Winter Kills (25 page)

“Who isn’t, Pa?”

“No, no—I mean Cerutti thinks he knows better than anybody else. He actually feels contempt for everybody else. You won’t believe this—but he even patronizes me.”

“Pa, why do you think Chantal Lamers set up that entire useless operation? That is, if she set it up. If she wasn’t just one of the three employees on the deal.”

Pa sighed. Maybe it depressed him. What he said then confirmed this. “I think her orders were to set you up to be killed.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But somewhere along the line during the time you were with her it figures that she was delivering you to a convenient place for killers to operate. Maybe it was set for the magazine building. Maybe she was the killer and she lost her nerve. It’s also logical that it was supposed to happen in Cleveland but that they spotted my men who were waiting to pick Mentor up.”

“That’s the only theory so far that makes any sense,” Nick said.

***

The feeder airline put Nick down at Ashland on Chequamegon Bay in Wisconsin. Standing on the pier and taking the wet wind off Lake Superior, Nick thought it was colder than Niflheim, the ancient Germanic underground place of eternal damnation. It was so achingly cold that it seemed as though hundreds of long steel pins were being driven deeply into the stiff mask of his face and into all the joints of his body. At 22:05 hours he was taken aboard the
Wendebo
, Cerutti’s sixty-eight-foot ice cutter, which was on its outside a copy of a Newfoundland Banks fishing vessel. Below decks the
Wendebo
was beautifully fitted with a companionway ladder that was really a wondrously graceful circular staircase, turning ninety degrees, with a gleaming chrome balustrade leading to a stainless-steel galley. It was warm. He began to thaw. After they were under way he discovered that the chart-table hinge could open to a small electric organ. He began to feel much better about everything. There was a wide-open expanse of the combination dining saloon, main cabin, galley and chart room which created exuberant spaciousness, all of it contained in African mahogany rubbed to a satin finish and splined with holly.

The steward kept putting bacon-and-cheese hors d’oeuvres into a microwave oven. Nick kept eating them and drinking some lovely Pétrus wine until the steward ran out of cheese and the wine bottle was empty. They were running steadily across the international inland sea. Night and the cold were locked out. Nick felt so good he opened the chart table and sat at the organ playing dignified and contrasting pairs of ricercari and Capriccios, then moved into the glorious contrapuntals of Franck’s
Trois Chorales
, building with thickening dimensions into the choral chaconne of
Jesu der Meine Seele
by J. S. Bach, cantor of Leipzig. It gave him a more stable perspective. It lifted him into
the deity position, reassuring him that he would overcome. Music was the master illusionist. The music had created a standoff.

The
Wendebo
took fifty-eight minutes to deliver them to the Cerutti mooring on Schrader Island. The captain told him to follow the lighted posts up along the concrete walk between the snow banks to a low, immensely square building that had a large main house behind it. The low house in the foreground was brilliantly lighted on the outside, but it had no windows. The front door was on the latch. He went in.

The room was about the size of a high school gymnasium and seemed to be filled with orderly rows of filing cabinets; hundreds and hundreds of them. A round-bellied shortish man wearing rimless eyeglasses arose from behind a large desk at a corner of the room and walked toward Nick, smiling. “Welcome, Mr. Thirkield,” the man said. “I am Professor Cerutti.” He shook Nick’s hand, then locked the only door. He led Nick forward into the great barracks of facts under a thirty-foot ceiling. They were enclosed in a cool, soothing blue shell like the womb of Bessie Smith, but the piped music, not muted enough, had been written by a computer and was as far out as Alpha Centauri. Thousands of reference books formed lazy Vs at each corner of the room, shelf upon shelf from floor to ceiling, all bound in bright yellow as a symbol that Pa’s gold had raised high the roof beams. Nick and Cerutti walked slowly around the perimeter of the room, and the view dead ahead was all Nick could see, because the filing cabinets blocked all else. “This is Corner One, the writing corner,” Cerutti said as they came to the enormous Florentine desk. Beside the desk were a powder-blue IBM self-correcting typewriter, a dictating machine, a microfilm reader and a tabletop Xerox. “I write all your father’s scenarios for all his problematic and suppositional needs at that desk,” the professor said. They turned to the left and advanced toward Corner Two while Cerutti explained the population of
filing cabinets. “These files hold the fruits of my mission as given me by your father,” he said. “They represent about twenty-two years of investigations and interpretations of personal and business motivations in the lives of all industrial and political managers at the crucial decision level with whom your father has done business, is doing business or plans to do business. This room is, of course, the very heart of the Industrial Maintenance Services Corporation and, if I may say it, the secret of your father’s prodigious success. There aren’t more than eight men in the United States who keep files as nearly complete as these. The files exceed in total security information the combined recorded security effort of Scandinavia plus Benelux and are the equal of the files held by the Republican Party. On your left, ahead, is my communications corner, which we call Corner Two.”

