Red Rag Blues (41 page)

*

Sometimes he dozed. He awoke, swaying dangerously, and spread his feet wide to stop himself falling. Time had lost all meaning. His left leg was dry but the underpants stuck to his skin. He was thirsty. He swallowed repeatedly. Maybe if he kept recycling his saliva it would lessen his thirst. After a while he forgot to swallow. Thinking was very tiring.

He woke up suddenly when someone grabbed his arm, pushed the sleeve up and stuck a needle in the forearm. “Look at it this way,” a man said. “You're either a guineapig or a martyr. No future either way.” The needle came out.

“Wait,” Luis said. “I've been thinking. That formula is wrong. We put in deliberate mistakes as safeguards.”

“Such as.”

“Um … replace potassium dichloride with sodium pentathol. And add ethylene glycol. And use benzenes as a catalyst.” Luis was gabbling. The last chemistry test he took, he failed, and that was when he was thirteen. “Heat everything to five hundred degrees Fahrenheit.” His imagination failed. Was the man still there? Long silence. He must have gone. Perhaps they would repeat the experiment. So what? His brain would be bent like a pretzel by then. Ethylene glycol … Where had that come from? He murmured the words and immediately he remembered. It had been the coolant mixture in RAF piston engines. Oh well. At least he'd tried.

Then his pulse began pounding. He stopped breathing in order to listen better. His heartbeat was kicking his ribs. Blood was throbbing in his throat, his ears, his skull. Now he knew his arms were bloated, they felt inflated, his fingers were as big as bananas. All he could see was the hood, but he knew his limbs had stretched enormously and his head was so high that it made him giddy, and it was getting higher. “This can't go on,” he said, and the growing stopped at once. “What's the point?” he asked. He sounded angry. “What does it prove?” That was when a hurricane of hot air knocked him over and blew off the hood.

He saw a flash like a sunburst, although some of that might have happened when his head hit the floor, it was hard to tell. There was certainly a bang like a battleship's broadside. The air was thick with dust and torn paper. He looked at the ceiling and waited for it to fall on him.

The fog thinned and he saw his hands. Tied with electric flex. No knots, the ends just twisted tightly together. He got one end between his teeth and made circles until it all came loose and he was free. He walked out of the room and along a short corridor and into another room, heading always for a bright light. It turned out to be a hole in a wall. In fact it was all hole and no wall. He walked through the hole and into a fine, refreshing rain.

*

“I was …” Luis turned his head and spat. Dust still coated his teeth and tongue. “I was out for a stroll.”

“Out for a stroll,” the cop said. He looked at the sergeant. “Guy says he was out for a stroll. In this dump.” It was a street of abandoned buildings, empty carparks, demolition sites, potholes, weeds.

“Free country,” the sergeant said. “How you feelin', son? You look like shit.”

Luis was sitting on a broken wall in front of the holed building. “I stopped because I heard a cry for help,” he said. That was good. That placed him
outside
the crime scene. It made him feel better. “I feel better now,” he said.

“This cry for help,” the cop said. “Came from inside?” Luis nodded. “Ain't nobody inside,” the cop said. “We just looked.”

The sergeant went to the car, talked softly on the radio, came back. “We need a name and address,” he said. Luis told him the truth. His imagination wasn't strong enough to think of a false
name and address. “Now, the way we see it,” the sergeant said, “we got you, an' we got an explosion, same place, same time, and that's the complete sum total of what we got.”

“A painful coincidence. An Act of God.”

The cop didn't like that. “Let's see some ID.”

Luis searched his pockets and found a billfold and a membership card for the Caracas Golf Club. The cop was not satisfied. “Perhaps tomorrow?” Luis suggested. Not acceptable either.

“Looks like you're coming with us,” the sergeant said, “Acts of God being illegal in the District of Columbia.” Luis was hunting through pockets he never knew he had. “We can't get God for it, so you're next in line, the sergeant said.” Luis dug into his hip pocket. Two passports. Another Act of God.

They took the passports away and studied them in the comfort of the car, while Luis sat in the fine, warm rain.

