Recoil (35 page)

“Very well.” Capitulating, Vasquez sat down again. But distaste was ground into his features. He scrutinized Mathieson. “It's reprehensible. Despicable.”

“Think of an alternative.”

“Easily. Kill them.”

“No. I won't do that.”

“You're a terrible man, Mr. Merle.”

“Then clear out.”

“You couldn't possibly handle it alone. It will be supremely difficult for four of us.”

“Then why did you try to send Homer away?”

“For exactly the reasons I gave. I don't lie about such things.”

“If you're so reluctant you may only be a burden to me.”

“I'll carry my share of the weight—and the guilt.” Vasquez lifted his coat off the back of the chair. “There's little sense wasting time. Let's find a dealer.”

“How? I blew it with Cestone—he never led us to the connection.”

“Cestone's connection is not the only source in New York. I made several calls while you were on the line to California.”

“And you found a connection just by making a few phone calls?”

“I've been in my profession a great many years …”

Roger said, “I take it you got names.”

“Names and likely places where we can look for the bearers of those names. You have your revolver?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Follow my lead and don't speak unless you must.”

“I'm becoming an expert at looking sinister.” Mathieson didn't smile at all. “Do you know how to use the stuff?”

Vasquez hesitated. Something happened in him—an emotion had been provoked. He turned away. “Oddly enough yes, I do.”

“I wish we'd found Cestone's connection.”

“Why?”

“It would have been neater. Using Pastor's own heroin.”

“Heroin is all the same. The vein can't tell whose it was.”

“Just the same, I'm going to tell Pastor that it was his own dope.”

2

The trivial things always ruin a schedule and in this case it was the tedious matter of the hideout. In the end they had to settle on something farther from the city than they'd anticipated—a broker's summer home on Culver Lake near the Water Gap in northwest New Jersey; it was nearly a two-hour run from the city and that made for a dangerously long period in transit but it couldn't be helped because they'd already used up four days in the search and it was the first suitable property they'd found. It was isolated; there were no close neighbors. Vasquez took it on a month's rental at an exorbitant price; they posed as businessmen looking for a quiet place to hold a series of high-echelon management conferences. The house was furnished, it was sturdy, and the owner thoughtfully had prepared it against break-ins by installing heavy bars over the ground-floor windows. They also would serve to keep a prisoner in.

Vasquez made only one change in the house. In a hardware store he bought a heavy dead-bolt lock and installed it on the corridor door of the downstairs guest bedroom. It could not be opened from either side of the door without a key. Two keys were provided with the lock. Mathieson kept them both.

It was Wednesday night when the four of them left to return to Manhattan but there was still one chore to do en route. In a sleeping Leonia street they unscrewed the license plates of a parked car and drove several blocks and stopped again to remove their rent-a-car's New York plates; they put the stolen Jersey plates on the car, stowed the New York plates in the trunk and drove on across the George Washington Bridge. It would be a little while before the owner of the Leonia car would notice the absence of his license plates; by the time he reported them stolen—if he reported it at all—the plates would be in a trash can somewhere.

Vasquez had never worked in New York before and Mathieson was baffled by the number of people there who seemed to owe favors to someone who, in turn, owed Vasquez a favor. They had an absurdly easy time making the heroin buy; Vasquez judged the price exorbitant but paid it without balking—it was, after all, George Ramiro's money.

Now it was a pharmacist on West Seventy-second Street who provided, at a price but without prescription, a phial of sodium pentothal and a large bottle of chloral hydrate capsules and two cartons each of which contained forty-eight disposable syringes.

By midnight they were back at the hotel. Mathieson unlocked the door to his room. Vasquez walked on toward his own room, then stopped and looked back at him. “You're convinced this is the only way.”

“Can you think of another?”

“One, but we've already been through that.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing else comes to mind. Variations on the same sort of scheme—all of them equally reprehensible.”

“There aren't any clean ways of dealing with vermin.”

Vasquez said, “Get some sleep. We'll check out of here in the morning.”

3

Friday was the day scheduled for the calls—Halloween.

The first was due at two in the afternoon; the phone was in a booth in the Plaza Hotel; he was in the booth at eight minutes to two, pretending to be talking into the phone. Then the woman in the fur stole found another booth and Mathieson put the receiver back on the hook and waited for it to ring.

Two o'clock came and went. At five minutes past the hour he decided Benson wasn't going to call. Bradleigh had made a mistake somewhere—put on too little pressure or perhaps too much. But he'd give it another ten minutes.

It rang at 2:12.

“You're still there. Sorry. We had busy circuits. This really Edward Merle? Talk to me, let me hear your voice.”

“It's me, Walter. It's been a long time but I don't think my voice has changed much.”

“Been a lot of blood passed under the bridge, hasn't there.” Benson's voice hadn't changed either: precise, thin, prissy. He'd been a bookkeeper in a numbers operation in Brooklyn but he hadn't been born there; his voice still had the Midwest in it. Of course he'd been living in Oklahoma for eight years.

Benson went right on—he'd always been filled with chatter. “How's that lovely wife of yours? How've you all been doing?”

“We're just fine, Walter. Look, I don't think we should spend more time on this line than we have to.”

“It's secure at both ends. You're in a phone booth, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“So am I. But then I'm paying for the call so I suppose we'd better keep it short. I'm not exactly rolling in money these days.”

“Walter, did Glenn Bradleigh give you any idea what this is about?”

“Very vague. Very vague. Enough to make it sound interesting. He said you were trying to pull something that might force the boys to leave us alone. He didn't say any more than that but he said it often enough that I got curious. That's why I'm here.”

“I think we've rigged up a foolproof trap,” Mathieson said. “It'll take your help to spring it.”

