme, and Hoover milked that for all it was worth. The Director had made a personal appearance on the first episode of “This Is Your FBI,” sometime near the end of the war, warning people about the Nazi spies among them. And maybe some Special Agents
were
after Nazis and Japs, but for Al Donovan the days were filled with tips on cars stolen in Connecticut and driven over state lines. He was in the New York Field Office then, and he chased hot cars, checked out threats against federal officials and occasionally assisted on a bank robbery.

He had never killed a man. Forty years in a job classified hazardous, in most people’s minds if not in insurance company briefs, and Albert Harlan Donovan had never had to shoot a man.

Still, the people loved him. It didn’t seem to matter how old he got or how times changed. There was always an enemy to fight, just as there was always a Joe McCarthy to exploit a situation and stir people up. It wasn’t until much later that the looks had changed from respect to suspicion. The last few years, really, what with all the Watergate business and all the dirt about the Director coming out. The new breed of woman didn’t telegraph sex. Maybe it was truly his age, but male ego wouldn’t let him think that. Not completely. He still had all his hair (it was white around the edges now, but so what?), and he kept fit with handball three times a week. He had been told that he looked like a man in his forties. Nobody believed him when he told them how old he really was. Kim hadn’t believed him when they had first met, two years ago. So it wasn’t his age. People just didn’t trust him anymore, not as they did when they thought there were Commies behind every bush. In times like these, when he had had too little sleep and carried the burden of intruding on a friend’s peace of mind, he actually saw a glimmer of truth in Gallup and Harris.

Donovan’s home was truly his castle. Once inside it, the troubles of the Bureau, and of the world in general, faded into the nothings they were. If one true thing could be said about Albert Harlan Donovan, it would be that he had life by the balls. He had done it all, everything he had wanted. He had security and a good pension coming, a lovely house in the suburbs, a frisky young wife four months pregnant, and dammit, he had his self-respect. No matter what the creeps said about Hoover and his dirty tricks, Al Donovan had always done what he believed in, and done it well. The FBI was something he could believe in, and you don’t write off a lifetime commitment like that too quickly or too easily.

Donovan had it all. The only thing he didn’t have was time.

Kim brought him a drink. Far back in the house, something mighty good was cooking for his guests tonight. She was a fantastic cook, this girl-woman he had married.

And she was perceptive. She saw things, even if she didn’t always understand them. If, as some wit had written, knowledge was a person’s storehouse of fact and intelligence was that person’s key to the storehouse, Kim had built a huge storehouse and was still working on the key. She knew a lot. She absorbed facts and never forgot what she had read or heard. She had been a straight-A student at Syracuse. Straight goddamn A’s, all four years. She constantly amazed Donovan with the charming combination of her knowledge and naiveté.

“I felt a kick today.” She touched her abdomen, which was just beginning to show.

Donovan looked skeptical. “Isn’t it a bit early?”

“All I can tell you was how I felt. How was your day?”

Then Donovan did a strange thing. He looked her in the face and told her about it. Strange, because he never brought things home, never burdened her with the Bureau. He told her about Walker’s pictures and the funny feeling they gave him in light of his talk with Virgil Craig. Telling her about it took him back to perhaps ten other times when some case had left him feeling this way. When, for reasons he couldn’t touch, things just hadn’t felt right. That last time: a so-called suicide at a federal office building late at night in the Brooklyn Shipyard. Very strange. He would have never let that one go as a cut-and-dried suicide, but almost immediately a car from the New York Field Office arrived and the case was taken away from him. Some agent from D.C. took it right out of his goddamn hands. It was almost unheard of, but the other agent had the authority, orders from Roland Simon, Special Agent in Charge. Donovan had been around long enough. He knew when to play it cool, and if ever there were such times, that was one. The hell with it. If it meant that much to the Bureau there had to be a reason, and Al Donovan was too old to start fighting rattlesnakes in the Arizona desert again.

He told Kim about that case too. She didn’t understand it. Kim had a single-emotion mind, and she couldn’t understand why he had sat still and said nothing if it still bothered him.

“It wasn’t my case anymore,” he told her. “In a sense, anything I said at that point might have been taken as an intrusion.”

She shook her head. “That’s stupid and shortsighted. Is the FBI always like that?”

“No.” He sipped his drink. “Almost never, as a matter of fact. So when they are, you know it’s something different, something out of the norm. You might not know what or how or why, but you know it is. And if you’ve been around for any time at all, you know enough to keep your mouth shut.”

“And let it bother you for the rest of your life.”

“Well, I don’t brood about it.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Kim, I’m just telling you. Dear God, it’s been months since it even crossed my mind. Don’t make me sorry I told you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“And don’t be sorry.”

She looked frustrated. “Then how should I be? You never talk about your work, and the one time you do, I can’t help you. If I can’t be honest, at least let me be sorry.”

He stroked her hair. “You do everything right.”

“Because I can cook? Because I’m still young enough to make babies?”

“Those things are important.”

“But they’re not the only things. I told you once I want to share your life. Remember when I got all those FBI books out of the library?”

“I read them. What a crock.”

“Which ones? Which ones were a crock?”

“Most of them. It’s amazing what the publishing industry puts out as fact. One I read wasn’t bad. The blue one.” But, he thought, too damn critical of the Director and of established procedure.

“It doesn’t matter. The point is, I learned more about the FBI from those books than I’ll ever learn from my husband.”

“What you’ve never understood is that most of the time I simply don’t want to talk about it. It’s got nothing to do with you, and God knows the cases I handle don’t present any security problems. It’s not that I can’t talk or that I don’t want to talk with you. It’s just that by evening I’m so goddamn tired of it I just want to put it away until tomorrow.”

“All right,” she said. “Let me fix your drink.”

She took his glass and disappeared into the bar. He knew she didn’t believe him. There was no way to make her believe him without playing it her way for a while. Talk, talk, talk. Maybe they could have a few minutes of talk at least, after he came home nights. He could tell her about his day and in a while she would see how truly routine it was and there would be peace again. But something about that frightened Donovan. Would there be, instead of peace, a gradual loss of ideal and illusion, and was that perhaps what worried Al Donovan most in the sixty-first year of his life? Would Kim wake up one day and discover how dull his job really was, and how close to the vest he had played it all these years? Hiding out in the Brooklyn office, pounding his home turf. How well he knew it, how safe it was. His record was among the best, and it boiled down to the fact that he knew the territory. No one farted in Flatbush without Al Donovan picking up the scent.