Winter Kills (37 page)

“Whatever you say, Tom. You know that.”

“But—and this is a big but—if this rifle is where Fletcher said it is, wherever that might be, then whoever sees it found—except Nick—is an entirely different proposition. Heller and Gander will go with Nick to look for it. So that means we gotta shut up Heller and Gander. You follow, Jim?”

“Tom, you are one of the people who own and run our country. I am a simple soldier. I am what you have armies for—to kill your enemies.” General Nolan was a thoroughgoing professional soldier who had made a brilliant career, and necessary killing had never seemed in any way prohibited to him. He was not some street person or some narcotics-drenched criminal who could run amok, doing murder. Necessary killing meant killing ordered by authority. He was a soldier.

“Okay,” Pa said. “That’s an order. Whoever is there—except Nick—when they find that rifle—they all have to go.”

“Check,” General Nolan said.

“Cerutti will put men on Gander, so you can handle him when you’re ready. Incidentally, he’s carrying a check of mine on the Soar Foundation. Pick it up, please.”

“Check,” General Nolan acknowledged.

The General raced to the Hadley Hotel in a taxi, registered, picked up the waiting envelope, then settled down in his suite of rooms with a pot of tea and read the woman’s dossier through.

Her name was Jane Talbot. She would work with him under the name of Chantal Lamers. She had been assistant to the director of “What’s My Line,” then, through his influence, a television actress in daytime soap opera, then in evening drama. She had appeared live in a play called
The Cloisonné Nose
for sixteen performances on Broadway and for four performances as an inmate at Tehachapi Prison, California, where she had been sentenced to five to seven and a half years for fraud. It was her only conviction out of nineteen
arrests on fraud charges. Miss Talbot, a/k/a Chantal Lamers, was a methadrine addict. She was at her best under “pretense conditions.”

General Nolan considered her to be a strikingly handsome woman. Her bright, intelligent eyes were remarkably clear. She had elegance and she had character, he saw instantly. She also had a gorgeous set of knockers. She stood before him in the doorway, her head mounted on a collar of beaver, under a beaver hat. He felt instant admiration for her. She was a gallant figure.

“Miss Chantal Lamers?” he asked as instructed, so that the stimulation of “pretense conditions” could take hold immediately. She smiled at him with such brilliant appreciation of this new name she had never heard before that he was dazzled. It became impossible for him to imagine her standing before him in a prison uniform. He took her coat. He asked her to sit down. He offered her tea, which she refused. He told her his name was Billy John Casper.

They went through her assignment with care. She asked relevant questions. She seemed delighted with what she would have to do. He began to imagine that he could smell the soft, perfumed skin along the inside of her thighs. He stared at her loose mouth. He seemed to be wishing for things about her breasts. Age and sex are not related, he had often told Tom Kegan. Only if one reaches can one grasp. He was monstrously shaped now. He wished she could have seen him as a young captain of infantry when he had marched with General MacArthur to drive the Bonus Army out of the Anacostia Flats in 1932, when he had been flat and fit, years ago, before she had been born. He had been younger than she was now, once, and the sperm had poured out of him like wine from a skin.

With great courtliness he handed over her sealed envelope with her money for doing the work. They did not discuss money. In any event she did not seem interested in the money, only in the excitement of the pretense
to come. She smiled across at him and said in a new, pronounced Oklahoma accent, “I just get this feelin’ that you are a very, very sweet man.” With a stately movement that General Nolan did not feel compromised her dignity for a moment, she lifted the light veil away from her face, swept it to the top of her hat, and knelt on the floor in front of him as he sat on the chair. With a deft gesture she unzipped his fly, put her hand inside his trousers and exposed him, “Now I am just goin’ to taste you to find out.”

It was a little present from Pa.

***

General Nolan looked old because he had eaten so much over such a long time. It was as though the weight of all that good food had sagged and ballooned him grotesquely. He was an old, fat, quaint figure who balanced a billycock bowler on his head. He wore striped four-button suits, with white piping showing at the edges of the waistcoat, over a pink or a lavender shirt. He was short enough and round enough to appear to be sitting in his suits. When he moved with the slow and careful gait of a brittle man of seventy-five, he seemed to glide as if he were on an old-fashioned wheeled chair made of wicker and pushed by a black man along the edges of a seaside a half century before.