“Diplomatic Corps,” the cop said. “Another goddam dip. These creeps are the curse of this town.”

“Venezuelan. I thought he looked kinda Hispanic under all that dust. Well, he's got immunity, so he walks.”

They went back and gave him the passports. “Connecticut Avenue is thataway,” the sergeant said. “About three miles.”

They watched him go. He was limping a little and his face was raised to the rain.

“Cry for help,” the cop said. “Total crap.”

“It's a hole in a wall, nobody's gonna steal it,” the sergeant said. “File and forget.”

*

Mikhail was about four hundred yards away, sitting in an old Ford, watching through binoculars as Luis's figure became more and more blurred and shapeless. “That worked out rather well,” he said.

“Enormous bang,” Kim said. “Made me jump.”

“Mostly pyrotechnic. Only a small charge was needed to blow down the wall. I calculated that the kidnapping would scare him half out of his wits and the explosion would take care of the rest.”

Philby wiped condensation from inside the windscreen. Now Luis was just a distant blob. “He needs to disappear, Mikhail. The man is dangerous.”

“He's an opportunist, Kim. He's in the game for money and for fun, but not for life and death. If those are the stakes he won't play.” Mikhail started the car. “We've beaten him with his own weapons. That injection we gave him was completely harmless, yet within minutes he was twitching and flinching and squirming like a junkie. Imagination, Kim. All that stuff he invented about mind-control drugs was so convincing that he believed it. And now it's driving him out of town. If I weren't such a dour, humorless Russian I'd call it highly ironic.”

They drove down the road and passed Luis.
“Dosvidanya,”
Philby said.

“Leaving,” McCarthy said. “This is a hell of a time to resign, Bobby, just when I'm up to my ass in all this Arabel intelligence.”

“I regret the inconvenience, senator, but—”

“Fuck the inconvenience. You hate Roy Cohn's guts. Schine makes you puke. Your problem, Bobby, is you waste your hate. Good mornin', Ralph. You're looking well.”

They were walking along a corridor in the Capitol building. The senator McCarthy greeted cut him dead: no word, no glance, no change of expression.

“Poor loser,” McCarthy said.

“I admire your work, senator, but you've got your brand all over it. I need to find my own war to fight.”

“Go fight the rich.” McCarthy sat on the marble plinth that held up a statue of a man in a toga. “Start a war on poverty. No, I forgot, you Kennedys never had much truck with the poor, did you?” He pressed his fingers against the artery under his chin.

“I'm going after the Mafia,” Kennedy said.

McCarthy sat in silence for twenty seconds and then took his fingers from his throat. “Gallopin' to the grave,” he said. “What's the rush? Damn doctors keep bitchin' about booze. Shit, if I stopped drinkin', my kidneys would die of fright. The Mafia, you say. Some folks reckon those gentlemen helped your brother get elected to the Senate. You sure know how to make people hate you, son.”

“They're scum,” Kennedy said. “They corrupt justice and brutalize American society.”

“Uh-huh. You forgot how they provide whores, drugs and bookies, that being what Joe Public wants in a country that's dumb enough to make prostitution, narcotics and gambling illegal in most States.” He stood up. “I shall miss you, Bobby. You're like the son I never had. I refute them allegations by that red-headed cocktail waitress in Ohio, flattering though they were.” He walked away.

Julie took twenty thousand dollars in travelers checks and the rest in cash. That closed the account. The bank gave her some sturdy paper bags to put it all in. She drove back to the apartment and sat in the car.

After an hour she ate part of a sandwich. By mid afternoon she was sick of sitting in the car, looking at the rain and Connecticut Avenue and not knowing what to do next. The rear view mirrors were coated with moisture and she didn't see him until he opened the passenger door and dumped himself on the seat like a sack of second-class mail.

Everything about him was wet and dirty. His clothes flopped and drooped. One side of his face was bruised and grazed. “Had a good day at the office?” she said.

He yawned. “Never got there. Got kidnapped.”

“Mikhail told me. He saw it happen, couldn't stop it.”

“Got kidnapped, got brainwashed, got blown up. Got away.” He rubbed his eyes, wiping away the rain. “Not sure about the last bit.”