Nick saw a twin of the huge Florentine desk at Corner One. Surrounding the chair behind it were three banked telephone switchboard consoles, each held down by a brilliant spotlight. “These give me direct lines to all of your father’s installations, to our own offices across the world and to my dear mother’s bedside and golf cart. We chat on these lines, of course, but primarily they are for recording tapes for computer retrieval here, tapes of conversations your father or his key agents may have during the course of a twenty-four-hour day. The installation was made by the Army Signal Corps when your brother was President. It represents an annual telephone bill, all in all, of about seven hundred thousand dollars a year, but it earns your father something in the neighborhood of ninety-three million dollars a year. It is a communications hobby nonetheless. A paying hobby, but still a hobby. Your father’s real income is from the earnings on the capital that Industrial Maintenance Services Corporation had already earned for him—plus, it goes without saying, the basic fortune that he built with his own fine mind and his two strong hands.”

“They won’t need to run a benefit for Pa,” Nick said.

Behind the ponderous communications desk were two hundred and forty shelves on which rested more than twenty-five hundred yellow-bound volumes. “These are my address books,” Cerutti said. “We maintain an up-to-date record of the home, office, extension and hideout telephones of all managers at optimum and secondary decision levels. Your father doesn’t like to wait when he places a call. He used to call Charles de Gaulle at his bedside phone late at night until Madame De Gaulle objected. Of course all these numbers are held in the computers, which actually dial the numbers that your father—or the rest of us—asks for by name, but he is still old-fashioned enough to love the idea of his little yellow books.”

They reached the far end of the room. “In the far corner on the other side of this room, facing us, which we call Corner Three, you can see my photo desk. In our files here we have stored well over five hundred thousand photographs of people in various kinds of compromised positions, and key specialist photographers everywhere are getting new material for us all the time. On the other hand, in a more exalted sense, we have millions of photographs of computer-retrievable photos of our planet—that is, the planet from the viewpoint of its total physical resources, its points of greatest productivity and richest pollution, and of its least exploited riches. Photography is a very useful discipline.”

They came to two facing Edwardian sofas on a Persian carpet in the corridor area between the two working corners. A long, low table separated the two men as they sat down. “Your father maintains his own Earth Resources Technology Satellite in orbit, which photographs the earth’s physical data from five hundred and seventy miles out in space. I don’t know four other individuals who have taken that trouble to secure their own investments in this way. Our ERTS photographs
the entire planet, except for the cones around the poles, every eighteen days. We have our specialists to read the photographs for population shifts, timber, agricultural and water availabilities, and to pinpoint the location of oil deposits and other high-grade mineral ore. An ERTS is a tool, after all. What wine will you have, Mr. Thirkield?”

“Australian wine?” Nick asked with bland malice in the hope of erecting one small dam across this flow of warm smarm. “Houghton’s white burgundy? From western Australia? Chilled? About four years old?”