So did he move carefully and elegantly when he killed John Kullers late in the day in Kullers’ office, Room 603 of the Engelson Building. He knocked politely and enquired if he might enter. He closed the door carefully before he sat down in the chair in front of Mr. Kullers’ desk and shot Kullers through the head with a weapon that Francis Manning Winikus’ agency had lent them, fitted with a silencer.

He had to travel out to the Main Line to kill Mr. Coney. He did not dare take the Ferrari, because that slow-moving traffic would most definitely have heated it up and he could have been hours getting back to the hotel.

He removed the Corinna Soar Foundation check
from Miles Gander’s wallet after he had struck him at the back of the head with a government-issue sap, before he left him in the closed car with the engine running.

When he killed Chantal Lamers she was kneeling directly in front of him, so he was able to place the bullet into her temple painlessly at extremely close range.

It was his present to Pa.

***

When Nick left the small white house on the Muskogee road for the first time, after his interview with Z. K. Dawson, General Nolan padded out to the back porch and told the two government men to take out the dentist’s chair on the half-track truck that was waiting behind the garage. Then the General opened the garage doors and got into the Ferrari, looking forward to a wonderful open-road drive to the Tulsa airport on the good, well-paved shunpikes that avoided the main road. The Ferrari worked like a dear little watch all the way. He called Pa from the airport and told him how well everything had gone.

“You are absolutely sure that the man who is taking the cream and that cat into Nick’s room is reliable?”

“Of course he’s reliable, Tom. He’s one of Cerutti’s people. And—oh, hey—some business came up at the meeting with your boy.”

“What?”

“When he gets to Tulsa he’s going to hire a man named Ed Blenheim. Is that any use to you?”

“Blenheim! Shit, I forgot all about Blenheim. He’d be a great man for running those Miles Gander leases. We need him, Jim. Get on the phone right now, tell him you are old Z. K. Dawson himself, and offer him a job. When he asks how much it pays, you tell him it’ll be a damned sight more than he’s getting now, and say Eddie Dillon will contact him tomorrow morning at eight o’clock at his house.”

“Where do I go now, Tom?”

“You go back to the Hadley in Philadelphia. Cerutti
will have an envelope waiting for you there. A man named Ira Skutch will contact you. He’s a memory wizard and a good actor. There’ll be an envelope there for him.”

***

General Nolan drove the Ferrari aboard the old Boeing KC-97G Stratofreighter, which had been phased out in 1956 and which Pa had been able to pick up for a song from the Georgia State Air Guard in ’67. It was handy to move cars, wire-tap equipment, favorite pieces of furniture and cases of wine around the country. Pa had a soft spot in his head for Nolan. “You know what, kiddo,” he had said to the General once, “combined we represent the military-industrial complex that is making this country rich.”

“I’m not so military anymore, and I never was complex,” the General said, hugely flattered.

Pa knew how much Nolan enjoyed roaring around in that Ferrari when he could get it out on the open road, so, operationally, the plane was almost entirely the General’s. When Pa knew he wouldn’t need Nolan around for a couple of days, the General would pile the Ferrari into the old Stratocruiser and they’d fly out to the Utah salt flats or up to the Alcan Highway, and the General would really open that car up and have a helluva time.

From Tulsa the Boeing flew General Nolan and his car to the Philadelphia airport, but on the way into town the damned car heated up like a Zippo lighter in the stop-and-go traffic, and he had to take a taxi into town (again) for the meeting with Ira Skutch. He got to the hotel with thirty-nine minutes to spare and immediately settled down to read the scenario from Professor Cerutti that was for Skutch’s use. He was astonished, if not saddened, because Heller had been such a greedy brute of a man, to learn, in a note from Cerutti, that Captain Heller had passed on. He had instinctively felt that Chantal Lamers would be a keen operative, but even he had not been ready to accept that she
would have caught on that quickly. She was certainly a very exciting woman, he thought, feeling the faintest stirrings of an erection.