“Well now wait a minute, just what does that include?”

“About one day of your time. That's all. I'll want you to fly to a place—not New York, it'll be Pennsylvania. Fly there, I'll meet you. We'll need you for about three hours. Then we'll take you back to the airport. I have no interest in knowing where you're coming from or where you go from there.”

“Very mysterious. I don't like mysteries much.”

“I can't tell you exactly what it involves until you agree to come in with us.”

“Who's ‘us'?”

“I have some associates working with me. No names, Walter.”

“They know my name, don't they?”

“Walter Benson is the only name they know. I have no idea what name you're using now and neither do they. This has nothing to do with Bradleigh's office. It's a private matter between the four of us and the people who've been trying to find us. There won't be any publicity.”

“Well Bradleigh did say this was something you'd cooked up yourself. He said he wasn't taking any responsibility, just relaying a message.”

“That was the truth.”

“This three hours you want out of my life. What's the risk?”

“No more risk than you'd stand by traveling anywhere.”

“The way things are, that's pretty risky by itself.”

“Bradleigh has agreed to provide a private plane. He'll fly you in and out. There won't be any airline reservations on the record.”

“It sounds pretty cute but I'm leery. You can understand that. Can't you tell me anything at all about what I'll be expected to do?”

“Mainly wait around while we focus a movie camera,” Mathieson said. “I need you on a few feet of film that we're going to show to the other side. Now if you've made any changes in your appearance, I'd like you to be ready to change back to your old self as much as you can—we'll want them to recognize you as the old Walter Benson. I don't know what you look like now so I can't suggest what it may require. Hair dye, a wig, a shave, whatever.”

“I'm ten years older and twenty pounds heavier. I can't exactly strip that away overnight.”

“Just so you feel they'll recognize you.”

“What do we do in this home movie? Thumb our noses at the camera?”

“Something like that.”

“If I didn't know you I'd think this was some kind of very bad practical joke.”

“Believe me it isn't.”

“No, you aren't the type. But you haven't convinced me it's in my interests to go along with it.”

“It's got a damn good chance of getting them off our backs permanently, Walter. And if it doesn't work you haven't lost anything. I'm paying all expenses.”

He could hear Benson breathing into the phone through his mouth. The man was very nervous. “When would this be?”

“Next Sunday. Nine days from now. Nine November. You come in the morning, you go out the same afternoon. I don't know how far away you are but you should be able to do the whole trip the same day, or break it up if you prefer. That's between you and Bradleigh—he's handling the travel arrangements. All I'm concerned with is that you show up at the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre airport at twelve noon on Sunday the ninth.”

“Wait a minute, I'm writing it down. Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, nine November Sunday, twelve noon. You'll be there in person?”

“That's right. You'll recognize me.”

“What about Draper and John Fusco, you talked to them?”

“Not yet. They're due to call this afternoon.”

“Be like old home week,” Benson said without audible enthusiasm. “Look, level with me, you really think this has a chance?”

“A damn good chance. When you get there I'll tell you.”

“How soon will we know whether it's worked or not?”

“Six weeks maybe.” Mathieson gripped the handle of the booth's door. He closed his eyes. “How about it—you think you'll make it, Walter?”

“I've been running my ass off, I got shot in the back, I'm still hiding like some hermit out here. Why the hell not. I'll be there.”

When he hung up and left the booth Mathieson was smiling. The other two would be easier: He'd be able to tell them Benson had already agreed to it. That would carry weight with them.

4

Fusco was no trouble: Fusco had always been a fighter. It was Draper who gave him a few bad minutes but finally he brought Draper around with the promise of security.

He had arranged to take the three calls in lobby booths in the three luxury hotels clustered around Fifth Avenue and Central Park South—the Plaza, the Pierre and the Sherry-Netherland—and afterward he walked to the St. Regis to make his fourth call; there was no reason to walk the extra blocks—there were ample public telephones—but it suited his sense of compositional balance. He realized that Vasquez was right: He was making talismans out of everything, the way a child was careful never to step on a crack in the sidewalk.

The call from the St. Regis was to Bradleigh's office. Bradleigh wasn't there. He was expected Monday.

Mathieson tried Bradleigh's home phone. He got an answering machine. Mathieson identified himself, said he would call back Saturday evening at six.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

New Jersey–New York: 1–6 November

1

H
E DROVE TO THE LAKE HOUSE AND LET HIMSELF IN. VASQUEZ
and Homer were in New York for the day doing surveillance on Pastor and his family. Mathieson found Roger in the house fiddling with lamps, taking experimental footage with the Arriflex. The living room had a cathedral ceiling and high glass doors across the length of one wall: They gave a view of most of the lake.

Roger was bundled in sweater and jacket. “My feet are colder'n a witch's tittie.”

“Try a bucket of hot water.”

“You talk like my grandma. You get Bradleigh all right?”

“It's all set. Any trouble with the camera?”

“No. Go set in that chair, let me take a bead on you and run a few frames, we'll see how the lighting works out.”

Mathieson sat down with the
Times
and let Roger photograph him from various angles, moving the tripod clumsily around the room and zooming the lens in and out. Mathieson said, “You've got both black-and-white and color, right?”

“Right. High-speed color, the new stuff. Otherwise we'd need klieg lights all over the place.”

“These two kinds of film, they're compatible? I mean they can be spliced together?”

“Sure. Same sprockets, same sound-on-film tracks. We use the same splicer on everything. It'd go easier with a Movieola but it would've cost a fortune and I couldn't find one to rent. We'll make out with what we've got.”

“You've got a week to practice. Get it right.”

“Old horse, time I get through with this even old Jack Ford would be proud of me.”