Winter Kills (31 page)

“Why?”

“Because the man has been sent to test the temperature. To see if you are serious.”

“What is serious?”

“To see if you want to kill his master.”

“That’s all?”

“That is all. No real talking with the tester. You know how it works. This is big business. This is a very big deal. The man you want has to bet his life that he can talk you down—if you serious.”

“I get the picture,” Pa said. He went back to the pinochle game. That night when Cerutti called from Bermuda Pa told him he would meet Alan John Melvin at four o’clock at the family apartment at the Walpole in New York. Then Si broke out a platter of roast beef sandwiches and a solid bottle of Pontet-Canet, and General Nolan played them a concert on his ukulele, doing “In a Little Spanish Town,” “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” “Exactly Where We Are,” and other
popular favorites. When he had finished, the General said wistfully, “I can’t tell you how I miss the little broads Tim used to bring up here.”

“You’re sixty-eight years old, fahcrissake,” Pa said. Pa himself was then sixty.

“Age in sex is a lotta Sunday-supplement crap,” the General said. “Sometimes I get so nervous I could bang the cleaning women.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Pa said indignantly. He picked up the telephone at the big console. “I’ll call Eddie in Palm Springs and have him send out some broads from New Haven.”

***

Alan John Melvin was a sweet-faced man with an old-fashioned New York, Greenwich Village, Al Smith accent. The Assistant Secretary was just another civil service employee to Pa. There were no preliminaries and no offers of drinks. Pa didn’t even ask him to sit down. He just stared up at the man from his chair beside his drink and said in greeting, “Are you going to tell me who sent you here?”

“No, sir.”

“Then take a message and get the hell out of here. Tell him what he knows already—that we’re so close behind him that he can hear us breathing. Tell him that when I find him—like next week or the week after that—I’m going to have him killed. Get out of here.”

“He wants to talk to you.”

Si knew his stuff. Si was right.

“Where? When?”

“At noon tomorrow. On the bench of the traffic island at One Hundred and Twelfth and Broadway.”

“How come?”

“You can’t kill him there.”

“My sniper could.”

“He might. However, my principal is counting on the fact that you want to shoot him yourself. For maximum security there will be an extra detail of police in the area.”

***

He was sitting on the bench on the traffic island, his image distorted by the thick fumes from car exhaust. Pa got out of his limousine on the east side of Broadway. He stared across the monstrous traffic in disbelief. He had known the man who was waiting for him on that bench for thirty years. They had come up together into the ownership of the nation. If the entire country were divided into ten-foot squares of ownership, between them they would have owned three of the squares. What the hell would that man want to kill Tim for?

Pa crossed the half street to the island. As it happened, there was a red light. He had not thought to look for traffic. He was staring in unbalancing hatred at the man who had ordered the death of his son.

The man smiled the way he had always smiled. “Hello, Tom,” he said.

Pa fell limply onto the bench beside him.

“I know what you’re thinking, Tom,” the man said, “because I know how you think. You’re thinking how you are going to have your people follow me to wherever I’m going when this is over, and how, when you have me staked out, you’re going to kill me there. Well, that’s the way you are. That’s the way you think. But a man has many levels of resources, doesn’t he? While we talk, as we came here to do, I want to address myself to some of the many levels of your mind. Where you really live. To who you really are. That’s what I want to do while we’re sitting here, Tom.”

Women with baby carriages and women with shopping bags walked past them on the way to both sides of Broadway. Old men shuffled slowly in front of them, glaring because they had preempted the old men’s bench and a chance to die a little faster in the carbon monoxide. It was very cold, but the sun was up there somewhere behind the smoke. It radiated rather than shone. Pa and the man were oblivious of the hordes of
people, the poison that they had helped to put into the air, and the traffic. The man spoke on and Pa gaped at him.

