Recoil (12 page)

“I know, I'm early. I took a chance …”

“Please have a seat? I'll see if he's free.”

The reception office was old-fashioned like the lobby of a rail-depot hotel.

The red-haired woman put her headphone down and pulled a cord. “Would you come this way, Mr. Merle?” She gave him a quick smile.

He followed her down a short paneled corridor. She showed him through a door into the corner office.

Diego Vasquez came to his feet.

Shirt-sleeved, tie at half-mast, long sidewise shock of glossy black hair. Vasquez had the incongruous face of an intellectual gone to seed.

The redhead vanished silently. Vasquez sized up his visitor with sad dark eyes. “Mr. Merle.”

The handshake was perfunctory as if Vasquez disliked the touch of flesh. He was thin and not very tall; he looked fragile. How old was he? Fifty?

Vasquez circled his desk and got into the high-backed leather swivel chair, seating himself as if he were a pilot settling at the controls. “How may I be of service?” Courtly, low-voiced—as contrivedly old-fashioned as his surroundings. But the redhead was a giveaway: This was Hollywood country and Image was rarely truthful.

On the wall in a glassed frame was the headline from the
Times
. FOUR EX-CONVICTS REVEALED DEAD IN VASQUEZ RESCUE OF ACTOR'S KIDNAPPED SON.

Vasquez pinned him with a speculative scrutiny. He prompted: “Sir?”

“It's rather a confidential matter.” A lame beginning; he wished he hadn't said it.

“They usually are.” A quick smile that vanished abruptly.

“I want to contract for your services.”

“So I gathered.” Patient, polite; but the eyes became harder.

Spit it out. Get on with it
.

But it was the point of no return. Beyond this moment he would be committed.

“My family and I are being—harassed. By gangsters. Members of organized crime.”

“Indeed.”

“I testified against one of them. Some years ago.”

“You're seeking protection? There are federal agencies that——”

“I'm not seeking protection, Mr. Vasquez.”

“I see.” The brown eyes narrowed. “Wear your hair longer, and take off that recently grown moustache, and yes. The photograph in the
Examiner
. It's Mathieson, isn't it? Fredric Mathieson?”

It jolted him. “Are you always that quick?”

“I read the newspapers, Mr. Mathieson. It's not every day that a house is blown up in Los Angeles. Why did you come here under a false name?”

“Edward Merle is my real name.”

“Have you got any identification?”

“I've got papers in the name of Paul Baxter.”

“Yet a third name. It must be rather confusing for you.”

“Until a few days ago I was Jason W. Greene.” He managed a sliver of a smile.

“I once knew a writer who used nine pen names. Sometimes he forgot his real name.”

“My name is Edward Merle. That's my real name, it's the name the mobsters know me under.”

“Then Mathieson is an alias, but you used it for rather a long time, didn't you.”

“Until a few weeks ago, yes. More than eight years.”

“I see. Let's see if I can reconstruct this. Your house is bombed by contract killers, presumably. Now it turns out the intended victim has been living under an assumed name and reveals that he testified against a criminal some years ago. You're not a Valachi type—you don't have the earmarks of a gangster gone rogue. You're not a defector from the syndicate, so I must assume you were an innocent witness to some criminal act. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“The whimsies of fate allowed you and your family to survive; but you've lost your house and you've had to go into hiding again. You've had to give up your job and your name for the second time. And apparently the law can't do a thing to prevent this situation. So you've come to Vasquez. Is that a fair summation?”

“Close enough, yes.”

Vasquez searched his face. “What you've got in mind takes more than resolve, Mr. Merle.”

“I've got more than resolve.”

“What have you got?”

“Time. A great deal of hate.” He reached into his pocket. “And money.” He laid the check on the desk.

Vasquez picked up a pencil and used its eraser to pull the check across the desk to him. He glanced at it. “Twenty thousand dollars. Rather impressive.” He left the check where it was and tapped the pencil against his teeth. “Hate can wear off.”

