Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 (10 page)

“The provost marshal saw what you saw?”

“Yeah. So did several other GIs and MPs…. Anyway, when Brazel went into Corona and heard all this saucer talk, it got him thinking, and somebody probably told him about that reward for finding a flying saucer, which I think was pretty good money, like three thousand or somethin’, so he decided to report it.”

“Why did he go to Roswell to make his report? Because that’s where the county sheriff was?”

“Exactly.” Marcel stopped to light up another cigarette, saying, “Sure you don’t want a coffin nail? Mr. Pearson said you were in the service …”

“Marines.”

“Guadalcanal, right?”

“That’s right.”

He grinned as he slipped his Zippo back in his breast pocket. “I thought everybody came back from overseas with a two- or three- or four-pack-a-day habit.”

“I did smoke, on the island,” I admitted. “But I managed to leave the habit there. So, uh—the next morning?”

He nodded, drew in smoke, exhaled it, saying, “Next morning, right after breakfast, right around seven o’clock, our rancher host starts saddling up horses. Now Cav was originally from Texas, so that was no problem for him; but I’d never sat a horse before and told ’em I’d follow ’em in the jeep. Besides, we could start loading up the debris that way, save some time.”

“So the debris wasn’t near the ranch house?”

“No, it was maybe three or four miles north of the house. Funny, bouncing along in that jeep, middle of nowhere, all that emptiness stretching to the horizon, and then, wham—all of a sudden, as far the eye could see, that weird wreckage.”

“There was that much of it?”

His buggy eyes bugged further. “Hell yes, spread over a wide area, three quarters of a mile long, two hundred, hell,
three hundred
feet wide. From the way the stuff was scattered, I had the feeling no aircraft had hit the ground, you know, bounced on the ground or anything.”

“More like a midair explosion?”

“Yes, like something must have exploded in the sky just over the pasture and strew this shit all over … although there
was
this deep scorched gouge, maybe five hundred feet long, and that could’ve been where something touched down and skipped along.”

“And then, what, bounced up in the sky and exploded?”

He sighed out more smoke. “Who knows? Maybe some kind of craft had an explosion and kept going a ways before finally crashing. I learned later that north of Roswell, they found something else.”

“What?”

“That I can’t say. I only know what
I
saw, and what I saw was enough.”

“The debris, was it just more of the same as in the shed?”

“Pretty much, just a
lot
more of the same, bigger pieces in some cases. A ton of that blackish-brown parchment material, from scraps to sheets. And we found a piece of that foil-like metal about two feet long and maybe a foot wide, so thin, so light it weighed practically nothing. But back at the base, we couldn’t tear it or cut it, we even tried to make a dent in it with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. Nothing.”

“Not a dent?”

“Well, it made a dent, but then the damn stuff went back the way it was. It was right out of Ripley—you could bend it but you couldn’t crease it. But you know, those rods were just as weird as the magic tinfoil.”

“Rods?”

“Yeah, that stuff I told you about, that was light as balsa but didn’t seem to be wood? They ranged in length from a few inches to a yard. Flexible stuff, but hard! We couldn’t break that shit or burn it; didn’t even smoke!”

The same couldn’t be said for Marcel; my eyes were burning from his Camels.

“But the truly bizarre thing,” he said, and I was certainly glad we were getting around to something bizarre, “was the markings on them, the writing.”

“Writing?” I had to smile. “Outer space writing, Jesse?”

“I don’t know what it was, symbols, maybe numbers … but not our numbers. It reminded me of hieroglyphics only without any animal-like characters: purple and pink embossed writing on the inner surface of the rods, which were kind of like I-beams.”

“Maybe it was Chinese or Japanese or Russian …”

“No, I have some familiarity with those. That’s not what it was.”

“You saw nothing you recognized as man-made?”

Marcel shook his head, smirking humorlessly. “You know, I’m interested in electronics and kept looking for something that would resemble instruments or electronic equipment, ’cause then we’d know what the hell we were dealing with. But I came up empty on that front, though Cav found a black, metallic box, several inches square. There was no apparent way to open it, so we threw it in with the rest of the stuff. I don’t know what became of it, but it went along with the rest of the material back to the base.”