“You and I have more in common than maybe most people in the world, Tom. Better than almost anyone else, we made it our business to find out where the money was, then to go and get it, didn’t we? We know that money is neither a production good nor a consumption good. We know there is no satisfactory way to state the value of money. They’ve used feathers and salt and stones for money. They used human skulls for money once, in Borneo, didn’t they? But the true fact is, Tom, over all the millennia nobody—not even you or I—knows what money is or how it works. We know only where and how each man uses it. Isn’t that right? We know it has to be portable, durable, divisible and recognizable. But there is an intangible essential that is even more important than all those qualities—and even harder to define. That essential is value.”

A woman with a small child holding each of her hands interrupted him to ask how to get to the subway. The man stood up and took off his hat. He showed her the way. He sat down, replacing his hat.

“You might never guess why money was invented, Tom. While we talk here you’ve got to bear one thing in mind. Money was invented to accommodate human emotion. Human emotion, Tom—not daily needs or trade—human emotion established money among the earliest and most primitive people. Money was invented for only two uses, Tom—and these are anthropological and sociological facts, not any whim of mine—for marriage first, for blood money second. The second use of money by mankind, Tom, was for blood revenge. Blood revenge always demanded a life for a life unless the injured party could be suitably compensated for the loss of services. Simple. Now—the loss of services of your son as President of the United States presents an extraordinary position of advantage for you and goes
far beyond the usual measurement in the use of money for blood revenge.”

“Are you trying to pay me for the loss of my son’s life?” Pa asked incredulously.

“No.”

“You haven’t talked this much in all the time I’ve known you. You can save your breath. I’m going to kill you sometime tomorrow.”

“I don’t think so, Tom. Not after you hear my proposition.”

“What proposition?”

“Lemme tell you. Lemme say it the way I thought it all the way through, because that’s how it’s going to make sense for both of us. Now—the first thing—of course I can’t really pay you for your son’s life. Sure, the whole blood revenge thing is right there between us, but you have so much money now that for me to try to pay you pro rata would mean I’d have to treble your fortune. I just don’t think any one man has any money like that.”

Pa had a kind of sense of smell that not many men have, because if more than a few had it, there wouldn’t be enough money in the world for all of them or anyone else. The man who was talking to him, who had the gift himself, saw it come over Pa. He had been rambling, waiting for Pa’s blinding anger to diminish so that his great natural force could take over again. The time had come.

“Then what are you talking about?” Pa asked.

“I want you to think about one thing, Tom. Just one thing. I want you to think about having three times as much money as you have right now. Then we can call it quits, because the right thing will have been done. Now—I’m going to leave, and your people are going to try to follow me. We’ll be in touch.”

The red light for north-south traffic on Broadway changed just then. The man got up and walked rapidly across the street to the downtown side and got into a large black limousine. The car rolled before the door
closed. Two policemen on roaring motorcycles came out of One Hundred and Twelfth Street, sirens open, to make way for the limousine. A motorcycle escort filled in behind the car as well. The procession picked up enormous speed, turned toward the river at One Hundred and Tenth Street, and disappeared.

Pa goggled after it with admiration.

***

June was the best time for Pa because it was the time furthest away from Christmas. Christmas always made him feel almost suicidal, because it brought out his feelings of unworthiness when so much emphasis was placed on the time of Christ’s birth, the screaming shops, secrecy of the surprises, the last-minute flurries of activity, which muddied the water of his imperfections all over again—everything pointed to that one allegedly perfect figure, all of it suggested the birth of more wives like Nick’s mother, who had called him a guttersnipe, proclaiming to all that he was the least of men.

But it was June and he was safer. Christmas was as far away as Nick’s mother. She was dead, but he was alive. He had her son in his fist with June and his money to protect him. He would play it loose. He would employ his cardinal rule of living, which was to imagine everyone in the world wearing long, red, lumpy winter underwear. Nobody could dominate him standing out there in lumpy red flannels. Tim was dead. Nothing he could do about that. Amen. God bless you, Tim. He sobbed uncontrollably in the closed room at Rockrimmon. Alan John Melvin must have reached the main gate by now. The car would take him to the country airport and the government plane would fly him back to Washington. It was clear and simple. Proper blood-revenge money had been paid over as the greatest homage ever made to Tim’s life and memory. He had done it for Tim.