Mathieson said nothing to that.

“You're what, an agent for screenwriters?”

“I was, yes.”

“And what was your profession before? When you were Edward Merle.”

“I was a lawyer in New York.”

“Criminal practice?”

“The firm I worked for had mainly business clients.”

“But you did practice criminal law to some extent at least?”

“Now and then. Trivial matters. Sometimes a client would be arrested for assault in a bar, that kind of thing. Once or twice a year we'd take on a felony case for the Legal Aid Society.”

“You had a fairly good practice?”

“I was a junior staff member. Not a very brilliant lawyer, I guess. But yes, I kept busy.”

“Making, say, fifteen or sixteen thousand a year?”

“In that area. Why?”

“I'm trying to hold up a mirror for you. You witnessed some sort of offense perpetrated by an organized crime figure, I take it, and you stepped forward to testify to what you'd seen. Was your life threatened at that time?”

“Yes.”

“Anonymous calls or letters?”

“Yes.”

“Did you seek police protection?”

“Yes.”

“And this led to your being provided by the Justice Department with a new identity. You moved three thousand miles and went into a new profession. Putting it another way, you decided your testimony was important enough to justify sacrificing your law practice and profession, your home, even your name.”

Vasquez leaned back and crossed his legs. “Look in the mirror then, Mr. Merle. A man who distinguishes between right and wrong. A man who believes in the difference between good and evil. A man who believes in justice and law so deeply that he's willing to make extraordinary sacrifices for the sake of moral principle. Is that a fair picture?”

“Distorted. I never aspired to sainthood.”

“Right now you're angry. Anger saps the reason. For a while it can neutralize inhibitions. It can even cancel out a man's deepest sense of moral rectitude—for a while. An angry man can make terrible mistakes. But anger wears off. If yours wears off after you've achieved your vengeance, how will you live with yourself?”

“I'll manage.”

“Sarcasm would appear to be out of place just now. And if your anger wears off before you've exacted your revenge, what then? Suppose you find you've started something that can't be recalled?”

“I won't quit.”

“Naturally you feel that way now. But you may begin to question yourself in time. You're a grown man whose life has conditioned you to accept certain values. You'll never escape that conditioning—not for very long.”

Vasquez twirled the pencil in his fingers. “You'll question things. It may lead to one of two results. Either you'll become uncertain and your uncertainty will cause hesitation, or you'll be so corroded and corrupted by your own acts of vengeance that you'll have destroyed yourself along with your enemies. If the latter, the entire exercise is pointless. If the former then clearly a man who hesitates is more likely to be killed than to kill. I mean that both literally and figuratively. We are talking about killing, aren't we?”

“No.”

For the first time he saw Vasquez taken aback. “No?”

“I'm not a killer. That's their style, not mine.”

“Then what did you come to me for?”

“I want training. I want you to teach me how to get them off my back. How to neutralize them so that they never threaten me again.”

“I don't quite understand.”

“It's not a job I could hire anybody to do for me. I want you to teach me how to do it myself. Without murdering them.” He felt the unconvincing tautness in his own smile. “The cliché happens to fit. Killing would be too good for them.”

2

Vasquez did not smile. “Tall order, Mr. Merle.”

“I know.”

“Expensive, I should think.”

“Naturally.”

“Time-consuming. Do you have any experience of violence?”

“Infantry, in Korea. I was at Inch
̆
n.”

“Combat officer?”

“Just a trooper. Private first class.”

“Hardly a decision-making position.” Vasquez looked to one side. “I've never attempted anything remotely like what you're proposing. This isn't a training academy. And you don't want them killed. Just what is it that you do want done with them?”

“If I knew the whole answer to that I wouldn't have had to come to you.”

“I see. Then you don't really have a plan of action.”

“No.”

“As I said before, it takes more than resolve.” Now the brown eyes came back to him. “How old are you?”