“Did you gather up all the debris?”

The buggy eyes bugged again, eyebrows climbing his high forehead. “Hell, no! We worked all morning and most of the afternoon, loading up the jeep carryall and transferring it to the Buick staff car’s trunk and backseat, then filled the carry-all again.”

“So how much were you able to haul?”

He shrugged. “A fraction. But after we got back to the base, Colonel Blanchard took a look at the wreckage, then the next morning sent Cav and Major Easley back, to cordon off the field. Thirty men cleared it.”

“How did the press get ahold of the story?”

He grinned, which made his weak chin seem weaker. “It was a press release straight off the air base! Walt Haut, the lieutenant who was public information officer, was kind of an eager beaver, and it would’ve been like him to jump the gun.”

“You can hardly blame the guy. It’s not every day the Air Force finds a flying saucer.”

“Yeah, but when I asked Walt about it, he claimed Colonel Blanchard personally dictated the press release to him, that same morning, and instructed him to hand-deliver the release to the two newspapers and the radio stations, there in Roswell.”

“Why would your commanding officer have done that?”

“I understand word about the saucer was getting around town, and Blanchard prided himself on good relations with the community, and keeping ’em informed. Or maybe he wanted some glory. They say he always resented he didn’t fly the
Enola Gay.”

“But within twenty-four hours, it was all retracted.”

Marcel’s eyes flared. “Hell, that same day the colonel ordered me to fly to Fort Worth and make a personal report to General Ramey. A B-29 was loaded up with all of the wreckage, most of it boxed up, the bigger pieces wrapped up in brown paper; damn plane was stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with that debris. When we got to Fort Worth, the wreckage was transferred to a B-25, which I heard later was flown to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. Me, I was taken to General Ramey’s office, with a box or two of debris, which I showed him, making my report. He listened, politely, nodding, and I left the samples of debris behind when we went to the map room, ’cause the general said he wanted me to show him on a map where we found the wreckage. After we had dinner at the officers’ mess, there was a press conference, and I was instructed to keep my mouth shut, let the general answer all the questions, while I bent down and smiled for the camera with the debris … only it
wasn’t
the debris.”

I’d seen the newspaper wire photos in Pearson’s clip file: Marcel had posed with the crumpled remains of a weather balloon and its trailing radar target—aluminum foil, balsa wood, burnt rubber. Only a total chump would have mistaken this stuff for something from outer space.

“I was the fall guy,” Marcel said, grinning like a skull, “the Army Air Force major who ‘goofed,’ who mistook a weather balloon for a flying saucer. Big joke.”

Now I knew why he was talking to Pearson, intelligence officer or not; like most soldiers, Marcel would have been willing to die for his country, but it’s much harder to play the fool for it. To play the sap.

“What do you think that really was out in that pasture, Jesse?”

The eyes tightened and weren’t buggy, anymore. “It wasn’t a goddamn weather balloon, I’ll tell you that much. I was familiar with every kind of gadget we used in the Army for meteorological observations, and was in fact fairly familiar with everything in the air, at that time. Not just our own military aircraft, mind you, but other countries’, too.”

He pitched the still-burning butt of his latest Camel down the granite steps and it trailed sparks like a dying comet.

Then he said, flatly, “That was not a terrestrial object. It came to earth, but not from this earth.”

Laughter echoed gently across the Potomac.

I put a hand on his shoulder. “What was found north of Roswell, Jesse? What were you hinting at, earlier, when you said I should talk to other people?”

He was lighting up yet another Camel. “No hearsay, Nate. I told you that.”

“For Christ’s sake, Jesse, we’ve come this far. At least point me in the right direction.”

Marcel exhaled a mushroom cloud of smoke. “Well, that would be northwest, wouldn’t it? Where they say the craft itself came to rest. Where they found the four little bodies.”

And suddenly, as we sat there on the steps of the Water Gate, I was fresh out of questions.

On Monday morning at the Pentagon, as a matter of good form, James V. Forrestal attended the swearing-in ceremony of his successor, lawyer Louis Johnson—chief fund-raiser for the Truman campaign—as the new Secretary of Defense. Custom had it that the outgoing cabinet officer would then proceed to the White House for a final exchange of respects with the president, a task Forrestal—being a creature of protocol—dutifully performed.