Skutch was a man in his late sixties. He was tall, skinny, and had bright red skin. In the friendliest sort of way he asked General Nolan if they had not met in Joliet prison in 1943.

“I was in London in 1943,” the General said, wondering all the while how Cerutti could have said this man was such a memory wizard.

“You sure are a ringer for this guy, I mean,” Skutch said.

“I was also thirty-one years younger in 1943,” the General reminded him.

“Ah! That’s it. That’s how I almost made a mistake,” Skutch said. “Because I never forget a face.”

The man not only had an inferior memory, General Nolan thought, but he might be a moron.

They went through the scenario together.

“Will there be just the one stand or will there be a follow-up?” Skutch asked.

“From the notes we have just gone over,” the General said, “I take it your orders are to stand by for two weeks at a rooming house in Amalauk, New Jersey. If Mr. Thirkield wants to see you again, we’ll contact you.”

After Skutch left, with memories of his most recent admiration for Chantal Lamers in his mind, General Nolan telephoned a young eighty-dollar hooker whose number he had had the foresight to get from Pa’s logistics man, Eddie Dillon. Nolan thought eighty dollars was an odd sort of inflationary number for a hooker, but this was Philadelphia. It wasn’t really that it was high; he’d paid more and he’d paid less—but it was such an odd number. When she arrived he was pleased to find that she was a pretty little thing, quite pleasant, but that she had a pathetically unformed style at fellatio.

While she was blowing him ineffectively the General
pondered the deep truth in the method that Professor Cerutti used with his scenarios. With sure skill he made certain to parallel American mythology, history, customs and usage. Just so, on a vastly larger scale, the White House, the Pickering Commission and the political oligarchy had screened and made mystifying all the facts about Tim’s assassination, obfuscating, ignoring, overlooking and denying reality while they fed out to the boyish, panting press a stream of half truths and nontruths until, in a not-very-long time, the American people had become so confused, so culturally exhausted, that they had abandoned all hope of ever making the sets of facts about any area whatsoever of the assassination match the facts of any other area. They had flaccidly accepted the corpse of Willie Arnold as the sacrificial goat. What Cerutti had done had been to concentrate the essence of all that fraudulence and fantasy into his short, continually contrasting and masterful scenarios. Nick, as their present target, represented in microcosm what the American people had been fourteen years before. General Nolan had never met Nicholas Thirkield, but even though he was one-half Tom Kegan or more, he would not be able to withstand the force of Professor Cerutti’s projected illusions.

The General reached out and signaled the young woman by patting the top of her bobbing head affectionately. He told her that would be enough, that he had to get along.

***

“Of course, we had no problem finding the people to play Harry Greenwood, the magazine editor, or Irving Mentor, the false Syndicate man,” Professor Cerutti explained to Nick in the enormous files room at Schrader Island. “But they were the last of the professional actors we used. Everything else was purest fiction, to be sure, but it was allowed to play out in your own imagination, using established premises as the stuff such dreams are made on—such as the known enmity
between your brother and the head of the Tubesters Union. We were prepared to go on weaving scenarios until we had exhausted you. Fictionized facts. Fantasized facts. Those are the steady cultural nourishment of the American people, forcefed down their throats through the power hoses of the most powerful and pervasive overcommunications design ever dreamed of by man to enslave other men. Still, the subtlety of lying can be fun, as we all know. It wasn’t the exposure of the Watergate tragedy that told Americans of the glorious Freedom of Their Press institutions—also called the Triumph of the Little Man Over the Forces of Repression—because, after all, the Glorious Free Press and the readers of that press had known about the Watergate since June of 1972, well before the presidential elections, in time for the Glorious Free Press to expose the Forces of Repression and prevent them from ever reaching the White House again. The skill there was that we could experience the thrill of the fantasy of a free press through which the Watergate was
re
-exposed, after our free press had gotten permission to do so. And that is where our collective genius really lies—in the extraordinary American ability to perceive only when we are told to perceive and to believe only when we are told to believe. Not before. All the facts of your brother’s murder have been there to be examined for fourteen years, Mr. Thirkield. It is only now that you have been told to disbelieve them.”