“Forty-four.”

“After twenty years' office work. Do you smoke?”

“No.”

“Drink?”

“Yes.”

“To excess?”

“Sometimes.”

“How often is sometimes?”

“Too often,” he conceded. “But I'll go on the wagon.”

“How's your heart? General physical condition?”

“Good.”

“When was your last physical?”

“About eighteen months ago.”

“Better have a thorough checkup.” Vasquez pulled a yellow legal pad out of a shallow drawer and wrote something at the top of the page, underlining it with a flourish. Then he hesitated. “What do you prefer to be called? Mathieson or Merle?”

“I've got used to Mathieson but it was Merle who testified against them. It's Merle they're trying to kill and it's Merle who's going to stop them.”

Vasquez wrote with his pencil—a swift crabbed hand. He looked up. “Who's the man you testified against?”

“Frank Pastor.”

Vasquez's entire face changed when he smiled. He looked boyish. He wrote quickly on the pad. “Just Pastor alone? He's the one you want?”

“I want Pastor and Ezio Martin and a Washington lawyer named C. K. Gillespie. There may be others. Certainly I want to know who threw the bomb into my house.”

“Enormous job.”

“Of course.”

“It's a huge organization,” Vasquez said. “You must have seen the news two or three weeks ago—apparently they bought an entire parole board. Pastor walked out of prison, I suppose you knew that.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know anything about these men? Where they live, where their offices are, the patterns of their movements?”

“Not really. The New York area of course. I'm sure they're insulated by guard dogs and bodyguards and electronic gadgets and God knows what else.”

“Those devices aren't as formidable as you may think. A man can always be reached. You need only to study the movements until you find patterns. They don't spend their entire time locked up behind walls and electric fences. They're active men. They manage a vast industry. They're always on the move. You can reach them. The hard part is to know exactly what to do when you've made contact.” He laid the pencil down. “Normally I wouldn't touch this with a rake.”

“But?”

Vasquez flipped to a fresh page in the pad and applied his pencil. “I'm going to draw up a contract. I'd advise you give it careful consideration before you sign it.”

“Let's discuss it first.”

“Discuss what?”

“The terms. Our separate obligations.”

“Nothing to discuss. Either you put yourself in my hands or you don't. We'll hold that check of yours in abeyance but I'd like a small retainer from you. I'm licensed to practice law in California and a retainer entitles us to the protections of the privileged-communications statutes. You're employing me as an attorney and an investigator.”

“Why so cut and dried?”

“It's the way I work. I'm arbitrary.” Vasquez smiled again, off center. “Take it or leave it.”

CHAPTER TEN

Long Island-Manhattan: 24–25 August

1

A
NNA MADE A WORD ON THE SCRABBLE BOARD AND WATCHED
him enter the score. “You look beautiful with hair.”

“I was about to take it off.”

“Please don't.”

“All this humidity, you sweat. The thing gets hot.”

“You'll get used to it. You look like a movie star.”

He brooded at his rack of tiles. “I've got a seven-letter word here and no place to put it on that stinking board.”

A gust came off the Sound and shook the windows; she heard the rain on the flagstones outside. It ran down the panes in rivulets.

She said, “Time.”

“The hell. I'm going to sit here until I find a place to put it. It's a lousy board.” He propped his chin in his hands and scowled. “One thing you learn inside. Patience.”

“You can't take all night. It's not fair.”

“Nothing's fair.”

“What's the matter, Frank? You came home tonight like something with a lit fuse.”

“All right, OK, I'm sorry. Look, I'm calm, everything's fine. What did you want to talk about?”

“First tell me what's the matter. Maybe you'll feel better.”

He took his elbows off the table and leaned back in the chair. The fingers of his right hand slid back and rested against the rim of the table. His index finger tapped two or three times. “What do you think about C.K.?”

“I think he's got a lot of charm and he's in a hurry.”