At the White House, however, the former Defense Secretary was surprised by President Truman with an assemblage of government dignitaries, including the entire cabinet and the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Reading from a presidential citation, Truman honored Forrestal for “meritorious and distinguished service,” pinning the Distinguished Service Medal on Forrestal’s lapel.

Flustered, Forrestal said, “This is beyond me …”

And Truman warmly clasped the deposed secretary’s shoulder and said, “You deserve it, Jim.”

God knew what Forrestal read into that remark.

After much applause, and many impromptu tributes, Forrestal did not make a thank-you speech. The papers, reporting this event, found Forrestal’s tight-lipped non-response in keeping with the innately emotional complexion of the occasion.

While Forrestal was busy getting honored (having already been fired), I spent the day with two key people in his life: his wife and his archenemy.

I met Drew Pearson at ten a.m. on the third floor of the Metropolitan Club, a venerable, subdued bastion of respectability on Connecticut Avenue. A colored waiter in a starched white coat served us eggs Benedict; the dark-paneled room was sprinkled with selected bankers and executives doing business over breakfast.

“At noon this place is jam-packed,” Pearson said, sipping a glass of orange juice. He was immaculate in a well-cut gray suit with gray-and-blue tie, the tips of his mustache waxed, sharpened. “You can’t turn around without bumping into a former Secretary of State or a top diplomat.”

“How is it that you’re a member?”

I knew an exclusive club when I saw it; this reminded me of Chicago’s Tavern Club.

“Oh I’m not,” he laughed, his smile turning his eyes to slits, as he took my dig in stride. “They draw the line at only two types of members: Negroes and journalists. But I’m on the approved permanent guest list.”

“I heard your broadcast last night,” I said, sipping my orange juice. “Thanks.”

Pearson had kept his word: no mention of Forrestal’s unstable mental condition; no mention of Forrestal at all, in fact.

“I held up my end of the bargain,” Pearson said, buttering a muffin. “What did you learn from Major Marcel?”

I told him Marcel’s story, reading from notes I’d taken after the interview. As the fantastic aspects of the tale accelerated, Pearson’s expression shifted from amused to absorbed to astonished.

“What do you make of all this?” he asked.

Our breakfast had been cleared away; we were having coffee.

“Marcel seems sincere enough,” I said, “and he did not appear to be deranged, or deluded. And he was reluctant to give me any secondhand information. All of that is a plus.”

“Do I detect, in your tone, the presence of a minus, as well?”

I nodded. “The guy’s in intelligence work, for one thing, which makes him a ripe candidate for carrying misinformation. He’s awfully high-placed to be spilling his guts like this.”

“But he has credible motivation to talk,” Pearson said. “If he’s being truthful, then his government ordered him to go along with a deception that made him look an utter fool who mistook an ordinary weather balloon for the wreckage of a flying saucer.”

“Listen to yourself, Drew. Think about your own credibility, using a term like ‘flying saucer’ in a sentence as if you take the possibility seriously. Major Marcel is a skilled intelligence officer, remember, fresh out of a war where propaganda and misinformation were common currency.”

And yet his eyes glittered with the possibilities. “But if it’s true, Nate, why … this is the biggest story since Jesus Christ …”

“What does your nose tell you?”

Pearson’s motto, famously, was: “If something smells wrong, I go to work.”

Now his eyes had hardened, studying me, deadly serious, even though his smile was wry. “You’re a professional bloodhound, Nathan. What do your olfactories tell
you?”

Our waiter returned to refill our coffee cups, the rich aroma drifting up.

“I’m just not sure,” I said, stirring some sugar in. “The guy seems legitimate to me. If he were telling me a story that didn’t have all this Buck Rogers shit in it, I’d buy him wholesale. Hell, retail.”

“If the government recovered an aircraft from outer space,” Pearson said melodramatically, “it might have access to new technology that could make the atomic bomb look like a popgun.”

“Quit writing your column out loud; you’re jumping to a preposterous conclusion.”