“Anything at all,” Cerutti said indifferently. He punched at the console on the tabletop, then leaned back, hardly able to conceal his gratification at having thwarted this young man’s ploy so easily, and said, “Although my people were, traditionally, from the Lugano area in the Ticino, then after that from Alexandria, Virginia, historic home of John Dean, I am a tea drinker. Tea is such a reassuring continuity in that it was discovered in 2737
B.C.
I drink a blend of twenty-seven teas—fermented, semifermented and unfermented—using black Chinese teas, Panyong and Ichang, as the main base.” The lift top at the center of the table opened and the refreshments ascended. Since Nick’s own dossier had indicated that he preferred to drink Australian white wine, the correct wine was on the tray.

“This is all too leisurely for me, Professor Cerutti, if you don’t mind. I am too pressed to want to hear about tea and satellites.”

“Right on,” Cerutti said. “You want to know who persuaded the Tubesters to use its—uh—expertise to find them Joe Diamond.”

Nick stared at him.

“There are just a few things to clear up before we go on to make that linkage,” Cerutti said. “Such as, I think you should know that it wasn’t by chance that Miles Gander happened to call on Inspector Heller to
accompany you to find that rifle. And, incidentally, perhaps your father hasn’t had the chance to tell you that we picked up the rifle at Heller’s house the morning after the night he died. I deduced that was where the rifle must be.”

Nick felt all systems stop. He felt as if someone had just slammed on his hydraulic brakes. “The next morning,” he said slowly. “You had the rifle picked up by a man wearing a police uniform, calling himself Marek, the next morning after Heller died?”

“Yes.”

Everything Cerutti had shown him—the dazing files, the dazzling equipment, the paralyzing (to the imagination) reach that Pa had developed toward the end of knowing
anything
he wanted to know—began to purple the edges of Nick’s comprehension, began to back him slowly and inexorably toward the edge of some unknown but awful cliff.

“But I told my father more than twenty-four hours after that time that I had deduced where the rifle must be—in the very same place—and Pa arranged for me to ride out to it with the police commissioner of Philadelphia to retrieve that rifle. Why would he let me think that we were on a fresh trail when he had already overtaken the rifle?”

“Ah,” Cerutti said, “there is a slight difference.
I
—not your father—had overtaken the rifle. And it is entirely possible that I had not yet reported to your father that we had the rifle.”

“But how could you know how to look, where to look? I hadn’t told my father that Heller existed until the very night Heller died.”

Cerutti smiled with Olympian superiority. “My dear fellow,” he said, “Heller was one of the principals in the Philadelphia police department at the time of your brother’s assassination. We have held an open file on him since 1960. There was very little about him or his habits that we did not know, and in his case it was remarkably
simple, as you demonstrated, to deduce that he would use the rifle to get money and that he would take the rifle to his house.”

“Professor—about Miles Gander—”

“Gander faced bankruptcy. Someone whose identity we do not yet know offered him financial assurances that his bankruptcy could be averted if he cooperated on this matter of the rifle. They promised him the moon because they planned to kill him anyway.”

“But, Professor Cerutti, how, in the very short time between my London manager’s telephone call to Miles Gander for a breakfast appointment with me—to discuss a matter about which Miles was unaware—and our meeting, did these plotters reach Miles to bribe him? Also, since they seem to have planned on killing Heller anyway, how come they didn’t take the rifle from him as soon as he got it? We deduced what he did with it, why wouldn’t they?”

“You would make a very good little detective,” Cerutti said with a patronizing smile.

“Never mind this insolent superior comment,” Nick said. “From the icy cores of your gigantic brain please tell me what could have happened.”

“From the icy cores of my gigantic brain I will tell you that the answer is: Somewhere along the way you fucked up, and the killers got the information they needed before you ever left Asia.”

“How?”

Cerutti stared at him with dislike. “I have no idea where you fucked up, Mr. Thirkield. I, personally, never fuck up. But I expected you to, of course. Indeed. Shall we return to the information I have been told to convey to you?”

“Please do,” Nick said. He had to talk this over with Keifetz. He might have had the answer all along. He might have it inside himself right now, but he had to talk it out of himself with Keifetz.

Professor Cerutti picked up his threads and spun them out blandly. “And just as Miles Gander was a
straw man, just as Chantal Lamers and Irving Mentor were frauds, there is another even more sinister misrepresentation that stares at us most balefully here.”