***

“The requirement here, Mr. Kegan,” Alan John
Melvin had said, “is that you assemble forty-seven blind companies in not less than thirty states that ostensibly have no connection with you and, most important, no connection with any single person or ownership. We think it will be all right if these companies shuttle their tenders through as few as a dozen of the private procurement and lobbying offices in Washington. That could add to the general diffusion. My office will see that these forty-seven firms get the major contracts for the program. Of course the moonshot and the whole space program is a very big and going concern even now, but by sixty-two it is going to be so enormous that you will be required to form probably ninety to a hundred and fifteen more companies as anonymous as the first forty-seven, because several billions—twelve to thirty billions of dollars—are going to be involved here.”

During those first years, his busiest years with the space requirement, he certainly didn’t want the status quo disturbed (mainly because he didn’t want to have to think about it until he had become entirely used to the new arrangement). But as the contracts were transformed into so much money and into the power of so much money he became each year more agitated until, at last, he instructed Professor Cerutti and the unit at Industrial Maintenance Services Corporation to find the second rifleman and to build an apparatus to overtake the evidence that would be a case against the man without in any way seeming to involve Thomas Kegan, because that would have constituted a double cross.

Now that the money had been earned, Tim’s and his own honor would be finally avenged.

***

The trouble was at night. Sometimes late at night he would come wide-awake despite the cold baths and the massages, despite the sleeping pills. He would feel such a guilt of greed, and a father’s guilt, and a kinsman’s guilt, and the guilt of power, that he would need to scream. He would put on a pair of swimming trunks,
go out and lower himself into the heated pool, and try an underwater scream.

He thanked the compassionate Almighty God with large contributions to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith for His mercy in making each year less and less terrible. When three years had gone by, he could live with it. He had his own billion dollars. By the time ten years had gone by and he had three billion dollars of his own, he never thought of it at all. His one hundred and sixty-three companies had done a grand job for the space program, had probably done a better job for being under his direction than discretely owned companies could ever have done, because, in the finest sense, he had done it all for Tim—for President Kegan. The conquest of space had been Tim’s own program, originated and installed by Tim, then made possible and practical by his consecrated father.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1974—NEW YORK

Pa let his head fall back on the sofa. He closed his eyes. There was a considerable silence. Pa opened his eyes.

Nick said, “I see.”

“In a sense I betrayed him. In another sense I did not.”

Nick said, “So you have known all these years who murdered Tim.”

“Yes.”

“When I found that rifle it must have upset you greatly.”

“I didn’t know what to do.”

“So you called the man and asked for orders.”

“Yes.”

“He told you to send me to that house on the Muskogee road.”

Pa closed his eyes. “Yes.”

“Then all those other things to throw me off the track.”

“Yes.”

Nick leaned forward. His voice rose and trembled. “Well, I didn’t make any whoring deal with the son-of-a-bitch—
who is he
? He has Yvette. He’s holding Yvette. Who is he, Pa?”

“Z. K. Dawson.”

“
Daw
son.”

“The real Dawson. But no use your going after him. He made that deal with me, but he isn’t the one who had Tim killed.”

“Who was it, then?”

“His daughter.”

“What?” It was a cry of pain.

“Dawson only made the deal to buy safety for his daughter.”

“Pa, open your eyes.”

Pa’s eyes opened.

“Z. K. Dawson’s daughter was only about sixteen when Tim was killed.”

“Oh, no. She was older than that. She had to be. She was sleeping with Tim. She was laying men at Lola Camonte’s. She planned Tim’s killing with cold blood. We have the whole story. Cerutti dug up the whole story.”

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 1955—WASHINGTON