“Got away from where?”

He aimed his right index finger at nothing, then gradually relaxed it. “Three miles, the cops said. It's a long story.”

His eyes closed and his whole body relaxed. Julie went back to looking at the rain and Connecticut Avenue. After a couple of minutes he woke up. “But enough about me. What about you? Why are you sitting in the car?”

“The apartment's full of tax men, Luis. Likewise the office. We're being investigated by the Internal Revenue. Mikhail warned me they were on the way.”

“Jolly decent of him.”

“Yeah? I reckon he sicked them onto us.”

“Surely not. Arabel's partner? Never.”

“Arabel's dead. Crashed and burned.”

He took a deep breath and slowly released it, making a long flubbering noise with his lips. “Tax men. That's a really dirty trick. I'm surprised they didn't arrest you.”

“I told them I was the maid. Then I went and emptied our bank account.” She showed him the paper bags.

“Crashed and burned. And this is the wreckage.” He was getting sleepy again.

“We're leaving right now,” she told him. “This here is a Rand McNally Atlas of the US. Shut your eyes.” She put the book on his lap. “Open it anywhere.” He fumbled with the pages. “No peeking. Point somewhere.” He stabbed with his forefinger. “Unbelievable,” she said. “You have chosen the town of Truth Or Consequences in New Mexico. Let's go.” She started the car.

“Only in America,” he mumbled. Within a few blocks he was asleep and gently steaming.

*

“I was wrong,” Mikhail said. “The temptation was irresistible, but I was wrong. I should never have tried to encourage McCarthy.”

“Don't be too hard on yourself,” Kim said. “The man is a phenomenon, not a politician. Nobody can influence a phenomenon. It's like trying to direct a tornado.”

“Well put.” They were deep into the pepper vodka. Arabel and his agent had long since vanished. The KGB had ceased worrying about revelations concerning mind-control drugs. Wagner was dead and cremated and forgotten. Jerome Fantoni was old news. Routine had been restored. Mikhail took another slice of smoked eel. “What I failed to realize is that the senator has no policy. We're so accustomed to sabotaging Western policies…”

“McCarthy is the saboteur
par excellence,”
Kim said.

“The supreme nihilist.” Mikhail enjoyed the word. “The ultimate rabble-rouser. The prince of hatred.”

“And yet arguably the biggest democrat in Congress. He gives America what it craves.”

“Yes? What does it crave?”

“Political thuggery. A nation can get drunk on fear.”

Mikhail poured more vodka. “Well, McCarthy doesn't need us. Never did. He can inflict boundless damage on this country without our help. You might as well go back to London, Kim.”

“Yes. This is an awful town, isn't it? My sinuses are in a permanent rage.”

*

Manfred Sturmer left the CIA. He moved to California and made a slim but steady living as a crossword puzzle compiler.

*

J. Reuben Knox, 47, vice-president of a San Francisco bank, knew he'd been given the title in lieu of the stock options and a bonus he believed he deserved. He had a thyroid condition, and from all he knew of the family history, Knox men did not live long. Termites were invading his house. Treatment would be hideously expensive. Also he was keeping a woman in Berkeley who was not his wife, and he had fallen in love with a female cashier called Belinda who was a hell of a lay but not cheap.

J. Reuben Knox took a couple of days' leave and drove to Seattle. He rented an office, paid for ten messengers to go to ten banks with ten envelopes, and got arrested by the Seattle PD while he was counting the first delivery. As the detectives drove him away, he said, “None of it was for me. I was going to give it all away.” The detectives made no comment.

In New York, Special Agent Prendergast took the news in his stride: neither excited nor discouraged. “Another fool takes a fall,” he said.

“Does this mean Cabrillo is right out of the picture?” Fisk asked.

“There is no picture, Fisk. No shape, no pattern, no symmetry. Crime is the fly in your wine glass. The fly gets greedy, gets reckless, and gets drowned. J. Reuben Knox is that fly.”

“Uh-huh,” Fisk said.

END

Red Rag Blues
is a mixture of fact and fiction. The reader is entitled to know which is which.