His eyebrows climbed his chrome dome. “Am I? Suppose, as Marcel indicated, there were aliens found, as well? Do you know the implications, the ramifications? Social, political … religious?”

“Print that, why don’t you? See how seriously you’re taken, after.”

He sighed and nodded. “And, as we both know, that could well be what this is all about: discrediting me.

“The only thing you might do,” I said with a shrug, sipping my coffee, “is send me to Roswell to poke around a little. Talk to these other sources that Marcel mentioned.”

His eyes slitted again. “How much would that cost me?”

“Who cares, if it’s the biggest story of the millennium? A hundred a day and expenses.”

He frowned, staring into his coffee cup. “I’ll consider it.” Then he looked up, arching an eyebrow. “You know, Nathan, if this is true—if there is a Majestic Twelve group in the government, that Forrestal is a part of—it could go a long way toward explaining the man’s mental state.”

“How so?”

“What if he’s been faced with a threat from the skies?”

I smirked. “Little green men to join the Reds he’s already frightened of?”

Pearson painted a picture in the air with a splay-fingered hand. “Think about it: a recovered flying saucer, advanced technology—maybe he thinks creatures from outer space are trying to kill him. Maybe they are!”

I laughed, grinned. “Definitely put that in your column. You’ll be in the padded suite next to Forrestal’s.”

He shook his head, returning my laughter. “It does sound ridiculous…. Let’s just put it aside, for now at least. But, uh, should I decide to explore this further … you are willing to make the Roswell trip?”

“As long as it’s in a train or a plane,” I said, sipping at my coffee cup, “and not one of these.”

And I tilted my saucer.

We left it at that, and to Pearson I’m sure I seemed indifferent about whether he sent me to New Mexico or not; but in truth my curiosity was piqued.

And Pearson was right: if the government had recovered—and covered up—technology from beyond the stars, the possibility that Forrestal’s condition was related to that remarkable discovery could be very real. Considering that the guy was under stress anyway, suffering from a world war’s worth of physical and nervous exhaustion, being confronted suddenly with the existence of creatures from another planet just might be … taxing.

I didn’t mention the subject to Jo Forrestal, however; she seemed only marginally more stable than her husband, as she prepared for their trip to Hobe Sound, Florida, and I supervised a sweep of their home for electronic bugs.

My A-1 Agency and Washington’s Bradford Investigations supported each other in their respective cities, and two of their men took much of the day combing the big house from basement to watchtower, garage to garden. Electronic surveillance was never my specialty, though, and I spent more of my time with Jo Forrestal than with the Bradford boys.

The Filipino houseboy, Remy, had let me in, and informed me that the bug hunters had beat me there.

“Men in kitchen,” the skinny little man said. He seemed kind of wild-eyed, put out by the intrusion.

I moved past half a dozen suitcases that were lined up next to the second-floor stairway—for the Florida trip, no doubt—and padded on into the kitchen, which was fairly small for such a big old house, and had been remodeled a gleaming white, cupboards and all. The two Bradford dicks were searching high and low, to the displeasure of the Negro cook, who was pacing out back, smoking and muttering.

Bob Hasty, whose last name was an inaccuracy, looked up from the black-patterned white linoleum where he was on his hands and knees, checking the floorboards, looking like a cat after a mouse. Both he and Jack Randolph, who was standing on a kitchen stool, checking the light fixture, were dressed in tan jumpsuits that looked vaguely military.

“Bowing and scraping in my presence isn’t really necessary, Bob,” I said. “A respectful tone will do. You could avert your eyes, maybe.”

“Blow me, Heller,” the round-faced Hasty said with a grin.

“Seems to me you’re in a better position for that.”

His lanky partner Randolph, checking the light fixture, was cackling over our witty exchange.

I asked him, “How’s it going, Jack?”

“Clean so far,” Randolph said. “If I get electrocuted, by the way, it’s gonna cost you.”

“Time and a half,” I said.

Bob, who had gotten to his feet, was brushing himself off. “Nothing so far. I swept the house with a field-strength meter … clean as a whistle. Jack checked all the phones.”

“Checked at the junction for a black box,” Randolph said, “came up empty. Phones themselves seem clean—no inductive pickups, no ‘suckers,’ no replaced transmitters … but we’re still at it.”

“If there are bugs present,” I said, “they could be very sophisticated—espionage quality.”

“We’re going over every floorboard,” Hasty said, “every electrical fixture in the place. But I think we’re on a fool’s errand.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “And nobody’s better at that than the Bradford agency.”

“Go to hell, Heller,” Hasty said with a grin, which then faded. Whispering, he said, “Say, what’s the deal with the lady of the house?”

“What about her?”

“Well I think for breakfast she put a little orange juice in her vodka.”

Randolph, still up on his stool, looked down at me wide-eyed. “She told us if we fucked anything of hers up, she’d have our balls. In that very language.”

“She had her hand on my ass at the time,” Hasty said.

So they had met Jo Forrestal.

“Well, Bob, it is a very cute ass.”

And I left them to their work.

She was coming down the front stairway, so slender she seemed tall—which she wasn’t—looking quietly elegant in a white blouse and black slacks. One hand casually stroked the banister as she came, the other hand held a tumbler of clear liquid and ice that I doubted was water. More than ever, she reminded me of the hostess of the house in the Charles Addams cartoons.

“Nate Heller,” she said, cheerfully. “You fucking bastard.”

“Nice seeing you again, too, Jo,” I said.

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, I added, “You’re looking lovely as ever.”

She did and didn’t: the pale oval of her face, the large dark eyes, the handsome features, were all still in evidence, but more pronounced, as if time had made a caricature of them; and though she hadn’t gained much weight, she had the double chin that years can give anybody. Her hair was still black, but artificially so, soft curls clinging to the side of her head, the length in back hairnet-held.

“Why thank you, Nate,” she said, and beamed, and slapped me, hard.

Then she clip-clopped past me, in her black high-heel sandals, into the spacious living room with its Duncan Phyfe furnishings, where she plopped into a textured cotton-and-silk-damask blue-green lounge chair and curled her legs up under her, sitting like a teenage girl.

I plodded in, rubbing where my face burned, and asked, “What did I do to deserve that greeting?”

She shrugged, sipped at her tumbler. “Maybe it’s because I trusted you and took your advice, and ended up getting shock treatment. Y’suppose that could be it?”

I sat on the nearby plump beige sofa. “I’m sorry about that. I just thought they’d have you talk to a shrink; I didn’t know they’d go the Frankenstein route.”

“Do you have to work at it?”

“What?”

“Talking like Humphrey Bogart in some cheap movie?”

I tossed my fedora on the coffee table. “Well, first of all, he’s trying to talk like me. Second of all, Bogie doesn’t make cheap movies.”

That made her laugh a little, then she frowned and said, “Stop that. I’ve decided not to like you.”

“When are you leaving for Florida?”

She sipped her drink. “I’m going today. Jim can follow me down whenever he likes, or not at all.”

“Why aren’t you going down together?”

Her hooded-eyed, fluttering-lashed expression included a smile that had very little to do with smiling. “We don’t do anything together, Nate, remember? Jim has some banquet tonight, for that horse’s ass replacement of his, Johnson, and then some meeting tomorrow morning. And he wants to make himself available throughout the week, in case he’s ‘needed.’ Do you think they’ll give him shock treatment, too? Or is that just reserved for the ladies?”

“I guess I can’t blame you for being bitter, but I think your husband really does need some help. Or anyway, a good long rest—and maybe a little understanding.”

She laughed, once. “Excuse me while I fucking puke, Judge Hardy! I like you better when you’re doing Bogart. Jim made his own bed; let him fuck and lie in it.”

“Did you ever consider maybe he really is under surveillance?”

Her eyes and nostrils flared as she leaned forward. “You mean, like I was? By the Reds? See, that’s typical; typical! A
woman
says that, and she’s a goddamn maniac! A man, a
powerful
man like Jim, well there’s either something to it, or maybe he just needs a little resty-bye. And understanding.”

“Jo, it’s not Jim’s imagination that Drew Pearson’s been out to get him. Is your maid working today?”